Category Archives: Obit

It’s clear COVID-19 will mow us all down, spiritually if not literally, decimating every aspect of life. The music world is already being cut down from every genre. I just saw Joe Diffie playing some agreeable country at my first visit to the Grand Old Opry in October; he’s dead of it at 61. Jazz [...]

I feel kind of bad now that I pressed Kenny Rogers a few years back on whether a tour he was calling “The Gambler’s Last Deal: Final World Tour” would actually be his last. Similar ventures by, say, Kiss, Cher and the Who over the past few years had not resulted in actual farewells. When [...]

Sleepy LaBeef, the rockabilly figure who played and toured for more than 60 years, died the day after Christmas. He was 84 and had played his last concert in September. One of the last rockabilly artists to be signed by Sun Records, LaBeef had an encyclopedic knowledge of American roots music, professing at one point [...]

Sad to hear of the death of Ric Ocasek Sunday at 75. The man most widely known for his elegant electronic pop songs with The Cars may have been equally influential in rock for producing a number of important acts, from Suicide and Bad Brains to Jonathan Richman, Weezer and Guided by Voices. I had [...]

Sad to hear of the death of Daniel Johnston, the prolific and singular songwriter, whose mental difficulties seemed to bring honesty and and unfettered heartbreak to his music. That he died at 58 may not be a shock. He looked to his death many times in his odd career, posed genuflecting at a gravestone with [...]

One of rock’s greatest timekeepers was stilled, as Hal Blaine died in Los Angeles Monday at age 90. A player on more than 350 Top 40 hits and 40 No. 1 records, Blaine was something of a hometown hero in Hartford, where I was working when I interviewed him in 2000, as he was about [...]

Much of what we know about Peter Tork, who died Thursday at 77, is based on the character he was cast for in 1966 on “The Monkees.” There, he played the dim member, the bassist, with a blissful, childlike look in his eye as the made-for-TV band got into capers each week, even as its [...]

Here’s something I wrote in May, 1999, upon the reissue of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” album by Aretha Franklin, who died Thursday at 76.    It should have been the most natural thing on Earth when Aretha Franklin entered the Los Angeles New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in January 1972 at the age of 29 [...]