Hubert Sumlin and David “Honeyboy” Edwards paid tribute to Delta bluesman Robert Johnson at Campbell Hall in January 2011. Both died this year. (L. Paul Mann photo)

By Jeff Moehlis, Noozhawk Contributing Writer | Originally Published Here on 12.28.2011

The following is a list of some of the notable musicians who passed away in 2011, including a few who performed in the Santa Barbara area in recent years. Some are well-known, many are not, but all are worthy of our respect. R.I.P. — Rock In Peace.

» Amy Winehouse became the latest to join the “27 Club,” the group of popular musicians who died at age 27 that includes Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. Winehouse’s 2006 album Back to Black is considered by many to be a modern-day classic, but she never overcame her demons to live up to her full potential.

» Jerry Leiber co-wrote numerous classic songs with Mike Stoller, including “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” (both hits for Elvis Presley), “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown” (both hits for The Coasters, whose Carl Gardner also passed away this year), “Stand By Me” (a hit for Ben E. King, who was also a co-writer), “Is That All There Is?” (a hit for Peggy Lee), “Kansas City” (which was covered by The Beatles and many others), and “On Broadway” (also with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). Leiber was primarily the lyricist in the collaboration with Stoller.

» Clarence Clemons played saxophone with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, beginning in 1972 during sessions for Springsteen’s debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Affectionately known as “The Big Man,” he also played with many other artists over the years, and can be heard on today’s pop radio on Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory.”

» David “Honeyboy” Edwards was a Delta bluesman who was with legendary fellow-bluesman Robert Johnson on the night in 1938 that Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey that led to his premature death. Edwards was first recorded in 1942 by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996, won the 2008 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album and in 2010 received a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy. Edwards performed here earlier this year as part of the “Blues at the Crossroads” tour.

» Hubert Sumlin was best known as the guitarist for Chicago bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, contributing riffs to classic songs such as “Killing Floor,” “Back Door Man,” “Smokestack Lightning,” “Spoonful” and “Wang Dang Doodle.” He was recently ranked as one of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone Magazine. Sumlin was along for the Blues at the Crossroads tour mentioned above, and was also part of the Experience Hendrix concert that visited town in 2010.

» Heavy D was the rapper and frontman for Heavy D & The Boyz, whose albums Big Tyme and Nuttin’ But Love hit No. 1 on the R&B charts in the United States. Their biggest hit single was 1991’s “Now That We Found Love.” Heavy D also performed the theme song for the TV show In Living Color and was an actor on television and film.

» Bert Jansch was a Scottish folk guitarist who was part of the British folk music revival during the 1960s. He was a huge influence on other guitarists such as Jimmy Page (who reworked Jansch’s arrangement of “Blackwaterside” into “Black Mountain Side” on Led Zeppelin’s debut album) and Neil Young. Jansch was also an original member of the folk rock band Pentangle.

» Gil Scott-Heron was a street poet and musician whose lyrics often dealt with timely social and political issues. His music was influential on the hip hop genre, and he has been called “The Godfather of Rap” and “The Black Bob Dylan.” His best-known song is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

» Gerry Rafferty was a Scottish singer-songwriter who is best known for the hit “Baker Street.” He also co-wrote and sang Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

» Max Mathews was a computer music pioneer who wrote the first widely used computer music program, and whose 1961 arrangement of “Daisy Bell” inspired Arthur C. Clarke to have HAL sing it in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mathews gave a lecture at UCSB in 2009.

» Eugene (Gene) McDaniels had two hits (“A Hundred Pounds of Clay” and “Tower of Strength”) in the early 1960s, and wrote Roberta Flack’s 1974 hit “Feel Like Making Love.” But his classic is the 1971 black power album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, which reportedly prompted Vice President Spiro Agnew to call Atlantic Records to complain.

» Jerry Ragovoy was a songwriter whose songs were recorded by The Rolling Stones (“Time Is on My Side”), Janis Joplin (“Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby,” “Try (Just a Little Harder),” “Get It While You Can,” “My Baby”), Jimi Hendrix (“Stop”) and others.

» Don Kirshner was a music publisher and producer who worked with artists including Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin and Carole King. He also worked with local songwriter and producer Jeff Barry on The Monkees and The Archies. Later, he was host of the TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which included performances by the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, New York Dolls, T. Rex, The Ramones and Genesis.

» Mark Tulin was the bass guitar player for The Electric Prunes, which is best known for 1966′s psychedelic garage-rock classic single “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night).” The Prunes’ original lineup also released 1968′s psych obscurity Mass in F Minor, a Catholic mass sung in Latin — the track “Kyrie Eleison” from this album was on the soundtrack for the generation-defining movie Easy Rider. A few years ago Tulin visited Santa Barbara as part of The Spirits In The Sky, and he played on some recent Smashing Pumpkins tracks. Click here for an interview with Tulin.

» Poly Styrene was the singer and songwriter for the English punk rock band X-Ray Spex, which was formed in the wake of the Sex Pistols. Their album Germ Free Adolescents and single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” are considered to be among the highlights of the original wave of punk rock.

» Joe Yamanaka was the vocalist for Flower Travellin’ Band, considered by many to be Japan’s greatest rock band from the 1970s. In his book Japrocksampler, Julian Cope says Yamanaka “was in possession of a scream from the bowels of Hell itself,” and calls the Flower Travellin’ Band’s 1971 album Satori “one of the all-time great hard-rock rages to have been unleashed upon the world,” whose “magical results were regally exultant and wantonly barbaric simultaneously.”

» Conrad Schnitzler was a German electronic/experimental musician who contributed to the debut album by Tangerine Dream, was a founding member of Kluster and released a staggering number of solo recordings.

» David Bedford was a composer and musician who made contributions to progressive rock music, including Kevin Ayers’ first two albums and Roy Harper’s Stormcock and Valentine albums. He also arranged an orchestral version of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

Other notable 2011 musician deaths:

» Phoebe Snow (best known for “Poetry Man”)
» Rob Grill (lead singer of The Grass Roots)
» Gary Moore (guitarist for Thin Lizzy and many solo albums)
» Dan Peek (from the band America)
» Nate Dogg (performed with Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, many others)
» Charlie Louvin (from The Louvin Brothers)
» Marv Tarplin (guitarist from The Miracles and co-wrote “The Tracks of My Tears”)
» Jim Sherwood (played saxophone with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention)
» James “Curley” Cooke (played guitar with Steve Miller Band)
» Mike Starr (original bassist in Alice in Chains)
» Mikey Welsh (bassist for Weezer)
» Gerard Smith (bassist for TV on the Radio)
» Carl Gardner (from The Coasters)
» Jet Harris (bassist for The Shadows)
» Michael “Wurzel” Burston (guitarist for Motorhead)
» Gladys Horton (sang “Please Mr. Postman” in The Marvelettes)
» Marshall Grant (played bass with Johnny Cash)
» Barry Llewellyn (founding member of The Heptones)
» George Shearing (jazz pianist)
» Joe Morello (jazz drummer)
» Cory “Flattus Maximum” Smoot (from GWAR)
» Nick Ashford (co-wrote “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”)
» Joseph Brooks (wrote “You Light Up My Life”)
» Larry “Wild Man” Fischer (outsider musician)
» Jani Lane (from Warrant)
» Pinetop Perkins (blues pianist)
» Mark Klingman (founding member of Utopia)
» John Walker (frontman of Walker Brothers)
» John Barry (composer for the movies Born Free, Out of Africa, Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia With Love)

Tales from the Troubadour

Introduction to “Rex’s Blues”:

I had a friend, a teacher. His name was Townes. He was a songwriter, a folksinger, the best I ever saw.

He was a migratory beast. He summered in Colorado, did his winters in Texas and Tennessee. Those of us who lived along his migratory path, well we just waited with baited breath until he’d come around again next year.

He had a horse named Amigo, he kept in the Bronco Newcomb stable in Aspen, Colorado. Every summer he’d pick him up and he’d ride him across the mountain at Crested Butte. I was 17 years old when I met Townes. I thought that was the coolest thing that I’d ever heard of. Actually, I’m fifty-four and a half now, and I still think that’s the coolest thing.

But then the Seventies wound down. Times got hard, I guess. And Townes had to let Amigo go. It’s my belief that he began to die that day.

Several winters back, I made the trip backwards, from Crested Butte over to Aspen. Fifty-eight miles as the crow flies, but I ain’t no crow. It’s a hundred seventy-five, a hundred eighty by the highway. But we ran into a particularly tenacious little snowstorm, you know the kind. It took us eight and a half hours to make the ride. I couldn’t sleep so I wound up in the shotgun seat. Whilst the snow was blowing across the highway and the headlights looked like low flying ghosts, I swear to God I saw Townes and Amigo come over the mountain five times that night.

I thought I’d make me a record of Townes Van Zandt songs. This ain’t on it.

Intro to “Pancho and Lefty”:

Now when a fella’s gonna make him a record of Townes Van Zandt songs, you know you got your work cut out for you. I mean, the night before I started recording I had twenty-eight songs on the short list. I have no idea how I got it down to fifteen.

I met a guy from North Carolina that built guitars, and he said that you just kind of cut away everything that didn’t look much like a guitar. It was probably a similar process to that.

But I did know, once I decided to do this, what I was going to record first. You have to apply your own life experience to these things. The first day in jail, what you do, you go out in the yard, and you pick out the biggest motherfucker out there, and you knock him out. If you get away with that, then you get to keep your radio. So, applying that theory, I decided to record this first.

Intro to “Brand New Companion”:

If aliens were to land in West Hollywood tonight, and one walked straight up to me and stuck his raygun into my head, and said, “Quick, tell me about Townes Van Zandt,” I would say “Townes Van Zandt was a blues singer, sir.” By that I don’t necessarily mean that all of his songs consisted of an opening line that states an issue or problem, followed by a second line that reiterates the issue, followed by a third line that fails miserably to resolve it.

Townes and myself, and my other teacher Guy Clark, we can say that we were in Houston, Texas in the early 1970′s, and we saw Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins in the same room at the same time on more than one occasion. That, my friends, is a very big deal. If you don’t believe me, google it.

Townes used to say that there’s only three kinds of music. There’s the blues, and there’s zippity do da. This, my friends, is not zippity do da.

Intro to “Gold”:

I met Townes Van Zandt in 1972, eastern Texas. I’d been stalking him for a couple of years. We’d been in the same room on two occasions, but I was kind of shy.

I was playing the Old Quarter in downtown Houston, and I headed downstairs for my second set and Townes was sitting in the front row. Or to be more accurate, there were six people there that night, and Townes kind of was the front row.

He didn’t make a sound when I was actually singing and playing, but as soon as I finished a song he would yell “Play ‘The Wabash Cannonball’”. And despite his reputation for being all quiet and sensitive and everything, he could really be fucking loud sometimes.

He’d listen until the songs were over with, politely along with everyone else, and then immediately, “Play ‘The Wabash Cannonball.’ You call yourself a folk singer and you don’t know ‘The Wabash Cannonball?’”

In self-defense I played this.

Intro to “Marie”:

Townes grew up with a lot of money. He had a hard time dealing with it. He went to college, and fucked it up. Went again, someplace else, and fucked it up again. He could have gone a third time. His parents would have definitely paid for it. He didn’t understand why he had so much that he didn’t feel like he had earned.

He was notorious for bringing homeless people home with him, which contributed heavily to the demise of his first marriage. He continued that habit into the period when I met him, when he basically homeless himself, which meant that he was just traveling around staying with friends for about seven or eight years, in a barely big enough circle not to wear his welcome out. So that meant when he brought people home he was bringing them to other people’s houses. You could wake up in the morning and find Townes fucking gone, and somebody you didn’t know in your refridgerator or worse.

I hit a pretty rough spot myself a few years later, and before it was over I was homeless. Before it got to that point… I mean I should have known that it’s not a good sign if Townes Van Zandt shows up at your house to give you a temperance lecture.

The door was standing wide open. I never locked the place because everything that was worth anything, or just about everything, was already at the pawn shop.

Townes was playing the last guitar that I had, sitting on the couch, when I walked in the door, and he said, “You look like shit.” I said, “I know.” He said, “Your arms really look like shit.” I said, “I know.” He said, “Well, you got clean needles?” I said, “Yeah,” which was true. He said, “Every time?” I said, “Yeah.” [He said,] “All right then, let me play this song that I just wrote.”

As told by David Lowery, September 10, 2009, El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, California

I apologize if you’ve heard this story before, but I sort of have to tell it because it takes place in Los Angeles.

A long time, I think it was maybe 1981 or something like that, some of us were in another band in Santa Cruz called Box O’ Laffs. One summer, the guitarist got a job working down in Pasadena. And at some point during the summer he began to phone us and tell us that he’d been hanging out with the percussionist from Talking Heads, and that we were going to get to open for The Talking Heads when they came to L.A. to play.

This seemed improbable to us as well. However, he kept calling and insisting that it actually was going to happen. Eventually the day approached when we were going to have to leave and drive down here and decide that we were going to play with The Talking Heads or not.

So we started driving down here. Meanwhile we’d been calling and, like, asking, “Well, how much do we get? You know, how come we’re not in the advertisements?” You know, we just had all these questions, whatever.

Anyway, we get to Pasadena about, I don’t know, about midnight or 1:00 in the morning, or whatever. And we go over to find where our guitarist is supposedly living, but he’s not actually living there, he’s living someplace else. I think it’s kind like of this offshoot of Highland Park. And we show up there. It’s not exactly a crack house, but you could say that it was like a crack home, or something like that. It was sort of nice.

But anyway, and he’s living there with the percussionist from The Talking Heads, who now has quotation marks around his name. So hoping against all hope, we start pestering this guy. “What time do we play?” “How come we’re not in the advertisements?” “How long do we get to play?” “How much do we get paid?” We’re going on like this, and the guy’s getting more and more frustrated with us as it goes along. And clearly, clearly we’re not getting it. And finally he says, “Man, I am not talking about that show. That show is the fake show. The real show is on a flying saucer above Los Angeles after that show.”

Four hundred miles in the back of a pick-up truck.

The thing was, he was absolutely right. We did play on a flying saucer with The Talking Heads above Los Angeles, and this is the song that tells the story.

[band proceeds to play "The Long Plastic Hallway" off the album New Roman Times]

I emailed Dick Dale the link to my review of his concert at the Ventrua Majestic Theater on 6/14/09. Here is his response, by email:

very very nice….thank you and i am glad that you felt and enjoyed what
comes from within me…. the dd music lovers are my family…

one correction:
jimi did not play like me… when i would show him my slides

he learned them as a true left hander….

his strings were strung for a left hander with the big E on top.

I play upside down backward…. the book never told me to turn it
the other way stupid….you are left handed….ha

so i play on a right handed neck just like you would if you are right
handed.

I only turn it upside down with the big E on the bottom cause my drumming
rhythm is in my left hand.

why fix it if it aint broke….ha d