Paul Westerberg on the passing of Alex Chilton: “How does one react to the death of one’s mentor?” (New York Times op-ed)

Singer and Songwriter Dies at 45: Vic Chesnutt, whose darkly comic songs about mortality, vulnerability and life’s simple joys made him a favorite of critics and fellow musicians, died Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a family spokesman said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.

He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week.

Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.

The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.

In a recent interview on the public radio show “Fresh Air,” he told Terry Gross: “It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say.”

Although he never had blockbuster record sales, Mr. Chesnutt was a prolific songwriter who remained a mainstay on the independent music circuit for two decades, making more than 15 albums.

Musicians flocked to work with him: he recorded with the bands Lambchop, Widespread Panic and Elf Power, as well as the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and in a recent burst of creative activity he made two albums with a band that included Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of the Montreal indie-rock group Thee Silver Mt. Zion.

Because of Mr. Chesnutt’s fondness for simple guitar chords — after his accident his fingers could no longer form the jazzier ones, he has said — his work was often described as a variant of folk-rock. But the sound of his albums changed with their revolving collaborators, from stark recordings of Mr. Chesnutt alone to finessed full-band arrangements.

…He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:

When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind

But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death

Oh death, I’m really not ready.

(New York Times obituary)

“James Gurley, who played guitar in Big Brother and the Holding Company, the psychedelic rock band that brought Janis Joplin to fame, died on Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 69. One of the central groups of San Francisco’s fertile mid-1960s rock scene, Big Brother and the Holding Company took blues-based songs on long, strange, electric trips that often featured Mr. Gurley’s protracted solos. In an interview in 2007 with The Desert Sun, in Palm Springs, Calif., Mr. Gurley said that his approach was inspired by the music of John Coltrane.” (New York Times obituary)

‘Sosa, the “voice of Latin America” whose music inspired opponents of South America's brutal military regimes and led to her forced exile in Europe, died Sunday, her family said. She was 74.’ (Washington Post obituary)

‘ “I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told The Associated Press in June. “As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.” ‘
(New York Times obit)

The folksinger, one third of Peter, Paul and Mary, has died after a battle with leukaemia, aged 72. Travers was an outspoken supporter of the civil rights and anti-war movements. “I am deadened and heartsick beyond words to consider a life without Mary Travers and honoured beyond my wildest dreams to have shared her spirit and her career,” Noel “Paul” Stookey said. (BBC obituary).

John Dawson is dead at 64: “Dawson, a singer and songwriter whose band New Riders of the Purple Sage began as a country-rock offshoot of the Grateful Dead but had a long life of its own, died on Tuesday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lived. He was 64.

…Mr. Dawson, known as Marmaduke, founded New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1969 with David Nelson and Jerry Garcia, whom Mr. Dawson had known from Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band Champions, a Grateful Dead predecessor formed in 1964. Mr. Dawson was looking for a band to perform his country-inflected songs, and Mr. Garcia was eager for a project in which he could indulge his newest musical obsession, pedal-steel guitar.

… Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were briefly members, and New Riders became one of the Dead’s regular opening acts, its country-leaning sound complementing the older band’s psychedelic folk-rock.

The group’s formal association with the Grateful Dead did not last long: Mr. Hart and Mr. Lesh departed before New Riders’ self-titled debut album was released in 1971, and Mr. Garcia left shortly thereafter. But the band remained closely connected to many of the top psychedelic groups of the era: Mr. Nelson had played guitar in Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Spencer Dryden, formerly of Jefferson Airplane, joined as drummer in late 1970.

New Riders released a dozen albums into the early ’80s. One, “The Adventures of Panama Red,” from 1973, went gold, and a track from that album, “Panama Red” — a novelty song about marijuana, not so thinly veiled — became a staple. With Mr. Garcia and Robert Hunter, the longtime Grateful Dead lyricist, Mr. Dawson also wrote the song “Friend of the Devil,” which appears on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album “American Beauty.” ” (New York Times obituary)

There has been much web speculation at times past that he was suicidal (Google search). In a total vacuum about autopsy findings, I wonder if it is reasonable to speculate about whether he took his own life, as troubled as he evidently was mentally, and with incredible mounting financial woes.

“John Martyn, a Scottish singer and guitarist whose gentle mix of folk and jazz and innovative use of electronic effects have influenced a broad range of musicians since the 1970s, died on Thursday in Kilkenny, Ireland. He was 60.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jim Tullio, his longtime record producer.

Mr. Martyn emerged from the London folk scene of the mid-1960s with a crisp and distinctive guitar style, but he had his greatest impact in the ’70s with albums that took that sound in new directions. Inspired in part by the slow-burning, mystical jazz of the American saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, he devolved a keen sense of texture and atmospherics, transforming ballads into sensuous rhapsodies.

Making novel use of the Echoplex and other devices in songs like “Glistening Glyndebourne” (1971), he manipulated the sound of his acoustic guitar, making it pulse and throb hypnotically, an effect widely imitated throughout the ’70s and ’80s.

Although his music never had a wide appeal, Mr. Martyn released more than 20 albums and has been emulated by generations of musicians.” via NYTimes Obituary.

Solid Air and Grace and Danger have always been in heavy rotation in my listening. Today, they will be on continuous shuffle…