Here's a really, really great video on Richard Manuel (and oh yeah, The Band).

@wharfy: Ha! I tried on his spare, and damn I don't know how they can play with those things on. I started feeling pretty claustrophobic.

@wharfy: A former fellow band member friend of mine is a week younger then I (we met the first day of 7th grade in September of 1962, and played our first show together at the Jr. High Talent Show in the spring of ’64. A year later we were both playing in separate bands), and he’s still out on the road, currently playing bass in the band that’s opening for and then backing Nick Lowe in his live shows (he and they are also the band on Nick’s latest album). But he no longer has to do the manual labour.

@wharfy: I turn 75 in June. Damn, where’d the time go?! In three years I’ll be the age my Pa was when he croaked. Colon cancer. But I never smoked, drank only moderately, ate sensibly, and got plenty of exercise hauling band equipment in and out of vans, up and down stairs, etc.

Did you get to see Bloomfield in The Electric Flag live? Fan-f*cking-tastic! Buddy Miles made Keith Moon look like a wimp.

Musselwhite was wiser than his contemporary, Paul Butterfield. Paul got in tight with the Woodstock guys, doing a lot of playing with Levon Helm and Rick Danko in particular. He died of an overdose at age 44.

The debut Paul Butterfield Blues Band album was the first "real" Blues music I heard. It opened the eyes of my teenage suburban bandmates and I as to how bad most of the British bands performed the music (the exceptions being John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac).

The only drugs we had in San Jose in the 60’s and 70’s (at least that I knew of) were weed, LSD, and amphetamine (speed). When I moved to L.A. in 1979, cocaine was everywhere. Every party I went to had mirrors with lines of coke floating around the room, like joints were in San Jose. I tried it a few times, and wondered what all the fuss was about. That was until one night, when I finally got enough of the stuff to really get off. It was so much fun that I decided right then and there to never do it again. Haven’t touched the stuff since.

Meanwhile, my sister (in Portland, Oregon) and my girlfriend’s sister and her husband (in.L.A.) got themselves addicted to heroin, the girlfriend’s sister and her husband doing a coupla stretches in prison for armed robbery. The husband died of an overdose (heroin laced with fentanyl) a few years ago, and the sister has been on all kinds of pills (including oxycodone) for years. My sister got clean, and remains so.

That longtime girlfriend of mine had been a productive, high-income (an assistant to a lawyer who represented big-time musical artists), level-headed kind of person, but in the first decade of the 2000’s got into weed on a deep level, and it completely changed her personality. That lead to our breakup in 2008, and her mental breakdown and firing resulted in her going on Social Security Disability, where she remains.

What a world!

@wharfy: Evan was in a band with the genius guitar player Danny Gatton, who like Richard committed suicide. Evan told me it was Danny’s wife who drove him to it. He also told me Danny was the best musician he ever played with. I wasn’t insulted; not everyone can be a genius. Just like I wasn’t insulted when Emitt Rhodes told me the best musician he ever worked with was the genius drummer Jim Gordon (though he did praise my playing on the song he was producing in his nice converted-garage recording studio. The bassist on the date wasn’t so fortunate; Emitt’s brutal critique of his playing had him in tears). Emitt himself was a big pothead, as well as a very unhappy, bitter man (he got royally screwed by the contract he signed with Lou Adler/Dunhill Records. Plus he had two ex-wives who caused him a lot of grief, and three daughters who caused him a lot of pain.).​​​​​​

@wharfy: It was only recently that I learned of Richard's (and Levon's) dabbling with heroin. Coincidentally, I believe that was also when Clapton was using, locked inside his house for a coupla years. And the same time John and Yoko were doing the same in The Dakoda. I remember hearing about Jerry Garcia's heroin addiction, and being surprised that a guy so associated with LSD and higher consciousness would be interested in a "body" drug.

I've known and made music with a couple of guys who drank themselves to death, including Evan Johns. During the recording of his Moontan album, he was drinking beer in quantities I had never before witnessed (about an 18-pk. a day). He told me "You're okay as long as you stay away from the hard stuff" (presumably whiskey, gin, and vodka). But as the album was being mixed and a tour set up to support the release of the album, Evan lapsed into a coma. The doctors told his woman to start making funeral arrangements, that he was in the final stage of liver failure. A coupla weeks later Evan suddenly sat up, asking about his Telecaster. Turns out that was the third time that had happened, but not the last. He somehow made it to the age of 60, dying in Austin, Texas back in 2017. The other guy made it to only 39.

Richard Manuel was only 42 when he committed suicide.

Here's Richard leading The Band in "The Shape I'm In" at The Last Waltz. My God, just awesome!

https://youtu.be/aHMp_HV6a4s?si=VYptz9gaLsZzH3EW