{"id":848,"date":"2010-06-24T21:47:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T02:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bourdaghs.com\/blog\/?p=848"},"modified":"2010-06-25T11:39:02","modified_gmt":"2010-06-25T16:39:02","slug":"music-and-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bourdaghs.com\/blog\/?p=848","title":{"rendered":"Music and Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fans of other 1960s rock bands have all had to deal with this many times over. But for us Kinks fans, it is a new and unwelcome experience: news is now spreading over the Internet that Pete Quaife, original bassist for the Kinks, died yesterday in Denmark. He’d been in a coma for several days and had been battling health problems for years. I’d just been thinking about Pete the other day, searching on-line for tracks by his post-Kinks band Mapleoak and stumbling across this 1988 interview:
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\nPete left the band in 1969, seven or eight years before I discovered them, and so I never had the chance to see him play live. But his wonderful bass playing forms a distinctive part of so many early Kinks records: “Waterloo Sunset,” “Sunny Afternoon,” and of course “Dead End Street.”
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\nThis is our first loss of a member of the Kinks, and I don’t like it one bit. I hope we don’t have to do this again for many more years to come.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, I’ve just learned that Bob Meide, drummer for the Flamin’ Oh’s, passed away a few days ago<\/a>. The Oh’s were probably my favorite local band in the Twin Cities in the early 1980s. They had a number of local hits and were monsters live, but never broke out nationally. I had the chance to interview them a couple of times and hang out with them at one or two shows. I remember one night in 1981 or 82 at Macalester College: after they finished playing a show on campus, I took them up to the broadcast studio of WMCN, the campus radio station, and we drank beer and played cool records for hours. Meide was a terrific drummer; as the obituary in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune<\/em> notes<\/a>, “He looked like Ringo Starr but played like Keith Moon of the Who.” RIP, Pete and Bob. Heaven has a new rhythm section, it seems.
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(Update on 6\/25\/10: More tributes to Pete Quaife are coming on-line now, from Dave Davies<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, Geoff Edgers<\/a> (of the movie Do It Again<\/em>), and Rolling Stone<\/em> magazine<\/a>.)<\/p>\n