Wednesday, March 3, 2010

R.I.P: T Bone Wolk (1951-2010)

Well, this is one hell of a bummer. When I was but a wee bairn deciding to play the bass, it wasn't really because I gravitated toward the basslines on records or anything. Mostly it was because my picking up the best instrument ever was coincident with my getting MTV so I could see cool guys that were bass players. In that era, there were two big guys who I though looked the coolest via video. The first was Peter Cetera in the video for Chicago's You're The Inspiration. Cheesy, I know, but the band scenes in the beach house with Cetera chilling in the arm chair playing the inverted Precision were totally bad ass. And note that Cetera rocks a fucking Bauhaus t-shirt. The second was T-Bone Wolk in the Hall & Oates Private Eyes video. Oddly enough, another P-Bass guy, but I wanted to be the guy in the hat for a long while afterward. In recent H&S years T-Bone was musical director for the franchise, but in a pronounced bummer wasn't playing bass, but rather acoustic guitar most of the time. I don't recall who was playing bass this past summer, Kasim Sultan maybe? Either way, kind of a bummer.

Evidently T-Bone had a heart attack after a session upstate, perhaps one for a solo record he was working on. Either way, the bass community has lost one of it's biggest pillars. Rest easy, big guy!

R

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