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July 31, 2005
Long John Baldry
There was a time when certain members of the vast staff at KIW were young.
6'7" Long John Baldry
There are some memories associated with that youth, one of which is the golden remembrence of a four day trip through the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee in the spring of 1975.
This remarkable mountain odyssey was undertaken by two eighteen year-olds who proudly and frequently referred to each other as “wild man”, which was, at that moment in time, the cleverest, most hippest (yet macho) moniker imaginable.
The soundtrack to the epic North American journey referred to above, was played and replayed on the 8 track stereo sound system in the 1969 light blue Buick in which the journey was accomplished. That soundtrack consisted of two remarkably well-crafted record albums put out a couple of years earlier by an English fellow named Long John Baldry.
According to KIW's music department, those two albums, 1971’s It Ain’t Easy, and 1972’s Everything Stops For Tea, rank among the very best folk/rock/blues recordings of the 1970s. This, in spite of the fact that the records were out of print even at the moment of the 1975 Tennessee voyage.
This brings us to the good news and the bad news.
The good news is, that Warner Brothers – after thirty years – will be releasing new versions of both It Ain’t Easy, and Everything Stops for Tea, in September, 2005.
The bad news, is about as bad as bad news gets.
On Thursday 21 July, 2005 at roughly 10:30 pm – just as one KIW staffer was strolling up Robson Street, on one of those routinely-spectacular Vancouver BC summer evenings – Long John Baldry died, a few blocks over, at Vancouver General Hospital.
That KIW staffer remembers that at roughly 10:30 pm on that particular night, he passed by a beggar sitting on the sidewalk holding a cardboard sign on which the beggar had written “HIV +.” The KIW staffer nodded at the beggar, who nodded back.
No one on the vast staff at KIW ever met Long John Baldry. We suspect that Mr. Baldry was a kind man. Lots of people say that he was.
Thank you Long John Baldry, for the delightful music that you created. You gladdened our hearts. The Smokey Mountains of Tennessee will always echo with your songs.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer; 23 July 2005; p.A5; "Blues legend boosted some of rock's greats"
Posted by williamfrick at July 31, 2005 10:22 PM