I saw Rick's picture on the evening news on Christmas Eve - my dad had the volume turned down in his living room - and I immediately knew what it meant, it stopped me dead in my tracks. I'm probably more emotionally attached to Quo than I am to Deep Purple or Judas Priest.
His health had been fragile since the last twenty years. His first heart attack around age 50, bypasses, throat cancer, more heart attacks (on several occasions), this year clinically dead for a couple of minutes following a gig in Turkey, loss of memory (the two months prior to his clinical death), the recent fall in Spain.
His band mate Francis Rossi saw him resusicated this summer and never one to mince words: "
I saw Rick's body jump into the air from the defibrillators again and again, not a pretty sight and I wouldn't want to have it done to me, I was about to tell them to stop it and leave him."
Parfitt and Rossi were the cokeheads within Quo (which in part explains the frenzied energy they had in the 70ies), but Rick was also a drinker (Rossi turned teetotaler) and smoker (Rossi kicked that habit too). And while always the good-natured affable Quo (Rossi has a caustic, even slightly callous nature), he had hs demons since his little daughter Heidi drowned in his swimming pool in 1980 which also killed his first marriage. "
Life goes on eventually", he once said, "
but you never get over something like that."
In memoriam of the "most handsome Quo" (he won all the polls in the girlie mags!), the "blond rock god" and the idiosyncratic rhythm guitar heart of them:
(PS: I saw Quo without Rick this November, the new guy played all the right notes and it was an excellent gig, but then you could teach most guitarists Keith Richards' parts too, yet the Stones wouldn't sound the same without him. It's the same thing with Quo, Parfitt was a force of nature on rhythm guitar, the music was arranged around him. Anybody who plays .14 as his "light" E-String and has the low E in gauges up to .60 is almost a bass player at heart anyway.
)
