RIP Rick Parfitt

[Basvarken]

The Grim Reaper is not done with 2016 yet...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/24/status-quo-guitarist-rick-parfitt-dies-aged-68

RIP Rick Parfitt

[Rob]

RIP

[TBird1958]

Hard year. 


RIP Rick.

[Dave W]

RIP. Shoulder injury becomes lethal infection? Sounds like it could be hospital malpractice.

Only a week left in a brutal year. And Carrie Fisher is in intensive care.

[Highlander]

I think ol' RP's ticket was booked some years back... just kept cheating it...  you can only run so fast and ol' Grim Reaper can run all day and all night without taking a breath... at least he's not playing a Gibson... rip Rick... you were a key part of my childhood and teens with your buddies...

[wellREDman]

crewed for Quo last week, was just not right without Parfitt

[Aussie Mark]

First concert I ever went to was Quo in 1974 or 75.  RIP

[Dave W]

crewed for Quo last week, was just not right without Parfitt

Was it only because he was ailing? Hard to imagine the band going forward without him.

[wellREDman]

dunno I didnt even know about it til show time
they had some young un playing and singing all his parts so the tour seemed to be  planned around his absence.
Rossi just looked lost

[Basvarken]

He suffered a severe heart attack last summer at a gig in Antalya Turkey. Narrow escape. He quit touring immediately.

Quo weren't a shadow of themselves anymore even before Parfitt had to quit.
More like a cabaret doing silly medleys.

[Highlander]

There's plenty of precedence for bands with little or no original members... Foreigner, with guest Mick Jones, Foghat with original rhythm section but no original singers or guitarists, Wishbone Ash with one orig, Yes have nearly run out, Thin Lizzy, Blackfoot, Heart still have their original singers, Quiet Riot, Guns and Roses, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Whitesnake and even Deep Purple, to name but a few...
The other side of the coin... U2 and ZZ Top are pretty much the only fully originals that come to mind; bound to be others...

Sing-a-long-a-Quo has been the case for many years, unfortunately...

[uwe]

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. )

[Dave W]

His death isn't on the news here, not surprising since Quo is almost unknown here. They're a one-hit wonder from 1968.

I emailed a local friend and asked if he had heard the news. His reply: "I saw that Rick died, but of course he was a real musician so no publicity for him."

[westen44]

His death isn't on the news here, not surprising since Quo is almost unknown here. They're a one-hit wonder from 1968.

I emailed a local friend and asked if he had heard the news. His reply: "I saw that Rick died, but of course he was a real musician so no publicity for him."

That's true that Status Quo was one of those famous bands that didn't get enough attention at all in the U.S.  On the other hand, millions of people all over the world know who Rick Parfitt was and are mourning his death.  That's in contrast to many others who die in obscurity.  That guitarist for the Outsiders comes to mind.  He also died at the age of 68, but in an Ohio nursing home.  (Of course the American Outsiders, not the Dutch.)

RIP Rick Parfitt

[OldManC]

Between my friends in the UK and my musician friends, my timeline on Facebook had plenty of announcement posts. The first time I ever heard of Quo was in '84 when I got to England, and they seemed (to me) to be more of a sentimental favorite/oldies band even then, but they were well loved, so I'm not surprised to see Rick's passing making the kind of impact (in England/Europe) that it is. RIP