Trevor Bolder -- RIP

[uwe]

Wetton is a fine bass player, but his playing with Heep was a bit heartless. Hensley once said: "Either very standard or completely off the wall, nothing in between!" Thain had more of an intuitive feel for the music (of which he wrote very little), he played complexly, yet it sounded natural and even simple.

Wasn't Heep's major exposure to the US market opening for T. Rex in the early seventies? Not that T. Rex cracked the US market wide open either. Heep are not even a Euro thing, but more of a Germano one. Not even in Britain did they ever have the success they had in Germany. Derided as "poor man's Deep Purple", they still did quite well in a market where Deep Purle meant all the world in the first half of the seventies. Heep weren't as popular in Germany as DP or Led Zep, but close and certainly more popular than, say, Black Sabbath, Mott the Hoople, UFO, Nazareth, Thin Lizzy etc.

The production of those early Bowie albums did Trevor Bolder no favors whatsoever. Strange, given that Tony Visconti is a bassist himself.

[TBird1958]

Heep's big sucess in the U.S. was "Stealin", as I recall it got pretty heavy FM play ( but it's always best to think of Seattle as a "musical island", we march to a very different drum here!) but there was no follow up to it -Thain passed away, so did sucess in the U.S.   

[uwe]

Demons & Wizards, Magican's Birthday, the Live Album and Sweet Freedom (with Stealin' on it) were the four consecutive albums that constituted Heep's chart reign in Germany (all of them featuring Thain) - things went down with Wonderworld, the last album with an already ailing Thain.

Return to Fantasy (with Wetton) picked up in sales again as did Innocent Victim (with Lawton and the jukebox/radio megahit Free Me) and Fallen Angel (with Lawton and the soppy Kerslake-penned ballad Come Back to Me which was another big hit in Germany). After that Heep disappeared from the charts in Germany and stopped touring medium-sized halls, they have since then essentially played larger clubs and small halls, but sell those out everytime, they have a faithful fan crowd. You can hear the ole two chorder (Em and D) Lady in Black (sung by Hensley, not Byron and now covered on the new Blackmore's Night CD) and Free Me on German radio to this day.

[gweimer]

Wasn't Heep's major exposure to the US market opening for T. Rex in the early seventies?

That may have been part of it - we had gotten the manager where I worked as a teen tickets to their stop in Chicago, but he couldn't go.

I recall that it was "Easy Living" that first caught everyone's ear here, but it was "Stealin'" that broke them out.  I'm with Mark on Thain - he was probably the biggest influence on my playing, far beyond the people I wanted to emulate - Bruce, Dunaway, Wetton, Squire, Butler....

We copied something off of Return To Fantasy, but it just wasn't the same.  Wetton may have been a better bass player technically, but didn't have any real emotional investment in Heep.  Thain seemed to play every note with them like he meant it.

[Happy Face]

I'm not sure that Wetton was a better player. I'd say the opposite, but he sure could sing!

This is an interesting thread. I was introduced to Uriah Heep by a band member who ... yep, lived in Denmark & Germany for a few years. We covered Easy Living & Sweet Lorraine. Both of them were always well received. Especially Easy Living. It was really fun to play those. All four of us had to hit the mikes to nail those choruses.

 

[4stringer77]

This thread makes me want to check out the two albums they did in the early 80's with Lee Keerslake on drums and Bob Daisley on bass. Abominog and Head First. They must have been tight albums with those guys coming in right after recording Ozzy's best stuff.

[gweimer]

This thread makes me want to check out the two albums they did in the early 80's with Lee Keerslake on drums and Bob Daisley on bass. Abominog and Head First. They must have been tight albums with those guys coming in right after recording Ozzy's best stuff.

I reviewed both of those for The Illinois Entertainer.  They were, as I recall, an attempt at being the Uriah Heep of legend, but relied on formula more than ideas.  The songs that stood out were a change of direction that they handled pretty well.

[Happy Face]

My wife & I enjoyed the laserdisc of the Spiders From Mars video tonight.

I just love the nasty bass sound Trevor got on "Moonage Daydream" and "Width of a Circle". 

This is a board where most of us realize through sad experience that we will sound like ourselves rather than our heroes no matter what guitars or amps we use..... but a couple of years ago I did get inspired by Trevor Bolder and bot an EB-3-L (long scale) clone specifically and only because of the tone Bolder got on that laserdisc.  Sadly, I could not get the action down to Entwhistle levels and sold it on to someone who thought he could.

Beyond that, I could prolly get that sound if I overdrived my little Sunn 200s head.    But, it sure would have been better if I'd kept my Marshall rig.

Not that any of my musings matter.

RIP Trevor Bolder.

[Nocturnal]

The Ziggy Stardust movie came on Weds. nite on Palladia (I think thats the music channel) and I watched it with my wife. Very few shots of Bolder, but you can sure hear him    Moonage Daydream is a favorite of ours as well. We actually went to the theatre to watch this movie early in our dating time.