Trevor Bolder -- RIP

[mc2NY]

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/trevor-bolder-bassist-for-david-bowies-spiders-from-mars-dead-at-62-20130522

with Heep


with Spiders....

[gweimer]

I got this from someone on the old Pit (tacurtis?), and I've always dug the whole song and bass work.  From the credits, this looks like it's all Bolder - from the writing to the vocals.

[Happy Face]

He played with a really nasty tone on that Spiders From Mars concert video. So-so sound, but one of my favorite vids. But you only catch a glimpse of Bolder now & then. 

Bowie shafted him & the others after that show. It was nice to see him replace Wetton in the awesome Heep.

[uwe]

That's Bowie. He meets people, is impressed and uses them, sucks them out like a leech and then discards them. He's done that to countless musicians. The one guy he keeps returning to again and again is Earl Slick who was with him in the Bowie Live/Station to Station era, then returned for the Let's Dance tour when SRV asked for a king's ransom, and is featured even today on the newest album.

[westen44]

Never been a Bowie fan and never will be. 

[gweimer]

That's Bowie. He meets people, is impressed and uses them, sucks them out like a leech and then discards them. He's done that to countless musicians. The one guy he keeps returning to again and again is Earl Slick who was with him in the Bowie Live/Station to Station era, then returned for the Let's Dance tour when SRV asked for a king's ransom, and is featured even today on the newest album.

The story I've heard about Carlos Alomar is a little different.  Alomar was doing the sessions for Young Americans(?), when Bowie was pretty messed up.  Carlos looked at Bowie and told him he needed a good meal, and took him back to his apartment and made him some dinner.  That led to a long-term slot on the Bowie roster.  At least, that's what I recall reading, possibly from Alomar himself.

I was never a Reeve Gabrels fan, though.  I opened a show for The Earl Slick Band.  I always liked his style.

[godofthunder]

  I had never seen/heard Trevor with Heep. That was just spectacular!

[uwe]

The story I've heard about Carlos Alomar is a little different.  Alomar was doing the sessions for Young Americans(?), when Bowie was pretty messed up.  Carlos looked at Bowie and told him he needed a good meal, and took him back to his apartment and made him some dinner.  That led to a long-term slot on the Bowie roster.  At least, that's what I recall reading, possibly from Alomar himself.

I was never a Reeve Gabrels fan, though.  I opened a show for The Earl Slick Band.  I always liked his style.

I remember that story too and given that Bowie likes good food it sure must have played a role. But Alomar was in the NYC Apollo Theater house band and already a name whilst Bowie (living with Glenn Hughes at the time, one cokehead with another) was in his "black music phase", soon followed by his Berlin/Eno phase. I'm sure Bowie had heard about him (Alomar), he's not the unplanned type - the invite to the Young Americans session did not come out of nowhere and as the Diamond Dogs tour morphed into the Young Americans one (he recorded that album in the middle of the Diamond Dogs tour documented on "David Live") he nicked Alomar already for the live band on the second part of the tour. Alomar still speaks kindly about Bowie today. He never got a reason why his services were no longer required, but says he would work with Bowie again anytime "if he asked me to".

I loved Reeves G. for his Tin Machine work - he's a bit of a mix of Adrian Belew/Roger Fripp weirdness and rock feeling a la Ronson and Slick.

[uwe]

 I had never seen/heard Trevor with Heep. That was just spectacular!

Was it very cold being deep-frozen since the mid-seventies, Scott?   (To be fair: I know how Heep lost the US market after Byron's departure - in Germany they continued to be a quantity though not on the scale of Deep Purple.) The guy was the longest serving and on-most-records-playing UH bassist ever! He's played on every UH album (that should be 10 to 15, not counting the live ones!.   ) since 1976's Firefly - with the exception of Abonimog and Head First which were graced by Bob Daisley's bass playing in the early eighties, but Trevor returned soon from Wishbone Ash (Twin Barrels Burning) to the Heep fold and recorded Equator with them in the mid-eighties. Since then he had stayed on.

I saw him a couple of times - on the Firefly tour with Lawton, sometime in the eighties when they plugged Equator, as an opening act of various Purple gigs and at a club gig two or three years ago. He got better and better and took more and more freedom in playing. Hats off to Mick Box (always a band-serving guitarist) for letting him.

[TBird1958]

No diss on Trevor Bolder but for me - no Gary Thain = No Heep.

[godofthunder]

 Uwe you are not far off! Being a fan of many non USA bands in the '70s was very much like living in a vacum. Information was sparse at best. I'd pick up the odd release from the import bin, maybe read a short bit in a music mag. that was about it. Even being the Slade fan I am I didn't learn of Don Powell's car wreck till 2003!

Was it very cold being deep-frozen since the mid-seventies, Scott?   (To be fair: I know how Heep lost the US market after Byron's departure - in Germany they continued to be a quantity though not on the scale of Deep Purple.) The guy was the longest serving and on-most-records-playing UH bassist ever! He's played on every UH album (that should be 10 to 15, not counting the live ones!.   ) since 1976's Firefly - with the exception of Abonimog and Head First which were graced by Bob Daisley's bass playing in the early eighties, but Trevor returned soon from Wishbone Ash (Twin Barrels Burning) to the Heep fold and recorded Equator with them in the mid-eighties. Since then he had stayed on.

I saw him a couple of times - on the Firefly tour with Lawton, sometime in the eighties when they plugged Equator, as an opening act of various Purple gigs and at a club gig two or three years ago. He got better and better and took more and more freedom in playing. Hats off to Mick Box (always a band-serving guitarist) for letting him.

[uwe]

No diss on Trevor Bolder but for me - no Gary Thain = No Heep.

I understand what you mean. Thain's mix of rhythmic nuance and melodicism is unmatched - he sounded phat, rhythmically sophisticated (very much so for a white player in a hard rock band) and melodic all at once. Very much a finger player. Bolder was a finger player too, but he had a pick player's approach for whatever reason.

Being a heroin addict if you don't have Keith Richards' nine lives is never a good idea though. 

[uwe]

Uwe you are not far off! Being a fan of many non USA bands in the '70s was very much like living in a vacum. Information was sparse at best. I'd pick up the odd release from the import bin, maybe read a short bit in a music mag. that was about it. Even being the Slade fan I am I didn't learn of Don Powell's car wreck till 2003!

It's funny how Heep never cracked the States while Deep Purple did (band with most US sales in 1973 - ahead of Led Zep). In many ways Heep were more accessible: more song-priented, chorus-heavy (never a forte of Purple), lavish backing vocals, no 25 minute instrumental workouts that always scare the girls away   - they had an AOR ingredient that Purple with its prog influence mostly lacked. What Heep did not have was the virtuoso aspect of Blackmore/Lord/Paice (though Box/Hensley/Kerslake were good players), no enigma star like Blackmore and I always found that for people who dug Ian Gillan's sometimes Jim Morrison'esque coolness and way with words, Byron was a bit too operatic in his singing and too glammed up as a frontman. Of course I do know that Mark found him starkly handsome back then!!!



I preferred Gillan's smirky coolness, David Byron was a bit too much larger than life for me.

[nofi]

heep was never a factor over here. my sister is the only person i know that ever saw them. imo they have always been more of a euro thing.

[TBird1958]

Indeed so Uwe!
My first exposure to them was "Easy Livin", then "Sweet Lorraine" back when Seattle's FM stations actually played good music! Gary Thain was one of my early bass heros, I was trully saddened by his death, had tix to see them and the show was cancelled. I saw them with John Wetton (Journey opened the show!) but for me the magic was lost.
I seem to always equate Bolder with Bowie.........