Tommy Bolin....

Jayrosc

Super Member
Been away from here for a few weeks but had to jump back in after revisiting this guys work. Brilliant slide player, good songwriter and a guy that knew how to pick great players to help him out.
Yeah, he died way too young.
Left behind some good stuff.
 
His music was unique and unlike most rock music I have listen to.
What I've always liked about it was how little repetition there was in a song. Even the beat and guitar tempos will change within his works.
Very unique and brilliant artist IMO and his works stand on solid ground and are really timeless.
A very sad loss.
 
He did a stint in Deep Purple,featured guitarist on Spectrum by Billy Cobham and was a member of Zephyr in his college years.
I liked his solo outings too.
 
While the Purple and the solo stuff was great I think my most favorite work of his was on the James Gang album 'Bang'.
 
image.jpeg

Private Eyes is still my favorite. Very polished album and well produced compared to some of his other solo stuff. Ironic he "post tosteed" himself. Waste of a great talent.

Love this picture of him in front of a wall of Hiwatts.
 
I knew the name but could not remember exactly why. His Teaser album was present for a couple of weeks in one of the bins at a thrift shop I frequent. Once, when there was absolutely nothing there but dreck, I gambled the $1.99 despite that the cover made me think it was going to be along the lines of say Rex Smith or a less talented relative of Marc Bolin.

Tommy Bolin Teaser.jpg

When I got around to playing it, it was much better than I expected - he is a very good player, innovative enough to keep my attention. It was after a Google search that I realized where I remembered his name from. Definitely not at all like Rex smith.
 
I have been a long time Deep Purple fan BUT.......I only heard Come Taste The Band for the first time about 4 years ago. It's now my favorite DP album. I have a great CD of Bolin demos and live recordings with different bands, I forget what it's called but I really like it.
 
About one month ago I got a private message on Facebook from Canned Heat's keyboard player. He knows I lived in Nederland, Colorado in the 70's and wanted to know if I knew Bolin's "partner in crime" when he'd come back and hang out in the area. I'm not going to mention his name here because he's still alive (that came as a surprise to me, I thought he was dead after vanishing suddenly) and under doctor's care. I'll call him MR. MR was also a guitar savant and a session player at Caribou Ranch Recording Studio. Bolin and MR were pretty close to equals as musicians and like twins when it came to partying. Bolin's death hit MR hard and he went off the deep end for a while and that got him on a locked psych ward in Boulder. I have a cassette I recorded at a private party in 1975 with Bolin and MR playing guitar on it. It's in a box somewhere in my basement along with others that haven't seen the light of day for four decades. Part of it is somewhat garbled because my car cassette player ate it one night and I had to take the player apart to get all the tape out. I had to splice it in a couple of places and I doubt the Scotch tape I did it with has held up very well. One day I may dig it out, properly splice it and put it in a better cassette shell then make a .wav file from it to see what I can do with it in Sound Forge Pro.
 
---snip--- I have a cassette I recorded at a private party in 1975 with Bolin and MR playing guitar on it. It's in a box somewhere in my basement along with others that haven't seen the light of day for four decades. Part of it is somewhat garbled because my car cassette player ate it one night and I had to take the player apart to get all the tape out. I had to splice it in a couple of places and I doubt the Scotch tape I did it with has held up very well. One day I may dig it out, properly splice it and put it in a better cassette shell then make a .wav file from it to see what I can do with it in Sound Forge Pro.
Very cool! If that were my tape, knowing what time and wear can do to some tapes, I'd consider making that conversion to digital a priority.
 
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