This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 27/05/15
Rock Fall
Right! I think this is about the point where I shout, "Fuck You!" at 2015:
Rocky Frisco (aka Rocky Curtiss, né Don Roscoe Joseph III)
Musician, author, activist
b. 26 July 1937, d. 26 May 2015.
I have known (in that particularly modern sense of the word) Rocky Frisco for over a decade, through conversations and discussions with him on alt.fan.pratchett. Some of those discussions (it wasn't just us, of course; in the olden times on afp there were dozens of us at a time) concerned music (as befits someone whose first paid gig was in the early rock'n'roll era), some concerned religion, others politics. I vehemently disagreed with him on many - but by no means all - of his views on the last two subjects, but I recognised and appreciated throughout Rocky's essential humanity.
As a musician who helped create the 'Tulsa Sound' in the late 1950s alongside his boyhood buddy J.J. Cale, and who later became Cale's ever-loyal touring keyboardist; as a committed racer of Minis in Canada in the late 60s (when he had left the life of a professional musician behind him in disillusionment at having been ripped off by the suits); and as a Libertarian political candidate and campaigner back in Tulsa in the decade before this one; as all of these, he brought a sense of integrity and honesty.
So, let's remember him as we ought to: home in Tulsa, in a recording studio made out of the church where he was baptised, singing one of his own songs, The Blues For You, and with Rocky gazing at the memorabilia of his bicycle ride from Tulsa to Killeen, Texas in order to meet Elvis (a tale told - along with many another - in this interview from 2008).
Goodnight, Rocky, and thank you.
