In light of the recent passing of the Beastie Boys‘ Adam “MCA” Yauch, Every Time I Die frontman Keith Buckley has offered a insightful missive about how the deaths of certain musicians have impacted him throughout his life.
The piece also touches on Roy Orbison, Pantera‘s Dimebag Darrell Abbott and Nirvana‘s Kurt Cobain. An excerpt from it can be found online below with the full entry available over at his official website, Keith-Buckley.com:
“The first time I remember seeing my father sad was when Roy Orbison died. Until that point I had seen my father in the throes of numerous emotions but a sincere, genuine sadness was never one of them.
It was hard to take seriously for a number of reasons. A) a sad father was something so unfamiliar to me that when he came downstairs and asked that we observe a moment of silence I figured he was being jokingly dramatic. B) I didn’t really know who Roy Orbison was and C) my father didn’t know Roy Orbison.
When his records were played, they were played loudly and I immediately developed an affinity for his warbled falsetto but his death didn’t mean that someone would be coming around to remove his music from our house.
To me, mourning seemed, I guess, unnecessary. My father didn’t lose a friend that he shared common memories with and in a sense he didn’t even really LOSE one of his favorite musicians.
He may never again be able to make music, but its not as if Roy Orbison handed my father a list of all the great songs he would one day write and died before fulfilling his promise. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Just put his record on and bring him back to life. Easy.
When Kurt Cobain died I was shocked for the simple fact that he did it himself. I loved Nirvana but more than that I loved being alive, so the idea that someone who coerced me through their music to actually FEEL alive would now go away without considering me? That made angrier than it did sad. I was 14, so being self important was second nature but so was being confused.
Again, I knew I could still listen to his music whenever I wanted, but no one I had read or listened to or cared about or knew or even knew OF had ever killed themselves and it always seemed to me that pulling the trigger on a gun aimed at yourself defied certain laws of self-preservation or physics or something…”
Read the full entry at Keith-Buckley.com
