As I was saying the other week, it’s hard to deal with the passing of rock people who were all part of our lives for so long. Am I being a romantic and a bit of a melt? Dave Cousins of the Strawbs passed away on Monday at 85. I learned about it when Rick Wakeman mourned his passing. To me, life is like building a house. You start off with the foundations, and then brick by brick, you construct it. And if you were like me and from 13 totally embraced rock music in all its depth and breadth, perhaps to a greater extent than most of my contemporaries, that house is largely built of rock n roll. That means when someone like Dave Cousins passes on, it removes another brick from the house and makes the whole edifice weaker. Is that daft? It doesn't feel that way to me.
I can only imagine how it feels for Rick after starting his career with them. I know that, walking to school clutching Bursting At The Seams in 1974, a #2 album, I could never have imagined such a fateful day. It would have seemed impossibly distant. On one hand it’s a bit mad, he was 85, after all and to be honest, since 1977 the band have hardly been in the foreground of my mind, but even so, it feels like losing a teenage friend who I was once close to. Because I loved the bands releases up to Burning For You and loved the hit, ‘Lay Down’, which made me want to play guitar with its driving chords. A time when it meant everything to me, was my whole world.
They were an unusual band in that they could play driving progressive rock but also acoustic folk, often opening albums with an 8 or 9-minute opus in several parts. They were the first UK band signed to A&M. His first solo album, Two Weeks Last Summer sank without a trace but is a very fine outing with the likes of Jon Hiseman, Roger Glover, Wakeman, and the great Miller Anderson on guitar that should have been hailed, not just dismissed.
Grave New World, a lavishly presented album, was a classic example of how records were seen as artistic ventures in more creative and sympathetic times, which enriched our lives. The front cover is a reproduction of William Blake's Glad Day. It’s one of the records I pull out to show people why vinyl is incomparable to any other format. It often surprises people that such an expressed concept should come in a booklet of illustrated lyrics pinned into the sleeve and that some of Cousins' song Benedictus were influenced by the IChing, which we used to use when we were students because it opened up our thinking and neural pathways. It got to #11. A work of art in a commercial setting.
So one more of the vast army of musicians who made up the landscape of our youth, is no more, and time rolls ever on. We should be thankful for all that great music, all those distant years ago, which we took to school under our arms so proudly and which lives on. But it really makes you confront your own mortality doesn’t it?
Dave Cousins of the Strawbs...
