Tommy Bolin

[ripley156]

I was looking at the Wayne website and was surprised to see that he had built a guitar for Tommy Bolin...He is one of my all-time favorites! No one really seems to talk too much about Tommy...If he is someone you are not familiar with, you should check-out some of his later work (Teaser, Private Eyes, etc...They aren't as challanging to listen-to as the earlier Zephyr/Moxy/Mourning music)...A lot of his music is still relevant even today. He had super-cool style and an excellent tone!

Dan

[shredmonster]

Re: Tommy Bolin

I liked his music. Very hip at the time.

[donf]

Re: Tommy Bolin

Ritchie Blackmore's replacement? [img]/images/graemlins/scratchhead.gif[/img]

[ripley156]

Re: Tommy Bolin

Yes, he replaced Ritchie in Deep Purple. I think he played on "Come Taste the Band" and the live album...He replaced Joe Walsh in The James Gang and I heard (although I cannot find any "real" documentation) through the guy at Starship Records in Tulsa that he was slated to replace Joe Walsh in the Eagles at one time soon before he died..
Man, he was cool dude!

[donf]

Re: Tommy Bolin

I remember buying Come Taste the Band when it came out. How'd he die? Car accident?

[pro-fusion]

Re: Tommy Bolin

Actually, in the James Gang, Tommy replaced the guy who replaced Joe Walsh. Tommy was on two JG albums: "Bang" and "Miami", both of which are pretty good, but not essential.

Being a big Deep Purple fan, I'm a fan of Bolin, but I have to say that his best work--by far--is on a jazz album by drummer Billy Cobham called "Spectrum." Tommy's playing on Spectrum is AWESOME!! Not chops-of-doom type stuff, but really funky and gut-wrenching, yet sophisticated at the same time. He had a lot of soul and could certainly hold his own with some pretty impressive jazz-fusion musicians who played on that album.

Tommy was a bit out-of-place in Deep Purple, since he was more into looser, jazzier stuff and was not at all interested in replicating Ritchie's work onstage. In fact, he refused to learn any of Ritchie's more famous solos, which led to a lot of fan criticism at the time. Also, Tommy was suffering from a severe heroin problem by the time he started touring with Purple in late '75--and he was very inconsistent from the performances I've heard.

There are now two officially released DP performances with Bolin ("On the Wings of a Russian Foxbat" from Long Beach Arena, and "This Time Around" from the Tokyo Budokan), and they each have ups and downs. They are both worth having, if you like Tommy and/or DP, but I wouldn't recommend them to beginners.

More interesting to me, is a cd of the rehearsal sessions for the DP studio album "Come Taste the Band", which are basically long and loose jams around the basic themes of the songs that would appear on CTTB--the rehearsal album is called "Days May Come and Days May Go", and I enjoy it more than CTTB, personally.

His two solo albums, Teaser and Private Eyes are both worth having, but they are more pop-oriented and don't show off his playing as well as some of his other work.

Finally, the Bolin Archive is a great organization started by the Bolin family that has released numerous albums of live and demo recordings from Tommy's personal archives. There are two albums of live dates he played at an old Denver club called 'Ebbitts Field' that are great, if you like Allman Bros.-style bluesy jamming stuff.

Ten years ago, you couldn't find any Tommy stuff on cd, now there's a real treasure trove of it. But he's definitely not for everyone.

[kmanick]

Re: Tommy Bolin

Oh ya, the stuff he did with Cobham helped pave the way for
players like Jeff Beck to go more Mainstream.
His lead playing on the song "Stratus" is just classic, classic stuff!
Wow,I used to jam to that album all the time when I was in High school

[pro-fusion]

Re: Tommy Bolin

[ QUOTE ]
Oh ya, the stuff he did with Cobham helped pave the way for
players like Jeff Beck to go more Mainstream.
His lead playing on the song "Stratus" is just classic, classic stuff!
Wow,I used to jam to that album all the time when I was in High school

[/ QUOTE ]

I think Beck actually cited Spectrum by name as one of the things that inspired him to record "Blow By Blow."

A lot of the early '70s jazz-fusion albums were really better classified simply as 'electric jazz', rather than 'fusion', since they were performed by musicians with a deep jazz background--Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Miles Davis etc. But Spectrum was different--a true fusion of rock and jazz, which is I think what inspired Beck so much. And the 'rock' in that fusion on Spectrum is largely due to Bolin's playing. Even if Tommy had never done anything else, Spectrum would be enough to establish him as a legend, in my opinion.