Photo: me and Ronnie (circa 1978?)

It’s not yet light here in AZ. I woke to take care of the usual old man’s sleep interruption and saw the news. 😢… we knew it was coming, but…😢

Friends, brothers in arms and musical sojourners together on and off starting in Dan St Amour’s music class in high school. We shared the same passion to play and the same desire to “make it in music”. I gradually came to the unhappy realization that the dream wasn’t going to come true for me, and let the fire die to embers, but Ronnie never gave up. Of all of us, he was the one that kept going, kept playing, kept dreaming.

After JAX in ‘79, our paths eventually wandered in increasingly different directions, but never completely detangled.

I think the thing I’ll remember most about him was his heart. For all his foibles, he had an unfailing love for his friends and his family, and would have given the proverbial shirt off his back if he thought you needed it. In that, he was a better man than me. During my “lost year” he was the one who always had time to check in. The phone would ring and it’d be Ronnie. “Hey man, how ya doin’?” Then a joke (or two, or five), usually off-color, and that conspiratorial laugh… I can almost hear that laugh as I try to write this through the tears this morning.

That red guitar is silent now. Vaya con Dios, my old friend. You will be missed, but you most definitely will not be forgotten…