I didn’t hear about this until last night, but apparently Garry Shider, guitarist, musical director and singer for Parliament and Funkadelic, died on the 16th. He had cancer of the brain and lungs and died at home in Maryland. He was only 56.
Garry was a great guitar player and he also sang lead vocals on some of P-Funk’s greatest anthems, including “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Standing On the Verge of Getting It On.” The song he played at virtually every show was the beautiful “Cosmic Slop.” Turns out he didn’t write it, but I always thought of it as his trademark song. Despite the psychedelic title it’s a heartwrenching story from the point-of-view of a kid whose mother resorts to prostitution to feed her kids, and every night he hears her praying for forgiveness. (read the rest of this shit…)
So the big movie right now is Almost Famous. A nicely crafted ’70s epic about a 15 year old kid named William who writes music reviews, and ends up having Rolling Stone magazine foot the bill for him to go on tour with a major rock band, to write an article. Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, for whom most of this shit REALLY went down, it is obviously a movie that is very close to his heart.
