So, 2023 has been a rotten year for musicians; and we're only just reaching February...

It's been the first conversation at recent musical gatherings. For me, I've lost childhood heroes, people I took for granted, people I admired, and even ones I knew and liked in person. I suspect the same is true for a lot of us.

I never paid much attention to Lisa Marie Presley but many folk were much more affected, remembering her growing up, the extraordinary marriages, and how impossible it must have been to establish yourself while dragging around perhaps the most legendary legacy of all.

But I mourn for Renee Geyer, who really was a unique gem of a singer and toured and played with numerous New Zealand musicians. They treated her as royalty; she was just so good.

And Larry Morris? I first met Larry through Ritchie Pickett but by then had already learned the guitar solo from ‘I Feel Good'. What a wonderful rush of a song. Even now I love that guitar solo and am amazed at the falsetto vocal, followed in a stoke of brilliant intuition by a high vibrating guitar note. There is a hit remake just waiting...

Once you'd met him you never forgot Larry, with his rich deep voice, always ready to shoot the breeze and share a million disreputable stories and musical adventures (often seeming to involve illicit substances). I hope he's jamming up a storm with Ritchie in that heavenly honky-tonk.

Larry Morris. Photo: Supplied

Crosby

David Crosby was always part of my musical landscape, from the Byrds to CSNY's ‘Déjà vu' and the never-ending revivals. He keeps appearing in biographies of others, usually as an agent of chaos, but his own autobiography, ‘Long Time Gone', was a disturbing trip from the top to the bottom told by clearly the world's biggest ego. It's riveting stuff.

The UK Guardian summed him up well: 'He could... be impossible: overbearing, mouthy, convinced of his own brilliance. The thing was, he was right: Crosby genuinely was brilliant. He was blessed with a beautiful voice and an uncanny gift for harmony”.

Perhaps that's epitomised by ‘Lady Friend', a song recorded by The Byrds, on which he wiped his bandmates' contributions and replaced them with his own multi-tracked voice. Yes, the result is fantastic; but no wonder they fired him.

And then there was Jeff Beck. I've always regarded him as the best of the English guitarists. He astounds me. His playing rips out my heart and leaves my jaw on the floor. I don't even want to write about him. Just go on YouTube – look for anything.

But particularly look for clips from 2007 at Ronnie Scott's in London, a small intimate club, backed by 21-year-old Australian bass player Tal Wilkenfeld. Prepare to be amazed. But then everything he did amazed. He could say more with one delicate sweep of a whammy bar than most guitarist manage in a lifetime.

Shakespeare?

And, unusually, perhaps I might expand upon this week's headline. ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls'. It is, most recognisably, the title of an Ernest Hemingway novel. But its origin...?

Many people assume it's Shakespeare. It usually is. Shakespeare coined so many now-common terms that his place as GOAT is secure. In ‘Macbeth' our titular Thane murders King Duncan with a bell as the signal. The full quote? 'Who knows for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for thee Duncan.”

Except, sorry to say, it never happened.

What Shakespeare wrote was: 'Hear it not Duncan for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.” Not even similar. The other quote, this week's headline, comes from English metaphysical poet John Donne.

You may have heard me mention him before, and I do so at any opportunity, since Donne, born slightly after Shakespeare in 1572, wrote what have become a lot of great song lyrics.

It was Donne who wrote: 'Send not to know for whom the bells tolls, it tolls for thee”. It was also Donne who wrote: 'No man is an island”, and coined the phrase 'catch a falling star”. And more.

If people are still pinching your work after 450 years I reckon you're doing alright!

Jeff Beck. Photo: Supplied