A Legend Has Passed

The world musical and bizarre lost one of it's finest and strangest yesterday.

Sky "Sunlight" Saxon passed from our earthly plane Thursday. Or would he have called it Thorsday?

Sky was my first introduction to 60s psychedelia via a New Rose LP in the early 80s. One side recent psych-splatterings that blew my mind because they were so formless and wild and unlike anything I'd ever heard before. One side structured and song-centered, all organs and driving beats.

That record. I barely understood what I was hearing. (Damn, how many times have I written that on this blog!) It was like the first time, a few years later, that I heard Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising - a new world was born in my head. In retrospect, that old New Rose LP is not such a hot album. Pretty shitty, really. And the B-side was horribly recorded, probably demos. I tried to listen to it a few years ago and was greatly disappointed. The sounds I heard as a teen didn't exist any more on this piece of vinyl. What happened, what changes occurred in the years along the way to that record and to me - well, that's life.

And Sky had a heckuva life. Whether you loved him for The Seeds or came to him via a different path like I did, you'll miss him.

Adios, Sky! Keep on pushin' too hard, man!