Robert Quine R.I.P

Brian Howe reports:
The world of music lost a valuable asset this past weekend, when avant-garde/punk guitarist Robert Quine was found dead in his SoHo loft. According to Billboard, Quine's body was discovered by his friend Rick Kelly on June 5th. The cause of death appeared to be a heroin overdose, which some suspect he may have intentionally induced, given that he'd been inconsolable over the passing of his wife, Alice Sherman Quine, this past August.

Quine, a beloved figure in both avant-garde music and punk, was perhaps best known as a founding member of Richard Hell & The Voidoids. Quine also collaborated with Lou Reed, Brian Eno, John Zorn, Matthew Sweet, Tom Waits (playing guitar on his landmark Rain Dogs), Lloyd Cole, They Might Be Giants, and Marianne Faithfull. He left a distinctive footprint on any project in which he was involved by dint of his fractured, primal, feedback-laden style.

Born on December 30th, 1942, in Akron, Ohio, Quine developed an early fascination with Brazilian folk music, Gene Autry and Django Reinhardt. He briefly studied piano, but quickly abandoned it for guitar when rock 'n' roll erupted in 1955. Quine discovered blues as a college student in Indiana in 1961 and played John Lee Hooker and Lightning Hopkins on his college radio program before continuing his musical evolution with an interest in the jazz of Kenny Burrell, Lester Young, and John Coltrane.

In college, Quine started his first band, playing mostly covers of Link Wray, The Ventures, and Duane Eddy. However, in 1965, while attending law school in St. Louis, Quine discovered The Velvet Underground, a band that would drastically influence his musical development. After passing the Missouri bar in 1969, Quine moved to San Francisco, where he obsessively attended and recorded Velvet Underground shows. In 2001, Universal released his recordings of their shows as The Quine Tapes, the first volume in their yet-to-be-continued Velvet Underground Bootleg Series.

Quine moved to New York City in 1971, where after a three-year stint writing tax law for Prentice Hall Publishing, he gave up law to pursue a career as a full-time musician. In 1975, he began working at a film memorabilia shop, where Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell were also employed. Quine and Hell assembled a band that included future Ramone Marc Bell and guitarist Ivan Julian. In 1977, Richard Hell & The Voidoids released Blank Generation, an album that remains firmly lodged in the canon of authentic, adventurous punk rock.

After The Voidoids' disbandment, and until his death, Quine kept busy with various projects of his own as well as numerous session gigs. Quine's most recent project was 2002's Lustro, a collection of the music and poems of Michael DuClos read by Deborah Harry, Kristin Hersh, and many others, for which Quine created lush tapestries of looped and delayed guitar. Lustro was hailed by no less an eminent poetic authority than Charles Simic as "excellent, very good... very interesting." Simic is probably most renowned for his book-length series of short prose poems, The World Doesn't End, and while Quine's passing may belie that statement, his legacy will continue unabated for as long as people continue to explore new ways to approach punk rock and look to its foundations for guidance.

.: Robert Quine: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~stayclean/sadnews.html

RIP.