The Record Man is an album that pays tribute to an American music fan, a story that took a dramatic turn. The album came out today on Spotify and all streaming services.
In 2017, I received a message from New York producer/composer Bob Gaulke that Ron Kane, an American fan of my old band MAM, was facing serious health problems:
“As you know, Ron has been very sick lately. I’ve been creating a few “Get Well” songs for him with some of his favorite musicians. I was wondering if you might like to get involved.”
In this way, interesting musical collaborations were soon created between 30 musicians worldwide (America, Australia, Brazil, France, New Zealand and Portugal) and a special album was created with a diversity of styles: The Record Man. A title that completely refers to Ron Kane because there is no bigger music collector imaginable with such an eclectic taste than Ron.
I play guitar on four tracks of the album The Record Man:
- White Car, Blue Ocean – with vocals from Henk Hofstede (NITS) and bass + computer work from Tom America (known from my old band MAM).
- Human Heart – the single! with vocals by Hans Croon (The Dutch) + additional guitar parts (Hans plays a beautiful George Harrison like “slide part”, see also podcast story on VERVORMER!) and Rick Snyder as bass player (known for his work with the legendary Captain Beefheart!)
- Better – with Fay Lovsky on piano
- What does It Mean? with Pieter Bon (known from my old band MAM) on vocals.
What did Ron think of the album?
The question remains what Ron would have thought of this album. He could never hear the end result because he suddenly died in November 2017 before the album was finished.
VERVORMER – Human Heart
Also listen to my episode I made for my podcast VERVORMER: Human Heart, the story behind the single of the album The Record Man.
Videoclip Human Heart
The Record Man on Spotify
The Record Man on Bandcamp
The album will be in the stores in the Netherlands this week (Concerto, Plato and the like).
3 Comments
I was a friend of Ron for over 30 years and will be traveling to Los Angeles in late July for the Ron-Kon II celebration of his friends. I had tickets for visiting him last year once I heard of his turn for the worse, but sadly, he died the day before I was scheduled to leave. Naturally, I am a huge fan of the likes of Fay Lovsky and The Nits, and we enjoyed the music of Pieter Bon at the first Ron-Kon in Portland, Oregon in 2008 on Ron’s 50th birthday. I will definitely be buying a copy of this soon.
I’ve read a few interesting things about Ron on your blog. Very sad how this all ended so quickly and tragically for Ron. I met him several times in early 90s in Holland. Ron filmed my old band MAM a couple of times on video. We talked a lot at the time and stayed in contact later on. I remember his old blogspot blog full of exotic albums. And his Flickr account. I guess that is all gone. Kinda sad too.
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Actually, Ron’s Flickr, and Blogger, and WordPress pages are still up! It’s his personal domain that went away very quickly.
http://ronkanefiles.blogspot.com/
https://ronkanefiles.wordpress.com/