​Overshadowed in death by the passing of Don Cornelius of Soul Train, St. Louis R&B and gospel singer David Peaston also died on February 1, 2012, from complications from diabetes. He was 54.

Peaston was part of St. Louis gospel royalty. His mother was Martha Bass, singer in the foundational gospel group the Clara Ward Singers, and his sister was Fontella Bass, who needs no introduction.

With his agile, deceptively devastating high tenor voice, Peaston received his break after a move to New York and his celebrated appearances on the Showtime at the Apollo TV series. His signature performance number was "God Bless the Child," a song that he utterly transformed, drawing on jazz scatting and a creamy phrasing that would boil over into something else entirely, something only a very great sacred singer can harness and set free.

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RFT File Photo

Mississippi Nights threw its final jam session on January 19, 2007. The venerable venue near the Mississippi River hosted a wide assortment of legendary artists over its history.

​In theory, music venues are interchangeable. If one especially great place shuts down, another spot surely will rise elsewhere.

But there's something disquieting about the closure of an especially memorable venue. Even years later, I'm still bummed about how Shattered - a Columbia, Missouri, institution - was, well, shuttered. A pool hall just isn't a suitable substitute for an up-and-coming band or an outstanding 80s night.

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RFT File Photo

Thursday lead singer Geoff Rickly screams up a storm at a 2009 show at The Pageant. The post-hardcore group announced in November that it will be going on an indefinite hiatus.

​Thursday may have been the next big thing in rock music. But at a 2009 show at the Pageant, they were an afterthought

Those 23 words may seem hyperbolic. After all, how many times has some dorky music "expert" declared some rock band "the next big thing?" But Thursday was literally declared one of "the next big things" when Spin Magazine put lead singer Geoff Rickly on their cover in 2004.

At the time, the designation seemed apt. The New Brunswick outfit's album War All Time debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200. Their prior album, Full Collapse, had become a paramount example of "screamo" - which blended the fast-paced violence and melodic professionalism of post-hardcore music with, well, screaming.

But nearly seven years after that issue hit newsstands, Thursday is soon to be no more. The band put out a statement in November announcing its indefinite hiatus, saying "despite the fantastic year that the band has enjoyed, creatively, things haven't been as easy for us on a personal level."

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Michael Dauphin

MU330 at the Firebird in June.

​It's fairly common to see local bands get back together over the winter holiday season. With people taking time off work to come home to their families, it only makes sense to plan a reunion show somewhere around Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve. That said, it's still mildly shocking to see four St. Louis powerhouses from the '90s make their way back to the stage this year. Celery, Fragile Porcelain Mice, Not Waving But Drowning and MU330 are all playing shows before 2011 draws to a close. Here's why you should care:

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Courtesy of Karen Dean

A young Mel Bay with a guitar

​If you learned how to play guitar sometime during the past 50 years -- unless you took lessons in a cave -- you have learned something from Mel Bay. The one person he couldn't teach, at least directly, was his son, 66-year-old Bill Bay, who peppers his speech with the phrase "gee whiz" as he discusses his father's legacy: Mel literally wrote the book on learning guitar. "Music was everywhere," says Bill.

"We didn't do well with me as a student and him as a teacher because I realized in very short order I could never make a mistake," says Bill, who took lessons instead from one of Mel's students. The common number of links between a modern guitar player and Mel Bay is frequently just one. "He would say let me show you how it goes and then it would end up being a concert. But it was a great one. Gee whiz, most of the people who play and love guitar probably don't know that Dad helped them get there."

On June 30, Mel's legacy will be rewarded with his addition to the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

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wikimedia commons

​Gene Clark, founding member and songwriter for the Byrds, died on May 24th, 1991: Twenty years ago. Clark was raised in Tipton, Missouri, graduated from high school in Bonner Springs, Kansas and got his start playing in bands in the area. He is most well known for his work with the Byrds, when he wrote "Eight Miles High" "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", "Set You Free This Time", "Here Without You", "If You're Gone" and "Here Without You," among others. He had a generally unsuccessful solo career and eventually wound up in a legal dispute with Byrd's co-founder Roger McGuinn over the rights to use their old band's name.

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John Claridge

​Jay Landesman, who founded the Crystal Palace nightclub, which became the linchpin of the Gaslight Square hipster/entertainment district, and wrote the novel The Nervous Set, which became the basis for the world's first (and only) beatnik musical, died Sunday in London. He was 91.

His son Cosmo, now a film critic for the London Sunday Times, wrote in his 2008 memoir, Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me:

My dad has had an interesting life. He's never had a job that bored him. He is an original man, a man who has opened minds and emptied a few rooms in his time ... He's taken tea with Bette Davis, cocktails with Bessie Smith and LSD with Timothy Leary. His is a life that many would envy; I know I do. And yet my dad has never thought of himself as a success, for one simple reason: he isn't a big name. His life has always lacked the imprimatur of celebrity.

If only he had stayed in St. Louis...

But to begin at the beginning:

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​(Via TMZ, via Mike A) GQ just posted a lengthy interview with Billy Ray Cyrus. The country star-turned-actor opens up about the troubles of his daughter, Miley, the effects of the TV show Hannah Montana on the family, his divorce and an impending new album. Relevant to us: Cyrus says that he canceled a world tour after Cobain's 1994 suicide. According to him, the Nirvana singer's death was a blow, because the two were friendly. From the article:

He was one of those guys that became a friend to me that I never expected. We met at a venue one night, some big coliseum somewhere--his rig was pulling out and mine was pulling in--and I was standing in the shadows, 1 a.m. in the morning, and he's 'Hey man, congratulations--you pissed the whole world off.' We shook hands, and I said, 'Thanks, man... I love what you all do.'" After that, Cobain congratulated him at an awards ceremony when most of his peers did not. "We crossed paths a couple more times," says Cyrus, "and then I was in St. Louis..."

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​Word is slowly catching on about last year's Welders seven-inch on BDR Records. Record collectors love mysteries, and certainly the Welders - a band of St. Louis teen girls who recorded a batch of inspired pop-punk gems in the late 1970s, and then sat on them for three decades - were completely off the radar to non-local residents until now. So it's not surprising that such knowledgeable magazines like The Big Takeover would laud the seven-inch as "a real lost power-punk-pop gem of the highest order!" Then there's the fact that they're on the cover of Maximum Rocknroll this month...

Wait. What? MRR? With the scene reports from obscure countries and the ink that comes off on your fingers?

None other. There they are, on the front of MRR's February 2011 issue (issue #333, if you're keeping track), with the teaser, "The Welders! The Wild Teenage Sound of '70s St. Louis!"

How did that happen?

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Frank Xavier Weyerich

Captain Beefheart and Tom "Papa" Ray

​On Friday, Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, died at the age of 69. Tributes and remembrances have been pouring in since Friday, from a reprint of a 1980 Lester Bangs story on the man to a moving LA Times piece by ex-RFT staffer Randy Roberts.

Close to home, remembrances of Captain Beefheart also abound. That picture above is of Tom "Papa" Ray and Vliet, taken at Washington University in the mid-'70s. According to a post on beefheart.com, avowed fan Ray was beyond thrilled to meet the man himself.

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