(For everybody that tried to sound or tried to play like him back in the sixties, here is the OBIT, snatched from the SF Chron website)

No Bull Remembering the father of multicultural fusion, guitarist Sandy Bull

by Derk Richardson, special to SFGate Thursday, April 19, 2001

When Sandy Bull died last week at the age of 60 at his home in Franklin, Tenn., the music world lost a true pioneer of multicultural fusion.

The guitarist had been out of the limelight for several years,battling the cancer that ultimately took his life April 11. But his legacy lives on in the spirit of any music that attempts to blend American folk and jazz with the idioms of world and classical music.

Indeed, "Blend" was the title of the epic 1963 22-minute improvisation Bull recorded with jazz drummer Billy Higgins, then best-known for his work with Ornette Coleman. Included on his first album for the Vanguard label, Fantasias For Guitar And Banjo, and inspired by the droning polyphonies of bagpipes and the flowing modal structures of Indian and Arabic music, "Blend" became the first underground anthem of "psychedelic folk."

"Blend" appears on the 1999 compilation, Re-Inventions: Best of the Vanguard Years, an essential compendium of Bull's early innovations. Other tracks show that Bull was an early experimenter with two-track overdubbing, as well: He played guitar, oud (the 11-string Middle Eastern lute) and electric bass on Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnival" and plucked banjo inaddition to oud and guitar on Guillaume de Machaut's 14th-century "Triple Ballade."

Bull's genre-defying cross-cultural blends garnered the awe and admiration of fellow musicians. Traffic's psychedelic experiments were partially inspired by "Blend," according to Steve Winwood. Brian Setzer told the Tennessean after Bull's death, "He turned me on to a lot of instruments I'd never heard of before, and he incorporated that into organic-sounding music." In 1972, poet-rocker Patti Smith wrote about her admiration for Bull a review for the New York Metropolitan Journal: "Even at its most 'cosmic,' [Bull's album Demolition Derby] is still sleazy ... juicy ... American. Yeah it's a real cool record."

Drawing From a World of Musical Influences

Born in New York City in 1941, Bull was exposed to a wide range of music by his divorced parents. As a child living with his father in Florida, he listened to Hank Williams, African drumming and "safari movie" soundtracks. Later, as an adolescent living in New York with his mother (a harpist who called her cabaret act "From Bach to Boogie-Woogie"), he adopted her expansive musical tastes.

Classical choral music, the pop standards of Jerome Kern, the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and the gospel-R&B of Ray Charles and the Staple Singers all insinuated themselves into Bull's musical consciousness.

A guitar player from the age of 8 and a banjo picker at 13 (learning from Erik Darling of the Weavers), Bull also briefly studied composition, bass and voice at Boston University before he dropped out to become a performing musician in New York City.

In the early '60s, Wavy Gravy, then known as stand-up comedian Hugh Romney, masterminded a show called "The Phantom Cabaret" with Bull and Tiny Tim at the Living Theater in Manhattan. "I remember when he used to play Bach on the banjo at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, and blow people's minds," the perennial countercultural clown and legendary Woodstock master of ceremonies said in a phone interview earlier this week. "Sandy was an extension of those instruments. His blood didn't stop at his body; it went into the oud and the guitar."

Bull took up the oud after he met Nubian master musician Hamza El Din through a mutual friend in Rome in the early '60s. According to El Din, the next time they saw each other was on Fifth Avenue in New York City; Bull was carrying an oud. El Din needed a place to stay to finish his own first album for the Vanguard label, and he ended up rooming with Bull for nearly five years. "We recorded our albums -- Sandy's Inventions and my Al Oud -- in that apartment," El Din said in a phone conversation after returning to the Bay Area from Bull's memorial service in Tennessee.

"He was just like a brother for me," explained El Din, who received news of Bull's death five days after learning that his own brother had died in Egypt. "We were very much in tune. We had a very exciting time together. As a musician, he was very much ahead of his time with what is called now 'world music.' Much before 'world music' was invented, he was playing indigenous instruments from other cultures or playing different cultures' music on his own Western instruments."

Fans Alienated by his Experiments

Like his contemporary, the recently deceased John Fahey, Bull explored a unique musical universe. But although Bull ran in the same social circles as the Greenwich Village folkies and California acid-rockers, he was marginalized by his experimentalism and individualism.

Bull cut four albums for Vanguard between 1963 and 1972. After that, despite kicking a heroin addiction in 1974 and opening shows for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, he suffered a long hiatus in his recording career. Record labels shied away from his eclecticism and early fans had a hard time keeping up as Bull injected his music with the same restlessness he brought to his life: A literal wanderer, he played his music on the streets of Paris and spent time in London, Cairo, San Francisco and Los Angeles. "I tried to go places where other people weren't going," says a quote from Bull in the liner notes to Re-Inventions, "just because I wanted to build something of my own. ... I kept trying to do different sounding records, and I'm sure I left a lot of fans behind as a result."

Bull re-emerged in 1988 with a typically diverse recording, Jukebox School of Music, which featured his entire arsenal of instruments, including pedal steel guitar and sarod, which he had learned from Indian master Ali Akbar Khan in the mid-'70s.

Bull released another album, Vehicles, in 1991, featuring Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng, drummer Bernard Purdie, the horn-playing Brecker Brothers and pianist Hilton Ruiz. Then, after settling in Tennessee in 1992, Bull started his own label, Timeless Recording Society, and issued a vocal CD, Steel Tears, in 1996. In 1998, he contributed a sarod solo to the song "Bastard Nation" on Kevin Welch's album, Beneath My Wheels.

To the end, Bull retained a masterful touch on his instruments. He always paid attention to the details of dynamics and ornamentation. He emphasized emotional nuance over the technical flash that has preoccupied rock fans since Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix came on the scene in the late '60s.

According to El Din, who spoke with Bull two days before he passed away, the guitarist had finished enough material in his home studio for two or three more albums. Until those recordings find their way to market, the best representation of Bull's vision remains the eight impeccably remastered tracks of Re-Inventions.

Although recorded between 1962 and 1973, that work sounds like it comes from a different century. It could be the 19th or the 22nd, as it blazes a trail through global cultures in the singular fashion perfected by Sandy Bull.