Obit: Chris Gaffney RIP (April 2008)

Subject: Obit: Chris Gaffney RIP (April 2008)
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Apr 08 - 01:07 PM

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gaffney18apr18,1,4527969.story

From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARY
Chris Gaffney, 57; witty songwriter, Southern California bar musician
By Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 18, 2008

Chris Gaffney, a roots-music omnivore whose earthy aplomb and offhand mastery of many styles made him a quintessential Southern California bar musician -- but who also earned international regard for his heartfelt and witty songwriting -- has died. He was 57.

Gaffney had been getting treatment for liver cancer that was diagnosed in February. His brother Greg said he died Thursday morning at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, where family members rushed him after a fall in his Costa Mesa home.

Gaffney toured extensively over the last nine years as a member of Dave Alvin's backing band, the Guilty Men, playing accordion and guitar and adding vocals, and as lead singer of the Hacienda Brothers, in which he teamed with veteran San Diego guitarist Dave Gonzalez.

But Gaffney had been a presence on the regional bar scene since the 1970s, playing multiple sets each night in small clubs such as the Upbeat in Garden Grove and the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano. It was a hard-won musician's existence that he and Alvin captured in their easygoing honky-tonk number "Six Nights a Week."

"One of the things that may have hindered him commercially was that he couldn't turn it on; he was a hundred percent honest," recalled Alvin, who considered Gaffney his best friend. "If Chris is in a good mood, you get an amazing show; if he was in a bad mood, he wouldn't hide it."

As a songwriter, Gaffney was a peer of Alvin, Los Lobos, X and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in chronicling the life of Southern California. In "Artesia," from the 1990 "Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts" album, he evoked memories of his teenage years cruising through the San Gabriel Valley -- remembrances stirred by the scent of cow manure carried on the wind from inland dairy farms.

"The Gardens," from the same album, and later recorded by Freddy Fender with the Texas Tornados, was an aching assessment of the void that gang violence leaves in a community's heart -- in this case, Hawaiian Gardens.

But many Gaffney songs reflect the dry, sometimes absurdist, sense of humor that stayed with him in his day-to-day life: "They made a mistake and they called it me," he sang in one jaunty tune; in another lyrical self-description he pegs himself as "a dancing cretin with faraway eyes."

Gaffney sang in a tuneful yet conversational voice that was both sandpapery and sweet. He had no pretentiousness about his music. In a 1992 Times interview, he described taking part in a songwriters panel at a folk festival: "The kids were asking, 'How do you write songs?' I said, 'I'm sitting in front of the TV, having a beer, and something comes to my mind, and I go 'what the hell' and write it down."

Born in 1950 in Vienna, Austria, he grew up mainly in Cypress, the son of a telephone company executive. Tall and solidly built, Gaffney excelled at track and cross country at Western High School in Anaheim and took his licks as a Golden Gloves boxer.

"I always ascribed his cockeyed view of the world to being beat around the head a few too many times," Alvin said.

As he built a critically acclaimed recorded repertoire during the 1990s with three studio albums, including "Mi Vida Loca" and "Loser's Paradise" for Hightone Records, Gaffney was unable to capitalize on it with touring -- tied instead to his bar hero regimen on top of days spent scraping hulls at a Newport Beach boatyard.

Gaffney accepted the bar-musician's lot with equanimity: "I was a working guy before becoming an unheralded roots-music recording eminence, and I continue to do that. If they don't want to put out an album, I'll go and do my day job," he told The Times in 1999. What sustained him, he said, was "the music, and I love the people. You surround yourself with good friends, and you're good to go."

Starting in 1999, though, Gaffney got to live the life of a musical road warrior, with Alvin and then the Hacienda Brothers, touring extensively through the United States and Europe. Alvin said he soon learned not to give Gaffney a weekly advance on his meal money: "He'd give it to some homeless guy or a guy standing at a rest stop begging for change."

With the Hacienda Brothers, who blended classic country and rhythm and blues styles, Gaffney recorded two studio albums and a live release. In December, he and Alvin recorded the song "Two Lucky Bums," a mellow duet to friendship:

Let's make a toast to the times we've had

The good, the crazy, the rough and the bad.

We've survived every one, a couple of losers who won,

And when it's all said and done, we're two lucky bums.

"He might have gone out early, but he did everything he wanted to do," said Greg Gaffney, who played bass beside his brother through many of the bar years. "He loved being on the road, happy in a van with a bunch of buffoons."

In addition to his brother Greg of Costa Mesa, survivors include his wife, Julie, of Costa Mesa; daughter Erika of Houston; sister Helen of Oakland; and brother Robert of Vancouver, Canada.

Services are pending.

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Subject: RE: Obit: Chris Gaffney RIP (April 2008)
From: GUEST,Bob Ryszkiewicz
Date: 18 Apr 08 - 01:45 PM

Rest in Peace...

Subject: RE: Obit: Chris Gaffney RIP (April 2008)
From: pdq
Date: 18 Apr 08 - 04:59 PM

California has been home to an amazing number of singer-songwriters for many years. Some like Tom Russell, Chris Hillman, Jackson Browne and John Stewart are household names to many. Others, like Jim Hosford, Dave Stamey and Chris Gaffney work just as hard and produce some fine material but have little fame or fortune to show for it. They do have fans and friends. Still, a life well-lived.

Subject: RE: Obit: Chris Gaffney RIP (April 2008)
From: open mike
Date: 19 Apr 08 - 03:30 AM

Obituary: The singer-songwriter, who died of liver cancer at 57, touched people with his songs and personality.

By PETER LARSEN

The Orange County Register



Chris Gaffney, the Orange County singer-songwriter whose country and roots rock-tinged music earned him a small but fervent following in barrooms and concert halls around the world, died Thursday after a brief battle with liver cancer. He was 57.

For years, Gaffney gigged constantly around Orange and Los Angeles counties, playing the Swallow's Inn in San Juan Capistrano with his band the Cold Hard Facts on a Saturday night, then moving up the highway to the Blue Café in Long Beach for a show on Sunday afternoon.

While he might not have found the fame his fans - including many fellow
musicians - felt he deserved, in recent years, as part of the Hacienda
Brothers band, Gaffney expanded his touring beyond Orange County, to cities around the nation and in Europe.

"In a lot of ways, he was the sort of guy who music critics dream of walking into a bar and finding their whole lives," said Jim Washburn, a former Register pop music critic who befriended Gaffney and say him play scores of shows. "Someone who's just there and is undiscovered and phenomenal.

"It gets kind of grating when the decades pass and he's still undiscovered, but that was also part of Chris' charm," Washburn said.

"On any night, you could go into a bar in Orange County and see one of the best shows you'd ever seen in your life."

His knowledge of music was seemingly unlimited. Though he specialized in what today might be called alt-country or roots rock, he knew, loved or played everything from Duke Ellington to Louis Prima, Porter Wagoner to the Specials.

"I met him in the early '80s, in a bar, where he was in the band," said
Julie Gaffney, with whom he would have celebrated 25 years of marriage next month. "He was the guy I knew I needed to be with all of my life - and all of his."

She said his music was what attracted fans to his shows, but his personality is what turned fans into friends.

"He was genuine, and he was also just a really funny guy, who could talk to anybody about anything," Gaffney said. "When he played and I was with him, he never even came and talked to me, because he always went out to talk to people at the show."

His music, like his personality, was the real deal: down to earth, honest, and grounded that part of America where hard-working people gathered to sing songs about life and share a beer or two.

"I think he does the country best," Julie Gaffney said. "The George Jones - I loved when he used to sing 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' - and 'The Cold, Hard Facts of Life' by Porter Wagoner.

Last year, in Nashville for a tribute to the late Wagoner, Gaffney sang that song on stage, alone with his acoustic guitar, she said. "And it brought down the house.

"You could tell that that was what he really liked to do - and he was lucky he got to do it."

His illness was diagnosed earlier this year, and the cancer attacked him aggressively. As news of his death filtered out into the world of those who knew him, friends - including fellow singer-songwriters Dave Alvin and Jim Lauderdale - started calling the house to express their condolences, Julie Gaffney said.

Walter Clevenger, whose band the Dairy Kings now includes former Cold Hart Facts' keyboard player Wyman Reese - says he spent Sundays at the Blue Café for a few years, soaking up the cheap Dixie beer and the inspiring Gaffney music week after week.

"It was pretty much a religious experience for me," Clevenger said.

Later, Gaffney played accordion on a few songs for one of Clevenger's
albums, and he and the Dairy Kings returned the favor for a song Gaffney later recorded. Those kinds of collaboration were a constant in Gaffney's career, with close friend Alvin a frequent partner in songwriting and touring.

Fundraising efforts to help with his medical costs include a tribute CD with musicians such as Clevenger, Lauderdale and Rosie Flores covering Gaffney songs. A concert at the Doll Hut in Anaheim was scheduled for April 27; details on its status now were not available Thursday night.

A Web site - www.helpgaff.com- also had been set up to help with expenses, and will continue to do so to help the Gaffney family medical and other bills, Washburn said.

Gaffney is also survived by Erika Gaffney, a daughter from a previous
marriage. Services are pending, Julie Gaffney said, with a memorial to be planned to celebrate his life and music.

"We need to have something," she said. "There's going to be a lot of people who are going to want to come and say goodbye."