Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country rock
group
Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an
integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died
Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Missouri. He was 75.
اضافة اعلان
His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart
attack.
Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a
half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and
the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country rock
movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country
instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of
other bands would follow in their wake.
Formed in 1968, Poco originally included singer-guitarists
Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another
pioneering country rock band from Los Angeles — along with Young, drummer
George Grantham and bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles.
(Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Meisner after he left the
band in 1969.)
Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the
Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Furay had invited Young to play
pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on
Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco
made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation
than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward
experimentalism and obfuscation.
Furay’s song “
Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of
Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:
"Well there’s just a little bit of magic
In the country music we’re singin’
So let’s begin.
We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happy
Sittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’
Casually, you and me
We’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh."
At once keening and lyrical, Young’s pedal steel work imbued
the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent
place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.
“I added color to Richie’s country rock songs, and that was
the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Young explained in a 2014
interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Furay’s compositions.
But Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was
not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar,
playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine.
He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3
organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an
organ.
Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters.
But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with newcomer Paul Cotton,
after the departure of Messina in 1971 and Furay in 1973. Young would go on to
write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which
reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop
chart) in 1979.
He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another
of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989
reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the
1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.
Norman Russell Young was born February 23, 1946, in Long Beach,
California, one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young.
His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music
bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.
He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel
guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country
bands.
After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he
turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers,
which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the
Byrds.
After Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial
dispute, Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album,
“All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar
Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the
Sun,” in 2017 and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco
until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.
Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan
Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons.
His brother, Ron, died in 2002.
Rusty Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco
in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as
opportune as it was fortuitous.
“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie
and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Furay and Messina, in his
2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music
part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for
me. So I liked the way things went.”
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