This blog, this year, is starting to look like a rolling obituaries column.
This week, sadly, we lost Alan Vega.
Close reader(s) will already know that Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" sits very high up on the Farmer In The City Greatest Songs Of All Time list. I am presently reading Garth Risk Hallberg's gargantuan novel of mid-seventies New York, "City On Fire", and so I am immersed in that era of that city to the extent that, when I first heard the news, I momentarily thought it was still 1977 and he had been cut down in his prime. But in fact he was 78 years old -- or, strictly speaking, young -- and, until quite recently, was still pushing the envelope. We all should be so lucky.
Vega was responsible for much more than just that one song, of course, both with Suicide (you shouldn't pass up either of their first two albums, even if you will only want to listen to "Frankie Teardrop" once) and alone (he had something of a nearly hit with "Jukebox Babe"). But, for this listener, all roads lead back to "Dream Baby Dream".
