Remembering HOCK
Richard "Hock"
Walsh
1948-1999
When Richard "Hock" Walsh died at the turn of the new year, he left more friends than perhaps he knew. To mark a celebration of the blues singer's life and his music, a who's-who of the Toronto blues community will perform at a special concert at the Horseshoe, 370 Queen St. W, on Sunday Feb. 6. Thanks to the number of artists anxious to be involved, the show will have an early start at 7 p.m.
Taking part will be a lineup including Big Daddy G (with whom Hock made his last recordings), Gordie Johnson of Big Sugar, The Rockin' Highliners, The Sidemen, Tyler Yarema and His Rhythm, and Downchild Blues Band - with whom he began his performing career.
Many other friends will be sitting in with the bands during the evening, and the night will end with an all-star blues jam.
Hock Walsh co-founded Downchild in 1969 with his brother Donnie (Mr. Downchild) Walsh; he left the band to form his own group (and later gave Gordie Johnson his first gig), but rejoined Downchild for a single album, Gone Fishing. He left in 1989 to front his own group again. Long a familiar figure on the Toronto scene, Hock was a powerful, original singer and songwriter, and one blessed with a fine sense of the absurd. Downchild's long-time publicist and TBS board member Richard Flohil wrote the following tribute for the Globe and Mail and it is reprinted here with permission.
Richard (Hock) Walsh, a blues singer and co-founder of The Downchild Blues Band, has died of an apparent heart attack in Toronto. He was 51.
He was found in his apartment on Sunday, in his easy chair, with a television remote control in his hand and the TV on. He had missed a New Year's Eve engagement at a club in Peterborough, Ont., with another Toronto singer, Rita Chiarelli.
"Well, that figures," said one of Mr. Walsh's friends when he heard how he had died. "He just loved his television."
It was a seemingly quiet and lonely end to the life of a man who, in his day, had been one of the country's best blues singers, had helped found the Downchild Blues Band and had served as an inspiration for the Blues Brothers - arguably (outside of B.B. King) the best-known blues "act" in history.
Born on Dec. 19, 1948, Richard Walsh was always known as Hock - a reference to his girth and the size of his arm muscles - and his story is inextricably bound up with that of his older brother, Donnie, who continues to lead the band into its fourth decade.
Music had always been a central part of the brothers' lives. As Donnie said recently: "When we were kids, our folks ran a resort hotel in Northern Ontario. On Saturday nights, when they closed the bar, there was always money left in the jukebox after it had been unplugged at closing time. So, on Sunday mornings, we'd get out of bed, plug it back in, and play all the music that had been paid for the night before."
By the time the brothers moved back to Toronto in their teens, music seemed even more important and, when Donnie wanted to start a band, his brother was the obvious choice as the singer. By 1969, after three months of intensive rehearsals, Downchild was ready to go public. Its first gig was at Grossman's Tavern, a legendary bar on Toronto's Spadina Avenue, in an area filled at that time with new Hungarian immigrants, West Indians, dyspeptic waiters, hippies, poets, draft dodgers and even some tired and emotional rewrite men from The Globe and Mail's King Street headquarters.
Hock's performances were both righteous and ribald. Blessed with a fine sense of the absurd and a clown's natural ability to turn the laughter onto himself, his introductions to songs were hilarious. Once, disturbed by a waiter's eagerness to close the joint by stacking the empty chairs on the tables, Hock improvised a 25-minute song with sardonic verses about everyone in the room, including the owner, the owner's daughter, and the impatient waiter.
More important, he had a distinctive voice that allowed him to model his work on such classic singers as Big Joe Turner without imitating them. And the contrast between the wisecracking, rotund singer and his brother - a more serious musician and a dedicated guitarist and harmonica player - was one that helped make the neophyte band's popularity grow almost instantly.
The band's first recording, cut in two nights in a tiny studio on the second level of the Rochdale College parking garage, was picked up almost immediately by RCA Victor. The second album had a surprise hit - a version of Mr. Turner's classic Flip Flop and Fly - that put the band on the road across Canada and into the United States.
The contrast between the brothers was also one that struck a young and frequently unemployed Toronto actor, Dan Aykroyd, who supplemented his earnings at a series of after-hours "clubs" where night people could, after work, relax and enjoy an illicit beer or three. When Mr. Aykroyd joined the cast of Saturday Night Live and met John Belushi, the Blues Brothers - obviously modeled on Downchild - became the pair's trademark.
For the real brothers, there were financial advantages, Donnie had written Everything I Need (Almost), and the two had jointly come up with Shotgun Blues. Both songs were featured on the Blues Brothers' debut album, which went on to sell five million copies.
Alas, Hock seemed less able to handle the band's early fame, or a grueling recording and touring schedule. Just before the band went into the studio to make its third album in 1974, his brother - now the acknowledged leader of the band - fired him. Hock returned in 1977 to share the stage with his successor, Tony Flaim, for a brief period, and once again in 1985 for the album Gone Fishing. "And then he upped and quit again", said his brother.
Richard Walsh may never have achieved the success that his talent indicated; he was, in many ways, a frustrating, difficult person to be around. His 1980 marriage collapsed in 1992, and his relationship with his brother was often strained.
Throughout the 1990s, Hock performed with a wide variety of Toronto musicians - including a fine band led by guitarist Dave (Big Daddy G) Glover - and, despite failing health, he always delivered shows that reminded everyone that his interpretive gifts for the blues had not deserted him. His dry sense of humour remained to the end; the Toronto blues community will miss both his wit and his singing.
In addition to his brother, he leaves an 18-year-old son, Richard, and sisters Mary, Bonnie and Marion.
- Richard Flohil