Ric Grech: The Blind Faith bassist who tragically died in poverty
“Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live. Do yourself a favour, and don’t debate me on this.” Steve Van Zandt didn’t hold back when talking about his adoration for Clapton.
Van Zandt wasn’t wrong either. Regardless of which band Clapton played in, he was always adamant about pushing the boundaries of music, which meant merging the styles of guitarists who had come before. You had the blues, R&B and rock, all of which were stuck together and given new form in the image of Clapton.
Needless to say, you couldn’t play alongside Clapton without also possessing a great musical ability. When you are playing with a musician who doesn’t like to stick to one genre, you have to be able to adapt in real time in a bid to keep up, hence why so many musicians Clapton played with are now respected as being some of the greatest musicians in history. One of these is Ric Grech, who played bass in the supergroup Blind Faith. A shy man, but someone who helped carry that band.
Geddy Lee has spoken on multiple occasions about the fact that when you have bands that make music which transcends genre, the bass player is the key component that holds everything together. Without a solid rhythm section, you simply can’t be so free-flowing with the music that you make, and so the bassist needs to be on top form.
“The thing that held the whole thing down was John Paul Jones’ bass playing,” said Lee, “So if you listen to ‘How Many More Times’, I mean, no matter how wild that song gets at times, there’s John Paul Jones just holding it all down in such a fluid way.”
In the case of Blind Faith, Ric Grech was the band’s John Paul Jones. He was the person responsible for holding the entire band together, as Eric Clapton was happily jumping from genre to genre with ease, Grech was responsible for ensuring songs still had form. Like a lot of musicians who started playing in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was one band that had a major influence on Grech.
Grech started his musical life playing the violin, and he was very good too, but as soon as he heard The Beatles for the first time, he knew he was going to step away from classical music. “When he heard the Beatles he didn’t want to play the violin, he wanted to play the guitar,” said his father when talking about Grech’s life, “I bought him one and that was that.”
His ability with the bass meant that he was able to keep Blind Faith’s music in good form and ensure it had structure. However, while he could apply such measures to music, he wasn’t able to do the same thing in his own life, as he found himself constantly battling addiction.
“Once you get involved with heroin it rips you apart,” he said in an interview, “The first thing I did in the morning was take a fix… I don’t know why I started. I suppose it was to overcome my insecurity. I never knew what was going to happen next. My life was so fast.”
His addiction ruled his life, as all the money he made and all his time were spent looking for his next hit. “My life was governed by the need to score,” he admitted, “I used to borrow from everyone and anyone to pay for the stuff.”
He died at the young age of 43, still a victim of addiction, both in his personal life and financially. Drugs cast a shadow over rock music that is consuming for so many, and it’s a shadow that Grech was unfortunately trapped under. When he passed away in 1990, he did so in poverty, but his legacy as one of the greatest bassists to ever pick up an instrument lives on.
