Lindley and his bandmates had little interest in doing what seemed necessary to pursue fame. Tom Donahue, the influential San Francisco disc jockey, called it “one of the best groups in the country.” Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin once called Kaleidoscope “my favorite band of all time, my ideal band absolutely brilliant.”īut Mr. After graduating from La Salle High School in Pasadena, he played in a series of folk groups in one of them, the Dry City Scat Band, he played alongside his fellow multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow, later a member of Kaleidoscope.Īlthough Kaleidoscope failed to hit the commercial jackpot, it turned heads within the music industry. Regardless, he found success with the instrument in the Los Angeles area, winning the annual Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest five times. “I played the five-string banjo in the closet,” he said in a recent video interview, “because it was very, very loud, and my mom and dad were a little disturbed by their son, the hillbilly musician.” His parents were less than enthusiastic when he channeled his energies into bluegrass. “I even opened up the upright piano in the playhouse out in back of my parents’ house to get at the strings,” he recalled in a 2008 interview with the musician Ben Harper for the magazine Fretboard Journal. He grew up in San Marino, Calif., an upscale city near Pasadena, where his father, a musical connoisseur, filled the house with sounds from around the world, including masters of the Indian sitar and the Greek bouzouki.ĭrawing on those influences, by age 6 David had become obsessed with all manner of stringed instruments. Nash and David Crosby in the 1970s.) “He was truly a musician’s musician.”ĭavid Perry Lindley was born on March 21, 1944, in Los Angeles one of five children of John Lindley, a lawyer, and Margaret (Wells) Lindley. “One of the most talented musicians there has ever been,” Graham Nash wrote on Instagram after Mr. Mixing searing slide guitar work with global stylings on instruments from around the world, he brought depth and richness to recordings by luminaries like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder and Iggy Pop.īut he was far more than a supporting player. Lindley became one of the most sought-after sidemen in Los Angeles in the 1970s. With his head-turning mastery of seemingly any instrument with strings, Mr. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause, although he was said to have been battling kidney trouble, pneumonia, influenza and other ailments. David Lindley, the rare Los Angeles session guitarist to find fame in his own right, both as an eclectic solo artist and as a marquee collaborator on landmark recordings by Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart and many others, died on Friday.
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