A Gentle Soul of Passion
Vancouver in the late 70s and early 80s had premier and authentic punk bands. The best known D.O.A. (still in business) in its first incarnation featured a bass player, Randy Rampage who has been a legend in his time. He died on Tuesday, August 14, 2018. He was 58.
Susanne Tabata (a very good friend of Rampage) called me late on Tuesday night, “My Randy died.”
After that there was no way I was going to go back to sleep.
You see Tabata’s Randy (58) was known as Randy Rampage. There are only in my estimation two passionate virtuosos of rock/punk music in Vancouver. One is a guitarist, Art Bergmann and the other was (!) Randy Rampage on bass.
To see him perform with D.O.A or with his heavy metal Ground Zero was to see what seemed to be a powerful and intimidating individual kicking himself up into the air.
And of course that was never Tabatta’s Randy, or his friend’s Randy or my own friend Randy.
He was all the opposite. He was a gentle man of grace in spite of his burly stature (he worked as a longshoreman), a man of kindness with a tender but almost bittersweet smile.
Around Randy I always felt safe. He was a mountain on shoes.
This gentle soul liked to use four letter words. But I could see through that smokescreen of apparent toughness. You see, Randy was an excellent cook and at many parties that I attended at Tabata’s home he was the perfect host.
Rock n’roll will never die, but everything exciting is over and done. Myself, I listen mostly to classical stuff these days. I’m really into Bach and Vivaldi — dudes like that. You just can’t beat that shit. Those old masters were fucking geniuses.
Randy Rampage 2016
While I photographed him many times the photograph you see here is my favourite. I told him that I wanted to take his picture in the spirit of Jean Harlow. He kind of looked at me so I said, “You are tough and macho and there is no way that you on a divan with silver satin will make you look any less so.”
And so he posed and in this picture I can discern the sadness of a man who fought many inner ghosts but in the end as he is now gone, we will all remember that gentleness.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
