My heart is broken... I've been playing the guitar since I was 6, and when I discovered his music I was held in awe for a long, long time... He was a pioneer who ventured into a completely new playing style. May he rest in peace.
If it was movable, or turnable, or anything that resembled something that could go up or down, I would mess with it to make the amp run hotter. I opened the amp up and saw this thing. I found out later it was a bias control, which controls the power to the output tubes. I'm poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I'd touched a capacitor. I didn't know they held voltage.
A prodigious talent, he beat 5,000 students to first prize in a local piano recital for four years in a row, despite being unable to read a note of music. "I fooled my teacher for six years," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995. "He never knew. I'd watch his fingers, and I'd play it."
