Michael Fonfara, the Canadian keyboardist who served in Lou Reed’s supporting band all through the Seventies, has passed on at 74 years old.
Fonfara died Friday in a Toronto, Ontario emergency clinic from complexities originating from a two-year fight with malignancy, the keyboardist’s marketing expert disclosed to Rolling Stone.
Notwithstanding his residency with Reed from 1974 to 1980, Fonfara was additionally a long-lasting individual from the Canadian blues outfit Downchild. “He’s the best musician I’ve ever worked with,” Downchild co-founder Donnie Walsh said in a statement, with bassist Gary Kendall adding, “Yesterday we lost a brother, a band mate, a co-writer and a dear friend. If you met him, you loved him. A creative genius.”
After stretches with Sixties rock acts Electric Flag (on 1968’s A Long Time Comin’) and Rhinoceros, Fonfara was enrolled by Reed to chip away at the artist’s 1974 album Sally Can’t Dance. For the rest of the decade, Fonfara would fill in as Reed’s go-to studio and visiting keyboardist, including on 1976’s Rock and Roll Heart, 1978’s Street Hassle and Live: Take No Prisoners, 1979’s The Bells and 1980’s Growing Up in Public; on the last collection, Fonfara is credited as co-essayist and co-maker close by Reed on the LP.
During a protracted vocation that likewise highlighted stops with Blackstone, Rough Trade and the Lincolns, Fonfara was employed to give “keyboard textures” on a couple of tunes on Foreigner’s crush 1981 collection 4, including the hit “Urgent.”