Vince Welnick
| Vince Welnick | |
|---|---|
Vince Welnick (center) performing live in 2005
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| Background information | |
| Born |
February 21, 1951 Phoenix, Arizona, US |
| Died | June 2, 2006 (aged 55) Sonoma County, California, US |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Keyboards, vocals |
| Years active | 1973–2006 |
| Associated acts | The Tubes, Grateful Dead, Missing Man Formation, Mickey Hart Band, RatDog, Todd Rundgren,Second Sight |
| Website | vincewelnick.com |
Vince Welnick (February 21, 1951 – June 2, 2006) was an American keyboardist, best known for playing with the band the Tubes during the 1970s and 1980s and with the Grateful Dead in the 1990s.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, as the great-grandson of Prussian immigrants, Welnick started playing keyboards as a teenager. He joined a band, the Beans, which eventually morphed into the Tubes, a San Francisco-based theater rock band popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s and noted for early live performances that combined lewd quasi-pornography with wild satires of media, consumerism and politics.
The Tubes in the 1980s were a major commercial rock act with substantial MTV success. Videos for rock classics "Talk To Ya Later" and "She's A Beauty" played in heavy rotation on the MTV network for years in the mid-1980s. While playing in the Tubes, he also played and recorded with Todd Rundgren.
When Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose on July 26, 1990, the band began auditioning players to replace him, including Ian McLagan, Pete Sears and T Lavitz. Welnick was selected, not least for his high vocal range for backup harmonies. His AP obituary mentioned he was so nervous at his first gig with the band in 1990 in Cleveland that he could barely play, until the fans put him at ease. They held up banners reading, "Yo Vinnie," which Welnick later decided to use as the name of his BMI-affiliated publishing company, Yo Vinnie Music, once obtaining his writer and publisher rights back from Ice Nine Publishing, which had copyrighted his works without an agreement in place to do so shortly after Welnick joined the Grateful Dead. Bruce Hornsby also supplemented Welnick on grand piano for over 100 shows in Welnick's first years in the Dead. Welnick remained as a member of the Grateful Dead and the band's keyboard player until Jerry Garcia's death in August 1995, when the group disbanded.
In 1994, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead.
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