This article is part of overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.
For visionary steel-string guitarist, pianist, composer and singer Robbie Basho, making music was more than a calling; It was a way to alleviate a lifetime of physical and psychological anguish, pain that only ended with his death, at age 45.
In the early 1960s, Basho expanded the vocabulary of the steel-string guitar using alternative tunings and experimental forms to create trance-like compositions.
He forged a distinctive style that drew on a variety of traditional world music from India, Japan, France, Germany, Persia, China, and Native Americans. An early example is “Harakiri, Kali style” incorporating the flavor of classical North Indian raga, using open harmonic structure, droning strings and improvisation to enter a deeply personal state: an immovable, hypnotic time-bending track.
“Basho's music is not meant to be listened to casually,” Steven Rings, an author and music theorist at the University of Chicago, said in an interview.
“It requires patience and attention, like a meditation, where you have to sit and endure a lot of discomfort to get there,” he added.
Basho began exploring music from other cultures after discovering the recordings of renowned Indian composer and sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1962. He later included more voices in his music. in songs like “Blue Crystal Fire” and “Leila's song” His sharp and dramatic voice resonates over tense instrumental landscapes, with a cantorial flavor and devoid of irony.
“It's the most inelegant singing you can imagine,” Rings said.
Basho gained a cult following as one of the great American guitar mystics. However, in music, as in life, it existed outside the mainstream. He lived in isolation and, as a student of the California-based ascetic spiritual movement Reoriented Sufism, committed himself to celibacy outside of marriage. He remained single his entire life, although he longed to have a partner, a feeling expressed in songs like “Tears of Teresa” with the lyrics:
The crown of love is surrounded by thorns.
From this day, from the day I was born
And I still reach for you,
Oh my crown of love, I reach you
But the thorns of thought are in the way.
He also struggled with mental illness and flashbacks which he attributed to his experiments with LSD before joining Sufism Reoriented. He held conversations with unseen presences both in private and on stage, and friends and colleagues said he rarely seemed comfortable.
The chronic back pain Basho suffered was the result of a car accident or a climbing accident (or both; stories vary). She treated him with acupuncture, massage, herbs, Chinese medicine and spinal adjustments. During a routine chiropractor appointment, an artery in his neck ruptured, causing a stroke that left him in a coma.
He died two days later, on February 18, 1986.
Basho was born on August 31, 1940 and was adopted; His birth certificate and adoption papers are sealed until 2040, so the details of his early life are unknown. His parents, Daniel Robert Robinson, a Baltimore surgeon, and Eilene Webb, a clinical pathologist, named him Daniel Robert Robinson Jr.
Basho's mother was “distant, cold and not a loving person,” Basho's niece, Valerie Cantrell, said in an interview. He and his stepsister, Penelope Hurley, were raised primarily by a housekeeper, and Basho grew up introverted and socially awkward. He was sent to a psychiatrist, which was unusual for children at the time.
Basho attended Mount Washington School and Loyola High School in Baltimore. He studied trumpet and then euphonium, a relative of the tuba, but it was not until he was 20 and enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Maryland that he began playing acoustic guitar, an interest he shared with his roommate, musician Max Ochs.
Even in college, Basho was awkward, Ochs said in an interview: “Robbie was always reading, always sweating, anxious, and always trying, unsuccessfully, to get a girl.” Basho was also a large man and a weightlifter; He once worked as a bouncer at a bar in Ocean City, Maryland.
Basho never graduated from college. He and Ochs met with a Washington, D.C., crowd that included John Fahey, a fellow pioneer of what is now known as the American primitive movement, and producer Ed Denson. Basho moved there for a time to study flamenco guitar, then followed Fahey to explore the thriving music scene in Berkeley, California. It was there, Fahey said, that he adopted the name Basho, after a 17th-century Japanese haiku poet who he claimed had been in a past life.
Exposure to Shankar's recordings soon followed and proved transformative. “After that,” Basho said in a 1974 radio interview, “nothing was ever the same.” He began studying with renowned sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, whose teachings influenced Basho's creation of new guitar techniques, as heard on his early records for Takoma, the label founded by Fahey and Denson.
Basho was admired for his intricate guitar work, but the international sounds he pursued, combined with his stripped-down, emotionally volatile aesthetic, proved kryptonite to mainstream success. He lamented and sang, as he did on songs like “The Orphan's Lament” and cried openly during the performances. On the album covers, he wore brightly colored robes; On stage he wore more conventional clothing, looking decidedly out of place in what was primarily a hippie club scene.
Guitarist Leo Kottke would sneak into clubs as a teenager to see Basho perform. “This guy surprised me,” Kottke said in an interview. “There wasn't a lot of instrumentalism on the scene in those days, so what I was doing was really unusual.”
Basho had synesthesia, a condition that combines the senses, allowing a person to see images in sound, and this led him to create a painting titled “The Esoteric Doctrine of Color and Mood” to articulate the colors associated with his compositions. Describing his music in a 1981 interview with Frets magazine, Basho said, “My gift is texture.”
He insisted that his work was not “far away” but “far within,” his lyrics evoking the natural world and drawing on legends and archetypes to populate the private universe his music inhabited. “Ride the buffalo” for example, he uses a forceful, idiosyncratic strumming style and unexpected chord changes to evoke the wide, open spaces of the American West.
In the liner notes to his 1971 album “Song of the Stallion,” Basho wrote: “My philosophy is quite simple: soul first, technique second, or 'It is better to drink wine from your hands than water from a pretty cup.'”
Basho depended on his father's financial support for basic needs. He toured for long stretches between the West Coast, Canada, and the Northeast, performing in small venues and getting transportation when he could (he didn't have a driver's license). Sometimes he slept in public parks.
He began performing on larger stages after signing with Vanguard in 1972, opening for acts such as Mahavishnu Orchestra. The success was short-lived. Two albums he recorded for Windham Hill, a label created by William Ackerman partly in response to Basho's music, failed to generate widespread attention, and by the mid-1980s his 14 LPs were out of print.
He began to produce and distribute his music himself, on cassettes; His last recording was “Twilight Peaks” (1984). Maurizio Angeletti, who toured with him in Italy in 1982, wrote in a recollection: “It was clear that he lived in a dimension close to poverty, struggling to stay alive financially and physically, but also struggling to be understood.”
There has been renewed interest in Basho's music in recent years, thanks in large part to the 2015 documentary “Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho” and two box sets of recordings unearthed from his personal archive released by Tompkins Square Records in 2020 and 2024.
“He was not of this world and he was not equipped to be part of this world,” Ackerman said on “The Voice of the Eagle.” “I'm not surprised he left this world early. It must have been very exhausting for him trying to be in it.”
Howard Fishman is a musician, composer, and author of “To Anyone Who Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.”
