On Saturday, June 7, 1969, the new band formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and a comparatively unknown 22-year-old bass player from Leicester played a free concert in London’s Hyde Park.
Going by the name Blind Faith, they hadn’t yet released an album (their hugely anticipated and hyped debut was still two months away) and it was their first ever gig together, but the band the music press had tagged with the new word ‘supergroup’ played to 100,000 people.
The shy bass player at the back of the stage was Richard Roman ‘Ric’ Grech. He had been poached from ‘underground’/progressive rock band Family to join the three stellar other musicians in Blind Faith.
Two decades later, Grech – renowned as one of the finest bass players and musicians of the late-60s rock era – died penniless in hospital, from kidney and liver failure after years of drug and alcohol abuse. He had been living in a flat in Leicester, surviving on Invalidity Benefit. He was 43 years old.
Grech was seven when he started to play the violin. He was good, his father told the Leicester Mercury newspaper. “But when he heard The Beatles he didn’t want to play the violin, he wanted to play the guitar. I bought him one. And that was that.”
Grech formed The Xciters, which included vocalist Roger Chapman, but then left to join The Farinas in 1965. The Farinas, now with Chapman on board, morphed into Family.
It was during his Family days that Grech first started to experiment with drugs.
“Once you get involved with heroin it rips you apart,” he said in a rare interview. “The first thing I did in the morning was take a fix… I don’t know why I started. I suppose it was to overcome my insecurity. I never knew what was going to happen next. My life was so fast.”
By 1969, Grech was out of Family and in Blind Faith. He later admitted that was the year he first started taking heroin. “My life was governed by the need to score. I used to borrow from everyone and anyone to pay for the stuff.”
Blind Faith lasted one album and one year. Grech went on to play with Winwood in the re-formed Traffic but was sacked after two albums because of his drug use.
He began a promising new country rock project with Gram Parsons, but music from the sessions was never released. Gram’s untimely death from an overdose in 1973 reportedly affected Ric badly.
He went on play sessions for the Bee Gees, Muddy Waters, Rod Stewart and Ronnie Laine, but the drugs made him increasingly unreliable.
He overdosed twice: once in 1974 at a Hollywood party after a near-fatal cocktail of cocaine and heroin, then again two years later.
By 1984 he was back living in Leicester, getting by on benefit and attempting to wean himself off heroin.
In 1987 the Leicester Mercury reported that Grech was banned from driving and fined £220 after admitting being three times over the alcohol limit and pointing a starting pistol at another driver. He asked magistrates if he could pay off the fine at £4 per week.
“The royalties stop coming in, the phone stops ringing and the limos stop waiting outside your house,” he said.
In 1989, 20 years after Blind Faith, doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking he would be dead within six months. It was like waving a red rag at a bull, said his ex-wife, Jenny.
“When he heard that, he just said he was going to hit the tequila,” she said. “He was told if he didn’t stop drinking he wouldn’t last six months. With a person like Ric, that was all you had to say. He wanted to go out in style.”
Ric Grech died in the Leicester General hospital on March 16 after his kidneys and liver haemorrhaged. He was buried under an oak tree at Gilroes Cemetery in Leicester, in the same grave as his mother.
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