RIP Richard "Kush" Griffith
Junior
4,853 Posts
Don't want to fill the friday board with sad news but don't know if anyone saw that Richard "Kush" Griffith passed away on Wednesday. Considering the life he had led I always thought it was a miracle he was still playing. In case you don't know here's the write up from the Denver Post.
RIPTrumpeter Richard "Kush" Griffith, pictured here in late September in Aurora, loved funk. He died Monday in Kentucky at the age of 58. (Post file / Cyrus McCrimmon)Richard "Kush" Griffith told me he was impossible to kill, but he was wrong. The funk musician, who got his start playing trumpet with the Louisville Civic Symphony at 14 and hit the big time as music director for James Brown, died this week in Kentucky, a brilliant, funny, musically gifted, fatally flawed human being to the very end. He had lived in Colorado for nearly 10 years after his career disintegrated. Years of drug abuse and the damage caused by untreated diabetes had sidelined him in 1995. When I met him, he was living in an apartment in Aurora. He had gone from a life of adoring audiences and a six-figure income to living day-to-day on dialysis and disability checks. He was scary broke, blind and confined to a wheelchair, but he had been clean for most of a decade - and of that he was proud. "I'm brutally realistic about my existence, mine and the state of existence of the people of the world," he once told me. In his blindness he had retreated into existentialism, where he would contemplate his favorite philosophers, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Mr. Spock. "I don't do happy," he said. That was a lie. Music was pure joy for Kush, and the sweetest sound was applause. I said goodbye to him last fall before he moved to Kentucky. He had decided to leave Colorado so he wouldn't be a burden to his friends. Paulletta Griffith, his companion and third ex-wife, said it was a mistake. Louisville wasn't home anymore, she said, and getting the medical help he needed was difficult. "We were really sorry we left." There was one great moment in Kentucky, though. A friend staged a benefit concert for him June 2 at a joint in Louisville called Bobby J's. Kush was there, playing the trumpet, singing and relishing the moment in the old funk groove once again with his friends Maceo Parker and drummer Melvin Parker. "He did good," said Paulletta. "The crowd just loved it, everybody had a ball, and the owner said after that performance he wanted Kush to be the house band." But the show took a heavy toll. Over the next two days, Kush didn't feel like getting up. Paulletta tried to rouse him, but he wouldn't stay awake, so she called an ambulance. The doctors said he had had a heart attack. They also found a fracture in his spine from a recent fall. His veins were blown from 18 years of dialysis three times a week. His legs were mostly paralyzed. He was skinny and weak. He never made it home. When I tried to call Paulletta on Wednesday, her answering machine was full. "Everybody has been calling," she said when we finally connected. "All his old friends from everywhere." He had played with George Clinton, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, the Commodores, Parliament Funkadelic and Bootsy's Rubber Band. "They all plan on coming down," said Paulletta, although memorial services have yet to be scheduled. Whenever it happens, there will be incredible music. "Music means everything to me," Kush told me in 2004. Alone in his apartment by the highway, he still played his trumpet every day "to keep my chops up." When he wasn't playing, he was listening to CDs or humming or composing in his head. He had done it all his life. His father had loved music and taught him to play the trumpet when he was 9. As a kid his dad performed as a minstrel in blackface, Kush said. Later he worked as a waiter, bartender, a cab driver. "He read a lot, W. Somerset Maugham and Voltaire. He was a brilliant man." Much like his son. Kush loved Debussy, Ravel and the Black Eyed Peas. His expertise, though, was in funk. "I'm a walking encyclopedia about that genre of music," he said, then he laughed about the walking part. By then he couldn't take more than a few steps. Kush knew he wouldn't live much longer, and he knew he was to blame for his bad health. He didn't do excuses either. "I loved the lifestyle," he said. "I didn't want it to end." On Monday, it was over. Kush was 58.
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