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This article was originally written for Westword way back in 1989; I was contacted in 2000 by a writer who wanted to talk to me about it and post the article on a Tommy Bolin Web site. That site since unlinked many of its articles, so I thought I'd go ahead and post the original article, bookended with the text from the interview, here.

"Shooting Star: The Rise and Fall of Tommy Bolin"

Tommy Bolin had been gone from us for thirteen years. During that time very little, if any, of Tommy's music was being aired by FM Rock Radio. With the exception of a devoted but small, loosely knit, legion of underground fans trying to keep his musical memory alive, Tommy's legacy seemed destined to become a mere footnote in the annals of Rock history.

In the autumn of 1989, two extraordinary things occurred which would prove to be the ground breakers in bringing Tommy's music back to the limelight. The first was Geffen Records release of "The Ultimate" box set. Although being just a mere sample of Tommy's vast musical career, it brought back to the main stream songs and compositions which had not been heard nor available in years. Tommy's fans now had something to rally behind.

The second was a major story about Tommy's life written by, the then music editor of Denver's Westword, Gil Asakawa. Gil's "Shooting Star" article was the first in depth piece written about Tommy since his untimely death in 1976. Thoroughly researched and leaving no stone unturned, Gil's article answered many questions which were left hanging since Tommy's death and actually raised some important new issues.

Since it first appeared in October of 1989, Gil's article has been the definitive and best written piece about Tommy's life and career to date. It has been photo copied many times and passed around amongst the ever growing circle of Tommy's fans for years.

Through the magic and power of the Internet, Gil has kindly allowed his article to be reprinted for the world to read once again. Now, for the first time in 10 years, here in its entirety, Gil Asakawa's "Shooting Star", The Rise and Fall of Tommy Bolin.

(Editor's note: As ardent Tommy Bolin fans ourselves, we must advise you the following is a very poignant, graphic, and detailed account of Tommy's life from 1969 to 1976 as reported by Gil Asakawa from the many interviews he conducted from bandmates and close associates of Tommy. If you choose just to remember Tommy Bolin, the musician, then please, by all means stop reading now and play your CD's and tapes and enjoy the great music he left behind. If you want to learn more about the man behind the music, we invite you to read on.....Art & Sal) <.i>

Originally printed in Westword, October 11-17, 1989

Shooting Star
Tommy Bolin was Colorado's brightest hope until drugs burned him out.
By Gil Asakawa

It's about 8:45 p.m. Friday. December 3, 1976. The Tommy Bolin Band is on stage at Miami's Jai-Alai Fronton, a sports arena, burning its way through an intense set as the opening act for superstar guitarist Jeff Beck This is the first night of the tour.

"This last song is from Private Eyes," announces Bolin, a Denver guitar player on the brink of stardom.

The band rips into a fifteen-minute version of "Post Toastee," a moody contemplation of the mid-Seventies rock scene's druggy excesses:

Don't let your mind Post Toastee, like a lot of my friends did. Just keep me out of LA., things are crazy out there. The people that I've been meeting, seems like I've got to beware. Now I know I've been wrong, it seems like nothing is right. I hope I get me some sleep tonight.

After two choruses, Bolin takes off on a screaming solo, then a series of rhythmic, echoing experiments. Halfway through the song, the house lights come on. Time's up, but Bolin's too involved in his six-string improvisations to stop now.

"Turn them lights down," he growls, launching into several minutes of unaccompanied guitar frenzy. The band joins in for the crashing finale. When Bolin finally leaves the stage, the audience is screaming for more.

Bolin's elated. After years of paying his dues, woodshedding and playing with other bands, this is the gig that will break his career wide-open. Private Eyes, his second solo album, has just been released; it showcases Bolin's unmistakable mix of melodic hard rock, cutting-edge jazz fusion and world-beat rhythms spun out with his distinctive guitar style. And Jeff Beck fans are the perfect audience. Before the concert, Bolin tells a friend the tour will be "the biggest thing I've ever done."

It's also the last thing he'll ever do. The first night of the tour is Tommy Bolin's final performance.

Ten hours after he walks off the stage, 25 year-old Thomas Richard Bolin is dead in a Miami motel room. He's suffocated from "acute multiple drug intoxication" -- alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates and heroin (in the form of morphine) overload his system.

Scattered around the room are bottles of health-food supplements. An autopsy uncovers the remains of ginseng in his stomach. Bolin had started thinking about cleaning up his act, but his interest in health was too little and came far too late. He'd ignored the warning in "Post Toastee" - the last song he ever played.

Like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and other late, great rock stars who overdosed on excess and success, Tommy Bolin left a legacy: his music. Local radio stations still play tracks from the records he made in the mid-Seventies with the James Gang and Deep Purple, as well as his two solo albums, "Teaser" and "Private Eyes."

But much of Bolin's work has been hard to find or out-of-print altogether. Until now, that is. This week, Geffen Records will release "Tommy Bolin: The Ultimate...," a multiple-disc retrospective.

The collection is a collaboration between two hardcore Bolin fans who thought his contributions to contemporary music shouldn't be forgotten -- a Montana musician named Will Dixon, a Bolin archivist working with the blessings of Tommy's family, and Tom Zutaut, a Geffen Records executive who supervised the project. The set spans Bolin's career, stretching as far back as Zephyr, the Boulder group that was Bolin's first brush with stardom.

After that came some of the Seventies' biggest bands. "The greatest players in the world wanted to play with Tommy," recalls Marty Wolf, a former Denver promoter and early Zephyr supporter who's now in Los Angeles managing heavy metal band Kingdom Come.

Thirteen years after his death, Bolin's colleagues still revere his work; Motley Crue just recorded "Teaser" for an upcoming anti-drug album featuring remakes of songs made famous by rockers who died of overdoses. With the Ultimate collection, Bolin's legacy can finally be enjoyed by music fans, not just musicians.

WITH HIS EXOTIC good looks - his father is of Scandinavian descent and his mother is Syrian - Bolin could have played himself in the Hollywood version of his life. The movie would have been a prototypical story of Seventies rock and roll of life in the fast lane until the road hits a dead end.

The scene running behind the opening credits of the Tommy Bolin story would be Tommy's first performance: Richard and Barbara Bolin dressing five-year old Tommy in an Elvis Presley costume - complete with blue suede shoes - for a talent show. Tommy didn't win the contest but that's where his obsession with rock and roll began. For years he carried a picture of Elvis in his wallet. Almost two decades later Bolin paid his respects to the King when he co-wrote the James Gang hit "Must Be Love" as a mock tribute to "All Shook Up."

Bolin's own rock-and-roll life began in earnest when he started playing guitar in various cover bands around his hometown of Sioux City, Iowa. But even as a teenager, Bolin wasn't satisfied by faithfully recreating the hits of the day. He discovered his destiny when he was sixteen years old, and kicked out of high school for refusing to cut his hair.

Within a few months, Bolin headed west to Denver, which had a reputation for being a hotbed of hipsters.

At first, he lived in seedy downtown apartments and panhandled in still-undeveloped Larimer Square. He also sought out other musicians. One was Jeff Cook, a seventeen year old songwriter and vocalist for a Denver band called American Standard. The two struck up a friendship that lasted through Bolin's career, and Cook co-wrote many of Bolin's best known songs. Today he works for Elektra Records in Atlanta, and still sings on records.

"American Standard was pretty amateurish," Cook recalls "but we were rehearsing in a downtown practice space somewhere on Curtis or Welton, and I heard someone knocking at the door. It was Tommy standing in the snow with his guitar. He said, 'Can I jam?' so we let him in. He plugged in and blew us away." Bolin joined on the spot, and American Standard became a regular opening band for concerts at the Family Dog, the club booked by young promoter Barry Fey.

Cook worked at the Folklore Center, a popular music store and hangout for folk and blues musicians. Bolin was soon a regular there, too. "He seemed to just love music," Cook says. "He was into Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, Albert King to B.B. King to Hendrix - it didn't matter what style or genre it was."

One day Bolin took a guitar off the wall and started playing the tricky time signatures of "Take 5," the jazz standard by pianist Dave Brubeck. "I about died, hearing him play that on guitar, when he was sixteen years old," Cook remembers. "You'd hear him play songs note for note one time, and then the rest of the time it would be different. I never, ever heard Tommy copy anybody."

While he was with American Standard, Bolin met the future members of Zephyr. His group and a blues band named Brown Sugar were both booked at an Aspen nightclub in '68. The driving force behind Brown Sugar was the husband-and-wife duo of bassist David Givens and singer and harp player Candy Givens.

Bolin and keyboard player John Faris soon left American Standard to start a more adventurous band, the Ethereal Zephyr, and Cook moved on to a blues band named Deep Rock. On New Year's Eve 1968, Ethereal Zephyr and Brown Sugar were both booked at a party put together by Marty Wolf and a partner, Kit Thomas. Suddenly, Bolin and the Givenses were making beautiful music together. With the addition of a drummer named Robbie Chamberlin, they joined forces as Zephyr in 1969.

ALTHOUGH ZEPHYR flopped commercially, it's still discussed in reverential terms around the Denver-Boulder scene. This was no ordinary blues band; Zephyr stretched the limits with its improvisational flair, quickly establishing a reputation for fiery performances and a hot young guitar player who split the stage - and the accolades - with a mercurial singer who had a voice like Janis Joplin with chops.

"People used to flip over us," says David Givens, who now lives in Hawaii. (Givens divorced Candy in the Seventies, although the two continued to work together in various groups, including different versions of Zephyr, until Candy's death in 1984. She drowned in a hot tub after drinking and taking Quaaludes.)

Wolf and Thomas, who helped organize Zephyr's first gigs, urged Fey to audition the band. Fey heard the band on a Sunday night in February 1969 at Shapes, an East Colfax nightclub. The next day, Fey convinced his West Coast competitor, Bill Graham, to book the band at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco and the Whiskey in Los Angeles. Soon Fey was acting as the band's unofficial manager, though he later relinquished control. "I was convinced I couldn't do the job because I was too inexperienced," he says now.

Zephyr's Los Angeles performance impressed several record labels and resulted in a record deal. Between stints in the studio, the band toured constantly, polishing its sound. The group played the Fillmore East (Bill Graham's New York club) and Fey's Denver Pop Festival, where Bolin met Hendrix. Zephyr even played a festival in Boston that year. It came on second, after a new British group called Led Zeppelin.

Zephyr's debut album, Zephyr was released in 1969 on the short-lived Probe label. It wasn't an altogether happy experience: The rigors and monotony of studio work were frustrating, and led to heavy drug and alcohol abuse.

"We should have made a live record," Givens says. "None of us had been in a studio before, and the producer had no idea what to do with us." The group recorded all the songs in two days; after that the spontaneous tracks were thrown out and Probe kept demanding revisions.

"I remember Candy singing the same parts forty times, and Tommy doing those solos twenty or thirty times in a row," Givens says. It was then that the band got interested in drugs. When we all lived together in a little house on Canyon Boulevard in Boulder, people used to think we were maniac drug-users, but we were mostly straight," Givens recalls. "Tommy used to take THC every now and then, but we played music all the time."

Tensions grew worse when Zephyr started working on its second album in 1970. Chamberlin had been replaced by Bobby Berge, a friend of Bolin's, and the new drummer didn't fit Givens says. "I didn't care for the rhythm stuff," he explains. "Bobby had a tendency to tighten up the beat so it was straight and hard, and it didn't swing."

Still, Going Back to Colorado sounded better than the first album, mostly because Candy Givens wasn't singing all over the melodic map, but also because Bolin had started developing his signature guitar style. According to Dave Brown, Bolin's friend and former guitar rival who had signed on as Zephyr's roadie, that's because someone had introduced Bolin to the echoplex, a piece of equipment that gave his guitar a spacey edge Bolin could control with a foot pedal.

Venturing ever further in search of new sounds, Bolin left Zephyr in the fall of '71, taking Berge with him. Zephyr broke up after one more album.

Bolin was going strong with a new band, Energy. He'd always been a voracious fan of every kind of music, including the brand-new fusion of rock and jazz pioneered by Miles Davis in Bitches Brew and taken to dissonant extremes by John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra. Released from the constraints of the twelve-bar blues, Bolin experimented with Energy.

Unfortunately, his rapid-fire riffs were a few years ahead of their time. "The stuff they were doing back then used to sound to me like a square wheel rolling down a corduroy road," Givens says. "Candy and I went to see Tommy one night. The room was full of young guys, no girls, sitting there watching him play guitar real loud." These guys didn't drink much and never worked up a sweat dancing; they were there to watch Bolin's six-string pyrotechnics.

Because their music didn't promote bar business, Energy was invariably fired by every club except one: Tulagi, the tiny Boulder bar run by a renegade University of Colorado political science graduate student named Chuck Morris. Morris was a big Zephyr fan and booked the band in Tulagi every chance he got. He did the same for Energy, even though the group ruined his bar business. "Energy was practically my house band for a while," Morris says.

Bolin hung out at the club. One night when Morris got up enough nerve to perform a few country songs (he now manages acts like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Highway 101 and Lyle Lovett), Bolin offered to accompany him on the guitar. "This is so sick, I can't believe I can remember this," Morris says, "but he played that night with a cowboy hat on and he was such a whiz he played country licks like a pedal-steel guitar. I had never heard him do that before; for weeks after we called him 'Tennessee Tommy Bolin.'"

When the band ran out of local clubs, Bolin took Energy on the road. Keyboard player and singer Max Groenthal first met Bolin in Omaha in late '71, when Energy blew through town. "He had Jeff Cook with him in the band," recalls Groenthal (who now goes by Max Carl, as the lead singer for .38 Special). "I had a Traffic kind of band, jazz oriented, but not as heavy as Tommy's stuff." Groenthal was so impressed he later headed for Boulder and joined Energy.

As band members came and went, Bolin made important contacts. At a Boulder concert he introduced himself to flute player Jeremy Steig, whose records he'd admired. After hearing Bolin's music, Steig invited the young guitarist to New York for some studio sessions. There Bolin fell into the East Coast fusion scene, which included such notable musicians as keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummer Billy Cobham, both members of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Cobham was so impressed he invited Bolin to play on his 1973 solo album, Spectrum.

At first, Bolin didn't believe it. "He said, 'This guy calls and says this is Billy Cobham' and I said yeah, yeah, sure this isn't Billy Cobham, and hung up," remembers Norma Jean Bell, Bolin's sax player.

There's no denying that Bolin's work on that record ranks among his best - his familiarity with every kind of music and his distinctive sound added soulfulness to the lightning-fast scales other hotshot guitarists could never match. "You'd see him pick up bits and pieces from everywhere, but when he recorded "Stratus" with Cobham, there was no reference point there," says Jeff Cook.

Bolin left Spectrum with a substantial reputation. "There were people who'd never heard anything about Zephyr or the James Gang, but they knew Spectrum," Dave Brown says.

As Bolin's sound evolved, so did his showmanship. Partly at the urging of his girlfriend, Karen Ulibarri, Bolin shed his shy demeanor and became more and more extroverted - on stage, at least. He draped feather boas over his shoulders; he and the other members of Energy dyed their hair psychedelic colors; he pierced his ears and began wearing the feather earrings that became his trademark. An early admirer of David Bowie's glitter-rock Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album, Bolin embraced the exoticism of androgyny. On the cover of his first solo album, he looked like a woman.

Bolin was an unmistakable sight in those days, Givens says, sauntering down Boulder's University Hill in his outlandish outfits. The look might have been eccentric, but everyone agrees Bolin's personality was anything but flashy. "He didn't like confrontation," Givens says.

"He was such a nice kid, he was always in a good mood," says Morris.

Groenthal's later memories aren't so pleasant "He was a gentle, sweet guy, but when it comes to drugs, compassion was forgotten for passion," he says.

In the early Seventies, though, Marty Wolf says Bolin was still the "happy little koala bear," before "the monster drug problem." Then, music was the problem.

"Energy played heavy metal jazz fusion - it was just too weird," says Cook, with pride. "People wanted to hear Rod Stewart covers; we looked weird and we sounded weird."

THEY RAN OUT OF ENERGY in 1973 when Bolin was offered a guitar-for-hire position he couldn't refuse. Joe Walsh had settled in Boulder after leaving the James Gang, a Cleveland-based group that had become a premier concert attraction (and was touted as an American version of the Who); he admired Bolin's playing on Spectrum but also knew the guitarist could rock.

When the James Gang asked Walsh if he knew of anyone who could replace Domenic Troiano, the man who'd stepped in for Walsh the year before, he recommended Bolin.

"The James Gang broadened his horizons and showed him how cosmopolitan the world was," Dave Brown says. "He learned that he could have fun then." Besides Ulibarri, Brown was Bolin's closest confidant. After being talked into becoming Zephyr's roadie and giving up his own band, Brown became Bolin's fulltime guitar technician and traveled with him for years. "We had made a deal," Brown says. He said, "You give up your career, and if I don't make it, I'll turn around and work for you. If I do make it, you'll never have to worry about anything."

For the two albums he recorded with the James Gang, Bang and Miami, Bolin (with help from Jeff Cook) penned classic hard-rock songs like "Standing in the Rain." He also recorded his first lead vocal, on the beautiful ballad "Alexis."

Between James Gang engagements, Bolin returned to his old Boulder hangouts. But by then, Brown says, the standing joke in Boulder at the time was "Oh, he made it back this week?"

When he was in town, another acquaintance says, Bolin played quick gigs at local clubs for cocaine money.

"During a two-year period, Tommy must have played two hundred times for me," Morris recalls.

Although he was making more money than he'd ever dreamed of, Bolin wasn't happy as the James Gang's lead guitarist. "I don't think he felt he had the freedom to do what he wanted, but it was a lot of money," says Cook. "It was just a great opportunity. The idea down the road was to put Energy back together."

"When we met Tommy, 'commercial' was a joke," remembers David Givens. "When he told me he was going to play with the James Gang, I laughed. We used to use them as an example of what we didn't want to be. But he had just made Spectrum and he was really proud of that. At that point there wasn't a whole lot going on, and he wanted the good life."

That good life turned sour soon enough. In August of '74, about the time Miami was released, Bolin quit the James Gang, saying he was unhappy with the band's musical direction. By then, Bolin had moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the heart of the music industry. Between bands, Bolin guested on another jazz-rock album, by composer/percussionist Alphonse Mouzon. He also signed with Fey for personal management. "He came to me and said, "I've been ripped off by everyone else, I want you to be my manager," Fey says. "He was amazing, he could have been huge. Superstars loved him, musicians loved him, the girls loved him -he just wanted to be a rock-and-roll star."

Fey got Bolin a deal to record a solo album with Nemperor, a new label run by a Fey acquaintance, attorney Nat Weiss. But then Bolin was offered another guitar-for-hire job, this time with the most popular hard--rock band in the world: Deep Purple.

"DEEP PURPLE came out of nowhere," says Dave Brown. "Tommy already felt so good about his own thing, and he auditioned almost as a lark."

Deep Purple's guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, had just quit to form his own group, Rainbow; the band tracked down Bolin and asked him to audition as Blackmore's replacement. Bolin listened to all kinds of esoteric music but he didn't know any Deep Purple songs, except for parts of the hit "Smoke on the Water." Brown showed Bolin the intro for the song, and that's what he played for his audition. He passed with flying colors.

"When they said they wanted him, he couldn't get out of it," Brown says. Soon Bolin was leading an artistic double life, recording most of his solo Teaser album in Los Angeles, then flying to Germany to record Purple's Come Taste the Band. Despite the schizophrenic schedule, Bolin managed to write or co-write most of the material on the Purple LP as well as his own. And in return, Deep Purple's Glenn Hughes sang the last two lines on Teaser's moving "Dreamer," which had been written by Jeff Cook - and were out of Bolin's range.

"It started as an obligation, but we enjoyed it, being able to run to London to mix Teaser and then to Germany to do Come Taste the Band," Brown says.

Being part of Deep Purple gave Bolin the headiest taste yet of rock-and-roll stardom. "Nobody ever paid a dime for drinks or drugs, and we met some crazy ladies," Brown recalls. During the recording sessions in Germany, the musicians regularly sniffed heroin. Brown says he remembers a shipment of cocaine mailed to the band from the U.S. in a hollowed-out book.

"We experimented a lot in those years," Brown adds. "In the beginning we had ground rules: no needles and no junk." But those rules went by the wayside. By the time he joined Deep Purple, Bolin was occasionally injecting drugs even though he was afraid of needles, Brown says. "He was very secretive about that. Sometimes it was speed, sometimes coke."

And sometimes it was heroin.

When Deep Purple took off on a world tour late in '75, Bolin was having the wildest time of his life. But the trip was plagued by technical difficulties and bad publicity. During a stay in Jakarta, a roadie was killed when he fell into an elevator shaft. The tour was so out of control that Brown abandoned his post as Bolin's personal guitar tech/bodyguard and returned to Colorado, "When I left it was because things were crazy, and I couldn't handle it." Brown says. "The person I saw scared me to death. This guy was tired of his own company - the only thing he heard was wild dogs (the title of a haunting song from 'Teaser')."

When Bolin finally came off the road and returned to California, the two friends were estranged. "I was still in Colorado, and Tommy got a new guitar man," Brown says. "I didn't even know this guy."

In the spring of '76, Brown was convinced to rejoin Bolin for part of the tour promoting Teaser, which had been released about the same time as the Deep Purple album.

But he soon quit again, citing Bolin's increasingly wild lifestyle. "We worked together but I never felt we were best friends anymore," Brown says. "This guy definitely had gone Hollywood on us. He'd lost that charm where when he touched his guitar you forgot everything bad you ever thought about him. He was believing his own press."

IN THE SPRING of '76, the Tommy Bolin Band entered the studio to record Bolin's second album. Joining him were his old friends Bobby Berge from Energy and Zephyr, as well as ex-Vanilla Fudge keyboardist Mark Stein, bassist Reggie McBride and saxophone player Norma Jean Bell. Throughout the year, Bolin played with variations of the group with Bell the only constant player.

He also broke up with his girlfriend of almost ten years, who hooked up with Bolin's friend from Deep Purple, Glenn Hughes. Friends and band members all say Bolin was very upset over the breakup, although he'd had screaming overseas phone arguments with Ulibarri while he was touring with Deep Purple.

Bolin briefly dated Exorcist star Linda Blair, for whom he wrote the propulsive "Shake the Devil" on Private Eyes. By summer, though, he had a relationship going with Valoria Monzeglio, a Swiss woman he'd met on the road.

Despite his personal problems and increasing use of drugs, Bolin could still play with amazing fire. In May, the Tommy Bolin Band made a triumphant return to Denver with a performance that's now legendary. The concert was at Ebbet's Field, a tiny downtown Denver club owned by Chuck Morris and booked by Barry Fey. That night, Bolin was backed by Bell, who'd played with Frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra; Stein, McBride and drummer Narada Michael Walden, who had replaced Billy Cobham in the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The music was impeccable, unbelievably kinetic. Even when Stein sang lead for two of his own songs and Walden offered an extended drum solo (he left Bolin soon after to record his debut solo album and is now an acclaimed producer), the set didn't skip a beat.

"I'd played with some of the best guitar players in the world, but I liked Bolin best," says Bell, who's now recording an album with her own Detroit-based band. "He could go from rock and roll to jazz to blues to funk, and he had a wonderful tone, his own distinctive sound. He didn't read music at all, but he had wonderful ears.

"Tommy used to play with great speed and articulation; he could play mellow, but he could also play some really, really fast riff. And unlike most rock musicians, he could play out - outside the chords for jazz improvisations."

That night at Ebbet's was one of the best shows she ever played with Bolin. "We held hands and meditated ahead of time," Bell says. "We did that kind of stuff a lot with Narada in the band. We felt so happy."

But unhappy times lay just ahead. The group continued touring, and the personnel kept changing. At one point Bolin's brother, Johnny (who now plays with Black Oak Arkansas), sat in on drums. During the summer, the Bolin Band opened at Mile High Stadium for Gary Wright, Steve Miller and Peter Frampton. It was the first gig for a new bass player, Jimrny Haslip, who remained with the group until Bolin's death. "It was a young, hungry band," Haslip says. "We were into playing music. Tommy liked that about the band - we weren't polished veterans, and we had a raw attitude."

The keyboard player during the last months was Max Groenthal, who'd been with Energy several years before. "We literally bumped into each other on a corner in L.A., and Bolin asked me to play with him," Groenthal says. That fall, Johnny Bolin was replaced by Mark Craney, an associate of Groenthal's.

By now, Groenthal recalls, "Tommy had lost the thrust for music. He was only looking for the next high. It was apparent he was killing himself. People were bailing on Tommy because they were scared. He had gone past his peak and his control, and he was caught up in a big thing: drugs."

The drugs had their effect on Bolin. "'There were times when it was not cool on stage where he'd lose track of the progression and look down and go, 'Where's one?'," Groenthal says.

Bell remembers otherwise, insisting Bolin could play "high or sober."

Bolin had been playing hard all summer and into the fall when the band finally took two weeks off in late November. The final performance before the break was a welcome-home concert in Sioux City, where the Bolin family celebrated the return of its most famous prodigal son with Middle-Eastern feasts for the entire entourage. After the celebrations, the musicians flew to their respective homes for Thanksgiving; they'd regroup in Miami for their first date as the opening act for Jeff Beck. Bolin spent the rest of November in Iowa.

That Thanksgiving was "a whole lot of being with the family, a whole lot of playing and a whole lot of partying," recalls Rick Bolin, Tommy's younger brother who was 18 at the time. "I was in a party stage; we'd go to the local clubs and have fun with the bands on stage." When Bolin wasn't sitting in with amazed and delighted Sioux City bar bands, he spent time with his family.

"On Turkey day, Tommy picked up a stupid old guitar and played songs my dad liked," Rick recalls. The family circled around Tommy as he picked out a note-perfect rendition of the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flower," with other Bolins joining in on spoons and harmonica. "We were always tight - he loved coming here," Rick says.

But he was also ready to go back on the road. Tommy Bolin flew to Miami several days earlier then the rest of his band was scheduled to arrive. Before he left, he autographed a photo for his parents: "To my Mom and Dad who gave me the faith to at least try to make it. And I will 4 your sake I love you both so very much. Please don't forget it."

"I think even he knew he wasn't coming back," Rick says now. "I said "What're you doing?" and when he told me, I said, "That's cool, just don't leave me out, you dog."

So his brother added this postscript to the photo: "Johnny and Ricky, no one had better brothers. I am proud and very lucky for the family of mine."

"When he split for the airport, I said, 'If I don't see you no more in this world I'll see you in the next and don't be late,' Rick says. "He said, 'Ricky I'm never late.' I knew he was never coming back."

MIAMI'S NO PLACE for a drug-using musician to try to clean up his act.

A rock star on the rise attracts hangers-on happy to supply anything he needs, especially free drugs - and especially in Miami.

Band members Jimmy Haslip and Mark Craney, both strict vegetarians, didn't use drugs - "We were addicted to these things called "Guru Chews," Haslip says. They'd convinced Bolin to start taking health supplements and eat ginseng. "He thought there was something to it," says Haslip, who's now the bassist for the Yellowjackets, a pop-fusion group. "He was making some sort of effort to stay straight."

Bolin started telling acquaintances he was going to take care of himself. At an October dinner with Barry and Cindy Fey and other friends, he discussed the virtues of ginseng. "He seemed terrific to me; he talked about taking ginseng and feeling really good," says Allan Roth, who manages local nightclub Herman's Hideaway.

"Two weeks before he died, Tommy came by the office and he seemed great," says Chuck Morris, who had joined forces with Feyline, Fey's concert-promotion company. "He was taking vitamins, and seemed really together."

It didn't last long.

When Haslip arrived in Miami, Bolin took him aside. "Tommy confessed to me he had got some blow and did some drinking. He apologized," Haslip says. "He wanted to do it but at that point, he knew he had a problem."

By now, Bolin's wild excesses were common knowledge. "The industry was rampant with rumors that he was a problem," Fey says. "I guess it reflected on me, but I didn't give a fuck. Everybody got disenchanted with Tommy, and at that time we were trying to turn it around, just to get him out of there to play. I was the last to find out; I never saw anything erratic or unusual for a long time, and he swore to me he didn't do anything."

Fey finally realized the extent of Bolin's problem when "Tommy almost fell off the stage at the Bottom Line in New York," he says. Bolin had just switched labels from Nemperor to CBS, and the audience that night was packed with company executives.

"I was very disheartened," Fey says. "He said he was real uptight about being in New York, and he was sorry. He always had an explanation."

When Bolin signed on for the Beck tour, the band's road manager expressed concern about the opening date. "He said we have to go to Miami, and that's a dangerous place for Tommy to go by himself," Fey recalls. So Fey sent L.C. Clayton, a Feyline security guard, to travel with the band. "L.C. volunteered to go down there," Fey says. "Not to be a bodyguard, you know, but to keep Tommy out of trouble."

Clayton was no stranger to trouble himself: He'd been arrested for possession of narcotics in the early Seventies. Associates say he used and gave out drugs, and even arrived in Florida carrying a case full of prescription pills.

Fey says he was unaware of Clayton's record. Westword was unable to reach Clayton, who reportedly lives in Denver.

Clayton flew to Miami on December 3, on the same flight as Dave Brown. Brown had received a call the day before from Bolin, who'd begged him to take care of the guitar equipment for this important tour "just like I used to," Brown remembers. "And he said, 'I already have somebody else who'll take care of me.'"

When members of the entourage arrived in Miami, they discovered Bolin had been on a several-day partying binge. "At the coffeeshop, someone asked me if I was with someone's band, because the guy had passed out there the night before," Brown says.

BUT BOLIN made it all right through the opening act. After watching Jeff Beck's band play part of it's set, Bolin headed back to the Newport Resort Hotel in north Miami, where his band was staying. Dade County police reports contain many conflicting recollections of that night, but everyone there agreed on one point: Bolin was ready to party.

"Tommy wasn't even that high on stage," says Bell. "But after, he had a fifth of Scotch at the bar, and that was just the start. Then we did a little bit of cocaine, and then.... He was saying he was trying to eat better and do better; he was probably trying to do better.

"It was an accident that night; he wasn't ready to check out, but Tommy probably just sniffed up everything in the place and then said, 'Oh, I forgot I was supposed to share this,'" she adds.

"In the dressing room after the concert there was a lot of drinking going on," Haslip says. A lot of people there I could tell were leeches. The last time he saw Bolin alive was about ten o'clock, when the guitarist was in his room. Haslip says, "I made a brief appearance, I didn't stay very long. There must have been two dozen people there. Tommy was high, but he was fine. He was drinking champagne out of the bottle. He didn't look any more outrageous than he did any other time." Haslip left and went to his own room, where he practiced on his bass and went to sleep.

According to the police report, at one point Bolin's party moved to Clayton's room, where Brown says he purchased some cocaine from a man he didn't know, but remembers as "Art." "He had three kinds of junk (heroin) and six kinds coke," Brown recalls.

It was a typical Seventies rock-and-roll scene, drugs and drinking everywhere. Art had arrived with a childhood friend of Bolin's, Phillip Tolimeni, who passed cocaine and a rolled-up five-dollar bill around the room.

Fey told police he had met Tolimeni several times. Tolimeni told the promoter he could "get Tommy anything that he wanted to make sure that he did not get anything that wasn't good. Mr. Fey wasn't sure what was meant by Mr. Tolimeni but thought that he was referring to narcotics," one report states.

Sometime after midnight; Tolimeni, Art and Bolin went into the bathroom for a few minutes to discuss an investment in a limo service; Clayton went to the door and told Tolimeni not to give Bolin any heroin, according to police reports. Then the threesome headed for 902, Bolin's room, to discuss business in private.

About 20 minutes later, Tolimeni came back to Clayton's room looking for papers concerning the limo service. When he couldn't find them, he returned to Bolin's room. Valeria Monzeglio, Bolin's new girlfriend, went with him. Bolin passed out in his room at about three in the morning, while he was on the phone. Monzeglio went to Clayton's room and asked Jeff Ocheltree, one of the band's roadies, for help. Clayton followed and found Bolin kneeling in the bathtub, the water running. Bolin's potential business partners couldn't agree on whether Bolin had shot any heroin, but they said he might have snorted five or six lines heroin by himself. The autopsy noted four recent needle marks on his left arm, but no tracks indicating long-term addiction.

Since Bolin's breathing was shallow, Clayton gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then he and Ocheltree undressed Bolin and laid him in bed. When Bolin defecated, the sheets were stripped and tossed outside; Bolin's body was wiped clean, then covered to the waist with a clean sheet.

When Dave Brown arrived a few minutes later, he called the hotel's physician. An answering service forwarded the message to a doctor on call; he phoned room 902 and spoke with Brown. After hearing Brown's description of Bolin's state (Brown left out most of the drugs, and told the doctor only that Bolin had consumed alcohol and valium), the physician recommended Bolin be taken immediately to a hospital.

Then some color returned to Bolin's face, and he mumbled a greeting to Clayton. Tolimeni and Art left. They were never contacted by Miami police.

Brown debated, then decided against calling an ambulance. The adverse publicity might hurt Bolin right when he was poised for stardom. "He played really well, this was the first night of the tour - did we want a big cloud of ugliness? In seven or eight years I had seen him pass out fifty times. How did I know this wasn't fifty-one?," Brown asks. "Yeah, I should have called an ambulance. God, I'd like to make that phone call again."

Bolin seemed stable when Brown left and went to his own room. Clayton massaged Bolin to keep his circulation going, then also left. Over the next few hours, Monzeglio watched Bolin slowly suffocate. She finally called an ambulance at 7:45 a.m. Saturday, December 4, when she saw mucus oozing out of Bolin's nose. Tommy had stopped breathing.

He was pronounced dead on the scene.

BARRY FEY'S PHONE rang around 6 a.m., Denver time. "The road manager called me and said, 'Tommy's gone.' I said, 'Well, can you find him?' He said, 'No, Tommy passed away.' I started crying," Fey says.

Over the years, rumors have cropped up that Fey was somehow involved in Bolin's death. He denies them all. "People really say those things? Fuck them, cocksuckers," Fey says.

Any dispute over Bolin had nothing to do with music, but with money. Long after Tommy's death, Rick Bolin says, the family received notices from Columbia Records saying, "You owe this amount, you owe that amount."

Columbia executives declined to comment on Bolin's financial arrangements.

Bolin was always asking for money, Fey says, "$3,000, $4,000 at a time, and I just couldn't tell him no. He used to say, 'Barry, I'm gonna make it, I'm gonna make it.' It was never a question of if, it was when."

Many of Bolin's friends remember Fey giving the musician money, even during the lean year of 1974 when Feyline almost went bankrupt. "Tommy loved to have a good time and he also loved to spend money. He thought he was a star and he should be treated that way," says Chuck Morris. "Barry loaned him a lot - Tommy was one of the few people who could get anything he wanted from Barry."

By the time Bolin died, Fey estimates Feyline had advanced him over $400,000 for expenses and to purchase a lavish home in Los Angeles. That's why the company was named as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy it had taken out the previous year at Bolin's insistence, Fey says. In the event of his death, Bolin asked Fey to give any money that was left over to his parents. There wasn't any.

"What we think and what happened could be two different things," says Barbara Bolin, who remembers an insurance company checking Tommy's family history the year before he died. "Tommy called me from L.A. once and said, "Barry Fey is here, thank him for taking care of everything if something happens to me." She won't comment on her late son's business affairs, except to say, "It's a sad thing, but it would have taken lots and lots of money to pursue it."

Rick Bolin says the family only saw one royalty payment after his brother's death. But that may change with Geffen's new release. According to Jeff Cook, who's been in contact with the label, "Geffen has gone to great lengths to make sure the family gets a share of the money."

Geffen didn't contact Fey regarding the retrospective, although the company collected remembrances and photos from many other Bolin acquaintances.

Now, memories and music are the only things left of Tommy Bolin.

"He was one of the first guys doing fusion, a rock-and-roll guy playing jazz," says Chuck Morris. "Hey, we were all out of control in those days. I didn't remember him being any more desperate than anyone else I hung out with - including myself. I got high with him all the time; I'm just lucky I didn't die."

"I remember when he was in Deep Purple, and we saw him, he was real fucked up," says David Givens. "He was real serious. When we walked away, Candy turned to me and said, 'Man, he's going to be dead within a year.'" Bolin lasted another two years; Candy herself died a decade later.

"We were very close to attaining an incredible success in the music industry," says Jeff Cook. "It stopped me dead in my tracks." After Bolin died, he quit playing in bands and entered the record-company end of the business. "To me, he was a very curious person, but not a very good judge of character. When he hung out, he fell in with the wrong people."

Bolin's death has haunted Dave Brown for 13 years. "I was working for a friend at first, but then I knew that I was working for someone who had something," he says. That something was what brought him to Miami for Bolin's last concert. That something, Brown says, was talent: "That's why I stayed - there were shows I had tears in my eyes after, just because of the way he played."

Thanksgiving Weekend - 1999: After a flurry of e-mails between Sal Serio, coordinator of the Tommy Bolin Appreciation Society - Madison, WI, and myself regarding Gil's story on Tommy, Sal states, "Man, I'd love to interview this guy, is he still around? " The die was cast. Gil is tracked down and contacted through the Internet. A few e-mails later, Gil gladly agrees to an interview with Sal to discuss how he researched and came about writing "Shooting Star." Here now is Sal Serio's interview with writer, Gil Asakawa.

INTERVIEW WITH GIL ASAKAWA BY SAL SERIO, DECEMBER, 1999

Q: These questions are in reference to your October 1989 (Denver) Westword article titled "Shooting Star". First, a bit about you and your background, please. You're from Colorado, correct? Ever go to Tulagi's? Is it really next to the Fox Theater in Boulder?
A: Yep, I live in Denver. I was born in Tokyo, though (I'm a third-generation Japanese American) and lived in northern Virginia before moving to Denver when I was in high school, in the mid-1970s. Tulagi's is indeed right next to the Fox Theater in Boulder, on "The Hill" - a popular student area close to the University of Colorado campus. The Fox is an old movie theater, and only recently (like 10 years ago) was converted into a concert hall. Tulagi's is a typically tiny funky place, where you stand on a dance floor and watch the act on a raised bandstand. It was one of the first places to book national acts on a regular basis in the 1970s, when the promoter and manager Chuck Morris took over the bar and started booking acts such as the Eagles and ZZ Top (legend has it for their first gig outside of Texas).

Q: How did you get involved in the Bolin project? Did you know him? Were you (are you still) a fan of Bolin's music?
A: I got involved with Bolin for the Westword article because I was a fan of his music while in high school. He died when I was attending art school at Pratt Institute in NYC, and at that point I owned both his solo records and was aware of, if not familiar with, his work with Zephyr, James Gang (Bang! was a big high school album for me and my friends) and Deep Purple. I hadn't thought about his music too much in the intervening years, but when I first read about the Bolin box coming out on Geffen, my curiosity led me to look into his death. As a local artist, I figured his story would be perfect for Westword, which is the alternative weekly newspaper in Denver. I was music editor and reporter for the paper from 1980-1991, so a big chunk of my life was involved with the local music scene.

Q: How much time and research did you put into that article? It's very well referenced.
A: I immersed myself in Bolin's life and music for over two months - I read everything I could find on him (which wasn't much), and began contacting people whose lives had crossed Tommy's, starting of course with David Givens. Then through contacts such as Mike Drumm in Denver, I got a hold of many recordings which gave me a fuller view of Bolin's creative output outside of the officially released material. At the time, of course, the albums were long out of print, though I managed to snag CD versions when a label briefly made them available. Most of the research was anecdotal, which is to say I interviewed lots of people. One of the problems doing this type of research is that you often get conflicting memories and stories, so I had to sometimes decide which was more credible, or make the references vague so it would be as accurate as possible. I'm glad to hear the article has gotten around, though I had a bad falling out with David Givens over it. He was pissed off that I had some detail wrong about the first Zephyr gig in the mountains. So, I've always been sort of embarrassed about some of that factual stuff, though I am proud of the investigative work I did around the hours surrounding his death. Man, I lived and breathed Tommy's music...almost like I was there at that concert (listened to a tape of it over and over) and there in the hotel room.

Q: You mention that Tommy was an admirer of Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust". In what way is this documented?
A: I don't know that it's documented per se, though I remember a lot of people talking about Tommy's extravagant personal fashion sense, and if memory serves me correct, Mike Drumm in particular remembered Tommy being into Ziggy Stardust as an inspiration for the androgynous makeup and feather boas and stuff. Mike ran a record store on the Hill at the time, that's when he became Tommy's friend.

Q: If Tommy signed with Barry Fey in 1974 after splitting with the James Gang, did Fey remain his manager throughout the Deep Purple stint, or was Bolin "co-managed" while with Purple?
A: I guess my article doesn't say for sure, but my recollection is that Barry was Tommy's unofficial advisor/manager throughout his career, and I don't know that Tommy had a "co-manager" during his Deep Purple stint. But I can't say with certainty what the business arrangement was. Whatever I got is in the article.

Q: It appears you interviewed alot of folks for the article. How difficult was it to track people down? Was there a particular chain of connections that lead you from one contact to the next? Who were some of themost interesting people to talk with? Were there people who didn't want to talk about Tommy?
A: I interviewed tons of people from throughout Tommy's career. It was great because the story hadn't been told before, and in any case, I was the first one who had contacted these folks for their memories about Bolin. And, each person led me to other people in the Tommy universe, so I never had a problem tracking down sources. A couple of people remained somewhat elusive, and remember Dave Brown, the friend and guitar tech who was crucial to the insights in the article, got a hold of me only by phone. I never did meet a lot of the people I interviewed, just over the phone. I found Norma Jean the old fashioned journalistic way, by contacting the Detroit Musicians Union, and getting referrals until I tracked her down. People who are still musicians or working in the industry were the easiest to track down, like Jimmy Haslip, Max Groenthal and Jeff Cook. People were generally very happy to talk about their memories of Tommy because they'd never had a chance to share them. The hardest person to track down was the Feyline security guard L.C. Clayton who flew down to Miami to watch over Bolin. I found many references to him and addresses and numbers, but every one was a dead end. As it happened, he called me after the article ran, to deny he had anything to do with Tommy's death.

Q: Who provided the major recollections of the time that Tommy spent in the Miami hotel room early 12/4/76, while in and out of consciousness, detailing the resuscitation attempts?
A: Most of the re-creation of the night in the Miami hotel rooms came from police reports, with narrative elements filled in by the various members of the band that I contacted, along with Dave Brown.

Q: You say that the heroin found in Tommy's body was in the form of morphine. How was this documented?
A: Also in the Dade County police reports, which I got a copy of. It was chilling to read the dry, "official" report, along with the attached autopsy findings. It was very helpful to have a sister newspaper of Westword, Miami New Times, track down these documents for me. I would have welcomed the trip down to Miami to look up the papers myself, though!

Q: You mention to Barry Fey that he's regarded as a suspicious character in Bolin's death, and he snapped back defensively. Do you feel that there might be any substantiation to the charge that Fey had given orders to the road crew to not call an ambulance and let matters take their course? Do you have any idea what may have happened? Did Dave Brown mention a phone call to management that evening?
A: At this point, I don't have much of an opinion either way about Barry Fey's involvement with Bolin's life, career, and death. I reported everything including others' accusations and Barry's denial, in a straight journalistic fashion. I also wrote in the article that Fey got a call in the morning, right? I didn't have any indications otherwise from anyone I spoke to.

Q: If Tommy had survived the '70's and weathered the '80's, where do think he would be in 1999?
A: Bolin was so musically creative that I think he would have been on the forefront of adding world music elements to his songs. He was already heavily into various forms of Latin music - "Alexis" with the James Gang is a fine samba, and he had lots of congas playing Latin rhythms all over his solo albums. But I think he would've loved various forms of African music, Algerian rai, Caribbean soukous and lots of other world rhythms. I'm sure he'd be along the forefront of contemporary guitarists, and perhaps would have been able to keep lead guitar from becoming so scales - based (just fast riffs, no melody) in the post-Eddie Van Halen era. I do wonder if he'd still be interested in rock or pop music, though. I could easily imagine him becoming a part of the contemporary jazz pantheon, because that's where his musical intelligence was already taking him.

Q: Since you wrote the Westword article, there has been a major resurgence of Tommy Bolin's music into the market via the Tommy Bolin Archives. What are your thoughts on this? Are you an Archives member?
A: I must admit, it's somewhat odd to find out that an article I wrote a decade ago is being passed around by Bolin fans. But I think it's great that someone like Bolin could live on with fans, and especially with the emergence of the Internet, that a network of fans could keep his music and memory alive in such a vital fashion. This is true of all music and creative artists, of course, but especially dramatic in the case of an artist such as Bolin whose career was so tragically cut short. The Archives, with the help of Mike Drumm and others, has also been key to maintaining the awareness of Bolin's accomplishments. I've ordered some of the music that's been released in recent years, and it holds up great! I just signed up for the Archives (they really should put up an online form instead of having people e-mail in their address information, and the mailings should be sent primarily via e-mail, not snail mail).