DMB is coming to Michigan in a few days. Hope they find a good replacement.
Posted on 07/01/2008 8:33:20 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
LeRoi Moore was injured today in an ATV accident on his farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia. LeRoi was immediately transported to the University of Virginia Health System for treatment where he remains in serious condition.
Please join us all in wishing LeRoi a speedy and complete recovery.
Beginning tomorrow in Charlotte, NC, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones saxophonist, Jeff Coffin, will be sitting in with Dave Matthews Band while LeRoi recovers.
**Update**
An Update on LeRoi
07/01/2008
LeRoi’s condition has been upgraded from serious to fair. We would like to thank everyone for the generous outpouring of well wishes and support that LeRoi has received. To send an email/ecard directly to LeRoi at the UVA hospital, please click here. Mail may also be sent to LeRoi at the following address: Post Office Box 1467, Charlottesville, VA 22902 or to fanmail@davematthewsband.com.
I hope he makes a full recovery.
Ironically, I’m thinking of the Crash CD when speaking of LeRoi Moore.
DMB is coming to Michigan in a few days. Hope they find a good replacement.
Yep. I love DMB...I try to leave politics out of my music selection.
Who is he? I have never heard of him before tonight. Prayers his way.
Jeff Coffin, the saxophonist from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, will step in for Leroi on the Summer 2008 Tour until Moore’s recovery.
...according to Wikipedia anyway.
I hope he is okay. I really enjoy their music.
As for ATVs, I’ve been riding them for 20 years and can do so safely but those things can be very dangerous. I’ve seen people turn them over at very low speeds doing things you’d never think could possibly turn them over. I also know some folks who have been really hurt. For some reason a lot of folks go all out on those things and drive them in a manner that they’d never think of driving a truck despite the fact that the ATVs are less stable and you have no protection. Flat out on a rough dirt road is asking for trouble. I’m not saying thats what happened to him just expressing my own observation.
I remember when Ozzy was all but killed on his ATV riding around in England on so many pills and a big MTV filming crew along for the ride.
Another close call for him...makes you wonder how many lives he has.
LeRoi is a pure talent. I mean all one has to do is listen to Bartender or Crush and you are drawn in immediately.
I didn’t realize that. I’ve seen them in concert a number of times, they put on a helluva show.
I did a search and didn’t find anything.
LeRoi has died.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080820/ts_alt_afp/entertainmentusmusicdavematthews_080820154504
Tragic....very sad day for the band. LeRoi was an awesome musician and will be greatly missed.
Thread contributers....update above.
Very sad...what a loss. Prayers for his family.
Yes with Tropical Storm Fay dumping 19.50 inches so far over my house I haven’t had time to post on this. Very very sad day...we lost a great. I am just thrilled I was able to see him recently when they played in West Palm Beach.
I wonder if he developed a thrombosis from the accident. Indeed, this is sad news, although I’m not a big fan of the DMB.
That was the first thing that went through my mind. It was sudden..a shock...he had a lung injury and leg injuries...all the signs there for an embolism.
From what I have read on fan forums over the last few weeks his injury was severe and downplayed but they really thought he was going to pull out of it and be better in 2 years.
Such a shame...very talented man. Listening to Crush will never be the same.
Review of Staples show the night of LeRoi’s death and dedicated to LeRoi.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Dave Matthews Band’s farewell to a fallen brother
Review: Hours after the untimely death of sax man LeRoi Moore, the group delivered an inspired elegy at Staples Center.
By BEN WENER
The Orange County Register
Comments 11 | Recommend 45
Even if it had been a merely half-hearted performance – which it wasn’t, not even close, though who’d have blamed ‘em if it were? – Tuesday’s inspired show at Staples Center would still linger long in Dave Matthews Band lore.
For this, sadly, was the night the group played a nearly three-hour elegy for its fallen brother, LeRoi Moore.
You could tell something was different – something wasn’t quite right – from the way Matthews approached the microphone after opening with a tremendous roar through “Bartender.” Clearly striving for some sort of grieving catharsis during that track’s dozen-minute running time, eventually achieving a high-pitched, hollered fervency like I haven’t felt shake my soul since Bono was in his prime, he suddenly looked sullen, sad-eyed, kinda lost – yet at the same time all business, as if out to impress.
“We got some bad news today,” he told the quickly quieted crowd. It was a heavy blow: Saxophonist and founding member Moore – DMB’s own Clarence Clemons – who had suffered health complications ever since sustaining serious injuries from an ATV crash on his Virginia farm in late June, had died earlier that afternoon at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, not far from where the band would play hours later. He was 46.
“(He) gave up his ghost today,” Matthews said matter-of-factly, “and we will miss him forever.”
That Matthews and his mates were able to soldier on so valiantly with an often profoundly moving and largely unsentimental performance wasn’t just admirable – it was downright astonishing. What’s more, it spoke to the inexplicable but immense healing power of live music.
“We’re gonna raise our spirits up a little bit,” the generally easygoing but this night stoic icon explained to the crowd after finding his smile as “Proudest Monkey” smoothly dovetailed into the roiling syncopated figure of “Satellite” and drummer Carter Beauford started letting the spirit stir him. “It’s always easier to leave than to be left,” he pointed out. And yet, as he acknowledged later in the set, before a hearty cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than with my family on stage.”
Naturally, the band turned the evening into a de facto tribute to Moore – something it has done at tour stops all summer, actually. But now there was a shift in tone: Where before heavier moments were meant to conjure good vibes for the ailing Moore, here those epics took on a distinctly funereal tone.
Granted, little about the selections was outright dour. Though accompanied by the bleak visual of raindrops cascading down a window pane, the soaring, shining finale of “So Damn Lucky,” for one, felt as if the glory of heaven were opening up before the musicians’ eyes. The relatively new African-derived gospel groove “Eh Hee,” meanwhile, arrived like a celebration of the circle of life, with an evil-slaying Matthews insisting he’ll “drop the devil to his knees.”
But then there was the added resonance to the hopefulness that emerges amid the identity-crisis storm of “Dancing Nancies.” There was the Johannesburg lull of “Water into Wine” to bring a tear – and there was Tim Reynolds’ solos on “Proudest Monkey” and the closing “Two Step,” yearning wailing like you get from Nils Lofgren on a good night, to do the crying for us.
There was the parting sorrow of the rarely aired “Loving Wings” and the baptismal cleansing of “The Maker.” (The hypnotic refrain “river, rise from your sleep” that concludes that latter piece was as calming as a Ladysmith Black Mambazo lullaby.) Then there was the most wrenching moment of all, at least for me, when the ensemble dusted off “The Dreaming Tree,” a moody epic that recalls the elegiac intensity of Sting’s “The Soul Cages.”
And yet this hardly came across like a strictly solemn occasion. How could it when Matthews also led his group (including Moore’s ace replacement, Jeff Coffin from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones) through the stress-relieving exaltation of Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” and the skin-shedding funk of Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”? How could it when for all its introverted indulgence it also made room for crowd-pleasers like “Crash into Me” and “Ants Marching” and the all-you-need-is-love optimism of “Everyday”?
“That’s professionalism,” I heard one fan say to another outside afterward. Yes, but there was more than the-show-must-go-on determination happening here. Who can know what Matthews, Beauford, fiddler Boyd Tinsley and bassist Stefan Lessard were remembering and feeling and mourning in song after song? What was evident in their joyful noise this night, though, was just how much staggering on stage with battered hearts might have been their only option.
Remember: They had spent the better part of two decades making music with Moore; this is how they related to one another most. First time Matthews heard Moore play, he recalled as the encore began, was in a bar in Virginia: “He leapt on the cash register – ‘cause standing had become something of a chore at that point. And he played the most beautiful rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ I’ve ever heard.
“If I could, I would,” he added, as if to say why he wouldn’t attempt it, before instead offering a haunting rendition of his own “Sister.” Indeed, all that he – and they – could do here was richly revive some of Moore’s favorite songs, disappear into their frameworks, savor lyrics that now had new meaning – and deliver the emotional immediacy the moment demanded.
It was brave, it was brilliant – it was a performance unlike any I’ve ever seen Dave Matthews Band give.”
For anyone interested....there is some footage of LeRoi’s last performance...Nissan 6/28/08.
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