I lost a great friend and brother last week. I met Brendan Relaford at Taylor’s in Eugene, Oregon in the early 1990s when I was in The Strangers. I remember it vividly. It was early afternoon – likely on a show day – and he came bounding in the front door with purpose, ever-present khaki shorts, sunglasses, frazzled hair. He strode up to our area and resoundingly dropped his keys on the table to announce his arrival. He was a little gruff but said hello. We all made acquaintances and that was that. I didn’t really get to ‘meet’ Brendan until months later when The Strangers were playing in Lake Tahoe and Brendan showed up in his trusty VW bus, tricked out for camping, on a solo trip to see the sights. This time I met the Brendan I knew the rest of our lives, which was a dear friend who was funny, open, driven, inquisitive, sometimes opinionated, sometimes ‘brutally frank’ but always kind and always wanting to learn and experience. My memory of this meeting was that he was smiling, enthusiastic and really enjoying his journey.
In the decades since, I knew Brendan to be a really good guy and a truly great friend. One of my best friends, in fact. A generous guy -- to a fault Brendan was generous. One of a hundred examples, when he later managed The Strangers, he frequently sacrificed his own pay to make sure the band got paid, or would incur debt without telling us. He shielded us from industry B.S. while championing our music and vision. His trips with us on tour and his brief time living with us in San Francisco are rife with stories – many he and I were still laughing about in the weeks prior to his death yesterday. We shared a love for absurd humor and the “Planet of the Apes” musical (with Troy McClure!) on The Simpsons brought us down with laughter every time.
When I left The Strangers, Brendan was already building his music booking and promotion credentials and mini-empire in Eugene. I joined him in his office to try and figure out what I was going to do next, which for a short time was promoting the bands I used to tour with. Not a great fit for me, but OK. One day in 1997 Brendan casually mentioned he had an open slot at the Wild Duck music venue and maybe we could put something together? I remembered learning about a third of the Dark Side of the Moon in high school and just as casually mentioned, why don’t we put a band together and play Dark Side of the Moon? Which is what we did, and 29 years later the band plays on. Brendan learned how to play bass so he could be the bass player in the Floydian Slips, which he did until his health pulled him away.
Brendan always wanted the Slips shows to deliver something new and special. He designed stage sets, created videos, worked with lighting directors and laser companies. One of his shelved ideas was to hire a helicopter to fly over the Cuthbert during the Wall song “Happiest Days of Our Lives.” One idea we DID do, which we joked about the last time I saw Brendan, was to build platforms on either side of the McDonald Theater stage where my Slips counterpart Rich Sellars and I could ascend to shout the Run Like Hell verse lines back and forth, and where Slips axe-master Alan Toribio could rip his Comfortably Numb solo from the top of “the wall,” which was achieved by building actual brick walls in front of those platforms using cinderblocks from the local hardware store garden center. Great idea, until load out. Those heavy bricks stayed under Brendan’s deck for years. We joked that we should have signed them and given them away as back-breaking promotional merch after the show.
This type of thing made Brendan laugh that HUGE laugh that he ALWAYS had, in good times and in bad. I will never not hear that laugh in my head. In the hospital on his last visit to Portland I played him a couple of Norm McDonald jokes that he had not heard and that big laugh came out long, loud and strong.
I can’t believe he’s gone. I will miss you, my brother.
