Now is the time to roll back the ultra strict EPA standards and start up idled power plants. It’s time for common sense to take over. Americans died over Climate Change nonsense.
>>Americans died over Climate Change nonsense.
Here’s one example.
Put a face on the tragedy.
Gene Taylor, a renowned blues and boogie-woogie pianist in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s who moved to Austin in the 1990s to play with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, died Saturday at home in North Austin. He was 68.
Taylor’s housemate, filmmaker Monty McMillan, said Sunday that he found Taylor’s body in bed Saturday morning. The house had been without heat for five days as a result of statewide power outages related to the recent winter storm.
“I don’t really know exactly what happened.” McMillan said. “I don’t know if he had some underlying health condition, but I know the cold didn’t help.
“We both stayed in our own beds trying to stay warm. I came out of it OK, and he obviously didn’t.”
..As a teen in the 1960s, Taylor got gigs in Los Angeles with blues greats such as Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker. He played in bands around Downey, Calif., with Alvin’s older brother, Phil Alvin, in the early 1970s before getting hired to tour with the California rock band Canned Heat...
...Taylor moved to Canada in the late 1970s and spent time playing with renowned musician Ronnie Hawkins, whose band the Hawks at one time included members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame group the Band. After moving back to California in the early 1980s, Taylor joined the Blasters, recording and touring with the group for several years.
Between runs with the Blasters, Taylor also toured with rock ’n’ roll pioneer Ricky Nelson, who died in a plane crash Dec. 31, 1985.
“He was supposed to be on the tour when the airplane crash happened,” Alvin said, explaining that Taylor had ended up playing a couple of gigs with the Blasters that week instead.
‘He was so looking forward to going back to Europe’
Taylor’s initial connection to the Fabulous Thunderbirds was another fateful encounter, on a night when both Alvin and Taylor simultaneously quit the Blasters. Band members “were fighting onstage in Montreal, and I just decided this was the end for me,” Alvin said, noting that the Thunderbirds had opened the show. Taylor made the same decision. Alvin recalls that “Gene walked directly onto the Thunderbirds’ bus and said, ‘Do you guys need a piano player?’ ”
Good luck finding an operator that wants to sit on an old, inefficient, underutilized plant waiting for demand to peak.