Saturday, April 18, 2009

More Peter Wood – Photos and a video.

We interrupt this regrettable hiatus to update one of the (happily) most popular features on this blog: The unsung hero known as Peter Wood.

As you may remember from some past posts, I had originally posted a video of what I thought was Peter playing "Year of the Cat" with Al Stewart (and several readers had identified as such), but it turned out to be Robert Alpert, another piano player.

Well, we thought we might have unearthed some footage of Peter playing (and I dug up my old photo of Peter from my Year of the Cat album) to help preserve him for Internet posterity. But we're still not sure.

However, thanks to a former rock photographer named Deborah Chesher who knew Peter and has herself written extensively about him on her blog, we know have a definite photograph and some videos of him playing – though regrettably not on "Year of the Cat."

Here's the photo she shot of him:

A little different from the photo I supplied, eh? I'm not sure of the year. But I'm sure Ms. Chesher will supply it if she visits this blog (She happened to have visited a previous test blog where I wrote about Peter. Somehow, that seems to come up on search engines first)

Anyway, if you go to her blog, you'll find a few YouTube videos of Wood performing with other musicians such as Pink Floyd and Lou Reed. I want to direct some traffic Deborah's way, so I won't post them all. But I thought I'd at least show Wood performing with Lou Reed and Robert Quine in 1984, which was around the time I encountered him. The close-ups of Peter's playing come about 7 minutes into the video.