A longing goodbye to 2009, the year I acknowledged the greatness of Nick Cave. (Not that Nick Cave, though it’s also the year I fell in love with doubling.) Above is the video clip for what may be Cave’s greatest song “Into My Arms.” Try listening to it and not misting up.

Also, a longing goodbye to Cave’s former bandmate Rowland S. Howard who passed from this earth a few days ago, dead from liver cancer. (Obituary via Australia’s The Age.) Rowland’s song “Shivers” which he wrote for The Boys Next Door, the first band he shared with Cave, seems to have provided one of Cave’s main songwriting templates. If you don’t believe that peep the two versions of it I’ve embedded below.

Such are the winding paths of influence. Such is the complicated paths of accreditation and fame when a communal activity decays into “drug-related exhaustion.”

Nick Cave “People Ain’t No Good” (Live)

“Into My Arms” (Live)

Rowland S Howard “Shivers” (Live)

The Boys Next Door featuring Nick Cave & Rowland S. Howard “Shivers” (1979)

Via Hamburger Eyes, via A Photo Editor, via et. cetera.

Remind me to tell you sometime about the afternoon I spent with those two in Santa Monica while I was reporting for a not-very-good profile I wrote about him on the occasion of a retrospective at the Getty Center. I remember a book on Nazi architecture on the top shelf of a closet…an elegant yet slightly down-at-the-heel hotel near the ocean…an old phonograph playing…the fact that Eggleston barely said a word…and a wander around the soulless beach yuppie shopping districts surrounding the 3rd Street Promenade. At one point, I handed Eggleston my camera and he pointed it at the sky: click.

The Eggleston’s also happen to know their music.