Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm in the studio with David Brown and we're going to be talking about two big losses to the world of music.

We're going to talk about Rick O'Kassick, frontman of the Cars, incredibly successful

producer, generally interesting dude, which is a really sad loss. and towards the end of the show we're

going to talk about Robert Hunter who wrote all those brilliant lyrics for

the Grateful Dead and it seems like as far as the rock cannon we're in a time quite sadly when we're going to have to deal

with a lot of these losses and it's a tough thing to get used to.

Rick O'Kassick was a shock. I actually did one of his last interviews, which I had no idea, of course, that it was any big deal at all.

I talked to him in July or so for my piece about Weiser's Blue Album.

And it sucks because it was kind of a shaky cell phone connection.

He had been interviewed I think too many times about the blue album so he didn't have

a ton to say about it that he hadn't said before.

You know, I asked him what he was up to right now and he said I'm doing

a little painting just kind of hanging out and I guess he was having heart

surgery right is that he has having some kind of surgery I'm going to get some

updates on that next week but yeah and he was 75 years old which I think

that was one of the shockers for a lot of us and partly because he shaved five years

off his age at one point early in the car's career and so there was some initial confusion as to how old he was but an old

friend of his who I talked to for a story that's in the works did confirm that Rick was 75.

And Robert Hunter was 78th so you're right I I mean, it's getting to that point now that,

even though we don't, Robert Hunter and Rick O'Kasek were icons of different generations,

but they were actually about the same age and a lot of that generation is approaching,

or they are approaching 80, which is kind of a shocking thing.

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