Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

I have with me Jason Fine, the editor of Rolling Stone.

We're really happy to have him with us,

but it's not a happy occasion.

We're gonna be talking about the life and music

of Tuts Hibbert, who died at the age,

we think, of 77 on September 11th and someone that Jason got to know really well and did an amazing feature that was months and months in the making that was published just before Tuts his death and so we really

wanted to dig into why Tuts was important and what made him special and the best of

his music and first of all I mean Jason this is someone you

really got to know so I'll say condolences it's it's a tough and shocking thing you

just were with this guy yeah I was and up until the very end, even though I knew how bad it was, I really believed he would pull through.

I had this sort of enduring image in my mind of the last time I saw him perform, which was in Brooklyn,

and he would never even lift the microphone above his waist.

His voice was so powerful, even at that age

and with that much gondia,

that he could fill a theater with basically no microphone. And I just kept thinking that a man with

lungs like that would would be able to pull through this so yeah it's shocking and

sad and and also just such a great loss you know one of the things that when I wrote the story that I felt that I needed to say was that how few of these true originals really are left, people with a direct connection to where the music comes from.

And Tuts was one of those guys. You know, he was there at the beginning and he was still there now.

And so it's, yeah, it's a huge loss and also a personal loss,

you know, thinking that I'll never,

I'll never get a phone call from him or or see him when I stop in through

...