http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-
gaffney18apr18,0,7043597.story

From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARY
Chris Gaffney, 57; witty songwriter, Southern California bar musician
By Mike Boehm
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 18, 2008

Chris Gaffney, a roots-music omnivore whose earthy aplomb and
offhand mastery of many styles made him a quintessential Southern
California bar musician -- but who also earned international regard
for his heartfelt and witty songwriting -- has died. He was 57.

Gaffney had been getting treatment for liver cancer that was
diagnosed in February. His brother Greg said he died Thursday
morning at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach,
where family members rushed him after a fall in his Costa Mesa home.

Gaffney toured extensively over the last nine years as a member of
Dave Alvin's backing band, the Guilty Men, playing accordion and
guitar and adding vocals, and as lead singer of the Hacienda
Brothers, in which he teamed with veteran San Diego guitarist Dave
Gonzalez.

But Gaffney had been a presence on the regional bar scene since the
1970s, playing multiple sets each night in small clubs such as the
Upbeat in Garden Grove and the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano.
It was a hard-won musician's existence that he and Alvin captured in
their easygoing honky-tonk number "Six Nights a Week."

"One of the things that may have hindered him commercially was that
he couldn't turn it on; he was a hundred percent honest," recalled
Alvin, who considered Gaffney his best friend. "If Chris is in a
good mood, you get an amazing show; if he was in a bad mood, he
wouldn't hide it."

As a songwriter, Gaffney was a peer of Alvin, Los Lobos, X and the
Red Hot Chili Peppers in chronicling the life of Southern
California. In "Artesia," from the 1990 "Chris Gaffney and the Cold
Hard Facts" album, he evoked memories of his teenage years cruising
through the San Gabriel Valley -- remembrances stirred by the scent
of cow manure carried on the wind from inland dairy farms.

"The Gardens," from the same album, and later recorded by Freddy
Fender with the Texas Tornados, was an aching assessment of the void
that gang violence leaves in a community's heart -- in this case,
Hawaiian Gardens.

But many Gaffney songs reflect the dry, sometimes absurdist, sense
of humor that stayed with him in his day-to-day life: "They made a
mistake and they called it me," he sang in one jaunty tune; in
another lyrical self-description he pegs himself as "a dancing
cretin with faraway eyes."

Gaffney sang in a tuneful yet conversational voice that was both
sandpapery and sweet. He had no pretentiousness about his music. In
a 1992 Times interview, he described taking part in a songwriters
panel at a folk festival: "The kids were asking, 'How do you write
songs?' I said, 'I'm sitting in front of the TV, having a beer, and
something comes to my mind, and I go 'what the hell' and write it
down."

Born in 1950 in Vienna, Austria, he grew up mainly in Cypress, the
son of a telephone company executive. Tall and solidly built,
Gaffney excelled at track and cross country at Western High School
in Anaheim and took his licks as a Golden Gloves boxer.

"I always ascribed his cockeyed view of the world to being beat
around the head a few too many times," Alvin said.

As he built a critically acclaimed recorded repertoire during the
1990s with three studio albums, including "Mi Vida Loca"
and "Loser's Paradise" for Hightone Records, Gaffney was unable to
capitalize on it with touring -- tied instead to his bar hero
regimen on top of days spent scraping hulls at a Newport Beach
boatyard.

Gaffney accepted the bar-musician's lot with equanimity: "I was a
working guy before becoming an unheralded roots-music recording
eminence, and I continue to do that. If they don't want to put out
an album, I'll go and do my day job," he told The Times in 1999.
What sustained him, he said, was "the music, and I love the people.
You surround yourself with good friends, and you're good to go."

Starting in 1999, though, Gaffney got to live the life of a musical
road warrior, with Alvin and then the Hacienda Brothers, touring
extensively through the United States and Europe. Alvin said he soon
learned not to give Gaffney a weekly advance on his meal
money: "He'd give it to some homeless guy or a guy standing at a
rest stop begging for change."

With the Hacienda Brothers, who blended classic country and rhythm
and blues styles, Gaffney recorded two studio albums and a live
release. In December, he and Alvin recorded the song "Two Lucky
Bums," a mellow duet to friendship:

Let's make a toast to the times we've had

The good, the crazy, the rough and the bad.

We've survived every one, a couple of losers who won,

And when it's all said and done, we're two lucky bums.

"He might have gone out early, but he did everything he wanted to
do," said Greg Gaffney, who played bass beside his brother through
many of the bar years. "He loved being on the road, happy in a van
with a bunch of buffoons."

In addition to his brother Greg of Costa Mesa, survivors include his
wife, Julie, of Costa Mesa; daughter Erika of Houston; sister Helen
of Oakland; and brother Robert of Vancouver, Canada.

Services are pending.

mike.boehm@...