Guitar Hero 3 RIP (Marcel Dadi)

My earliest guitar instructor, after my dad who showed me my first chords and arpeggios, was Tunisian-born French finger-picker extraordinaire Marcel Dadi.  In the mid seventies I was given one of his early French LPs and studied his tablatures for hours.  As far as I know, he was the first guitarist back then to provide tablatures for every album track he recorded.  This allowed mere guitar mortals like myself to slowly pick up complex and lightning fast licks without vast guitar knowledge and/or a practiced ear.  Those are still among the most advanced licks I have in my guitar repertoire, even if they are a bit rusty these days.

Marcel was a disciple and friend of Chet Atkins and recorded covers of American finger-picking standards by artists such as Chet, Merle Travis, and Doc Watson, as well as wonderful original compositions.  Here he is performing his new "Big Chief" in the mid-1970s on French television.



It's a great clip.  Marcel was barely in his mid-twenties then and among the other guests is the giant of French song: Georges Brassens.  Brassens is the guy looking on while smoking a pipe on the set! Next to him is Maxime le Forestier, another famous French singer/songwriter/guitarist (also smoking).  Marcel self-deprecatingly introduces his new composition, explaining that it only has three chords -  Too Funny!!  Then he shows them how it's done, fingerpicking-style, on his run-of-the-mill Ovation guitar.

Having been mostly away from all things guitar for the past two decades, I wondered what he had been up to since I studied his charts back in the seventies, so I looked him up.  I was saddened to find out that on July 17, 1996, while returning to France after being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville TN, he was on TWA flight 800 when it exploded over the Atlantic off of Long Island, minutes after its takeoff from JFK international airport, killing all 231 people on board.  He was 44 years old.  I feel like I just lost an old friend...

Here he is the year before his death during the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society (CAAS) convention playing another one of his compositions - "Je Te Veux" - for American friends in a hotel room on what looks like a museum-quality Gibson Archtop.  We have lost a special person and musician. Merci Marcel.