Saturday night, and as I thought to check the computer one more time before I hit the mattress, there was a message from my son. “Did you see this?” he asked, and posted a link from the San Diego Union Tribune. And as I read the article I began to feel the tears roll down my cheeks. Larry Robinson, a gentle, kind and wonderful man who worked for years at my old local music shop and was a gifted guitarist, singer and songwriter…had been beaten to death at the store in an apparent robbery on Friday night.
I’m just going to post this story below here in a sec, but I just want to say that there was not a nicer man you could possibly meet. Married with four children, and (as it says below) a local fixture for years at many of the area’s venues, Larry was the go-to man for all things related to my instruments and to all the other musicians throughout the Temecula Valley. About forty-five minutes north of San Diego in California, over a quarter million people live there and Pete’s Music is the last of the great old indie music stores, where you not only could find your band equipment when you were just starting out in elementary school, but that first guitar, drums, keyboards or bass. Lessons in the backroom, repairs up front and you could easily spend hours just sitting and pickin’, as I often did over the years. I can’t tell you how I treasured those wonderful conversations with Larry about life and music.
I found this video on You Tube….Larry doing what he loved to do. Give it a listen before you read this truly sick and sad story.
Fallbrook musician slain in apparent robbery
By J. Harry Jones11:13 A.M.MARCH 23, 2013Updated5:12 P.M.TEMECULA
A Fallbrook singer and songwriter known for his Americana music died Saturday, several hours after being found beaten and bound inside the Temecula music store where he worked, authorities said.
Edward “Larry” Robinson, 64, was found unconscious, badly beaten and tied up inside Pete’s Music & Guitar Shop on Old Town Front Street about 7:30 p.m. Friday. He died Saturday morning at a hospital from injuries suffered in the attack, said Riverside County sheriff’s Deputy Myling Bordeau.
No arrests have been made, Bordeau said, and no information was released about the apparent robbery. Homicide detectives were at the store all night.
The victim was found after the shop’s owner called and said he had been unable to reach his employee by phone, Bordeau said.
Robinson has been a fixture in the local music scene for decades and released his most recent album last year.
Friend and former partner Gary Shiebler, who was in a band call The Dorados with Robinson for several years in the late 1990s, was stunned when he heard about the death.“He was a good friend. I’m in shock,” Shiebler said. “He was an institution in Fallbrook. He was a guitarist and very fine songwriter.”
Sven-Erik Seaholm, who has performed with Robinson many times and produced his most recent album, likewise was saddened. “For his life to end violently is beyond comprehension,” Seaholm said. “He was so gentle, he was one of those guys who led his life like the example you would want to follow.”
Robinson has for years performed at “open mic” functions in Fallbrook, Seaholm said.
“He played a lot of blues and country, rock — pretty diverse. Maybe some would call it a roots-oriented approach. When you say the word Americana, Larry Robinson was definitely Americana in the sense he took all those diverse traditional musics and distilled them with great songwriting and just a really great rendering of it.
“He was a very homespun, grounded, balanced individual. His music was comfort food for the soul.”
Pete’s Music & Guitar Shop is one of a chain of independent, family owned and operated music stores in Southern California, according to its website. The stores buy, sell, repair and trade musical instruments and offer lessons.
According to an article published last year in the San Diego Troubadour, a local music blog, Robinson was a member of Things to Come, a band that played Los Angeles’ Whiskey A Go-Go club in 1967 with the Byrds. He recorded several discs for The Dorados, a band whose songs mainly celebrated fishing, and he was a club mainstay in the North County with a solo CD, “Old California Town,” released in 2005.
Last year he released “Cadillac and Trailer,” a mix of nine original songs and one cover, the article said. Seaholm said Robinson was mostly a solo artist but would get together with local musicians often to record and perform.
He was married and had four children, according to an online biography. His wife, Patricia, was too distraught to speak to a reporter Saturday afternoon, a family friend said.
This is a performance at the local Barnes and Noble with his son Evan from 2008.
Larry Robinson….rest in peace my brother.
