
Someday I would like to write a book, 'The Life and Times of David Briggs'. I could research everyone he touched and really get to the bottom of some things about my mercurial, mysterious brother.
He was born Manning Philander Briggs on February 29, 1944, and grew up in Wyoming with family members who took care of him. His best friend was Kirby, and one day in the mid-sixties they up and went to LA to find their fortunes. Kirby became a grip, working in the movies, and Briggs became a record producer, eventually marrying a Wyoming girl, Shannon, and having a son, Lincoln Wyatt Briggs, in Topanga Canyon, which is where I met him. Shannon was a great girl, and he loved her. He was a wild man, and she loved him. Lincoln was a good boy, and I’m not sure how he is doing now, although I worry about him sometimes.
Briggs and I made my best records, the transcendent ones, the ones where I am closest to the Great Spirit. I say that because She visited me more often with Briggs than when I was with any other human being. Briggs and I had a way of getting to the place. We somehow knew the way. He was the most influential person on my music of anyone I’ve met. His guidance and friendship through the creation of countless pieces of music are one of the greatest gifts of my life, right up there with my wife’s love and all of my children. I feel the loss. I feel the memories. I feel the weight of every mistake I made in our long relationship, the times he was right and I was wrong, the times I didn’t use him to produce for the wrong reason, every battle we had. I feel the absence of his unbelievable energy for music, combined with mine. There is no replacement for that. It is one of life’s little voids.
So there he was in his apartment in San Francisco with Bettina, his sweetheart. Barely standing and all crooked and bent over. Short in stature, this giant of a man, now resembling a tree with no leaves waiting for winter, was looking right at me. It was obvious he was dying from something and the process was well advanced. I was surprised at how far it had come in a short time, having only heard he was sick. It had been a few years since we had worked together, and this was not the Briggs I remembered. Be that as it may, there he was, barely able to stand, which he did, for some reason I can’t remember. He was in pain from an ailment, a mysterious ailment that may have visited him once earlier in life, in the seventies. At that time, he had disappeared for a few months and come back as if nothing had happened. There was a rumor of cancer and a hospital stay in Sacramento, but nothing was for sure. David was mysterious, and that is the end of that. Nobody knew what was really happening with David, ever. That is why a book on the subject might be worth a shot.
So now here we were with David’s second big bout against whatever it was, and it had pretty well gotten him. He was taking a lot of morphine for the pain and looked terrible, although the spirit was still in his eyes, weak as it was.
“Do you have any advice for me on my music going forward?” I asked David.
“Just make sure to have as much of you in the recording as you can,” he said. “Stay simple. No one gives a shit about anything else.”
He told me to keep it simple and focused, have as much of my playing and singing as possible, and not to hide it with other things. Don’t embellish it with other people I don’t need or hide it in any way. Simple and focused. That is what I took away. He didn’t exactly say that, but I got that message. I have failed to do that in some instances. “Be great or be gone,” his famous phrase, echoes in my head. I have to remember that for sure. Damn.
So I left the apartment after a hug. It was devastating. He died a week later. He wanted to go. His body was all fucked up. He asked to be OD’d, and they did it, I think. Apparently it did not go as planned and it was not easy. His tenacious spirit would not let him go.
from 'Waging Heavy Peace'