“It’s hard to watch a friend face down their demons in front of you and come off second best”: The doomed blues hotshot who blew away Bono and toured with Dylan – but ran from fame and died in obscurity

A lush, modern blues confection, it was declared by Rolling Stone as Best Debut of that year, and Whitley was momentarily perceived to be the heir to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, labelmates of his at Columbia Records. Throughout the rest of his childhood, Whitley and his siblings lived a peripatetic life with their mother, drifting from place to place, shacking up in two-bit houses and on hippie communes in Mexico, Oklahoma and Vermont. It was as if the city was now able to restore Whitley’s wrecked psyche, and he made two extraordinary records there: 2003’s Hotel Vast Horizon and the following year’s War Crime Blues, both of them hushed and haunting.

Author: Paul Rees

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