Dick Wagner (Facebook photo)
Dick Wagner, a Michigan-bred guitarist who worked with such musical legends as Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Rod Stewart, has died at age 71, the Detroit Free Press reports.
He died Wednesday morning in Scottsdale, Ariz. of respiratory failure, according to Brian McCollum of the Detroit Free Press. He had been in intensive care for the past two weeks following a cardiac procedure.
McCollum wrote:
The guitarist famously overcame a series of medical issues over the past decade, retraining himself on guitar after a stroke paralyzed his left arm. He re-emerged to begin recording, writing and performing gigs, including a triumphant homecoming concert at the Magic Bag in November 2011.
“There was just a magic in the way we wrote together,” Cooper wrote in a statement to the Free Press. “He was always able to find exactly the right chord to match perfectly with what I was doing. I think that we always think our friends will be around as long as we are, so to hear of Dick’s passing comes as a sudden shock and an enormous loss for me, rock ’n’ roll and to his family.
Wagner moved from Iowa to Michigan as a kid. He first moved to Waterford and then Saginaw, the Freep reports. He lived in Arizona in his latter years, but returned to Michigan regularly.
McCollum wrote:
He eventually was recruited by Cooper for the milestone 1975 album “Welcome to My Nightmare,” cowriting enduring songs such as “Only Women Bleed” and going on to more A-list session work with the likes of Reed, Peter Gabriel and Rod Stewart. Rock lore has long held that Wagner was a secret hired hand on albums by several high-profile bands. It eventually emerged, for instance, that Wagner cut tracks on Aerosmith’s “Get Your Wings” album.
