I hadn’t written anything about Robert Crotty dying. I was out of town when it was announced last month. He and I barely knew each other, hadn’t seen each other in years, came from different worlds.

And yet…

When I began writing the Music Notes column for the New Haven Advocate in 1991 and was dutifully doing my homework on who were the heavyweights in the local band scene, Crotty came up immediately. He’d been a fixture in blues bars for a while but was building a fresh following thanks to Mike Reichbart’s then-new Café Nine.
Crotty hosted a weekly blues jam at Café Nine for years, one which took on a different tone than the jazzier one he’d led in the 1980s at the Foundry Café in the Whitney/Audubon “arts district.”
When I started Band This Week, a companion column to Music Notes which profiled area musicians, Crotty was one my first interviews. I remember him being reluctant to talk, unlike his bandmate drummer “Mitch” Mitchell. He could be laid back and aloof onstage too, but there was no question who was in charge of the Robert Crotty Band. He commanded respect because nobody could question his natural talent, his fluid understanding of how to build a blues tune from an opening riff through a series of highs and lows into a forthright, soul-searching conclusion.
Crotty wasn’t cool or slick. He was Crotty.

This all came flooding back to me last week when I was at Café Nine and there was “Mitch” Mitchell. It was as if time had stood still, mainly because he was giving me grief for something I’d written about him 20 years ago. But he teared up a bit when talking about Crotty.
So did another guy there that night, ace bassist Bobo Lavorgna. Our chat wound round to a different local musical Bob, Bob Sheehan, who passed away a year or two ago. Like Crotty, Sheehan could be subdued and withdrawn at the bar, but never lacked confidence when playing, Onstage, they kept everything together—not as leaders but as masters. They hadn’t chosen their livelihoods. The music selected them.
I’m not the scene-dweller I used to be. I wonder if icons like Crotty ever appear in the present-day musical realm, or if that type is part of a vanished era. All I know is that I hadn’t seen Crotty play in years, yet I could feel the void.