Toy Matinee- Last Plane Out- Dallas 1990

This one haunts me.

Believe me, I am far from being alone in the admiration and appreciation of the obvious musical talent of singer/songwriter Kevin Gilbert, first demonstrated in Summer 1990 with the collaboration with pop producer Patrick Leonard as Toy Matinee. Gilbert had been a mainstay in the late ’80s singer/songwriter L.A. brat pack immortalized in Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club  debut. The eco-aware global warming/global warning song “Last Plane Out” had the kind of savvy progressive pop arrangement and sardonic, witty lyrics that had few comparisons short of Steely Dan, and when Gilbert showed up at my Friday Q102/Dallas radio show in a crowded nightclub with fleet-fingered guitarist Marc Bonilla in tow, it did not take long to realize that this guy Kevin Gilbert, with the boy-next-door good looks, eager smile, and charm, was going places.  On that day in 1990  when this performance went down, Kevin introduced me to his parents who were there, having just relocated to south of Dallas where his father was a physicist on the Superconducting Super Collider. The pride in the esteemed scientist father’s eyes, as he stood next to his musician son about to be interviewed  on this big city radio station, is something I will never forget. None of us knew then that, within four years, the SSC project (the biggest American scientific initiative  since NASA’s lunar mission) would lose its funding in Congress, and within six years his boy would be dead in a tragic accident. This one haunts me. – Redbeard