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- PopuluxeCowboy
Yeah he was kind of one of those session musicians who could play anything, write a tune (and boy could he) and put on a show but didn't find more than moderate chart success, his biggest being the eponymous Toy Matinee due in no small part to it having been produced by Bill Bottrell. I only really knew about him from that album until he died, but knew it well enough to know who he was when the news dropped. I knew about a live performance he'd done of Genesis' The Lamb in its entirety but you couldn't get it apart from bootlegged until 20 years later. He was actually picked to sing on what would become Genesis' Calling All Stations, and his manager couldn't reach him to let him know but then found his body. Then I think it was The LA Times that did a piece about him. He introduced Sheryl Crow, whom he'd been dating (after having dated Rosanna Arquette who appeared in a Toy Matinee video which was my introduction to the band, "The Ballad of Jenny Ledge"), to a group of musicians rounded up by Bottrell for jam sessions referred to as the Tuesday Night Music Club and launched her career by pushing her to sing with them. I think all the members in that group had worked with another previously in some capacity (for example Gilbert and Toy Matinee bandmate Brian MacLeod with David Baerwald on the latter's Triage produced by Bottrell, and Baerwald with David Ricketts making up David & David) and, after Crow left, were joined by The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs who just last year released an album from those sessions. It's actually funny because I knew of both Gilbert and Baerwald but didn't know they'd worked together until after Gilbert died.
