Rick Grossman is the epitome of ‘cool’. He always stands out in a crowd with his classic gold-rimmed retro blue-lensed aviator sunglasses, stylish snakeskin-leather ankle boots and one of what must be an infinite collection of multi-coloured paisley button-up shirts, that only he could pull off. If you didn’t know any better and happened to pass Rick in the street, you’d undoubtedly find yourself trying to work out which blockbuster movie you’d seen him in.
But aside from his star factor and undeniable sense of style, Rick Grossman, (AKA bass guitarist of the iconic Australian bands, The Divinyls and the Hoodoo Gurus) is a multifaceted man, as wise as an owl, with a generous heart and genuine soul. Just a simple conversation with him could make you feel like the luckiest person alive.
This is his story.
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Rick Grossman possesses an unconditional and unalterable love for music. This love did not develop over time extrinsically, but rather this passion and desire to devote his life to music has burned within Rick from a young age.
Rick’s utter need to live and breathe music has forever pulled at him like a magnetic force, for no specific reason at all. “When I think about music, I’m driven to play music, don’t know why I do it, but I’m driven to do it,” Rick explains.
This drive is not fuelled by the thought of fame and fortune, but merely the result of fate, or destiny, or a supreme being, or perhaps a combination of all three. “I was driven to do it when I didn’t earn any money, you know what I mean?”
Humans have an uncontrollable curiosity to seek answers to life’s most unanswerable questions, but some things just are, and that’s that. We question everything. ‘What is my purpose in life?’ ‘Am I following the right path?’ ‘Is this the right choice?’ And then, we try to match up all the dots to justify our actions, to try to understand ourselves, even just a bit better. “I don’t know, it’s just, you start off, like when I was a kid all I wanted to do was be a part of a band,” Rick explains.
As this unexplainable attraction to music began to draw Rick in further, he followed its direction all the way to young adulthood. If he wasn’t playing his bass guitar alongside John Prior, his schoolmate from Sydney Boys High School (Rick’s second school after attending Scots College), and later drummer of the band Matt Finish, he was going to gigs to get inspired and learn the ropes from the pros.
“There was a band around called Radio Birdman in the mid-‘70s who still play a bit now. They were the most exciting band I’ve ever seen. I used to go and see them all the time. Just their energy, so exciting, so fast, they’d play so fast,” Rick recalls. “They were like a punk-rock band. Just so, so exciting. And kind of dangerous, you know? They had this element of, you didn’t know what was going to happen! And they didn’t look like they really got on very well,” Rick reminisces.
The ’70s sound of steel string guitars fused with a jagged bass line and a double, sometimes even triple-time, drumbeat which shook the stage and electrified the audience at any given Radio Birdman show, stimulated Rick’s growing passion for music. “I used to carry their equipment up and down the stairs for them. That was the mid-‘70s. That was before I started playing in bands,” says Rick.
Every second of exposure to the industry and every moment that Rick immersed himself in the music added fuel to the fire for music which had ignited inside him. Rick constantly found himself inspired by other fellow musicians who were out there making a living out of what they loved the most.
With wide-eyes Rick paints a picture of the first time he saw the Angels perform live. “I couldn’t believe it, there were so many people in this pub, and the whole place was like jumping, moving up and down,” he said. “I was in a band in Melbourne that was doing well, but doing well in Melbourne meant that you’d go to a little pub and there’d be four-hundred people jammed in. This was like two-thousand people in this venue, and they were going crazy.”
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After completing high school Rick began to pursue a career in music, performing at local parties and small-time pub gigs with fellow musicians such as Mark Kingsmill, the Hoodoo Gurus’ current drummer.
Rick and Mark established an exclusive little spot at their Oxford Street rehearsal room. “There was a bit of a scene there when we used to hang out,” Rick recollects. One can only imagine the magic and mischief that used to go down in Darlinghurst where many young and budding Sydney musicians lived before they became the Australian music legends they are today.
Around this time Rick moved into a flat in Sydney and worked in a pub picking up glasses. But all that changed when after a conversation with a friend of his sister’s who lived in Melbourne he packed up and embarked on his biggest adventure yet. “She said, ‘bring your bass down, there’s this band down here called the Bleeding Hearts.’ And I went down there and had a play with them,” he recollects.
“I can’t remember the intent. I certainly didn’t think, ‘I’m gonna run off and play in Melbourne’, but I just went down there and took my bass. It’s weird. I remember thinking, ‘God.’ It was just a complete nightmare moving to Melbourne. I didn’t know anyone there and I had a job in Sydney. I’d just moved into an apartment with some people and I had to tell them I wasn’t coming back.” But he said his gut screamed, “I should do this!”
And so he did, without a dollar to his name, and caught up with the Bleeding Hearts.
“They were quite a bit older than me and they said, ‘Do you wanna join?” And then I found out they were quite popular in inner-city Melbourne and everyone wanted to play with them. I had no idea!” Rick says.
“It was exciting. And I learned so much, really quickly, and all of a sudden I was playing five nights a week. And I had all these people coming into the dressing room who were heroes of mine. Musicians who I used to go and watch when I was at school and they’d come in and they’d say, ‘oh good on you!’ It was wild!” says Rick.
This was a time when Melbourne’s inner-city music scene was suspiciously quiet during the day but knocked the socks off people at night, with the buzzing and electric energy of rock ‘n’ roll bursting through the clubs. People travelled from afar to break into the Carlton, Melbourne music scene in the ‘70s. With its sense of rhythm and artistic flair, Melbourne had a way of prying artists out of their shell, producing the sort of talent that could give you a run for your money.
It wasn’t long before Rick and the Bleeding Hearts really started to make a name for themselves after they recorded and released their original music which eventually hit the radio waves.
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6:35 AM, 16 October 1978.
It was a choppy October morning. Rick and the rest of the band were tightly packed into an old second-hand 1960s Volkswagen minivan on the road to Sydney from Melbourne. In a time when there were no freeways, the band slowly chugged along in the musky smelling van through the night, running on little to no sleep, rudely woken by the painfully bright rays of the rising sun at six o’clock on the dot.
With the boys dozing in and out of sleep, the only thing keeping Rick (the designated driver) awake was the early morning fresh spring air whooshing through the rattling manual-roller window on the driver’s seat, and the soft music playing on Double J, with the occasional fuzz of white noise coming from the van’s out of range radio.
After a long week of late-night gigs at several inner-city Melbourne pubs, followed by a thirteen-hour overnight road trip, the band was hanging for a feed, coffee, and a half decent night’s sleep in anything that resembled a bed.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Sydney, Rick leaned forward to turn up the volume on the van’s old crackling radio, and was utterly gobsmacked by what he heard. All band members shot out of their slumbers in absolute shock.
It was their ‘Hit Single’ playing on the radio.
Their song? On the radio? In this moment, this incredibly exciting, once in a lifetime, dream-come-true moment, the only adequate response Rick could string together was, “wow”.
“It’s a great, great feeling. And now sometimes I’ll be in Woollies or something, and I’ll hear a Matt Finish song. Nothing like writing your own song and hearing it on the radio, or getting that first record in your hand. It’s an awesome feeling,” he says.
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Despite his love for Melbourne, a few years down the track the Bleeding Hearts disbanded, and Rick began to yearn for his hometown. Then Rick received an unexpected call from Midnight Oil’s drummer Rob Hirst, informing him that the Oil’s were planning to replace their bass guitarist, and offered Rick the position.
“I just thought, ‘YES!’, packed everything up and just jumped the gun and moved back up here,” Rick explains. Exploding with excitement for this amazing opportunity, Rick got a bit ahead of himself. “I got up here and he said to me, ‘oh, we haven’t really done anything yet, you’re too fast.”
Still hungry for a new Sydney-based band to perform with, Rick kept his eyes peeled for the next opportunity. A new door quickly opened when Iva, singer of Australian rock band Icehouse mentioned there was another band on the hunt for a new bass guitarist. “That was ‘fate’ too because when I went and played with them, the singer Matt had a mental illness, and him and I just clicked really, like so strongly,” Rick recalls.
Rick became a permanent member of Matt Finish, bringing his own unique flair to the table. “It wasn’t so much me, but they were a very different style band. I had just come out of this ‘Melbourne-progressive-alternate scene’ and brought this influence into that band. The band changed and it was just great, really great,” Rick remembers.
Matt Finish went on to become one of Australia’s iconic ‘80s bands. “We had a great time and I just fell in love with that band. And when the Oil’s decided to get a new bass player, I said, ‘Nah.”
Despite Rick’s rejection of the Midnight Oil offer, there were no hard feelings. Rob Hirst and Rick became very close friends, eventually forming their own music duo side project in 1990, Ghostwriters, releasing four albums together since, and aimed to continue writing new material together when Rob returned from the 2017 Midnight Oil tour.
“I remember one moment in Matt Finish where we played at a place called the Bayview Tavern in Gladesville, and that was a big venue, and they had quite a big room there, I don’t know what it’s like now. I mean there were no OH&S, you’d get a thousand people in there.”
At this stage, Matt Finish was at their peak, performing an average of five gigs a week at all the great Sydney venues. Upon their arrival at the Bayview Tavern on Victoria Road, Gladesville, they realised just how popular they had become. “We turned up there, and there was a queue down the street, and it was just PACKED, and people couldn’t get in.”
As the venue didn’t have a dressing room, the band quietly waited with anticipation inside the Bayview’s kitchen for their queue to take the stage. With whispers of, “oh my god!” to one another, they quietly waited, their excitement about this incredible turnout bubbling inside.
“We were so excited. And that’s great, being able to do that. It’s what I always wanted to do,” Rick says. It was from this moment on that Rick was officially part of the iconic Australian music industry in its prime.
Richard Grossman and Brad Shepherd from Hoodoo Gurus
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The Aussie pub-rock scene in the ’80’s was like no other. “It was hard work! You’d be in Melbourne, get in the car and drive back to Sydney, you’d be in Brisbane, and drive back, or you’d drive to Adelaide, and you’d drive to Albury, and you’d break down by the side of the road, and you’d eat crap food, and you’d get sick, and you’d stay in crappy hotels, and you wouldn’t get paid at some gigs. It was an adventure, and it was the reality then. I look back now and I think, it was like the Wild West.”
Compared to today’s music industry, the Australian music business in the ‘80s was raw, hardcore, and unfiltered. “I mean now everything’s so politically correct. All road crews are very polite. It wasn’t like that then. The guys who were road crews back then were guys from jail! They’d protect you from the audience, and they’d do the sound as well. They had names like ‘The Bear’ and ‘The pig.’ And all these guys were tough, rough guys!” Nowadays your average stage crew member is likely to have studied an audio engineering degree, or at least a Certificate III in Live Performance and Production.
“Sometimes it was really scary. I got hit by broken glass once at Blacktown!” Rick sheds light on the occasional darker reality of the Australian ‘80s pub rock scene, telling the story of the night he performed in a Blacktown pub as a member of the Divinyls and had glass thrown at him onstage by a crowd member, leaving lead singer Chrissy Amphlett no choice but to courageously intervene. “It hit my chest. And Chrissy Amphlett stopped the show and started yelling at the audience and then the guy who threw it, who was obviously drunk or something, was trying to get out of the room, and the crowd jumped on him! In the ‘80s, you know, this stuff would happen. Big fights. You’d get too many people in a crowded space, and a lot of alcohol and stuff’s going to happen!” Rick says.
The music industry today has changed entirely, primarily due to the internet. Musicians are no longer lugging around instruments and equipment from pub to pub night after night. Instead, they are more likely to churn out video after video online, hoping that just one would go ‘viral’ and land on the right person’s newsfeed. “The internet’s changed everything really,” Rick explains. “…And also, when they brought poker machines into the pubs. That really changed the live scene in the early ’90s. Before that, people used to go out to see bands, to see live music.”
Before the crackdown on Occupational Health and Safety regulations, on a Friday or Saturday night, you were likely to find around two-thousand people jammed into a sweaty pub with sticky floors and not much ventilation, ready to watch the next big band on the scene perform live. “A lot of bands from the ‘80s were very good live. And the way they’d play their instruments was quite forceful, cause you had to kind of deliver in those pubs otherwise, you’d just die a horrible death, you know? It was a different world. Everything, you can just look up now so easily. Which is great but it was just a different time,” explains Rick.
In those days people sought after the less mainstream and more alternative bands. Rick explains that the Hoodoo Gurus, the Divinyls and Matt Finish were all initially alternative bands who landed commercial success. “Once you become commercially successful a lot of people start to hate you. It’s quite funny actually. You’ll be playing in your local pub, and you might get a hundred or fifty people, and you know half the audience,” he says. “And then you get a record on the radio, and all of a sudden there’s five-hundred people there. So, the original fifty people get a bit possessive of you, and they’re like, ‘oh, they’ve got popular now,’ and you get a bit of a backlash.” According to Rick, this is something that most successful artists encounter at some point in their careers. “The Hoodoo Gurus had a bit of a backlash. The Divinyls had a backlash, but the Divinyls were like an inner-city, alternate band. We played in little pubs around the city first and became really popular. There’s a saying, you know, “cool don’t pay.”
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In 1981, after several successful years, Matt Finish finally split up. At this point, Rick decided to take a break from music to go and work on a boat. “As it happens in life, you have a plan, and you think, ‘okay, I’m gonna go leave here and go to Melbourne.’ My plan was to go and play with a guy called Joe Camilleri.”
Life certainly has a way of shaking things up and turning plans upside-down, but in the end, things usually work themselves out. After working on the boat in Melbourne for just a week, destiny, yet again, came knocking. “I got a phone call from the manager of the Divinyls, and he said, ‘Would you like to come to Sydney and have a play? You keen?’ I thought Chrissy was amazing! So, I went up there and had a play, and it was really good. And they said, ‘Do you wanna join?’ And then we were off.”
Joining the Divinyls sky-rocketed Rick’s music career like never before. Rick remembers, “rushing home, throwing stuff into a bag, running out to the airport, jumping on a plane, and going away for six months.”
Somewhere in between the endless months spent away on tour, and the many writing and recording sessions, Rick always managed to squeeze in a quick pit stop home to catch up on some sleep, do a load of washing, run back out the door, and do it all over again.
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Out of everyone in the Divinyls, Rick developed a very close relationship with lead vocalist, Chrissy Amphlett. “She was a very strong woman, she’d say what she felt. Sometimes, she’d say things that were a bit abrupt, and people would get offended. She wasn’t scared of saying stuff to anyone,” Rick recollects.
Chrissy had the reputation of a warrior. She was known to be an incredibly direct person with a wild onstage persona, because for her, as a woman in the music industry in those days, it was the only way to survive. “She came up in a very male-dominated industry, and she wasn’t taken seriously at first. People didn’t take her seriously. And she was the real deal you know? She should’ve been taken seriously, and she never forgot there were some people who didn’t take her seriously and treated her as a bit of a novelty act or something.”
With her fiery demeanour and unique personality, Chrissy was like no other. She was one of those women who were rare to come by, and as Rick describes her, she was a very passionate and obsessive person. “I had a great relationship with her because we were both born pretty close together, and we liked a lot of the same things. I mean straight away, as soon as I joined that band, it was like, ‘click!’ I remember she came away on holidays with me a couple of times. My mother really liked her, and she liked my mum.”
As Rick remembers her, Chrissy was one of those people, that if she took to you, you could not ask for a better friend, but if she didn’t, you’d never find a worse enemy. She was never malicious, just brutally honest and direct. “She was, you know, kind of a difficult person. She put a lot of people’s noses out of joint because she’d say stuff. And she was a woman, and women were ‘meant to be’ quiet then. No, she wasn’t quiet. She was fiercely independent, didn’t like to be pushed around by anyone or told what to do. And she had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do.”
Chrissy, unfortunately, lost her life to breast cancer and multiple sclerosis in April 2013. Losing Chrissy was definitely one of Rick’s most significant losses in life. “She was just a magnificent person, and I miss her every day. You know, she was the one person I could ring, and she’d ring me, and we’d talk about anything,” Rick explains.
Over the years countless rumours circulated about a romantic affair between the two, however, there was never any romance between Rick and Chrissy. “You know people always used to say, ‘Oh she’s gorgeous! Did you sleep with her?’ And I – ‘NO! She’s like my sister! It’s like sleeping with my sister!” Rick tells.
Rick and Chrissy shared an incredible bond together. When Rick speaks about Chrissy, he only ever does so with eloquence, love and utter respect. Rick and Chrissy were soul mates, just not the romantic kind. They were soul mates in the way that they completely understood each other and just really clicked. Their instant connection was similar to love at first sight, not to be confused with lust at first sight. It is the notion that two people can have an instant connection, regardless of whether that involves any sexual attraction.
“I used to talk to her every week. I went over there a few times when she got sick and stayed with her. And we used to have arguments. And, she really cared about me, and she cared about whether I was unhappy. If I was unhappy, she used to get the shits. Yeah, I just miss her a lot, she’s someone I, you know, I could talk about anything to, you know? She’s an awesome girl, awesome woman. I mean I, I just wish she was around.”
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The ‘80s were notorious for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. There was no doubt that musicians of this time were likely to experiment with recreational drugs. It was just the culture. But at a certain point, experimentation quietly turns into addiction.
Being one of the first Aussie-grown bands to sign with an American record label, the Divinyls quickly rose to fame. In no time, they were in the big apple recording an album. The euphoric experience of being at the peak of their music careers in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world, New York City, was soon replaced by an artificial euphoria, entering the body via a syringe.
Heroin became Rick’s escape from the demons which followed him in the form of insecurities associated with his negative childhood experiences. His addiction was kept secret from his bandmates and other loved ones until it reached a point where it could no longer go untold.
“There was one particular time where I’d been waiting for four or five hours for someone to turn up to give me some smack. And they arrived and gave it to me, and I ran into the bathroom of my apartment and accidentally dropped it into the toilet. And you know, I didn’t cry when my dad died, and I was in tears when I did that.”
Slowly, everything about Rick began to change. His personality, his light, the fire that burned inside of him every time he picked up his bass, it all eventually began to dwindle before his very eyes.
“I’d used this stuff, felt terrific. Got on stage, felt unreal. And I was playing, and I looked down, and there was a trickle of blood coming out of my arm. I was absolutely shattered. No one else saw it, I saw it, and it was like, just this moment where you’re revealed to yourself. And I remember thinking, well, here’s something I’ve loved so passionately to do, play music, and I have to stick a needle in my arm each day, just to feel, or get some sort of resemblance of self, feel okay in my skin, something’s got to change.”
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8 February 1987, Mooloolaba, Queensland: Rick’s last gig with the Divinyls:
It was a scorching hot summer’s day in Mooloolaba, in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, when Rick played his final gig as a member of the Divinyls. Rick had now reached a crossroad in life where he was left with one of two choices:
- To continue on his current route, and possibly not make it to his next birthday
- Or, to leave the Divinyls and say goodbye to music for now, so he could focus on overcoming his addiction.
After a killer encore and massive round of applause from the audience, the band ran off stage with a sense of accomplishment, Rick, however, not so much. After careful consideration of his options, Rick had finally made his decision. With his stomach churning, his heart pounding, his eyes beginning to water, and his head held down low, Rick called the rest of the band over to talk.
Rick: “I need some time off.”
Chrissy: “Why? What’s wrong?”
Rick: “I have a health problem.”
Mark: “What sort of health problem?”
Rick: “Don’t really wanna say.”
Chrissy: “You have to tell us what’s wrong!!!”
Rick: “I’M A F****** HEROIN ADDICT OKAY?!”
“I’ll never forget their, the look, I mean Mark McEntree our guitar player, just a fantastic musician, started crying.” Shortly after, Rick checked himself into the Buttery Rehab Clinic in Bangalow, Northern New South Wales. Despite feeling weak at the time, this was an incredibly courageous and admirable move which truly showed the strength that Rick had inside him. Sacrificing his first love (music) to save himself from a downward spiral, was comparable to someone who is blinded by love finally realising their self-worth and walking away from an abusive relationship.
The Buttery carried Rick through the brunt of the detox and guided him down the path to recovery. “Five days later, I got a call from the manager of the Divinyls, who said to me, ‘Mark and Chrissy send their love to you and are thinking about you, and we just wanted you to know that we’ve found someone to replace you in the band, and we just want to wish you all the best.” While absolutely gut-wrenching news to Rick, this message was delivered from a place of love and good intentions.
After a long five months in rehab, Rick finally recovered from his addiction. Rick left the Buttery as a new and improved Rick Grossman, ready to get back out there and do what he does best, perform. “I really believe in the place as a facility, but also, I really love going back to see where I’ve come from.” Rick has given back to the Buttery by recruiting fellow musicians, Neil Finn, Jimmy Barnes and others to record and release a fundraiser album to raise money for renovations and improvements at the facility.
“I’d drink a lot, and take drugs, acid, speed. And so eventually when I did decide to get clean, Rick was one of the main people that decided to help me. And I just thought, this guy’s incredible, and this is exactly why I wanted to be involved in this project, this record, for Rick,” said Jimmy Barnes.
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In 1988, Rick joined the Hoodoo Gurus, and despite a short band break in the ‘90s, they’ve been performing together ever since.
“I was playing six nights a week, and you know my son would say, ‘Oh that must’ve been just awesome!’ And we certainly didn’t walk around going, ‘oh this is awesome!’ And yeah, you know, it was great! You just took it for granted in a way that you just play, you just play.”
In the Hoodoo Gurus, Rick spent a significant amount of time touring overseas. “I was away from home for six months a few times, in America, and you know, you’d get lonely, you’d miss your home. Very hard to have a normal life like that. But who wants to have a normal life anyway, you know?”
In the past few months, Rick and the Hoodoo Gurus have embarked on a six-week tour around Australia. “The band still sounds good and pretty contemporary really. We get a lot of young people, coming to see us, which is great!”
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Nowadays, Rick works as a mentor to students at the JMC Academy, a university for the creative industries, in Ultimo, Sydney. “JMC has sort of become quite a big thing, and I just want to get better at teaching and better at what I do here,” Rick explains.
Rick works with students in bands at JMC, helping them improve their performance skills and musicianship, often joining them on stage at regular gigs at the Bondi Jam Gallery among other Sydney venues. Rick has had a profound influence on his students, inevitably shaping the next generation of the Australian music industry.
Nathan Walsh, a 22-year-old student at the JMC Academy, was star-struck when first meeting Rick, “I remember the first time we had band, I came in, and Rick’s like, ‘I’m your band teacher, I play in an Australian band called the Hoodoo Gurus.’ And I was just like, ‘Whoa!’ Cause like, I’m from the country, old rock stuff is like, my kind of thing! So, I was just like blown away that I’d even know someone like that!”
Nathan admits Rick has had a remarkable impact on his music playing. “He has definitely changed my whole perspective of music. I’ve definitely just changed even the way I think about songs now. It’s pretty cool.”
Fellow student and bandmate Joss, has also been incredibly inspired by Rick, who actually convinced him to switch his primary instrument (being the guitar) to the bass guitar, and even bought him his very first bass guitar, which Joss eventually paid off.
Joss says, “Rick’s had a pretty huge impact on my perspective of stuff. He’s made me enjoy music a lot more.” Before JMC, Joss originally planned to study an engineering degree. Working with Rick has been confirmation for Joss that he made the right decision when decided to change career paths.
Travis New, lead guitarist in the Australian band Mi-Sex and fellow mentor of Rick’s at the JMC Academy says he and Rick share a similar philosophy and approach to teaching. “Whether you’re a singer, guitar player, bass player, or a drummer, at some point you need to develop your own individual identity on your instrument. When Rick plays bass, it sounds like Rick,” says Travis.
Travis explains a time when he was asked to put together a band for a corporate gig. “I got Steve Balbi from Noiseworks, and I said to Rick, ‘come and play some bass, it’ll be great!’ I sent Rick a list of songs, and he’s like, ‘Oh man, it’s a lot of songs. Do you want me to learn all the bits from the records?’ And it was really funny, he got kinda nervous about it! And I was like, ‘What! Just do your thing, just play how you play, and we’ll be fine.’ Then we got there, and he was playing away, and goes, ‘I don’t really know this song!’ And I was like, ‘Nah, it’ll be fine!’ and he just played, played, played, and Steve turns around and goes, ‘Sounds just like Rick Grossman!”
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Author’s Note:
Prior to pursuing journalism, I studied a Bachelor of Music (Contemporary Performance) at the JMC Academy, and I too was incredibly lucky enough to be mentored by Rick. The two years I spent under Rick’s wing at JMC were undoubtedly two of the most inspiring and fulfilling years of my life. Rick played an enormous role in helping me find my way as an artist. He inspired and encouraged me to believe in my own unique talents and abilities. I am forever grateful for the time I spent working with one of Australia’s greatest musicians. The lessons I learnt from Rick are embedded within me for life.
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Rick Grossman was put on this earth with a purpose to change the lives of those around him in some way or another. Whether through music or mentoring, Rick has touched so many lives, inspiring them with both his achievements, and the lessons learnt from his mistakes, and will undoubtedly continue to do so for the rest of his life.
