

Dave Cloud, pictured in 2004.

Sources close to Dave Cloud have confirmed with the Scene that the beloved local outsider musician and actor died late last night, several hours after being taken off life support. Cloud was admitted to Centennial Medical Center on Monday for complications related to melanoma. He was 58.

When people demand to keep Nashville weird, Dave Cloud embodies what they mean: someone who sent lightning bolts of manic creative energy scattering in every direction, starting fires wherever they hit. Twenty years ago, while Nashville was lusting after the acclaim and approval of coastal arbiters, Cloud was bashing out untutored, incantatory garage rock in venues like Springwater and Lucy's Record Shop. Nobody at the time suspected how crucial those clubs would be to the city's reversing fortunes — or how much of a cult figure Cloud would become in Scandinavia and other ports of call.

And yet even when he was backed by members of Lambchop, Silver Jews and other vanguard indie bands, Cloud bowed to nobody's fashion. Whether he was playing ’60s bubblegum tunes or easy-listening standards, they came out in his own Martian time signatures and pulverizing arrangements, animated by the innocent primordial current of rock 'n' roll. He could be courtly and coarse, sophisticated and vulgar, elevated and lowbrow. What he could never be was the same damn thing you'd seen a hundred times before — or like everyone else.