PASSINGS: Tom ‘T-Bone’ Wolk, Carlos Montemayor, Walter J. Thomson

Tom ‘T-Bone’ Wolk

Bass player for Hall & Oates

Tom “T-Bone” Wolk, 58, best known as the longtime bass player for the band led by pop-rock stars Daryl Hall and John Oates, died Sunday in Pawling, N.Y., of an apparent heart attack, according to the duo’s manager, Jonathan Wolfson.

Wolk died hours after completing a recording session with Hall, who was working on a solo album. The bassist had been scheduled to appear Monday night with Hall and Oates on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

Wolk joined Hall & Oates in 1981. He was also a member of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” house band from 1986 to 1992.

A busy session musician, he appeared on literally scores of recordings with such varied artists as Bette Midler, Billy Joel and Avril Lavigne. He played bass on several of Elvis Costello’s recordings, accordion on Robert Palmer’s “Heavy Nova” and guitar on Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again.”

Wolk grew up in the New York City suburb of Yonkers. He played the accordion as a youth, but after seeing the Beatles perform on television’s “Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, he said, he talked his father into buying him an electric guitar.

He studied art briefly after graduating from high school, then turned his full attention to music.

Carlos Montemayor

Mexican author and scholar

Carlos Montemayor, 62, a Mexican author and guerrilla movement scholar, died Sunday in Mexico City, according to a statement from his publisher, Random House Mandadori. He had stomach cancer.

A historian and linguist whose academic work centered on indigenous culture and rebels, Montemayor was sympathetic to the armed Zapatista uprising in 1994 in the southern state of Chiapas.

In 2008, Montemayor joined a commission to mediate between the government and the leftist People’s Revolutionary Army, or EPR, over the group’s claims that two of its members were taken by security forces in Oaxaca state.

His best-known novel, “War in Paradise,” is a fictional account of a real-life guerrilla movement led by Lucio Cabañas in southern Guerrero state in the 1970s, and the government’s campaign against it.

“War in Paradise” is considered the definitive book on Mexico’s “dirty war,” a 1960s and ‘70s crackdown against rebels and suspected sympathizers in which hundreds of people died or disappeared.

Walter J. Thomson, a businessman, philanthropist and thoroughbred breeder in Arcadia and the Santa Ynez Valley whose horses included Seabiscuit descendant Sea Orbit, died Feb. 1 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, his family announced. A resident of Montecito, Thomson was 98.

-- times staff and wire reports

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