Creativity Quote by Jimmy Carl Black

There is a particular cruelty in the casualness here: a decade of silence reduced to a shrugging headcount, then patched over with a quick, almost reflexive decency. Jimmy Carl Black isn’t delivering a grand statement; he’s letting the emotional math of long-running band history show through. In a single breath, “I don’t even know if he’s alive” turns estrangement into something like administrative failure, the kind that happens when relationships get filed away under “old lineup, old drama, old number.” The follow-up, “I hope so,” is small, humane, and tellingly insufficient. It’s what you say when you don’t want to be the villain in your own story, but you also don’t want to reopen the door.

Coming from a musician, the line carries the ambient context of scenes that burn hot and then scatter: bands splinter, managers triangulate, grudges calcify, people move cities, addiction and illness take their toll. Time doesn’t heal so much as it edits, and what’s been cut is contact, accountability, intimacy. Black’s phrasing frames Ray Collins less as a person than as a missing update in the archive, a collaborator who has slipped from “someone I knew” into “someone I once knew.”

The intent feels like damage control without reconciliation: acknowledging the loss without performing sentimentality. It works because it’s plainspoken and a little ugly, the way truth often is when friendships die quietly rather than in a blaze of public feud.