DETROIT – Dick Wagner, a guitarist renowned for his work with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and others, died Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 71.
Wagner succumbed to respiratory failure at Scottsdale Healthcare Shea Medical Center, where he had been in intensive care for the past two weeks following a cardiac procedure.
The guitarist famously overcame a series of medical issues over the past decade, retraining himself on guitar after a stroke paralyzed his left arm. He re-emerged to begin recording, writing and performing gigs in 2011.
“There was just a magic in the way we wrote together,” Cooper wrote in a statement to the Detroit Free Press. “He was always able to find exactly the right chord to match perfectly with what I was doing. I think that we always think our friends will be around as long as we are, so to hear of Dick’s passing comes as a sudden shock and an enormous loss for me, rock ‘n’ roll and to his family.”
Wagner was born in Iowa, moved with his family to Michigan as a child and later settled in Saginaw. He was a key figure in southeastern Michigan’s emergent rock scene in the 1960s, a go-to guitarist who made his name with such bands as the Bossmen and the Frost.