One year ago today, 58 people were killed on the final day of the ROUTE 91 HARVEST country music festival in LAS VEGAS. It was the deadliest mass shooting in US history. Bump stocks, which the killer used to turn several rifles into automatic weapons and which PRESIDENT TRUMP denounced afterward, remain legal at a federal level and in most states, including Nevada. Congress has declined to take up bump-stock-legislation. Action may finally be on the way in the form of a Justice Department regulation, which the president has encouraged and which gun-control advocates say is a considerably weaker approach than legislation. But it would, at least, be something. Country music radio stations across the US—and all radio stations in Nevada—will go silent for 58 seconds at 10:05 am PT today. May assault weapons remain silent for much, much longer. May legislators and the president show at least as much courage as the survivors of the Las Vegas attack, and too many others like it, show every time they walk into a concert or similar public gathering. May the sound of music continue to be a more powerful sound than every gun and every bullet ever fired... OTIS RUSH'S fluid, lyrical and luxuriously bendy electric guitar lines didn't necessarily influence the rhythms or melodies of legions blues and rock guitarists who came after him. The influence, rather, was on their very sound. Their feel. The fundamental nature of the music they made. LED ZEPPELIN, ERIC CLAPTON and STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN ("DOUBLE TROUBLE" was an Otis Rush song long before it was the name of Vaughan's band) are among the many who owe him countless debts. Rush owes his own debt—and this made me love him all that much more—to being lefthanded and learning to play with the strings in upside-down order and the whammy bar going the wrong way. He had no idea at first. He just picked up the thing and started playing. Which is always the correct way to go about doing this. RIP... MARTY BALIN was an outsider in his own band, singing the beautiful ones that didn't become hits when they were called JEFFERSON AIRPLANE and the beautiful ones that did become hits when they were JEFFERSON STARSHIP. He was instrumental in putting the band together and he was one of the founders of the MATRIX, the San Francisco club where the Airplane and so many of the other bands that shaped psychedelic rock in the '60s cut their chops. And yet when they were filmed performing at MONTEREY POP, as the NEW YORK TIMES' JON PARELES notes in his obituary, the camera remained on GRACE SLICK throughout the song "TODAY," which he, and not she, was singing. He quit, out of multiple frustrations, before the Airplane disbanded and the Starship rose up in its place, but the Starship eventually reeled him back on. "When the rest of the band was going wild and partying, Marty was just writing songs, singing songs and going home,” publicist CYNTHIA BOWMAN said. “He was different than everybody else." He never played in any incarnation of the band that didn't have the word "Jefferson" in its name. RIP... KANYE WEST said some stuff this weekend. Also, grass is green... The story of reggaeton in 30 music videos.