'I love to drink. I hate people who can't hold their liquor," David Axelrod, the 1960s jazz producer and musician who has recently been re-discovered through sampling of his music by hip-hop artists, told Pádraig Collins a year ago.
His drinking and love of Irish literature are part of the basis for his friendship with Limerick-man Brian Cross (aka B+).
"Brian has a fantastic capacity for liquor . . . He was a little startled that I knew so much about Irish writers, especially my friend Jimmy Joyce," he said.
After Cross, who works in Los Angeles as a hip-hop photographer, found an Axelrod album in a second-hand shop, he decided he had to track down the reclusive legend. "Over a few drinks we became friends. He wanted to fight me, he used to be a boxer," said Cross.
Street fighting was what he did mostly as a kid growing up in what was then a very anti-Semitic LA. He used to ask those who baited him: "When my brother was blown away in Iwo Jima, what was he? Was he an American or a Jew?" And then he'd, mostly, kick the lard out of them.
But eye trouble that still requires regular treatment and the near-permanent wearing of sunglasses show that he didn't always win.
Before falling in love with alcohol, Axelrod was a heroin addict for 10 years, before replacing that with cocaine. This did not stop him from achieving great success in the 1960s, first as a gifted pianist on the West Coast jazz scene, then as an A&R man for the Capitol label, and later as a producer and solo artist.
At Capitol, he helped shape the careers of alto sax giant Cannonball Adderley, soul-man Lou Rawls and psychedelic popsters The Electric Prunes.
He wrote and orchestrated The Electric Prunes' 1968 classic, Mass In F Minor. It probably would have sold better had the Catholic Church not praised it, saying it was the first rock record the Church could approve of.
After three individual and brilliant solo albums - 1968's Songs Of Innocence and 1969's Songs Of Experience, both inspired by the writings of William Blake, and 1970's proto-environmentalist Earth Rot - tragedy struck with the death of his son, Scott.
Axelrod found himself unable to work to his full abilities for years, but when he returned, he again wrote inspirationally.
Requiem: The Holocaust (1993) is a haunting evocation of the mass murder of Jews during the second World War, while last year's self-titled album uses rhythm tracks recorded for an abandoned Electric Prunes 32 years earlier. On it, the track Big B Plus was dedicated to Brian Cross.
The legend, who has survived all the curveballs life has thrown him, lives on.