Born on June 7, 1951, in East Germany, Rainer Jaromir Ptacek grew up in Chicago after his family fled the Communist country in 1953. Musically inclined from childhood, in the mid ’60s Rainer swapped violin for guitar (he once quipped, “None of the Beatles, it seemed, were interested in violin”). A decade later he’d become a fixture on the Tucson music scene, ultimately garnering an international reputation as a song stylist and slide virtuoso that had critics speaking of him, Ry Cooder and John Fahey in the same breath, while pondering the intricacies of an elaborate tape loop and delay pedal strategy he’d developed during his later years that allowed him to sound like three guitarists at once. In addition to four albums (”Barefoot Rock”, “Worried Spirits”, “Texas Tapes” and “Nocturnes” - all still available via Glitterhouse Records) released between 1986 and 1994, he collaborated with everyone from Giant Sand and Germany’s F.S.K. to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and Led Zep’s Robert Plant.

On Groundhog’s Day of ‘96, while Rainer was riding his bike to work at the Chicago Store (where he repaired string instruments), his brain faded out and he fell over. He wound up at the University Medical Center where they scanned him and imaged him and concluded that Rainer Ptácek had brain cancer. They said it appeared like a cloud throughout his head - no lump of malignancy that could be excised and let the man live in peace. So Rainer had to commence the exhausting ordeal of radiation and chemo treatments. “It took some time to relearn everything he’d known before the seizure,” says Howe Gelb (of Giant Sand fame and Rainer´s best friend) of Rainer’s initial recovery period. “The most amazing part of his trek - which was unbearably frustrating, given how his brain wouldn’t work with him for the longest time to remember so many things, let alone the coordination it takes for his hands to carry out his brain’s ideas - was that he not only was able to teach himself all over again; his stunning achievement was then to surpass his ability before he got sick!”

He did not have medical insurance and his bills were mounting. Howe Gelb and Robert Plant organized sessions for a charity album. The resulting record, The Inner Flame: Rainer Ptacek Tribute, featured Ptacek-penned songs performed by Gelb (with Giant Sand), Plant, Jimmy Page, Emmylou Harris, Evan Dando, Victoria Williams, Vic Chesnutt, PJ Harvey, The Drovers, Madeleine Peyroux, Kris McKay, Jonathan Richman and Bill Janovitz. Ptacek is a participant on most of the tracks.