Ravens Moreland, Nervous Gender Reloaded, Sylvia Black, and Harry Cloud at the Monty Bar
Gregg Foreman was the kind of musician other musicians knew. Born in Philadelphia on October 5, 1972, raised in Valley Forge, he bought his first synthesizer (a Roland Alpha Juno) and a Yamaha drum machine at thirteen, and spent the rest of his life turning that early fixation into a working practice. He died at home in Los Angeles on April 21, 2026, at fifty-three.
Between those two dates, Gregg ran a circuit through underground music that would be hard to retrace even if you’d been there for all of it. He founded The Delta 72 in the mid-90s, a post-punk/soul/no wave band that released records on Dischord, Kill Rock Stars, and Touch and Go, working with Brendan Canty, Eli Janney, Steve Albini, Royal Trux, and Shelly Yakus before disbanding in 2001. He played on Acme by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. He joined Cat Power in 2006 and became musical director for Chan Marshall’s band, a partnership he once summed up to LA Weekly as “what was meant to be two weeks is now going on ten years,” and he held that role for the rest of his life. Along the way he played in Pink Mountaintops, The Meek, The Black Ryder, and The Silver Chords; he toured Europe with The Gossip in 2019, including Madrid’s Mad Cool festival; he released a 2019 EP with Suicide’s Alan Vega featuring Nick Zinner, White Hills, Jim Sclavunos, and JG Thirlwell; he contributed to James Williamson’s 2015 Re-Licked project alongside Alison Mosshart, Bobby Gillespie, Jello Biafra, and Mark Lanegan; he played in Justin Warfield’s band Warfield; he scored live with Martin Rev; and from 2020 onward he served as bandleader and synth player for Kat Von D across Love Made Me Do It and 2024’s My Side of the Mountain. In 2023 he toured with Lydia Lunch and Sylvia Black on Trust the Witch.
Known professionally as Mr. Pharmacist, a nod to his self-described “Moth” aesthetic blending Mod and Goth, Gregg built a reputation as a versatile keyboardist and bandleader spanning punk, post-punk, indie rock, and electronic music. In his later years he was producing live scores to underground, strange art, and obscure films at the Philosophical Research Society, working with Death Valley Girls, Martin Rev, David J, Eugene Hütz, and Paris Jackson. He ran a freelance writing beat for the Philadelphia City Paper in the ’90s, interviewing musicians like Ian McLagan and Bobby Byrd, and his obsession with 45s led him to start a mod/soul residency in Philadelphia called The Turnaround, a formative party that helped seed what became David Pianka’s long-running Making Time. From there he DJed worldwide, including David Lynch’s Silencio in Paris, Le Baron, and Tokyo’s Beat Cafe. His radio show, also called The Pharmacy, interviewed everyone from Genesis P-Orridge to Damo Suzuki to ? of ? and the Mysterians, a separate vocation he treated with the same scholarship.
He was also, in a particularly LA way, a curator of other people’s songs. Gregg put on tribute shows for the artists he loved, gathering local players to inhabit the catalogs that had shaped him. Ravens Moreland’s Bruce Moreland sang on a Birthday Party / Bad Seeds tribute Gregg organized, and again at a Suicide tribute, two of the most demanding songbooks in post-punk and a credible measure of who Gregg trusted with them. The 2018 Alan Vega memorial concert at Bowery Electric in New York found Gregg backing JG Thirlwell on “Harlem,” part of the same lineage of work: Gregg as the engine that let other people stand in front of songs that mattered.
He was, by every account that’s surfaced since April, the connector. “He was the light and love and everything,” his sister Abbe said. “Everywhere he went, he brought love and light, and he was so talented.” Cold Cave’s Wesley Eisold put it more bluntly: Gregg “lived a life that others only claim to have lived.”
This benefit gathers a slice of the community that grew up around him. Ravens Moreland, Bruce Moreland’s current project with roots stretching back through Wall of Voodoo, the Weirdos, and Nervous Gender, anchors a bill that also features Nervous Gender Reloaded, Sylvia Black (who toured with Gregg as part of Lydia Lunch’s Trust the Witch in 2023), and Harry Cloud. Proceeds support the Gregg Foreman Trust.
Come for the music. Stay for the room he made possible.
The Monty Bar, 1222 W 7th St, Los Angeles.