Gregg Foreman, Delta 72 frontman, DJ, and Cat Power bandleader, has died at 53

Gregg Foreman, 53, the Philadelphia musician and DJ who led the punk-R&B band the Delta 72, and toured with acts such as Cat Power and the Gossip, has died.

Mr. Foreman’s body was found by firefighters in his Los Angeles home on Tuesday. The cause of death has not yet been determined. His death was confirmed to The Inquirer by his sister Abbe Foreman.

Raised in Wayne in Delaware County and a graduate of Conestoga High School, Mr. Foreman was a singer, guitarist, keyboard player and bandleader who had a passion for giving vintage sounds new life. He was also a music journalist for the Philadelphia City Paper in the 1990s and a radio host who went by the name Mr. Pharmacist.

“He was a natural musician,” Abbe Forman said. “When he was young, he used to dance around the kitchen to Al Green, James Brown, anything with a good beat.”

“He used to pretend the kitchen was a drum set and use his fingers as drum sticks. Music was Gregg’s everything and he could truly play every instrument well without ever having had a lesson.”

Mr. Foreman learned to love music from his late mother Vicki Foreman, whose favorite song was Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave.”

“She played me tons of Motown, Mod, Soul, Rock N Roll and Reggae records” Mr. Foreman wrote in an Instagram post last year.

“My mom had a piano,” he said in a 2009 interview. “I started playing because she was dating at the time and I would play the piano just to annoy her boyfriend. Stuff like Jerry Lee Lewis, just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! I had no lessons on piano, but on guitar they showed me the chords and then I just kind of figured out the rest on my own.”

He bought his first synthesizer at 13 after hearing electronic composer Vangelis’ music in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner. In a meme he shared last year, he joked that Blade Runner, Synths and Mod & Post-Punk 45s add up to equal “My Personality.”

Mr. Foreman was a connoisseur of 1960s R&B and the British Mod subculture, down to his spiky rooster hairdo in the style favored by Brit rock stars like Rod Stewart and Ron Wood.

“I call it a white man’s Afro,” he quipped in a 2000 interview with The Inquirer.

After high school, he briefly attended Penn State, but left to pursue music, joining the punk band Junction. But after hearing artists like bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, jazz organist Jimmy Smith, and soul man Otis Redding, he moved on and founded the Delta 72.

“I want to get inside that music and make it fresh,” Mr. Foreman said in 2000 at the time of Delta 72’s raucous third album Ooo, which was recorded at Philadelphia’s Tongue and Groove Studio and produced by Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux.

With his music, Mr. Foreman said, he aimed to selectively lift from pop’s past “and inject some punk rock.”

“All of my favorite bands have a sense of history,” he said, “Without going back, there’s no way to move forward.”

That approach was mirrored in The Turnaround, the Silk City Lounge party ignited by Mr. Foreman’s ardor for vintage soul and R&B and also evident in his work for the City Paper. His interview subjects ranged from Bobby Byrd of James Brown’s Famous Flames to the Small Faces’ Ian McLagan.

Philly keyboard player Mark Boyce, who has recorded with Philly artists including the Roots, the Goats, and King Britt, played on Ooo and toured with the Delta 72.

“That music still holds up today,” Boyce, now a music teacher in San Diego, said this week. “I’m proud of the work we did. We had a love for Stax label artists, rare soul, and funk.

“There were four or five of us in a small van traveling around, with no internet, no cell phones. We would just take turns DJing, listening to music on cassettes and CDs. We had a love for soul music from a time before us, but our energy and our shows came from a more modern place.

“Greg had such a lust and a love for that. We would go around the country, going to to thrift stores. We’d make special stops in Memphis and walk around to where the studios were. I remember one Sunday we woke up wet and hung up dry and went to see Al Green preaching. That was a must stop. We had to get ourselves up very early and go to church that day.”

After the Delta 72 broke up, Mr. Foreman met Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power (and pronounces her first name “Shawn”), when he was DJing and living in Miami in 2006.

What started as a two-week gig stretched over 20 years with Mr. Foreman eventually becoming the band’s music director.

This year’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of Marshall’s album The Greatest brought the band to Union Transfer in March, and Mr. Foreman is featured on the poster for the band’s Newport Folk Festival gig in July.

Playing with Cat Power opened doors for Mr. Foreman to collaborate with other artists “as a musician who isn’t doing it for the money or the accolades,” he told LA Weekly in 2016.

While hewing to his own “Moth” aesthetic — part Mod, part Goth — he toured or recorded with The Gossip, James Williamson of the Stooges, Lucinda Williams, Alan Vega of Suicide, Kat von D., and many others.

“I like the outsiders, the antihero, the underdog,” he said. “That’s why some of my heroes are people like Alan Vega from Suicide, Lydia Lunch and Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV.”

This week Wesley Eisold, who performs as Cold Cave, paid tribute to Mr. Foreman, who introduced him to his wife and musical partner Amy Lee.

“He bounced in and out of our lives and changed each one that he visited. For better or worse, he lived a life that others can only have claimed to live. His love for music was as genuine as the pain he harbored,” Eisold said on X.

“Gregg was a fantastic musician, and a deeply soulful artist,” Sopranos actor and musician Michael Imperioli wrote. “I was fortunate enough to be with him on Lydia Lunch’s Verbal Burlesque crew …. His humility, sincerity and kindness made a big impression on me.”

On Thursday, Marshall posted a photo of Mr. Foreman with his sister Abbe on her social media accounts. “Listen close,” she wrote. “U can hear him singing, U can hear him playing.” She added that she was “Pouring all my love into the heart of dear Gregg’s baby sister. Please, please pour some too.”

“He was truly a light in this world — kind, warm, and full of love,” Abbe Forman said. “I adored him more than any words could ever express. He had a quiet way about him with a soft heart. He could always make people laugh and had a presence you just felt. Anyone who met him was lucky.”

Mr. Foreman is survived by his sister. Life celebrations are being planned in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.