The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (128 page)

After Looking Glass, Sweval joined New York stadium pop act Starz (originally Fallen Angels, fronted by singer Michael Lee Smith) and enjoyed another brief flirtation with Billboard’s Top Forty in 1977. Still touring with the band, Peter Sweval died of cancer in his late thirties.

Sunday 28

Sandra ‘Puma’ Jones

(South Carolina, 5 October 1953)

Black Uhuru

(Mama Africa)

Another cancer victim, ‘Puma’ Jones was a Columbia University graduate who became one of the most celebrated women in the predominantly male world of reggae. Raised in Harlem, New York, Jones migrated to Jamaica during the early seventies, where she worked as a social worker on housing projects, satisfying her love of reggae with the band Mama Africa in her spare time. Black Uhuru (originally just Uhuru, meaning ‘freedom’) had already released one album by the time Jones joined the ranks as a harmony vocalist – the ranks having been trimmed since the band’s 1973 formation to just founder Derrick ‘Duckie’ Simpson and lead singer (Anthony) Michael Rose. The first album with Jones’s vocal input was the excellent
Showcase
(1979, reissued later as
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,
named after the band’s best-known song). Black Uhuru now signed with Island and, working with the fabled Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, produced another great collection the following year:
Sinsemilla.
After the death of Bob Marley (
May 1981),
the band became reggae’s leading flag-bearers on the international stage – and the genre’s first act to land a Grammy, for the 1984 album
Anthem.

Rose had now left, and in 1987, a devastated ‘Puma’ Jones learned she had cancer and also bowed out of one of the second generation’s best bands. For the first album without her unique voice
(Positive,
1987), Black Uhuru brought in soundalike Ola Funke, but apparently felt her name should not appear on the credits. Jones passed away three years later and was buried in the town of her birth. Veteran Black Uhuru percussionist Sidney Wolfe also succumbed to cancer in June 1998.

FEBRUARY

Thursday 8

Del Shannon

(Charles Weedon Westover - Coopersville, Michigan, 30 December 1934)

(The Midnight Ramblers)

His tales of rejection and broken hearts spawning at least one bona fide classic, Del Shannon was one of the first pin-up idols to compose his own material. Always keen to promote his work, Charles Westover (as was) first found himself on the radio while serving with the Special Services in Germany, hosting the
Get up and Go
show – but it soon became clear the keen guitarist would far rather be making the records than presenting them. On his return to Michigan, Westover sold carpets by day and cut rug by night with his Midnight Ramblers, a Hank Williams-influenced band formed with keyboardist Max Crook. Westover’s ‘carpet boss’ heard an embryonic song called ‘Runaway’ and suggested they record it. Shortly after, a show at The HiLo Club in Battle Creek was attended by local DJ Ollie McLaughlin, who signed the newly renamed Del Shannon to his label Embee – ‘Runaway’ gained instant hit status in the spring of 1961. At one point shifting over 80,000 copies a day, the record lived up to its title and topped the national charts for four weeks – six weeks in the UK, where the singer had The Beatles open for him on tour. The debut record’s extraordinary falsetto and Musitron organ hook had captured the imagination of record-buyers the world over, and now Shannon – a reluctant star uncomfortable with all the sudden attention – was under pressure to follow it. Shannon managed another big seller in the US with ‘Hats off to Larry’ (1961), but, after this, his hit run was to yield just one more Top Ten entry (1964’s ‘Keep Searchin’’), although in the UK he remained one of the most successful male solo acts throughout the early decade. Steadfastly hardworking, Shannon relieved the stress of constant touring (and the added strain of appeasing managers and labels who sought another ‘Runaway’) with alcohol. He admitted he didn’t care for the taste – but he liked where it took him.

‘The screaming kids when I got to number one … Lord, the fear was so great! I thought, what am I doing here?’

Del Shannon gives clues

Del Shannon: Here’s Charlie

By 1966 Shannon’s US fanbase had become concerned at the direction their favourite was taking: he was now working with Andrew Loog Oldham in London, and the resulting album,
Home and Away,
was refused release by his US label, Liberty. Similarly, a bizarre psychedelic album issued under his real name was roundly ignored, presumably because his fans hadn’t worked out that Del Shannon was behind the project. His work thus snubbed, Shannon developed a belligerent attitude towards recording and became aloof with his followers at home (although he found time to produce hits for LA girl band Smith and friend and fellow heart-throb Brian Hyland). The later years of his career were spent mainly in obscurity; Shannon was, however, to find friends among a new generation of rock musicians, not least longtime admirer Tom Petty, who guided his
Drop Down and Get Me
album in 1982, spawning Shannon’s first Top Forty success at home for fifteen years with ‘Sea of Love’. But the singer, despite having conquered his alcohol addiction, was descending into a self-destructive world of depression.

After consulting a doctor early in 1990, Shannon returned home to his wife, Beverley LeAnne Gutierrez, with a clutch of Prozac. His wife recognized immediate problems: Shannon began dieting drastically and eschewing all work commitments. Five days after appearing at the annual Buddy Holly memorial concert in Fargo, Del Shannon was found dead at his newly purchased home in California’s Santa Clarita Valley, his bathrobe-clad body slumped in a rocking chair with a .22 rifle lying on the floor. He was cremated ten days later, and a monument was erected in his home town, Coopersville. Gutierrez fought back her devastation to sue pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co for ‘wrongful death, negligence and fraud’, insisting that her dead husband had been ‘a well-informed, healthy man’ and had been using the drug for just two weeks.

Thursday 15

George Suranovich

(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15 June 1944)

Love

The Eric Burdon Band

Blues Image

(Various acts)

The fourth drummer with Los Angeles rock band Love – following erstwhile percussionists Don Conka, Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer and Michael Stuart – George Suranovich already had an eclectic CV before he joined Arthur Lee’s band, having played with Bo Diddley and even the military in Vietnam. Suranovich played – with Lee (vocals/guitar), Jay Donnellan (lead guitar) and Frank Fayad (bass) – on the 1969 albums
Four Sail
and
Out Here
(which included his vocals on his own composition ‘Nice To Be’) before regular disputes over money curtailed his time with the epochal four-piece. A proposed session with Jimi Hendrix then came to nothing when the legendary guitarist died suddenly
(
September 1970).
During the early seventies, Suranovich sat behind former Animals frontman Eric Burdon as he toured the US and drummed with Blues Image and, simultaneously, various other California-based bands. But a return to Love in 1977 for a live album didn’t prevent Suranovich from pursuing his first calling as a jazz percussionist.