The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (218 page)

The Lords, with Ulli (centre): A hard act to follow

Thursday 28

Wes Berggren

(Dallas, Texas, 3 April 1971)

Tripping Daisy

Taking their lead from Led Zeppelin at their riffing best and The Beatles at their most psychedelic, Tripping Daisy – Tim DeLaughter (vocals/guitar), Wes Berggren (guitar), Mark Pirro (bass) and Mitch Marine (drums) – burst out of Dallas in 1991. A first album,
Bill
(1992), was enough to secure a deal with Island, for whom this prolific band recorded four albums over the next six years. The most impressive was
Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb
(1998) – but within a year of its issue the band were no more: Wes Berggren, a longtime drug-user, was found dead of an overdose of cocaine, propoxyphene and benzodi-azepine. DeLaughter finally achieved deserved international recognition a few years on as leader of the excellent Polyphonic Spree.

NOVEMBER

Saturday 13

R J Vealey

(Robert Jason Vealey - Charleston, West Virginia, 29 September 1962)

Atlanta Rhythm Section

(Various acts)

A drummer in the classic rock style, R J Vealey joined Southern-rock journeymen Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1995, the band then a touring unit (ARS had scored seven US Top Forty hits – including the sultry ‘So Into You’ (1977) – during the late seventies). Although just thirty-seven when he died, Vealey was a well-respected figure in the industry with a lengthy CV of projects by the time he joined the Ronnie Hammond-fronted band. They were promoting their first album in a decade at a concert at the campus of Florida’s Central University when the percussionist collapsed backstage from a massive heart attack. Vealey’s death – on his daughter’s first birthday – was entirely unexpected.

Ronnie Hammond passed away in March 2011.

Saturday 27

I Roy

(Roy Samuel Reid - St Thomas, Jamaica, 28 June 1942)

‘I Roy was Jamaica’s greatest ever DJ.’

Producer Harry Mudie

Young Roy Reid, better known to the music world as I Roy, started out in unlikely fashion as a government accountant, making his name by evening as the DJ in front of most of Spanish Town’s resident sound systems. An impressed Harry Mudie invited this young mic artist to toast on a series of great singles at his Dynamic Sounds Studios, until a disagreement over, of all things, touring arrangements ended their partnership in 1971. Thus I Roy’s first album,
Presenting I Roy
(1973), was delayed – it was released on Trojan and, produced by Augustus Clarke, did not disappoint. At this point, I Roy was working under a number of different producers as he found his voice, most notably Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry; the prolific artist put out no fewer than thirteen singles in 1975! In a spat that predated the reciprocal tongue-lashings of Eazy-E and Dr Dre, I Roy’s success briefly raised the ire of rival Prince Jazzbo and the pair chose to air their differences on vinyl.

These disagreements seemed to have dissipated by the late eighties, with the much lower-profile I Roy then recording on Jazzbo’s label, Umoja. But with fewer record sales, I Roy’s life fell into disarray, the artist spending his final years on the streets. Although his death from heart failure was met with little ceremony by the world’s music press, I Roy should always be recalled as a significant character for his multitude of seventies recordings.

Close!

Ronnie Hammond

(Atlanta Rhythm Section)

Don’t be a Southern-rock star - that’s a given. After the deaths of various members of The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Marshall Tucker Band, ARS lead singer Ronnie Hammond nearly joined the heavenly throng on 28 December 1998. Wielding a hammer and ‘part of a guitar’, the vocalist attacked a Georgia policeman in downtown Macon; the cop retaliated by pumping a couple of bullets into Hammond’s stomach.

In this case, however, there seems to have been a genuine death-wish, Hammond admitting he was alcoholic, depressed and ready to commit suicide. The singer survived and was subsequently hospitalized for a month, however finally succumbed to heart failure a dozen years later.

DECEMBER

Friday 3

‘Scatman’ John Larkin

(El Monte, California, 13 March 1942)

The creator of surely the nineties’ most irritating pair of hit singles, John Larkin developed his scat style to mask a stutter that he had had since his youth. What on earth Scatman John got up to for the first fifty-odd years of his life is anyone’s guess, but for the last five he must have had a ball: from early 1995, Scatman shifted some 3 million copies of his brace of albums, the singles ‘Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Da-Dop-Bop)’ and ‘Scatman’s World’ were huge hits in the UK, while pretty much all his releases – perhaps unsurprisingly – charted strongly in Japan. A longtime smoker (which probably didn’t do his voice much good, either), Scatman John died from lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles.

Saturday 10

Rick Danko

(Richard Clare Danko - Simcoe, Ontario, 29 December 1942)

The Band

Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks

The plaintive, near-mournful tenor that lowlighted such early classics as ‘The Weight’ (1968) and ‘The Unfaithful Servant’ (1969) was the latest heritage voice to be silenced as rock music hurtled towards 2000. Inspired by his musical older brother Maurice, Rick Danko was a frail young singer with multi-instrumental flair who left school at fourteen to emulate his heroes Hank Williams and Sam Cooke. His achievements as a key member of The Band were perhaps even broader than either’s. Danko’s professional work began, however, with Ronnie Hawkins’s classic band The Hawks, most of whom continued with this later manifestation. The limitations of life with a rockabilly unit were apparent to Danko; by 1966 The Band had moved on sufficiently to line up behind Dylan as he plugged in, to a barrage of catcalls. But folk rock now existed, and
Music from Big Pink
(1968) set out the Band’s stall as roots musicians with potentially vast influence. Their music celebrated the disintegration of Middle American values during a time of cultural revolution (and, of course, life on the road) – but now with the added power of an electric chord or two.

Rick Danko’s input to the group was utterly essential, and never better illustrated than in The Band’s celebrated
Last Waltz
performance at the San Francisco Winterland Ballroom in 1976. His fragility and musical prowess were displayed in rawer form on a solo effort for Arista,
Rick Danko
(1978) – which is often overshadowed by the momentousness of
The Last Waltz.
Although Danko was to reform The Band in the early eighties, it was largely to please followers and to secure the band’s induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (which they managed ten years later). The reformation was hugely damaged, however, by the aftershow suicide of Danko’s long-term friend Richard Manuel
(
March 1986).