The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (333 page)

Less was heard from Federici after this point, although he did play on Springsteen’s next studio effort,
The Ghost of Tom Joad
(1995), after having joined The Boss for a Greatest Hits tour the same year. Federici was also on hand four years later for what turned out to be Springsteen’s longest tour ever, which extended into the summer of 2000. When he wasn’t working with the New Jersey legend, Federici issued several albums of jazz-tinged music, beginning with
Flemington
(1997), for which he was ably assisted by Tallent and another Springsteen sidekick, guitarist Nils Lofgren. He also sessioned with UK artists such as Joan Armatrading and Graham Parker.

Danny Federici was diagnosed with melanoma in 2005. During Springsteen’s 2007
Magic
concerts – for which the front man had reunited with his former E Street Band members – Federici was forced to accept medical advice and quit the tour to pursue advanced treatment for the disease. Federici’s last live appearance with his best-known group occurred in Indianapolis on 20 March 2008, just one month before his death at a New York specialist center. Federici was remembered by Springsteen on the album
Working on a Dream
(2009), and his friend of many decades also donated the proceeds from a live recording of
Magic
to a melanoma research fund set up in Federici’s name.

See also
Bill Chinnock (
March 2007); Clarence Clemons (
June 2011).

Sunday 20

Orish Grinstead

(Las Vegas, Nevada, 2 June 1980)

702

702, named after the area code for their home town of Las Vegas, enjoyed a brief but notable moment of R & B stardom during the late nineties. The group was made up of twins Orish and Irish Grinstead, their elder sister LeMisha (the siblings were initially encouraged by their mother to entertain paying adults in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace) and lead singer Kameelah Williams, who replaced their cousin Amelia Childs.

Unlike her sisters, Orish didn’t study at the Las Vegas Academy of the Performing Arts, but her natural exuberance made her an essential part of the quartet, originally called Sweeta Than Suga. Michael Bivins (formerly of New Edition and spin-off Bell Biv Devoe) certainly agreed. He rechristened the group 702 and assisted them in the studio with a strong-selling debut single, ‘This Lil’ Game We Play’ (1995, with Bivins’s other proteges, Subway). The former R & B pin-up also invited the girls along to open for New Edition’s revival tour in 1996.

702 were never likely to scale the same heights as TLC or Destiny’s Child, but they managed gold and platinum albums with their first pair of releases
No Doubt
(1996) and
702
(1999). They also charted with a few hit singles, most notably ‘Get It Together’ (1997, US Top Ten), ‘Beep Me 911’ (1998 – with Missy Elliott, UK Top Twenty) and ‘Where My Girls At?’ (1999 – written and produced by Elliott – US number four; US R & B number one; Canada Top Five; UK Top Forty).

Following the second record, however, the road became rockier for 702. Williams left in 2001 to work with Faith Evans, and the Grinstead sisters recruited Cree Lamore to replace her. Williams eventually returned to the fold two years later, though there were no more significant hits and 702’s third album
Star
(2003) stalled outside Billboard’s Top Forty.

Fans of the group had little inkling that anything was wrong in the 702 camp; most assumed their latest hiatus was due to further line-up changes. (Orish herself had left and returned more than once since 2003.) However, after a long, previously unpublicised illness, Orish Grinstead died from kidney failure at the age of just twenty-seven, having reportedly also been diagnosed with cancer.

Golden Oldies #64

Al Wilson

(Allen LaMar Wilson - Meridian, Mississippi, 19 June 1939)

(Various acts)

A performer of gospel and spiritual music as an adolescent, Al Wilson went on to become first a star in R & B and, later, an evergreen among Northern Soul enthusiasts. The singer came from humble roots: he’d worked as a janitor, a mailboy and an office clerk while touring with Johnny Harris’s band The Statesmen; military service landed him the opportunity to sing with an enlisted men’s chorus. Wilson had settled in Los Angeles by the time he encountered Johnny Rivers (John Ramistella), an emerging rock ‘n’ roll singer, musician and producer whose Soul City label became Wilson’s first recording home in 1966. From these early sessions came ‘The Snake’ (1968, US #27), a brooding tune that was almost a decade later to become a firm favourite within the dancehalls of Europe - and which in more recent years bore the dubious honour of promoting sparkling wine in a British television commercial.

Despite such a strong debut, Wilson had a patchy career that saw him disappear from favour for half a decade before returning with
Show and Tell
(1973), which went gold. This fresh-sounding set was bolstered by its Billboard-topping eponymous single, an insistent tune that sold in excess of a million copies in America alone. However, despite what appeared to be a major breakthrough, Wilson found subsequent hits harder to come by, though ‘La La Peace Song’ (1974) hit the Top Forty and ‘I’ve Got a Feeling (We’ll Be Seeing Each Other Again)’ (1976) gave the singer his highest R & B chart entry.

Although he managed to maintain a profile on the cabaret circuit, Al Wilson’s final years were tinged with more than a little sadness: aside from a dramatic decline in his own health, Wilson suffered the destruction of many precious master tapes by a 2007 fire that swept through his home studio in San Bernardino. Wilson died from kidney failure at a Fontana hospital on 21 April 2008.

Tuesday 22

Paul Davis

(Meridian, Mississippi, 21 April 1948)

(Various acts)

US singer/songwriter Paul Davis was just as comfortable writing and singing blue-eyed soul ballads as he was performing pop numbers or even country standards. While touring with a number of minor bands, Davis also held down the position of staff songwriter at Mississippi’s Malaco Records.

By the time he signed to Bang Records in 1969, Davis was an established name in the industry. At just twenty years old, the young songwriter was a popular media face but had no hit record to call his own: his cover of The Jarmels’ ‘A Little Bit of Soap’ (1970) came close to providing this, but it was not for another four years that Davis could boast a
bona fide
Top Forty entry. Country singalong ‘Ride ‘Em Cowboy’ (1974) finally picked the locks, opening the door for a succession of hits over the next decade. The biggest in terms of sales was ‘I Go Crazy’ (1977), a smash that took eight months to peak at number seven – and, with a total of forty weeks on the list, set a new Hot 100 longevity record. (Current US music consumers should note that this really didn’t tend to happen before 1995.)

Davis was the last man standing at Bang when the label bit the dust, his move to Arista proving a good one when singles ‘Cool Night’ (1981) and ‘‘65 Love Affair’ (1982) pushed him back toward the business end of the charts. Although only one further song (‘Love Me Or Let Me Be Lonely’) became a solo hit, Davis showed considerable versatility by penning the country chart-toppers ‘Meet Me in Montana’ (1985) for Marie Osmond and ‘Bop’ (1986) for Dan Seals. He even managed to top this success with two number ones of his own: the first with Osmond on 1986’s ‘You’re Still New to Me’ (which also topped the country charts in Canada) and the second with Tanya Tucker on 1988’s ‘I Won’t Take Less Than Your Love’.

Paul Davis was still very active in the industry when he died from a heart attack at the Rush Foundation Hospital in the town of his birth, just twenty-four hours after his sixtieth birthday.

Close…

Paul Davis

Whether his duet with Marie Osmond was pushed to number one on a wave of national sympathy is open to conjecture, but, just as this record was climbing the country charts, Paul Davis suffered a pointblank shooting that almost cost him his life. The singer, by then residing in Nashville, was leaving a hotel on Music Row with an unnamed woman (not believed to have been Osmond) when confronted by a mystery gunman. As the singer approached his automobile, the assailant demanded his wallet, shooting Davis at close range when he hesitated. The musician suffered an injury to his abdomen, spending some hours in intensive care before making a remarkable recovery. The attacker– who was never found–escaped in a car.