The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (6 page)

As the title of his 1953 album suggested, Sonny Boy Williamson ‘II’ was always ‘clownin’ with the world’. With more front than a hundred wooden porches, the blues harmonica-player ‘borrowed’ his assumed name from that of contemporary blues harpist John Lee Williamson, towards the end of his life hoodwinking many into believing he was indeed the original ‘Sonny Boy’.

A gifted performer in his own right, Williamson was born into a sharecropper’s family, and lived the familiar bluesman’s life of a wandering minstrel, playing every juke joint in town, trying to scratch a living. It was, however, a regular Arkansas radiostation KFFA slot presenting
King Biscuit Time
(sponsored by King Biscuit flour) that made him a star locally and an influence on other Delta-blues players. Among his self-written pieces were ‘One Way Out’ (later a hit for The Allman Brothers) and ‘Nine Below Zero’. “When he signed, as late as 1950, to Lillian McMurry’s Trumpet label (and thereafter Chess), many of his minimalist harmonica workouts found their way on to disc at last. Williamson’s talent didn’t go unnoticed by the new breed either and, before he died, this excellent craftsman visited Europe and recorded with The Animals and The Yardbirds. (Such was Williamson’s history of telling tall stories, many back home refused to believe he had travelled to Britain, let alone played with its top rock musicians.)

Williamson returned to the USA to resume
King Biscuit Time
in 1964, his alcoholism now exacerbated by the tuberculosis he knew was killing him. Struggling not to cough up blood during his performances, he played an impromptu jam, now the stuff of folklore, with the group Levon & The Hawks (who went on to become Bob Dylan’s back-up unit The Band) just a fortnight before he passed away. Williamson’s failure to show up to present his radio show in May 1965 prompted KFFA to send someone to rouse him – but it was too late. Williamson had died in his sleep at his boarding house in Helena, Arkansas. Stonemasons wrongly engraved the date of death on Williamson’s headstone as ‘23 June’. Despite obvious discrepancies over his birth date, this
is
an error.

AUGUST

Saturday 14

Charles Fizer

(Shreveport, Louisiana, 3 June 1940)

The Olympics

One of the more versatile of the era’s slew of vocal quartets, The Olympics began in 1954 as The Challengers while still at high school in Compton, California. Initially, this group was moulded more in the style of The Coasters than the standard doo-wop unit, onstage schtick between members setting up novelty tunes such as their popular debut, US number-eight hit ‘Western Movies’ (Demon, 1958 – a witty number in which the narrator bemoans his girlfriend’s addiction to cowboy pictures), which also made the UK Top Twenty. The group’s first line-up comprised Walter ‘Sleepy’ Ward (who died in December 2006 – lead), Eddie Lewis (tenor), Walter Hammond (baritone) and – often at the heart of the operation – Charles Fizer (tenor/baritone), who joined following a talent contest. Fizer was certainly a larger-than-life character, finding himself in the hands of the law more than once in his short life; just as The Olympics were enjoying their biggest success he found himself on an enforced ‘sabbatical’ from the band when a prison sentence for drugs possession kept him away for a year (he was replaced by Melvin King).

Cut to 11 August 1965: days after masses of black music fans had chanted the positive slogan ‘Burn, baby, burn!’ at the Stax Revue in Watts, Los Angeles, the phrase itself was to take on a darker hue. As black brothers Marquette and Ronald Frye travelled into South Central in their 1950 Buick, they were stopped by a California Highway Patrol, who believed the driver to be intoxicated. With little apparent motive, the police hauled Marquette from the car and set about punching and kicking him and slamming him in his own car door; even the Fryes’ mother found herself handcuffed, slapped and hit when she attempted to intervene. Within an hour, South LA was in the middle of the most violent racial uprising it had ever witnessed, with Watts at the very epicentre. Following early altercations, the
Los Angeles Times
talked of ‘rocks flying, then wine and whiskey bottles, concrete, pieces of wood – the targets anything strange to the neighbourhood’.

By the weekend, Lyndon B Johnson described a ‘disaster area’, and the LAPD admitted that the situation was out of their control; there would inevitably be casualties as they stepped up attempts to regain the township. The majority of these would be innocents, in the wrong place at the wrong time, most of them black. One such was Charles Fizer. On 14 August, day three of the uprising, Fizer – very much a reformed character since his incarceration – was making his way innocently to an Olympics rehearsal when he was hit by National Guard bullets and died on the street. He was just one of thirty-four to die that week; Melvin King’s sister was another, on the very same afternoon. A further thousand were injured and four times that many arrested as Watts was razed to the ground over six days. A neglected suburb for years – and with a particularly poor record for police brutality – it lay desolate, a charred monument to years of oppression. Devastated by the events of 14 August, Melvin King played just one more performance before throwing in the towel with The Olympics. His replacement, Mack Starr, died equally tragically following a motorcycle accident in Los Angeles
(
June 1981).

OCTOBER

Thursday 21

Bill Black

(William Patton Black Jr - Memphis, Tennessee, 17 September 1926)

Bill Black’s Combo

Scotty & Bill

Doug Poindexter & The Starlight Wranglers

Guitarist Bill Black was well situated to join up with the biggest star popular music had ever seen, though ironically his time as bass-player behind Elvis Presley proved far less lucrative – or artistically rewarding – than working with his own band, Bill Black’s Combo. Sam Phillips was fast to spot Black’s potential, prising him and guitarist cohort Scotty Moore away from his own hoedown act Doug Poindexter & The Starlight Wranglers before lining them up to record with the young Presley at Sun Records. Over four years, the pair cut some hugely influential sides with the King, ‘That’s All Right Mama’ (1954), ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (both 1957) among them. One problem, however, was the sharp practice of Colonel Tom Parker as Elvis’s star went supernova. Believing his charge to be a level above the others (and more than a little concerned at Black’s often commanding stage presence), Parker was not prepared to pay Scotty and Bill much more than a basic union wage. By 1958 the pair had cut and run. As frontman for Bill Black’s Combo, Black – strangely forgotten by many today – was as prolific as he was successful: in six years he recorded a remarkable fourteen albums, shifting 5 million units.

Early in 1965, Bill Black was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Devastated, and feeling his time was limited, he signed over responsibilities for the band to guitarist Bob Tucker (who would front them into the 1980s) before undergoing the first of three operations. On 8 October, after the third operation, Black slipped into a coma from which he did not recover, and died two weeks later at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis – the very same hospital at which Presley himself was pronounced dead, nearly twelve years later (
August 1977).
Although visiting Black’s widow, Evelyn, and three children, a saddened Elvis Presley did not attend his former friend’s funeral, fearing that his presence would ‘turn it into a circus’.

DECEMBER

Thursday 9

Eddie Sulik

(Sagamore, Pennsylvania, 2 October 1929)

The Echoes

Rockabilly has never been noted as a genre for throwing up heart-throbs, but Eddie Sulik, with his immaculate hair, cleft chin and composed offcamera gaze when on photo duty, was surely one of the few. A comparative latecomer to fame, Sulik was, in his early career, one half of The Echoes, a popular Nashville vocal duo who scored a few minor hits with Columbia. A return to solo work and a seemingly endless schedule of club dates kept Sulik’s clear vocal tones in the public ear during the early sixties, his oeuvre drawn from rock ‘n’ roll, country, pop and Latin. His success was still fairly regional, but in 1965, a recording/publishing deal with guitar-giant Chet Atkins and Archie Bleyer of Cadence Records looked to be on the cards.

Eddie Sulik never made the meeting that would probably have changed his life. The night before the conference in New York City, Sulik was killed in an automobile crash near his home in Connecticut; the songs he had prepared on tape for Atkins and Bleyer remained unheard until released by Sulik’s son, Eddie Jr, as
A Farewell Legacy
some thirty-four years later.