The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (79 page)

Chapin’s funeral at Huntington was attended by his parents, three brothers, widow and five surviving children. Elektra Records set up a memorial fund, which has raised some $5 million for charitable concerns in the years since its inception. Chapin’s daughter, Jen – a respected singer/songwriter in her own right – maintains the charitable work for the WHY (World Hunger Year) Foundation, which her father founded three decades ago.

Jim Chapin survived his son by almost thirty years, passing away in July 2009.

AUGUST

Friday 28

Ronnie Self

(Tin Town, Missouri, 5 July 1938)

How Ronnie Self didn’t become a big star as rock ‘n’ roll kicked in during the late fifties is something of a riddle: he had all the charisma and attitude of a Gene Vincent and, some say, the voice of a white Little Richard – but he was known as something of a wild boy in the shit-kickin’ town of his birth. The eldest son of a railroad worker, Self was frequently in trouble for what the press of the day loved to call ‘juvenile delinquency’ – assault and vandalism often high on the agenda. (He also once pursued a teacher with a baseball bat.) Somehow, the 18-year-old Self found it in him to land a songwriting/publishing deal in Nashville, and released a self-penned single, ‘Pretty Bad Blues’ (1956), with ABC. Perhaps he arrived fractionally too soon, as the record didn’t hit. However, Self’s ripped-up stage performance prompted Columbia to sign him up in 1957, so all was far from lost. Self then cut the track he is most readily associated with, the near-psychobilly ‘Bop-aLena’ (1958), which finally climbed the US charts, peaking at sixty-eight. Fittingly, he also recorded the original version of ‘I Fought the Law’ (1961). But Self surprised his small following by refusing a major allstar tour, which most artists would have jumped at, on the grounds that he had recently married and was expecting his first child. The decision proved costly: to Self’s fans, this was about as unrock ‘n’ roll as it came; to his label, it made him unreliable – thus Columbia dropped him. Although he was contracted by Decca shortly after, Self’s recording career was on the decline. He remained a gifted songwriter, and several more hits were forthcoming, most notably for Brenda Lee, whose takes on his ‘Sweet Nothin’s’ and ‘I’m Sorry’ were big sellers in 1960. At the same time, however, Self became self-destructive, complicating his personal life with addiction to booze, recreational drugs and tablets. Often called ‘Mr Frantic’, Self had long been known for his quick temper – now he was starting to lose control publicly. On one notorious occasion, Self burned his few gold discs in front of the offices of BMI in Nashville.

By 1980 Ronnie Self was pronounced unfit for any kind of work and his health deteriorated rapidly thereafter, to a sad, inevitable conclusion in August the next year. Ever a perfectionist, Self left a legacy of thirty-odd recordings, each a nugget of splintering rock ‘n’ roll with a tinge of country. Yet – except in Europe, where he’s still viewed as something of a god – almost nobody remembers him.

Saturday 29

Guy Stevens

(East Dulwich, London, 13 April 1943)

A major player in British rock in the sixties and seventies, Guy Stevens wasn’t so much a manager, producer or musician as all three – which is perhaps why he does not figure as often in rock annals as his mentor Chris Blackwell or contemporaries like Andrew Loog Oldham. Record-junkie Stevens left school early to work as a journalist and disc jockey at the Scene Club, Soho – a nightspot that helped to start the careers of such bands as The Animals and High Numbers (ie, The Who) and was attended by various members of The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Yardbirds. Stevens later became an A & R executive at Island, where he ran the label’s Sue subsidiary. In this capacity, he unearthed some highly influential acts, displaying an uncanny knack for naming them. Perhaps most famously, he named Procol Harum after his beloved pet cat. Unfortunately, Stevens was not around to enjoy that band’s early success with ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (for the title of which he is also rumoured to be responsible) in 1967 as he was serving a sentence in Wormwood Scrubs for drug possession. While inside, Stevens was taken with the title
Mott: The Hoople
– a novel by Willard Manus. During his time producing the band to whom he suggested the name, Stevens’s drug- and alcohol-fuelled behaviour really began to show: on one occasion he destroyed a studio clock when it appeared that a session was running over, on another he filled a piano with beer to make it ‘sound better’. Also producing Free, Traffic and Nirvana (the earlier band of that name), by the end of the 1970s Guy Stevens had embraced the new wave, working on The Clash’s timeless
London Calling.

Patrick Campbell-Lyons of Nirvana encountered a drunken Guy Stevens in 1980, and said later: ‘A dishevelled figure mumbled something indistinguishable to me as I passed him. I recognized the person as Guy, and I knew it was near the end of his story.’ And so it proved. His life apparently having fallen apart, Stevens suffered a heart attack in 1981 after overdosing on prescription tablets, dying at the age of just thirty-eight. Some reports have him falling down a flight of stairs, much like Kit Lambert earlier in the year
(
April 1981);
if this is true, he would be the second of three British rock managers to die in such a manner during 1981 alone – Michael Dempsey, of The Adverts, being the third, in December.

DECEMBER

Wednesday 9

Sonny Til

(Earlington Carl Tilghman - Baltimore, Maryland, 8 August 1925)

The Orioles

Tall and lanky, Sonny Til was an unlikely sex symbol, but once he opened his mouth and that true, mellow tenor issued forth, the female contingent of his audience were generally putty in his hands. Til (Tilghman, as was) had returned from the Second World War a hero, only to be thrown by an enthusiastic girlfriend into the lesser battlefield of talent contests. Til knew he could do it – he’d entertained the troops at many a USO show in his time.

In 1948, a vocal quintet named The Vibranaires – Til, Alexander Sharp (tenor), George Nelson (baritone), Johnny Reed (bass) and guitarist Tommy Gaither – finished a poor third in Arthur Godfrey’s radio
Talent Scouts
contest but provoked such a reaction that they were asked back twice anyway. By July they were The Orioles and – managed by songwriter Deborah Chessler – and found themselves cutting sides for the Jubilee label. The first hit was ‘It’s Too Soon to Know’ (1948), which rose to number one on the R & B listings and also became a sizeable pop hit. More hits arrived and, with Til’s unique sound and natural stage presence, The Orioles were a sensation throughout 1949. But needless to say, it was all too good to be true. Sales slipped a shade during 1950, then The Orioles were beset by tragedy and drama. In November, the distinctive Tommy Gaither was killed and two other band members injured in a horrific car accident (
Pre-1965),
while in 1951 another close call behind the wheel was followed by the attempts of a young (apparently suicidal) female fan to extort money from Til. Between then and 1955, most of the original line-up were to disappear, while Sonny Til remained in great demand, continuing to record as Orioles lead as well as solo and in duet with teenage prodigy Edna McGriff.

Keeping The Orioles’ name alive proved a tough call for Sonny Til, though he did manage to perform under the name in some shape or form until 1980. Of the original Orioles, only Reed lived long enough to see the group inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1998: Nelson survived both car crashes only to die from an asthma attack aged thirty-three (1959), while Sharp – by then a member of The Ink Spots – passed away after a cardiac arrest (1970). A diabetes sufferer, Til died at Veterans’ Memorial Hospital, Baltimore, also from a heart attack – though at just fifty-six, he was scarcely a ‘veteran’.

Later Orioles singer Delton McCall died in
May 2008.

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1981:

Michael Dempsey
(UK manager of punk band The Adverts who also edited the
Sniffin’ Glue
fanzine; fell down a flight of stairs while changing a light bulb, and died of internal bleeding the next day, 6/12)

Carl Feaster
(US doo-wop vocalist with The Chords, who hit US #2 in 1953 with ‘Sh-boom’ - one of the first black hits to gain a white audience; born 24/9/1930; cancer, 23/1)