Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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This tome is dedicated
to my soul sister
MARY MAGDALENE—
the first groupie
R
ock and roll is over four decades old. Frightening but true. When Etta James belted out “Roll with Me, Henry” in 1955, she was boldly begging for some all-night-long S-E-X. “Insistent savagery” is how the 1956
Encyclopaedia Britannica
described the fearsome “youth” music. Swivel-hipped god Elvis, with a face full of pancake makeup and eyes rimmed with dark blue eye shadow, was chopped at waist level on “The Ed Sullivan Show” for inciting a steamy sexual riot among pubescent girls all over America. I was one of them, though still in a state of prepubescent curiosity. But when the Beatles made it onto the “Sullivan Show” a few years later, my hormones were dribbling out of my ears as I slobbered all over the screen. Their first album was called
Meet the Beatles.
And that’s just what I wanted to do.
Rock-and-roll panic grew and grew to unbelievable proportions while alarmed and bemused parents shook their heads in dismay. Huge stars were created almost overnight (and uncreated just as quickly). Suddenly an important group of humanity—teenagers—were ready to shake, rattle, and roll,
idolizing and emulating the rockers who inspired such instant, hard-hitting, high-flying sexual and social rebellion.
I am a daughter of rock and roll. My very first records were Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock”/ “Treat Me Nice” and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.” I was nine years old. I’ve got to admit those two hunks of vinyl set the tone for the rest of my life. All was calm in suburbia until Elvis told me that when he walked through the door, I had better be polite, and Jerry Lee broke my will, but what a thrill. I wanted to kiss the asses of those who inspired my soul and made me hot. And nothing was going to stop me. Armed with this awestruck determination, I eventually incited my own kind of infamy becoming a rock courtesan supreme, being carted across the country by various rock gods, forming my own all-girl band, the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), with the late avant-genius Frank Zappa at the helm. He produced our record,
Permanent Damage,
in 1970, and Jeff Beck was a guest guitarist. Roderick “the Mod” Stewart (as he was called then) sang some backup vocals. I was in my element. I needed to be near what moved me so deeply that I wanted to climb inside Jimmy Page’s guitar, hold Keith Moon’s drumsticks, be in the room with Hendrix when he dropped a handful of acid and spewed fantastic cosmic wisdom. It was a heady existence, full of tightrope tension with a backbeat.
Rock stardom can be outrageously rewarding, but along with the onerous fame, massive amounts of money, and way too much backstage naughtiness of every description come the stresses and strains of chronic mass adulation. Sheltered, isolated, and protected, with every absurd whim catered to, rock stars are often the sacrificial lambs of their own success—and excess. Inspiring their fans to tortured, worshipful frenzy, rock stars often come to believe that they are above (or below) most of the laws that apply to the rest of us, taking madcap chances, teetering majestically on that invisible ragged edge in a tattered velvet cloak, while half the world watches. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and the keening wail freed the soul of rock and roll. Anything went. Anything goes. And it’s not always pretty.
Little Frankie Lymon was not quite fourteen when he had his first smash hit with the Teenagers in 1955, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” written for a schoolgirl he had a crush on. A few more hits followed in those early sweet-beat years of rock and roll, and then Frankie went solo with “Goody Goody.” But by the time little Frankie Lymon was twenty years old, his high-pitched angel voice had deepened and he had a heroin habit. Nobody cared about him anymore. He got a few lip-synching dates, played some record hops, and tried to clean up, but just couldn’t seem to do it. Frankie got married and had to pimp out his young wife to keep up his habit. Dreaming of a comeback, he moved to Hollywood and rekindled a relationship with the Platters’ Zola Taylor. He married her, even though he was married already. He messed with
Zola’s life and she wanted an annulment, telling the papers that her marriage to Frankie had been “a joke.” (“He ain’t my stick,” she said.) Back with wife number one, Frankie was arrested for theft and heroin possession. After a brief stint in the army (he was dishonorably discharged), Frankie married wife number three in 1967. On February 28, 1968, he was found on the bathroom floor of his grandmother’s Harlem apartment, dead from an overdose of heroin. No longer a teenager, Frankie had made it to the ripe old age of twenty-six. Years later the three Mrs. Lymons and their lawyers became involved in a heated battle over massive back royalties for “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The legal wranglings continued for years. Finally, in 1992, a federal court proclaimed the winner. It wasn’t a Mrs. Lymon at all, but the two Teenagers—Jimmy Merchant and Herman Santiago. The court found that they were the song’s authors and awarded them royalties going back to 1969.
He wasn’t called the Killer for nothing. When Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra, the Killer’s career all but stopped in mid-strut as headlines blared CRADLE SNATCHER! After thirteen years of wedded hell, Myra finally filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery and abuse. In 1971 Jerry Lee married Jaren Gunn, but wife number four actually had the nerve to sue him for divorce, seeking piles of money Having just plea-bargained to a pot possession misdemeanor charge, Jerry must not have been too happy when Jaren’s divorce lawyers filed charges accusing Jerry of telling Jaren, “If you don’t get off my back and leave me alone, you will end up in the bottom of a lake.” Jaren was found dead at the bottom of a pool on June 8, 1982, weeks before her settlement was supposed to come through. The death was ruled an accident. Jerry Lee’s next wife, twenty-three-year-old Shawn Stephens, didn’t live long either. After a few stormy months of marriage, Shawn told her mother she was going to leave the Killer, but was found dead in her bed the next morning. An investigation by local law enforcement followed. No charges were ever brought against Jerry Lee or anyone else. Jerry Lee tied the knot with the sixth Mrs. Lewis in 1984. She’s still alive.
In 1959, when Danny Rapp of Danny and the Juniors sang his joyous ode to the music he loved, “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” he hadn’t planned on the endless empty years of obscurity that would follow his happy hit records. Finally in 1983 he locked himself in an Arizona motel room and blew his brains out. Depressed over his failing marriage and drug and alcohol problems, Temptations singer Paul Williams shot himself in a parked car in 1973. In 1990 Del Shannon, who hit number one in 1961 with “Runaway,” blew his head off with a shotgun. An old friend of mine, Tommy Boyce of the successful songwriting duo Boyce and Hart (forty-two million records sold!), shot himself in the head just last year. Unable to kick his heroin habit, so did Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.
Skinny little Stiv Bators, founder of the Dead Boys and gothic punk supergroup
Lords of the New Church, has to qualify for the most unusual rock death: On his way home from a club in the middle of the night, Stiv was run over by a car in Paris, but because he was so stoned, he found his way home, fell into bed comatose, and later died of his injuries.
What comes first, the addiction or the rock and roll? Are addictive people attracted to the high-wire lifestyle, or does the madness create the addict? I think the tendency has to be there, but rock stars have endless opportunities to fulfill this compulsion. They were (and are) expected to shoot, hit, sniff, snort, inhale, imbibe, drop, pop, and slop up all sorts of lethal substances in the name of rock and roll.
It seems that heroin has always had a comfy little niche in the rock world. In 1988, the original inspired guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hillel Slovak, OD’d on heroin shortly after the release of the Peppers’ third album,
The Uplift Mofo Party Plan,
missing out on the massive success that followed. Mother Love Bone’s singer/songwriter Andrew Wood cleaned up his habit to record their debut album,
Apple
, for Polydor, but a month before the release date, March 1990, he wanted one more bite, and died from an overdose. Twenty-two-year-old spiky-haired Darby Crash, punk frontman for the Germs, committed heroin suicide in 1980 after only one album on Slash Records. It was rumored that he was having a difficult time with his sexuality. He and one of his few girlfriends planned to leave the planet together, but Darby made sure that his dose was lethal and hers wasn’t. In October 1995, Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon was discovered in the back of the tour bus, slumped in his seat, dead from a heroin overdose. More recently the Stone Temple Pilots had to cancel a slew of tour dates due to singer Scott Wellands’s admitted heroin addiction, which was followed by a long stint in rehab.
If you don’t count the pioneers—bluesman Robert Johnson, who was poisoned by a jealous husband when he was just twenty-seven, or “white man’s blues” country gold Hank Williams, who died in 1953 of drug and alcohol poisoning at age twenty-nine—the first apparent rock-and-roll death occurred on Christmas Eve 1954, when Johnny Ace, a smooth-crooning R&B rocker, blew his head off in between shows in a game of Russian roulette. Twenty-four years later Chicago singer Terry Kath played the same game. There are several versions of the story—he was alone, he was at a party, he shot himself through the head at the breakfast table in front of his family. One thing is sure—Terry Kath played Russian roulette with one of his own guns and he lost the game.
They say the music died on February 3, 1959, when the four-seater plane carrying Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson), and seventeen-year-old Ritchie Valens crashed in an Iowa cornfield, instantly killing the three famous rockers. The seemingly geeky, bespectacled Buddy Holly was the first
rock star to become involved in all aspects of his chosen profession. He performed, wrote, arranged, and played guitar. He had plans to build his own recording studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas. He wanted to produce—himself, as well as new artists. He had a unique vision.
The Winter Dance Party Tour had become an exhausting grind, and Buddy booked the plane for himself and the Crickets, Tommy Allsup, and Waylon Jennings (who, years later, went on to shake up the country world as an “outlaw”), due to the freezing cold and their mechanically challenged tour bus. Image conscious, Buddy was also concerned about his rumpled stage clothes and wanted to have time to do his laundry. At the last minute the Crickets gave their seats to Valens, who flipped a coin for the prized seat on the plane, and to the Big Bopper, who was suffering from a bad cold.
Buddy sang most of his hit singles that night—“Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” “Rave On.” Ritchie Valens had a double-sided hit record with “Donna” and “La Bamba”—the high-school kid from the San Fernando Valley was number two on the Top Ten and a bit overwhelmed by his success. The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” had been on the charts for six months, but he was ill, his wife was pregnant again, and he couldn’t wait to get home. After playing for fifteen hundred teenagers that night, the musicians paid their thirty-six-dollar fees to Dwyer Flying Service, climbed into the Beechcraft Bonanza, and headed into stormy weather. The next morning Buddy Holly’s mother turned on the radio, pleased to hear a string of her son’s hits, then learned about his death from the anguished disc jockey.
Some of the music definitely died that day, but the music has died over and over again. One of the great soul singers of all time, Otis Redding, was poised for crossover success after a kick-ass set at the Monterey Pop Festival and a scintillating rendition of the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” He wrote the sweet ballad “Dock of the Bay” to thank his Monterey audience, but it wasn’t released until two weeks after his plane crashed in Wisconsin’s frozen Lake Monona on December 10, 1967, killing Otis and four members of his band, the Bar-Kays. Otis was twenty-six. For months afterward my band mate Miss Mercy carried around a photo of Otis torn out of
Jet
magazine, frozen stiff in the seat of the plane.
On New Year’s Eve 1985 Rick Nelson and his band died in a small plane once owned by Jerry Lee Lewis, who had sold it due to its constant mechanical problems. The rumor started that Rick had been freebasing on the plane, thereby causing the fiery accident, and though absolutely untrue, the rumor has become the stuff of rock legend. When I interviewed his kids, they said people still ask them how their father could have done such a horrible thing. It breaks them up.
When “Sweet Home Alabama” boogie band Lynyrd Skynyrd lost singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backup singer Cassie Gaines in
a plane crash on October 20, 1977, it seemed they were cursed. Their final tour had been called “Tour of the Survivors,” promoting the album
Street Survivors,
which featured “That Smell,” a song about death. The cover of the album, a photo of the band engulfed in flames, was yanked by the record company after the accident.
I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t as familiar as I should have been with the brilliant soul of Stevie Ray Vaughan until I listened to all his records while writing his chapter for this book. I’m not big on regrets, but I wish I had seen Stevie play live before his helicopter went down on August 27, 1990.
I’ve experienced my own rock casualties. Three members of my all-girl band, the GTOs, are no longer with me. Twenty-three years ago, Miss Christine mysteriously OD’d in a hotel room after mixing up a prescription-drug cocktail; Miss Sandra died of breast cancer, leaving four children; and Miss Lucy died of AIDS three years ago. I miss them a lot. In 1979 my friend Lowell George, who combined boogie funk with R&B in Little Feat, died at thirty-four from just too much booze and coke abuse. He was so talented and so damn sweet. I knew Badfinger’s Tommy Evans, who hung himself in his backyard eight years after his partner, Pete Ham, hanged himself in his garage. I spoke to Tommy’s wife, Marianne, and she told me such a sad tale. Signed to Apple and guided by the Beatles, Badfinger had several lilting pop hits before the music business ate them whole. Apple dissolved, the band was in litigation with Warner Bros., and there were horrendous management problems. When Pete Ham hanged himself in 1975, he left behind a suicide note calling Badfinger’s manager a “soulless bastard.” Tommy gamely tried to carry on, but it proved too much for him. “Tommy had throat problems,” Marianne told me, “spitting out blood, he couldn’t eat … . He was being sued for four million dollars.” Tommy’s son Stephen, six years old at the time, found his father hanging from a tree in the backyard.

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