The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (112 page)

See also
Bobby Lester (
October 1980); Marvin Gaye (
April 1984); Harvey Fuqua (
Golden Oldies #115)

MAY

Sunday 3

Dalida

(Yolande Christina Gigliotti - Shoubra, Cairo, 17 January 1933)

Born to an Italian opera violinist and his wife, Yolande Gigliotti was a former Miss Egypt whose looks and voice helped her carve out a niche as both an actress and a singer. Almost as soon as she’d won the title, Gigliotti headed to France in order to exploit her sudden fame: inevitably, one branch of her twin-pronged career attack was to prove more successful than the other, and – despite having appeared on film with Omar Sharif – it was as a support singer to stalwarts Charles Aznavour and Gilbert Becaud that she made her mark. As ‘Dalida’, she was a huge hit from 1957, selling some 80 million records worldwide during her lifetime.

The flipside of this success and glamour was a personal life that beggared belief, so drenched was it in confusion and tragedy. Dalida left her first husband and original mentor, Lucien Morisse, for artist Jean Sobieski in 1961 – just months after the couple had married; Morisse, unable to cope with his grief, shot himself. In 1966, Dalida began a relationship with her RCA duet partner Luigi Tenco, a volatile man who desired success whatever the cost. Within months, Tenco too was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after Italy’s San Remo Festival
(
January
1967).
Dalida shortly thereafter tried to take her own life with sleeping pills. She recovered but, having put her life back into some sort of order after these events, then fell into a relationship with less-than-reputable playboy Richard Chanfray. The former convict – best known for his odd claim on French television to be the Count of St Germain – continued the macabre trend by killing himself in 1983, just as the couple planned to marry. Crushed beyond hope of any meaningful recovery, Dalida sought solace in Hinduism, but life now had little left for her. She returned to acting in the 1986 movie
Le Sixième Jour,
but it would be her last artistic statement.

‘Life has become unbearable - please forgive me.’

Dalida’s suicide note

In April 1987, Dalida sold her car, many of her belongings and, significantly, changed her will. She then lowered the blinds of her bedroom and swallowed a lethal dose of pills. Dalida was posthumously remembered by a monument in the Cimitière de Montmartre and on a French postage stamp issued ten years after her death.

Monday 4

Paul Butterfield

(Chicago, Illinois, 17 December 1942)

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Paul Butterfield’s aptitude for the blues stemmed directly from Hyde Park, the predominantly black area in which he was born and brought up. A singer and musician, his mastering of the electric Chicago genre earned Butterfield respect from both black and white blues camps – and did much to interweave the two. Butterfield became a good friend to one of his heroes, Muddy Waters, the master occasionally allowing the novice to share stage space with him. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was established properly when Butterfield befriended musician and fellow university student Elvin Bishop, who shared Butterfield’s fascination with the sounds of Chicago’s South Side. It was on the North Side, though, that the band – Butterfield (harmonica/vocals), Bishop (guitar), ex-Howlin’ Wolf backers Jerome Arnold (bass) and Sam Lay (drums), and eventually Michael Bloomfield (lead guitar) – began to find residencies. From here they were lured by producer Paul Rothchild to sign with Elektra Records in 1964. After an edgy beginning, with Butterfield and Bloomfield taking a while to warm to one another’s styles, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band found themselves summoned by Bob Dylan for his first electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The occasion is, of course, legendary: Dylan and the band were roundly heckled by the purists in the crowd – though there were many able to appreciate the breakthrough that was to come.

Although they made some great records, The Blues Band experienced too many defections and line-up changes ever to make a consistent impact. By the end of 1969 key players Bishop and Bloomfield had both left for pastures new, and the frontman tried out other musicians, most notably The Band’s Levon Helm and Rick Danko. Butterfield performed on and off until the early eighties, when he was stricken with peritonitis, a painful stomach condition, which many feel led to his heroin addiction. At around the same time, he was shocked to learn of the drug-related death of former colleague Bloomfield (
February
1981
).

Returning to the stage early in 1987, Paul Butterfield looked to have beaten his twin health and drug issues – until he was found slumped in the kitchen of his Hollywood apartment by his manager. Butterfield was dead at forty-five from intestinal problems.

See also
John Kahn (
May 1996); Rick Danko (
December 1999)