The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (127 page)

Ewan MacColl
(noted Scots folk stalwart who composed ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ for wife Peggy; also father of the late Kirsty MacColl; born James Miller, Auchterarder, 25/1/1915; heart attack, 22/10)

Chris ‘Biffa’ McCaffrey
(UK bassist with shamefully ignored Liverpool guitar band The Pale Fountains; brain tumour after a motorbike crash)

Ron Morgan
(US guitarist with Three Dog Night and The Electric Prunes; born
c
1945; hepatitis C)

Dámaso Pérez ‘Prez’ Prado
(Cuban pianist/band-leader and ‘Mambo King’ who scored a 10-week #1 with ‘Cherry Pink & Apple Blossom White’ in 1955; born Mantanzas, 11/12/1916; stroke, 14/9)

D Lucifer Steele
(US drummer with Colorado black-metal act Satan’s Host; born Robert Evans; murdered, possibly by an anti-Satanist pressure group)

Nicky Thomas
(Jamaican reggae singer who recorded the definitive version of ‘Love of the Common People’; born Cecil Thomas, Portland, 30/5/1944; heart attack or suicide)

Steve Wahrer
(US surf-rock drummer with The Trashmen, who nailed a Top Five hit with 1963’s ‘Surfin’ Bird’; born Minnesota, 22/11/1941; oesophageal cancer, 21/1)

1990

JANUARY

Thursday 18

Mel Appleby

(Melanie Susan Appleby - East London, 11 July 1966)

Mel & Kim

Remembered by most as the act that made the work of Stock, Aitken & Waterman just about bearable, Mel & Kim enjoyed brief UK chart domination with a run of house-flavoured pop hits between 1986 and 1988. In true Human League style, both girls were spotted dancing in a nightclub by the production team, who, for once, discovered something worth pursuing. It was only when massive success beckoned that Mel’s previous
métier
as a nude model was inevitably unearthed by the tabloids.

The splendidly ‘up’ ‘Showing Out’ took Mel & Kim to UK number three at the end of 1986, its follow-up ‘Respectable’ reaching number one just three months later – the pair of singles shifted a combined 750,000 copies for the now-hot duo. The songs were also sizeable international hits and were followed by two further Top Ten singles and a 3-million-selling album,
FLM (Fun, Love and Money)
(1987). By now, though, the news that Mel Appleby had been diagnosed with spinal cancer was leaking to the outside world. The sisters, for some reason, continued to deny this in public, though Mel was shortly forced into retirement and the secret was thus out. Her death at the start of 1990 was met with many tributes. Kim Appleby pursued a briefly successful solo career thereafter.

Mel
(left
) & Kim: Fun, love, money and extravagant headgear

Tuesday 23

Allen Collins

(Jacksonville, Florida, 19 July 1952)

Lynyrd Skynyrd The Rossington-Collins Band

(The Allen Collins Band)

Beginning a career marked as much by personal catastrophe as it would be by international acclaim, guitarist Allen Collins left his school band The Mods, hooking up in 1965 with buddies Ronnie Van Zant (vocals) and Gary Rossington (guitar) to form an embryonic version of the future Southern rock megastars under the name My Backyard. After recording one 1968 single with a local label, the group – completed by early members Larry Jungstrom (bass) and Bob Burns (drums) – became Lynyrd Skynyrd, in commemoration of a former gym teacher who had given members a hard time years before. After various other line-up changes, Skynyrd scored their first hit album with
Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd
(1973), and quickly followed it with two more gold discs and million-sellers in the 1976 live double
One More for the Road
and the final, grimly prophetic
Street Survivors
(1977). By the last album, what is generally considered to be the definitive roster of Lynyrd Skynyrd was set at Collins, Van Zant, Rossington and newer boys Steve Gaines (guitar), Leon Wilkeson (bass), Billy Powell (keyboards) and Artimus Pyle (drums), ahead of the much-anticipated ‘Tour of the Survivors’, which would also feature the band’s back-up girl vocalists, The Honkettes. The tour ended in disaster with the light-aircraft crash that killed Van Zant, Gaines, his Honkette sister, Cassie Gaines, and road manager Dean Kilpatrick and injured Collins and the others (
October 1977)

For Collins, the tragedy that ended an era for his band was merely a precursor to the heartbreak-ing concluding years of his own life. After forming The Rossington-Collins Band with his previous co-guitarist, the musician lost his wife, Kathy Johns, during her third pregnancy and immersed himself in his music, dedicating the new group’s album
This is the Way
(1981) to her memory. After the demise of the shortlived Allen Collins Band, the guitarist drove his brand-new Thunderbird off the road in January 1986. The crash was so severe that the guitarist was left paralysed from the waist down; his girlfriend, Debra Jean Watts, was killed, and the crippled Collins was convicted of manslaughter and commanded to use his fame to warn the young against drinking and driving. Never fully recovering, Allen Collins appeared briefly with a 1987 tenth-anniversary reformation of Lynyrd Skynyrd (playing in a wheelchair) but finally passed away after contracting pneumonia in 1989, the illness exacerbated by his decreased lung capacity, a product of his permanent disability.

See also
Leon Wilkeson (
July 2001); Billy Powell (
January 2009). Allen Collins Band vocalist Jimmy Dougherty died in January 2008.

Peter Sweval

(Piet Sweval - Toms River, New Jersey, 13 April 1948)

Looking Glass

On the same day, the field of commercial heavy rock lost Peter Sweval, a bass-player who had found brief fame not once but twice during the seventies. Looking Glass was formed as a frat-house pastime while members Sweval, Elliot Lurie (vocals/guitar), Larry Gonsky (piano) and Jeff Grob (drums) prepared to graduate from Rutgers University, New Jersey. The musicians reconvened after leaving college and were stunned to find themselves signed to Columbia; heaven knows how they must have felt when their third single, the Lurie-penned ‘Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)’ – originally a B-side, topped the Billboard charts in the summer of 1972. Despite this mass acceptance of their work, Looking Glass were unable to repeat the success.