The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (139 page)

‘Death and black metal is something ordinary mortals should fear, not make into a trend! Those who don’t like blood and rotten flesh thrown in their faces can
fuck off
!’

Dead, in 1990

Saturday 20

Steve Marriott

(Bow, London, 30 January 1947)

The Small Faces

Humble Pie

(Various acts)

He became one of the most distinctive voices in early British rock, but had circumstances been different, Steve Marriott could have followed the acting path he started down as a boy. Dismissed from school, he found his way into the cast of Lionel Bart’s stage version of
Oliver,
also making an appearance in the Peter Sellers film
Heaven’s Above.
Association with the keen-eared Andrew Loog Oldham diverted Marriott towards music and, after some abortive solo work – and a few pub dates with future cohort Peter Frampton, as The Moments – he made the transition to front The Small Faces. The key line-up – Marriott (vocals, guitar), Ronnie Lane (bass), Ian McLagan (organ) and Kenney Jones (drums) – headed up the rising mod movement of early sixties London, though this seminal R & B/ pop act inevitably outgrew it. Of their twelve UK chart entries for Decca and Immediate – which included classics such as ‘Sha La La La Lee’ (1966), the number one ‘All Or Nothing’ (1966) and ‘Tin Soldier’ (1967) – only ‘Itchycoo Park’ (1967) broke America, rare at a time when most British acts were hitting constantly in the US. The group’s dabblings with LSD produced the remarkable
Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake
(1968), which presaged a psychedelic turn as it, too, topped the UK charts. Something of a wild boy, Marriott was The Small Faces’ focal point, at one stage deemed a likely frontman for Led Zeppelin. Instead – partly in anger at Decca’s release of ‘Lazy Sunday’ (1968), which he’d intended as a joke – Marriott left The Small Faces in 1969 to create Humble Pie, a more progressive unit which featured his old sparring partner Frampton (ex-The Herd, guitar) as well as Greg Ridley (ex-Spookytooth, bass) and Jerry Shirley (drums). Marriott’s only UK hit in this guise was ‘Natural Born Bugie’ (1969), though several albums made reasonable showings thereafter. While his former colleagues cleaned up as The Faces, Marriott subsequently recorded alone and with his seventies touring band, Packet Of Three. He also featured on recordings by a number of other artists; meanwhile, his dog can be heard on Pink Floyd’s
Meddle.

The Small Faces - McLagan, Lane, Marriott and Jones: Soon able to afford a jacket each

Settling for a lower profile during the next decade, Marriott made himself comfortable in his sprawling sixteenth-century home in Arkeston, near Saffron Walden in Essex (a venue for several episodes of BBC drama
Lovejoy).
Towards the end of 1990, Marriott and Frampton began writing together, the singer/guitarist visiting his friend’s home in Los Angeles to set the project in motion. Apparently dog-tired after the lengthy flight home, Marriott consumed a few drinks and slumped, jet-lagged and asleep – with a lit cigarette in his hand. Fire authorities found his body the following morning, dead from smoke inhalation: the musician had attempted to escape, but – according to paramedics – owing to the vast amounts of alcohol, cocaine and prescription drugs in his system, he had been unable to. A treasure trove of rock ‘n’ roll relics and artefacts was also lost for ever.

See also
Ronnie Lane (
June 1997); Greg Ridley (
November 2003)

Tuesday 23

Johnny Thunders

(John Anthony Genzale Jr - Leesburg, Florida, 15 July 1952)

The New York Dolls

Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers

(Actress)

(Various acts)

‘The rock ‘n’ roll Dean Martin of heroin!’

Richard Hell - very much Thunders’ ‘Joey Bishop’

New York prototype glam-punk guitarist Johnny Thunders donned women’s blouses and dolled himself up at a time when few US artists dared to do so. Hard as it is to believe, at school in New York he’d wanted to pursue a career as a sportsman, excelling in baseball far more than his studies, but the longhaired outcast was never going to fit in with the jocks. Instead, the young Genzale, adopting the name Johnny Volume, fronted a rock band, The Jaywalkers, creating the blueprint for his murky blues-influenced rock guitar style. Attracting like-minded friends in Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane (bass) and Billy Murcia (drums), he formed Actress, which morphed into the seminal line-up of The New York Dolls by 1971 – with the addition of schoolfriend Sylvain Sylvain
(ne
Mizrahi, guitar) and highly distinctive vocalist David Johansen. Record sales were never huge, but with punk, metal and newwave luminaries admitting a substantial debt, The Dolls were to prove one of the most influential acts of the epoch. They put together a couple of suitably murky albums too:
New York
Dolls
(1973) and
Too Much, Too Soon
(1974).

The band’s first of many encounters with the darker side, though, occurred with the ontour death of Murcia (
November 1972)
(the drummer was replaced by Jerry Nolan). Far from pulling the band to its senses, this loss heralded a public relationship with drugs that would inform much of their songs’ subject matter and run to some inevitable conclusions. Despite later management by one Malcolm McLaren and some very odd changes in image, The Dolls never fully caught on (at least, not at the time); Thunders left during a 1975 tour to fashion the popular Heartbreakers with Nolan and Richard Hell (the former Television bassist and future Voidoids frontman), brushing with McLaren again as the band frequently opened for The Sex Pistols. Playing on Thunders’s increasingly strung-out image, early publicity for The Heartbreakers included posters bearing the legend ‘Catch ‘em while they’re still alive!’, but the group somehow still came up with the excellent
LAMF
on Track Records (1977). After the breakup of the band, Thunders’s further recorded work was mainly in a solo capacity (1978’s
So Alone
is well worth digging up), though he did link up with MC5 guitarist/singer Wayne Kramer in Gangwar, later fronting The Living Dead (with Sid Vicious) and Oddballs, at one point even playing with Steve Marriott, whom he was to survive by just three days (
April 1991).
But Thunders’s addiction to heroin was critical now, and the musician was effectively kept going by his management and friends. Throughout his life Thunders – who was supposedly introduced to the drug by Iggy Pop – must have spent countless days wired: one waiter friend at rock hang-out Max’s Kansas City described the guitarist once continuing to hold a conversation with him while his face was immersed in a fish dinner.