The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (14 page)

Sensibly shedding her given name, Alexandra Nebedov was something of a prodigy – a gifted artist, actress, dancer and singer, as well as being fluent in several languages. The latter skills proved significant as she scored hit records in French, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew, her best-known English-language song being 1967’s ‘Golden Earrings’. Nebedov was to prove a popular draw in France: within two years of being discovered she had recorded with MOR stars Gilbert Bécaud and Yves Montand. She settled, however, in Munich with her young son.

Constantly on tour, Nebedov was taking a rare vacation in Schleswig-Holstein with her family when her and her mother’s lives were ended by a collision with a truck they were attempting to pass in her Mercedes. What seemed like a tragic and un-avoidable accident was soon shrouded in mystery: it transpired that Nebedov had taken out life insurance that same week and that her son – who survived the crash – had had a year’s schooling pre-paid. The case was reopened in 2004, when reports emerged that the singer might have committed suicide because it had become known that her then-current lover, Pierre Lafaire, had been a US spy.

AUGUST

Monday 5

Luther Perkins

(Tennessee, 8 January 1928)

The Tennessee Two

Guitar-pickin’ Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant formed The Tennessee Two, a struggling but cheery country duo that moonlighted in Memphis bars and cathouses while holding down motor-sales jobs by day. Their major break came along in the shape of showroom-colleague Roy Cash’s younger brother Johnny, who fronted their act. The group was aware of its musical shortcomings, but Sam Phillips at Sun Records could hear a whole new sound in their apparent sparseness. Thus, throughout the late fifties and early sixties, as Johnny Cash’s reputation grew, Perkins and the band – latterly augmented by (unrelated) Carl Perkins – toured the US in Cash’s Plymouth, their genial rough ‘n’ ready style complementary to the singer’s deeply laconic tones.

Luther Perkins’s performance at Cash’s famous Folsom Prison gig proved his last: he died from burns and smoke inhalation a couple of days after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand. Perkins – who had also played with Jerry Lee Lewis – was buried in Henderson, Tennessee. He’d been a good friend to Cash, who was so moved by his death that he eulogized him in song and continued to issue the guitarist’s pay cheque to his widow for at least six months afterwards. Perkins’s singing brother, Thomas Wayne Perkins, died equally tragically three years later.

See also
Johnny Cash (
Golden Oldies #16)

SEPTEMBER

Saturday 28

Dewey Phillips

(Crump, Tennessee, 13 May 1926)

If Alan Freed was the DJ who made rock ‘n’ roll popular, largely unsung hero Dewey Phillips was the first to introduce his mainly white listeners to black (so-called race) music – and was almost certainly the first broadcaster to play and interview Elvis Presley. Taking over WHBQ’s
Red Hot & Blue
show in 1949 and introducing a mid-South audience to a different kind of music, Phillips pre-dated John Peel by several decades with wrong speeds, sides, etc., but the man was no slouch either: what had begun as a 15-minute weekly show became three hours, five nights a week, under his guidance. His playing of an acetate of Presley’s ‘That’s All Right, Mama’ in July 1954 was the high point – though a later unauthorized pre-release on his show damaged his relationship with The King.

The ‘formatting’ of radio programmes is not a new phenomenon: following the payola scandal of the late fifties which so damaged Freed, Phillips found himself out of sorts with new-style playlisting, and lost his slot in the shake-up. Ever more reliant on prescription painkillers following a car accident when he was younger, he slipped into decline and, despite finding other radio openings, Phillips’s on-air tomfoolery became harsh and cynical – he was, by the mid sixties, a broken man. He died in his sleep, aged forty-two.

See also
Alan Freed (
January 1965)

OCTOBER

Thursday 31

Malcolm Hale

(Butte, Montana, 17 May 1941)

Spanky & Our Gang

Formed in Illinois in 1965, Spanky & Our Gang were occasionally looked upon as a poor man’s Mamas & The Papas, the group’s disciplined harmonies more than reminiscent of their better-known Californian contemporaries. Hale was a working singer/multi-instrumentalist when he met Chicago-based Oz Bach (bass), Nigel Pickering (guitar) and Elaine ‘Spanky’ McFarlane, the latter a washboard-toting singer who had performed with jazz/folk/protest act The New Wine Singers. As if that name weren’t awful enough, the new group had become Spanky & Our Gang by the time they recruited Hale as a guitarist and drummer. A brief flurry of hits on Mercury began with ‘Sunday Will Never Be the Same Again’ (1967), a US Top Ten single rejected originally by rival bands The Left Banke and – yes – The Mamas & The Papas.

Malcolm Hale, who arranged much of the group’s work, died suddenly at his Chicago apartment at the age of twenty-seven. There have been conflicting verdicts of ‘walking’ pneumonia or cirrhosis of the liver, though some reports also suggest that he may have died as a result of carbon-monoxide poisoning due to a faulty heater. Either way, it proved pretty much the end of the line for the group. McFarlane left to have a baby (though she reformed the group in 1975), and later member Lefty Baker died just three years later
(
August
1971), Bach (
September 1998)
and Nigel Pickering some decades after.

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1968:

Bruce Cloud
(US second tenor with vocal group Billy Ward & The Dominoes; born c 1932; when his solo career failed to take off, tragically he killed his wife and child before committing suicide)

Red Foley
(US country singer who recorded ‘Old Shep’ and was father-in-law to Pat Boone; born Clyde Julian Foley, Kentucky, 16/7/1910; heart attack, 19/9)

Little Walter
(US bluesman; born Marion Walter Jacobs, Louisiana, 1/5/1930; died from a blood clot promoted by injuries sustained in a Chicago street fight, 15/2)

Skeets McDonald
(US honky-tonk singer; born Enos McDonald, Arkansas, 1/10/1915; heart attack, 31/3)