The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (143 page)

Miles Davis succumbed to pneumonia in conjunction with a stroke and respiratory failure in a Los Angeles hospital on 28 September 1991.

OCTOBER

Thursday 10

Gamble Rogers

(James Gamble Rogers IV - Winter Park, Florida, 31 January 1937)

The Serendipity Singers

A folk singer and writer in the traditional style, Gamble Rogers had already nurtured a reputation before taking on lead-guitar duties with The Serendipity Singers, a vast pop-folk ensemble formed at the University of Colorado. A popular booking on such enormously popular television showcases as
The Tonight Show
and
The Ed Sullivan Show,
the group enjoyed a big-selling hit with ‘Don’t Let the Rain Come Down (Crooked Little Man)’ (1964). Rogers left the group within two years, however, becoming something of a mainstay in the media, where his music and his dramatizations – including the PBS television screenplay
The Waterbearer
– continued to impress into the nineties.

Rogers was enjoying a day’s rest at Flagler Beach near St Augustine, Florida, when his attention was drawn to a man apparently in difficulties in the water. Diving to his assistance, Gamble Rogers was sucked under by the heavy current, drowning before dozens of horrified onlookers. Following the incident, local recreation area Winter Park was renamed in his honour, while his protégé Jimmy Buffett dedicated an album,
Fruitcakes
(1994), to Roger’s memory.

Friday 25

Bill Graham

(Wolfgang Grajonca - Berlin, Germany, 8 January 1931)

One of the few non-musician entrepreneurs to find his way into
The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars,
Bill Graham was a celebrity in his own right, a significant figure whose business nous made it possible for some of America’s most influential leftfield bands to play major venues. His father died in an accident just days after his birth, and Wolfgang Grajonca and his brother lived in an orphanage in Germany before emigrating to New York. Changing his name to Bill Graham, the young manager’s success in raising funds for the defence of his San Francisco Mime Troupe (undergoing investigation for obscenity) by putting on a benefit music show started him off as a rock promoter. Further such benefits saw early performances by The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Graham’s attempts to seize control of the Fillmore – San Fran’s leading venue – saw him briefly incarcerated, but the entrepreneur was not to be denied. He relaunched the venue as ‘Fillmore West’ (simultaneously opening a New York counterpart, ‘Fillmore East’) and put on ‘controversial’ rock acts such as The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Santana and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Leaving the venues to concentrate on larger projects, he oversaw such events as Live Aid (1985).

The original Fillmore closed in 1989, following damage during the San Francisco earthquake. Then, with plans underway to revamp the classic auditorium, Graham was killed in a freak helicopter accident: the craft attempted to gain height during a severe storm, hit a transmission tower and exploded. The promoter (who had been attending a concert by that archrock ‘n’ roll rebel Huey Lewis) and two others on board, including the pilot, died in the crash.

NOVEMBER

Friday 8

Dave Rowbotham

(Manchester, 1958)

The Durutti Column

The Mothmen

(Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls)

Dave Rowbotham had played with gifted Durutti Column founder Vini Reilly in The Invisible Girls, the late-seventies project of ex-Penetration singer Pauline Murray, a sort of newwave supergroup that also featured Buzzcocks drummer John Maher. The guitarist/bassist recorded a number of discs with Reilly before the latter took the project forward as a solo affair. At a loss, Rowbotham and other Column-ites formed The Mothmen, releasing
Pay Attention
(1981) on On-U Sound. The sophomore record
One Black Dot
appeared a year later, but the band split acrimoniously shortly after. The remainder of the band enjoyed success with Simply Red, while the rest of the decade was quiet for Rowbotham, apart from playing several sessions with Factory. He managed to find his way into some fairly dubious company.

At the end of a traumatic year for Factory, Dave Rowbotham’s body was discovered at his Burnage flat some time after his death: the guitarist had been murdered with a lathe hammer. Although no one has ever stood trial for his killing, a clue came to the surface in the otherwise-impenetrable lyrics of ‘Cowboy Dave’, a track on the album
Yes, Please!
(1992) by former Factory cohorts Happy Mondays. It was widely suspected that an S&M-loving former companion of Rowbotham’s was responsible for the atrocity: frantically seeking drugs – or the money to score them – the anonymous woman is thought to have taken out her desperation on the hapless musician.

See also
Tony Wilson (
August 2007). Early Durutti Column vocalist Colin Sharp died in September 2009.

Sunday 24

Freddie Mercury

(Farrokh Bulsara - Stone Town, Zanzibar, 5 September 1946)

Queen

(Various acts)

‘I’ve had more lovers than Liz Taylor. I’ve tried relationships on both sides, male and female.
And all of them were wrong.’

Freddie Mercury

A year punctuated by a spate of AIDS-related demises saved the biggest name to succumb to the disease until last. Yet, until just two days before his death, Queen’s outlandish figurehead had, for reasons that remain undisclosed, kept his condition a secret from the world. The grief that followed Mercury’s passing was, however, quickly replaced by a cascade of celebration of his time in the spotlight; in an industry increasingly dependent upon background figures, Mercury was considered by most to have been rock ‘n’ roll’s last consummate showman.

Mercury was originally Farrokh Bulsara, a Zanzibar-born boy who had seen something of the world, having attended boarding school in Panchgani, India, before his parents took him and his younger sister to England in 1964. Turning down the suggestion that he might attend music school, the grade-four pianist earned instead a diploma in illustration at Ealing College of Art in 1969. Nonetheless, Bulsara took his first steps into the music business, his remarkable multi-octave voice developing as he fronted a succession of smalltime groups (including school-band The Hectics, Sour Milk Sea, Wreckage and Ibex) before running a market art-and-fashion stall with drummer Roger Taylor, whose band Smile recruited him as singer. Joining guitarist Brian May and bassplayer John Deacon, the pair founded Queen (the now-renamed Freddie Mercury’s choice, over Taylor’s Build Your Own Boat), signing with EMI in 1971. (Already recognized as a potential star in the making, Mercury simultaneously recorded The Beach Boys’ ‘I Can Hear Music’ as Larry Lurex.) It was not until the album
Queen II
(1973) that the band broke through. In 1974, they accepted a last-minute
Top of the Pops
slot when a David Bowie promo failed to materialize, and the public had its first real glimpse of the longhaired, spandex-donning Mercury as Queen’s terrific ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ climbed into the UK Top Ten.

Freddie Mercury: Another one bites the dust

The song branded Queen and Mercury to record-buyers; its follow-up, ‘Killer Queen’, was only held from number one by David Essex that autumn. The next year, Queen cracked open the international market in spectacular style. In November 1975, they topped the UK charts for nine weeks with the extravagant, sprawling ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (far from the group’s best record, but these days frequently voted the UK public’s favourite single), simultaneously heading the albums chart with
A Night at the Opera,
replete with its Mercury-designed group crest: both would also find Top Ten placings in the USA. Much of their work was starting to skirt a prog-rock arena that was technically efficient but soulless, though Queen – and especially Mercury – appeared to retain an intelligence and humour not always found in British album rock during the seventies. The singer’s pomp, pose and semi-operatic warbling made him the supreme foil for the band’s cod-classical musicianship. The ‘humour’ only started to pall with 1978’s grim
Jazz
album; its paean to ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and the like not especially well received by Mercury’s growing gay fanbase. There are one or two other horrors among their
oeuvre
(one tries hard to forget 1982’s
Hot Space),
but Queen and Mercury showed they were able to survive critical panning while effortlessly straddling the least likely musical trends: ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ (1979) pre-empted a rockabilly revival to top the US charts; the throbbing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ (1980) somehow headed America’s
black
music chart before giving the band a second Billboard number one; ‘Under Pressure’ (1981), a strong duet with Bowie, showed Queen could stay relevant in a clinical eighties pop market.