The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (144 page)

It was probably the group’s appearance at Live Aid in 1985 that cemented their position as a UK institution. Freddie Mercury – hair cropped, decked in his uniform of leathers, or vest and jeans, and possessing the now-trademark moustache – stole the charity show with a performance of typical bravado and camp deprecation. He was the complete entertainer, yet he kept his private life a closely guarded secret. Although his hedonistic lifestyle and numerous male/female affairs were well known, Mercury never officially came out as bisexual to his fans. Long after a 1980 split with ‘public’ girlfriend Mary Austin, the couple appeared together in what now seems to have been an arrangement for the press. The moving ‘Who Wants to Live Forever?’ – issued on
A Kind of Magic
(1985) – suggests that the singer may have learned he was HIV positive as early as 1984 (when little was known about AIDS). Having confided his bad news to Austin, Mercury’s sudden reversion to monogamy with a final partner, Jim Hutton (later his carer), was also perhaps a clue to his worsening condition. A final concert at Britain’s Knebworth Festival in 1986 announced his retirement from public life, but Mercury and Queen continued to record, with no lessening of sales. In January 1991, the band achieved their third UK number-one single with ‘Innuendo’ (a disquietingly epic production even longer than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’), although no one was any the wiser as to his illness. Mercury’s filmed appearances to promote the record showed him gaunt and frail, beginning a flurry of rumour. The record’s parent album was similarly littered with clues in the shape of tracks such as ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’, ‘These are the Days of Our Lives’ and the stirring ‘The Show Must Go On’.

On 23 November, Mercury finally revealed to the press that he had AIDS and was close to death. The singer had already told friends that he must now dispense with his increasing regime of essential medication and face up to the end. He was now partially sighted, bed-bound and virtually immobile; the last task his friends had to perform was to help Mercury to the bathroom and back. At 7.45 the next evening, Freddie Mercury, the King of Pomp, was dead. With him were several friends, including Hutton, and his beloved pet cats. Mercury was cremated the following day, and his ashes are widely believed to have been scattered at Lake Geneva (a place of which the Queen frontman had been extremely fond and one where his statue was shortly to be unveiled) – though apparently only Austin knows the truth of this matter. To the chagrin of his family, Mercury left 50 per cent of a multimillion-pound inheritance and his Georgian mansion in Kensington – the home in which he died – to Austin in his will; Hutton, by contrast, was left £500K. Much also went to AIDS charities.

Having had a solo career for some years in tandem with his Queen recordings, Mercury secured a posthumous UK number one with ‘Living on My Own’ (1993). Various Queen records have also (unsurprisingly) fared favourably since his death, but the Mercury legacy has in truth become something of a licence to print money, his undoubted craft now diluted to the nth degree following relentless outings by (and with) boy bands, nostalgia-based compilation albums and dubiously conceived musicals featuring his songs.

Eric Carr

(Paul Charles Carravello - Brooklyn, New York, 12 July 1950)

Kiss

(Creation/Mother Nature/Father Time)

Although latterday Kiss drummer Eric Carr’s death was overshadowed by that of Freddie Mercury, it nonetheless proved a difficult twenty-four hours for lovers of stadium glam. Like Mercury, Carr had displayed early promise as an artist before switching to music: his father bought him a Ludwig kit and he soon joined Salt ‘n’ Pepper, a badly named black/ white combo that went on to become Creation. This New York-based funk act kept a loyal fanbase, although they were not to make any kind of breakthrough nationally. Tragedy struck in 1974, when two members of the group died in the notorious Gulliver’s nightclub fire in Westchester (
June 1974);
Carr not only survived, but also pulled band members John and Sarita Henderson to safety. (In deference to the deceased, Creation was renamed not Cremation but Mother Nature/ Father Time.)

Eventually returning to his day job repairing gas stoves, Carr learned that longtime Kiss drummer Peter Criss had left the band and he auditioned to be the schlock-rockers’ new percussionist. Carr inherited not only Criss’s position, but also his ‘fox’ face makeup, as the new-look Kiss went on to even greater success than the original line-up had experienced in the seventies. With them, Carr helped cut eight albums, and a few hit singles including ‘Crazy Crazy Nights’ (UK, 1987) and ‘Forever’ (US, 1990).

A final cover of Argent’s ‘God Gave Rock ‘n’ Roll to You’ reached the British Top Five in the wake of Carr’s death, though the drummer appeared only in the record’s promo, having by this time been replaced for recordings – somewhat crassly, given his open-heart surgery in April 1991. Eric Carr succumbed to a cerebral haemorrhage while in hospital in New York.

See also
Mark St John (
April 2007)

DECEMBER

Tuesday 10

Headman Tshabalala

(South Africa, 10 October 1945)

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

One of four brothers who founded the celebrated a cappella ‘isicathamiya’ group Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 1964, Tshabalala gained international prominence when the ten-strong troupe contributed harmonies to Paul Simon’s multiplatinum
Graceland
album (1986). LBM’s performance on the record may have been well received by Simon’s huge fanbase, but it sat uncomfortably with many others in light of the anti-apartheid boycott of South African musicians imposed by the UN.

Finding himself involved in a roadside scuffle with an off-duty highway security guard – who was later charged with his murder – Tshabalala was fatally shot in Pinetown, near Durban. It is widely believed that the murder was racially motivated. Since his passing, Ladysmith Black Mambazo have become one of the biggest-selling African groups in the world, receiving a Grammy and numerous commissions for endorsement work – though other members of the family, Nellie Shabalala and Ben Shabalala, also died in shooting incidents during the next decade.

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1991:

Chris Bender
(teenage US R & B singer whose
Draped
album cracked the Billboard listings; born Massachusetts, 2/8/1972; shot as he waited in a car near his mother’s home, 3/11)

Jerome Brisch
(US singer, aka Alex Deluxe/Presley Haskell, with rated newwave bands The Haskells and In a Hot Coma; born Wisconsin, 29/2/1952; murdered while out walking his dog, 16/5)

Terry ‘Tex’ Carson
(UK bassist with Merseybeat band The Dennisons; multiple sclerosis - singer Eddie Parry died of a heart attack three years later)

Roger Christian
(US DJ, actor and prolific ‘surf’ songwriter; born New York, 3/7/1934; suicide, 11/7)

Odia Coates
(US soul/gospel vocalist with The Edwin Hawkins Singers who also scored major hits in duet with Paul Anka; born Mississippi, 1942; breast cancer, 19/5)

‘Tennessee’ Ernie Ford
(hugely popular US country/ pop singer who topped the UK charts with ‘Give Me Your Word’ and ‘Sixteen Tons’, the latter also a US #1; born - guess - 13/2/1919; liver failure, 17/10)

Jacques Morali
(US disco writer/producer who created The Village People; born 1947; AIDS, 15/11)

Paula Pierce
(distinctive US guitarist/songwriter with garage punks The Pandoras, Direct Hits and Rage; born California, 23/6/1960; aneurysm, 10/8)

Buck Ram
(formidable US R & B manager/songwriter who penned classics like ‘The Great Pretender’ and ‘Only You’ for The Platters; born Samuel Ram, Illinois, 21/11/1907; natural causes, 1/1)

Vince Taylor
(noted UK rockabilly singer/guitarist who was somehow bigger in France; born Brian Holden, London, 14/7/1949; a recluse for most of his later years, he succumbed to cancer, 28/8)

J Frank Wilson
(US singer with rock band The Cavaliers, who hit #2 with ‘death disc’ ‘Last Kiss’ in 1964; born John Frank Wilson, Texas, 11/12/1941; diabetes, 4/10)

The Death Toll #4

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

The following are ten tales of cataclysm and disaster, real and fictitious, committed to disc. Come on, what were
you
doing when you heard the news about the
Edmund Fitzgerald?

1 ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’

The Bee Gees (1967)

What chance the grinning Manx brothers would open their distinguished career with this fictional tale of tragedy? But, fair’s fair, the song’s opening gambit still sounds as haunting today as it did four decades ago. Harrowing it may have been, yet it was nowhere
near
the disaster that the brothers Gibb would experience when they made that
Sgt Pepper
movie a decade or so later …