The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (154 page)

See also
George McCorkle (
June 2007)

MARCH

Friday 19

Jeff Ward

(Chicago, Illinois, 28 November 1962)

Nine Inch Nails

Ministry

(Various acts)

Jeff Ward had been a mainstay of Chicago’s industrial-rock scene for some years before he took to the road with Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails for the first Lollapalooza package tour in 1991. A drummer with leading acts such as Ministry and Lard, he also played with Ministry singer Al Jourgensen in industrial supergroup Revolting Cocks, and at the time of his death was percussionist with the prophetically named Low Pop Suicide.

Ward had been struggling with heroin addiction for a while before his inner demons finally had the better of him in 1993. His death from self-inflicted carbon-monoxide poisoning prompted the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Downward Spiral’, while Ward’s friend (and former NIN guitarist) Richard Patrick also dealt with the issue in ‘It’s Over’ by his next band, Filter.

See also
E William Tucker (
May 1999); Paul Raven (
October 2007)

APRIL

Thursday 29

Mick Ronson

(Hull, 26 May 1946)

David Bowie (& The Spiders from Mars)

Ian Hunter/Mott the Hoople

(Various acts)

He was quite simply the leading lead guitar in UK glam rock. Mick Ronson, having immersed himself in the violin and piano as a youngster in unfashionable Hull, rose to become the snarling-yet-sensitive foil to both David Bowie and Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, while arranging and recording with many other gargantuan names of the era.

Ronson’s family were practising Mormons – a fact that had some resonance in his adult life – and the young musician broke away from their restricting lifestyle to play in Yorkshire-based pub-rock acts such as The Rats and The Hullabaloos. Ex-Rat John Cambridge recommended the guitarist to the emerging Bowie, who soon recognized in Ronson a sympathetic character possessing no small ability. The eager-to-please Ronson then moved into the stairwell of the former David Jones’s London flat! A prolific musical relationship with Bowie (he struck up a more personal one with the singer’s hair stylist, Suzy Fussey) resulted in five of The Thin White Duke’s best albums:
The Man Who Sold the World
(1970),
Hunky Dory
(1971),
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars
(1972),
Aladdin Sane
and
Pin Ups
(both 1973). Much of the sound employed in the group’s work can be attributed entirely to the inspiration of Ronson. Never one to upstage his frontman, Ronson nonetheless engaged in some oft-recalled ‘heavy electric petting’ with Bowie on an
Old Grey Whistle Test
performance, enraging a British television audience that, at the time, felt
The Black & White Minstrel Show
to be more appropriate evening entertainment. Ronson, decked in slashed-open jumpsuit, also complemented the singer’s sartorial style. When Bowie killed off Ziggy in 1973, Ronson embarked on his own projects, producing two well-received albums,
Slaughter on 10th Avenue
(1974) and
Play Don’t Worry
(1975), as well as Lou Reed’s classic
Transformer
(1973), and playing with Bowie-protege Ian Hunter. Hunter’s band, Mott the Hoople, were very much on the decline commercially by the time Ronson jumped on board, but the two remained close after the inevitable 1974 disbanding: indeed, Ronson played lead on Hunter’s excellent solo hit, ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy’ the following year. Another year on, and the seemingly inexhaustible Ronson was producing an album for former Byrds’ leader Roger McGuinn
(Cardiff Rose).
Over the next decade and a half, the guitarist worked with Bob Dylan, Elton John, ex-New York Doll David Johansen, Van Morrison and Glen Matlock’s post-Pistols band, The Rich Kids.

Mick Ronson: All eyes on the lead guitarist

By 1991 Mick Ronson – having recently separated from Fussey, with whom he had a teenage daughter – was diagnosed with liver cancer and told fairly bluntly that his days were numbered. Rather than disappear into a black hole of self-pity, Ronson went back to the studio to work on his third solo album (some sixteen years after the second) and also produced Morrissey’s
Your Arsenal
(1992). Ronson’s last live performance was as part of an April 1992 tribute to the recently departed Freddie Mercury
(
November 1991
), the only occasion on which he, Bowie and Hunter all played together. Ronson, who had recently rediscovered his faith and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints, died at his home in London just over a year later. His final solo set,
Heaven and Hull
(featuring contributions from Bowie, Def Leppard’s Joey Elliott and John Mellencamp), was issued posthumously.

JUNE

Saturday 5

Conway Twitty

(Harold Lloyd Jenkins - Friars Point, Mississippi, 1 September 1933)

Country music’s most prolific hitmaker was known by a variety of nicknames, his preferred being ‘The Best Friend a Song Ever Had’. Conway Twitty (the name derived from two small towns in Arkansas and Texas respectively) was raised on a houseboat and made his radio debut at just twelve years old – but he would juggle career opportunities in baseball and the armed forces before he took to music full time. At Sun Records, Twitty appeared to be heading in a rockabilly direction, sharing studios with the likes of Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, but it was a country-flavoured ballad that made the man a star across the genres: ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ (1958) took Twitty to number one in both America and Britain. And it was in the C & W listings that the singer cleaned up most: it’s reckoned that he charted some fifty-five songs, including an astonishing thirty-plus solo country number ones. In the seventies, Twitty was to duet with country legend Loretta Lyn, at the same time opening up other business interests – a fast-food chain (‘Tweet yourself to a Twittyburger!’) and his own music theme park, the somewhat opulent Twitty City in Tennessee. (The park was sold on to a Christian foundation following Conway Twitty’s death.)