The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (183 page)

The (Five) Crowns

The big break for throaty bass vocalist Elsbeary Hobbs came when notorious Drifters manager George Treadwell sacked the original line-up and recruited The Crowns – a similarly styled troupe waiting in the wings. With super-soulful Ben E King (lead tenor) at the front, Hobbs, Doc Green (baritone), James ‘Papa’ Clark (lead) and Charles Thomas (lead tenor) finally broke The Drifters on to the national pop charts. In the summer of 1959, ‘There Goes My Baby’ – featuring Hobbs’s prominent tones – came within an ace of topping the pop listings; the following year ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ went to number one, but for The Drifters’ bass vocalist, time in the spotlight was all too short. After Ben E King left over a financial dispute, the group struggled with a series of new lead singers (which came to a dramatic head in 1964 when the latest, Rudy Lewis, was found dead (
Pre-1965)).
By now Hobbs had been drafted (himself replaced by a number of hopefuls before the returning Tommy Evans took the position) – which effectively ended his singing career for a decade.

Finding work as a hospital therapist in the interim, Elsbeary Hobbs had rejoined one of many touring versions of The Drifters by the end of the sixties, which kept him busy for most of the rest of his life. The singer died from lung cancer in New York – one of some sixteen former Drifters now passed on (
Pre-1965/Dead Interesting!).

JUNE

Saturday 1

Alan Blakely

(Bromley, Kent, 1 April 1942)

The Tremeloes

Cancer was also to take a founder member of one of Britain’s most successful sixties pop acts, The Tremeloes. Guitarist/keyboard-player Alan Blakely was one of a group of Essex school-friends – Ricky West (Richard Westwood, lead guitar), Alan Howard (bass) and Dave Murden (drums) – who’d formed the fledgling band behind singer Brian Poole in 1959. Signed to Decca – who foolishly sidestepped The Beatles in order to lay claim to the band – The Tremeloes nonetheless gave the label a great start with the UK number one ‘Do You Love Me?’ (1964), making them the first southern group to top the chart during the beat era. Although he was a reasonable singer himself, Blakely stood back to let Len ‘Chip’ Hawkes replace Brian Poole (and Howard on bass) when Poole left for an attempt at solo stardom in 1966. This move appeared a good one – The Tremeloes scored a second number one with the classic ‘Silence Is Golden’ (1967) and a decent run of other hits to 1970 – but the group’s dismissal of its past and attempted prog direction proved to be a huge error of judgement. (At one point, The Tremeloes passed up the song ‘Yellow River’, which gave Blakely’s brother Mike a number one with Christie.) The group had been largely forgotten by the record-buying public when Blakely left the line-up in 1975.

The inevitable nostalgia tours followed, but Alan Blakely had all but left the music industry by the time of his death.

Friday 14

Mathew Fletcher

(London, 5 November 1970)

Heavenly

Talulah Gosh

(Bugbear)

His associations with two of the UK indie scene’s most ‘innocent’ bands perhaps make the death of drummer Mathew ‘Fat Mat’ Fletcher all the more incongruous. As reviled by the press as they were loved by their not-insubstantial fanbase, Talulah Gosh – an Oxford-based five-piece formed by Fletcher and his sister Amelia (aka Marigold, vocals/guitar) – emerged after the ‘C86’ movement instigated by the
NME.
The band’s songs were lightweight and sometimes painfully twee, but occasionally touched upon the sublime (early tune ‘The Day She Lost Her Pastels Badge’ and 1991 sessions album
They’ve Scoffed the Lot
showed the humour lying beneath the surface of their work). Perhaps inevitably, it was to be something as innocuous as ‘university commitments’ that brought an end to the band in 1988, but the Fletchers (and guitarist Peter Momtchiloff) were not to be floored, and reemerged as the much-touted Heavenly in 1989. Recording for Scotland’s Sarah Records label (alongside such fey wonders as Even as We Speak and The Field Mice), Heavenly put out some unexpectedly strong albums in the nineties, much of the material written by Mathew Fletcher, who was also recording with his own punk outfit, Bugbear. However, by the issue of the final album,
Operation Heavenly
(1996), on Wiiija, the band was under something of a pall following Fletcher’s shock suicide. There seemed to be little forewarning of the drummer’s hanging, and those associated with the band have remained tight-lipped about the event ever since. Amelia Fletcher continues to play with her current band, Tender Trap.

JULY

Friday 12

Jonathan Melvoin

(Los Angeles, California, 6 December 1961)

Smashing Pumpkins

The Dickies

(The Family)

The son of a noted jazz pianist, Jonathan Melvoin learned drums as a small boy and mastered a wide variety of other musical skills that were to see him flit between rock genres during his short career. The brother of Prince & The Revolution’s Susannah and Wendy Melvoin (the latter of Wendy & Lisa fame), he began, at their behest, with the Prince-endorsed The Family, then played drums on the purple musician’s
Around the World in a Day
(1985). A 1994 spell as drummer and road manager with original gonzo punks The Dickies gave Melvoin, who somehow juggled this role with his career as a paramedic, a complete change of musical direction. Then, in 1996, the musician was recruited as second keyboardist with alternativerock giants Smashing Pumpkins, leader Billy Corgan being keen to augment his line-up as they toured the newly platinum album
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
(1995).

Following a triumphant show in New York, the band returned to their hotels – in Melvoin’s case, to the Regency in Park Avenue. The vehemently anti-drug-and-alcohol Corgan and other band members James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky retired to another hotel several blocks away. Unbeknown to them, Melvoin and regular drummer Jimmy Chamberlin dallied on the street, scoring what they believed to be high-grade heroin from a dealer. Despite having avoided an earlier sacking from the band by the skin of his teeth, Chamberlin, with Melvoin, drank into the night, then shot up back at the hotel. Having fallen into a haze, the drummer – a more seasoned user than his bandmate – awoke at around 3.30 am to find Melvoin comatose. Putting Melvoin in the shower, on the advice of 911 services, proved fruitless: when officers arrived at 4.15 am, the 34-year-old keyboardist was pronounced dead. The following day, all the members of the Chicago-based band were detained in New York for questioning, and five days later, Chamberlin was given his marching orders from the band (though he was later rehired).

Smashing Pumpkins – already enduring a difficult year, after the death of a fan at a Dublin show – were not invited to Jonathan Melvoin’s funeral, though they later agreed to pay $10K to his widow, Laura, and baby son. Ironically, the dead musician’s father, Michael Melvoin – for many years the chair of the National Academy of Recording Artists and Sciences – had long been a campaigner to rid the music world of drugs, in particular the heroin that was to kill his son.

See also
Chuck Wagon (
June 1981)