The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (187 page)

With little interest in academic studies, Eva Cassidy – who, as a child, sang and played guitar in a band with her father and brother – planned a career as an artist until her near-flawless crystalline soprano was discovered. In 1986, music producer Chris Biondo overheard her voice when mixing a record for one of her friends. Biondo, who had a relationship with Cassidy, had the foresight to nurture her talent over a period of a few years before exposing her to some of the significant figures with whom he worked – one such being the very impressed soul balladeer Roberta Flack. For Cassidy, though, mass critical and commercial acceptance was to arrive after her death.

In 1993, Cassidy began touring as singer with Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers (also, briefly, with the band Pieces of a Dream) and recording with Blue Note records. It was also around this time that she had outpatient surgery for a malignant lesion on her back, treatment she and most around her believed to be routine. A year or so later, however, increasing pain in her hip forced Cassidy to abandon touring (as well as her work as a mural artist) and seek further tests: the news was bad. In the summer of 1996, Cassidy was diagnosed with advanced melanoma and given only months to live. Weakened, she was admitted to hospital, emerging just once to sing a touching rendition of ‘What a Wonderful World’ at her own tribute concert, some six weeks before her death. Her ashes were scattered at Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.

Remarkably, it wasn’t until 2000 that Eva Cassidy’s work passed into the greater public consciousness. Unearthed by the BBC (particularly by veteran DJ and fan Terry Wogan), a large back catalogue of her songs – most notably those on Cassidy’s fourth album,
Songbird
–were reissued on a series of CDs. Her albums shifted over 4 million copies, and in 2003, Eva Cassidy, who had never played in the country, became the only artist with three posthumous number-one albums in Britain.

‘All I want to do when I get well is sing and travel with my music.’

Eva Cassidy, 1996

Saturday 30

Tiny Tim

(Herbert Khaury - New York, 12 April 1932)

‘From the sublime …’ etc. Often referred to as ‘Master of the Disturbing’, part-Lebanese, part-Jewish Herbert Khaury toyed with a number of aliases before settling on the Dickens character’s identity in the late fifties. The singer’s big break came after some appearances on cult American TV comedy hour
Rowan & Martin’s LaughIn
in 1967, whereupon he was offered a recording deal with Reprise and the deranged falsetto of his ‘Tiptoe Thru’ the Tulips’ (1968) vaulted into the US Top Twenty; the debut album
God Bless Tinny Tim
then went Top Ten. His onscreen marriage to GTO Miss Vicki on
The Johnny Carson Show
similarly garnered much publicity (and the couple’s daughter, born in 1971, was honoured with the name ‘Tulip’). Tiny Tim was no slouch, however – an educated man, his live performances were liberally sprinkled with erudite song references and historical nuggets.

By his later shows, Tiny Tim had all but dropped his quavering high pitch for a more natural baritone, but audiences still – for some reason – clamoured for the voice of old. In September 1996, he suffered a coronary at the Massachusetts Ukulele Festival and was warned by his GP to take things more easily. Instead, Tiny Tim kept up the live appearances. At a charity function at the Women’s Club of Minneapolis, Tiny Tim completed a rendition of his biggest hit, then collapsed at the side of the stage, finally succumbing to that year’s second heart attack. Khaury was buried alongside his trusty ukulele and – of course – a single tulip. His work was kept alive by its strangely fitting inclusion in the pilot episode of anarchic kids’ show
Spongebob Squarepants.

DECEMBER

Monday 9

Patty Donahue

(Akron, Ohio, 29 March 1956)

The Waitresses

Emerging from an Ohio newwave scene that gave the world Devo, Chrissie Hynde and Pere Ubu, The Waitresses were a sassy, self-aware outfit just made for the pose of singer Patty Donahue. The song that first gained the group some attention was ‘I Know What Boys Like’ (reissued 1982 – an Australian Top Ten hit), an anthem of tease penned by Donahue’s partner in the band, guitarist Chris Butler. This resulted in a deal with Ze Records, who issued the first Waitresses album,
Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?
(1982). The debut fared well, missing the US Top Forty by only one place, but The Waitresses – Donahue, Butler, Dan Klayman (keyboards), Mars Williams (sax), Tracy Warmworth (bass) and Billy Ficca (drums, ex-Television) – were destined to remain a cult phenomenon. That said, their ‘Christmas Wrapping’ remains an annual ‘jolly’ far more welcome than the usual Slade/Wizzard/Wham fare.

After the recording of a second album, Patti Donahue was replaced in The Waitresses by Holly Vincent (ex-Holly & The Italians). Donahue – once a backing singer for Alice Cooper – briefly rejoined the band in 1984 before taking up a more background role as an MCA music publisher, a position she held until shortly before her untimely death in New York from lung cancer.

Tuesday 10

Faron Young

(Shreveport, Louisiana, 25 February 1932)

Considered by some to be a cuter, slighter Hank Williams, Faron Young was discovered by hawkish talent-spotter Webb Pierce, who placed the novice singer on his local
Louisiana Hayride
radio programme at the start of the fifties. Young had fronted his own country group as a teenager – initially to while away the time at high school, from which he inevitably dropped out – and picked up more than a few of Williams’s onstage trademarks. But Young was to become a better singer and songwriter than most of the Nashville elite cared to admit. His first country chart hit was the almost rock ‘n’ roll-sounding ‘Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young’ (1953) – Young appears to have achieved most of these objectives during his lifetime (persistent rumours connect him with a number of partners, including Patsy Cline). A star of several movies and very much a heart-throb of his generation, Young also managed a couple of crossover hits with ‘Hello Walls’ (1961) and ‘It’s Four in the Morning’ (1972), a huge UK hit that put the singer on
Top of the Pops
alongside Slade and Alice Cooper. (The song and its protagonist were then further immortalized by British songwriter Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout in 1984).

‘I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a drunk.’

Faron Young

Young’s later career, though, was blighted by poor sales, alcoholism and the singer’s increasingly cantankerous behaviour. He discharged firearms in public places and, on one notorious occasion, proffered corporal punishment to a young girl in his audience who stuck her tongue out at him. It seems sad that a figure as significant as Faron Young should feel that the industry had snubbed him, but it became apparent during the nineties that the singer – whose health was rapidly deteriorating – had given up not just on music but on life itself. Hugely depressed by the emphysema that had affected him since 1990, Young put a shotgun to his own head at his home on the night of 9 December, and died in hospital the following morning.

Tuesday 17

Ruby Murray

(Belfast, 29 March 1935)

Ruby Murray’s trademark hoarse vocal style was not, in fact, a gimmick – as a child, she underwent an operation to correct her vocal chords, giving her the characteristic voice that would enchant millions. Having taken her first tentative steps as a 12-year-old entertainer in Belfast, Murray made her mark on BBC television’s
Quite Contrary
while still a teenager (and gained a fan in guest Frank Sinatra). The response to her was extraordinary: Murray’s remarkable feat of charting five simultaneous UK Top Twenty hits early in 1955 is unlikely ever to be bettered. The biggest of these was the schmaltzy ‘Softly, Softly’, a number one that sold over 750,000 copies.

By her twenty-fifth birthday, however, it was pretty much all over. As many were to find out (Helen Shapiro among them), longevity was more difficult for female singers to achieve during this era. In Murray’s case, the seismic shift created by rock ‘n’ roll dated her sentimental ballads overnight, but she was now married … and there was always cabaret. Enduring at least two nervous breakdowns, alcoholism and a painful divorce (after which she remarried), Ruby Murray finally passed away from liver cancer at a Torbay hospital. Her instantly recognizable name lives on via her songs – and, of course, its rhyming-slang adoption. Mine’s a king prawn bhuna.