The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (205 page)

Friday 4

Lal Waterson

(Elaine Waterson - Hull, 15 February 1943)

The Watersons

With her sister, Norma, and brother, Michael, Lal Waterson made up the folk trio The Watersons, the three siblings beginning their singing career while very young indeed. The group cut its first album proper,
Frost and Fire,
in 1964, following it with three others – at a time when folk was beginning to give way to the beat boom. Nonetheless, The Watersons’s
oeuvre
is considered core to the development of later UK folkies such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. With the group suspended by the end of the decade, Lal and Michael Waterson returned in 1972 with an album featuring contributions from many future folk luminaries. The Watersons regrouped for further recordings, and Lal Waterson’s compositions were covered by many, including June Tabor. A later incarnation of The Watersons included celebrated folk instrumentalist Martin Carthy, Lal Waterson’s brother-in-law.

Shortly after completing the record
Once in a Blue Moon
with her son Oliver Knight, Lal Waterson passed away at home from the cancer diagnosed just days before.

Mike Waterson died in June 2011 at the age of seventy.

Monday 21

Oz Bach

(Paul Bach - Huntington, West Virginia, 24 June 1939)

Spanky & Our Gang

(Tarantula)

(Wings)

Without the quality of songwriting of their closest rivals, The Mamas & The Papas, Spanky & Our Gang are often overlooked in US pop history – but the act still managed five Top Forty hits between 1967 and 1969. Hatted, moustachioed bass-player Paul ‘Oz’ Bach had studied music in Florida, attending the University of Miami while finding slots backing some of the era’s best-known local names. Bach relocated again – to Chicago this time – after he met founder musician Malcolm Hale and quirky Illinois blues singer Elaine ‘Spanky’ McFarlane during a three-day Florida ‘hurricane’ party. The group – completed by guitarist Nigel Pickering – scored their first major hit with the catchy ‘Sunday Will Never be the Same’ (1967). For Oz Bach, though, it would be a brief spell in the spotlight: he quit the band before a second album the year after; Spanky & Our Gang were then left reeling by the sudden deaths of Hale
(
October 1968)
and Bach’s replacement, Lefty Baker (
August 1971).

Although his post-Spanky band projects, Tarantula and Wings (not Paul McCartney’s group, obviously), were not to take off, Oz Bach went on to work with a variety of musicians (including Steve Miller and Linda Ronstadt) and was also a respected music arranger for theatre and film. For a short while, Bach even fronted his own television talk show. Oz Bach died from cancer shortly before his sixtieth birthday. His musician daughter Belinda also died prematurely in 2007, while Pickering passed away in 2011.

OCTOBER

Sunday 11

Raymond Myles

(New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 July 1958)

An R & B-influenced gospel singer, Raymond Myles was expected to emulate his lifetime hero Al Green, so profound was the effect he had on those who listened to him. In 1969, Myles enchanted many with his heartfelt ‘Prayer from a 12-Year-Old Boy’, a record that called for an end to both segregation and the Vietnam War. But, instead of jumping ship to the secular market he clearly loved, Myles maintained his gospel standing, touring with his own Raymond Anthony Myles Singers and also performing with genre heavyweights such as The Mighty Clouds of Joy and, yes, even the Reverend Al Green. Then, with cruel irony, the singer who had first made his name with a call for peace was gunned down by a carjacker in his home town of New Orleans. His assailant has never been brought to justice.

NOVEMBER

Sunday 8

Lonnie Pitchford

(Lexington, Mississippi, 8 October 1955)

Young blues pretender Lonnie Pitchford modelled himself very much on the legacies of Robert Johnson and Elmore James, learning his craft from Delta practitioner Eugene Powell (whom he survived by just four days).

Guitarist Pitchford’s unique selling point was his utilization of the African single-stringed diddley-bow, an instrument otherwise unheard of in blues. As a teenager, he wowed the audience at 1974’s National Folk Festival, going on to tour the world and play with an assortment of musicians, including Johnson’s stepson Robert Junior Lockwood and even rock singer John Cougar Mellencamp. Despite this, the musician only ever cut one album himself, 1994’s
All Around Man.
Diagnosed HIV positive, Pitchford died prematurely from complications arising from pneumonia and is buried in Ebeneezer, Mississippi.

Golden Oldies #8

Roland Alphonso

(Havana, Cuba, 12 January 1931)

The Skatalites

(The Soul Vendors)

(The Ruinaires)

Just months after the passing of founder and fellow sax-player Tommy McCook (
Golden Oldies
#6), the world of ska lost another key member of the genre’s first real stars, The Skatalites. Alphonso, born to a Cuban father and Jamaican mother, got his break when the jazz-trained tenor saxophonist encountered Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd at the latter’s Studio One complex, becoming an inhouse musician by the end of the fifties. With ska being Jamaica’s first indigenous musical creation, the country embraced The Skatalites to such an extent that it’s hard to believe that the group effectively existed for just a year and a half. Nevertheless, the band line-up read like a hall of fame - Alphonso, McCook, Don ‘Cosmic’ Drummond (trombone), ‘Ska’ Campbell (tenor sax), ‘Dizzy Johnny’ Moore and Baba Brooks (both trumpet), Lloyd Brevett (bass), Jackie Mittoo (piano) and Lloyd Knibbs (drums) among them. In their career, Alphonso and The Skatalites also played as back-up to The Wailers - and Alphonso sometimes jumped ship to record with Dodd’s rival, Duke Reid. The Skatalites, however, were not afforded the respect they should have been and ended as a going concern after the incarceration of Drummond in 1965, though the band’s signature tune, ‘Guns Of Navarone’ became an international success two years later. Alphonso was elsewhere by then, playing with his own set-up, The Soul Vendors (initially The Soul Brothers), and then club band The Ruinaires until his first mid-performance stroke in 1971. After a dozen years in the shadows, Roland Alphonso, now residing in New York, reformed The Skatalites; this time, the band toured the world and finally received the acclaim they deserved.