The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (229 page)

Thursday 30

Scott Smith

(Donald Scott Smith - Vancouver, British Columbia, 13 February 1955)

Loverboy

Canadian group Loverboy were the rock band your girlfriend liked: the epitome of eighties soft-metal excess, they were a blow-waved bunch of pretty boys with a nice line in topped-up tans, toned torsos and titillating Top Twenty tunes. Comprising Mike Reno (vocals), Paul Dean (guitar), Scott Smith (bass), Doug Johnson (keyboards) and Matt Frenette (drums), Loverboy burst out of Vancouver with a series of radio-friendly albums and a goodly batch of Billboard hits. ‘Working for the Weekend’ (1982) is perhaps their best-known song – featuring on countless teen movie soundtracks – though it was ‘Lovin’ Every Minute of It’ (1985) and ‘This Could be the Night’ (1986) that took them into the US Top Ten, alongside a raft of gold albums between 1980 and 1997.

A lover of sailing for almost as long as he had been of women, Scott Smith frequently blew his considerable wad on massive yachts. On 30 November 2000, Smith, his ‘lovergirl’ Yvonne Mayotte and friend William Ellis took the bassist’s 37-foot craft out on to the water just off San Francisco’s Ocean Beach: Smith planned to moor it in Southern California for the winter. About four miles off the coast, strong winds caused gigantic, powerful waves to begin battering the craft, at which point the experienced Smith banished Mayotte and Ellis below deck. It was some time before the pair realized that both Smith and the boat’s steering wheel were missing, wrenched from the deck into the turbulent waters. Unhurt, they contacted coast guards, but a search for the musician’s body proved fruitless.

DECEMBER

Monday 18

Kirsty MacColl

(Croydon, Surrey, 10 October 1959)

One of the finest British pop songwriters of her generation, Kirsty MacColl conversely enjoyed her biggest hits with the songs of others, though in truth only flirted with the fame that should have been hers. Depressed as a child, MacColl suffered from asthma and was subsequently placed in a special school by authorities who seemed to want to brush a fairly common medical condition under the carpet. Her ability, though, was spotted as early as 1966 when the future star and her mother -choreographer Jean Newlove, by then separated from MacColl’s father, the noted folk musician Ewan MacColl – appeared on a BBC television series on gifted children, and she was already writing songs by the age of eleven. MacColl attended Croydon Art College and briefly became Mandy Doubt, singer with best-forgotten punk band The Drug Addix. Her future songwriting was inspired more by Phil Spector than The Sex Pistols, however, and a shimmering Stiff Records debut, ‘They Don’t Know’ (1979), surprised many. The record should, of course, have been a huge hit for MacColl, topping airplay charts during the summer, but a distribution strike prevented this – the first in a series of unfortunate events that hampered her career. (Some parity was restored when singer/comedienne Tracey Ullman’s somewhat saccharine rendition of the song earned MacColl a gold disc in 1983.) MacColl spent time with five different labels during a turbulent recording history; her first bona fide hit, ‘There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ (1981), was issued by Polydor, who then rejected a second album, which they felt was non-commercial. Returning to the label she had left three years before, MacColl reached the Top Ten in 1985 with Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’ Shane McGowan: ‘She turned a good song into a great song’), before the company went bankrupt. Now a mother, MacColl– who suffered from extreme stage fright in any case – took a sabbatical. After much-needed time off, her
Kite
(1989) and
Electric Landlady
(1991) albums for Virgin weren’t the vast successes they’d anticipated, despite top-dollar songs like the singles ‘Free World’ and ‘Walking Down Madison’ pulled from each (a later
Best of
compilation for the label then went platinum, proving a point or two somewhere). A spell with ZTT similarly failed to alter the course of history. During her career, the massively respected MacColl recorded with a vast array of British and American artists, including Simple Minds, Happy Mondays, Talking Heads, The Wonder Stuff, Evan Dando and, of course, MacGowan and The Pogues– for whom she illuminated the near-charttopping ‘Fairytale of New York’ in 1987, for many the best Christmas hit ever.

In January 2000, Kirsty MacColl seemed finally to have found contentment in her life. She had signed with Virgin subsidiary V2, releasing the witty, critically acclaimed
Tropical Brainstorm,
an album of Cuban-influenced songs. Most importantly– with her failed marriage to producer Steve Lillywhite long behind her – she had a new partner in saxophonist James Knight. Invigorated by these significant upturns in both her personal and professional lives, she planned a scuba-diving vacation for her lover and her two sons, Louis and Jamie, at the end of the year in a part of the world she’d grown to love.

Cozumel is Mexico’s largest island, a 28-mile stretch of white sand and clear reef-strewn water off the Yucatan peninsula that - after some endorsement from world-famous diver Jacques Cousteau – developed from a quiet fishing community into a thriving tourist and recreation centre during the sixties. For an enthusiast like MacColl, it was the ultimate divers’ paradise. On 18 December, she took her sons to experience the underwater world with diving instructor Ivan Diaz and a number of other divers in an area specifically designated for the sport. As MacColl and her sons prepared to surface, Diaz spotted a large speedboat approaching rapidly within the restricted area. The vessel was travelling too fast for any significant action to be taken, however: as she pushed her sons to safety, Kirsty MacColl was struck and killed instantly, her body mutilated by the impact (her eldest son, Jamie – who remained astonishingly composed in the aftermath – even spoke of ‘swimming in his mother’s blood’). It was a wicked, violent end to a life of such creativity.

After the tragedy, the problems of seeking justice became apparent to all connected with MacColl. Although clearly not responsible for the accident, 26-year-old Juan José Cenyam took (or was instructed to take) responsibility for it, the untrained boat hand being ordered to pay £1,500 to MacColl’s sons, a sum related to his paltry salary. It became apparent, however, that the man in charge of the speedboat was wealthy businessman Guillermo Gonzalez Nova, who years later has still not been brought to any kind of justice, nor made any kind of public statement of culpability or indeed proffered any kind of apology to the bereft family. For Kirsty’s octogenarian mother Jean (who chose to employ the name ‘MacColl’ to publicise her ‘Justice For Kirsty’ campaign), it was clearly a distressing process. In 2004, she was confounded yet again when Mexican Federal Prosecutor Emilio Cortez Ramires refused to reopen proceedings: he was, however, found liable in 2006 for breach of authority in his handling of the case. That year, Mexican President Vicente Fox also promised to re-examine the case, however - despite strong suggestion of his culpability (including an alleged overheard admission) - no hard evidence could be presented with which to prosecute Nova. In December 2009, it was announced that the JFK campaign was to close, the singer’s surviving family feeling that little else could be done to seal a prosecution. (Full details of the campaign’s achievements can be found at
www.justiceforkirsty.org
.)

From Croydon to Cuba - there’ll never be anyone else like Kirsty

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Kirsty’s passing was to prompt continued tributes for the artist, her music and her beliefs. Given the manner of her death, the sleeve design for
Tropical Brainstorm
offers a poignant reminder of a part of the world that had become important to the singer at the end of her life: ironically, she had become actively involved in the Cuban Solidarity Movement, which pursued justice in its attempts to bring an end to US economic sanctions.

Tuesday 19

Rob Buck

(Jamestown, New York, 1 August 1958)

10,000 Maniacs

The band’s name a corruption of a largely forgotten B-movie title, 10,000 Maniacs first offered their newwave folk to the public around 1981. Singer Natalie Merchant and bassist Steven Gustafson had met at Jamestown Community College where they co-ran a campus radio station. Rob Buck and John Lombardo (guitars) were among six of a huge original line-up to make the final cut. Signed to Elektra, the Maniacs were mainly an outlet for Merchant’s musings and unorthodox stage presence, songs like ‘My Mother the War’ (1982) piquing the casual listener. Despite a loyal following in New York, the band were most popular in the UK, where their albums sold steadily (as opposed to spectacularly), with
Blind Man’s Zoo
finally breaching the Top Twenty on both sides of the Atlantic in 1989. Buck, who had played the guitar since he was a kid aping Jimi Hendrix, went on to write a good number of the group’s songs, including their most popular, ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ (1987). Merchant’s departure from the band in 1993 effectively ended interest in 10,000 Maniacs, though they did continue throughout the nineties with singer Mary Ramsey. Rob Buck had been hospitalized at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center for some weeks by the time of his death from liver failure, his health having deteriorated too rapidly to allow a transplant.

Sunday 31

Eddy Shaver

(John Edwin Shaver - Texas, 20 June 1962)