The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (259 page)

Unfortunately, so did Jackson’s. His next band, The Vibrations, barely scraped into the charts, the singer more concerned about refining his features with expensive cosmetic surgery than honing his tunes. Jackson left the music industry for more conventional employment a couple of years later, increasingly embittered by his lack of personal success. He played with Mike Pender’s Searchers during the nineties, but the onset of arthritis was to curtail even this. Suffering from diabetes as well as alcohol-related diseases, Tony Jackson was apparently penniless when he died in a Nottingham hospital.

See also
Chris Curtis (
February 2005). Original bassist Tony West died in November 2010.

Warren Zevon: Few got to the bottom of his twisted stares

SEPTEMBER

Warren Zevon

(Chicago, Illinois, 24 January 1947)

Unassuming though he may have looked, part-Jewish part-Mormon songwriting legend Warren Zevon nurtured a darker side in his work. But this remained hidden for some time, while the fresh-faced Zevon toured the USA with The Everly Brothers, who were keen on his piano-playing. The musician – who’d made a good living penning jingles and songs for highprofile bands like The Turtles – found that his own first album,
Wanted Dead or Alive
(1969), barely caused a ripple, its follow-up not even meriting release by his label One Way. The breakthrough came when Zevon moved to Los Angeles, putting him in touch with major artists such as Jackson Browne (who produced his 1976 major label debut) and Linda Ronstadt (who hit with his ‘Poor, Poor Pitiful Me’ in 1978) and seeing the introduction of his trademark glasses. The next album,
Excitable Boy
(1978), contained what would become Zevon’s best-known song, ‘Werewolves Of London’, his only US hit and a staple for movie soundtracks for ever after.
Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School
(1980) continued the upward trend for Zevon, the songs ‘A Certain Girl’ and ‘Gorilla, You’re a Desperado’ both international airplay hits. However, the decadent side of the Californian scene affected Zevon to the extent that his career was hampered for some years by serious alcohol- and drug-related problems, the songwriter merely regarding these as fuel for his creativity, despite the toll they would take on his health. The musician dedicated his 1980 album to author Ross McDonald (one of many writers to befriend him), who it is believed counselled Zevon through some heavy times. He also became acquainted with the up-and-coming REM, who, as major fans of his work, were delighted to collaborate with Zevon on their Hindu Love Gods project in 1990. Zevon’s self-confessed phobia of doctors and hospitals were to hit back at him in his fifties when the singer learned that he had mesothelioma in 2002: his days were by then clearly numbered. Thankfully, Zevon lived long enough to see the birth of his twin grandsons.

Johnny Cash: ‘The one on the right is (also) on the left’

Although Warren Zevon made numerous comebacks in the final decade of his life, his work is always likely to remain an acquired taste – a shame, given that he was one of the most original, imaginative and concise songwriters to emerge from an environment that produced much that was hackneyed and overblown.

Golden Oldies #16

Johnny Cash

(Kingsland, Arizona, 26 February 1932)

Classed as a country artist throughout his career, Johnny Cash was clearly much more than this, frequently voicing publicly his distaste for the Nashville mainstream. Sure, like those of his nemeses, Cash’s lyrics of sin and redemption were informed by a rockily eventful personal life, but they also possessed a sardonic humour unique to the genre, displayed prominently in lighter numbers like ‘A Boy Named Sue’ (1969) and ‘One Piece at a Time’ (1976).

The frankness of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (1968) drew a huge fanbase among inmates, though Cash never served a sentence himself, even if there were, of course, several ‘one-night stands’. Given his upbringing, this was probably a remarkable achievement - the abuse of an alcoholic father and the death of his older brother Jack in a horrific sawmill accident (the boy living on in agony for a week before he died) only steeling Cash to succeed. As his career took off, he did, however, cultivate an outlaw image and became addicted to booze and amphetamines (sharing an apartment with Waylon Jennings wouldn’t have helped), his first marriage collapsing in 1966. His second marriage, to June Carter, a singer who helped Cash kick his addictions, was altogether more harmonious and the couple were still together at Carter’s death, just four months before his own.

Johnny Cash died on 12 September 2003 from complications of the diabetes diagnosed six years previously. An admirer of many styles of music, his ability as an interpreter of the writing of new artists became especially noted by a third generation of listeners drawn by chilling renditions of Nick Cave’s ‘The Mercy Seat’; Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’; U2’s ‘One’; and, perhaps most significantly, Trent Reznor’s ‘Hurt’ -which won Cash his final Grammy, just days ahead of his death.

Wednesday 24

Matthew Jay

(Plymouth, 10 October 1978)

In an apparently impulsive manner, young singer/songwriter Matthew Jay ended his life in a gesture that nobody will ever fully be able to interpret. Although he was born in England, Jay was brought up by his Beatles-, Stones- and folk-loving parents in Abergavenny, South Wales, playing in the family’s semi-professional band. Eager to learn as much as he could from those who had preceded him, the guitarist became a disciple of seventies artist Nick Drake (
November 1974),
though none of his colleagues had any idea that Jay’s life would conclude in such a similarly unfulfilled and tragic way. In 1999, Jay signed with Parlophone subsidiary Food Records, despite never having played live before. Jay’s first full-length record,
Draw,
arrived in 2001 to some acclaim, the singer landing highprofile support tours with Dido, Doves, Starsailor and The Stereophonics as he began to work on material for a second set. With minimal sales – and there were clearly many reasons for that – Jay felt under pressure from EMI to deliver with the next record, but in 2003 the label decided not to continue with the artist when suitable collaborators could not be found.

The next move, though, was one that nobody expected. Shortly before midnight on 24 September, Matthew Jay fell to his death from the seventh-storey window of a friend’s apartment in Harrow, north London. The authorities were quick to confirm that the singer had been alone at the time (although since the event, it has become apparent that this was
not
the case, when an unnamed girlfriend and another acquaintance were discovered to have been present around the time). Beneath the shock and upset, family and friends were mystified: although frustrated by the hiccough in his career, Jay was not believed to have been depressed, having spoken cheerfully to his family that same evening. Was it suicide? Was it an accident? Followers of Nick Drake felt they’d heard this one before …