The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (268 page)

Her career quieter as she concentrated on her family, Syreeta returned in 1994 to tour in the stage musical
Jesus Christ Superstar.
She’d spent much time in Britain by the time of her death from bone cancer, after a two-year battle with the disease.

Tuesday 13

Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane

(The Bronx, New York, 3 February 1952)

The New York Dolls

(Various acts)

Despite being the fourth of them to pass on to that trashy grotto in the sky, Arthur Kane was the New York Doll who was ‘saved’. Less rock ‘n’ roll than Johnny Thunders or Jerry Nolan, and certainly less flamboyant than David Johansen, Kane somehow rode the band’s rollercoaster of bad luck and hard drugs to find religion and then reemerge on stage with the other survivors just a month before his death.

Unassuming bassist Kane – known throughout his career as ‘The Killer’ – began with guitarist Thunders and early Doll Billy Murcia (drums) in the hard-rock band Actress before the trio merged with Johansen (vocals) and Syl Sylvain (guitar) in a cycle shop in New York. The first notable achievement of The New York Dolls was to lose Murcia after a drugs binge while on tour in Britain
(
November 1972),
which at least put the band a few pages nearer the front of the tabloids. With Jerry Nolan taking the late drummer’s place, the band completed more costume changes than they did albums under the watchful gaze of punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren, The Dolls’ reputation only really taking off once they’d disbanded, following the departures of Thunders and Nolan to form The Heartbreakers in 1975. By now, Kane had given himself over to the bottle and was ‘miming’ his bass lines as the rest of the group argued around him at live shows. Two years on, the remaining Dolls went their separate ways, Kane forming the largely unsuccessful Killer Kane (with a pre-WASP Blackie Lawless). Ten years on, Kane arrived at another crossroads: it is widely believed that, at break-ing point, he attempted suicide at the end of the eighties before finding apparent sanctuary in religion and devoting his life to Mormonism.

It took former Smiths frontman Morrissey (an unknown and president of The Dolls’ UK fan club in the seventies) to reunite the group – or, at least, the three left after the deaths of Thunders (
April 1991)
and Nolan
(
January 1992)
– for his Meltdown Festival on 18 June 2004. The show was believed by some to be the best The Dolls had played (which wouldn’t have been that tall an order) but sadly proved to be the last gig in which Kane was to take part: unknown to Johansen and Sylvain, the bassist was suffering from leukaemia, dying from the disease just three weeks after The New York Dolls’ triumphant comeback. The two survivors – who later suggested that Kane himself may have been unaware of his condition – vowed to continue The Dolls in some form, with a new album issued in 2006.

Friday 23

Bill Brown

(Fayetteville, North Carolina, 21 March 1960)

The Titanic Blues Band

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

The Misstakes

Don Shipps

(Springfield, Missouri, 22 August 1952)

The Titanic Blues Band

(Granny’s Bathwater)

Don Shipps had been widely considered Missouri’s top blues/jazzplayer, his style allowing him into the crossover acts and bringing some commercial acceptance. Beginning in the interestingly named fusion band Granny’s Bathwater, bassist Shipps had witnessed the group, which had once backed Martha Reeves, fall apart after the death of leader Mike Bunge in a 1975 car crash. He’d rallied to play as a sideman until forming the very popular Titanic Blues Band in 1991. For his part, guitarist Bill Brown had come closer to national success with the rock band The Misstakes during the late seventies, opening for big names like U2 and The Eurythmics over the next few years. Then, having played one gig with The Ozark Mountain Daredevils – best known for an earlier hit, ‘Jackie Blue’ (1975) – he ended up joining the reformed act full time and stayed for fifteen years until his death. But, lured by a great musician like Shipps, Brown also found space in his diary for The Titanic Blues Band.

‘I will always remember the look of bashful happiness on Arthur’s face as people in the audience constantly called out his name.’

Lifelong Dolls fan Morrissey

The TBB were set to play their home town of Springfield as a precursor to the multi-date Greater Ozarks Blues Festival on the evening of 23 July 2004 when a catastrophe befell Brown and Shipps early that same morning. Staying at Brown’s duplex, the two musicians were unaware that a fire had begun elsewhere, spreading to entrap them inside the building. With no means of escape, the pair died from smoke inhalation and severe burns. It was the second major disaster to hit The Ozark Mountain Daredevils after the death of earlier drummer Stephen Canaday five years before
(
September 1999).
The remaining Titanic members, renamed The Back Alley Band, played at the festival in tribute to their late friends.

AUGUST

Friday 6

Rick James

(James Ambrose Johnson Jr - Buffalo, New York, 1 February 1948)

(The Mynah Birds)

(Various acts)

How he lived to be fifty-six remains a source of amazement to many: a self-styled rebel who carried his antiestablishment stance to outrageous lengths both on and off stage, Rick James became funk’s campest ‘black knight’ in a career spanning over thirty years. James – one of eight children – dropped out of school and then the US navy; all par for the course, he felt, if he were to emulate his successful uncle, Melvin Franklin of The Temptations. The singer moved to Toronto to form The Mynah Birds (they’d wisely dropped the name ‘Sailor Boys’) with a roster that at various times included Goldie McJohn (later of Steppenwolf) and James’s roommate – none other than Neil Young. Briefly with Columbia, the band then joined Motown, where, though they weren’t to release any of their own records, James was later to find a lot of work as a producer. (A spat with his manager then led to James being arrested and briefly incarcerated for draft evasion.)

In 1977, following several false starts with Salt ‘n’ Pepper, Heaven & Earth and the London-based Main Line, James finally formed The Stone City Band, a unit heavily influenced by the P-Funk that was to shape his future sound. The singer also identified with the ostentatious stage garb of George Clinton and co, and this was a major factor in the success of the single ‘You and I’, which finally earned James a gold disc in 1978, as did ‘funk ‘n’ roll’ albums
Come Get It!
(1978) and
Bustin’ out of L Seven
(1979). Around this time, the darker side of James’s world began to manifest itself publicly: quite open about his recreational drug use (‘Mary Jane’, his ode to pot, had been a minor hit in 1979), the singer was hospitalized many times for overindulging. For a third album,
Fire It Up
(1979), James was accompanied on tour by his ‘close friends’ The Mary Jane Girls and a young singer called Prince. James was now at his most hedonistic, tales of cocaine and sex parties far outstripping the number of critiques of the man’s music for the next decade or so. It helped sell records, though: 1981’s
Street Songs
and its flagship single, ‘Superfreak’ (with The Temptations as backing singers!), became the biggest-selling hits of James’s career, the latter also being sampled by cod-rapper MC Hammer on ‘U Can’t Touch This’ (1990 – for which James sued him to hell and back, clearing a reported $30 million in royalties).