The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (272 page)

Since he was around nineteen years of age, Andre Hicks – better known to his small but so-solid fanbase as Mac Dre – had issued over a dozen albums without ever break-ing out of the underground circuit, as well as setting up his own Thizz Entertainment label. Mac Dre’s lyrics – like those of so many of his contemporaries – echoed his violent, outlaw lifestyle. The artist was believed to have been a member of the notorious Vallejo Romper Room Gang, a group responsible for pizza-parlour stick-ups and even a bank robbery, his connection to which led to Dre spending five years in jail.

Bearing all this in mind, Dre’s death due to a drive-by shooting might seem par for the course, but police remain uncertain of any motive. Mac Dre was apparently the passenger in a white van travelling through Kansas when he was attacked from a car that pulled up next to the vehicle as it waited at traffic lights. The van swerved across two lanes of the highway, crashing down an embankment – though Dre was already dead from the bullet wound by the time it came to rest.

Terry Knight

(Richard Terrance Knapp - Flint, Michigan, 9 April 1943)

(Terry Knight & The Pack)

A rather different murder that occurred the same day shocked locals in the quiet town of Temple, Texas. Throughout a long and productive career in rock ‘n’ roll Terry Knight had earned praise as a disc jockey, musician, producer and manager, enjoying a measure of success in each guise. At twenty-one, Knight was believed to have been the first US presenter to play music by The Rolling Stones, his groundbreak-ing show on Detroit’s CKLW ahead of the game when it came to playing British pop artists in general. Knight’s enthusiasm for the music from across the pond informed much of his own output: the Stones-influenced Terry Knight & The Pack were one of those bands of whom more was expected than was delivered, but their local fame was enough to make the would-be singer and guitarist a decent living for a few years. The Pack’s cover of The Yardbirds’ ‘Mister, You’re a Better Man than I’ (1966) gave Knight a (small) national hit, while Brownsville Station returned the favour with a cover of one of his tunes on their hit album
Yeah!
After an aborted solo career, Knight moved into production before finding real success as manager of Michigan multimillionselling arena-rock trio Grand Funk Railroad. When sacked from the position in 1972, Knight responded by denouncing the group’s output, thereby echoing the sentiments of a press that had savaged GFR’s offerings with clockwork regularity. (Before this, one of Knight’s favourite axioms had been that, in 1970, Grand Funk Railroad sold him ‘a record every four seconds’.)

By 2004, Terry Knight had long been retired from the music business, addiction to cocaine and heroin having consumed much of his creativity (and most of his money) in the eighties. Sharing an apartment with his daughter Danielle and her partner Donald Alan Fair, Knight arrived back on the evening of 1 November to discover a drugged-up Fair attempting to attack his daughter with a knife. Neighbours reported a fracas and the police arrived to discover the former musician dead from a series of knife wounds. Knight, it seems, had stepped in to prevent the assault, Fair then turning his wrath on his girlfriend’s father. In November 2005, Fair was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for Knight’s murder.

Thursday 4

Rob Heaton

(Knutsford, Cheshire, 6 July 1961)

New Model Army

Straddling the twin markets of punk and neo-folk, Bradford’s New Model Army emerged in 1983, voicing the growing discontent of anti-Thatcher-ites, their name borrowed from that of Cromwell’s revolutionary troops, who had opposed the culture of greed pervading Britain at the time of the Civil War. Formed in 1980 by Justin ‘Slade the Leveller’ Sullivan (vocals/guitar), Stuart Morrow (bass/vocals) and Rob Heaton (drums/guitar/various), NMA offered an unpolished manifesto never better displayed than on their debut album,
Vengeance
(1984). For his part, although primarily a drummer, Heaton was a strong all-round musician who wrote or co-wrote many of New Model Army’s standards over sixteen years with the band. Seven of the band’s singles made the Top Forty, perhaps the best known being ‘No Rest’ (1985), the lead song from their second LP.

Rob Heaton, who had undergone brain surgery, left New Model Army in 1998, concentrating on Fresh Milk, his project to encourage and nurture young musical talent. His death – following a fall at his Bradford home – revealed pancreatic cancer of which he’d been unaware. At the musician’s funeral, Sullivan played the 1989 NMA song ‘Green and Grey’ in tribute, Heaton’s finest composition.

Sometime New Model Army collaborator and Psycho Surgeons front man Wild Willi Beckett died in March 2007.

Monday 8

Roger Johnston

(Texas, 26 December 1939)

The Monks

Formed by five American GIs stationed in Germany, The Monks (who certainly shouldn’t be confused with the UK band of ‘Nice Legs’ fame) became a cult draw in the mid sixties. Their heads shaven into monastic tonsures, Gary Burger (vocals/guitar), Dave Day (rhythm guitar/vocals), Larry Clark (organ), Eddie Shaw (bass) and Roger Johnston (drums) caused no little upset to religious groups keen to expose their apparent blasphemy. Far from being put off, The Monks (back in America after discharge in 1965) added black cassocks to the look, as well as miniature nooses instead of neckties; as for the music, it was primitive and mantralike, Johnston’s jazz-influenced drumming broken down to a minimal tribal beat. The band returned to Germany to record their first and only album,
Black Monk Time
(1966). But although their existence was brief, the group’s sound influenced a great number of later acts, including the otherwise original Velvet Underground.

Ironically, after The Monks had long dispersed, Roger Johnston became custodian for his local Methodist church. He was, however, still playing, the band having made several recent comebacks by the time of his passing from a lengthy illness.

Dave Day passed away from a heart attack in January 2008.

Saturday 13

Ol’ Dirty Bastard

(Russell Tyrone Jones - Brooklyn, New York, 15 November 1968)

The Wu-Tang Clan

Ol’ Dirty Bastard … The Professor … Big Baby Jesus … Dirt McGirt … Joe Bannanas … Osirus … or just plain old ODB – whatever one chose to call him, the troubled Russell Jones stood out as one of the true mavericks of hip hop for a decade up until his unexpected death. But the man who’d made rap his escape from the impoverishment of his childhood became as much press fodder for the extremes of his personal life as he did for an impressive body of work.

Drawing together Staten Island’s sprawling Wu-Tang Clan with his cousins RZA (Robert Diggs, also of Gravediggaz) and GZA (Gary Grice), ODB developed a unique vocal style that veered from the almost melodic to the slurred and, on a couple of occasions, to the nigh-on incoherent. By the time of The Clan’s debut,
Enter the Wu-Tang 36 Chambers
(1993), the ‘family’ had grown to include further members – Cappadonna, Ghostface Killah, Inspector Deck, Masta Killa, Method Man, Raekwon and U-God. Although much of their subject matter covered, shall we say, familiar territory, The Clan – and especially ODB – had a highly original take, their imagery steeped in Chinese folklore and martial arts (on which they had certainly done their homework). The map of the East Coast was thus restructured to suit their ends, with Staten Island, their patch, being renamed ‘Shaolin’. As many Clansmen were to do, ODB also established his own solo career with the albums
Return to the 36 Chambers
(1995) and
Nigga Please
(1999 – which featured the hit ‘Got Your Money’, accompanied by Kelis), his main band having cleaned up with a platinum-selling second album,
Wu-Tang Forever
(1997, a US and UK chart-topper), in between.

At the 1998 Grammys, ODB stormed the stage during singer Shawn Colvin’s acceptance speech with his notorious (and baffling) ‘Wu-Tang is for the children!’ outburst – prompted by Puff Daddy’s victory over The Clan in an earlier rap category. It’s likely that this was the moment that his audience learned all was far from well in Dirty-land. For, having built himself up into something of a celebrity in hip-hop circles, ODB had also been busy elsewhere. He was alleged to have fathered no fewer than thirteen children by a variety of women before his thirtieth birthday, in 1997 running into trouble with the authorities for (perhaps understandably) falling behind with maintenance payments. And this was revealed to be far from ODB’s only misdemeanour: there were several arrests for assault, shoplifting, driving without a licence and possession of Class ‘A’ drugs (supposedly in fear for his reputation, ODB had famously told arresting officers to ‘make the rocks disappear’), possession of an offensive weapon, making terrorist threats and the possibly unique charge of ‘wearing a bulletproof vest as a convicted felon’. In true gangsta style, he’d also twice taken bullets. (In the interests of balance, it should also be pointed out that in 1998 ODB saved the life of a girl trapped under a car.) Escaping from state-ordered detox in 2000, ODB went AWOL for some weeks before being traced and arrested – just days after stunning fans by appearing onstage with The Clan. During his subsequent incarceration this clearly disturbed man attempted suicide at least once.