The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (275 page)

BOOK: The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars

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‘Danny’s standing side by side with his great friend Jim Morrison -and the two of them will now be laughing into eternity.’

John Densmore, drummer, The Doors

Tuesday 11

Jimmy Griffin

(Cincinnati, Ohio, 10 August 1943)

Bread

The Remingtons

(Black Tie)

Growing up in a neighbourhood where rock ‘n’ roll abounded, guitarist Jimmy Griffin eventually took the ‘softer’ option, forming the definitive AOR band Bread with songwriter David Gates. Early on, his musical proficiency had been noted by local wild boys Dorsey and Johnny Burnette, who lived just across the road; their connections eventually led Griffin to Los Angeles and a music community swept away by the new sounds emerging. The guitarist cut a solo album for Reprise in 1963
(Summer Holiday),
but although his songs were recorded by highprofile stars such as Bobby Vee, major success for Griffin was still six years away.

Bread began in 1969, Griffin and his new pal Gates (vocals/guitar/keyboards) accompanied by Robb Royer (bass) and Jim Gordon (drums – replaced by Mike Botts after the first album). With beat music now replaced in the US by the smoother sounds of Blood, Sweat & Tears and The Carpenters (for whom Griffin later wrote the Grammy-winning ‘For All We Know’), Bread were to fit right in, topping the Billboard chart with the seductive ‘Make It with You’ (1970). A series of similarly paced Gates tunes followed, some of which – ‘If’, ‘Baby I’m-a Want You’ (both 1971) and ‘Everything I Own’ (1972) – went on to become MOR classics. Griffin was away from the band for three years after several artistic disagreements with Gates, although he returned for the evocative
Lost without Your Love
(1977). After this album, Bread called it a day, however, Griffin returning to solo work. Black Tie emerged in the late eighties, the guitarist teaming with Billy Swan and former Eagles bassist Randy Meisner, though this seemingly infallible line-up was unable to achieve the success of Griffin’s earlier band. The next venture, The Remingtons, propelled him back into the US Top Ten with ‘A Long Time Ago’ (1992), but there were no further hits and subsequent work for Jimmy Griffin was restricted to sessions and songwriting, plus a Bread reunion in 1997. Griffin had been receiving treatment for a year when he died from cancer at home in Nashville.

See also
Mike Botts (
December 2005); Larry Knechtel (
Golden Oldies #96)

Spencer Dryden

(New York, 7 April 1938)

Jefferson Airplane

New Riders of the Purple Sage

The Peanut Butter Conspiracy

(Various acts)

On the same afternoon, cancer took another stalwart of American rock music in the shape of psychedelic-rock percussionist Spencer Dryden. The drummer – who boasted Charlie Chaplin as an uncle – came from a jazz background, his syncopated rhythms largely unheard in pop music before he formed the Los Angeles band The Heartbeats with noted guitarist Roy Buchanan. This was a full ten years before Dryden replaced the errant Skip Spencer as drummer of hippy leading lights Jefferson Airplane. By 1967, the band – Dryden, Grace Slick (vocals), Paul Kantner (guitar), Jorma Kaukonen (guitar) and Jack Casady (bass) – were at the height of their powers with Top Ten signature tunes in ‘White Rabbit’ (complete with Dryden’s distinctive snare) and ‘Somebody To Love’ remained at the frontline of the counterculture alongside The Grateful Dead et al for three years. Most remember Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont as the decade’s trio of key festivals; fewer recall that The Airplane were the only band to play all of them, Dryden in place as musical history was made. After leaving the band in 1970, Dryden found himself a niche with the equally influential (if not as commercially viable) New Riders of the Purple Sage and The Peanut Butter Conspiracy. In the eighties, he emerged from a brief sabbatical from music to perform with the ultimate hippy supergroup The Dinosaurs – comprising members of The Dead, Country Joe & The Fish, QMS and Big Brother & The Holding Company – though he played no part in the metamorphosis of Jefferson Airplane into Starship during that decade.

Spencer Dryden’s final years were highly distressing. After a botched hip operation left him permanently crippled, a fire in September 2003 then destroyed his home and most of the memorabilia from those golden years of the sixties. Finally, he was diagnosed with colon cancer in October 2004, a benefit concert held by his highprofile friends raising just about enough for the vast medical bills he was now accruing. Dryden, however, lasted only three months after diagnosis, dying from the disease at his home in Penngrove, California.

See also
Sandi Robison (
April 1988); Skip Spence (
April 1999); John Dawson IV (
July 2009). Three former New Riders bass-players have also passed on: they are David Torbert (
December 1982), Clyde ‘Skip’ Battin (d 2003) and Allen Kemp (d 2009).