The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (371 page)

Guy Babylon suffered a fatal heart attack while swimming in a friend’s pool in Los Angeles.

On the same day, former (London) Suede manager John Eydmann died in almost identical circumstances while vacationing in Menaggio, Italy: the rock boss suffered a seizure after diving into Lake Como.

Friday 11

Jim Carroll

(New York City, 1 August 1949)

The Jim Carroll Band

The often-overlooked Jim Carroll was a maverick US talent even more widely respected for his forays into poetry, prose and spoken-word than he was for his musicianship. Somehow, Carroll – from a working-class background – had managed to balance high-achievement as a poet and basketball player at New York’s elite Trinity School with a spiralling heroin habit, often funded by crime and self-prostitution. But what may have seemed squalid and unseemly actually proved to be a catalyst …

Carroll’s writing saw him published in the late sixties, the poet attracting the likes of Andy Warhol – who had him contribute scripts to his movies – and Patti Smith – who later encouraged Carroll to form a band. (He’d shared an apartment in New York with Smith and her erstwhile partner, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, while writing the acclaimed if sometimes harrowing memoir,
The Basketball Diaries)

The Jim Carroll Band (originally Amsterdam) came together after the front man hopped to San Francisco in 1978. The band – Carroll (vocals), the Linsley brothers, Brian (guitar) and Steve (bass), plus Terrell Winn (guitar) and Wayne Woods (percussion) – straddled the punk/newwave scene, releasing the excellent, cathartic
Catholic Boy
(Atco, 1980). This collection included the artist’s best-known song, ‘People Who Died’ – a much-rotated band composition documenting the passing (largely from drug abuse) of a number of the singer’s New York acquaintances. While not possessing the greatest range as a singer, Carroll nonetheless imbued his poetry with great drama and passion, the effect only slightly lessened on the follow-up album
Dry Dreams
(1982). By the third set,
I Write Your Name
(1984), Carroll had fulfilled his contract, and, ready to move on again, sacked his band.

Carroll remained one of the few poets to have shown prowess in transferring his craft to the rock medium, issuing further albums of both music and spoken-word over the next two decades. Following the death of Kurt Cobain (
April 1994
), he composed ‘8 Fragments’, a poem aired via
MTV Unplugged
that has been widely acclaimed as the finest of the hundreds of tributes to the Nirvana front man. In his later career, Carroll also wrote songs recorded by artists as diverse as Blue Oyster Cult, Boz Scaggs and Rancid. In 1995, he achieved ultimate acceptance when Hollywood turned his now folk-classic
The Basketball Diaries
into a movie, with Carroll’s character played – surprisingly well – by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Jim Carroll died from a heart attack at his Manhattan home, apparently while working at his desk. Could it really have happened any other way?

Sunday 13

C J Jenkins

(Clarence Jenkins III - Newport, New Jersey, 1959)

Faith or Fear

On 13 September, fifty-year-old Clarence Jenkins became the latest of a growing group of rock performers to have died on stage. His band Faith or Fear hadn’t really made thrash-metal’s big league, having split in 1991 after just one album,
The Punishment Area
(Combat, 1989). However, the band had gained national renown in this short time, having opened a US tour for Brazilian big-hitters Sepultura.

Faith or Fear’s continued popularity in Germany and Japan prompted a reunion in 2008, the group releasing a long-overdue second record,
Instruments of Death
(Lost and Found, 2009), the reaction to which prompted renewed touring. FOF were back in their home town of Millville, playing the New Jersey Arts, Music & Antiques Fair, when bassist Jenkins collapsed mid-set. Although he was rushed to a hospital in Vineland, the musician was pronounced dead of a heart attack. Faith or Fear guitarist Chris Bombeke – who, along with audience members, had rushed to his band mate’s aid – employed a little gallows humour as he later paid homage to the man who lived and died for his music, saying: ‘He went out to a huge crowd. I had to pry that bass out of his hand.’

Golden Oldies #100

Bobby Graham

(Robert Neate - Edmonton, London, 11 March 1940)

The Outlaws

Joe Brown & The Bruvvers

(The John Barry Seven)

(Various acts)

Respected English drummer Bobby Graham had many claims to fame throughout his varied career, but the one that stands out the most is his long-held declaration that he turned down The Beatles before the position was offered to Ringo Starr: Graham alleged many times that the reason he gave Brian Epstein was that he was already in a more successful group - Joe Brown & The Bruvvers …

Prior to this, Graham had been a member of the chart-bothering John Barry Seven and then The Outlaws, a British instrumental group initially created by Joe Meek to back his singer Mike Berry. This unit at various times also featured Chas Hodges (later of Chas & Dave-fame), Ritchie Blackmore (to join Deep Purple, then Rainbow) and Mick Underwood (The Herd, Quatermass, Gillan). But, whatever the truth of that Beatles tale, Graham joined Joe Brown’s band in 1961, contributing to hits such as the near-charttopping ‘A Picture of You’ (1962). Quitting this position in 1963, the drummer became a remarkably prolific session musician who performed on recordings by countless major artists including The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, The Animals and Tom Jones. (His claim to have provided percussion on hits by The Dave Clark Five is, however, contested by the band.) Whether Graham could have played on a reported 15,000 recordings is unclear, but he undoubtedly performed on over forty UK Top Five hits - a record practically unmatched for a side man.

Although he toured with his own jazz ensemble for many years, little had been heard about Bobby Graham in recent times until his death from stomach cancer on 14 September 2009: however, legendary US producer Shel Talmy has described him as ‘the best drummer Britain ever produced’.

Golden Oldies #101

Mary Travers

(Louisville, Kentucky, 9 November 1936)

Peter, Paul & Mary

(The Song Swappers)

Contemporaneous to Graham was Mary Travers, a silver-voiced soprano who emerged from Kentucky to join the New York folk-music revolution of the fifties on her way to a career that lasted some five decades. During her teens, Travers had been a member of The Song Swappers, an accomplished backing vocal-unit to Pete Seeger that appeared at Carnegie Hall, the young songstress already well-versed in the music of Woody Guthrie, Josh White and The Weavers.

A tall, willowy blonde, Travers juggled stints as a fashion model with her singing, but the huge, global success of her next act was to change her life. Under the guidance of Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, Peter, Paul & Mary -the trio in which he cast her with Pete Yarrow and Noel ‘Paul’ Stookey during 1961 - found almost instant stardom. The group quickly became the most popular act at Greenwich Village’s The Bitter End venue, the following year establishing themselves as a major commercial force when a self-titled debut album topped the listings on its way to double-platinum status: singles ‘Lemon Tree’ (US Top Forty) and the Grammy-winning ‘If I Had a Hammer’ (US Top Ten) secured Peter, Paul & Mary’s newfound status. The trio’s follow-ups were almost as emphatic,
Moving
and
In the Wind
(both 1963) achieving US number two and number one respectively. The former had spawned the timeless ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ (1962, US number two) - which was very definitely
not
a ‘drug’ tale, despite unnecessarily hysterical press reaction. While not charting with every release, Peter, Paul & Mary earned further smashes throughout the 1960s, among them Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1963, US number two; UK Top Twenty), ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ (1963, US Top Ten) and ‘I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music’ (1967, US Top Ten). Their biggest and perhaps best effort was, however, John Denver’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, a 1969 charttopping (and UK number two) single saved for the very end of the partnership. Peter, Paul & Mary went their separate ways the next year.