The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (38 page)

MAY

Wednesday 8

Graham Bond

(John Clifton Bond - Romford, Essex, 28 October 1937)

The Graham Bond Trio/Organization

The Graham Bond Initiation

Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated

The Don Rendell Quintet

Thick-set, unfashionable Graham Bond never really wanted to be ‘the next big thing’. An Essex-born music enthusiast, he played alto sax for Don Rendell’s jazz quintet at the age of fifteen, finding himself earmarked as Britain’s New Jazz Star in 1961. Bond – whose playing partners would make up a veritable Who’s Who of British blues glitterati – made the transition to blues rock, playing first with Alexis Korner (the genre’s godfather) and then persuading band members Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to join him in his own new project in 1963. The Graham Bond Organization was soon known for its leader’s distinctive Hammond organ and rasping vocal. (A lack of hit singles – then essential currency for any beat combo – caused Bruce and Baker’s departure to form Cream with Eric Clapton three years later.)

Graham Bond: Never emerged from the underground

Bond struggled to reachieve the critical heights he’d experienced in the sixties, moving briefly to the USA with his partner, singer Diane Stewart, to find work, and then back to Britain, where – despite recording with Bruce and Baker’s new projects – his slump into self-destruction alarmed his colleagues. Increasingly obsessed with the occult, Bond (with Stewart) formed the band Holy Magick, and began ingesting vast amounts of drugs and alcohol as his frustration and despondency increased. His Graham Bond Initiation music project collapsed within two years.

Near-destitute, Bond’s personal problems escalated, with his two-year marriage to Stewart ending in 1972 (posthumous allegations of the sexual abuse of a stepdaughter emerged in a biography) and work impossible to find. Bond was seemingly hamstrung: his attempts to take even low-paid music jobs were met with genuine disbelief by potential employers, astonished to be approached by such a legend. Following a month in prison for a public misdemeanour (and subsequent enforced institutionalization), Graham Bond died under a tube train at London’s Finsbury Park station. Although the driver of the train described Bond as having ‘appeared in front of him’ as he emerged from the tunnel, without a suicide note we can never know whether his death was intentional. Bond’s funeral in Streatham was no more straightforward either – a vast pentagram hung behind his coffin, and Jack Bruce improvised a bluesy dirge on the church organ.

JUNE

Sunday 30

George Chase Damon DeFeis

(1957)

Creation

Not to be confused with the British psychedelic band of a few years before, Creation was a New York funk-rock act set up by guitarist John Henderson, his singer wife, Sarita, second vocalist George Chase, Damon DeFeis (keyboards) and Eric Carr (drums), previously playing as Salt ‘n’ Pepper (again, not to be confused …)

On the night of 29 June 1974, Creation played a packed nightspot called Gulliver’s in Port Chester, New York. A young hood named Peter Leonard had burgled the bowling club next door, and decided that the best way to cover his tracks was to start a fire in the alleys themselves. The blaze spread, thick black smoke seeping through the ventilation ducts of Gulliver’s, a discotheque-cum-restaurant on several floors. By the time the Port Chester and Greenwich Fire Departments had been summoned, the damage was done. Attempting to announce an evacuation, Creation were overcome with smoke. Chase and DeFeis were among twenty-four who perished in the ensuing catastrophe, though Eric Carr was something of a hero, saving the lives of both John and Sarita Henderson. Leonard served seven years for manslaughter. Creation continued under the new name Mother Nature/Father Time; Carr then went on to considerable fame as drummer with theatrical rockers Kiss in 1980, before his own premature death a decade later
(
November 1991
).

JULY

Tuesday 2

Jimmy Ricks

(Jackson, Florida, 6 August, 1924)

The Ravens

Among the true founders of American R & B, The Ravens were formed pretty much straight after the end of the war by Harlem waiters Jimmy Ricks and Warren Suttles. It’s hard to imagine what company they might have kept in the Billboard chart at this time, but The Ravens were there with ‘Write Me a Letter’ and the massive ‘Old Man River’ in 1947. By 1950, though, Ricks was the only original member of the group remaining as they signed with Mercury Records, and had switched to a solo career by 1956 – though The Ravens would tour the nostalgia circuit during the seventies. Ricks was one month short of his fiftieth birthday when he died from a sudden heart attack; his replacement in The Ravens, Joe van Loan, also died just two years later. Sometime lead Maithe Marshall passed on in 1989 and another member, Ollie Jones, in 1990.

Monday 29

‘Mama’ Cass Elliot

(Ellen Naomi Cohen - Baltimore, Maryland, 19 September 1941)

The Mamas & The Papas

(The Big Three)

(The Mugwumps)

Cass Elliot was a big lady, but, nope, contrary to one of pop music’s most persistent myths, she did
not
die choking on a ham sandwich. It’s believed that a flippant remark attributed to an attendant physician made it into the post mortem report, but a senior pathologist attested that although the food was present, none had blocked the singer’s trachea. Elliot was just 5’5” tall but weighed in excess of 230 lbs – and it was this that brought about her early heart attack.

Among a slew of bearded guitar-noodlers, The Mamas & The Papas were the vocal leaders of the Greenwich music scene during the sixties. Having moved around constantly as a child, Ellen Cohen settled in New York in 1960, changed her name and acted in several off-Broadway shows. She joined a couple of bands, The Big Three (an early example of Elliot’s self-deprecating humour) with her husband – the unluckily named Jimmy Hendricks – and The Mugwumps, where she met Denny Doherty, who joined her in her best-remembered group. (The other Mugwumps, John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky, went on to found the equally successful Lovin’ Spoonful.) The Mamas & The Papas were completed by the innovative John Phillips and his wife, (Holly) Michelle Gilliam, who were initially reluctant to involve Elliot, possibly because of her size. Eventually, they had to concede that she had ‘something’, the four Greenwich friends finding their unique harmonies while vacationing in the Virgin Islands. Moving to Los Angeles in 1964, the quartet (originally known as The New Journeymen) met success astonishingly fast: their first two albums shifted well over a million units each, while inspiringly tuneful hits including ‘California Dreamin’’, ‘Monday Monday’, ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’ (all 1966) and ‘Creeque Alley’ (1967) were all to become standards. Cass Elliot – often at the band’s fore – was an instant hit with fans and never slow with a riposte where one was appropriate.