The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (40 page)

‘I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible - for it to be a plea for help that nobody hears.’

Actress Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister

In 1971, peers could see the change in Nick Drake’s personality. He was withdrawn and was prescribed the antidepressant Tryptizol by a psychiatrist, but early on found its side effects insupportable. Chris Blackwell, head of Island Records (with whom Drake now recorded), had a better idea – he offered the artist a couple of weeks at his Spanish apartment: Drake accepted, and on his return that October announced to delighted colleagues that he was ready to go into the studio for a third album. The result, however, was a deeply personal, lonely disc, cut by the musician in just two nights. Island’s first knowledge of the work was a set of tapes left at reception, so reticent had the singer become. Despite the earlier hopes of his friends and family, that all was clearly not well was borne out by the collection of sparse songs that made up
Pink Moon
(1972). When this, too, failed to make an impact, Drake’s frustration turned to anger: he would accuse only-slightly-more-successful contemporaries of ‘selling out’, labelling friend John Martyn ‘devious’ and deeming Joe Boyd’s decision to move to the USA ‘a betrayal’. Turning his back on music, Nick Drake tried a new career in computer programming, and even enlisted in the army. When these paths also proved fruitless, Drake returned to his parents’ home, isolated and despondent. Having reached his lowest point, Drake – who checked himself into a psychiatric unit for a month – stated that he ‘didn’t see the point of living’.

Once again, an invitation to foreign soil (or, in this case, water) stemmed the startling decline of a man who should have been in his prime. Drake lived on a houseboat on the Seine for a while, reacquainting himself with chanteuse Françoise Hardy, who, having fallen in love with Drake’s songs some time earlier, had expressed an interest in his writing for her. Partly invigorated by this new-found approval of his work, Drake cut four tracks for a proposed fourth album of his own while making arrangements to settle permanently in Paris, and returned home to organize this move (and to start learning French) in November 1974. It was never to happen: Nick Drake died in the early hours of the twenty-fifth – seemingly from an overdose of Tryptizol. He was discovered sprawled across his bed the following lunchtime by his mother. Suicide was the verdict, though Drake had left no note to this effect, and had even recently denounced such an action as one he could never consider. His mother believed that her son had suggested his intent to her – and lyrics to his later works seemed to support the notion that he’d been greatly unhappy for the last couple of years – but many believe Drake’s death can only have been accidental. Writer Nick Kent, who covered Drake’s passing for the
NME,
insisted that ‘there was no great flourish that so often tends to typify the self-imposed taking of one’s life’.

Nick Drake reportedly sold fewer than 30,000 records while he was alive, but times and attitudes change. Three decades on, the rock revisionists have had a field day with a series of reissues and, in the case of
Made to Love Magic
(2004), previously unreleased material finding its way on to the market. Those who have openly acknowledged Drake’s influence over the years include artists as diverse as Elton John, Television’s Tom Verlaine, Robert Smith of The Cure and ex-Dinosaur Jr leader J Mascis.

DECEMBER

Sunday 15 Rodd Keith

(Rodney Keith Eskelin – Baltimore, Maryland, 30 January, 1937)

(Rodd & Bobbie)

Little-known talent Rodd Keith was a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose father’s conversion to fundamentalism grounded Keith’s musical skills in gospel. His upbringing had a profound effect on him, and he married another non-secular musician, the couple touring the South as keyboard duo Rodd & Bobbie, eventually securing a regular television slot in the late fifties. A hugely unpredictable figure, Keith then turned his back on religion (and on his marriage and young son) for secular music, though, initial success lacking, he resorted to stunts such as looting the music shop that employed him in order to raise capital. Moving alone to California, where he remarried, the maverick musician began recording under a variety of aliases, customers approaching him from far and wide for his unusual and seemingly effortless ability to set anything – prose, poetry, whatever – to music (‘song poems’).

Abusing drugs increasingly, Rodd Keith nurtured the regrettable habit of playing practical jokes in order to ‘psyche out’ his acquaintances. One of these was to walk along high and very narrow ledges. At 5.10 am on the morning of 15 December, Keith was indulging in this activity when he slipped and fell from a freeway overpass on Santa Monica Boulevard. Passing traffic was unable to avoid his falling body, and Keith was struck by several cars, sustaining massive injuries which killed him. The plot thickened when it was discovered that he had recently spoken of making a movie about just such an occurrence.

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1974:

Pink Anderson
(noted US bluesman whose name apparently inspired that of Pink Floyd; born South Carolina, 12/2/1900; heart attack, 12/10)

Charles ‘Packy’ Axton
(much-recorded US saxophonist – the son and nephew of the founders of Stax – whose Mar-Keys evolved into Booker T & The MGs (without him); born 17/2/1941; heart attack, 1/1974)

Herb Coleman
(US first tenor with The Delta Rhythm Boys; born New York, 2/10/1927; shot during a visit to Cannes, he died in the arms of group leader Lee Gaines, 12/6)

Pamela Courson
(US ‘muse’ to Jim Morrison who took his name and worked for The Doors’ company; born California, 22/12/1946; heroin overdose, 25/4)

Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup
(seminal gospel/blues singer who wrote Elvis’s first hit, ‘That’s All Right Mama’; born Mississippi, 24/8/1905; heart attack, 28/3)

Adge Cutler
(popular original frontman of ‘ooh-aar’ scrumpy ‘n’ western outfit, The Wurzels; born Somerset, 1930; car crash 5/5)

Shorty Horton
(US original bass-player with Link Wray’s bands; born Brantley Moses Horton, Virginia, 5/6/1921; unknown, 11/11)

Lightnin’ Slim
(US ‘swamp blues’ maestro; born Otis V Hicks, Missouri, 13/3/1913; cancer, 27/6)

Bernie Nee
(US one-man orchestra - ‘The Five Blobs’ - who charted in 1958 with the theme from the movie
The Blob;
born 4/12/1922; unknown, 2/1974)

Billie Pierce
(lively US blues pianist who sang ‘In the Racket’; born Wilhelmina Goodson, Marianna, Florida, 8/6/1907; illness, 29/9)

Ed Sullivan
(celebrated ‘stone-faced’ TV host who introduced the US to The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Doors, among dozens of other artists; born New York, 28/9/1901 (or 1902); cancer, 13/10)

1975

FEBRUARY

Monday 10 Dave Alexander

(Detroit, Michigan, 3 June 1947)

The Stooges

The somehow indestructible Iggy Pop kept on going while contemporaries of his fell by the wayside: Dave Alexander was the first such victim. As a 17-year-old Beatles/Stones fan, Alexander, having dropped out of school, dreamed of being in a band. Flying to England on a whim with his friend Ron Asheton, Alexander didn’t manage to meet his heroes, but he returned to the US more determined than ever. The pair rehearsed with Ron’s brother, Scott – and, in 1965, the very first inklings of The Stooges could be heard rasping from the bass guitarist’s basement. All they lacked was a frontman – but then there was this weird guy who worked at the local record store …

The (Psychedelic) Stooges were complete in 1967 when they recruited James Jewell Osterberg (aka Iggy Pop, late of The Prime Movers), the band – effectively Ron (guitar), Scott Asheton (drums) and Alexander (bass) – a stonewall backing to the frontman and his bizarre stage antics. In spite of their primeval sound and the singer’s predilection for smearing himself with blood and peanut butter on stage, Elektra signed The Stooges in 1968. Alexander was becoming more and more interested in mysticism as the group made its first (low-selling) pair of albums: he persuaded the band to record his strange chanting for the ten-minute ‘We Will Fall’ for the John Cale-produced
The Stooges
(1969). His primal bass riff drove the band’s best moment, ‘Dirt’ from
Fun House
(1970), but Alexander’s particularly heavy abuse of drugs caused his unlikely firing by Iggy shortly after this record – following a performance at the Jackson Goose Lake Festival when a tripping Alexander forgot all the songs. Although he was replaced on bass by Ron Asheton (James Williamson came in on guitars), the proto-punk pioneers disbanded soon after – to return as Iggy & The Stooges two years on.

During a long-running feud with the singer in the eighties, the Asheton brothers were quoted as saying that had Iggy not sacked Alexander he might still be alive today. He died early in 1975, years of drug and alcohol abuse weakening his body until he fell victim to pneumonia in Detroit. Just months later, The Stooges lost another bass-player (and roadie) – Zeke Zettner – to a drug overdose.

But one former Stooge often believed dead by inaccurate sources is saxophonist Steve Mackay, whose playing lit up the band’s second album. Mackay proved he was very much alive in 2003, playing to thousands of Stooges fans amazed to see him – and his original sax – reunited for a tour with Iggy and the Ashetons.

See also:
Ron Asheton (
January 2009)