The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (418 page)

Hard-rock act X Japan were (as the name might suggest) a popular Japanese band whose styles drew from many influences. The group’s songwriter and bass player was the versatile, but ultimately troubled Taiji Sawada.

X Japan had begun as early as 1977, when school pals Toshi Deyama and Yoshiki Hayashi formed an act called Dynamite: a decade later the band were known as X. The bassist, guitarist and songwriter Sawada was then installed by the debut album,
Vanishing Vision
(1988). After changing their name to X Japan’ (thereby avoiding confusion with the established US punk act), the band went on to score three Japanese number one albums and thirteen Top Five singles at home. Their popularity elsewhere has been limited to that of cult status.

Taiji Sawada – who left X Japan at the height of their success to form numerous other bands in the intervening years – had been suffering from chronic epilepsy. This condition appears to have been at the centre of his arrest during a Delta airlines flight to Saipan, in which the musician was charged with causing a disturbance and assaulting a stewardess; it was reported that Sawada was in a state of such agitation that he had to be restrained by several passengers. During his detention, Sawada attempted suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet in his cell. Upon discovery, the artist was rushed to an intensive care unit, but was shortly certified as being brain-dead. His mother and fiancée made the decision to switch off his life support three days later.

Saturday 23

Amy Winehouse

(Southgate, London, England, 14 September 1983)

That voice must
surely
have been age-proof, designed to weather and wear like a fine instrument; a tool honed to embrace the passing of time rather than to succumb unto it. Well, maybe. At any rate, with or without the foibles that made Amy Winehouse ‘good copy’, she was a singer who understood what, from within,
made
the song – and, even more importantly, had the vision to apply the correct measure of herself into what she was to craft. But, of course, we’ll never know what the future may have brought for her, or she to us.

Amy Winehouse: Found it hard to say no, no, no

‘A perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent … and poor impulse control.’

The New Statesman,
on Amy Winehouse, July 2011

Everywhere one looked within the Winehouse family, there was a jazz presence: most of her relatives seemed to be musicians, singers or, at the very least, collectors, and the young Amy paid close attention. Her cab-driving father Mitch particularly encouraged her to learn the great standards and develop her voice. Winehouse herself applied the extra ingredients, be they from her own love of soul, R & B or brassy pop, and she was writing her first songs on guitar before anyone had to sit her down to do it.

There was never a doubt that Winehouse would find a home at one of London’s talent schools; however, keeping her there was to prove the problem. The singer was first placed at the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School and then switched to Sylvia Young, from which she also left early – allegedly for piercing her nose. By now, Amy was also nurturing the earliest signs of the ‘bad-girl’ image that was to dominate her public profile over the next decade. She was to attend at least three more schools before her inevitable discovery.

It was purely her sassy and decidedly ‘retro’ look, style and, above all, sound that was to reel in the big fish. The teenage singer was noticed by Simon Fuller while performing at London’s After Dark jazz club (after naturally persuading her way in for free). His 19 agency were the next to try to develop her – this proved successful. Winehouse remained an industry ‘secret’ until her debut album
Frank
(2003) emerged on Island. A critically acclaimed record,
Frank
– in homage to Sinatra – featured several songs penned (or co-written) by Winehouse and went on to shift just under a million copies in the UK. The singer’s smoky, chocolatey delivery was unlike anything heard from a young artist in some years and the depth of her lyricism was, similarly, to stun many. Early signature hit ‘Stronger Than Me’ (2003) claimed for Winehouse the first of many prizes, in winning a deserved Ivor Novello award for songwriting.

Accompanied by a new, trademark beehive hairdo – and a host of fresh tattoos – the singer reemerged with a follow-up collection that was even more of a revelation. However, by its release, the wheels, if not already ‘off’, had started to work free of their axle. Fans had waited three years for the British number-one album
Back To Black
(2006), an altogether darker, more personal work that documented what appeared to be a growing reputation for substance and alcohol abuse – and an apparently destructive relationship with her supposed ‘muse’ (and for a short time, husband), Blake Fielder-Civil. Frankly, what this man did other than score drugs is a mystery, however for a time he was to hold a controlling spell over Amy that even her beloved parents had been unable to match.

In contrast, Winehouse’s professional career was very much on the ‘up’.
Back To Black
garnered unprecedented praise for its perpetrator, becoming Britain’s top-selling album in 2007, while also break-ing the singer to a considerable extent in the USA. The album went Top Ten in America, as did the extraordinary single ‘Rehab’ (2006, also UK Top Ten), in which the artist cocked a blatant snook to all those continuing to suggest that she needed therapy. (Winehouse did, however, attend a clinic early in 2008.) In spite of the burgeoning concern for her health, Winehouse then went on to snare a record five Grammy awards including Record and Song of the Year, as well as Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist: no British woman had
ever
achieved this. (However, Amy had to perform her part of the ceremony from the other side of the world, tales of her visa ‘too late in processing’ later amended to ‘denied’, reportedly for a pending charge of drugs possession.)

The first suggestions of Winehouse’s demons impacting upon her live work were around the tail end of 2007, when fans began noticing something of a downturn in the singer’s ability to perform. By the start of 2011, this had escalated to the point that Amy was apparently too intoxicated to recall the names of her band members, let alone the city in which she was performing (Belgrade), or the words to her own songs. Indeed, the singer’s final years had been a mess of personal issues, and she was often photographed in states of drunkenness or apparent physical disarray. After her divorce in 2009, Winehouse began confessing to this kind of behaviour, as well as her addiction to stronger substances (she was by now using crack cocaine and heroin). She was admitted to the hospital on more than one occasion, compounding her sorry state of affairs with at least three charges for common assault.

Although by 2011 Winehouse was in an altogether calmer relationship (with movie director Reg Traviss) and largely free of drugs, her appetite for alcohol seemed as voracious as ever. Witnesses spoke of her drinking binges, while others merely listened open-mouthed as the singer described elaborate cocktails that seemed to possess every comestible liquid known to man – bar a mixer.

In the early weeks of the summer, Winehouse was speaking happily of her next projects, which came as good news for her many fans who’d, after all, been waiting four years for new material. On 20 July, she appeared coherent on stage for the first time in some while; she was with her niece, who was also an aspiring singer: perhaps Amy was turning a corner? The singer seemed in especially good spirits a couple of nights later, particularly to the bodyguard who light-heartedly had to persuade her not to play her drums past midnight for fear of upsetting the well-to-do neighbours of her Camden, north London home. He later observed that Winehouse -apparently alone – was watching television and laughing into the small hours of the night. However, having been unable to rouse the singer by ten o’clock the following morning, the bodyguard returned to her bed five hours later to discover that her position remained unchanged. Contacting emergency services, he quickly knew what the world was within minutes to begin learning: Amy Winehouse was dead.

Forensics removed various bottles (mainly vodka) from the premises, a post-mortem revealing that Winehouse had a blood-alcohol measurement of 416 mg per decilitre of blood in her system – more than five times the legal limit for drivers. The coroner’s verdict was therefore one of misadventure by alcoholic poisoning, prompting the singer’s bereft parents to set up a support foundation in their daughter’s name. Winehouse’s tragic demise at just twenty-seven had prompted an understandable outpouring of both grief and tributes – among them the many British females (Adele, Lily Allen, Duffy) who were quick to pay respects to the singer for once more unlocking a door for British female artists to thrive abroad. The singer’s death had come as no real surprise to the remainder of us following the rollercoaster tale of Amy Winehouse. Whether she was
always
on some kind of collision course with fate barely merits discussion; however, what remains undeniable is the talent that had taken her all the way to music’s top table within just a few years.

Sunday 24

Dan Peek

(Panama City, Florida, 1 November 1950)

America

(Various acts)

Latterly a pioneer of Christian rock music, Dan Peek will be more readily associated with platinum-selling soft-rock band America. But for one whose music has always appeared introspective, the quote (right) suggests that he was something of a dark horse with no name.

Peek – who lived in Japan as a child – met his similarly exiled America band mates at school near London, England, where their military fathers were stationed. As the trio Daze, they’d begun making waves in their adopted city, opening for a variety of acts at the fabled Roundhouse venue (when they were not washing dishes there to make a few pennies). The group name was shortly changed to America, a symbolic nod to the homeland they’d barely seen.

Belying their tender years with a maturity in sound and songwriting, America – Peek (guitar/keyboard/backing vocals), Gerry Beckley (lead vocals/guitar/bass) and Dewey Bunnell (guitars/percussion/backing vocals) – trotted onto the scene with the number-one debut album
America
(Warners, 1971). This set was only to catch on when repackaged a year later to feature the Bunnell song that was to become the band’s most-famous, and a standard to this day: originally called ‘Desert Song’, ‘A Horse With No Name’ (1972, US number one; UK Top Three – their only British hit of note) was a global smash for the band, and effectively cemented their careers. The critics were generally taken with the young trio that seemed to recall the best of Crosby, Stills & Nash (or indeed Neil Young, who was briefly mistaken as the singer of ‘Horse … ‘) – and America rubbed shoulders with Bread, The Eagles and The Doobie Brothers as a new ‘soft rock’-era dominated US music. The group then compounded platinum status for their album by also taking the 1973 Grammy for Best New Band.