The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (55 page)

With her marriage to her errant husband, musician Trevor Lucas, collapsing, Denny visited her parents at their holiday home in Cornwall, and suffered a calamitous fall down some steps, hitting her head on concrete. Her mother, reportedly more concerned to preserve their reputation than to acquire medical assistance, refused to have her daughter seen drunk – a huge error of judgement that came back to haunt Denny’s family a month later. A concerned Lucas took their daughter to
his
family in Australia – apparently with little intention of returning – and the singer was found collapsed at the London home of her friend Miranda Ward. Four days later, Sandy Denny died at Atkinson Morley Hospital, never having regained consciousness. Doctors initially put the death down to mid-brain trauma, believing she’d suffered the injury at Ward’s home: those who had seen Denny sporting a horrific wound at her final concert three weeks earlier knew that this was not the case.

See also
Trevor Lucas (
February 1989)

JULY

Saturday 29

Glen Goins

(Plainfield, New Jersey, 2 January 1954)

Parliament/Funkadelic

(Quazar/Mutiny)

To be considered the best vocalist/rhythm guitarist to emerge from the P-Funk stable is no mean feat, considering the sheer number of musicians that have come and gone in fifty years of Parliament/Funkadelic. Glen Goins’s time in what has become a funk institution was very brief, but his soaring voice and dynamic rhythm playing is still greatly missed by the groups’ followers.

America’s biggest, sweatiest, most colourful combo actually had a nucleus as The Parliaments, a New Jersey barbershop vocal troupe founded by George Clinton, but that was a far cry from the glammed-up, sci-fi beast into which they would mutate twenty years later. By 1975 Clinton and co were producing the rip-roaring P-Funk classic
Mothership Connection,
the first album to feature the lead vocals of gospel-taught Goins, which housed a breakthrough US hit, ‘Tear the Roof off the Sucker’. This set was followed by
The Clones of DrFunkenstein
(1976) and
Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome
(1977), the latter a monstrously ambitious piece of conceptual work that in its live format featured onstage spaceships and the like, as Parliament/Funkadelic became arguably the hottest concert draw in the world. But, as so many other P-Funkers were to do, Goins – disillusioned by Clinton’s controlling manner – had already left the pack to pursue another project in the shape of Quazar. This new funk unit, which Goins joined with fellow Parliament-mutineer Jerome Brailey, had been formed by his brother Kevin, and would duly morph – P-Funk style – into another act called, simply, Mutiny.

A quiet man outside his work, Glen Goins experienced recurring health problems throughout his short life. In 1978, Mutiny were signed to Arista, but Goins collapsed at home in New Jersey on 27 July – and died two days later from complications arising from Hodgkin’s disease. Kevin Goins completed Mutiny’s 1979 debut album
Mutiny on the Mamaship,
dedicating the set to his brother’s memory.

See also
‘Tiki’ Fulwood (
November 1979); Eddie Hazel (
December 1992); Raymond Davis (
Golden Oldies #26); Garry Shider (
June 2010). Sometime P-Funk trumpeter Richard ‘Kush’ Griffith died in 2007 while guitarist ‘Catfish’ Collins and original vocalist Mallia Franklin passed on three years later.

AUGUST

Thursday 24

Stacy Sutherland

(Kerr County, Texas, 28 May 1946)

13th Floor Elevators

The average dark, uncompromising guitar hero would have found it hard to hold an audience when competing with spacelord frontman Roky Erickson, but Stacy Sutherland – axe-toting psyche-warrior with shortlived Austin legends The 13th Floor Elevators – didn’t do a bad job of being second in command. Although they remain a relatively exclusive treat for a minority of record-buyers, in their day The Elevators were the top acid-guzzling, stoner kings of over-amplified, psychedelic preach-pop. The band was the result of a collision between two Texan garage outfits, The Lingsmen (Sutherland) and The Spades (Erickson). As The 13th Floor Elevators (the new name coined as a reference to the ‘floor that doesn’t exist’ for superstitious American hotel-goers), they embarked upon a 2-year rampage of drug-taking. Nevertheless, they created extraordinary music as they went – the expression ‘psychedelic’ had not been seen on an album sleeve until The Elevators’ 1966 debut. With ‘guru’ Tommy Hall playing a 1.5-gallon ‘electric’ aluminium jug, the line-up was somewhat more sedately completed by Benny Thurman (bass; later replacement Danny Galindo died in 2001) and John Ike Walton (drums). As The Elevators’ most talented player, Stacy Sutherland would have a big say in the band’s songwriting, but it was his and Erickson’s recreational habits that garnered the most column inches. Erickson became a sort of American Syd Barrett, paranoid, deluded and convinced he was a Martian with a ‘third eye’ – he would be in and out of institutions for years afterwards. For Sutherland, the future was even darker. The Texas Rangers were almost constantly on the band’s (and especially his) tail, and he spent a jail term for drug possession in 1968. The rest of the band were put out by this development, and The Elevators dissolved some months after (Tommy Hall eventually became a Christian).

In 1977, Sutherland joined a line-up of The Elevators for a reunion show – without the unwell Erickson – but any pipe dreams that the group might one day reform were exposed as hallucinations when the once-fried guitar man, now often strung out on heroin, was shot dead by his estranged wife in a domestic dispute in Houston. He was buried in the town of his birth.

‘They didn’t make any money to speak of, but they did get lots of pussy and buttloads of free drugs.’

Bob Galindo, Texan musician, Elevators fan and brother of bassist Danny

SEPTEMBER

Tuesday 5

Joey Negroni

(Harlem, New York, 9 September 1940)

Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers