The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (58 page)

Eventually signing a lucrative deal with Mercury, Street’s records began to hit the country charts – but a major breakthrough eluded him, requiring the singer to tour relentlessly, which put massive pressure on this family man. On 21 October 1977, the Mel Street single ‘Just Hangin’ On’ entered the country chart. Its title proved accurate: on the same day – the singer’s forty-third birthday – he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. After his death, demand for Street’s greatest-hits package was phenomenal – it sold half a million copies.

DECEMBER

Wednesday 27

Chris Bell

(Memphis, Tennessee, 12 January 1951)

Big Star

(Ice Water/Rock City)

If the turn of phrase can be excused, there was something painfully unavoidable about Chris Bell’s death. He was a character of great inner sadness, a dark, unfathomable figure who endeared and frustrated in equal measures. As a young man, he’d spend most of his time in the ‘Back House’, a building on his family’s expansive Memphis land with one room for music and one for his other passion, photography. Friends would come and go, and the concept of Bell forming a band had been floating around since his teens.

By 1969 the guitarist/singer and Beatles devotee had a band, Ice Water (previously Rock City – a band originally formed to back singer Tom Eubanks, whom Bell had planned to produce), of whom no one had heard. That is, until his old high-school buddy Alex Chilton arrived to front the band soon known as Big Star, a unique act – completed by bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens – that predated the new wave by some four years to become the US’s first and perhaps most interesting powerpop unit. Although the attention given this band was generally directed at his co-founder (after all, Chilton had known much success between 1967 and 1969 with The Box Tops), Bell was arguably the most passionate force behind Big Star’s (at the time) overlooked recordings. Stax (of all people) took a chance on the band, releasing their 1972 debut album,
#1 Record,
a terrific set driven by Bell’s lyrical (and production) input. But, because Stax were suffering financial difficulties at this time, distribution for this potentially huge record was poor, thus it sold maybe 5,000 copies. The lack of any commercial reaction was devastating to Bell, who had wanted desperately to make this record since he was a boy. His disappointment gradually giving way to acute depression, Bell decided very soon after that it just wasn’t working for him – and may have attempted suicide for the first time. (Lyrics to the exquisite, sombre ‘Try Again’ or ‘Feel’ suggest Bell’s mental state.) His brother David took the step of removing Bell from the scene of all his angst by taking him to Europe, though the amount of substances ingested by the brothers only deflected problems.

Big Star - Bell, Stephens, Hummel and Chilton: Should have emulated their name

Big Star’s second record,
Radio City
(1973) was – despite credits reading ‘Bell/Chilton’ – completed with the main protagonists working apart. It was sound, but scarcely in the league of its predecessor, and now critical dismissal was added to commercial shunning. Bell’s reaction was to go off the rails once more, becoming addicted to heroin and attempting suicide again – this time resulting in hospitalization. His brother removed him to the château studios in France used by Elton John, and Bell – clearly rejuvenated by the experience – put together music for a solo project.
I am the Cosmos
was even more a revelation of Bell’s feelings, with some ‘fight’ in both content and delivery. But the album did not see a release and Bell quietly threw in the towel to work in his parents’ restaurant business. Then, just after Christmas 1978, he was heading home when his compact Triumph hit a kerb and skidded across a private driveway, whereupon it smashed full-on into a lamp-post. The said pole broke off at its base and collapsed on to the car, killing Chris Bell at the scene.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Bell’s career is that while nobody took any interest in his work when he was alive, his albums with and without Big Star are now treated as the treasures they should always have been, and he and Chilton have since been cited regularly as influences by many acts, REM, Teenage Fanclub and Primal Scream among them. In 1992, this recognition prompted Big Star to reform and Rykodisc to give
I am the Cosmos
a long-overdue release.

See also
Alex Chilton (
March 2010); Andy Hummel (
July 2010)

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1978:

Larry Brownlee
(US R & B/soul vocalist with The CODs, Mystique and The Lost Generation, who charted in 1970 with ‘The Sly, the Slick and the Wicked’; born Illinois, 18/3/1943; murdered in Chicago)

Eddie Calvert
(UK musician - ‘The Man with the Golden Trumpet’ - who had fifties #1s with ‘Oh Mein Papa’ and ‘Cherry Pink & Apple Blossom White’; born Lancashire, 15/3/1922; unknown, 7/8)

Maybelle Carter
(US country guitarist, mother of June Carter Cash - thus mother-in-law of Johnny Cash; born Maybelle Addington, 10/5/1909; Parkinson’s disease with respiratory complications, 23/10)

Jimmy Cross
(US novelty singer of unabashed death-ditty classic ‘I Want My Baby Back’ (
Death Toll
#1) - also briefly a screen actor and radio producer; born 17/11/1938; heart attack, 8/10)

Don Ellis
(noted US horn-player who played with both jazz and rock musicians; born California, 25/7/1934; heart attack, 17/12)

Keith Ellis
(UK rock bassist who worked with Van der Graaf Generator, Spooky Tooth and Juicy Lucy, among others; born Matlock, England, 19/3/1946; overdose, Darmstadt, Germany, 12/12)

Rick Evers
(US drummer/songwriting partner of Carole King, whom he married in 1977; heroin overdose)

Nancy Spungen
(US punk groupie and girlfriend of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious; born Pennsylvania, 27/2/1958; stabbed to death in the Chelsea Hotel, New York - apparently by Vicious, 12/10)

Foy Willing
(US country singer/founder of Riders of the Purple Sage; born Foy Willingham, Texas, 1915; unknown, 24/7)

Tom Wilson
(noted US producer who worked with The Animals, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa; born Texas, 25/3/1931; heart attack, 6/9)

Gerhard Zachar
(German bass guitarist with Dresden soft-rock band Lift; born 8/10/1945; died in a car crash that also killed singer Henry Pacholski, 11/1978)

1979

JANUARY

Saturday 13

Donny Hathaway

(Chicago, Illinois, 1 October 1945)