The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (61 page)

With units refusing to shift, the band shortened their name to The Bishops and signed with Dutch label Dynamite. But in March 1979, it all ended sadly for De Fleur, when – after a typically boisterous Bishops’ gig at The Nashville in West London – he crashed his car into a tree, sustaining severe injuries. Although off the critical list, and even asking about artwork for the band’s imminent third album from his West Middlesex Hospital bed, Zenon De Fleur suffered a relapse and died of a heart attack one week later. He is perhaps best recalled for his raucous vocal on The Count Bishops’ one genuine classic, ‘Train Train’ (1976).

JUNE

Thursday 21

Angus MacLise

(Bridgeport, Connecticut, 14 March 1938)

The Velvet Underground (Joyous Lake)

Although he’s generally referred to as the Velvet Underground drummer who left before they began recording, Angus MacLise was no avantgarde Pete Best, being highly prolific in and around world and experimental music. Having learned Haitian drumming as a boy, he was entered into the Buddy Rich School to master jazz technique throughout the fifties. Thereafter, he played with a number of freeform acts and worked with La Monte Young and a pre-Lennon Yoko Ono, as well as overseeing multimedia events of his own. The band’s original drummer, Angus MacLise founded Velvet Underground when he met John Cale – then a friend of Young’s – at a musicians’ collective, but walked out on the group when he discovered that they would be performing their first gig for money, something a purist like MacLise would always refuse to do. Claiming that this group would likely be ‘too structured’ for his own tastes, he put together his own amalgamation, Joyous Lake. (Sterling Morrison was quoted as saying that even Keith Moon was considered ‘too controlled’ by the drummer, who was replaced in VU by Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker.)

A traveller for much of his life, Angus MacLise placed little importance on financial security, his frugality partly responsible for his premature death from hypoglycaemia while hospitalized in Kathmandu, Nepal.

See also
Nico (
July 1988); Sterling Morrison (
August 1995)

Friday 29

Lowell George

(Hollywood, California, 13 April 1945)

Little Feat

The Mothers of Invention

(The Standells)

(The Factory)

As a slide-player, Lowell George tends now to be rated in the same bracket as the late Duane Allman, but his heroin-promoted death continued a depressing litany of premature fatalities in Southern rock. As the main man behind Little Feat, though, George was far less conventional than most of his peer group, spanning the genres from gospel through R & B to country-blues and boogie-woogie.

The son of a furrier and a neighbor of actor Errol Flynn, George made his musical debut on television, playing harmonica with his brother Hampton at the age of six – but veered towards the guitar, and then the flute, during adolescence. The latter gave George scope to master the oboe, his playing of which can be heard on many Frank Sinatra recordings during the late fifties and early sixties. George’s first folk-rock act was The Factory (whose work was only issued a decade after his death), but this quickly gave way to a brief few weeks as frontman for garage rockers The Standells before Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention came calling. George played on two of The Mothers’ albums, and was set to sign his own group, Little Feat, with Zappa’s label until negotiations broke down in 1969. In the event, this great band signed with Warners and put out eight albums in nine years, the best of which was probably 1974’s
Feats Don’t Fail Me Now.
The year after, George contracted hepatitis, which would curtail his touring a great deal. But although Little Feat disbanded in 1978, it was not the end for George: within months of his going it alone, Warners issued
Thanks I’ll Eat It Here
– a mainly covers album that had been some two years in the making – and all appeared rosy for a prolific solo career for Lowell George.

Lowell George: Thanks, I’ll drink it here

‘The best singer, songwriter and guitar-player I’ve ever heard, hands down.’

_{Bonnie Raitt}

The combination of George’s obesity and his seemingly unshakeable desire to use Class-A drugs had an understandably detrimental effect in the last years of his life. Finally, following a concert at the Lisner Auditorium, Virginia, George fell ill at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel, Arlington: although no drug paraphernalia was found in his room, the musician was discovered dead from a heart attack.

JULY

Friday 6

Van McCoy

(Washington, DC, 6 January 1944)

Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony

(The Starlighters)

Washington-based session instrumentalist/writer Van McCoy was in his thirties before his theme tune, ‘The Hustle’, became an enormous worldwide smash in 1975. Before this, he’d been a well-respected producer/songwriter under the guidance of Leiber and Stoller, working with a number of not inconsiderable talents like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. Push farther back still, and McCoy, who had sung with The Starlighters, was himself putting out records such as the near-hit ‘Hey Mr DJ’, on Scepter, when he was just a teenager.

That title gave a small hint of what was to come: late in 1974, McCoy – now fronting an amalgamation called The Soul City Symphony – was putting the finishing touches to his
Disco Baby
album, a professional but somewhat nondescript series of workouts for the dance floor, when he came up with ‘The Hustle’, an instrumental that almost didn’t make the collection. Some months later, the song was number one in the Billboard charts. Although it was his only Top Forty success in America, McCoy employed the formula well elsewhere: he helped to rework the track for the Stylistics’ ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but My Love’ (a 1975 UK number one), making the UK Top Five a second time with ‘The Shuffle’ (1977), a similar-sounding piece that became a BBC radio sports theme.

A Grammy winner in 1976, McCoy also wrote a top-seller for former Temptation David Ruffin and worked on soundtracks – though his real love in music was the Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak his mother played him as a child. McCoy died unexpectedly from a heart attack in Englewood, New Jersey.

Thursday 12

Minnie Riperton

(Chicago, Illinois, 8 November 1947)

(The Gems)

(The Rotary Connection)