The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (66 page)

In 1980, planning to search for his absentee father – the singer Desmond ‘Sidney’ Elliott – Jacob Miller made contact with a long-lost cousin, rising reggae star Maxi Priest, who resided in London (where Miller believed Elliott now lived). Part of a sprawling musical dynasty, Miller had known as a boy that his future was in reggae. Sent to live with his grandparents in Kingston at the age of eight, the young extrovert eventually befriended most of the music capital’s leading musicians and producers, including Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd, King Tubby, Dennis Brown, Ken Boothe and Bob Andy, and began releasing records while still in his teens. At twenty-four, he joined Inner Circle – the group recruited this likeably imposing vocalist on the basis that he had been ‘everywhere they had’ – quickly scoring an international hit on Island with reggae singalong ‘Everything Is Great’ (1978).

In early 1980, ahead of Miller’s planned trip to the UK, Island supremo Chris Blackwell took him and Bob Marley (his two leading reggae charges) to Brazil for the opening of the label’s South American offices. Returning to his homeland on 21 February, Miller was in triumphant mood: a US tour opening for The Wailers was imminent, as was a new Inner Circle album,
Mixed-Up Moods.
Two days later, however, celebration turned to grief. Driving his car along Kingston’s Hope Road, Miller was killed instantly when the vehicle struck a pole and turned over, a death recorded as misadventure. The bereft Inner Circle broke up immediately – though a revived version of the band enjoyed its biggest hit more than a decade later with ‘Sweat (a-la-la-la-la-long)’. Jacob Miller was just twenty-seven when he died. He never met up with Maxi Priest – and was never reunited with his father.

MARCH

Friday 14

Anna Jantar

(Poznan, Poland, 28 January 1938)

The Polish nation went into mourning following the death of one of its most celebrated pop singers of the era, Anna Jantar. The vocalist, who racked up international hits with ‘So Much Sun in the Whole Town’ and her version of the Hank Williams tune ‘Jambalaya’ (called ‘Baju Baju’), had won song festivals in Ljubljana, Sofia, Castlebar and Villach.

Jantar was killed when the Polskie Linie Lotnicze Ilyushin IL-62 aircraft taking her home crash-landed half a mile from Warsaw Airport. As the plane awaited clearance to land, indications were that its landing gear was not down. A surge of power then caused the freak disintegration of the second engine: later inspection revealed that its turbine disc showed severe metal fatigue. Among the eighty-six others who died in the disaster were twenty-two members of the US Olympic boxing team. Jantar was married to noted composer/songwriter Jaroslaw Kukulski; they had a daughter, Natalia – just four when she lost her mother – who also enjoyed Eastern European success as a singer during the nineties. Her mother is commemorated by the Anna Jantar Award, created to honour musical prodigies at the annual National Festival of Polish Song.

Jaroslaw Kukulski died from cancer in 2010.

Wednesday 26

‘Jon-Jon’ Poulos

(John Poulos - Chicago, Illinois, 31 March 1948)

The Buckinghams

John Poulos found himself a niche in US pop/rock before he had even reached his twentieth birthday, as The Buckinghams ran off a string of American chart hits during the heady period of 1967–8. Songs such as ‘Don’t You Care?’, ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’, ‘Susan’ and the charttopping debut ‘Kind of a Drag’ (all 1967) were seldom off campus jukeboxes, while the group itself – Poulos (drums), Denny Tufano (vocals), Carl Giammarese (guitar), Nick Fortune (bass) and Martin Grebb (organ) – were constantly called on for television appearances.

As The Buckinghams’ star began to flicker, Jon-Jon Poulos found himself more and more ensnared by drug abuse. The band split in 1970, and he spent the last ten years of his life managing other artists (including his former Buckinghams’ colleagues Tufano & Giammarese), before a heroin-induced heart failure at his Chicago home ended his days less than a week ahead of his thirty-second birthday.

APRIL

Friday 4

Red Sovine

(Woodrow Wilson Sovine - Charleston, West Virginia, 17 July 1918)

The Singing Sailors

The Wandering Boys

Born Woodrow Wilson Sovine to particularly patriotic parents, the singer known as ‘Red’ had a career spanning 300 recordings over five decades with country acts The Singing Sailors and The Wandering Boys. Sovine was best known internationally for the excruciatingly sentimental ‘Teddy Bear’ (1976), a spoken-word ‘song’ about a crippled boy and his trucker buddy, which somehow also gave Sovine a posthumous Top Five hit in Britain – the nation’s brief fascination with the Citizens’ Band was mainly responsible for this lapse. However, when Red Sovine died at the wheel of his van, it was a heart attack – not CB distraction – that brought about his demise.

Monday 7

Nathaniel ‘Buster’ Wilson

(California,
c
1945)

The (Fabulous) Coasters

Emerging out of Los Angeles during the mid fifties, the original Coasters were a vocal group that provided much-needed comic relief from the increasingly formulaic quartets dominating US doo-wop. After a fairly sober beginning, the group soon developed its own unique shtick, hits like the Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller-penned ‘Yakety Yak’ (1958), ‘Charlie Brown’, ‘Poison Ivy’ and ‘Along Came Jones’ (all 1959) becoming instant locker-room classics and eventual million-sellers.

When the original line-up dissipated, a number of cabaret versions of the legendary vocal clowns sprouted (some of which had little connection with the first line-up but adopted similar élan). One such was Cornell Gunter’s Coasters, also known as The Fabulous Coasters. This incarnation was formed by longtime frontman Gunter who, having left The Coasters in 1961, overcame years of legal battles with former manager H B Barnum to front the only authorized version of the group during the sixties and seventies. The new band, initially a trio made up of ex-members of California vocal group The Penguins (plus occasionally Gunter’s sister Shirley), was significantly bolstered by the addition of a new bass in the shape of Nate ‘Buster’ Wilson, a strong performer who took to his role with gusto. They also secured a new manager, highprofile business mogul Patrick Cavanaugh. Despite the existence of various other Coasters collectives (including a formidable rival built around Gunter’s earlier colleagues Will Jones and Billy Guy), his band appeared to be the most popular. Cavanaugh’s business practices were not all they should have been, however – nor were they particularly well hidden from his charges. As time passed, Wilson became all too aware of Cavanaugh’s involvement in a series of fraudulent schemes in Southern California, and, as this latest incarnation of The Coasters planned to part company with its manager, was on the point of taking his evidence to the police. On 7 April 1980, Cavanaugh decided to take his own drastic action to avoid the probable custodial sentence …

Several weeks after his disappearance, parts of Nathaniel Wilson’s body were found dumped near the Hoover Dam, while others were retrieved from a ravine near Modesto, California. These gruesome finds revealed that the singer had been shot in the head, before his hands and feet were cut off, presumably to prevent identification. On 8 December 1984, 53-year-old Cavanaugh was convicted in Clark County of first-degree murder and mutilation – and sentenced to death. His wife, a former stripper from Las Vegas, was the state’s star witness, providing the evidence that was to link her spouse to the killing. In 1998, the incarcerated ex-manager attempted to clear his name, claiming that he had been undergoing treatment for haemorrhoids at the Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles at the time of Nathaniel Wilson’s murder. The evidence – at one point considered significant enough to warrant a new trial – was proven faked following an investigation by CBS current affairs show
60 Minutes.
Hospital employee Maurica Hawkins – who, it emerged, was an associate of another death-row inmate – was found to have falsified medical documents to substantiate Cavanaugh’s declaration. In March 2005, his fourth appeal was refused as he awaited execution in Nevada – the venue for Gunter’s murder ten years later
(
February 1990).
Cavanaugh eventually died at Ely State Prison in April 2006.

See also
King Curtis (
August 1971); Bobby Nunn (
November 1986); Bob B Soxx (
November 2000); Carl Gardner (
Golden Oldies #137). Original Coasters Will ‘Dub’ Jones (2000) and Billy Guy (2002) have also died, as have other touring members.