The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (93 page)

The great Jackie Wilson: He’s in heaven

However, if his songs lacked red blood, the singer himself did not: Jackie Wilson’s reputation as something of a womanizer was becoming common knowledge. The now established singer – who’d been married to childhood girlfriend Freda Hood since 1951 – made another error of judgement in taking not one but two mistresses. The first was Harlean Harris, an aspiring
Ebony
model and former lover of the ill-fated Sam Cooke, the second an extremely volatile fan named Juanita Jones. When the latter eventually learned of the former, she followed Wilson and Harris home on 15 February 1961 and shot the singer twice in the stomach. Although Wilson fared better than Cooke (
Pre-1965),
he lost a kidney in intensive care and was to carry one of the bullets in his body for the rest of his days. Pressure from his management to fudge the story put Wilson in the bizarre position of defending his assailant’s motives, suggesting that she was depressed and that he’d prevented her from committing suicide; Jones escaped all charges scot-free. In pain and temporarily unable to work, Wilson then suffered the humiliation of learning he was broke and having his home seized by the IRS. The reason for this was clear: Tarnopol had pocketed all his earnings while Wilson was incapacitated.
This
hurdle was overcome (by arrangement with the tax office), but Hood had understandably run out of patience with her wandering partner and filed for divorce.

With fewer hit records, Wilson remained in a dire financial situation which wasn’t helped by a scandal involving him, his drummer Jimmy Smith and a pair of white girls (this was 1967) in a motel room. The agreed-on glue to mend Wilson’s shattered public image was a hastily arranged marriage to Harris. Oddly, despite all this turmoil surrounding him, Wilson produced two dazzling soul gems at this time: ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher’ (1967) and ‘I Get the Sweetest Feeling’ (1968). Then, in 1970, the once-more-separated Wilson had to deal with the first of several tragedies involving his children: caught in the crossfire of a domestic argument, his eldest son, 16-year-old Jackie Jr, was shot and killed on a neighbour’s porch. (Two of the singer’s daughters were also to die young.)

In and out of drug rehabilitation, his career having spluttered for many years, Jackie Wilson was given a last opportunity by promoter and presenter Dick Clark on his ‘Travelling Oldies Revue’ – but what might have been looked upon as a sad conclusion to a glittering career was to prove heartbreak-ing and tragic. Having finally broken free of his management, a seemingly revitalized Wilson performed at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on 25 September 1975. But, as he built up to a crescendo in the song ‘Lonely Teardrops’, Wilson suffered a massive heart attack and collapsed in front of hundreds of onlookers. His body dropped from the stage on to a concrete floor below, his head talking the full brunt of the fall. Although his breathing was restarted (reportedly by quick-acting Cornell Gunter of The Coasters), Wilson’s career effectively ended there and then. He regained consciousness after three months (giving his family false hope), but Wilson was brain-damaged, and the last seven years of his life were spent in a vegetative state (in 1977, he was institutionalized at the Medford Leas Retirement Community). Wilson was just forty-one in 1975 – and would never utter another word. His distraught mother fell into a diabetic coma and died within a month of her son’s accident. Many of his showbiz friends rallied around Wilson’s bedside at this time. Barry White and The Detroit Spinners were said to have put $60K towards his nursing – though further rumour suggests that this money was swallowed up in back tax and also litigation. Tarnopol was finally collared and convicted on several federal charges regarding Wilson’s royalties as the singer lay semi-comatose – though, after the manager’s death
(
December 1987
), Wilson’s estate still awaited full backdated payments.

It was not until January 1984 that the one-time ‘Mr Excitement’ finally slipped away at Burlington County Hospital. His funeral was attended by Berry Gordy, The Spinners and The Four Tops. Gordy and Davis’s ‘Reet Petite’ (1957) was reissued nearly thirty years later, giving Jackie Wilson a posthumous UK number one (and the top British single of 1986, with some 700,000 copies sold) – but it was three more years before his paltry Detroit plot could be marked with a stone befitting one of the greatest soul vocalists of all time.

Friday 27

Candy Givens

(Candy Ramey - Iowa, 9 December 1946)

Zephyr

(The Legendary 4-Nikators)

Born to a Colorado outlaw, the granddaughter of gamblers and train-robbers, it’s perhaps unsurprising that rough-edged singer Candy Givens led the life that she did. Her unwieldy upbringing apparently took in some months on the run, living in a converted chicken coop, yet Givens excelled in her schooling and was earmarked in her Oklahoma high-school yearbook to make it as a major singing talent. With a bluesy vocal style reminiscent of the late Janis Joplin, Givens – then singing with a jug band from Aspen, Colorado – was snapped up by Boulder hard rockers Ethereal Zephyr, for whom she would contribute vocals, keyboard and harmonica to three albums (as the abbreviated Zephyr) during the seventies, alongside bassist David Givens – whom she had married in 1968 – and future Deep Purple guitarist Tommy Bolin. The band were unable to break into the charts though, and Bolin left to join The James Gang, but his death while on tour opening for Jeff Beck (
December 1976)
prompted Givens and the rest of Zephyr to give it another shot.

Zephyr were still performing in 1984, although Givens – who had by now separated from her husband – was also moonlighting with The Legendary 4-Nikators. Ever seeking independence in one form or another, Givens had argued with her latest boyfriend on the night of 27 January 1984 and consumed a number of tequila shots with friends before locking herself into the bathroom with a clutch of Quaaludes. Having drawn a hot tub, the singer immersed herself and slowly lost consciousness – drowning in the hot water. She was discovered much later by her concerned boyfriend, who had had to break down the door to reach her. One of Candy Givens’s final performances had been for a rugby-club party, where she had stunned the massed hulks into silence with an improvised set of Motown covers.

FEBRUARY

Paul Gardiner

(Hayes, England, 1 May 1958)

Tubeway

Army (The Lasers)

Paul Gardiner was the quiet, unassuming bassist who seemed happy to remain in the shadow of frontman Gary Numan. The pair had been together since 1976 when they teamed up in The Lasers, an amateurish punk band which the two friends abandoned to form Tubeway Army a year later. Known early on as ‘Scarlett’, Gardiner was in place for Numan and Tubeway Army’s spectacular success in 1979: the group – hitherto unknown – stormed to the top of the UK charts that summer with both ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and ‘Cars’ (which also hit the Billboard Top Ten in 1980), though by now Numan was happier to use just his own name. By 1981 the suddenly wealthy singer had disbanded his backing band, and Gardiner began work on solo material. That year, he just missed the Top Forty with ‘Stormtroopers In Drag’ (which seemed to feature Numan extremely heavily for a supposedly Gardiner-only affair). But the pair drifted apart somewhat over the next few years, Numan alienated by Gardiner’s escalating drug use. The singer was nevertheless devastated by Paul Gardiner’s death from a heroin overdose and posthumously issued the bassist’s version of ‘Venus In Furs’ as the first release on his Numa imprint.

Tuesday 28