The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (168 page)

Guitarist Dan Hamilton started out as a songwriter/composer, a skilled musician from a young age. At nineteen, he found himself with a hit on his hands, having formed LA-based studio trio The T-Bones. Hamilton’s gut-busting ‘No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In)’ (1965) – an instrumental based on an Alka Seltzer commercial – reached Billboard’s Top Five. With fellow T-Bone Tommy Reynolds and a third vocalist, Joe Frank Carollo, Hamilton then enjoyed another big-selling hit with ‘Don’t Pull Your Love’ (1971). Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds (the band) then traded Reynolds for Alan Dennison – oddly keeping the original group name – and returned with the swooning soft-rock ballad ‘Fallin’ In Love’ (1975). This American number one was quickly followed by the similar-veined ‘Winners and Losers’, though after this, Dan Hamilton faded somewhat from the scene, co-writing low-profile songs with his wife. He died during abdominal surgery in California.

Sunday 25

Eugene ‘Bird’ Daughtry

(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 29 October 1939)

The Intruders

A native of Philadelphia, Eugene Daughtry was a member of one of the key groups to inform the ‘Philly’ sound of the seventies. The Intruders – Daughtry, lead singer Sam ‘Little Sonny’ Brown, Robert ‘Big Sonny’ Edwards and Phil Terry – had been around for some seven years before securing a major US hit with ‘Cowboys To Girls’ (1968). The group’s smooth stylings gave them several R & B chart entries thereafter, but few pop successes other than the rather trite ‘(Love is Like a) Baseball Game’ (1968) and the 1973 airplay smash ‘I’ll Always Love My Mama’. In the UK, The Intruders scored a surprise final Top Twenty hit with ‘Win, Place or Show (She’s a Winner)’ during the summer of 1974.

Eugene Daughtry had been unwell for many years before his death on Christmas Day 1994 from liver and kidney failure.

Sam Brown committed suicide by jumping from Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion Bridge four months later - he was reportedly found with several Intruders tapes tied to his body. (Later Intruders member Larry ‘Woo Woo’ Williams died in January 2010.)

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime in 1994:

Papa John Creach
(veteran US violinist who joined Jefferson Airplane at the age of 53; born Pennsylvania, 28/5/1917; suffering a coronary during the LA earthquake, he then died of pneumonia, 22/2)

Yvonne Fair
(powerful Motown diva who backed James Brown, later making UK #5 with 1976’s ‘It Should Have Been Me’; born Flora Yvonne Coleman, Virginia, 21/10/1942; undisclosed causes, 6/3)

Eric Gale
(US guitarist with R & B/funk unit Stuff; born New York, 20/9/1939; lung cancer, 25/5 - just a year on from bandmate Richard Tee)

Danny Gatton
(gifted, multi-styled US session guitarist; born Washington, DC, 4/9/1945; suicide by gunshot - without explanation, 4/10)

Deborahe Glasgow
(UK-based reggae vocalist who recorded the original ‘Mr Loverman’; born 1965; cancer/brain haemorrhage, 25/1)

Wilbert Harrison
(US R & B singer who bagged a Billboard #1 with 1959’s ‘Kansas City’; born Charlotte, North Carolina, 5/1/1929; stroke, 26/10)

Nicky Hopkins
(revered UK session pianist who played with Jeff Beck, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones and Bob Seger; born London, 24/2/1944; heart/abdominal problems, 6/9)

Dave Mulchin
(US bassist with unlikely New York punks The Sturgeon Riverbottom Nightmare Band; suicide, 6/1994 - just one month after keyboardist Kevin Toby had also taken his own life)

Donnie Owens
(US country/pop guitarist who hit in 1958 with ‘Need You’; born 30/10/1938; threatened by an attacker, he was accidentally shot by his intervening motel-manager girlfriend, Chato D’Rea, 27/10)

Gene Tanner
(US R & B singer who joined his brother’s already-successful vocal act, The ‘5’ Royales; born Winston-Salem, North Carolina, ½/1936; illness, 29/12)

DJ Train
(US MC to rappers JJ Fad and former NWA member MC Ren; born Clarence Lars, c 1971; killed in a fire at his mother’s home, 25/6)

1995

JANUARY

Tuesday 24

David Cole

(Tennessee, 3 June 1962)

C&C Music Factory

David Cole lived up to his billing as ‘the boy most likely to’, leading and voice-training a choir in his teens, then landing a DJ position as he hit his twenties. The beginning of the nineties looked more than promising for Cole and his project partner, Robert Clivillés. As C&C Music Factory the duo – having survived on the underground circuit throughout the late eighties – rode the crest of a wave with a pulsating series of dancefloor smashes featuring the dynamic vocals of Freedom Williams. The US 2-million-selling number one ‘Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)’ (1990) was a radio mainstay, as were the follow-up ‘Here We Go’ and the next summer’s ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm …’, which also placed Top Five in the UK. Cole’s reputation was now such that he subsequently produced major singles and albums with Aretha Franklin, Richard Marx, Martika and Mariah Carey.

However, as his hits continued, David Cole was diagnosed with spinal meningitis at the age of thirty-one. The news came only weeks after C&C Music Factory had been awarded a Grammy for their production work on the Whitney Houston movie
The Bodyguard.
Within months Cole’s condition had deteriorated; Clivilles ended the act as a going concern on his partner’s death.

Sunday 29

Ken Jensen

(Vancouver, British Columbia, 1966)

DOA

(The Four Horsemen)

Vancouver punk stalwarts DOA (Dead On Arrival) had been formed in 1978 by the stylishly named trio of guitarist and singer Joey ‘Shithead’ Keithley, bass-player Randy Rampage and original percussionist Chuck Biscuits. In the event, Keithley was the only permanent member of a band whose rollcall otherwise reads like a police ‘missing’ file: DOA had already seen four drummers come and go before Ken Jensen joined up for their 1992 album,
Thirteen Flavors of Doom.
Jensen was killed when a fire swept through his East Vancouver home on the afternoon of 29 January 1995; much of the band’s equipment was destroyed at the same time, though four friends of the band were believed to have escaped the blaze. Keithley issued the DOA album
The Black Spot
(1995) in Jensen’s memory: ‘He was the nicest of young guys – full of enthusiasm and getting better all the time. I’ve worked with a lot of musicians, man, and Ken didn’t have any dislikeable angles.’ Just four months previously, DOA had lost previous drummer Ken ‘Dimwit’ Montgomery to a far more conventional rock ‘n’ roll death (
September 1994),
while the first major tragedy for the band had been the 1991 passing of early bassist Simon Wilde. Jensen, like Montgomery, had also played with the hapless Four Horsemen.

FEBRUARY

Sunday 12

Philip ‘Taylor’ Kramer

(Ohio, 12 June 1952)

Iron Butterfly

(Various acts)

Physics genius cum prog bassist gets psychobabble and drives into oblivion, anyone? When he disappeared early in 1995, 42-year-old Philip Kramer had just forty cents in his pocket – but in his head harboured an arsenal of analytical information worth millions. A computer executive, Kramer had designed revolutionary compression software in the past; a student of theoretical physics, he knew equations that he believed would be of critical significance in the future; and as an aerospace engineer, he knew how to configure the flight path of a nuclear missile in the present. And somehow this genial six-foot-five giant still found time to play bass with prog legends Iron Butterfly.

Richey Edwards