The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (264 page)

For Les Gray, a coke habit would have been
far
too glamorous: it was his fifty cigarettes a day that led to his demise – from a heart attack while battling throat cancer – at his home in Portugal. Feeling the operation would end his career, Gray had even turned down the voice-box surgery that might have saved his life. He’d intended to appear that weekend at a Glasgow glam revival show that became a memorial to one of pop’s more distinctive frontmen.

MARCH

Friday 5

John McGeoch

(Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland, 28 May 1955)

Magazine

Siouxsie & The Banshees

Visage

PIL (Public Image Ltd)

(Various acts)

Guitarist John McGeoch was a guiding light who showed British punks that virtuosity was far from being a dirty word, and his startling and original contributions to so many groundbreak-ing newwave bands spoke for themselves. McGeoch had moved down from Scotland to Manchester in his teens, becoming fascinated by the town’s burgeoning newwave scene that produced bands such as The Buzzcocks, The Fall and Joy Division. Ditching his position as co-leader of the first band, Howard Devoto (Howard Trotter) had started Magazine in early 1977, McGeoch then joining as an ideal player for this more progressive band. The pair wrote together, many of the early songs appearing on the acclaimed Virgin Records album
Real Life
(1978). The guitarist remained with Magazine for two further albums,
Secondhand Daylight
(1979) and
The Correct Use of Soap
(1980), before commitments with other bands (including Steve Strange’s Visage, with whom he enjoyed his first Top Ten single) meant that he no longer had room for Devoto’s project. The main catalyst for his departure, though, was Siouxsie & The Banshees – the most commercially viable of all McGeoch’s bands. Many of his fans believe that the guitarist’s best work emerged in his two years with Siouxsie. Albums like
Kaleidoscope
(1980) and
Juju
(1981) exploited McGeoch’s swirling style, while perhaps inspiring a few future goth axe-wielders.

‘I learned to play copying all John McGeoch’s stuff in Magazine and The Banshees.’

Revelation from John Frusciante, guitar legend and sometime Red Hot Chili Pepper

McGeoch’s heavy workload inevitably took its toll in 1982; suffering nervous exhaustion (not assisted by the guitarist’s taste for fine wine and heroin), he was hospitalized and out of the band, to be replaced temporarily by The Cure’s Robert Smith. A break of several years (some of which was wasted in former Skid Richard Jobson’s abortive Armoury Show project) preceded the musician’s time with John Lydon’s PIL, the group shedding much of its experimental, leftfield image under his influence and enjoying success on the Continent (though less so in the UK). In his time, McGeoch was also to find space in his diary to work with Generation X, Heaven 17 and Spandau Ballet’s John Keeble.

Possibly rock’s purest definition of a workaholic, John McGeoch even made time to retrain as a nurse once he’d hung up his guitar. He died in his sleep from an unspecified illness, leaving a wife and daughter.

Tuesday 9

Rust Epique

(Charles Lopez - Stockton, California, 29 February 1968)

Crazy Town

Pre)Thing

Although little more than a manufactured rap/rock hybrid created as the genres cross-pollinated, Crazy Town – Shifty Shellshock (Seth Binzer, vocals), Bret ‘Epic’ Mazur (vocals/production), Charles ‘Rust Epique’ Lopez and Antonio ‘Trouble’ Valli (guitars), Doug ‘Faydoedelay’ Miller (bass), Adam Goldstein (DJ) and James ‘JBJ’ Bradley (drums) – made an immediate impact on a market that had recently made stars of the more ‘metal’ Linkin Park and the funnier Bloodhound Gang. The band’s third single, ‘Butterfly’ (2001), scored them a Billboard number one while scaling the charts worldwide as the hype machine went into overdrive. Then, as debut album
The Gift of Game
(2001) was slammed by some sectors for its retrograde sexism, Epique was slung out for being ‘too crazy’ for The Town.

Returning with his harder-rocking new band – named Pre)Thing – the singer/guitarist became disillusioned at what he believed was a lack of promotion for the group’s first album,
22nd Century Lifestyle
(2004). There was little coverage at all, until Rust Epique’s sudden death from a heart attack at his Las Vegas home. It seems that, during 2003, Epique had apparently done little other than make a complete nuisance of himself at V2, the label that had signed his band. In fact, staff at the company had become so fed up with his rudeness via phone and email that they resorted to the imaginative solution of informing the press that he was mentally ill (even forging documentation, to prevent any embarrassing interviews) and then created ‘Bob Rubinstein’ – an entirely fictitious publicist to whom the unknowing Pre)Thing could send emails and voicemails. Some months after Epique’s sudden death,
Rolling Stone
received an email from ‘Rubinstein’ explaining that he had resigned from V2 after bringing in a psychic to enable the musician to conduct interviews from beyond the grave. Thus the ruse came full circle. Even though the band no longer existed, Pre)Thing were starting to gain airplay and column inches that they couldn’t have
bought
earlier on.

See also
Adam Goldstein (
August 2009)

Wednesday 10

Dave Blood

(Dave Schulthise - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 16 September 1956)

The Dead Milkmen

Picking up the ‘gonzo’ baton from California’s The Dickies, The Dead Milkmen emerged from the Philly punk scene around 1983. A whole bunch of breakneck paeans to girlfriends, UFOs and laundromats spilled out of The Milkmen’s
oeuvre
over the next few years, their albums rejoicing in great titles like
Big Lizard in My Backyard
(1985) and
Metaphysical Graffiti
(1990) – the latter featuring the nearest the band was ever to come to a hit in the MTV-favoured ‘Punk Rock Girl’. Grade A student Dave ‘Blood’ Schulthise (bass) had formed the band, in lieu of a PhD in economics, with singer/synth-player Rodney ‘Anonymous’ Linderman, adding guitarist ‘Joe Jack Talcum’ Genaro and drummer Dean ‘Clean’ Sabatino. The band were very close-knit and toured incessantly, clocking up thousands of miles in a converted ambulance.

The Dead Milkmen’s split in 1995 left Blood at something of a loss. Still an academic, he studied Serbo-Croat – even moving to Serbia to teach English (until hostilities there drove him back to the States in 1999) – but, without his band, he became despondent. At the start of the millennium, the former bassist was beset by seemingly unshiftable tendonitis (perhaps as a result of his playing). Finally, the death of his mother from cancer in January 2004 pushed Blood over the edge: one night at his sister Kathy’s house, he took his own life. She told the press: ‘David has been “away” for a long time. Maybe he’s happy now – finally released from a life that only gave him conflict and turmoil.’

‘Every time I consider picking up the four-stringed love axe again, I hear this voice in the back of my head asking me, “Do you really want to have to take Darvocets in order to be able to tie your shoe laces or twist the lids off of juice bottles?”‘

Dave Blood, shortly before his death

Thursday 11

Edmund Sylvers

(Memphis, Tennessee, 25 January 1957)

The Sylvers

Ten-strong family vocal group The Sylvers appeared to be the ‘biggest new thang’ as the US celebrated its bicentennial. Brother-and-sister groups were no new concept of course, but The Sylvers were the first to stick a disco beat behind their permanent smiles. In 1976, Angelia, Charmaine, Foster, James, Jonathan, Leon Frank, Olympia-Ann, Pat, Ricky and lead singer Edmund (count ‘em) went to number one with the slight but catchy ‘Boogie Fever’, followed by another million-seller, ‘Hot Line’, before the year was out. The group had been a going concern for four years by now, Edmund Sylvers’s high tenor integral to the sound. But, by 1980, the 23-year-old leader decided he wanted that solo career. Sculpting the regulation ‘Michael Jackson’ hair, he issued a less-crafted album,
Have You Heard?,
for Casablanca, drawing something of a blank thereafter. Many years after moderate success as a producer for Freda Payne, Sylvers – who once provided the voice of Marlon on US T V ‘s
Jackson 5
cartoon – died from lung cancer at his home in Richmond, Virginia.