The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (270 page)

But, despite continued UK success – unlike many of their contemporaries, The Move didn’t crack America – the band was fragmenting. Kefford left in 1968 (due to illness), with Burton (opposed to ‘commercial’ material) and finally Wayne (to follow a solo career) departing soon after, despite the fact that The Move had now scored a number-one single, ‘Blackberry Way’ (1968). Suffice to say that Wayne did
not
repeat his band’s success on his own, though he was for several years to appear on television, singing theme tunes and ad jingles; he was also offered stage roles, including that of the Narrator in the long-running London show
Blood Brothers.
In 2000, the singer returned to formal band work, replacing Allan Clarke when he retired as frontman for The Hollies. Within months of his diagnosis with what was thought to be a controllable cancer of the oesophagus, Wayne deteriorated and died in hospital following a routine check-up.

See also
Tony Secunda (
February 1995). Vikings guitarist/banjo player Terry Wallace died from mesothelioma in August 2008.

SEPTEMBER

Wednesday 15

Johnny Ramone

(John Cummings - Long Island, New York, 8 October 1948)

The Ramones

(The Tangerine Puppets)

So, finally, we lost dear old Johnny … While Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy were sniffing it, Johnny Ramone had used that infamous glue to hold the band together. This was the man who’d kept his fellow Ramones on the straight and narrow – suddenly, like Joey
(
April 2001)
and Dee Dee (
June 2002),
another ‘brudder’ was no more.

Despite regarding him as something of a taskmaster, The Ramones couldn’t have survived without the clear thinking and business sense of Johnny, many within the band’s orbit believing that the creativity of Dee Dee and Joey (alongside whom he was to stay the course in The Ramones) could not have flourished otherwise. As young Johnny Cummings, the guitarist was affiliated with various gangs and briefly addicted to heroin– perhaps getting all his tearaway tendencies out of his system back then. In his first band, The Tangerine Puppets, Johnny resembled a young biker, his regulation long hair, leathers and tennis shoes informing The Ramones’ ‘uniform’ – adherence to which he was to insist upon in the following years. Johnny was already twenty-five when The Ramones came together, his friendship with fellow outsiders Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin), Tommy (Erdelyi) – both ex-school buddies/fellow Puppets – and Joey (Jeff Hyman – who shared Johnny’s love of sixties garage pop) finalizing the seminal line-up of Ramone (vocals), Ramone (guitar), Ramone (bass) and Ramone (drums). Let’s face it, a record-buying public that had contented itself with Bread and The Eagles was never going to get
this;
thus the wonder of The Ramones was to remain an open secret for – well– virtually the band’s entire career. Shame really, because, aside from the group’s obvious, if unacknowledged, brilliance even back in 1976, Johnny was a fine guitarist who improved dramatically as The Ramones developed (he was nominated
Rolling Stone
’s 17th Greatest Guitarist in 2003 – ahead of John Frusciante, Bo Diddley and even Pete Townshend). But whatever one’s view of his technical prowess, the significance of his contributions to timeless albums like
Ramones
(1976),
Leave Home
(1977),
Rocket To Russia
(1977) and
Road To Ruin
(1978) cannot be denied.

‘Gander gander hey!’: The late, legendary Johnny still attracting new fans …

‘The band was a family - and Johnny was Dad.’

C J Ramone (Dee Dee’s replacement in 1989)

But if their two-minute anthems came together easily enough, The Ramones’ personal history was far from harmonious. Johnny and Joey fell out early on, mainly as a result of the former ‘stealing’ the latter’s girlfriend (an event supposedly documented in 1981’s ‘The KKK Took My Girlfriend Away’), but also – almost unbelievably – owing to a clash in political colours. Johnny was a closet Republican who finally made his allegiances known when The Ramones were inducted into The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. He and Joey continued to work together but they never made up. In the great Ramones documentary
End of the Century,
Johnny explained how he felt their estrangement was so insurmountable that he couldn’t even bring himself to make up with the singer when he lay dying in hospital in 2001.

By contrast, Johnny Ramone’s own death bed was attended by a broad range of rock (and associated) celebrity friends. The guitarist had been suffering from prostate cancer for five years, although he was believed to be on the point of pulling through when he passed away in his sleep. Lisa Marie Presley was by his bedside, as was guitarist Pete Yorn and musician/actor Vincent Gallo, plus ‘heavy’ friends Rob Zombie and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, and their wives. Although he never reconciled with Joey, Johnny was to be reunited posthumously with Dee Dee – in the form of the magnificent statue that sits near the latter’s graveside at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. So, RIP Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny: we may only just have started the millennium, but it sure feels like the end, the end of the century …

Weather Girls Izora Rhodes-Armstead and Martha Wash: Anticipated quite a deluge

Thursday 16

Izora Rhodes-Armstead

(Houston, Texas, 6 July 1942)

The Weather Girls/Two Tons o’ Fun

Likely always to be associated with just the one hit record, Izora Armstead and her (aptly named) partner, Martha Wash actually recorded three albums for Columbia before their brand of Hi-NRG disco went out of fashion in the late eighties. A couple of strapping ladies, it must be said, Armstead and Wash originally backed Sylvester in 1976, the former already in her thirties: their shtick drew a huge fanbase, giving rise to Two Tons o’ Fun, a part music, part slapstick affair. From this came the song that was to change things … As The Weather Girls, the double act looked to have broken through with ‘It’s Raining Men’ (1984, a song rejected by Donna Summer), which was only kept from UK number one by Lionel Richie’s dreary ‘Hello’ (though Geri Halliwell’s otherwise pointless cover was to make the leap seventeen years later). Without a follow-up, The Weather Girls went their separate ways, Armstead reviving the act some years on with her daughter Dynell Rhodes. A victim of her size, Armstead died of heart failure at home in California.