The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (32 page)

Heading for the Big House – the band’s communal residence, originally rented by Oakley and his family – the bass-player and his friend roadie Kim Payne were engaging in a bit of motorcycle horseplay. The pair wove in and out of the cars on Macon’s Bartlett Avenue until Payne decided to lose his buddy by putting his foot down. As he approached an intersection, a city bus appeared from the opposite direction; Payne managed to avoid the vehicle as its driver slammed on his brakes, but Oakley’s Triumph hit the bus full on. Like Duane Allman a year before, the rider skidded some sixty feet across the street, his machine landing on top of him. A rueful Payne later mused: ‘I knew Berry was probably turning on the gas to catch up with me. I also knew he wasn’t very good at riding.’ Refusing immediate medical treatment, Berry Oakley went into shock and walked away from the scene. He died from a skull fracture later that afternoon, at the very same hospital where Allman had passed away the previous year. Position of bassist within the band proved to be unlucky: Oakley’s replacement Lamar Williams also died prematurely (
January 1983),
as did a third, Allen Woody
(
August 2000).

Saturday 18

Danny Whitten

(Columbus, Georgia, 8 May 1943)

Crazy Horse

(The Rockets)

(Danny & The Memories)

Talented arranger Danny Whitten’s first foray into popular music was with his mid-sixties act Danny & The Memories, although given that this group performed a capella, Whitten’s guitar prowess did not reveal itself until he formed The Rockets, a six-piece rock band that released one album in 1968. Though the record-buying public ignored his work, Neil Young of the soon-to-split Buffalo Springfield certainly didn’t. Whitten had invited the Canadian guitarist to play with The Rockets at LA’s legendary Whisky A Go-Go – now Young was convinced that Whitten was an ideal guitarist and that this was to be
his
new band. The Rockets became Crazy Horse, Whitten jousting with Young on his brilliant 1969 solo outing
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
and its follow-up
After the Goldrush
(1970), especially on the epic ‘Southern Man’.

Unfortunately, Whitten utilized this huge career upturn to support his increasing use of heroin; Neil Young viewed Crazy Horse as his Rolling Stones and was hugely dismayed to see his lead guitarist fast becoming dependent on the drug. Shortly after the release of a debut Crazy Horse album (1971), Whitten was fired from his own band. Sympathetic towards his former guitarist – not to mention afraid that an unoccupied Whitten might invite trouble – Neil Young invited him to tour again in late 1972, on condition that he kick heroin into touch. But with drugs off the menu, the guitarist relied instead on alcohol, which made him barely coherent. Another chance had gone and Young had little option other than to fly him home to LA to straighten out. Danny Whitten never made it back: using the cash with which he had been paid off, he purchased a wrap of pure heroin, overdosing on the very evening of his dismissal. Young remembered his friend in the harrowing ‘Needle and the Damage Done’ (1972) and ‘Tonight’s the Night’ (1975), while Whitten’s own ‘I Don’t Want to Talk about It’ (1971) became a standard, covered by artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Nils Lofgren and Everything but the Girl.

Lest We Forget

Other notable deaths that occurred sometime during 1972:

James C Bracken
(US co-founder of the Vee-Jay R & B label; born Missouri, 23/5/1909; unknown, 20/2)

Mick Bradley
(UK drummer with British blues-rock combos Methuselah and Steamhammer; undiagnosed leukaemia, 2/1972)

Maurice Chevalier
(popular French singer/actor; born Menilmontant, 12/9/1888; unknown, 1/1)

Reverend Gary Davis
(US blues/folk guitarist whose distinctive style influenced, among others, Jerry Garcia and Ry Cooder; born Laurens, South Carolina, 30/4/1896; heart attack, 5/5)

Charlie ‘Redman’ Freeman
(US session guitarist/saxophonist who recorded with many great singers, particularly Jerry Lee Lewis; born Memphis,
c
1941; a habitual drinker, he choked on his own vomit)

Mel Lastie
(US rock/R & B brass player who worked with Aretha Franklin, King Curtis and Sam Cooke, among others; born New Orleans, Louisiana, 18/11/1930; illness, 4/12)

Mississippi Fred McDowell
(US blues slide-guitarist; born Tennessee, 12/1/1904; cancer, 3/7)

Jimmy Rushing
(US jazz/blues singer with The Blue Devils; born Oklahoma, 26/8/1903; leukaemia, 8/6)

Pete Watson
(Australian singer/bassist with sixties bands The Phantoms and the very successful MPD Ltd; after a few years of ill health, he succumbed to chronic illness in Perth, 30/4)

Billy Williams
(US pop singer, who hit with 1957’s ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’; born Texas, 28/12/1910; diabetes-related illnesses, 17/10)

John ‘Scarface’ Williams
(US musician with Huey Smith & The Clowns; stabbed to death during a fight)

1973

MARCH

Thursday 8

Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan

(San Bruno, California, 8 September 1945)

The Grateful Dead

The genesis of The Dead can be traced to the 1962 collision of Ron McKernan’s band with that of Jerry Garcia, the pair teaming up (as Second Story Men and then The Zodiacs) to create the myth that would become The Grateful Dead – not so much a rock band, more a way of life. McKernan’s father was a white R & B/blues singer and DJ, so he was exposed early to the genre and encouraged to take up the harmonica. Like Garcia, he was brought up in the decidedly bohemian district of Palo Alto, both of them music archivists more at home playing the area’s bars than studying for school finals. ‘Pigpen’ (it was a school nickname) dropped out of education by ‘mutual agreement’ when he started adopting a biker look as a teenager: unfortunately, his later ill health was also kick-started by the appetite for alcohol he discovered at that time.

The Grateful Dead were originally Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, an unwieldy name that gave way to The Warlocks, which was already taken. Nestling comfortably into the Haight-Ashbury scene, the group had originally been the unofficial house band at Ken Kesey’s notorious ‘acid test’ parties – a prevalent entertainment since the drug’s discovery. The buzz surrounding The Dead only became audible outside of San Francisco following the band’s astonishing performance at the Monterey Festival, after which they took their place at the helm of the underground, the scene’s top ‘live’ attraction, McKernan’s bluesy keyboard (and other instruments) driving the group’s dense, sinewy sound. Often performing as lead singer, this somewhat fragile musician was a reluctant hero: he was reportedly much more interested in the music (and the booze, of course) than the surrounding subculture, and was an unwilling participator in LSD binges that would leave him paranoid and consequently unable to play. But McKernan’s problems really started when second drummer Mickey Hart’s father disappeared with several thousand dollars of the band’s cash, leaving him impoverished. Then, in 1971, treatment for alcoholism revealed cirrhosis of the liver – a terminal condition which McKernan chose to keep from the rest of The Grateful Dead. His last live performance in May 1972 coincided with the questionable assistance of Keith and Donna Godchaux with keyboard duties. It was, however, clear to all that McKernan was unwell. The following month, the declining keyboardist left the band, and died from a gastrointestinal haemorrhage nine months later. Discovered alone at his Corte Madera home by a neighbour, McKernan, it transpired, had asked his long-term girlfriend to leave him two months earlier.

McKernan was buried in full biker get-up at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, and The Dead lived on, of course, dedicating that July’s
Bear’s Choice
LP to the unit’s founding member.

See also
Keith Godchaux (
July 1980); Brent Mydland (
July 1990); Jerry Garcia (
August 1995); Vince Welnick (
June 2006); Owsley Stanley (
Golden Oldies #130).