The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (420 page)

Joe Yamanaka died following a battle with lung cancer less than a month before his sixty-fifth birthday.

Thursday 11

Jani Lane

(John Kennedy Oswald - Akron, Ohio, 1 February 1964)

Warrant

(Cyren)

(Various acts)

Those who witnessed the flamboyant Jani Lane hopping around on stage with glam-metallers Warrant might have been forgiven for assuming there wasn’t a lot else to the man’s game. But Lane – an accomplished pianist, guitarist and drummer – was one of a huge family of talented musicians.

The boy was given his distinctive (and given his surname, ironic) birth name having arrived just months after the assassination of JFK. However, the young Oswald chose to change this not once, but three times. The eleven-year-old was already John ‘Patrick’ Oswald by the time he was playing the clubs – an environment in which he was then dubbed ‘Mitch Dynamite’: this name survived as the musician joined the band Cyren as a teenager. The young man’s natural exuberance and shock of blond hair allowed him to push to the fore of his next act, Plain Jane, which also inspired the third change of his name – to Jani Lane – as he began to settle into a rock lifestyle in Hollywood, California. This band morphed into Warrant – Lane, Joey Allen (guitar), Erik Turner (guitar), Jerry Dixon (bass) and Steven Sweet (Steven Chamberlin, drums) – after being signed with Columbia in 1984. The band were to undergo many personnel upheavals before tasting success. With Lane now overseeing all of the group’s songwriting, Warrant struck gold – or rather double-platinum – with the Beau Hill-produced debut
Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich
(1988), which featured Lane’s smash power-ballad, ‘Heaven’ (1989, US number two), one of several singles to chart. Although reviews hinted at ‘glam-by-numbers’, this was a time for all things brash, brushed and bolshy. The second Warrant album,
Cherry Pie
(1990), thus continued the upward spiral, with further hits including the title cut (US Top Ten; UK Top Forty) which also broke the band in Europe and Australia. But the turn of the nineties was to mean serious changes in style.

The emergence of grunge and alternative metal saw the popularity of Warrant – and other US ‘hair’ bands like Motley Crue and Poison – diminish greatly. After a third album
Dog Eat Dog
(1992) sold only to the group’s diehard fanbase and failed to obtain Top Twenty status, the band were dropped by their label. With the group fragmenting, Lane made a half-hearted attempt at a solo career, however his collapsing marriage saw the singer/songwriter return to Warrant by the end of 1994: suffice it to say that Lane’s subsequent divorce informed much of the lyric of
Ultraphobic
(CMC International, 1995) – a record that went by almost unnoticed. The front man also issued a pair of so-so solo albums in
Back Down to One
(2002) and the covers collection
Photograph
(2007). Lane remained with a much-altered line-up of Warrant until 2004, when business disagreements caused him to leave again. The singer was coaxed back four years later, when it was ‘announced’ to the delight of his and Warrant’s ageing fanbase that all of the original members of the band had made up their differences and were once again ready to camp it up on tour. Sadly, the wounds were deeper than at first believed and projected dates disappeared into dust. Lane continued working with other acts, including Saints of the Underground (a glam ‘supergroup’ including members of Ratt). He also wrote a song for his hero Alice Cooper (2008’s ‘The One That Got Away’) and toured as standin for the recuperating Jack Russell of Great White.

All of this, however, did little to satisfy the man’s desire to front his own band once again. Lane seemed rejuvenated when a further solo collection and supporting tour were pencilled in for the summer of 2011, but again the project was scrapped: the singer was thought to have been hit hard by this news.

Jani Lane was found deceased that August – pretty much the time that he should have been recording – at a Comfort Inn hotel room in Woodland Hills, California. The cause of death was given as acute alcoholic poisoning. Lane had been arrested several times for drunk-driving in the past.

Golden Oldies #144

Jerry Leiber

(Baltimore, Maryland, 25 April 1933)

Jerry Leiber, recognised as one of modern music’s greatest songwriting talents, witnessed to some extent the developing R & B culture first-hand after his widowed mother opened a grocery store in a ghetto. He’d become fascinated with the sounds and rhythms by the time he met his composing partner Mike Stoller on moving to Los Angeles. The pair - who attended rival high schools - were nonetheless both from Jewish families in which a variety of music was an integral part of their growing up.

Leiber - employing Stoller’s talent as a pianist - wrote his first hit tune in 1952 (Charles Brown’s R & B standard ‘Hard Times’), the pair shortly thereafter composing ‘Hound Dog’ for Big Mama Thornton. This song made number one on the R & B charts for almost two months and found itself covered by many and in a variety of contrasting styles: three years later, the song was to become the flip to Elvis’s third US number one, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ (1956). Although reportedly ‘unimpressed’ by the rewrites prevalent in Presley’s lyric, the duo nonetheless penned further Elvis classics, most notably ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (1957-58, US/UK number one) and the album cuts ‘King Creole’ and ‘Trouble’ (1958). With their reputation soaring, Leiber and Stoller then co-wrote a series of classic tunes for The Coasters, including five US Top Ten hits: ‘Searchin’’ (1957), ‘Yakety Yak’ (1958, US number one; UK Top Twenty), ‘Charlie Brown’ (1959, UK Top Ten), ‘Along Came Jones’ (1959) and ‘Poison Ivy’ (1959, UK Top Twenty). Among other timeless Leiber/Stoller moments are Wilbert Harrison’s ‘Kansas City’ (1959, US number one), Ben E King’s ‘Stand By Me’ (1961, US Top Five; 1987, UK number one), The Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’ (1963, US Top Ten) and Peggy Lee’s Grammy-winning ‘Is That All There Is?’ (1969, US Top Twenty).

Then, in the seventies, Leiber and Stoller became incredibly in demand as producers. Among their many successes in this capacity was Stealers Wheel’s international hit ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ (1973, UK/US Top Ten - whose co-writer Gerry Rafferty also passed on this year
(
January 2011)).
Among other songs not perhaps immediately associated with Leiber and Stoller are the 1977 Elkie Brooks hit ‘Pearl’s a Singer’ and Donald Fagen’s 1982 take on ‘Ruby Baby’.

Leiber and Stoller’s legacy was confirmed by fifteen chart-toppers and inductions into both the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame during the mid-eighties. Jerry Leiber’s death on 22 August 2011 from cardio-pulmonary failure at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center brought an end to a glittering partnership that had endured for well over half a century.

Golden Oldies #145

Nickolas Ashford

(Fairfield, South Carolina, 4 May 1941)

Ashford & Simpson

Another songwriting and production great passed away on the very same day: Nick Ashford was the creative genius behind a stream of soul/R & B classics, alongside his soon-to-be wife, singer Valerie Simpson. It’s strange to believe that the duo – having met at a Harlem church – were initially unsuccessful in their own recording careers.

The pair had begun a songwriting partnership during the sixties, composing R & B hits such as ‘California Soul’ for The 5
^th
Dimension (1968, US Top Forty); however, it was for songs recorded by legends Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin that Ashford and Simpson were aggressively headhunted by Motown boss Berry Gordy. The partnership was there teamed with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, for whom they penned hits like ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’ (1967, US Top Ten; UK Top Twenty), ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing’ (1968, US Top Ten; UK Top Forty) and ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ (1967, US Top Twenty). The latter was, of course, a Grammy-nominated number one for Diana Ross three years later, and remains a standard covered around the world. While at Motown, Ashford and Simpson also wrote for Gladys Knight & The Pips, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Marvelettes and The Temptations. Over the next couple of decades, the pairing spread their net wider and worked with artists such as Teddy Pendergrass, The Brothers Johnson and Rufus & Chaka Kahn during an equally prolific era. While never quite as successful as recording artists themselves, Ashford & Simpson (the act) nonetheless found R & B hits with several releases. The duo’s biggest pop-crossover tune by far was ‘Solid’ (1984, US Top Twenty; US R & B number one; 1985, UK Top Three). In more recent years, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson had opened their own restaurant and music venue, New York’s Sugar Bar, while finding time to work as DJs on the city’s Kiss FM station.

Ashford passed away on 22 August 2011 from throat cancer: he had been undergoing radiation treatment in his adopted home of New York City.

Golden Oldies #146

David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards

(Shaw, Mississippi, 28 June 1915)