The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (77 page)

Bob Marley
(right)
and Wailers in ill-advised soccer moment

‘My music will go on for ever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts, me can say facts. My music will go on for ever.’

Bob Marley

JUNE

Monday 1

Mack Starr

(Julius McMichael - Brooklyn, New York, 25 November 1935)

The Paragons

The Olympics

Formed as a ‘brother’ group to the legendary Jesters – New York’s foremost vocal quintet of the mid fifties – The Paragons were led by tenor/lead Julius McMichael, a fine singer from Brooklyn’s Bedford/Stuyvesant area who proved himself also as a writer. McMichael attended the Jefferson High School from whence came most of his group – Ben Frazier (second lead), Donald Travis (second tenor), Ricky Jackson (baritone) and Al Brown (bass). McMichael teamed up with Paul Winley (of Winley Records), with whom he co-wrote the mini classic ‘Florence’ (1957), a ballad that eventually sold well in the US. Despite further memorable tunes – some penned by McMichael – the group could not match this early peak and began to unravel in 1961. The lead had, by now, reinvented himself as the more swaggering Mack Starr, and his band were less than thrilled to have their releases billed as ‘Mack Starr & The Paragons’. By 1968 the best Starr could manage was a slot with a new version of The Olympics – the vocal troupe that had lost tenor/baritone Charles Fizer in the Watts uprising three years before (
August 1965).
Starr’s sporadic solo career found some following in the Northern soul market of the seventies.

Mack Starr was killed when an out-of-control automobile knocked him off a motorcycle near his home in Los Angeles. The Olympics still recorded occasionally, the void left by Starr filled by new lead William DeVase.

Wednesday 3

Joe Santollo

(Jersey City, New Jersey, 23 July 1943)

The Duprees

The Elgins

The Duprees were in a minority of white vocal acts competing with their many black counterparts in the saturated market of the early sixties. Emerging from New Jersey, the group was put together from the remnants of The Elgins – a vocal unit that housed, among others, the powerful tenor of Joe Santollo – and The Utopians. Discovered by George Paxton and Marvin Cane (president and owner of Coed Records), the renamed Duprees (originally The Parisiens) went on to score nine Billboard Hot 100 entries – no mean feat for a white act that had until then been a standards/covers unit. The best-known hit was the first, ‘You Belong to Me’ (1962) – a US gold-seller. (The Duprees proved popular elsewhere as well: their ‘The Sand and the Sea’ was, perhaps unsurprisingly, number one for eight weeks in Hawaii.)

The hits dried up at the time of the British invasion, but The Duprees continued to make records until the mid seventies, although lead Joey Vann (Canzano) left for a solo career in 1964. Just as The Duprees were preparing for a much-anticipated reunion tour, Joe Santollo suffered a heart attack and died at Jersey City Medical Center from subsequent internal bleeding. He was only thirty-seven.

See also
Joey Vann (
February 1984). Michael Arnone - another founder Dupree - died in 2005.

Sunday 28

Chuck Wagon

(Bob Davis - Los Angeles, California, 11 August 1956)

The Dickies

(The Quick)

Formed in 1977, The Dickies were the first LA punk band to land a major label deal. For a while back there, they were America’s clown princes of punk, powering their way through breakneck versions of rock (and other) standards with a lack of ceremony that was as admirable as it was disrespectful. The band – at this time Leonard Graves Phillips (vocals), Stan Lee (guitars), Billy Club (Bill Remar, bass), drummer C(K)arlos C(K)aballero and multi-instrumentalist Chuck Wagon – were, almost unbelievably, originally a jazz-tinged rock outfit, only choosing the new wave as their natural home after watching The Damned play. Wagon was by far the most insane of this motley crew, sometimes wheeling around the stage playing his electric piano or, for some reason, donning an Afro wig for the sax parts: hard to imagine for those who’d known him as plain old Bob Davis, bassist with The Quick in the mid seventies. Signed to A&M, The Dickies surprised many by hitting big in Britain, their cover of the ‘Banana Splits’ theme (1979) making UK number seven, while
The Incredible Shrinking Dickies
was a Top Twenty album. Perhaps the group’s finest moment was their Justin Hayward-approved version of The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ (1979) – which still gives the original a not-so-serious run for its money.

Their best days behind them, The Dickies moved on by the early eighties to embrace an embryonic California punk scene that spawned Black Flag, among others. Wagon had now taken over the traps from Kaballero but was showing signs of despondency. Early in 1981, he quit The Dickies to record a follow-up to his own solo EP,
Rock ‘n’ Roll Won’t Go Away
(1980). With a new Dickies album also in the offing, Wagon agreed to play some final local dates with his former bandmates – including one at Topanga Canyon. What happened on the night of 27 June remains largely a mystery, but it is known that Wagon had suffered a minor road accident on his way home, and returned to the venue to hitch a lift from a roadie. Back at his parents’ San Fernando Valley home, Chuck Wagon took himself up to his bedroom and shot himself in the head with a .22 rifle. Although he survived the night, the drummer died in hospital the following morning. The surviving Dickies continue to release records (albeit with little exposure), making them the longest-running punk band still recording new material. The line-up has briefly included late ex-Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin
(
July 1996).

JULY

Wednesday 1

Rushton Moreve

(John Russell Morgan - Los Angeles, California, 6 November 1948)

Steppenwolf

(Sparrow)