The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (11 page)

Clearly now lost to a twilight world, Brian Epstein gave his last ever interview to the
Melody Maker
three weeks before he died. In it, he spoke of the desolation and loneliness he felt in his spiralling situation; his father, who had encouraged him from the start, had died just a week before, exacerbating his depression. He also admitted to recreational drug use and, as was widely known, that he was taking vast quantities of pills to sleep (Epstein often didn’t emerge until late afternoon, whether for work or to be present at Beatles’ sessions – the last one he attended was on 23 August 1967. Four mornings later, the butler and housekeeper at Epstein’s Belgravia home were unable to rouse him from behind his locked door. Forcing the bedroom door open, a quickly summoned doctor discovered Epstein’s lifeless body lying on his bed, surrounded by bottles of pills. There was no suicide note – although he had considered this solution in the recent past, as letters found by his assistant, Joanna Newfield, later corroborated – so a verdict of accidental death was returned by the coroner. Brian Epstein had overdosed on Carbitral at the age of thirty-two. The band that he had helped turn into world-beaters learned the shocking news in Wales, where they had an audience with the visiting Maharishi; they returned immediately, and Jimi Hendrix cancelled a show in London as a mark of respect. Epstein’s brother, Clive, made plans for NEMS.

A small service in Liverpool was not attended by the devastated Beatles – Epstein’s mother, Queenie (having only just buried her husband), decided on a small, family affair. Offering an ounce of light relief to an otherwise sombre occasion, a traffic delay holding up the hearse’s passage to the cemetery prompted Gerry Marsden to remark, ‘Trust Brian to be late for his own bloody funeral.’

See also
Stuart Sutcliffe (
Pre-1965); MalEvans (
January 1976); John Lennon (
December 1980); George Harrison (
November 2001)

OCTOBER

Tuesday 3

Woody Guthrie

(Okemah, Oklahoma, 14 July 1912)

Woody Guthrie could always be guaranteed to find wry, witty and urbane words to accompany life’s tragedies, whatever form they might take; sadly, all accolades for his work were to be posthumous. He saw much of life’s downside when young: his older sister, Clara, died in a fire when he was a boy, his devoted mother became terminally ill and his father’s land dealings – in what had been one of the first of the oil-boom towns – went belly up. Guthrie hit the road for Texas in 1931, his guitar at his side (initially composing new words to old tunes), but found success a long time in coming as a musician. Guthrie’s broad array of creative talents – he made a living as a sign-writer – meant he could still just about support his young wife (and soon three children) as the Depression kicked in. However, just as workers had begun to fight their way out of this lean period, the Great Dust Bowl Storm of 1935 stripped them of homes and land, taking many lives as it travelled across the Great Plains. These days were recounted in Guthrie’s semi-autobiographical novel,
Bound For Glory
(1943).

Woody Guthrie was the archetypal wandering minstrel who developed a relationship with the open road, hitchhiking, stowing himself away and riding freight cars to find the action. When he arrived in California, the poor reception he got from insular types fearful of a post-storm influx of outsiders (and suspicious of an apparent Commie in their midst) only strengthened the resolve of a man fast becoming the first notable white protest singer. Another shift saw the restless Guthrie take his ‘songs of the people’ to New York, where he befriended the likes of Leadbelly (
Pre-1965),
Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston and took up a distinctly ‘leftist’ stance – his ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ guitar slogan was a prominent feature of the act. The limitations of New York radio caused the too-often-snubbed Guthrie to move on again, although he returned, after a stint in the navy, with a second wife and three more children – one of whom, Cathy, died tragically in another domestic fire when just four; another, Arlo, of course, followed him into the music business. (Ever restless, Guthrie would later marry a third time and father a seventh child.)

The last thirteen years of Guthrie’s life were spent in chronic ill health. Doctors offered conflicting diagnoses, though schizophrenia was suggested more than once. In fact, it was Huntington’s chorea – a degenerative disease that had seen his mother institutionalized thirty years earlier – that robbed this talent of virtually all his faculties and eventually took his life.

DECEMBER

Sunday 10

Otis Redding

(Dawson, Georgia, 9 September 1941)

(Various acts)

Ronnie Caldwell

(Memphis, Tennessee, 1948)

Carl Lee Cunningham

(Memphis, Tennessee, 1948)

Phalon Jones

(Memphis, Tennessee, 1948)

Jimmie King

(Memphis, Tennessee, 8 June 1949)

The Bar-Kays

The second ‘day the music died’ was a cold, foggy December afternoon in Wisconsin and – like Buddy Holly almost nine years before (
Pre-1965)
– a groundbreak-ing stylist, equally at home with the gentle and the uptempo, was taken at the absolute height of his powers.

A minister’s son, Redding was singing gospel in Macon, Georgia, as a child, his voice already a powerful gift at five years old. Then, dropping out of his studies to help his financially strapped family, Redding earned a small amount of money singing with Little Richard’s Upsetters before taking the post of lead vocalist with Johnny Jenkins’s Pinetoppers (both much against his sick father’s devout preferences). The Pinetoppers were signed to Atlantic but recorded much of their material at the hallowed Stax-Volt Studios in Memphis, the label’s trademark call-and-response sound evident in their output; in spite of this coup, the hits were confined to Georgia. Redding’s own solo recordings – backed by Booker T & The MGs – included the US R & B hit, ‘These Arms of Mine’ (1962), originally mooted as a B-side. 1965 brought the splendid
Otis Blue,
an album full of Stax trickery that included the first classic Redding soul composition, ‘Respect’, which became a bigger hit for Aretha Franklin. His own crossover chart success still proved elusive at home – where he didn’t reach the Top Twenty until his death – though a couple of covers were picking up overseas interest. Redding’s rendition of ‘My Girl’ narrowly missed the UK Top Ten in 1965, while his 1966 version of ‘Satisfaction’ gained European airplay and was later rated by Mick Jagger as the best Stones cover he’d ever heard.