The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (13 page)

Lymon had already had an affair with Platters singer Zola Taylor at just thirteen, but his world began to fall apart when he reached full maturity. The singer’s attempted solo career faltered, after he was shown dancing with a white girl on television’s
Dance Party,
which many believed – however ludicrous it might now sound – effectively ended his chances. Having experimented with drugs even before his brief fame, Lymon entered rehab in 1961, but in 1966 was charged with narcotics possession (he allegedly sold the rights to ‘Why Do Fools?’ to buy drugs). To avoid a custodial sentence, Lymon joined the army; his discharge from the forces (for repeatedly going AWOL) followed by a short-lived marriage to teacher Emira Eagle then took him to Georgia.

In mid February 1968, the recently recontracted Lymon told Emira he had a ‘weekend job’ back in New York, but when he failed to return, she became suspicious. Two weeks later, his body was found in the bathroom of his grandmother’s Harlem apartment – the home in which he had been brought up two decades before – an emptied needle next to his body. The Teenagers (now seriously contravening the Trade Descriptions Act) struggled to create any momentum without the singer; Garnes
(
February 1977)
and Negroni (
September 1978)
also died young, a decade after Lymon.

MAY

Sunday 26

Little Willie John

(Cullendale, Arkansas, 15 November 1937)

The resonant tenor voice of William Edward John belied its perpetrator’s small stature. Alongside Sam Cooke – though without ever being as commercially popular – John was one of the best-loved practitioners of proto-soul, working with legends like Count Basie and Johnny Otis from the age of fourteen. Part of a musically gifted family (his sister Mabel became one of Ray Charles’s Raelettes), John was signed to King Records at eighteen, enjoying sporadic crossover hits starting with ‘Fever’ (1956), which, like many black records of the era, became a bigger hit for a white artist (in this case, Peggy Lee), while another was later picked up by The Beatles. Willie John’s last and biggest hit was ‘Sleep’ (1960), and King decided to drop him when it became apparent his moment had passed. This did not sit well with John, as noted for his unstable personality as for his music: in 1964, he was charged with assault in Miami but jumped bail and headed to Seattle where, during an after-hours lock-in at one of his infrequent live engagements, John returned from the lavatory to discover a patron, Kendall Roundtree, had helped himself to his seat. When he refused to move, a scuffle inevitably broke out, Roundtree somehow sustaining a fatal injury. Many sources claim that this was from a blow to the head, while some state that John – who often carried a weapon – had used a knife. Despite the charges against him (and the fact that he had already breached bail), John continued to perform while he awaited trial. In the event, he only avoided a conviction for murder when his defence lawyer pointed out that Roundtree was the much bigger man; even so, on 18 May 1966, he was facing eight to twenty years at Washington State Penitentiary.

Then, having completed just two years of his sentence, Willie John died mysteriously. Keen to put the case behind them, authorities returned a verdict of ‘heart attack’, though there have been unsubstantiated tales over the years of mistreatment by both staff and inmates, possibly resulting in asphyxiation.

JUNE

Friday 14

Ken Errair

(Detroit, Michigan, 23 January 1928)

The Four Freshmen

In May 1953, Ken Errair was recruited as replacement for tour-tired Hal Kratzsch in the jazz-styled vocal four-piece The Four Freshmen – an acclaimed vocal harmony troupe formed by brothers Don and Ross Barbour while at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music in Indianapolis. Before Errair joined, the group had had several sheet-music hits, but his first recording session that July spawned a radio-airplay hit in ‘Holiday/It Happened Once Before’ (1953). Success for Errair was brief – he had married actress Jane Withers (soon to be seen in the epic movie
Giant)
just ahead of joining the group, and, like his predecessor, found constant touring detrimental to his domestic life. The decisive Barbours were quick to give Errair his marching orders (replacing him with Ken Albers), preventing him from enjoying the US Top Twenty hit ‘Graduation’ in June 1956.

Ken Errair attempted to crack the market on his own with the self-explanatory
Solo Session
album for Capitol a year later but, now a settled man with a wife and two children, found a seemingly more stable future in real estate instead. Sadly, travelling to a California development, he was killed instantly when his light aircraft crashed in bad weather. His colleague Don Barbour had died in a Los Angeles car crash in 1961, while Kratzsch succumbed to cancer in 1970.

Sometime Four Freshmen multi-instrumentalist Ken Albers died in April 2007, while founder Ross Barbour and tenor vocalist Bob Flanigan both passed on four years later.

JULY

Wednesday 24

Nervous Norvus

(James Drake - Memphis, Tennessee, 13 May 1912)

One of the more idiosyncratic characters to emerge from early pop culture, Nervous Norvus initially pushed himself as working musician/writer Singing Jimmy Drake before finally earning notoriety with a brace of novelty hits that baffled US radio listeners in the fifties – that is, once the authorities had given the go-ahead to let them be heard. With the combined restrictions of the Depression and crippling asthmatic and heart conditions, Drake endured a housebound upbringing. However, having learned the ukulele while young, he set off as a young man to busk in sub-Woody Guthrie style around the country between jobs. Having been excused military service during the war due to his various ailments, Drake worked the shipyards, eventually taking a peacetime job as a truck driver, which prompted his best-known song, the curious ‘Transfusion’ (1956) – a dark tune telling of a trucker who in his career had caused countless accidents and now sought assistance from the local blood bank as he lay on his death bed.

Drake was largely inspired by the fifties Bay Area broadcaster Red Blanchard, a DJ who had cut an album or two of mildly comic novelties with a teenage audience in mind. Changing his name to Nervous Norvus – this time in homage to one of Blanchard’s tunes – Drake, now in his forties, began peddling his somewhat derivative songs like pizza, i.e., one for seven bucks, two for eleven, etc. It was only once he’d hit upon the genuinely different ‘Transfusion’ that folk began to take notice. After some delay, the record – replete with ‘crashes’ and ‘skids’ inserted by Blanchard – unexpectedly made the US Top Ten, its follow-up ‘Ape Call’ further confounding critics by also making the Billboard chart a couple of months later. Briefly, ‘Norvus Fever’ was in (or at least on) the air. Although his success meant he was now able to take up music full-time, Drake’s reluctance to perform the songs publicly would foreshorten his moment in the spotlight.

Various stories about Drake’s life suggest a solitary ‘mummy’s boy’ type who’d never had a relationship (odd, given that he had supposedly been married in 1942) and who drank himself to a premature death. The latter is, however, fairly likely: Drake died from cirrhosis of the liver at Almeida County Hospital. In good ‘Transfusion’ style, he donated his body to the University of California’s anatomy department.

Wednesday 31

Alexandra Nebedov

(Doris Nebedov - Heydekrug, Prussia (Lithuania), 19 May 1942)