The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (180 page)

With a career spanning more than fifty years, The Tams join that elite collection of vocal groups still performing into the millennium. Smith, however, is the only original member treading the boards, former lead Joe Pope having died from heart failure.

Friday 22

Don Murray

(Glendale, California, 8 November 1945)

The Turtles

The Turtles confounded all those who’d dismissed them as bandwagon-jumpers by achieving huge success in America between 1965 and 1969. Initially members of surf instrumental bands styled after the likes of The Surfaris, The Turtles – Don Murray (drums), Howard Kaylan (Howard Kaplan, vocals/saxophone), Mark Volman (vocals/saxophone), Al Nichol (piano/guitar), Jim Tucker (guitar) and Chuck Portz (bass) – found inspiration in the achievements of local boys made good The Byrds. Briefly (and ill-advisedly) changing the spelling of their name to ‘Tyrtles’, the group also followed Roger McGuinn and company’s lead by covering a Bob Dylan song, taking ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ into the US Top Ten in the autumn of 1965. When the public appeared to be tiring of their somewhat slavish copying of The Byrds’ blueprint, The Turtles reinvented themselves as a crypto-psychedelic pop unit. In this guise, the band were much more the ticket, running off a series of memorable hits such as the 1967 million-seller ‘Happy Together’. Murray, however, missed out on the band’s most glorious period: tired of constant touring, he had quit The Turtles in June 1966, and was replaced by percussionist John Barbata.

Don Murray was to leave the music industry far behind him. Kaylan and Volman briefly joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and The Turtles were a distant memory by Murray’s untimely death. He passed away following heart surgery. Later Turtles keyboardist Bob Harris died in 1993.

Sunday 31

Jeffrey Lee Pierce

(Montebello, California, 27 June 1958)

The Gun Club

Jeffrey Lee Pierce was one of the great unsung heroes of rock ‘n’ roll. Whether better management could have brought this anti-hero amalgam of Brando, Monroe, Morrison and Howlin’ Wolf to the masses will never be known – but for those who bought into the ethic of The Gun Club, his like will never be seen again. In his late teens, Pierce became a devotee of Deborah Harry and Blondie, going on to run the New York powerpopsters’ fan club and befriending guitarist Chris Stein, who produced a couple of early eighties albums for this unusual young man’s band (originally called Creeping Ritual) via his Animal label. The Gun Club had already exploded on to the scene with a fabulous debut,
Fire Of Love
(1981), which offered a powerful combination of howling blues and dead-end punk rock – the songs set alight by the singer’s extraordinary performances, both on stage and in the studio. Pierce loved the music of the Delta, adopting slide-guitar techniques for his songs and reworking blues standards like Tommy Johnson’s ‘Cool Drink of Water’. The Gun Club – originally Pierce (vox/guitar), long-term sidekick Kid Congo Powers (Brian Tristan, guitar), Rob Ritter (bass) and Terry Graham (drums) – saw numerous changes in personnel over the years, the reckless, self-destructive Pierce disbanding and regrouping them almost wilfully. But that was pretty much the man: if he wasn’t learning Haitian voodoo, he’d be getting himself beaten up or sectioned. That’s if he hadn’t shot up a load of heroin first.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce: Join his Club

‘Jeffrey felt a certain pressure to live up to the idea he was going to die for rock ‘n’ roll. He’d play up to it sometimes -and ultimately it killed him.’

Nick Sanderson, drummer, The Gun Club

After a brief solo outing, 1985’s
Wildweed,
a refreshed Pierce surprised fans by reforming The Gun Club with a whole new line-up that included his Japanese girlfriend, bassist Romi Mori – revealing a lusher variant of his previous garage stylings on the excellent
Mother Juno
(1987), a record produced in Britain by The Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. Further recordings emerged into the nineties, including the fine solo album
In Exile
(1992). Pierce was literate and widely read, and also took to the stage as a spoken-word artist at this time.

The singer’s habits did not, however, refine themselves: after years of drug and alcohol abuse, Pierce was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver when he suffered a severe nosebleed while on tour in Germany. He would never be in good health again. Those who recognized the shambling character while he resided in London recall incidents such as a fight in a Kensington pub when Pierce pulled a samurai sword on shocked assailants (which saw him deported at the end of 1995). Jeffrey Lee Pierce – who had an assortment of new projects underway (including a biography and yet another Gun Club) – fell into a coma at his father’s home in Los Angeles on 28 March 1996 from which he was not to emerge. Tragically, a fatal clot on the brain resulting from his cirrhosis finally robbed the world of this genuine original; Pierce was laid to rest some days later in a Buddhist ceremony in Los Angeles. Since his passing, numerous artists have cited Pierce and The Gun Club as a huge influence, most notably distinguished US acts The Pixies and The White Stripes.

See also
Rob Ritter (
January 1991); Nigel Preston (
May 1992); Nick Sanderson (
June 2008)

APRIL

Thursday 18

Bernard Edwards

(Greenville, North Carolina, 31 October 1952)
Chic

(Outloud)

(The Power Station)

Bernard Edwards – who had relocated to New York with his family as a boy – had the most significant meeting of his life at just seventeen years of age. Befriending fellow guitarist Nile Rodgers, he made the first tentative steps towards greatness as a house bassist at the city’s Apollo Theater. The pair, plus drummer Tony Thompson, fashioned The Big Apple Band – a club unit eventually forced to change their name (under pressure from Walter Murphy’s identically named disco combo) to become the dance aggregation Chic. The addition of first Norma Jean Wright, then Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin as vocalists gave Edwards and Rodgers’s band the lift it needed – and a flurry of great singles placed Chic at the pinnacle of the disco boom at the tail end of the seventies. The first was 1977’s ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)’, which went Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic; the biggest was ‘Le Freak’ (1978) – a remarkable 4-million-selling supernova smash that rewrote the rules as regards funk basslines. Between 1977 and 1982, Edwards and Rodgers could do no wrong, also producing smash hits for the revitalized Diana Ross and Sister Sledge.