The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (217 page)

Saturday 25

Stephen Canaday

(Springfield, Missouri, 12 September 1944)

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

Arkansas’s Ozark Mountain Daredevils were among country rock’s more inventive practitioners during the seventies, and their easygoing smash ‘Jackie Blue’ became one of 1975’s most played records on AM radio. Drummer Stephen Canaday joined the band two years later, by which time the Larry Lee-fronted six-piece were on the decline, though still a popular touring attraction. Recording one album,
Modern History
(1989), with the band, Canaday then moved to Nashville and operated primarily as a tour manager for a number of country acts, including at one point Tammy Wynette.

Canaday was also making a decent living as a photographer, and on the morning of 25 September 1999, he and aircraft-owner Rick Loudermilk took to the skies over Nashville to grab some aerial shots of the area. At around 11 am, residents and workers in the area became concerned when Loudermilk’s vintage single-engine aircraft appeared to be struggling to make a turn. Buildings emptied as the plane plummeted into trees before crashing into a derelict office block; fast-acting locals doused its chassis with water to quench any fire. Loudermilk was already dead and the unconscious Stephen Canaday was losing blood from a severe wound to his leg. Despite all attempts to save him, the former drummer died on his way to hospital. Since the WW2 craft was controllable from the rear seat, it can never be ascertained exactly which of the two deceased men was the pilot that morning.

See also
Bill Brown (
July 2004)

OCTOBER

Friday 1

Lena Zavaroni

(Rothesay, Isle of Bute, 4 November 1963)

Lena Zavaroni’s archetypal fairy tale turned tragedy will always strike a chord with the British public – and the irony of her parents running a fish-and-chip shop won’t be lost on the more cynical, either. In 1973, Zavaroni’s ‘pigtails and pinafore’ act enchanted viewers of ITV’s
Opportunity Knocks,
her five-week winning run catapulting the precocious 10-year-old to childhood stardom. In reality, her music-hall shtick was only marginally more palatable than that of contemporary Bonnie Langford, but the Lucille Ball-approved Zavaroni nonetheless shot into the UK Top Ten with ‘Ma He’s Making Eyes at Me’ early the following year. Her variety style was perhaps too dated to sustain a chart career beyond this though, and Zavaroni (who undoubtedly had talent) found her way into theatre and television, still the youngest performer ever to top the bill at the London Palladium.

As the years passed, however, it was Zavaroni’s weight issues that courted attention, as opposed to her singing. Always a small-framed girl, less than five feet tall, she was diagnosed anorexic at the age of thirteen (at a time when little was known about the disease) and her weight dropped to an alarming 35kg while she was at London’s Italia Conti stage school. This psychological problem was to dog the artist for more than two decades, her health and confidence suffering to the extent that she retired from show business at just twenty-five. An increasingly tragic figure, Zavaroni was further jolted by divorce, then a fire that destroyed much of her showbiz memorabilia and, most dev-astatingly, the apparent suicide of her mother in 1989. In the years before her own death, the performer lived on state benefits in a council home, the press making much of a charge of the alleged theft of a fifty-pence packet of jelly early in 1999 (which was later thrown out of court). An indication of her deteriorating mental state was Zavaroni’s explanation that ‘stealing food doesn’t count as eating it’.

The tragic Lena Zavaroni: Stages of decline

In a sad finale echoing the higher-profile death of Karen Carpenter (
February 1983),
Lena Zavaroni was admitted to a Cardiff hospital on 7 September, where it was hoped a last, drastic brain operation would provide a cure; within two weeks she had returned, a blood infection having caused her heart to fail. The autopsy put Zavaroni’s death down to bronchial pneumonia.

Wednesday 13

Lord Ulli

(Ullrich Günther - Hamburg, 24 July 1942)

The Lords

Hamburg’s The Lords were one of the few German beat groups to make any kind of impact outside their homeland, the band aping British acts of the early sixties, right down to the haircuts. What set them apart was good-looking lead singer Lord Ulli and his unique microphone and floor technique. Less memorable were the band’s songs, of which only ‘(Over in the) Gloryland’ (1966) stands up to much repeated listening. The Lords’ later work appeared to draw on skiffle and US folk rock.

With a fortieth anniversary approaching, The Lords put together a grand concert for the many fans who had remained loyal to the band since the beginning. As they launched into yet another favourite, Lord Ulli suddenly slipped, fell heavily and cracked his skull on the side of the stage. Thus Ulli very nearly received his ‘ideal death’, though he held on for a week before dying from a brain haemorrhage in hospital.

Tuesday 26

Hoyt Axton

(Duncan, Oklahoma, 25 March 1938)

A successful musician, songwriter and actor, Hoyt Axton was encouraged by his mother (who herself had co-written such pop standards as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’) to learn classical piano, until his preference for blues and boogie-woogie became apparent. In his twenties, Axton had his first break with the song ‘Greenback Dollar’, a moderate hit for The Kingston Trio in 1963; this success led to a deal with Horizon and then VeeJay, for whom Axton recorded four albums. Axton, like his mother, will likely be best remembered for the songs he wrote for others, the biggest of which was ‘Joy to the World’, taken to US number one for six weeks in 1971 by Three Dog Night, the band for whom he had been opening. The nearest Axton came to a crossover hit in his own right was 1979’s ‘Della and the Dealer’, from his highly rated
Rusty Old Halo
album. A muchloved performer who also appeared in over thirty movie and television roles, Axton died from a coronary on his Montana ranch.

‘When I die, I’d like to drop dead from the stage.’