The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (260 page)

Friday 26

Robert Palmer

(Robert Allen Palmer - Batley, Yorkshire, 19 January 1949)

Vinegar

Joe

The Power Station

(The Alan Bown Set)

Regarded as something of an old-school gent, clean-cut Robert Palmer spent many years working the circuit with a variety of bands before his huge multiplatinum successes of the 1980s. The first decade of Palmer’s life was spent in Malta where his serviceman father was stationed, but the would-be singer was to be quick off the mark once his family returned to the UK. Palmer joined his first band at fourteen, polishing the style that led to his being picked up as a replacement for Jess Roden in The Alan Bown Set in the late sixties. Better known were Vinegar Joe, a bluesy pop band in which Palmer sang alongside the throaty Elkie Brooks (the pair having sung previously in Dada) and which enjoyed a reasonably high profile in 1972–3, recording three albums. Although Brooks was also to enjoy solo success, Palmer clearly had the edge in star potential. After an acrimonious falling-out with his co-star, he left to record
Sneakin’ Sally through the Alley
(1974) in the USA, with no less than The Meters as backing band and Lowell ‘Little Feat’ George at the desk. This, and
Pressure Drop
(1975), both sold steadily, but it wasn’t until 1978’s
Double Fun
that Palmer achieved a US hit single in the light, optimistic ‘Every Kinda People’. Record sales at this stage were no indication of his eighties dominance, however, and even
Clues
(1980) – possibly Palmer’s best album – required assistance from the unlikely hand of Gary Numan to furnish him with a UK hit. More collaborations followed, including the truly wretched Power Station project with Andy Taylor and John Taylor of Duran Duran, which found favour for Palmer with the teenies in 1985 (and again, to somewhat better effect, ten years later). Absolute paydirt was hit, however, with the platinum album
Riptide
(1985), which confirmed Palmer as pop’s number-one ‘Lothario’ with its brace of million-selling US singles, ‘Addicted To Love’ and ‘I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On’ (both 1986 – also UK Top Ten hits). Some gratuitous model-heavy promo work from late director Terence Donovan didn’t go amiss here, either.

So, what to do once you’ve made your millions from AOR pop music? Simple: set up a studio in Switzerland (closer to the bank account, one might imagine) and then strip it all back down to the gritty, blues-influenced material of your early work. To his credit, Palmer did this with some aplomb with his final recording,
Drive
(2003), though admittedly not before a couple of reworkings of
Riptide
to keep the management and label happy. Robert Palmer had lived in exile for fifteen years when the news filtered back home of his sudden and unexpected death from a heart attack while spending a weekend in Paris with his partner. He was interred in his adopted city of Lugano.

See also
Bernard Edwards (fApril 1996); Keef Hartley (
Golden Oldies #154). The death in November of drummer Tony Thompson meant that three sometime members of The Power Station had died by the end of 2003.

OCTOBER

Tuesday 21

Elliott Smith

(Steven Paul Smith - Omaha, Nebraska, 6 August 1969)

(Heatmiser)

(Stranger Than Fiction)

Hot on the heels of Matthew Jay’s mysterious death came the apparent suicide of a more established singer/songwriter whose tender and deeply introspective songs similarly echoed the work of Nick Drake. Yet, despite his widely acknowledged tendency towards the morose, the circumstances surrounding Smith’s death remain unclear.

The young Smith was not yet a year old when his parents divorced, the boy growing up in Texas with his mother and a reportedly abusive stepfather (whom he’d later threaten to pursue), which eventually resulted in his moving to Oregon to be with his father. Before he was out of his teens, the singer, not wanting to sound like a ‘jock’, had changed his first name, and fronted his first rock band, Stranger Than Fiction, at high school. Smith – who’d graduated from university in Massachusetts with a degree in philosophy – was at this stage a fan of thrashier music than the kind that would make his name, forming the Fugazi-esque Heatmiser with Neil Gust (guitar), Brandt Peterson (bass, replaced by Sam Coomes, who played with Smith throughout his career) and Tony Lash (drums) while living on benefits. This band displayed for the first time Smith’s clever juxtaposition of sophisticated, lyrical ideas against an uncommercial backing, and lasted until 1996, by which time the singer was already acknowledged as being greater than the sum of the band’s individual parts. Elliott Smith solo was a different beast: his songs were oblique, well crafted and endlessly haunting. A first album,
Roman Candle
(1994), now sounds awkward compared to what the man achieved over the next decade, but reveals a sensitivity with which Smith was to become synonymous. While friends of Ian Curtis (for example) were quick to talk of his ‘laddish’ joking, Smith was habitually portrayed by his contemporaries as wilfully morose, always ready to suggest that ‘this would be the last time they saw him alive’. So the signs were in place – but the music was remarkable. Wonderful albums like
Either/Or
(1997) and major-label debut
XO
(1998) seemed to pluck from (and perhaps even improve on) the finer moments of Simon & Garfunkel. The singer/songwriter had spent two years in a drug-fuelled haze, though, rumours of his inability to remain
compos mentis
during live shows perhaps suggesting that Smith was now using crack. He cleaned up for a while – long enough to collect a 1998 Academy nomination for the song ‘Miss Misery’, one of several chosen for the Gus Van Zant movie
Good Will Hunting
– but was clearly using again following the 2000 album
Figure 8,
which, presumably by reason of its smoother production, had disappointed certain critics.

Elliott Smith: Mr Misery?

‘Yeah, like Kurt, he was making music for the sad kids.’

Mary Lou Lord, friend of Elliott Smith (and former girlfriend of Kurt Cobain)

‘[Smith’s was] the best suicide I ever heard of!’

Tact, as ever, from another of Cobain’s exes, Courtney Love

Elliott Smith, although now ‘clean’, talked openly of increasing depression before his death in 2003. He was not lonely, however, at least not in the more literal sense of the word. He now had a live-in girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, singer with the paradoxically named Happy Ending, a Los Angeles guitar band Smith had nurtured and taken on the road with him when promoting his latest album. It is believed that Smith’s production input into the band’s work was causing resentment, however. As a producer, he was known to be a perfectionist, which led to a huge row when an impatient member of Happy Ending waltzed off with the master tapes for their first single. His input was also causing tension with Chiba, a factor that increased the pressure on her when Smith died. The pair had endured the mother of all domestics when Smith finally cracked. Infuriated by her boyfriend’s threats of self-harm, Chiba locked herself in their bathroom – only to emerge when she heard the guttural scream that could only mean that Smith had actually carried out the threat he’d made more than once before. She rushed to him to discover a kitchen knife embedded in his chest, the singer/songwriter collapsing before her: Smith died in hospital just over an hour later. The music world was stunned: despite knowing him to be a depressive, the authorities – and indeed many of the singer’s fans – weren’t convinced it was suicide. Certain factors seemed highly suspicious: the singer’s name had seemingly been misspelled on a Post-It note that had served as his suicide missive (though this has since been cleared as a transcription error in the coroner’s report), while self-stabbing is of course almost unheard of as a suicide method. For Chiba, it was the beginning of a nightmare. Although abuse (and even death threats) from Smith’s fans on her band’s website forced its closure – and, eventually, the breakup of Happy Ending – she was never questioned by the authorities, having apparently refused all such requests. Investigations are still ongoing.

All outstanding work on Elliott Smith’s unfinished final album,
From a Basement on a Hill
(2004), was resolved with a great deal more ease than have been the inquiries surrounding its perpetrator’s grim departure.

Friday 24

Rosey Nix Adams

(Rozanna Lea Adams - Tennessee, 13 July 1958)

Jimmy Campbell

(Tennessee, 28 April 1963)

(The Sidemen)