The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (71 page)

NOVEMBER

Tuesday 4

Ronnie Goodson

(New Jersey, 2 February 1945)

Ronnie & The Hi-lites

(John Fred & His Playboy Band)

Ronnie Goodson was already showing great vocal potential in his regular role of Baptist choirboy at the age of twelve. With Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers paving the way for young black male vocal acts, he was snapped up for local quintet The Cascades. Despite one national hit with ‘I Wish That We were Married’ (1962), Goodson and the renamed Hi-lites found little success away from the East Coast. After the inevitable but vain stab at a solo career, Goodson sensibly returned to his studies – though he finally enjoyed a transatlantic Top Five hit in 1968 with the Beatles pastiche ‘Judy In Disguise’ as a member of John Fred & His Playboy Band. Goodson’s health was poor, however, and the singer was diagnosed withCity. brain cancer around this time. He died of a tumour at his home in Jersey

See also
John Fred (
April 2005)

DECEMBER

Thursday 4

Ronnie Österberg

(Finland, 15 January 1948)

Wigwam

(Blues Section)

Drummer Ronnie Osterberg was one of the leading protagonists of Finnish progressive rock during the late sixties and early seventies. He started out with the John Mayall-influenced jazz-rock outfit Blues Section in 1965, graduating to the more successful Wigwam three years later. With English singer Jim Pembroke at the helm, Wigwam proved a hit at UK music festivals for a number of years, although the band managed only modest commercial success outside their native land. Their best-known song was 1969’s ‘Luulosairas’ – a number-fourteen hit in Finland (!) – though later album
Fairyport
(1971) is generally considered the group’s best work by prog fans. Osterberg died completely unexpectedly from heart failure at the age of just thirty-two.

Sunday 7

Darby Crash

(Jan Paul Beahm - Los Angeles, California, 26 September 1958)

The Germs

The seemingly condemned Darby Crash was on a collision course from the day he came into the world. Crash had an emotionally tough upbringing, losing an older brother to heroin at a very young age. At thirteen, when his stepfather passed away, he went in search of his natural father – only to discover that he, too, had recently died. Music seemed a natural way out to Darby Crash (then ‘Bobby Pyn’), who, on meeting guitarist Pat Smear through their drug dealer in 1976 while at school, formed the band that was to become influential punk-rock extremists The Germs. Despite the singer’s destructive antics getting them banned from almost every venue they played, The Germs were opening for Devo and Blondie by 1979. (At one memorable performance, Crash smashed a glass into his face, dived headlong into the shards and still somehow managed to get himself stitched up in time to watch Blondie close the evening.)

Crash had forewarned his band that ‘it would be over in five years’. Disbanding The Germs just when they looked to be break-ing through, he took himself into his bathroom and, in a pact with his girlfriend, injected a lethal dose of heroin. Rumour has it that he was found emulating the shape of a cross, having written ‘Here Lies Darby C’ above his head, apparently dying before he could complete his name. Crash’s partner survived – the singer had doctored the doses to ensure his death and her survival. As for Pat Smear, he famously went on to play with Nirvana – thus witnessing another volatile frontman’s suicide first hand
(
April 1994).

Crash’s attempt at Sid Vicious-style rock immortality was, however, utterly scuppered by what took place just twenty-four hours later …

Monday 8

John Lennon

(Liverpool, 9 October 1940)

The Beatles

(The Plastic Ono Band)

The killer often has much in common with his victim. In this case, both assassin and target had been outsiders from fractured family backgrounds, both had used drugs to enhance their visions – and, most crucially, both were unable to handle anonymity. But beyond these similarities, John Winston Lennon had everything that Mark David Chapman did not: unique talent, success, love and, above all, universal approval.

The young John Lennon was to become used to loss close at hand. His father, Alf, a merchant seaman, abandoned the family when Lennon was five. His mother, Julia, felt unable to care properly for their boy alone: under authority pressure, her sister Mimi became his surrogate mother, and brought up Lennon through his school years. Julia remained in close contact, and having learned banjo from her estranged husband, she encouraged her son in the
métier
at which he was to succeed so spectacularly. But Julia was never to witness her son’s fame – she was killed by an off-duty police officer’s car as she crossed a road near their homes when Lennon was seventeen. (Years later, the musician was to remember his mother in future songs and also in the naming of his first son, Julian.) Two years before this tragedy, Paul McCartney had also lost his mother – a factor that cemented the early relationship between the century’s most potent songwriting partners.

Having failed academically, Lennon took a place at Liverpool College of Art (after some persuasion from Aunt Mimi), where the caustic young wit and general outspokenness so frowned upon in school seemed initially to be encouraged. Not especially gifted as an artist, Lennon used the opportunity to hang with cooler people, starting friendships with Cynthia Powell – his first major love – and the more artistically talented Stuart Sutcliffe, whom he encouraged to take up an instrument in the hope that they might play together the Elvis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly numbers he’d learned. By now a faltering guitarist, Lennon had already played in his own high-school skiffle combo, The Quarry Men. The addition of new acquaintances McCartney and the shy young George Harrison on guitars gave this unit an edge and, with Sutcliffe’s rudimentary bass and Pete Best’s drums, The Silver Beetles – later The Beatles – were born. Lennon dropped out of the art school he felt held him back, fame as a musician now the only target in his sights.

Lennon suffered another major loss with the death of Sutcliffe from a cerebral haemorrhage in Hamburg (
Pre-1965),
though his close ally had already left a band starting to make headlines. The German city had twice been home to The Beatles between 1960–62, with Lennon brandishing a shiny new Rickenbacker and McCartney now assuming bass duties, as they took up residencies at the Kaiserkeller, among other clubs – Lennon regularly reneging on his vow to remain faithful to Cynthia Powell (whom he nonetheless married, she having fallen pregnant soon after his return). During a remarkably busy 1962, Lennon also oversaw the recruitment of key manager Brian Epstein and drummer Ringo Starr, late of Merseybeat hopefuls Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, and The Beatles signed to Parlophone. But, if that year was eventful, the following few years were to take Lennon’s breath away. Beginning with ‘Love Me Do’ (1962), ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’ (both 1963, the latter the first of eleven consecutive UK chart-toppers, and seventeen overall), each Lennon & McCartney song seemed to outdo the previous one. Beatles’ record sales rocketed: ‘She Loves You’ (1963) went to number one twice inside two months at home, toppled only by ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – a record reckoned to have sold a staggering 12 million copies worldwide. In the States, the group’s acceptance was even more remarkable, The Beatles claiming the entire Top Five in the first week of April 1964, having drawn 40 per cent of the whole population to their earlier
Ed Sullivan Show
appearance.