Where Are They Buried? (64 page)

DECEMBER 30, 1928 – JUNE 2, 2008

In the furniture-making shop of his vocational high school in Chicago, a young Bo Diddley built himself a guitar along with a violin and an upright bass and, after dropping out of the school at 15, he played his instruments on street corners for spare change. Within a short while he had formed a rough-edged blues group called the Langley Avenue Jive Cats and become a fixture of the city’s blues club scene. In 1954 Diddley cut a demo of two of his original songs, “Uncle John” and “I’m a Man,” but instead of adhering to the traditional restrained blues brand of his contemporaries, he showcased the influences of a frenzied Pentecostal church congregation that he frequented, and those exultant and frenetic stylings are considered to be some of the very beginnings of rock ’n’ roll.

The next year his single, “Hey Bo Diddley,” with its instantly recognizable rhythm of three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-da-bomp-da-bomp, da-bomp-bomp, raced to the top of the charts. This “jungle beat,” as he called it, had been around in various incarnations since time immemorial, including in the children’s game hambone, but ever since Bo laid it on vinyl it’s been a foundation of rock music that can be heard on everything from Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” to Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” to Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone.”

After imprinting his trademark style on the world, Bo blitzed the charts throughout the 1950s with pile-driving performances, his guitar distorted with a bubbling tremolo and his booming voice loaded with echo, all roped together around his spine-rattling rhythms. Yet his sound was only one element of Bo’s musical charisma. In an age of apple pie and Chevrolet, his lyrics were radically playful, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit, and sexual cockiness. And his live performances, where he usually sported a black cowboy hat, a loud plaid suit, and thick-rimmed glasses while coaxing out-of-this-world effects from a weird-looking rectangular guitar, were trancelike ruckuses. A wild performer who jumped and lurched and balanced on his toes while shaking his knees as he wrestled his instrument, Bo’s high-kicking, hipwiggling, swaggering stage repertoire and panache preceded Mick Jagger and James Brown. Playing his “axe” behind his head or with his teeth while using amped-up electric effects that included reverb and distortion was a breakthrough for music, especially once Jimi Hendrix and others took his inventions to extremes.

By the early 1960s new artists emerged using the sound he invented, and Bo quickly began to sound quaint. Searching for a hit, his record company had him make albums to capitalize on the Twist and surf and dance music, but the picture only worsened. These were low times for Bo. Completely disillusioned with the music business, he moved to New Mexico in 1971 and for two years served as deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. Now that’s a career change!

Despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock, and hiphop in later decades, Bo’s recording career never picked up again. But that wasn’t even the worst of it: throughout his life Bo was embittered about both his musical legacy and being exploited by the music industry. He felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged and it frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat. “I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he said. And though in the 1980s he did resume apace as a terrific performer, his live crunching sound paying the bills for the rest of his life, he had nothing but contempt for every other aspect of the music business. Despite all his hits, he enjoyed zero financial success from any record company, receiving not even a single dollar in royalties until 1989. “I am owed,” Bo commented darkly. “I never got paid. I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama, and even then, look at her real good.’”

On a hot summer night, with death imminent, family and friends surrounded Bo and together they sang the gospel song “Walk Around Heaven.” Bo gave a thumbs-up and died minutes after his last words, a barely audible, “Wow, I’m going to heaven.”

At 79, he was buried at Rosemary Hill Cemetery in Bronson, Florida.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This cemetery is located on Route 24, just about a mile east of its intersection with Route 27.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Situated proudly under an old Spanish moss tree, Bo’s stone can be seen from the car window while cruising past the cemetery.

JULY 10, 1942 – MAY 16, 2010

With his powerful, almost operatic signature vocals and doom-laden but often poetic lyrics, Ronnie James Dio, the “Man on the Silver Mountain,” was the front man for iconic heavy metal bands and became one of the best-loved figures of the genre.

Born Ronald Padavona, he released his first record in 1958 with the group Ronnie and the Red Caps, and it was a few years later that he adopted his stage name, supposedly inspired by a New York mobster named Johnny Dio. By the 1970s, Ronnie was known in the then limited heavy metal circle as a purist with a wide range of vocal prowess and a devilish stage persona, and in 1975 when Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple and hired Ronnie to front his new band, Rainbow, metal fans rejoiced and Ronnie’s talents gained their first wide exposure. After four landmark albums with that band, personal differences drove him to leave and in short order he was filling Ozzy Osbourne’s vacated shoes in Black Sabbath. Ronnie rejuvenated Sabbath’s creative slump with gusto and their first album together,
Heaven and Hell,
went gold, as did its follow-up,
Mob Rules,
in 1981. But in rock, and especially in heavy metal, the only thing that’s constant is change; after just a couple years Ronnie left Sabbath to start his own band named, aptly enough, Dio.

The cover art of Dio’s first album,
Holy Diver,
an immodest and cartoonish painting of a red-eyed demon whipping a drowning priest, succinctly encapsulates the band’s over-the-top style and the group became a symbol of both the glories and the silliness of heavy metal. Drawing heavily on medieval imagery, the theme of Dio’s catalog of songs on ten albums over the next twenty years revolved around the struggle between good and evil. Onstage, medieval theatrics abounded including swords and goblets and
thrones and dragons, while Ronnie wailed about devils and defiance, punctuating his points with gale-force vibrato. Meanwhile in the audience, throngs of sweaty disciples rocked in unison, one hand upraised in the “devil’s horn” hand gesture—index and pinky fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist—as a symbol of metal’s occult-like worship of everything scary and heavy. Ronnie is widely credited with popularizing the hand gesture and claimed to have gotten it—the “malocchio” or “evil eye”—from his Italian grandmother. In any event, fans loved and embraced it—and him. Rock on, indeed.

At 67, Ronnie lost his battle with stomach cancer and was interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 134, which is the connector between Highway 101 and I-210, take the Forest Lawn Drive exit. Proceed west for a mile and the park’s entrance will be on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Get a map from the information booth and drive to the Courts of Rememberance. Walk up the long sidewalk in the middle, up the two sets of three stairs each, and through the archway. After the archway, diagonally to the right is a painting of three children, in front of which is Ronnie’s white sarcophagus.

AUGUST 10, 1909 – MARCH 21, 1991

In the 1930s musical instruments functioned much as they had for years: drums provided the beat, horns performed the melody, and, because they couldn’t be heard very well, string instruments were relegated to the background. But then a new invention changed modern music—and popular culture, as well—the electric guitar.

By rudimentary physics, a vibrating metal object—a guitar string, for instance—moving in a magnetic field creates a signal that can be picked up by a wire coil. In 1931 an inventor named George Beauchamp applied this principle to his guitar hobby and, on his dining room table, built a crude version of the world’s first electric guitar.

For the first time, a guitar could hold its own against the horn section, and guitarists could pick out melody lines instead of just strumming the rhythm. Beauchamp finally got a patent in 1937, but by then the electric guitar had been introduced to the jazz world, was redefining swing orchestra ensembles, and several
companies were making their own electric guitars. After a few technical headaches were overcome and some stylistic changes were advanced by Les Paul and other pioneers, radio-repairman Leo Fender jumped onto the scene in 1945.

Leo advanced a solid-body guitar with a better pickup and tone controls but, most important, within a few years, his guitar was cheap. Leo revolutionized the scene by mass-producing the instrument, beginning with his 1948 Broadcaster, a guitar for the masses. The tools of the revolution that would soon become rock music were now in the hands of America’s youth, and the culture would never be the same.

Leo died at 81 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease and was buried at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-5, take Route 22 east and exit at Grand Avenue south. Make an immediate left onto Fairhaven Avenue and the park is a half-mile ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left after the office, and from that point stay as parallel as you can with Fairhaven Avenue. Turn right when you finally reach a pronounced “T,” then stop after twenty feet. In the grass on the right, Section J, count eleven rows to find Leo’s grave.

And later on, check your attic. Though Leo offered his 1948 Broadcaster for $75, such an early original can today fetch $30,000.

NOVEMBER 9, 1941 – SEPTEMBER 6, 1990

The economical style of rock and roll promoted by Creedence Clearwater Revival was a long way from rock’s mainstream in the late 1960s, but these guys hit it big anyway. With a consistent recipe of three-minute songs, Creedence earned eight gold singles. Featuring the growling vocals and rhythmic guitars of brothers Tom and John Fogerty, the band seemed destined for greatness. But conflicts arose because of John’s totalitarian attitude, and Tom left the band in 1971 to pursue a solo career.

In December of 1980 the original band reunited onstage for the first time in nine years during Tom’s wedding, but this proved to be their last performance together. Tom released eight solo albums but never found much commercial success, and at 48 died of respiratory failure due to tuberculosis.

He was cremated and his ashes scattered in Hawaii and around California’s Half Moon Bay.

Tom and John never fully reconciled and remained estranged even as Tom lay dying. The animosity between John and the other band members continues and, when Creedence was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, John declined to play with his ex-band mates.

APRIL 2, 1939 – APRIL 1, 1984

Marvin Gaye was a charter member of that generation of soul artists that skyrocketed to fame under the Motown label, and his songs—unique blends of soul music and old-time gospel—cut a wide swath from torrid sexual abandon to impassioned social rectitude.

He’d grown up in Washington D.C., the son of an iron-fisted Pentecostal minister, Marvin Gay Sr. (For show business, Marvin Jr. added an “e” to his surname.) While he was still quite young it became obvious to anyone within earshot that Marvin Sr.’s son could
really
sing and the boy became a church fixture, leading the congregation through hymns between his father’s sermons. Eventually, the protracted religious discourses and his father’s inflexibility induced an animosity that worsened through Marvin’s teens. Still, though Marvin’s lifestyle later drifted light-years away from the strictures of Pentecostalism, he was always quick to credit his father for instilling in him the faith he felt was central to his success.

At 18, Marvin enlisted in the Air Force but, by mutual agreement, was discharged honorably before his duty was up. Next, he played with a few different vocal groups, performances that led to a solo Motown recording contract. In 1964 Marvin hit real pay dirt: a duet with Mary Wells on “My Guy” was the smash that opened the floodgates. For the remainder of the decade, both Marvin and Motown Records cashed in.

After a string of hits, including “Can I Get a Witness?” and “How Sweet It Is to be Loved by You,” Marvin released 1971’s
What’s Going On?
, an album filled with outspoken social commentary that surprised fans who’d come to expect danceable love songs. Still, the album was a Motown milestone, and it demonstrated that its popular artists were not mere dance-steppers.