Dead Folks 2010: Music
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Solomon Burke (70)
“King Solomon” was many things, but shy wasn’t one of them. A massive man, he performed sitting on a throne with a scepter and robe (before James Brown used the latter). Ordained a minister at age 12, he grew up performing gospel music and was recording it, as well as R&B, in his teens. But because R&B was anathema in church, he coined the phrase “soul singer” to describe himself, thus naming a genre he helped define with hits like “Cry to Me” (1962; covered by the Rolling Stones), “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” (1964; covered by the Stones and the Blues Brothers) and “Got to Get You Off My Mind” (1965). Interestingly, his early 1960s recordings were mostly country, and these influenced Ray Charles to go in a similar direction. In fact, Burke’s “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)” (1961) led to his accidental booking to sing at Ku Klux Klan events by a promoter who didn’t realize he was African American. Burke recalled: “They called the doctor and had him cover my face in bandages and made it look like I had an accident,” and the show went on. He recorded more than 30 albums, acted in The Big Easy, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 2001. The man also knew how to hustle: between sets at the Apollo Theater, he would sell food backstage, and he owned a chain of funeral parlors and other businesses (as he fathered at least 21 children, this may be understandable). He also headed Solomon’s Temple: The House of God for All People, a denomination with 40,000 parishioners in almost 200 churches across North America and Jamaica.—Bart Grooms
Captain Beefheart (69)
Once you’ve heard Beefheart, it’s hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood.—Tom Waits
Musicians are often the most eccentric of artists: Little Richard, Sun Ra, David Byrne, George Clinton, Tom Waits. But let’s be honest; the truly insane engineer on the crazy train to Wig City, or the mad pilot flying music’s mystery plane to an even madder planet—that would be Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.
Musically, Beefheart is a godfather to Guided By Voices, Public Image Ltd, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, Sonic Youth, The Fall, P.J. Harvey, Tom Waits, and The Flaming Lips, among numerous others. Culturally, he is an underground patron saint for anyone who marches to the beat of his or her own drum. Actually, make that an invisible drum on which tribal spirits pound out the obscure rhythms of a lost, psychotic civilization whose ghosts haunted Beefheart’s desert home. His unique sound was all of that, plus earth-shattering electric guitar riffs, wild vocals, and other cool stuff you might hear along the Mississippi delta, or at a club where John Coltrane is playing, or on Venus. In many instances the voice was the thing. If Howling Wolf is at one end of the spectrum, and Tom Waits is at the opposite end, we find Captain Beefheart at dead center, growling into a withering microphone, fitfully making indecipherable gesticulations while staring vacantly at a stunned audience.
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Sometimes the more indulgent and experimental aspects of certain Beefheart recordings resulted in wholly off-putting abstraction and cacophony. In other words, the hype and lore concerning Trout Mask Replica, the third album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, remains a mystery. It is a genuinely awful record that, although revealing the possibilities of music to generations of artists, rarely offers listeners the possibility of a pleasant experience.
On the other hand, Beefheart could corral his instincts for surreal, avant-garde composition toward challenging but truly appealing songs filled with invention, lyricism, and surprise. In that respect, Clear Spot is essential listening. As for what makes his music so forcefully compelling, mesmerizing, or confounding (often all at once) words tend to fail. But words never failed Beefheart. Despite the surface appearance of abstraction and play, the facts and logic in his writing are fundamentally sound. “Magnet draw day from dark, sun zoom spark,” sounds like pure, fanciful imagination, unless you consider how light energy is affected by the electromagnetic force. A perverse sense of humor lies at the core of his lyrics, and the joke is in his saying something nonsensical that eventually establishes its own perfect logic: “The moon showed up and it started to show,” or “my head is my only house unless it rains.”
There’s something deeply satisfying about the fact that language can even do that, yet it’s doubtful that Beefheart could communicate in any other way. Appearances on talk shows and radio interviews, throughout his life but especially in later years, suggested that his weirdness was no mere persona, but perhaps a condition best explained by new advances in cognitive science. Put another way, the syntax and semantics of his everyday language did not differ greatly from those of his charmingly baffling lyrics. Poet and blues singer, desert mystic, underground pop star, or bipolar/autistic genius? The jury is still out.—David Pelfrey
Fred Carter Jr. (76)
Fred Carter will be remembered for his guitar work with Dale Hawkins, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Levon Helm, among many others. A former guitarist with Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty when the latter was playing rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s before becoming a country star, Carter became an in-demand studio musician heard on classic recordings such as Marty Robbins “El Paso,” Bob Dylan’s album Self Portrait, and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” on which he contributed four guitars, including the finger-picking guitar lines that open and conclude the tune. He was personally responsible for attracting such diverse acts as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Band, Neil Young, and others to Nashville for recording. He also was The Band guitarist Robbie Robertson’s guitar mentor when Carter was touring with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, for whom Robertson was playing bass.—Ed Reynolds
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Hank Cochran (74)
Songwriter Hank Cochran wrote Patsy Cline’s first number one hit, “I Fall to Pieces”—the song often referenced as the common thread that attracted a diverse group of people to eventually embrace country music. He followed that up with Cline’s 1962 smash, “She’s Got You.” The songwriter’s early showbiz career included a band with rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran (no relation) in 1954 called the Cochran Brothers, a duo that often opened for country singer Lefty Frizell. In 1965, Eddy Arnold scored a Billboard hit with what many consider to be Cochran’s signature tune, “Make the World Go Away,” a song that Cochran wrote in a mere 15 minutes.—ER
Ronnie James Dio (68)
He had become a joke for many things, including suing a band called Dios. Ronnie James Dio also once threatened an Atlanta rock critic with a curse that would lead to an ear infection. In his defense, though, Dio never really tried to claim credit for inventing heavy metal’s notorious “sign of the horns” hand gesture.
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He was a legitimate rock god who could put on a great show far into his sixties. That was as a solo act, although Dio was mostly loved for his long stint with Black Sabbath. He couldn’t be part of the proper band anymore for legal reasons, but he occasionally reunited with his old bandmates as Heaven & Hell—which was also the name of the group’s best album with Dio.
The New Hampshire native also provided vital vocals for Elf and Rainbow over the course of his very long career. Dio’s solo work pretty much defined melodic metal, often in service to Satan. He would have been pleased to know that notorious homophobe Rev. Fred Phelps held a rally after his death to condemn the rock star. He would have been less pleased to have so many glowing obituaries written for him by rock writers who never bothered to see him in concert. (68, stomach cancer)—JR Taylor
Eddie Fisher (89)
MAD magazine used to run a regular feature called “The Mad Library of Extremely Thin Books.” It included Songs I’ve Sung On-Key by Eddie Fisher. The reliably bland Fisher was one of the recording industry’s biggest teen idols at the start of the 1950s. His run of hits between 1950 and 1956 included “Lady of Spain,” “Oh! My Pa-pa,” and “Dungaree Doll.” The Beatles would have probably killed his career, but Fisher managed to wreck his own success in spectacular fashion. It was a major scandal when he left wife Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor in 1959. His popular TV show was canceled, and he was dropped from his record label.
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Taylor showed some support by giving him a role in her 1960 film Butterfield 8, but by 1964 the couple was divorced. Fisher went on to marry Connie Stevens. He kept working and even managed some chart hits though 1967. After that, he was strictly a lounge act for the oldies crowd. His celebrity offspring include Joely Fisher (with Stevens) and Carrie Fisher (with Reynolds). The latter, of course, became an outspoken novelist who did a lot to make Fisher notorious as a lousy father. Fisher responded by embarrassing Carrie with his own private and lascivious details in his 1999 autobiography Been There, Done That.—JRT
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Dale Hawkins (73)
A lot of people probably thought Dale Hawkins was already dead. His pioneering swamp-rock is certainly—and appropriately—the kind of primordial genius that makes you believe the songs never had a human creator. The Louisiana native first mixed his local influences and admiration for Elvis to create 1957′s “Susie Q.” (Guitarist James Burton provided the vital riff that would lead to the guitarist working with Ricky Nelson and then Elvis.) Hawkins kept recording, but things really took off for him in 1968. That’s when Creedence Clearwater Revival performed an epic cover of his early classic.
The song had already been done by the Rolling Stones and Johnny Rivers, but CCR scored the (edited) radio smash that turned Hawkins from a one-hit wonder to an important early pioneer. By then, he had become a popular record producer, sounding mod while helming hits like the Five Americans’ 1967 song “Western Union.”
Hawkins worked through some drug problems and began a proper comeback with 1999′s Wildcat Tamer. It was his first album of original material in 30 years. He put on great live shows and made a few more strong albums, ending on a high note in 2007 with Back Down to Louisiana. It was always depressing to realize Hawkins was only a few years younger than Elvis Presley would have been.—JRT
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Bobby Hebb (72)
Hebb was from Nashville, where he played in Roy Acuff’s band and with other country musicians (rare for a black musician at that time). Hank Williams gave him songwriting advice. Then he cut some R&B in New Orleans, backed by Dr. John and James Booker. His huge 1966 hit “Sunny” (which he wrote, and which featured backing vocals by his friends Melba Moore, Nick Ashford, and Valerie Simpson) led to a tour with the Beatles, to whom he suggested that his friend Billy Preston might be a good piano player (Preston played organ and piano on several Beatles hits). “Sunny” has the number 25 position on BMI’s Top 100 Songs of the Century, and has been covered by Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra with Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, the Four Tops, James Brown, and 500 or so others.—BG
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Lena Horne (92)
Joining the Cotton Club as a chorus line singer at age 16 in 1933, Lena Horne eventually found her rising Hollywood career stalled after she was blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s. She was forced to return to the nightclub circuit as a result. A high-profile civil rights activist, Horne refused to appear before whites-only audiences while doing USO shows during World War II, and she once stormed offstage when she performed in a mess hall where German POWs had been seated in front of black American soldiers.
Janet Jackson had been chosen to portray Horne in a TV movie about her life, but after Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, Horne requested that Jackson be dropped from the role. Horne tolerated performing for white audiences and was known to curse them beneath her breath as she took her bows to thundering white applause, according to her biographer. Most of her film appearances featured her as a singer in an evening gown leaning against a pillar as she sang, an image that became her on-screen trademark. In her 1965 autobiography Lena, she wrote: “They [Hollywoood] didn’t make me into a maid, but they didn’t make me into anything else either. I became a butterfly pinned to a column singing away in Movieland.” The reason she usually appeared in cameos in films as a singer was so that her scenes could be edited out when the movies were shown in the South, where Jim Crow laws stipulated that blacks not be depicted as other than a lower class.—ER
Marvin Isley (56)
The youngest of the Isley brothers, Marvin joined the band as bassist in 1969 and was a part of their 1970s success (“That Lady,” “Fight the Power”). The younger brothers and in-law Chris Jasper performed as Isley-Jasper-Isley (“Caravan of Love,” 1985) for most of the 1980s; Marvin returned to the Isleys proper from 1991 to 1997, after which he was sidelined by diabetes. He and the other Isleys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.—BG
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Abbey Lincoln (80)
Born Anna Marie Wooldridge, Lincoln was accomplished as an actress, jazz vocalist, and songwriter. A striking beauty, she was made for the big screen, and her films include The Girl Can’t Help It, Nothing But a Man, For Love of Ivy,and Mo’ Better Blues. Influenced by Billie Holiday as a singer, she recorded more than 20 albums with some of the best players in the business (Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz) and for a time was married to drummer Max Roach. Lincoln’s delivery was striking—she projected with power in a speechlike, dramatic manner that was instantly recognizable; Cassandra Wilson and Lizz Wright name her as a major influence. Though unusual for a jazz vocalist (especially for a woman in that sector of the recording business), Lincoln came to write much of her repertoire, especially over the last 20 years.—BG
Teena Marie (54)
Berry Gordy’s Motown label had a tradition of banning artists—both black and white—from their own album covers if the color of their skin didn’t match the music. Teena Marie scored that questionable honor with her 1979 debut. Wild and Peaceful established her as a protégé of Rick James, who first met her in the Motown label’s headquarters. Then at the peak of his powers, the funk-rock genius—and future crackhead—scuttled a planned album with Diana Ross to work with the 20-year-old newcomer. Their duet on “I’m a Sucker for Your Love” was a hit. Marie followed up with a sophomore album that lacked James’ imprint but made her an international success.
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Her next two albums showed the multi-instrumentalist taking control of her own career. Typically, this led to friction with Gordy. Marie ended up successfully suing Motown after he refused to release her fifth album. She ended up on the Epic label in 1984, and spent the rest of the decade plying a likable mix of funk, rock, dance, and pop. She wisely took a break at the start of the 1990s, and during her absence was widely sampled. her ballads for both labels were also rediscovered as part of a Slow Jams revival.
She couldn’t get signed to a major label that decade, but began a proper comeback with La Doña (2004). Congo Square (2009) showed impressive sales on the R&B charts, even as Marie began to experiment more with jazz. It was a shock when she was found dead by her daughter on December 26. She still lived pretty long, considering her early association with a psycho like James. Marie was smart not to marry the guy after they were briefly engaged. Ike Turner also used to talk about hooking up with Marie for a new variant on an Ike & Teena Revue—another bullet dodged.—JRT
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Teddy Pendergrass (59)
One of the most powerful (and sexiest) voices in R&B, Pendergrass became famous as lead singer with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes in the 1970s (“If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” “The Love I Lost”) before leaving the group to start a successful solo career that included five platinum albums). He was competing with Marvin Gaye in popularity when in 1982 he suffered a spinal cord injury when his brakes failed and his Rolls-Royce crashed; he was paralyzed from the waist down. He continued to record, but apart from a few brief appearances, it was 20 years before he was able to do shows again.—BG
Billy Taylor (89)
Jazz has not had a better spokesman than Dr. Billy Taylor, and not many better musicians. A brilliant pianist (his mentor was Art Tatum) whose focus on harmony influenced numerous players in the 1950s, he played first with Ben Webster and then as the house pianist at the legendary club Birdland with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. He was music director of The Subject Is Jazz (1985; the first TV show about the music), was the first black leader of a talk show band (David Frost, 1969–72) and was an engaging, always articulate authority on jazz, whether hosting NPR’s Jazz Alive or appearing on CBS Sunday Morning for two decades.
A tireless advocate for what he called “America’s classical music,” Taylor founded the Jazzmobile in 1964, which began as a series of free concerts “where he basically dressed up a beer float that drove through Harlem and carried musicians who blew bebop at passersby” (Matt Rand) and now embraces two festivals and several workshops and symposia. Among his hundreds of compositions is “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” covered by Nina Simone in 1967, and more recently by Derek Trucks and Levon Helm. “I think of myself in some ways as an urban griot,” Taylor said, “because the griot was someone who was a minstrel; he was a teacher, a healer, kind of a part of the collective memory of the people that he related to and served.”—BG
