ROCK ’N’ ROLL DOES NOT FEAR the Reaper. As band names like Grateful Dead, Dead Kennedys, the Dead Milkmen, Dead Boys, Slayer, Suicidal Tendencies, Suicide, the Killers, the Strokes, and of course, Death, attest, the specter rides with rock ’n’ roll stars, and its constant shadow only makes them seem all the more edgy. Death and rock ’n’ roll go together like rum and coke, coke and heroin, heroin and Kurt Cobain, and Kurt Cobain and guns, and the history of rock ’n’ roll is littered with the debris of drug overdoses, plane crashes, beatings, shootings, car wrecks, and suicides. Deaths onstage, though? Ahhh, that’s another level of immortality altogether.
From Sam Cooke, rubbed out in December 1964 by mobbed-up music moguls who wanted ownership of his songs (talk to his family), to John Lennon, shot dead in December 1980 by a programmed assassin (read Fenton Bresler’s book), to Kurt Cobain, murdered in April 1994 (see Nick Broomfield’s documentary), to Marvin Gaye, shot point blank on April Fool’s Day 1984 by his cross-dressing preacher dad (that’s simply a fact), many a rock ’n’ roll star has fallen to gun violence. The majority were not onstage at the time.
Darrell Abbott just happened to be. Born in Ennis, Texas, south of Dallas, in 1966, Darrell Abbott was twelve when he learned to play a guitar and fifteen when he formed the heavy metal band Pantera with his big brother drummer, Vinnie Paul. “Diamond” Darrell was regarded as the Texas Van Halen, the hottest metal guitarist in the Dallas–Fort Worth region, even before the group’s groove metal sound broke nationally in 1990. Pantera was at its peak in 1994 when he took on the moniker “Dimebag” Darrell. After Pantera broke up for all the usual rock ’n’ roll reasons in 2003, Darrell and Vinnie formed a new group called Damageplan.
Damageplan’s first album, New Found Power, was released in February 2004. The band flew to Japan for four nights of shows in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before embarking on a grueling year of concert promotion across the United States. Whereas Pantera in its prime played arenas, the Devastation Across the Nation tour made stops at smaller venues and clubs.
On December 8, 2004, thirty-two dates in and two dates from the end of a tour leg that began in September, and on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, the band arrived at the Alrosa Villa club in Columbus, Ohio. Pantera had played the club in its early days. The venue could hold 600 people; about 250 were in the club, and four warm-up bands had performed by the time Damageplan took the stage at about 10:15 PM. “We were all in a good mood and we had a full house that night and went up on the deck, and right before we went on Dime was warming up his hand and putting his lip gloss on,” Vinnie Paul told Loudwire. “The last thing I ever said to him was ‘Van Halen?’ And he gives me five and says, ‘Van fuckin’ Halen!’ That was our code word for letting it all hang out and having a good time. And that’s the last thing he ever said to me, man. It’s insane.”
The band was a few bars into its opening song when a six-foot-five-inch former US marine named Nathan Gale emerged from behind the seven-and-a-half-foot-high wall of amps and ran across the stage with a Beretta 9 mm handgun. He stopped directly in front of Dimebag Darrell and fired three shots into the guitarist’s head and one through his hand. Darrell fell forward, face-first toward the crowd. His right leg twisted under his body; his guitar screeched feedback. Members of the crew charged the shooter, who kept firing. Nathan Gale killed three other people and injured seven others before grabbing Vinnie Paul’s drum tech, John “Kat” Brooks, in a headlock and taking him hostage.
While most audience members fled, a few dragged Darrell’s body off the stage and a nurse attempted CPR. Gale was backing through the club, holding a gun to Brooks’s head, when police officer James Niggemeyer arrived, alone, less than three minutes after a 911 call. From twenty feet away, he took aim and blasted Gale dead with a single shot to the face from a 12-gauge shotgun. Niggemeyer later told MTV News, “I knew from that distance I could shoot the suspect, as long as I aimed high enough and wouldn’t hurt the hostage. At that point, almost immediately, I fired.”
Gale had thirty-five rounds of ammunition remaining when he was killed. After some witnesses said he shouted, “You broke up Pantera!” before he began shooting, he was initially written off as a disappointed fan. A police investigation, however, determined that the thirty-five-year-old Gale was a schizophrenic who believed members of Pantera were stealing his thoughts.
Dimebag Darrell Abbott was thirty-eight. The song he was playing when he died was titled “Breathing New Life.”
After the death of Dimebag Darrell, the mantle of Dallas–Fort Worth heavy metal guitar hero was passed to Mike Scaccia. Brooklyn born, Scaccia formed the thrash/speed/death metal band Rigor Mortis with a pair of high school pals in 1983. Rigor Mortis became the center of the metroplex heavy metal scene and broke nationally when Capitol Records released the band’s debut album five years later. Scaccia left Rigor Mortis in 1991 to work with Al Jourgensen’s industrial metal band Ministry and its offshoots, Revolting Cocks and Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters. When Rigor Mortis reunited in 2003, Scaccia was again part of the lineup and divided his time between the quartet and Jourgensen’s projects.
On December 22, 2012, Scaccia was onstage with Rigor Mortis at the Rail Club, Fort Worth’s heavy metal mecca. It was a fiftieth birthday party for singer Bruce Corbitt, and Scaccia had the place rocking with lightning riffs and slashing chords from his Les Paul guitar. Shortly after midnight, December 23, the band was charging through its sixth number when Scaccia suddenly collapsed.
The music stopped. An ambulance was called, and Scaccia was taken to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth, where he was pronounced dead at age forty-seven.
It was originally reported that Scaccia had suffered a seizure, possibly caused by the strobe lighting at the venue, but the club owner was quick to absolve his place of any blame. He posted on his Facebook page that the strobe lights had been turned off during the first song, at the request of drummer Harden Harrison.
Rigor Mortis vocalist Corbitt used Facebook to second the story:
Please everyone . . . I know there has been so many rumors and reasons that Mike passed away. This stuff about strobe lights is totally false. I wanted to wait for the official cause of death to be released. But I already knew when it happened. Here is the official word . . . RIP Mike Scaccia.
SUDDEN CARDIAC DEATH Due to: ATHEROSCLEROTIC AND HYPERTENSIVE HEART DISEASE.
The Tarrant County medical examiner confirmed that death was caused by a heart attack brought on by heart disease.
Edmond Turner was one of those diehard rock ’n’ rollers who was able to make the music his life without ever achieving anything close to financial success. A guitarist and composer who friends and fans compared favorably to Jimi Hendrix, he arrived in Nashville from Chicago and was a fixture on the Music City club scene since the 1980s, in bands like the Movement and Blacks on Blondes.
Edmond Turner stood out, and not only because he was a big man, and an African American in the country music capital. “Edmond was a very large man, large enough that many times white men felt intimidated by him and fights would ensue,” Michael Custer, a renowned Nashville rock guitar slinger who played bass in Blacks on Blondes, recalls in a conversation with the authors. “He was a gentle giant, but he was also very brash. There was a word he used: galoot. Edmond was a bit of a galoot. People loved him or hated him. Always, I would say, loved and hated him with equal ferocity.”
Custer is among those who loved Edmond Turner: “He really was a great guitarist. He didn’t like picks, so he played straight with his fingers. I used to like to play with Edmond because he wasn’t afraid of the jam. I would push him musically. I’d take a song in another direction, and he’d follow. It’s hard to describe, but I was able to communicate with him. It’s not easy to find someone like that, and I really haven’t found it since.”
By 2010, “Big Edmond” Turner had a reputation, according to Steve Haruch of the Nashville Scene weekly, as “a hard-living rocker, an infamous mooch and a loyal friend.” Some friends of Edmond were offended by the “mooch” label, but the mention only makes Custer smile. “You can be offended by the truth. Let’s just say there wasn’t a couch Edmond didn’t appreciate. And if you gave him drug money, he’d come back with at least a roach.” Turner had also lost almost all of his belongings in a fire the previous year.
On Saturday night, September 25, 2010, the Blacks on Blondes trio, including Chris Wall on drums, had a gig at the La Hacienda Mexican restaurant in the suburb of Franklin. “We played a pretty good mix of Edmond’s material and cover songs,” Custer remembers. “We did some Zeppelin, some Thin Lizzy; we did some Jimi Hendrix. When we covered a song, if you were listening, you knew we owned it. But I preferred to play Edmond’s originals. The power went out during our first set. They finally got it back on, and we got back onstage.”
Big Edmond had friends at tables in the audience. He stopped on the way to the stage to thank his pal David for giving him a place to live after the fire. He noticed David’s friend Troy and lifted him off the floor in a bear hug. Then he strapped on his Stratocaster and got back to the music with Blacks on Blondes.
“We were on our fourth or fifth song when Edmond invited this girl onstage,” Custer says. “Yes, she was a blonde.” Kalli Nolen would be guest vocalist on Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”:
She wore a rasp-berry beret
The kind you find in a secondhand store . . .
Somewhere in the middle of the song, Turner hit an A chord and stopped playing. Kalli turned to look at him, thinking she’d made a mistake. “Oh, no. You did fine, little sister,” Turner assured her.
Those would be his last words. Edmond Turner suddenly stumbled backward, toward the amps, and slammed into the drum kit before falling back against the wall and onto the stage floor.
“He got caught on the A chord,” says Custer. “I turned around and looked at him and kicked his feet and said, ‘Hey man, get up.’ And then I saw his face. He was smiling. His eyes were open. He wasn’t there, but he was smiling. He was gone.”
Another big man, Turner’s musician buddy Dale Allen, had to pry Turner’s fingers from neck of his Strat so he could start administering CPR. All the while, the sound of Turner’s last chord continued to resonate from his amp, squealing with Hendrixian feedback.
“That A chord was still playing. It was that chord,” says Custer. “We had to turn the sound down on the amp.”
By the time the ambulance arrived, it was definitely too late. “Turner suffered a massive heart attack doing what he loved most,” Nashville Scene reported. “Turner was fifty years old.”
“He played his heart out,” Dale Allen said. “He truthfully did.”
Edmond Turner’s body was cremated, and his friends scattered his ashes along Nashville’s Music Row.
Michael Custer would switch from bass to a Les Paul guitar and, with Chris Wall, carry on with a new band, Creature on a Rock. But the memory of Edmond Turner’s last gig at La Hacienda has never faded.
“He died doing what he loved the most, with people he loved doing it with, in the middle of doing it,” Custer recalls. “And I know when I’m in the middle of a groove and there’s a crowd out there getting into it, that is my heaven. I feel Edmond experienced that heaven in his death, and I can’t think of a better way to go. I don’t want to die in pain, laying in a bed somewhere. If there’s such a thing as a Viking death, in battle, onstage, that was a Viking death. And I think Edmond would like the idea of having a Viking death.
“He lived rock ’n’ roll, and he died rock ’n’ roll. I’m honored I got to play with him on his last song.”
It was another very special event at the celebrated Fox Theatre in Atlanta. The lavish Moorish palace was the place where, in 1976, the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded its album One More from the Road—the one that included the definitive version of the anthem “Free Bird”—and where, on April 14, 2016, Prince gave his last concert.
The show on May 1, 2017, would have none of the tragic implications of those historic occasions. (The Skynyrd album was the band’s last before the 1977 plane crash that took the lives of two band members.) This would be a party, a birthday party for Colonel Bruce Hampton.
Colonel Bruce Hampton was a guitarist and spiritual godfather—no, make that granddaddy, because that’s what they called him—of the American jam-band community. He was described by the New York Times as “the 1970s rock star who wasn’t: a comic, bearish, Dadaist spieler with a deep Georgia accent, a Dali in the body of a Southern wrestler.” That was a pretty apt appraisal of the man born Gustav Berglund III.
Hampton first came to attention in Atlanta in the late 1960s with the Hampton Grease Band, an eclectic, avant-garde bunch that toured with the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band. He went on to form or work with many other groups, including the Aquarium Rescue Unit, the Fiji Mariners, and the Codetalkers. In the early 1990s, he helped launch the H.O.R.D.E. Festival music tours and was credited with helping inspire improvisational jam bands, including Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band, and Phish.
Members of those bands and their fans convened at the Fox Theatre that Monday evening for an all-star concert celebrating Hampton’s seventieth birthday the day before. Hampton 70: A Celebration of Colonel Bruce Hampton featured more than thirty music heavyweights, including Jimmy Herring, Chuck Leavell, Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Oliver Wood, John Popper, Jon Fishman, Mike Woods, and Peter Buck. Hollywood heavyweight Billy Bob Thornton would also bring his musical chops. He’d given Hampton a role in his 1996 film Sling Blade. (Hampton played the tour manager.)
The show kept throwing on more surprises and highlights, with four hours of music and unannounced guest appearances. At the end, many of Hampton’s acolytes joined him for an encore jam on the song “Turn On Your Love Light.”
Hampton growled out the first part of the song, and then, as various stars soloed, he paced the stage theatrically and teased the audience by pretending to make his exit, only to return, to their delight, James Brown–like.
The guitar heroes traded solos. Then it was Brandon “Taz” Niederauer’s turn. He was a fourteen-year-old blues guitar prodigy, and he was whipping out a searing guitar solo when Hampton walked back onstage. The colonel was blown away—as was everyone else in the place—by Taz’s skill, and he dropped to his knees, and then to the stage floor, in front of the young axman. The theater resounded with cheers. It appeared that the showman was really hamming it up.
Taz, though, could tell something wasn’t right. The old man, sprawled with one arm over a speaker, wasn’t moving. Taz continued to play while shooting glances to the adults crammed onstage, looking for help. John Popper of Blues Traveler was unaware. He stood behind Hampton and wailed on his harmonica. The fans danced wildly. Everybody grooved, and the jam went on for several minutes, waiting for the birthday boy to get up.
When he didn’t, somebody checked and realized Colonel Bruce was having some kind of medical emergency. The music came to a clanging halt. The fans stopped dancing and looked to each other in confusion. What happened?
Billy Bob Thornton made the announcement: “We’re going to take care of business backstage here. Thank you so much. We love you so much. Thanks for honoring Bruce Hampton on his seventieth.”
The stage was cleared. The curtains were drawn. An ambulance arrived to take Colonel Bruce away to Emory University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. A statement issued by former Allman Brothers guitarist Haynes confirmed that “after collapsing on stage surrounded by his friends, family, fans and the people he loved, Col. Bruce Hampton has passed away.”
Former bandmate Jeff Mosier posted a tearful video on Facebook in which he said, “Bruce looked like he was jokingly worshipping that young guitar player. And he got down on his knees and I was getting ready to do the same thing. . . . I’ve dreaded this day for years, but could have never imagined a more joyful departure.”
Leavell, who played keyboards with the Allman Brothers Band and toured with the Rolling Stones, observed that Colonel Bruce Hampton died doing what he loved: “A poetic exit. I’m sure if he had written the script himself, that would’ve been the last page of the last chapter.”
What better place for a wild, extreme, heavy metal drummer to beat his last skin than in a cozy jazz club? The club was the Baked Potato, a cool little spot in Studio City, California, just down the street from Universal Studios. The jazz promised to be a little less cool and a lot more explosive on May 21, 2016, when a trio of heavy metal legends took over the Baked Potato’s small stage.
OHM was a progressive jazz rock fusion group led by guitarist Chris Poland, who twenty years earlier was headbanging with thrash metal band Megadeth. Bassist Robertino Pagliari had held the bottom for metalists Divine Rite. Between them, wielding sticks behind an extravagant orange drum kit that took up most of the stage, was the heaviest metal legend of the group. Nick Menza had joined Megadeth in 1989, two years after Poland’s departure. He pounded the beats on Megadeth’s most successful albums, including Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction, and was with the band for eight years, until he was sidelined by a benign tumor on his knee and ultimately given the boot.
Promotion of his subsequent solo album, Life After Deth, hit a speed bump in 2003 when guitarist Ty Longley set out on tour with the reformed Great White—and was killed in the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island. A year later, Menza’s bassist Jason Levin died of heart failure.
Menza had his own close calls. In 2007, he almost lost an arm in a gruesome run-in with a rusty power saw. He recovered and auctioned off the bloody saw blade and X-ray to a lucky fan. When he joined OHM in 2015, he was the sixth sticksman to occupy the throne, replacing David Eagle, who died that August after a heart attack and open heart surgery. (Menza was the seventh drummer if you count Gar Samuelson, who was to be the third piece in the original lineup when he died of liver failure at forty-one.) With enough death and mayhem in his past to fill a book, Menza decided to do just that: he was planning to fly to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after the Baked Potato gig to finish a comic book version of his autobiography, Menza-Life (ultimately released as Megalife).
While some fans thought it strange that the power drummer wound up playing in a tasteful jazz club, the music of OHM was not a far cry from the jazz that Menza’s German-born father Don Menza played in his years blowing tenor sax in the Tonight Show band. Though the Baked Potato had been a jamming room for many Tonight Show musicians before the show was moved back to New York City in 2014, it also made room for outfits like OHM that played a fiery, precise, Jeff Beckian jazz rock, full of blazing solos and tricky time signatures.
On the night of May 21, Chris Poland recalled, Nick Menza played with an intensity “like I’d never heard before. It’s not the volume intensity; it’s just how intense he was playing it,” he said on the podcast As the Story Grows. “He had a fire under his butt. It was the best I’ve ever heard him play drums.
“We get to the end of the first song, and I look at him like, ‘What is going on with you?’ He just laughed. We get to the end of the second song, and I’m sweaty already. Normally I’m not sweating until the fourth song. I got sweat dripping off my nose, and he’s still laughing. We get to the end of the third song, which I think was ‘Peanut Buddha,’ and . . . my guitar, where the right arm is hitting the body, is all wet. I’m drying myself off, and he goes, ‘Dude, are you OK?’ I go, ‘No, I’m good.’
“He tightened his high hat, and he sat his hands down on his lap, and then he just leaned over into the monitor. I thought he was fucking with me. He’s still there, and I said, ‘Hey, man, let’s go.’ I thought, ‘Of course he’s messing with me.’ I said, ‘Nick, come on, man.’ I look over, and his eyes are open. That’s when I knew that something had happened. I couldn’t believe it.”
The problem looked at first to be a seizure. Two patrons rushed to the stage and began CPR until EMS arrived. The paramedics worked on the drummer for more than twenty-five minutes. They gave him shots of adrenaline, three shocks, and nonstop chest compressions.
None did any good. Nick Menza was gone at the Baked Potato and pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He was fifty-one. The Los Angeles County Coroner would rule that Menza died of natural causes: a heart attack as a result of hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. In the days to follow, his manager Robert Bolger said that friends and family took some comfort knowing that on several occasions Nick Menza said that when he died he wanted to do so onstage.
After the Station fire, you might think rock ’n’ rollers and the nightclub owners who book them would have learned their lesson. The Station was a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. On February 20, 2003, 452 people entered through the front door for a show by Jack Russell’s Great White, a quintet fronted by the former lead singer of the 1980s hair band Great White. Four hundred and fifty-two heads is not a turnout a former MTV star would usually crow about, but the number included fifty-eight more heads and bodies than the fire regulations allowed. The joint was packed.
The band was only moments into the show when its tour manager lit the pyrotechnics: three gerbs, thick cylindrical tubes that set off a fifteen-second spray of sparks. The sparks shot out, high over the heads of the band members, toward the walls and ceilings. As soon as the spray subsided, it was clear there were flames on the ceiling and the walls on either side of the stage, burning through the polyurethane foam acoustical padding. Within minutes, the club was engulfed in fire and thick, choking black smoke.
Almost everyone ran toward the same front door they’d entered. In the words of firefighter Fred Bricker of the Coventry Fire Department, “You could see people laying at the door, stacked up like a cord of wood, arms hanging over the pile.”
A hundred people died, including Ty Longley, the thirty-one-year-old guitarist for Jack Russell’s Great White. As the fire spread, Longley reportedly had run from the stage and used his guitar to smash out windows, allowing at least three other people to escape. He was the only band casualty. (Despite the black cloud that still hovers over the Great White brand, Jack Russell continued to tour into 2019 with a new lineup of Jack Russell’s Great White.)
In the wake of the worldwide outrage over the Station nightclub fire, it would seem obvious that no one in his right mind would ever use flames or spark-shooting pyrotechnics in a crowded, indoor, low-ceiling venue. Not quite. In the years following the Station nightclub fire, there have been a number of similar tragedies that have claimed the lives of hundreds of music fans. One of the horrors stands out, for reasons that will become obvious.
The free concert at the Club Colectiv in Bucharest, Romania, on October 30, 2015, was a homecoming and celebration. The metalcore band Goodbye to Gravity was back home after conquering Europe, celebrating the release that very day of its second album.
The five heavy metalists had first joined forces in 2010, when singer Andrei Gălut, winner of Prima TV’s Megastar competition series (Romania’s version of American Idol), pulled together a backing band by plucking members of the popular Bucharest metal group Thunderstorm. The self-titled album Goodbye to Gravity, their first, was well received by hardcore metal fans. In its review, the German website Metal proclaimed that “every note played and every note sung . . . clearly demonstrates why Goodbye to Gravity can effortlessly play in the upper league.” Tours across Europe followed, and there were music festivals in Germany, Portugal, and Italy.
In 2015, the band got down to recording its second album. Mantras of War was released on October 30, and that was the reason four hundred fans jammed into the Club Colectiv, a venue in the basement of a building that was a factory during the Communist era.
The band took the stage and led off with the first song from the new album. It was a blast of fast tempos, precision riffing, and growling, razor-gargling vocals. Lights flashed and pyrotechnic gerbs attached to metal trusses at the sides of the stage spewed a vomit of sparks toward the crowd and ceiling.
That burst of hazardous theatricality went off without a hitch. At about 11:00 PM, when Goodbye to Gravity was in the middle of its set, the firework candles belched out another spray of hot sparks. This time, some sparks caught on the polystyrene foam soundproofing wrapped around a pillar that supported the club’s ceiling.
Delia Tugui, a Spanish teacher who was in the audience, described on her Facebook page what happened after the sparks turned to flames: “The lead singer made a quick joke: ‘This wasn’t part of the program.’ The next second, he realized it wasn’t a joke and asked for a fire extinguisher. In 30 seconds . . . the fire spread all over the ceiling.”
The flames whipped through the club, and toxic smoke filled the space. The fans stampeded toward the exit—the one door, the only exit. It was too narrow for everyone to fit through at once. People climbed on top of each other, over each other, in an attempt to escape.
Sixty-four people died inside the Club Colectiv that night. Another 173 were injured. It was another terrible rock ’n’ roll tragedy, but one with an important distinction that separated it from others, including the Station nightclub fire. Here, the victims included multiple members of the band, who died onstage.
Guitarists Vlad Telea and Mihai Alexandru fell dead where they played. Bassist Alex Pascu and drummer Bogdan Enache (known to fans as Bogdan Lavinius) were carried offstage but died in the hospital.
Goodbye to Gravity’s sole survivor was its lead singer, Andrei Gălut. He did not escape unscathed—far from it. He was seriously injured, with burns over forty-five percent of his body, and internal damage from inhaling the toxic smoke. He’d spend more than a year of treatment in hospitals and clinics in the Netherlands and Germany.
When he finally made it home in February 2017, Gălut announced that he wanted to resume his career and rebuild Goodbye to Gravity. Close to two years later, he was still struggling to recover.
There is one footnote to the story, a detail that may have been overlooked. The first song on the album that was released on that fateful day, and the song that opened Goodbye to Gravity’s final show that evening, was entitled “The Day We Die.”
It was water not fire on December 22, 2018, when three of four members of the Indonesian pop group Seventeen died in the middle of a show. The band was playing an outdoor concert before a large crowd at the Tanjung Lesung beach resort in Java when their stage was swept away by a giant, unexpected tsunami. As was the case with Goodbye to Gravity, the band’s lead singer survived.
Dianna Theadora Kenny, professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney, conducted a study in 2015 on the connection between musical genre and the life expectancy of musicians. She found that the leading cause of death among rap and hip-hop artists is homicide. (Cancer and heart ailments are the main causes of death among blues, jazz, country, gospel, R&B, folk, pop, and world electronic musicians—and even rock musicians. Punk and heavy metal? Accidents. Go figure.)
Despite Professor Kenny’s conclusions, the chances of a rap artist dying onstage, be it by violence or natural causes, are far less than for artists of other musical genres. In fact, a rapper stepping onto a stage in a smoke-filled warehouse without metal detectors at the door and an audience full of warring gang members has less of a chance of going belly up than he would if he stepped up onto a podium in an orchestra pit.
That makes the case of Jax the Axehandler, of Atlanta’s indie hip-hop crew Binkis Recs, all the more intriguing. “Binkis Recs was created due to the lack of creative and honest hip-hop music”—so claimed the mission statement from the trio of rappers consisting of Killa Kalm, Flux da Wondabat, and Jax. The group emerged during the city’s indie-rap renaissance of the late 1990s and helped launch the career of DJ Drama, who provided their backup beats before breaking out nationally with his Gangsta Grillz mixtape series and album. In the decade to follow, Binkis Recs were considered legends on Atlanta’s underground hip-hop scene, acclaimed for their thick beats, flash rhymes, and old-school authenticity.
The magic was on display on Monday night, November 3, 2008, at Lenny’s Bar, a strip-mall dive known as “the CBGB of Atlanta.” A few minutes after midnight, November 4, Jax was onstage, spitting out the lyrics of his signature rap:
I grew up in Queens, been saggin’ my jeans!
People always wanna know just what Binkis means.
“Before Ignorant Niggas Killed Intelligent Songs.”
But hold on, it won’t be that for long . . .
Jax raised a hand. “Hold up, hold up, hold—” Midlyric, he dropped more than the mic, collapsing in a saggy-jeaned heap to the floor. Folks at Lenny’s got him to a hospital as quickly as they could that Tuesday morning, but Jax was dead.
What killed him? An assassin’s bullet shot from a rival crew? Was he caught in an early morning robbery? A drive-by? Was it simply a case of senseless rap violence? The Fulton County Medical Examiner made the announcement the following day: Jax, born Christopher Charles Thurston, died of “natural causes due to hypertension.” He was thirty-two.
It’s long been accepted that the first rock ’n’ roll star to die onstage via electrocution was Les Harvey, lead guitarist for the Scottish rock band Stone the Crows. The date was May 3, 1972. There were twelve hundred people in the Top Rank ballroom in damp Swansea, Wales. Harvey was onstage, tuning his black Gibson Les Paul, when he grabbed a microphone and was zapped into membership in the “27 Club”—the least famous among the group of pop stars who died at age twenty-seven but the only one, so far, to have died onstage. Whether he was standing in a puddle from the rains outside or had damp hands because he’d just quaffed a beer when he handled the improperly grounded mic is still subject to debate.
The actual “honors,” however, go to British musician and producer Nick Lowe, who was shocked to death onstage in London three years earlier, on July 6, 1969. That was the night his band Brinsley Schwarz opened for Yes at the Marquee Club in Soho, the night after the Rolling Stones had played a free concert in Hyde Park in memory of their recently fired guitarist Brian Jones, who’d drowned in his swimming pool two days earlier.
“Anyway, the P.A. had been in the shop, and they’d somehow connected up the plugs the wrong way,” Lowe told Musician magazine editor Vic Garbarini years later. He continued:
We finished the number “Chest Fever,” and the place went wild. I went up to the mike to say something, and I had one hand on the guitar and one hand on the mike, and I got this violent electric shock, but it was one of those where you can’t let go! And I was literally flung about eight feet across the stage and went crashing into the back of those amps. I remember lying on the stage, unable to let go, shaking like a doll . . . but my mind was very clear, and it was like this person was talking to me, saying, “God, you’ve got a nasty electric shock here, Basher. . . . I’m afraid you’re going to die any second now.” . . .
Meanwhile, there were people screaming and fainting and leaping up and down. The thing is, they couldn’t turn the power off because those huge stacks of Marshalls were blocking the way to the power point. I was lying with the mike across my chest and the bass in my hand, jerking like a puppet, and no one would grab them or touch me because of the current. So [keyboard player] Bob Andrews ran up and tried to kick the thing out of my hand, to break the circuit. But in doing so, he kicked me really hard in the ribs . . . which doctors later told me got my heart going again!
Lowe was taken to Middlesex Hospital with severely burned hands but “was so grooving on being alive” that he sneaked out and walked to the pub across the street from the Marquee, where his bandmates were “hideously drunk.”
“I walked in and they freaked, ’cause they really thought I’d died,” he said. In fact, Nick Lowe had died at twenty and been brought back to life. The boys all went back to the Marquee to play the second set.