We have two ways of memorializing rock stars who die young: compilation discs and conspiracy theories. Neither method, however, provides an adequate answer as to why so many of them expire in their twenty-seventh year on the planet. Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison—all dead at twenty-seven. And that’s just the A team; other rockers who made it through just one score and seven include Chris Bell of Big Star, D. Boon of the Minutemen, and Pigpen of the Grateful Dead. That’s old enough to have left their mark, yet young enough that we can always argue about whether they would have been able to outdo themselves if they had lived.
I heard that in college, some friends of James Taylor’s flew his girlfriend in as a surprise, but her plane crashed—which is what “Fire and Rain” is based on. Any truth to that story?
Only a little. “Fire and Rain” was inspired by the death of a female friend of Taylor’s, Susie Schnerr. But Taylor never went to college, Schnerr wasn’t a romantic interest, and tragically, Schnerr committed suicide. Taylor’s friends didn’t tell him she had died until six months later because they didn’t want to rattle him while he was recording Sweet Baby James —hence the song’s line “They let me know you were gone.” Taylor wrote the first verse of “Fire and Rain” in his basement apartment in London, the second verse in a New York City hospital where he was hospitalized because of his heroin addiction, and the third verse in a Massachusetts psychiatric clinic.
My roommate told me that Jeff Porcaro, drummer for Toto, actually died in a “tragic gardening accident,” à la Spinal Tap. Can that be true?
Porcaro—who was also a top studio drummer, with such credits as Steely Dan, Michael Jackson, and Bruce Springsteen on his résumé—keeled over suddenly on August 5, 1992, when he was just thirty-eight years old. The initial report from Toto’s record label was that Porcaro had expired because of an allergic reaction to pesticide while spraying his garden—which, bizarrely, would indeed qualify as a tragic gardening accident. A month later, however, the coroner’s report revealed that there was no pesticide in his bloodstream. The cause was actually a heart attack due to hardened arteries from his extensive use of cocaine. This, of course, provokes further questions: What sick minds cooked up a Spinal Tap alibi for Porcaro’s death? And why didn’t they claim instead that he had spontaneously combusted or choked on somebody else’s vomit? I grilled a source close to the band. He requested anonymity but insisted that the initial report wasn’t a coverup of a drug binge, just a mistaken conclusion reached when Porcaro abruptly died in his garden.
I heard that the former bassist of Iron Butterfly was an innovative scientist who was killed after finding out in his research that objects could go faster than light. Is this true? It seems pretty bizarre.
Philip “Taylor” Kramer, born in 1952, joined an Iron Butterfly reunion in 1974 and recorded two forgotten albums with the band (whose “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” heyday was some years behind them by then). When the group broke up again in 1977, he got an engineering degree, worked on the MX missile, and later specialized in video compression.
In early 1995, Kramer said that he had developed a formula for instantaneous transmission of matter, exciting anyone who ever wanted a Star Trek transporter. You might want to consider his claim with some skepticism, though; around the same time, he also said that the earth was about to be consumed by a supernova and that his wife was actually Mother Earth. On February 12, Kramer called 9-1-1 from Los Angeles International Airport, told the operator he was going to kill himself and that “O.J. is innocent,” and then vanished. His disappearance fueled talk of foul play or alien abduction—until 1999, when hikers found Kramer’s body at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot ravine in Malibu, California. The evidence suggests that Kramer had become mentally unbalanced and, tragically, had made good on his threats of suicide.
Did one of the Temptations die in a crackhouse?
No—he overdosed at the crackhouse, but died in the hospital. On June 1, 1991, three weeks after a Temptations reunion tour, lead singer David Ruffin reportedly smoked ten vials of crack and passed out. A limousine dropped him off at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; the driver identified his passenger and drove away without giving his own name. An hour later, Ruffin expired. He had been wearing a money belt containing $40,000, which was stolen sometime during the night of his death and never recovered. Since Ruffin died broke, Michael Jackson paid for his funeral.
Before Ty Longley of Great White, did any rock stars die onstage?
Yes, although this is not as great an occupational hazard for musicians as drugs or traveling in small airplanes. Among the notables who had fatal heart attacks in front of live crowds: blues legend Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Country Dick Montana of the Beat Farmers, novelty artist Tiny Tim, British skinhead ska star Judge Dread, and Mark Sandman of Morphine. (Some people think soul legend Jackie Wilson died onstage after his heart attack. In fact, he survived for eight more years, although he spent them in a coma.) In addition, Les Harvey, guitarist for the Scottish soul band Stone the Crows, was electrocuted onstage in 1972. But punk rocker G. G. Allin, who spent most of his career threatening to commit suicide onstage, actually died in a New York City apartment of a heroin overdose.
Did the Yardbirds’ Keith Relf really get electrocuted onstage by an electric guitar?
No, it was in the privacy of his own home. Relf was the singer of the Yardbirds for six years while an array of star guitarists (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page) rotated through the ranks. When he died on May 14, 1976, it was widely reported that he had been playing electric guitar in the bathtub and electrocuted himself. (Other places it’s unwise to play an electric guitar: on a tall building during a thunderstorm, in front of an oncoming freight train, at the Newport Folk Festival.) In fact, his family says, Relf was not in the tub; apparently he was playing guitar in the basement when the tragic combination of malfunctioning equipment, an exposed pipe, and electric current killed him at age thirty-three.
I got interested in Donny Hathaway after I heard Ruben Studdard was a big fan, and I was wondering: Did he commit suicide?
Hathaway was a soul singer/songwriter best known for his duets with Roberta Flack; their hit cover of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” led them to do two whole albums together. Tragically, on January 13, 1979, Hathaway fell to his death from the fifteenth floor of the Essex House Hotel. There was no note, meaning nobody will ever know for sure what thoughts were going through Hathaway’s head, but he had been hospitalized for depression. The coroner ruled his death a suicide. Jesse Jackson delivered the eulogy at Hathaway’s funeral and, noting that Hathaway had been dressed for the New York winter in a coat and scarf, contended that no one gets bundled up “just to jump out of a window.” Further evidence suggesting the fall was accidental: Hathaway had been cheerful earlier the same day, while in the studio with Flack. Furthermore, he was in the habit of leaning out the window of his seventeenth-floor apartment in Chicago, preaching and singing to passersby on the street below. Since he had been tossed out of other hotels for the same habit, it seems possible that it was a repeat of that dangerous behavior that led to his untimely plummet.
Did Johnny Ace really shoot himself?
Ace, famous for his smooth baritone and the single “Pledging My Love,” was a popular ballad singer in the early ’50s, and routinely jammed on piano with B. B. King. On Christmas Day 1954, he died of a gunshot wound backstage at Houston’s City Auditorium between sets of a show with Big Mama Thornton. The coroner’s verdict was Russian roulette, but some people speculate that Ace was shot by Don Robey, owner of Duke Records, in an effort to end contract renegotiations. (Robey was a music-world thug who was known for pulling guns during business transactions.) The more likely story, corroborated by several eyewitnesses, is that although Ace wasn’t playing Russian roulette, he was horsing around with his own gun and accidentally shot himself— or, as a Houston homicide detective on the scene that night put it, he died of “pistolitis.”
Did Keith Moon and Mama Cass really die in the same apartment?
Bizarrely, yes; both died in a flat in London’s Mayfair district owned by their mutual friend, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. Since Nilsson was only in London half the year, he would loan the apartment to pals while he was out of town. “It was just a typical London flat,” Nilsson said, “but it was in a great neighborhood. It was across from the Playboy Club, diagonally. From one balcony you could read the time from Big Ben, and from the other balcony you could watch the Bunnies go up and down.”
“Mama” Cass Elliot, best known as one of the Mamas and the Papas, was in town for a live performance when she died on July 29, 1974. Although it was widely reported that she choked on a ham sandwich, the autopsy revealed that she actually died of a heart attack. Her cardiac condition may have been exacerbated by an extreme yo-yo diet, where she would alternate weeklong fasts with massive weight gain.
Four years later, Keith Moon, the Who drummer legendary for his excess, was borrowing the apartment from Nilsson. On September 6, 1978, he attended a screening of the movie The Buddy Holly Story, hosted by Paul McCartney. At 4:30 A.M., he came home and swallowed a handful of Heminevrin sleeping pills while watching the Vincent Price horror movie The Abominable Dr. Phibes. A few hours later he woke up, cooked himself a steak, and swallowed it down, along with some champagne and more pills. He then passed out again, dying sometime that day of an accidental overdose. The autopsy revealed he had taken thirty-two Heminevrin pills. Understandably spooked, Nilsson never returned to his apartment; Pete Townshend, who had been renting it from him on Moon’s behalf, bought it from him so he wouldn’t ever have to see it again. In 2002, when Townshend was asked what he would say to Keith Moon in the afterlife, his joking answer was, “You owe me five thousand pounds back rent.”