http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jlks/pike/DeathRR.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)by Jeff Pike (hypertext by Jordan Schwartz (jlks@u.washington.edu) and Jeff Pike)
"Rock'n'roll is here to stay," Danny Rapp sang with his sock-hop band, the Juniors, in 1959. "It will never die." In the midst of payola scandals and other serious troubles of the year -- including the sudden deaths in an airplane crash of the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens -- Danny Rapp wanted to offer something like a call to arms, an anthem for a generation. What he came up with, however, was more a statement of pure puppy-dog faith, a product of its high-school ponytail times marked as much by innocence as by ardor.
But twenty-four years later, in 1983, the innocence was gone, and so was the ardor. Danny Rapp locked himself in a motel room in Arizona and put a gun to his head. And the beat went on. Irony rarely comes so painfully rich. There's hardly a point in discussing the death of Danny Rapp, it's so obvious. Rock'n'roll had claimed another one, and made a truth so striking it's a cliche just that much more evident. Along with sex, drugs, and haircuts, death has set the tone for rock'n'roll since its earliest days. As much as anything, it's what ties
Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols to Slayer.And here it comes again: If it's likely that rock'n'roll will continue to live on, itself an arguable point, it's guaranteed that its adherents will not. Many will die young and, sad to say, under ludicrous circumstances: victims of drug and alcohol abuse, auto and plane accidents, severe depression, and from causes we can't even imagine. Certainly it's a long-standing tradition by now. Bluesman Robert Johnson and country singer Hank Williams, perhaps the two most influential figures in everything rock'n'roll was to become, never even saw the age of thirty, and both died years before Bill Haley had ever urged anyone to rock around a clock. (The lights went out for Bill Haley in 1981, by the way: heart attack.)
And, oh yes, there is Elvis Presley, too, who certainly put the finishing touches to what Johnson and Williams started, arriving as the Son to complete a kind of holy trinity between them. If Elvis inherited rock'n'roll, and he did, he inaugurated practically everything that came in its wake. Without Elvis, there could never have been a Bryan Ferry or a Prince, let alone a John Lennon or a Bruce Springsteen. And if Elvis did make it past thirty, he still died early -- in the process turning the age of forty-two into nearly as much of a mythical cultural hurdle as thirty-three.
One wonders what in hell is going on here. Is there something about the trappings of rock'n'roll -- the drugs and alcohol, the obsessions of the fans, the life on the road -- that is inherently fatal or dangerous? Or is it that those people attracted to rock'n'roll already have a lifeline that peters out approximately at their middle finger, and are destined for early death no matter what their career choice?
Well, yes and yes. After nearly half a century of rock'n'roll there is a feast of deaths to sort through -- one for every occasion, and a few for some occasions we didn't know existed. If models, politicians, film celebrities, wrestlers, and even race-car drivers and stunt pilots are liable to the same dangers and mortifying death rates as rock'n'roll stars, and that's a big if, their contexts have never provided the same sort of thrilling shout at the devil, that chilling gesture of challenge not just to physical limitations, but to metaphysical limitations as well.
Face it. There just is no escaping the death of rock'n'roll. What else can we possibly do but catalog this litany of disaster, the better to gape at it in wonder?
Speaking of Robert Johnson, it's long been speculated, and taken quite seriously, that Johnson struck a bargain with Satan at about the time Franklin Roosevelt was ousting Herbert Hoover for the U.S. presidency. Presumably, in exchange for his enormous talent, Johnson traded away his immortal soul. In one way, a very weird one, that explains his abrupt, overpowering appearance as a giant of the blues, the unearthly authority of his music, and the quaking terror at its heart. But he died so young, and left relatively so little -- just a few dozen tunes. You'd think he could have at least, like Jerry Lee Lewis, seen the terms out to the end, or, like Mick Jagger, hired a good celestial attorney to find a loophole and renege the deal altogether.
Still, the point remains. Dedicating one's life to rock'n'roll has always involved an essentially religious decision, and has led to lives full of ritual and mystery. So many thank God on their album sleeves, and so many are accused of worshipping Satan. Alice Cooper got his stage name from a ouija board, Bob Dylan is deathly afraid he will burn in hell, the Grateful Dead play the Egyptian pyramids, Deicide dunks itself in pigs' blood, Little Richard is ordained as a minister in the Seventh Day Adventist church, Sinead O'Connor creates waves of scandal by tearing a photo of the Pope in half on live television.
Since its earliest days rock'n'roll has been shot through with intimations of death and visions of the great beyond -- and many times a lot more than just shot through. If you don't want to start with Robert Johnson, consider Hank Williams's "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," a hit in 1952 shortly before his death. If that won't do, try Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train." Or Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You." Or Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire."
That weird, obsessive fascination with death and supernatural power in rock'n'roll runs along under the surface, yet traces through pretty easily, until about 1968 -- at which point it breaks wide open. What had once been darkly hinted, not least because of powerful taboos, suddenly became a focal point and chief feature, or at least prevailing image, of whole groups and careers: the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground, and countless more.
By 1971, the Buoys could have a novelty hit about cannibalism, while Bloodrock (and note that name) could have a hit that was anything but a novelty, "D.O.A.," about a grisly accident. A few years later the Sex Pistols turned genuine self-mutilation (borrowed from Iggy Pop) into viable shtick and fashion statement. By 1981, the death obsessions of such figures as Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who hanged himself, had come to be seen as romantic. By 1991, death metal act Gwar was enacting scenes of gore on stage, with blood spewing from the gaping wounds left behind by arms and heads lopped off with single mighty blows.
Goodness -- what is the meaning of all this? Are we faced with a chicken-and-egg dilemma? Are rock'n'roll musicians obsessed with death because they've witnessed so much carnage in what is supposed to be an entertainment industry? Or is it death-obsessed people who are attracted to rock'n'roll in the first place?
As the millennium approaches, let us consider the meanings of the death of rock'n'roll together.
As for the death of rock'n'roll itself, that has happened a few times now -- once in about 1959, around the time of Buddy Holly's plane accident; again in about 1970, as part of the post-Woodstock morass that included Altamont and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison; and again in about 1977, and this time for real, when the Sex Pistols and punk-rock not only declared it over, but effectively destroyed it.
To one extent or another, of course, the first two deaths of rock'n'roll were something of staged media events, with a good deal of public hand-wringing in print -- much, in fact, as this book itself is intended to be. The end of rock'n'roll makes a good, dramatic story, and, incidentally, has served the interests of the industry as well. At the time of the first death of rock'n'roll, it was an opportunity to sanitize what had come to be seen as a dangerous youth activity that, with government agencies beginning to take action, clearly threatened sales. At the time of the second death, it was an opportunity to shift the focus from songs on AM-radio to album tracks on FM-radio, thus opening up the market permanently for the more lucrative LP format.
The last death of rock'n'roll, of course, which happened almost silently -- inevitably raising questions of trees crashing to the ground in uninhabited forests -- is a different case. There was nothing for the industry to gain by it, so they ignored it. Punk-rock was a non-event, a false alarm, a meaningless blip. In the year that the Sex Pistols went international, 1977, Fleetwood Mac and Debby Boone blew out the top of the charts, single and album, and the year finished with the release of Saturday Night Fever. How do you read that? Does it really add up to rock'n'roll being more vital than ever?
Consider what critic Rick Shefchik, writing in the Village Voice in 1988, had to say: "Although I don't really remember what it was like when the Dorseys and the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Benny Goodman and even Duke Ellington and Count Basie were passing from mass popularity, I feel as though we're entering a similar phase of pop culture. Rock and rollers have proven they can get old and still make good music, but so did the big band leaders. I hear rock and roll being refined, expanded, colorized and in some cases even improved, but it ceased being invented a long time ago. The pros have taken over, the scene is as mainstream as the big bands ever were, and it will wither and die just as inevitably. I no longer wait for the Next Big Thing as though I could possibly have any hand in discovering it; my three-year-old daughter will tell me what it is when she discovers it."
Here's hoping she tells us all. Meanwhile, let me tell you a little about the Last Big Thing.
This book is organized into four sections that co-exist in space and time like all good things: chapters that alphabetize and list dead rock stars linked by the type of music they made (which itself is set in rough chronological order), noting their influence and impact in condensed biographies; chapters that discuss themes of death raised by various figures in rock'n'roll; three chapters that examine the great falls of rock'n'roll, followed by chapters listing the great fallen heroes associated with those eras; and snapshot lists that provide a cross-referenced overview of who died and how -- whether by cancer, at the age of thirty-three, in a tawdry, untidy fashion, or on December 8.
Please, don't anyone reading this kill yourself.
- Seattle, 1993