May 25, 1996 – Bradley James Nowell was born February 22, 1968 and was the founding frontman/guitarist of the ska rock group Sublime. He tragically did not live to see the success of the band’s best-known album, Sublime, having overdosed on heroin in 1996 before it was released.
He truly could have become a legend.
The story of Sublime is full of sad, strange twists, but this is perhaps the strangest: Since frontman Brad Nowell overdosed before his band became a phenomenon, before he had a chance to become a bona fide rock star, his death has been oddly free of the mythic impact of so many rock star flameouts.
Sublime’s success has come as a slow-building surprise, rather than in a rush of mourning, and it’s been based on the sweet funk Nowell cooked up during his too-short 28-year love affair with punk, hip-hop, reggae and whatever other music he could lay his hands on. Bradley Nowell died on May 25, 1996, in a San Francisco hotel room, after shooting up some heroin that was much more potent than the brown Mexican tar he was used to. His death came seven days after his wedding to Troy den Denkker, who’d given birth to their son, Jakob, 11 months earlier; it was two months before the release of Sublime, the album that would make his band famous. The heroin death of the Smashing Pumpkins’ touring keyboard player, Jonathon Melvoin, got more attention in the press. In fact, plenty of Sublime fans don’t even know that Nowell is gone. “We still get lots of letters for him,” says Brad’s father, Jim, who handles his son’s estate. “I have a boxful of them in my office.”
At least a boxful. By April 1997, a little less than a year after Nowell’s OD, Sublime had entered Billboard‘s Top 20, and the album’s first single, the breezily grooving, mostly acoustic hip-hop toaster “What I Got,” went to No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart. And that was only the beginning. Throughout 1997, Sublime produced hit after hit, and the album has sold more than 2 million copies to date. The follow-up to “What I Got” was the reggae-tinged ballad “Santeria”; then came the shuffling ska of “Wrong Way” and the dance-hall-flavored “Doin’ Time,” which Nowell constructed around the melody of the Gershwin standard “Summertime.”
Eighteen months after Nowell’s death, Sublime sold about 40,000 records every week; in November, MCA released Second-Hand Smoke, a collection of early songs, unissued material, remixes and alternate takes. Sublime’s surviving members recently inked a deal to release at least three more albums of archival material over the next few years. Incredibly, the band that was no longer a band became perhaps the biggest American rock act of 1997.
These are a few of the things Brad Nowell loved: surfing; eating; drugs; his dog, Louie; his son, Jakob; his wife, Troy; and music – maybe music most of all. He grew up gifted and musically inclined: His mother was a singer with perfect pitch, and his father liked to strum folk songs on the guitar. At Christmas, the acoustic guitars would come out and Brad would spend hours playing and singing with his father, grandfather and uncle. He devoured sounds, and could pick out a tune on the guitar after hearing it once. By the time he was 13, he’d started his own band, Hogan’s Heroes.
Nowell was 10 when his parents split up. He lived with his mom, Nancy, for four years before moving back to his dad’s house in Long Beach, Calif., in 1981. He was a smart kid who got good grades and had the brains to make his younger sister, Kellie, do his homework whenever he didn’t want to. “He was probably twice as intelligent as I am,” she says, “but he just wasn’t real school-minded.” Guidance counselors had a name for what was wrong with kids like Brad who failed to live up to their obvious potential – attention-deficit disorder – and a drug for it, too: Ritalin.
Unlike the wealthier, whiter suburbs of Orange County, where Brad’s mom lived, Long Beach is a funky old port town of 450,000, with affluent bayside communities – Belmont Shore and Naples – and Latino, African-American and Southeast Asian neighborhoods farther inland. With cheaper rents than Hollywood and lots of available space, Long Beach had a thriving art underground in the ’80s, as well as a music scene in which punk, surf and hip-hop cultures clashed and blended freely.
Nowell was a master at melding these sounds into something new. From Sublime’s earliest recordings, his combination of ska, dub, punk, funk, rap, reggae and heavy metal seemed less like a synthesis than a natural byproduct of Long Beach’s youth culture. Though there were few local clubs to play, house parties could bring a couple hundred bucks every weekend – enough to buy all the beer, pot and gasoline the band needed. In 1990, one semester before graduating from California State University Long Beach with a degree in finance, Nowell dropped out to devote all his time to the band. By then, Sublime were well-known up and down the coast; from San Diego to Santa Barbara, beach towns were their turf.
In photographs from this period, Nowell looks like the prototypical SoCal surf rat: sun-bleached hair, wraparound shades and Hawaiian shirts. With his round face and easy smile, the cherubic singer gave off an air of bemused calm. But behind the mellow exterior, Nowell was troubled. “There was always a part of him that wasn’t satisfied,” says his widow, Troy Nowell. Sitting on the patio of Nowell’s dad’s house, overlooking the calm waters of Alamitos Bay, she recalls her three-year life with Brad. “As happy as he was 80 percent of the time, there was 20 percent that could not be made happy, and it ate him up.”
Nowell battled with his addiction for most of the time Troy knew him, kicking when his record deal with MCA was in the offing, in 1994, and again when Troy got pregnant a year later. But friends say he could never be comfortable without the drug. Troy blames the Ritalin he was given as a child for having created his craving for drugs, but she blames something else as well: “He wanted to be a rock star. He said it was very rock & roll, you know. Perry Farrell and Kurt Cobain and all those guys did drugs, and Brad wanted to see what it was like. Then they honestly begin to think that they write better music! I mean, Robbin’ the Hood [Sublime’s second album] was written when Brad was at his worst of being strung out. It’s a great album, but it’s all about his heroin abuse: ‘Now I’ve got the needle/I can shake but I can’t breathe/Take it away and I want more, more/One day I’m gonna lose the war.’ ”
Sublime were a party band. They played house parties, beach parties, frat parties; and if there wasn’t a party, they brought one with them. They were, people will tell you, lovable, but they were also, the same people will attest, out of control. They loved to get fucked up, they loved to fuck things up, and they had many ways of doing it. Sometimes Nowell hocked the band’s instruments before a gig in order to pay for his habit. Other times, the band would party too much on the day of a major gig and squander a golden opportunity. For instance: June 17, 1995 – Sublime are invited to play the KROQ Weenie Roast in Los Angeles alongside Bush and Hole, at a time when they have nothing more than two indie albums and a hot local single, “Date Rape.” They print up 40 backstage passes for their friends, family and dogs. By the end of the day, Nowell’s beloved Dalmatian, Louie, has bitten a record exec’s little girl, and one of their pals just missed puking on MTV’s Kennedy while she was interviewing the band.
Here’s the latest variant: In September 1997, Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh – Sublime’s bassist and drummer – fly to New York for the MTV Video Music Awards. The band has been nominated for best alternative video. The duo’s been drinking for most of the evening, and by the time their category comes up, Gaugh is melted into his seat and Wilson is sucking down a vodka tonic at the lobby bar.
MCA reps corral them just before they win, and they’re shoved onstage, followed by Troy Nowell and Marshall Goodman, the group’s DJ. Dazed in the spotlight, Gaugh performs a little jig and mumbles a few thank-yous to friends and family. Then, the hulking Wilson holds up the band’s shiny statuette, raises a fist and incongruously blurts out, “Lynyrd Skynyrd!” Gaugh, realizing that his band mate’s comment might need clarification, adds, “for writing the tune ‘Workin’ for MCA.'” In the midst of this stoned spectacle, Goodman comes to the rescue, pointing out very soberly, “This is all for Bradley Nowell – peace.”
A month later, Wilson and Gaugh are in more familiar environs – sitting with their girlfriends around a picnic table at Long Beach Sport Fishing, a tackle shop, seafood restaurant and boat-charter operation that looks like it’s been perched on this rusty waterfront since long before oil refineries dotted the landscape. Wearing wraparound sunglasses, a loose T-shirt, shorts that reveal several tattoos, and a fresh buzz cut, Gaugh is itching to explain his and Wilson’s onstage blunders back in New York.
“It all started with the tequila,” Gaugh begins. The day before the show, the drummer had been fishing with his girlfriend in Cabo San Lucas, a party town at the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and he purchased an $85 bottle of tequila as a gift for his dad. But by the time he met up with Wilson the next day in New York, the bottle looked too good to save. So the two decided to “have a little victory shot,” as Gaugh puts it. “We thought, ‘Fuck it, even if we don’t win, let’s drink this shit.’ So by the time we got onstage, man, we were wasted.” He gazes out at the fishing boats swaying by the docks. “I guess we forgot to thank a couple of people.”
Wilson, clutching a jet-fueled margarita, shudders at the memory. “See, we were already pretty buzzed back at the hotel when I said to Bud, ‘You know, if we win, we should say “Lynyrd Skynyrd!”‘ Bud had mentioned something about the song they did about working for MCA. So when we actually got up there, I was so flabbergasted that I just go, ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd!’ That’s all I could say.”
The conversation drifts to memories of Sublime’s early days. “It was [the most] fun for us when we were traveling around in a van and crashing on people’s floors,” Wilson says wistfully. These days, Wilson and Gaugh start most mornings with a bong hit and continue smoking well into the night. Wilson’s thrashed two-story Victorian house in Long Beach is their headquarters and the practice space for their new band, the Long Beach Dub All-Stars. It has the feel of a college hangout, with a revolving cast of characters lounging on the couches and chairs, beer bottles covering every flat surface, bongs on the end tables and three Rottweilers that bark viciously and gnash their teeth at newcomers.
Wilson and Gaugh whose families lived across an alleyway from each other, have been friends since childhood, when they first started playing music together and surfing at nearby Seal Beach. When punk bands like the Minutemen came to town, Gaugh and Wilson were always at the edge of the stage. (In fact, the Minutemen lyric “punk rock changed our lives” was sampled as the first line on Sublime’s 1992 debut, 40 Oz. to Freedom.)
Wilson’s dad, Billy, a drummer who toured with big bands in his youth and played on a cruise ship during the Depression, was Gaugh’s drum teacher. Though Billy Wilson was much older than the parents of Eric’s friends, he was also much cooler; it was he who introduced his son to marijuana. “He got into it while he was hanging out with all those jazz cats, I guess,” Eric says of his dad. “He smoked now and then, and to hide the odor he carried around a little bottle of Binaca.”
Wilson played trumpet for a while but says he sucked at it and switched to guitar and then bass. When he was in sixth grade, he met Nowell. The two began playing music together before Nowell took off for Santa Cruz, to start college at the University of California. During one of Nowell’s breaks from school, Wilson introduced him to Bud Gaugh, and the three started jamming together. After recording several DIY cassettes and selling them at shows, Sublime went into a Long Beach studio in 1992 to record 40 Oz. to Freedom. The album, which the band released on its own label, Skunk, did well on a word-of-mouth basis.
But by then Nowell had begun experimenting with hard drugs, and by the time Sublime began work on the followup, Robbin’ the Hood – most of which was recorded in a Long Beach crack house – his addiction was out of control. Gaugh attempted to reach out to his band mate – though often in destructive ways. “I felt like kicking his ass,” recalls Gaugh, who himself had been hooked on speed and heroin for years. “I mean, I’d been there and was still struggling with it. So I was all things that I could be to him during that time. I tried to be his conscience; I tried to be his nurse. I even tried to be his drug buddy; I mean, we got loaded together a couple of times.”
Nowell met Troy in 1993, at a Sublime show in San Diego. “We were just friends at first and we stayed friends for a long time,” she says. “It wasn’t until ’95 that we started seeing each other.” As Nowell alienated his friends, family and band mates, Troy was the one person who was there for him to talk to. “He’d already promised everybody that he would stop doing it and had asked for help,” she says. “People would help him and then he’d hurt them. So when I came along, I hadn’t been fooled by him yet.”
The prospect of signing to a major label was a big deal for Nowell, so when Sublime began talking with MCA, in 1994, he was determined to really clean up. “He decided on his own that he wanted to go to rehab,” says Troy. “He knew he had to get clean before the MCA thing could happen.” Nowell did get clean for a while, but in February 1996, when the band traveled to Austin, Texas, to begin recording Sublime at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio with producer Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers, Nowell went back to heroin more vigorously than ever. “They’re the sweetest bunch of guys, [but] it was chaos in the studio,” Leary says. On good days, they’d show up at 9 a.m. with margaritas in one hand and instruments in the other and go to work; on bad days, they nearly burned the place down. “There were times where someone had to go into the bathroom to see if Brad was still alive,” he says. Nowell’s drug use became so intense that Leary sent him home to Long Beach before the record was completed. “It took him three days to get back on his feet,” Jim Nowell recalls. “It was the worst I’d ever seen him.”
The skies above Long Beach are clear today, and Troy Nowell is sprawled on a lounge chair on the back patio of her in-laws’ house, a modest yellow-paneled, two-story home in a well-kept neighborhood. She has long, blond-streaked hair and is dressed in black running shorts and a white baby tee that partially exposes a rose tattoo on her right arm. When she speaks, her voice has a coarse, cigarette-wrecked edge. “Did you see the tattoo on my back?” she asks, turning to reveal a pair of Chinese characters. “The top one means ‘to be in mourning,’ and the bottom one means ‘husband.'” She laughs and lights another Marlboro as 2-year-old Jakob runs around in a tiny T-shirt with Big Kahuna scrawled across the front. “He was very bad at the grocery store this morning,” she says. “He’s acting much better now, aren’t you, Jake?” Jakob nods vigorously, and you can see Brad in his face and Troy in his half-moon eyes. “Sometimes Jake will say something that I want Brad to hear so bad,” she says, “but he can’t, because he’s gone.”
Troy den Denkker was born and raised in a San Diego household where drugs and alcohol were always around. Her mother was hooked on speed throughout Troy’s childhood, and her father was a biker who held frequent parties at the house. “They were wonderful people,” Troy stresses. “I loved them all. I mean, they were real.” Troy will look you straight in the eye and tell you exactly why she was attracted to Brad Nowell. “I love drug addicts,” she says. “I went to see that movie Boogie Nights the other night, and, you know, I knew all those people. When it was over, I turned to my girlfriend and that’s just what I said: ‘I love drug addicts.’ I guess they’re just the kind of people I’m used to being around. They’re great; they’re crazy.”
Troy, who is studying to be a substance-abuse counselor, says she and Brad spent a lot of time talking about his problems. “I was very understanding,” she says. “And Brad was so open about it. He used it as a way of getting attention. That’s the sick thing about heroin addicts. They’re like, ‘Take care of me.’ They’re like puppy dogs. And I guess I wanted to take care of him.” She was also more than ready for him to clean up when he decided to go back to rehab in 1995, soon after Troy found out she was pregnant.
“In the beginning I was real accepting of his behavior, but then there was much more at stake,” she says. “We’d bought this beautiful house, we had our beautiful son, we were about to get married and it was driving me crazy. I felt like I didn’t have anyone to turn to. His whole attitude was, ‘Look at everything we’ve got – I can have a reward every now and then.’ He wanted to reward himself. It was like, ‘I’m not hurting anyone, I’m just doing it this one day.’ ”
But one day turned into a week, and pretty soon Brad was in trouble again. “It scared the hell out of me,” Troy says. “And the thing that was so horrible is that when he would get high, he’d be so euphoric and so happy. I was like, ‘Why can’t you be this happy when you’re not on it?’ ” She pauses and looks away. “It got really ugly,” she finally says, “and that tore him up.
“You know, the one thing that gave me the most peace after Brad died,” she continues, “was when his first love, Eileen, came to me and said, ‘He did everything that he wanted to do, and he went to sleep. He was tired and went to sleep.’ The way she put it was exactly true. Brad was so tired – he really was. He was tired of letting everyone down, of letting himself down; he was tired of trying to stay clean, tired of everything.”
Even though Nowell died too soon to experience his band’s success, for Troy his death was like the final chapter in a long, exhausting journey. “Brad had accomplished everything he wanted,” she says. “He always wanted to have a baby: ‘We gotta have a kid,’ he said. He wanted to get his family back, ’cause he had hurt them so bad with his drug use. And he did. He wanted to get this album written, and he wanted it to be the best one he ever wrote. And he did. He wanted his band to have glory. And they did.”
She lights another cigarette. “I’m not saying that it’s OK that Brad died, because it’s not OK. So many things have happened that I wish he could see – Sublime being nominated for awards and their videos being on MTV all the time and their songs played on the radio. Or things will happen with me, and Brad’s the first person I want to tell, ’cause we were best friends. I want to see his reaction to all this. What’s OK is [that] there’s no more struggle, no more war. That struggle took up a lot of our energy and our time, and it was horrible. He’s at peace now.”
Jim Nowell and his second wife, Jane, are flipping through a photo album that shows Brad from birth through his teen and college years, his emaciated drug years, and his wedding, a Hawaiian-themed extravaganza in Las Vegas, when he had filled out again and gotten some color back in his face. Jim, a burly, affable guy, was a contractor until he retired to manage Sublime’s affairs. Last Fourth of July, he and Jane threw a big backyard barbecue and invited Brad’s old posse. The Long Beach Dub All-Stars jammed most of the afternoon. When they got around to playing Brad’s songs, Jim and Jane were shaken and had to go inside – they didn’t want their grief to spoil anyone’s good time.
The first time she met Brad, says Jane, she was astonished at his good behavior. “I remember telling Jim, ‘Gee, you did something really good with this kid. I’ve never seen a boy who is so polite and interested in his elders.’ Even when he got into his teens, he would always offer his chair to you.” She loved Brad from day one, helping him through his best years as a student and musician, as well as his worst years as a drug addict. Jane defended her stepson’s decision to get a tattoo – even when his father opposed it. “It was kind of like an Aztec design that went from his knee to his ankle,” she says, remembering the day he came home with it. “Well, Jim’s sitting here looking at it, and he says to Brad, ‘So, how long is that thing going to be on there?'”
“I said, ‘It does wash off, doesn’t it?’ ” Jim adds.
Jane laughs. “Brad and I just look at each other because we’re thinking, ‘He’s kidding,’ you know. And then we look at Jim and we see that he’s not kidding. So I go, ‘Jim, that’s not the wash-off kind of tattoo.’ And Jim goes, ‘It’s not?’ I mean, it was a huge tattoo!” To prove her loyalty to her stepson, Jane hikes up her pant leg and shows me her own new tattoo. It’s the image of the sun from the cover of 40 Oz. to Freedom.
There’s a party going on at Eric Wilson’s house, which is on the edge of one of Long Beach’s more unsavory neighborhoods. Wilson and the Dub All-Stars are jamming on an old Skatalites tune when Jim Nowell drops by for a visit. Before long, Nowell picks up an acoustic guitar and joins in, playing and singing. As the group moves from the Skatalites to a silly version of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and then to a free-form Dead-like jam, everyone in the house – including a gangly couple who’d been playing pool in the front room, a couple of dudes just back from a beer run, and Opie Ortiz, a shirtless tattoo artist who had earlier been working on a customer – packs into the room, listening intently to the deep, warm croon of the elder Nowell’s voice.
At one point, Wilson, hunched over his upright bass in a Surf and Sail tank top and mismatched sneakers, turns to Nowell and smiles. “Hey, Jimbo,” he says, “play some of those real old songs that you know. How ’bout ‘Minnie the Moocher’?” Over the next hour, the group runs through a set of pop, folk and country hits, like “Ain’t She Sweet?” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Okie From Muskogee.” By the end, the blue-collar cool of this posse of tattooed skate-punks has turned to blissful, drunken, giddy exuberance.
Then, suddenly, the mood turns wistful. “Hey, Jimbo,” asks Jack Maness, who’s been playing acoustic lead guitar, “what about ‘Sunny’?” He is referring to the old Bobby Hebb song that Jim and Brad used to play together at backyard parties at the Nowells’ home. “I remember one day Brad said to you, ‘I wanna do it like this, Dad,’ and you told him, ‘Yeah, son, but this is how it goes.’ ”
Everyone in the room erupts in laughter. The kind of laughter that brings tears. It’s a laughter that has positively conjured the ghost of Brad Nowell – right here, right now, in the wee hours of an October morning in Long Beach. It’s a few moments before Wilson’s gregarious girlfriend, Kat Rodriguez, breaks the silence: “Now, that’s Brad for you – in a nutshell,” she says. “He was going to do things his way or no way. That’s why no band will ever sound like Sublime.”
This story is from the December 25th, 1997 issue of Rolling Stone.
March 17, 1996 – Terry LaVerne Stafford was born on November 22, 1941. A native of Hollis, Oklahoma, he is best remembered for his 1964 hit song, ‘Suspicion.’ The song, written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and originally recorded by Elvis Presley, became Stafford’s only hit song and a Top Ten single. He sounded uncanningly like Elvis.
August 30, 1995 – Holmes Sterling Morrison (The Velvet underground) was born in East Meadow, Long Island on August 29th 1942. He had two brothers and three sisters. His parents divorced when he was young and his mother remarried. He first met future Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker during childhood, through her brother Jim, who attended Division Avenue High School in Levittown, New York with Morrison. Originally playing trumpet, Morrison switched to guitar after his trumpet teacher was drafted.
August 26, 1995 – Ronald Anthony ‘Ronnie’ White (The Miracles) was born on April 5, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. White began his friendship with fellow Miracles co-founder Smokey Robinson when they were kids. The pair started singing together when White was 12 and Robinson was 11 as the duo Ron & Bill. They were soon joined by a third boy, Pete Moore, and in 1955, the trio formed a quintet called The Five Chimes, with two other boys.
August 25, 1995 – Douglas Alan ‘Doug’ Stegmeyer was born on December 23rd 1951 in Flushing Queens, New York.
March 8, 1995 – Ingo Schwichtenberg (Helloween) was born May 18th 1965 in Hamburg, Germany. At the age of 14 he took some clarinet lessons with the encouragement of a music teacher at school and started playing folk music in the school’s band. During this period he also had his first approach to a drum kit. “As the drummer in my group was very bad, I could not stand it and I sat in front of the kit and played as I liked ” he said ” I think I was fifteen… I knew I was going to play it seriously since then”.
March 5, 1995 – Vivian Stanshall (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) was born Victor Anthony Stanshall on 21 March 1943 in Shillingford, Oxfordshire.
February 23, 1995 – Melvin Franklin was born David Melvin English in Montgomery, Alabama on October 12th 1942.
February 1, 1995 – Richard “Richey” James Edwards, the former co-lyricist and rhythm guitarist of the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers was officially ‘presumed dead’
February 12, 1995 – Philip Kramer (Iron Butterfly) was born on July 12th 1952 in Youngstown, Ohio.
November 16, 1994 – Dino Valenti was born Chester “Chet” William Powers Jr on October 7, 1937 in Danbury CT to Carnival entertainment parents. He became known by the stage name “Dino Valenti” and as a songwriter he was known as Jesse Oris Farrow in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. His first claim to fame came after he wrote the famous 1960s song 
August 1994 – Kristen Pfaff (Hole) One of the mourners at Kurt’s Seattle memorial was Kristen Pfaff, a member of Courtney Love’s band, Hole, and a former girlfriend of fellow member Eric Erlandson. Two months after Kurt’s death, in 1994, Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in the bath tub at her Seattle apartment, just like Jim Morrison. She was also 27, the third member of the Seattle music community to die at that age within a year.
March 22, 1994 – Dan Hartman was born on December 8, 1950 near Pennsylvania’s capital, Harrisburg, in West Hanover Township, Dauphin County. He joined his first band, The Legends, at the age of 13. His brother Dave was also a member of the band. He played keyboards and wrote much of the band’s music, but despite the release of a number of recordings, none turned out to be hits.
February 22, 1994 – Papa John Creach (Jefferson Airplane) was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania on May 28th 1917.
December 5, 1993 – Doug Hopkins was born on April 11, 1961 in Seattle, WA but raised in Tempe, Arizona. It’s unknown when exactly the Hopkins family arrived in Arizona, but the family lived in suburban Tempe. Little is published about Doug’s younger days, prior to attending McClintock High School. As a senior, Hopkins picked up an acoustic guitar and began taking lessons. An instructor encouraged him to change to bass, on account of his large hands. Doug’s interest in music kept him busy, often practicing the guitar on a Friday night rather than going to parties. Doug successfully graduated McClintock in 1979, even after a gym short incident resulting in a two week suspension during his senior year.
December 4, 1993 – Frank Vincent Zappa was born on December 21, 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland with an Italian, Sicilian, Greek and Arab ancestry. With his dad employed as chemist/mathematician in the Defense industry, the family often moved to the extent that he attended at least 6 high schools. He began to play drums at the age of 12, and was playing in R&B groups by high school,
December 1, 1993 – Peter Wood was born on April 9, 1950 in Middlesex, and brought up in Egham, Surrey. He became one of those talented music performers that have contributed to a massive amount of hits and superhits, but never really became famous, outside of the industry.
August 4, 1993 – Randy Jo Hobbs was born on March 22nd 1948 in Winchester, Indiana.
February 25, 1993 – Toy Talmadge Caldwell Jr (Marshall Tucker Band) was born in Spartanburg, SC on November 13, 1947.
February 18, 1993 – Patrick Waite . Waite was born on May 16, 1968 in the Birmingham area of England. His father had moved from his native Jamaica to England in 1966.
November 12, 1992 – Ronnie Bond was born Ronald James Bullis on May 4, 1940, the week before Nazi Germany invaded the Lowlands and brought the war to England. Born in Andover, Hampshire, he was a founding member of the rock band, The Troggs, originally called The Troglodytes.
August 14, 1992 – Samuel Anthony “Tony” Williams was born on April 5th 1928 in Roselle, New Jersey. His family moved to California in the 1940s.
January 29, 1992 – Willie Dixon was born July 1st 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His mother Daisy often rhymed the things she said, a habit her son imitated. At the age of seven, young Dixon became an admirer of a band that featured pianist Little Brother Montgomery. He sang his first song at Springfield Baptist Church at the age of four. Dixon was first introduced to blues when he served time on prison farms in Mississippi as an early teenager.
Eric “The Fox” Carr was born as Paul Caravello on July 12, 1950 in Brooklyn New York. He grew up typically post war American and by the time he was 15, while still in high school, he began playing with a string of bands mostly performing covers of Top 40 songs.
November 2, 1991 – Mort Shuman was born November 12, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York City, of Polish Jewish immigrants and went to Abraham Lincoln High School, subsequently studying music at the New York Conservatory. He became a fan of R&B music and after he met Doc Pomus the two teamed up to compose for Aldon Music at offices in New York City’s Brill Building.
August 27, 1991 – Vince Taylor was born Brian Maurice Holden on July 14, 1939 in Isleworth, Middlesex, England. When he was seven, immediately after WWII, the Holdens emigrated to America and settled in New Jersey where his father found employment. According to Wikipedia, around 1955, his sister, Sheila, got married to Joe Barbera, of Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Productions. As a result of this, the family moved to California, where Taylor attended Hollywood High School. As a teenager, Taylor took flying lessons and obtained a pilot’s license. (note: this seems to need further research, since Joe Barbera (creator of the Flintstones and Tom & Jerry a.o.) was married to his high school sweetheart with whom he had 4 children until 1963!!)
March 22, 1991 – Dave Guard was born October 19th 1934 and along with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane, was one of the founding members of The Kingston Trio. He spent his early years first in San Francisco, and then his junior high school and high school years in Honolulu, pre-state Hawaii. Guard grew up hearing the soft vocal melodies and strummed guitars of Hawaiian music. He was particularly attracted to the unique rhythmic sounds of finger-picked slack-key ukulele and guitar music masterfully performed by the many of his neighbors and beach boys.While an undergraduate at Stanford, Dave started a pickup group with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane.
March 21, 1991 – Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender was a Greek-American inventor, born on August 10th 1909. He founded Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, now known as Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, and later founded MusicMan and G&L Musical Products (G&L Guitars). His guitar, bass, and amplifier designs from the 1950s continue to dominate popular music more than half a century later.
March 14, 1991 – Doc Pomus was born Jerome Solon Felder on June 27th, 1925 in Brooklyn, New York, he was a son of Jewish immigrants. Having had polio as a boy, he walked with the help of crutches. Later, due to post-polio syndrome, exacerbated by an accident, Felder eventually relied on a wheelchair.
July 27, 1990 – Bobby Day was born Robert James Byrd on July 1st 1928 in Fort Worth, Texas.
July 26, 1990 – Brent Mydland was born in Munich, Germany on October 21, 1952, the child of a U.S. Army chaplain. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was just one and he spent most of his childhood living in Antioch, California, an hour east of San Francisco. He started piano lessons at age six and had formal classical lessons through his junior year in high school. In an interview he commented that: “my sister took lessons and it looked fun to me, so I did too. There was always a piano around the house and I wanted to play it. When I couldn’t play it I would beat on it anyway.” His mother, a graveyard shift nurse, encouraged Mydland’s talents by insisting that he practice his music for two hours each day. He played trumpet from elementary till his senior year in high school; his schoolmates remember him practicing on an accordion, as well as the piano, every day after school.
March 17, 1990 – Ric Grech (Blind Faith) was born Richard Roman Grechko in Bordeaux, France’s famous wine area on November 1st 1946. He was educated at Corpus Christi RC School, Leicester, after attending Sacred Heart Primary School, where he played violin in the school orchestra.
February 8, 1990 – Del Shannon was born born Charles Weedon Westover on December 30, 1934 in Grand Rapids Michigan and grew up in nearby Coopersville. He learned ukulele and guitar and listened to country and western music, including Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Lefty Frizzell. He was drafted into the Army in 1954, and while in Germany played guitar in a band called “The Cool Flames”.
Feb 14, 1989 – Vincent Crane – (Atomic Rooster) was born Vincent Rodney Cheesman on 21 May 1943 in Reading, Berkshire, England.
February 4, 1989 – Trevor George Lucas (Fairport Convention) was born in Bungaree, Victoria, Australia on December 25, 1943. He learned to play guitar in order to help with his dyslexia. In his youth, Lucas studied to become a carpenter and performed nights at local clubs in Melbourne from 1961 or 1962.
December 6, 1988 – Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas to Nadine and Orbie Lee. He formed his first band at age 13. The singer-songwriter dropped out of college to pursue music. He signed with Monument Records and recorded such ballads as “Only the Lonely” and “It’s Over.”
July 29, 1988 – Pete Drake was born Roddis Franklin Drake October 8th 1932 in Augusta, Georgia. The son of a Pentecostal minister, Drake began his music career with his siblings in the Drake Brothers band. His bother Jack went on to join Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadors for 25 years. Inspired by the Opry’s steel great Jerry Byrd he saved and bought himself a steel guitar for $38 in a pawn shop.
March 10, 1988 – Andrew Roy Gibb “Andy Gibb” was born on March 5th 1958 in Manchester, England. He was the youngest of five children of Barbara and Hugh Gibb. His mother was of Irish and English descent and his father was of Scottish and Irish descent. He has four siblings: his sister Lesley, and three brothers Barry and fraternal twins Robin and Maurice.
Feb. 13, 1988 (Styx) – John Curulewski was born on October 3, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois. Nicknamed “JC,” was one of the original members of Styx. He joined Dennis DeYoung, the Panozzo brothers, and James Young to form TW4 in 1968, which was renamed to Styx in 1970. He played acoustic and electric guitar on the band’s first five studio albums: Styx, Styx II, The Serpent Is Rising, Man of Miracles, and Equinox. He left just before the Equinox promotional tour and was replaced by Tommy Shaw.
December 1, 1986 – Irving Lee Dorsey was born on Christmas Eve December 24, 1924 in New Orleans and a childhood friend of Fats Domino.
March 31, 1986 – O’Kelly Isley Jr (Isley Brothers) was born on December 25th 1937. The eldest of the Isley Brothers, Kelly Isley started singing with his brothers at church. When he was 16, he and his three younger brothers (Rudy, Ronnie and Vernon) formed The Isley Brothers and toured the gospel circuit. Following the death of Vernon Isley from a road accident, the brothers decided to try their hand at doo-wop and moved to New York to find a recording deal. Between 1957 and 1959, the Isleys would record for labels such as Teenage and Mark X. In 1959, they signed with RCA Records after a scout spotted the trio’s energetic live performance.
March 4, 1986 – Richard George Manuel (The Band) was born on April 3rd 1943 in Stratford, Ontario. He was raised with three brothers, and the four sang in the church choir. Manuel took piano lessons beginning when he was nine, and enjoyed playing piano and rehearsing with friends at his home. Manuel received a diploma from the Ontario Conservatory of Music in lap steel guitar; this was his only formal music certification. Some of his childhood influences were Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Jimmy Reed and Otis Rush.
March 3, 1986 – Howard Greenfield (songwriting partner with Neil Sedaka) was born on March 15, 1936 on Brooklyn, New York. By his late teens Greenfield formed a songwriting partnership with Neil Sedaka, a friend he had met as a teenager when they both lived in the same apartment building, in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. For several years in the 1960s they worked out of the famous Brill Building. He is best known for his series of successful songwriting collaborations, first with Neil Sedaka from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, and a near-simultaneous and equally successful songwriting partnership with Jack Keller throughout most of the 1960s.
December 12, 1985 – Ian Andrew Robert Stewart was born on July 18, 1938 at Kirklatch Farm, Pittenweem, East Neuk, Fife, Scotland, and raised in Sutton, Surrey. Stewart (often called Stu) started playing piano when he was six. He took up the banjo and played with amateur groups on both instruments. Stewart, who loved rhythm & blues, boogie-woogie, blues and big-band jazz, was first to respond to Brian Jones’s advertisement in Jazz News of 2 May 1962 seeking musicians to form a rhythm & blues group. The shifting and shuffling in the early British rock and roll days left unfortunate victims like Stu Sutcliff and Pete Best with the Beatles; Ian Stewart became one of those as well and to a degree even Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones also.
July 25, 1985 – Willie Lee Perryman was born October 19, 1911 on a farm in Hampton, Georgia, where his parents Ada and Henry Perryman sharecropped. He was part of a large family, though sources differ on exactly how many brothers and sisters he had. Perryman was an albino African American, as was his older brother Rufus, who also had a blues piano career as “Speckled Red”.
March 29, 1985 – The Singing Nun or Soeur Sourire in her native Belgium, was born Jeanine Deckers on October 17, 1933.
March 7, 1985 – Gordon Huntley (Southern Comfort) was born in 1930. Nicknamed The Governor, he played steel pedal with the Hawaiian Serenaders on a triple neck Fender lap steel. In 1959 he progressed on to ‘pedal’ steel by adding a pedal to his guitar made out of a tractor accelerator pedal and bicycle brake cable.
August 7, 1984 – Esther Phillips was born Esther Mae Jones on December 23, 1935. in Galveston Texas. She began singing in church as a young child. When her parents divorced, she split time between her father in Houston and her mother in the Watts area of Los Angeles.
February 4, 1984 – Paul Gardiner was born in Hayes, Middlesex on May 1st 1958. In early 1976 he was playing in a band called The Lasers when Gary Numan (then using his real name Gary Webb) auditioned as lead guitarist. The two became fast friends and when Numan left the band soon after, Gardiner followed. The pair formed Tubeway Army, initially with Numan’s uncle Jess Lidyard on drums. In October 1977, the band was signed to the independent label Beggars Banquet and released their first single, “That’s Too Bad”, in February 1978. The trio used assumed names, Gardiner’s being ‘Scarlett’.
August 2, 1983 – James Lee Jamerson was born on January 29th 1936 in Edisto Island, near Charleston, South Carolina. In 1954 he moved with his mother to Detroit where he learned to play the double bass at Northwestern High School, and he soon began playing in Detroit area blues and jazz clubs.
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