Posted on Leave a comment

Wayne Kramer 2/2024


Wayne Kramer 2/2024 (75) was born Wayne Stanley Kambes in Detroit on April 30, 1948. He had a typically nomadic post-World War II upbringing. His parents divorced when he was young, and Kramer’s father, Stanley, effectively disappeared from his life. Raised by his mother and stepfather, the young Wayne sought solace in the seismic sounds of 50s rock’n’roll, apparently as a reaction to being abused by his stepfather and as a result turned to music as an outlet. 

In the music of the era there was one pioneering figure in particular shaping the course of his future.

“Quite simply, Chuck Berry was the reason I played guitar,” Karmer enthused in the sleevenotes for Rhino’s The Big Bang! The Best Of The MC5. “When I heard that sound when I was nine years old, that was it. That was the sound of liberation, the sound of release and of power. And I mean the electric guitar. The sound of the amplifier was a huge part of it for me. That visceral spirit formed me and got me into bands.”

Continue reading Wayne Kramer 2/2024

Posted on Leave a comment

Wilko Johnson – 11/2022

Wilko Johnson (Dr. Feelgood) was born John Andrew Wilkinson on 12 July 1947 in Canvey Island, Essex, UK. One of his earliest memories was of the 1953 floods, which hit low-lying Canvey badly and caused many deaths. His father, a gas-fitter, was “a stupid and uneducated and violent person”, according to his son, and died when Wilko was a teenager. Canvey became a romantic place in Johnson’s mind, with its lonely views of the Thames estuary overshadowed by the towers and blazing fires of the nearby Shell Haven oil refinery. Johnson and his contemporaries dubbed the area the Thames Delta, in homage to the Mississippi Delta, which spawned the blues musicians they admired.
He first began playing the guitar after watching the Shadows on television, then later was inspired by Mick Green, guitarist with Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. Green’s knack for mixing up lead and rhythm guitar parts had a clear influence on Johnson’s technique. Wilko instinctively began to play left-handed, but forced himself to switch to right-handed. When he found that playing right-handed meant he could not hold a plectrum, he perfected a way of flicking his fingernails across the strings, which helped him to play the speedy, slashing rhythms that became his stock-in-trade. Continue reading Wilko Johnson – 11/2022

Posted on Leave a comment

Sylvain Sylvain – 1/2021

Sylvain Sylvain Mizrahi (69) – The New York Dolls – was born in Cairo, Egypt on February 14, 1951. His Syrian Sephardic Jewish family fled Egypt because of the Suez Canal crisis in 1957, initially moved to France and then the USA in the late 1950s. They first settled in Buffalo, New York and later in New York City.

Sylvain, who grew up with dyslexia, attended Newtown High School in Queens and Quintano’s School for Young Professionals in Manhattan, where he met future New York Doll bandmate Billy Murcia and together they ran a clothing company called “Truth and Soul”, which helped define his fashion sense and would play a role in the band’s groundbreaking look. His early musical influences were the Who, MC5 and Iggy Pop.

Continue reading Sylvain Sylvain – 1/2021

Posted on Leave a comment

Ric Ocasek 9/2019

Ric Ocasek (75) – The Cars – was born in Baltimore on March 23, 1944. His paternal side was of Czech descent. When he was 16 years old, his father moved the family back to the Otcasek hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a systems analyst with NASA at the Lewis Research Center. Ocasek graduated from Maple Heights High School in 1963. He briefly attended Antioch College and Bowling Green State University, but dropped out to pursue a career in music.

Ocasek met future Cars bassist Benjamin Orr in Cleveland in 1965 after Ocasek saw Orr performing with his band the Grasshoppers on the Big 5 Show, a local musical variety program.

After performing in various bands in Columbus and Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ocasek and Orr relocated to Boston in the early 1970s. There they formed a Crosby, Stills and Nash-style folk rock band called Milkwood. They released one album, How’s the Weather,  in early 1973 but it failed to chart. Future Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes played on Milkwood’s album. After Milkwood, Ocasek formed the group Richard and the Rabbits, which included Orr and Hawkes. Ocasek and Orr also performed as an acoustic duo during this period. Some of the songs they played became early Cars songs. Later, Ocasek and Orr teamed up with guitarist Elliot Easton in the band Cap’n Swing. Cap’n Swing soon came to the attention of WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori, who began playing songs from their demo tape on her show. After Cap’n Swing was rejected by several record labels, Ocasek got rid of the bass player and drummer and decided to form a band that better fit his style of writing. Orr took over on bass and David Robinson, best known for his career with the Modern Lovers, became the drummer. Hawkes returned to play keyboards and the band became “the Cars” in late 1976 with their first official live gig on New Year’s Eve of that year.

The concept behind the band’s name was born out of a modern search for keywords.

“Shortly after I joined,” drummer David Robinson told the Wall Street Journal, “Ric wanted to change the band’s name,” because “Cap’n Swing sounded like the name of a bar band.” So, the musicians sat around and devised a list of possible band names. It was Robinson who mentioned the Cars, the entry that everybody seemed to like. “It was easy to remember and it wasn’t pegged to a specific decade or sound,” Robinson said. “The name was meaningless and conjured up nothing, which was perfect.” Furthermore, Ocasek liked the Cars because it fell at the beginning of the alphabet, which would earn the band good placement in record stores, and also that it was easy to spell.

1977  was the year of earning their stripes as they gigged all over the Northeast. The repeated return of their demo songs on local radio finally convinced record company Elektra to offer the band a contract that worked for both and resulted in a partnership that produced 6 platinum and/or golden albums, selling more than 23 million copies in the US alone.

In 1978, the Cars self-titled debut album reached nr. 18 on the Billboard 200 chart and three singles reached the top 40 – including “Just What I needed”, sung by Ben Orr, which became #4 in Billboard’s records of the year. Their next album Candy-O went to #3 in the Billboard 200 and successive singles hit high on the Hot 100. The band cut 4 more albums with Elektra in the next 8  years, 3 platinum and 1 gold, while over time the band members started going solo. One of the reasons for the band to ultimately break up in 1988 was Ric’s distaste for touring and being on the road. In his own words he said:

I guess you could blame it on me. I toured a lot in the early years when we were the Cars, the five of us. I saw the world. I’ve always been more of a songwriter than a performer. I produce and I love the studio. I’ve always not so much liked touring. That’s kind of the reason. Also, I didn’t want to do things like, “Hey, let’s do some casinos and some boats.” I didn’t want to get into that. That’s just a different reason to do it. That’s really just being mechanical and playing your songs for whatever it is.

Ric’s first solo project was the album Beatitude in January 1983, which features a more minimal and sparse interpretation of the Cars’ new wave rock sound. On some tracks Ocasek played all of the instruments. A more synthesizer-heavy follow-up, This Side of Paradise, was released in 1986; and featured Greg Hawkes, Elliot Easton and Benjamin Orr. Hit single, “Emotion in Motion” accompanied the album.

Now the strange thing is if you play the Cars’ records today in the 2020s…you’re shocked, too much old stuff you have to apologize for, you wonder why you once liked it, but not this music, it sounds as fresh as ’78, ’84, as a matter of fact it sounds even better. Radio always muffled the lyrics, now lyrics stand out and their wisdom and insight and humor stick out. But even better is that sound, an amalgamation of the old and new filtered through a hit record sensibility, the Cars didn’t want to stretch out and noodle, they wanted to get it right, in a compact fashion, anything unnecessary was excised.

The Cars disbanded in 1988, and Ocasek disappeared from the public eye for a couple of years. His 25 year close friendship with Benjamin Orr estranged until shortly before Orr’s death in 2000. His 17 year old marriage to second wife Suzanne ended, no doubt as the result of his growing relation with supermodel Paulina Porizkova, whom he married in August 1989. He resurfaced in 1990 with his own album, Fireball Zone. One track, “Rockaway”, enjoyed a brief stay on the charts, but his solo albums realized disappointing sales, especially compared to his success with the Cars. He subsequently released other solo works during the decade.  In the 1990s and 2000s he was very active as producer, writer and occasional movie performer. For many years Ocasek also had a hobby of making drawings, photo collages, and mixed-media art works which, in 2009, were shown at a gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as an exhibition called “Teahead Scraps”.

In 2010, Ocasek reunited with the surviving original members of the Cars to record their first album in 24 years. The album, entitled Move Like This, was released on May 10, 2011. Not long after the album’s release and its 2 week supporting tour in May, with a final show at Lollapaloosa in August, the Cars resumed their hiatus, and reunited once again in April 2018 for a performance at the ceremony of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ric Ocasek wasn’t friends with everybody, he wasn’t the life of the party, he suffered no fools, he spoke through his music, that was enough, it was less emotion than intellect, the tracks were all you got, the band members were not individual stars, all you got was this vision, unique in the landscape, direct and oftentimes ironic, it kept you guessing, but the music did not. His relationship carried this reservation, whether it’d be towards wives, partners or children. It must have been a lonely life, as possibly witnessed by the fact that he died alone during the night of September 15, 2019, to be found by his ex-wife, who later learned that she and her children with him had been written out of his last will.

Sometimes life seems just a cruel confirmation of misplacing arrogance for talent.

Posted on Leave a comment

Alvin DeGuzman 10/2017

October 4, 2017 – Alvin DeGuzman (The Icarus Line) was born in Manila in the Philippines on December 3, 1978.

When he was 4 years old the family moved to the US.He attended Holy Family School in South Pasadena and graduated from Loyola High School in Los Angeles in 1997. He also attended Cal Poly Pomona. 

Alvin was a talented musician and passionate artist. While in High School he became a founding member of the indie punk rock band The Icarus Line, where he played the guitar both left and right handed, and also played bass and keys. The Icarus Line was the successor to high school friend Joe Cardamone’s first musical effort named “Kanker Sores”. Continue reading Alvin DeGuzman 10/2017

Posted on Leave a comment

Robert Throb Young 9/2014

September 9, 2014 – Robert ‘Throb’ Young (Primal Scream) was born in Glasgow, Scotland on November 19, 1964. Young met Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie when they were both studying at Kings Park Secondary School in Glasgow, and he joined the band in 1984.

Known as Throb to his bandmates and fans, this Scottish rock bassist and guitarist was most commonly known for performing both roles with the Glasgow-formed, Mercury Music Prize winning Primal Scream. A core member throughout their lengthy career, he joined when they were still unknowns in 1984 and departed for health reasons, after a lengthy and successful international career with the group in 2006.

Continue reading Robert Throb Young 9/2014

Posted on Leave a comment

Scott Asheton 3/2014

Scott-AshetonMarch 15, 2014 – Scott Asheton (Iggy Pop & the Stooges) was born Scott Randolph Asheton on Aug. 16, 1949, in Washington DC.  After the death of his father, Ronald, a Marine Corps pilot, his mother, Ann, moved the family to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He co-formed the Stooges in 1967, originally the Psychedelic Stooges, along with his older brother Ron Asheton, Dave Alexander and Iggy Pop. The Stooges  began as kind of amateur avant-gardists — “like jazz gone wild,” Iggy Pop once said.  Scott Asheton’s homemade drum set, as his brother recalled it, included a 55-gallon oil drum, timbales and a snare, though no cymbals.

Continue reading Scott Asheton 3/2014

Posted on Leave a comment

Chrissy Amphlett 4/2013

The Divinyls

April 21, 2013 – Chrissy Amphlett was born on October 25, 1959. She grew up in Geelong, Australia as a singer and dancer and left home as a teenager to travel around England, France and Spain where she was imprisoned for three months for singing on the streets.

In 1976, Amphlett played the role of Linda Lips in the R-rated musical Let My People Come. In 1980 back in Australia, Amphlett met Mark McEntee at a concert at the Sydney Opera House in 1980 and they formed Divinyls with Jeremy Paul (Air Supply).

After several years performing in Sydney, they recorded several songs for the film Monkey Grip, in which Amphlett also acted. Amphlett made her film debut in Monkey Grip (1982) in a supporting role as the temperamental lead singer of a rock band. Monkey Grip’s author, Helen Garner, claimed that the film’s director preferred Amphlett in the role of Jane Clifton as “Clifton was neither good looking enough or a good enough singer to play herself.”

Continue reading Chrissy Amphlett 4/2013

Posted on Leave a comment

Willy DeVille 8/2009

romantic punk rocker Willy DevilleAugust 6, 2009 – Willy DeVille was born William Paul Borsey Jr. on  August 25th 1950 in Stamford, Connecticut. The son of a carpenter, he grew up in the working-class Belltown district of Stamford.

DeVille said about Stamford, “It was post-industrial. Everybody worked in factories, you know. Not me. I wouldn’t have that. People from Stamford don’t get too far. That’s a place where you die.” DeVille said about his youthful musical tastes, “I still remember listening to groups like the Drifters. It was like magic, there was drama, and it would hypnotise me.

Continue reading Willy DeVille 8/2009

Posted on Leave a comment

Lux Interior 2/2009

Lux InteriorFebruary 4, 2009 – Lux Interior (The Cramps) was born Erick Lee Purchaser in Stowe, Ohio on October 21st 1946.

He met his wife Kristy Wallace, better known as Poison Ivy, a.k.a. Ivy Rorschach, in Sacramento in 1972, when he and a friend picked her up when she was hitchhiking. The two shared a love for surf rock, shamanism, rockabilly, B-movies and other bits of so-called “trash culture.”

Lux Interior’s name came “from an old car commercial”, having previously flirted with the names Vip Vop and Raven Beauty, while his wife’s name change was inspired by “a vision she received in a dream”.

Continue reading Lux Interior 2/2009

Posted on Leave a comment

Johnny Ramone 9/2004

Johnny_Ramone_-_Hollywood_Forever_Cemetery_1September 15, 2004 – Johnny Ramone was born John William Cummings on October 8, 1948 and died of prostrate cancer at age 55. He was the rhythm guitarist, songwriter for the Ramones, a New York rock band that held Rock and Roll Hall of Fame status.

A rebel in a rebel’s world, Johnny was raised Queens, N.Y., where as a teenager, he played in a band called the Tangerine Puppets with future Ramones drummer Tamás Erdélyi aka Tommy Ramone. Influenced by the likes of the Stooges and MC5, in 1974 he co-founded “The Ramones”, often regarded as the first punk rock group, with Tommy Ramone, Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone. They went on to perform 2,263 concerts, touring virtually nonstop for 22 years. The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement in the US and the UK, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold was the compilation album Ramones Mania.

Continue reading Johnny Ramone 9/2004

Posted on Leave a comment

Joe Strummer 12/2002

Joe StrummerDecember 22, 2002 – Joe Strummer (The Clash)was born John Graham Mellor on August 21, 1952 in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a British diplomat, the family spent much time moving from place to place, and Strummer spent parts of his early childhood in Cairo Egypt, Mexico City, and Bonn Germany.

At the age of 9, Strummer and his older brother David, 10, began boarding at the City of London Freemen’s School in Surrey. Strummer rarely saw his parents during the next seven years.

“At the age of nine I had to say good-bye to them because they went abroad to Africa or something. I went to boarding school and only saw them once a year after that – the Government paid for me to see my parents once a year. I was left on my own, and went to this school where thick rich people sent their thick rich kids. Another perk of my father’s job – it was a job with a lot of perks – all the fees were paid by the Government.”

Continue reading Joe Strummer 12/2002

Posted on Leave a comment

Dee Dee Ramone 6/2002

dee-dee-ramoneJune 5, 2002 – Dee Dee Ramone (the Ramones) was born Douglas Glenn Colvin on September 18, 1951 in Fort Lee, Virginia. While an infant his family relocated to Berlin, Germany, due to his father’s military service. His father’s military career also required the family to relocate frequently. These frequent moves caused Dee Dee to have a lonely childhood with few real friends. His parents separated during his early teens, and he remained in Berlin until the age of 15, when he, along with his mother and sister Beverley, moved to the Forest Hills section of New York City, in order to escape Dee Dee’s alcoholic father.

Soon after he met John Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi and together they formed The Ramones.

Continue reading Dee Dee Ramone 6/2002

Posted on Leave a comment

Layne Staley 4/2002

Layne StaleyApril 5, 2002 – Layne Staley (Alice n’ Chains) was born on August 22, 1967 in Kirkland, WA. Staley showed musical talent at an early age, and took up the drums at age 12. Staley approached music through his parents’ collection, listening to Black Sabbath (regarded by him as his first influence) and Deep Purple. But upon joining garage bands and discovering rock music as a teenager Staley switched his interest in drumming to singing.

In 1984, Staley joined a group of Shorewood High students in a band called Sleze, which also featured future members of The Dehumanizers and Second Coming. In 1986, as Sleze morphed into Alice N’ Chains, a band which Staley said “dressed in drag and played speed metal,” they performed around the Seattle area playing Slayer and Armored Saint covers.

Continue reading Layne Staley 4/2002

Posted on Leave a comment

Joey Ramone 4/2001

Joey RamoneApril 15, 2001 – Joey Ramone was born Jeffry Ross Hyman on May 19th 1951 in Forest Hills, Queens, New York where he had a dysfunctional upbringing, but in 1974, he co-founded the punk rock band Ramones with friends John Cummings and Douglas Colvin.

All three adopted stage names using “Ramone” as their stage surname. Cummings became Johnny Ramone, and Colvin became Dee Dee Ramone, with Jeffry adopted the name Joey Ramone. The name Ramone stems from the fact that x-Beatle Paul McCartney used to check into hotels under the pseudonym “Paul Ramon” while touring.

Joey initially served as the group’s drummer and Dee Dee was the original vocalist. However, Dee Dee proved to be unsuited for the lead vocals so they switched positions. Even though The Ramones had enormous influence on the punk rock movement in the US, they achieved only minor commercial success, their only certified gold record was the compilation album Ramones Mania. In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played their final show and then disbanded.

Continue reading Joey Ramone 4/2001

Posted on 1 Comment

Ian Dury 3/2000

ian duryMarch 27, 2000 – Ian Dury was born in London on May 12th 1942.

At the age of seven, he contracted polio during the 1949 polio epidemic. In 1964 he studied art at the Royal College of Art under British artist Peter Blake, and from 1967 he taught art at various colleges in the south of UK.

Ian formed the band Kilburn & the High Roads in November 1970, he was vocalist and lyricist, co-writing with pianist Russell Hardy. But Ian rose to fame later in the 1970s, during the Punk and New Wave era of rock music, as founder, frontman and lead singer of the British band Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who were amongst the most important groups of the New Wave era in the UK.

Continue reading Ian Dury 3/2000

Posted on Leave a comment

Wendy Williams 4/1998

wendy-o-williamsApril 6, 1998 – Wendy Williams was born on May 28, 1949 in Webster, New York. She studied clarinet at the Community Music School program of the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and later was a clarinetist in her high school’s concert band. At the age of six, she appeared tap-dancing on the Howdy Doody show as a member of the “Peanut Gallery”.

She had her first run-in with the law at the age of 15, when she was arrested for sun bathing nude. Williams attended R. L. Thomas High School in Webster at least partway through the tenth grade, but left school before graduating. Her schoolmates and teachers recalled Williams as a “shy and pretty girl, an average student who played in the junior high band, paid attention to her hair and clothes, and who spoke so softly you had to lean toward her to hear her.

Continue reading Wendy Williams 4/1998

Posted on Leave a comment

Dennes Boon 12/1985

dennes boon - the minutemenDecember 22, 1985 – Dennes Boon or “D” Boon (Minutemen) was born on April 1, 1958 in San Pedro, California and was best known as the guitarist and vocalist of the American punk rock trio Minutemen. In 1985 he was killed in a traffic crash at the age of 27.

His father, a navy veteran, worked installing radios in Buick cars, and the Boons lived in former World War II barracks that had been converted into public housing. As a teenager, Boon began painting and signed his works “D. Boon”, partly because “D” was his slang for cannabis, partly after Daniel Boone, but mostly because it was similar to E. Bloom, Blue Öyster Cult’s vocalist and guitarist. Continue reading Dennes Boon 12/1985