The mysterious disappearance (and presumed death) of J. Richey of The Manic Street Preachers in 1995. His car was left on (or right by) a bridge, but there was no note and his body was never found.
As told to me by someone in the industry: after D. Boon of The Minutemen died, a Minutemen fan named Ed Crawford just showed up at the house of, I think, bassist Mike Watt, and wouldn’t leave. Watt kept telling him to get lost, even begging him to give it up, but the guy just wouldn’t leave. But after a couple of days, Watt relented, letting the guy in for an impromptu audition. He was great; he knew all the riffs; he was a formidable musician in his own right; and the superfan was accepted by the two surviving Minutemen in their new band, Firehose.
Surely that doesn’t happen everyday. Drug busts, deaths and disappearances, sure, but a band accepting a mere fan into their ranks? Too weird to be true!
Hutchence’s AEA death was duly noted. It sure was bizarre, though.
What exactly was the Roy Harper thing? Enquiring minds…
Perhaps the odd studio fixation, concommitant with running up huge deficits in self-indulgent perfectionism, wasting years in the process, alienating and even burning out engineers and producers, deserves a mention. There’s a slew of these, but I can think of a few: The Beach Boys’s (actually, Brian Wilson’s) aborted Smile album; My Bloody Valentine’s three years/$500,000 work on their sophomore effort, the classic 1991 album Loveless; and The La’s all got caught up in the studio-perfectionist trap. In the latter case, they took four years to record their classic (and only) album, going through a half-dozen producers in the process. In the end, their exasperated label just put out a version unauthorized by the band, which refused to acknowledge it as their own.
An inefficiently-running band can have a “burn rate” that would rival many a dot-com startup.
And that’s barely half the story with My Bloody Valentine! Reportedly, MBV’s Kevin Shields has spent the past decade or so recording and scrapping multiple albums.
Don’t have a specific cite (yet) but it took place during the No Nukes concert in Madison Square Garden on his 30th birthday in 1979. Bruce and photographer Lynn Goldsmith had broken up recently and he asked her not to take pictures of him at the show. When he saw her in the photographers pit he pulled her up onstage and introduced her to the crowd as his ex-girlfriend.
Didn’t Phil Ramone have quite a few meltdowns in his past? I’ve read of him firing guns in the studio.
How about Ike Turner? Now that was a meltdown of the first order. “I know, I’ll beat Tina for the fun of it…she’s never goin’ anywhere”. What a guy.
How about Lennon either buying into or trying to sell Yoko to the public as a legitimate recording artist? How high was he anyhow?
Someone mentioned Jerry Lee Lewis and his less than perfect marriage to his 13 year old cousin. How about the fact that he’s called “The Killer”? Wasn’t there some suspected foul play with at least one of his other wives that died? Wish I had a cite.
How about the Grateful Dead’s Pigpen? He died of alcohol abuse in 71’ at the age of 27…weighing in just over 100 lbs.
Has anybody mentioned Marvin Gaye’s dad? Shot his boy dead. Pretty serious meltdown in my book.
