Who is the most tragic figure in rock and roll history?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
my first thought is Jimi Hendrix, for all that unexplored potential. what could he have brought to music with even 10 more good years?
otoh, “tragic” in the classical sense really requires a rise and fall, not just a rise cut short.
David Crosby gives us a fine example of rise, fall, and redemption. But a classical tragic hero just falls. Can’t think of a good rock example right now.
Janis
Recordings never captured her stage magic. Possibly because live it was easier to overlook that the band was merely okay.
Janis was the first one to come to mind for me also. Growing up in Texas was tough for her, and she meant it when she sang the blues. Strong but also very vulnerable. Tragic short life.
Fascinating question.
I’m going to go with Kurt Cobain, because the same inner forces that were his genius also led directly to his death.
Cobain, Buddy Holly, and Jimi Hendrix are all up there for the lost contributions they might have made with longer lives.
John Lennon, for being murdered as the price for his fame and accomplishment.
“Honorable” mention: Syd Barrett, whose vision led to both madness and one of the greatest rock bands ever, without him.
No mention of Danny Whitten? 🙁
Compelling question.. particularly since I just burned thru Patti Smith’s incredible memoir, “Just Kids”. She was around, knew great, tragic figures like Janis Joplin, Jim Carroll, etc.
For me it’s John Lennon, my second-fav Beatle after George. I loved John’s (and Yoko’s) activism, the fact they helped fuel the protests which ended the Vietnam “police action”.
John being taken from us was particularly tragic since he had gotten back with Yoko, they had a son together, and he had just completed a great new album.. preparing to go on tour.
A close second would be Syd Barrett, of early Pink Floyd fame.
Just Kids is an amazing read. Highly recommended.
I’m thinking either Kurt Cobain or Sid Vicious. A classic tragic hero falls due to his own flaws, which makes Vicious a better choice.
My heart breaks for Pete Ham of Badfinger. Robbed blind by crooked management he hung himself right at the peak of artistic output. Then a few years later his bandmate Tom Evans took his own life via the same method.
I did not know of these suicides. Jeez, that’s pretty tragic, OK.
Buddy Holly is the politically correct answer.
Joplin and Hendrix are safe too. If you are younger go with kobain.
I go with Roy Buchanan who spent years trying to make a decent living while being considered by his peers as the best guitarist on the planet. Drunk and despondent that he could not support his wife and kids he hanged himself in a jail cell.
Tim Buckley and Stevie Ray Vaughn are tied for second
Jeff Buckley (son of Tim) was another sad story.
Ok–I can’t even–this just kills me.
Still touching after all these years:
Freddy Mercury comes to mind first for me. One of a long list of possibilities that I actually heard perform live.
::
Great suggestion. Another one whose success – as one of the only openly gay rock musicians of his time (at least when he started) – also defined his death. And his cultural and musical influence is hugely underrated.
Brenda Lee.
I don’t know that Alex Chilton should make the finals, but he definitely deserves mention.
My vote goes to Elliott Smith.
Seconded on Elliott. I’d put the Buckleys in there too.
The Roy Buchanan story that Andrew Longman cited takes the cake for me, though. I never knew that one.
I thought of Chilton as well, mainly because I so favored his Big Star work. # 1 Record and Radio City- my God, those were awesome LP’s!
After that, well, I recall Jeff Tweedy from Wilco talking about one of his band’s most extreme deconstructions of their pop songs. A generally accurate paraphrase of Tweedy: “We wrote the songs, and we can fuck them up however we want to.”
Alex Chilton started fucking up his songs big-time after 1974. In his actions and statements, he seemed to be struggling with mental health issues that caused him problems in his art and his life.
You can even hear it a bit in this song, “O My Soul”, from the opening of Radio City,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbnekl_rE-8
which I’m listening to with great pleasure as I write. It’s a great, showy romp, but you can hear the beginnings of things falling apart in the way it’s performed. At this level, though, the unpredictable nature that brings to the performance makes it extremely exciting. It’s fun.
I’ll put in a plug for the great Mike Bloomfield, Dylan’s guitarist on Highway 61 Revisited.
Dylan made him famous but before that he played with Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters. He was a kid and they would let him sit with them on stage and jam.
Then there is Brian Jones.
Yeah. Brian Jones certainly qualifies as one of the iconic rock burn-out-rather-than-fade-aways. But at least he was fortunate enough to make a big contribution to music via his productive years with the Stones.
It seems like Bloomfield’s immense talent kind of dissipated before he got the chance to make more than a couple of great records.
Joe Wilder.
You dunno who he is, right?
Precisely.
I could list a hundred or more amazingly gifted musicians. (And this is just a primarily NYC-centric view of the whole thing.)
And hundreds more.
You might “recognize” the names of a few of these gifted musicians, but I can almost guarantee that you couldn’t recognize their music aurally because you were not bombarded with it as you were…and I use the term very loosely here…growing up.
Why not?
Because the corporate-owned media realized early on that they could make infinitely more money selling second-rate musicians like Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones and God only knows how many other ripoff assholes to the children of the white middle class…because that’s where the money was….than they could make selling the real deal to said money pit.
So these great musicians and so many more…Jon Hendricks, Clark Terry, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Holman, Annie Ross, the list is almost endless…were forced to become at least part-time functionaries of the corporate media in order to make enough money to pay the bills.
These people were the real losers in the corporate rock-and-roll wars that continue to this day under other brands.
No…I take that back.
You fools were the greatest losers.
You lost your real culture and the U.S.A. of today is the result.
Elvis was a fake bluesman. The Rolling Stones too, and how many others?
Obama is a fake leftist.
The Elvis of contemporary politics.
You been sold a bill of goods. You still think Rolling Stone knows something about music!!!???
Unbelievable.
Wake the fuck up.
Go listen to Nina Simone or Clifford Brown or Gil Evans and then…wake the fuck up!!!
Whadda buncha maroons.
AG
Help me out, Arthur. What is the tragedy of Joe Wilder’s life or career? Isn’t he still living?
Do you mean that tragedy is that he isn’t more well known or richer or what?
Don’t be foolish, Booman. Joe is still not only living, but communicating his knowledge and experience to yet another generation of serious young musicians, almost all of whom will…just as have Joe and those who have modeled themselves after him and his peers…be forced to make painful decisions about their musical honesty versus making enough money to live a line-level acceptable life in an economic sense. You know…like enough money to have an acceptable place to live, wealth enough to educate their children and support themselves as they get older. Give me a fucking break!!!
Meanwhile jivesass, no-playing motherfuckers like…ohhhhh, name ’em if you have the sense to know the difference…make millions as part of the cultural sinkhole that we
not solaughingly call “the mass media” make huge amounts of money for their total lack of musical achievement and the culture in general tanks straight down the old cultural toilet in a shitstorm of Justin Beibers and the like.Wake the fuck up, Booman. Ain ‘t shit happening in this system except mind-control at the smallest expenditure of money possible to run the game.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
I put up with your shit, Arthur, specifically because of the solidarity I feel for you as a struggling artist. I know what you do and how talented you are and how poorly compensated you have been. As for your political ranting, my agreement is very much on the big picture and rarely on the fine details. I give you credit for largely understanding the big game I am playing and for calling me on some of finer details. I don’t mind. You play the outside game, and I’ll play the inside game. We all have our roles.
But your insults do grow tiresome. It amounts to respect unreciprocated. By all means, demand that I live up to the meaning of my creed, but don’t pretend that I am not struggling even more than you are. Because, that is not true.
I do not know how hard “you are struggling,” Booman. I do my job in this world and you do yours. But what I am laying on you is not “shit.” It is the inside game.
If one has a bad inside game the outside game inevitably suffers.
God lives in the details.
Bet on it.
Insults?
An insistence that you wake the fuck up to the massive failures of the system that you have apparently…on the plentiful evidence of your daily posts…accepted as the best possible system available to us?
That’s not an insult.
It’s a prayer.
AG
It’s a pretty damn condescending prayer, then. On your knees whan you deliver that prayer, are you, AG? Or is that prayer delivered while standing behind the pulpit you created for yourself?
How many are flocking to your congregation and joining in your particular form of prayer? Our opposition has megachurches. You don’t build for the big changes you and I and BooMan fervently want by insulting nearly everyone who shares your form of protestant faith.
The details of your messages do specific harm to your professed message.
They completely disregard how the message will be perceived and cause them to be disregarded.
Or put another way you come off as an angry pompous ass even if that is not your intent.
Jus’ Saying’
Amen.
It’s probably too late for anyone to read this thread, but I’m too riled up not to post this.
Arther, you are just flat wrong on your assessment of pop music. I am happy you love jazz, and I share that sentiment. Mingus is among my favorites, as is Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Monk. Saxophone Colosus is my favorite album, as Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is one of my go to songs. If you wanted to discuss the different Miles Davis Quintets in detail, and how his change to fusion is both brilliant and tragic, we could do that.
However, shitting on the Rolling Stones because they are part of a system you don’t like is childish and naive. I love the Rolling Stones as much as I love jazz, as well as much as I love punk and electronic and other music. I am equally sad that society is bombarded with commercial music rather than pure art, but that doesn’t mean art cannot coexist with commercial music. The Rolling Stones are great because they made great art that also made fortune and appeals to many people. Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers & Exile On Main Street is a masterful statement on American music and may we represent millions of people’s entry into Robert Johnson and the blues.
Its not all about mind control, good music is good music. Wake the fuck up to that.
I have to agree with Arthurs take on Rock and Roll here. The tragedy is that the public has been happy to slurp down the really terrible commercial crap thats been spoonfed to them for the last 50 years. Our overlords have been busy lowering our intelligence in so many ways, including musically. The brilliant artists in the polluted sea of American rock and roll are small scattered islands. Now I used to enjoy a nice tasty hunk of commercial crap from time to time as much as the next person; but these days my taste for it has waned considerably. Must be getting old. Time to go put on some Django.
Yes indeed.
Django Reinhardt.
Had he lived today in the U.S.A. he would…if he didn’t cop out in order to live a mainstream-level life….have been working $30 gigs in tourist-trap midtown NYC dives.
Or worse.
Bet on it.
AG
I’ll see your Joe Wilder and call you a Bartók (who was a real leftist, if not exactly like Abbie Lincoln, and served as Commissar of Music in the Hungarian Soviet Republic for the few months in 1919 during which that country existed). Are you saying Wilder because he participated in rock history as a session musician getting crap money from singers who were not as they say fit to lick his boots? No doubt he has had his struggles, but it’s been a very long life filled with wonderful music appreciated by the few who were able to appreciate it. Better than being as rich as Elvis.
I know nothing about his personal life, family, finances or any personal tragedy. But the guy is in his 90’s, and he played with everyone, and I mean everyone you could really have wanted to play with. From the outside, he seems to have lived a quite long and fulfilling life.
Exactly–but the other question would be how do you tie him in with rock and roll history?
How do I tie him in with rock and roll history?
Because “rock ‘n’ roll” …corporate bullshit music on every level imaginable…eventually robbed him (and many others) of the opportunity to not only live a life where they could make a living playing real music as opposed to totally jive commercial crap but robbed the culture itself of the nourishment it could have gained from their mainstream input.
That’s how.
Lose/lose.
Bet on it.
AG
You know, I gotta say that it sucks that a lot of gifted artists of all types (musicians, painters, poets, writers, ad nauseam) are not valued in a capitalist society, and have to either give up their art or make dreck or barely scrap by with their integrity intact and cat food for dinner. It’s a shame. And yeah, I know a ton of musicians – and writers – who were talented but never famous, and led tragic lives due to their inability to pursue their passion and find an audience.
But you know what? It also sucks that some people sneer at – pick a random example – musicians who make music that isn’t all that technically proficient or insightful, but brings joy to millions of people. How is that a bad thing? Why does one need to preclude the other?
The question was about rock musicians. You don’t like rock music. We get it. Wait for a question that concerns something where you have an opinion, rather than a sneer.
I do like “rock music,” Geov.
I totally ascribe to Duke Ellington’s take on the matter.
Buffalo Springfield?
The Band? (I could name many others.)
Good music.
The Rolling Stones?
The Grateful Dead?
Bad music.
It’s as simple as that.
Promote “good music”…music that is in good tune and time, music that has a certain intelligence to it on any number of levels…and the culture thrives. Promote bullshit music and you get a bullshit culture.
The Greeks knew.
“When the mode of the music is changed the walls of the city shake” said Plato through Pythagoras.
Bet on it.
AG
Joe, Bartók, Travis Jenkins, Sam Brown, Roland Hanna…I could give you a couple of hundred of names just off the top of my head because I have lived in the midst of that musical culture since the mid-’60s…made the best of a bad scene because the alternative (giving up the massive happiness of making real music at a very high level w/their peers even once or twice a week in small venues) was totally unacceptable.
And the culture suffered the equivalent to an almost fatal chokehold from the lack of real musical input.
You doubt this?
Not much more I can say except…
Wake the fuck up.
Please.
Thank you and goodnight.
Later…
AG
So…Charlie Parker doesn’t count? Billie Holiday? Bessie Smith? I could keep going too, but it would amount to just another opinionated list.
That, to me, is the real fucking crime: the sheer arrogance of the canon, in any genre. Of course, the sheer arrogance of “bbbbut you left out brilliant artist X” is just as oppressive.
Not to mention the sheer arrogance of assuming a love of so-called baser music precludes appreciation or (gasp) love of higher forms.
This stuff has always and will always be subjective. It’s supposed to be fun. Attaching “authority” or “authenticity” to any of it hastens its death.
Or what about Mozart?
Orpheus got a raw deal too.
Bird? Bille? Bessie Smith?
First of all…you’re living in the past.
Equivalent talents now?
They couldn’t even pass an audition for American Idol now. Bet on it.
Too idiosyncratic and too dependent on the live accompaniment of their peers.
The culture is fatally compromised now, keirdubois. Nothing new (or even real) is allowed in.
Lissen up.
The blues…the real shit…is about as “base” as music gets. I love it dearly, myself, and I not only listen to it regularly but can play it with the rootiest best of the best. Same with a number of others of real “roots” musics. You ain’t gonna hear any of that real shit on American Idol either. Just bullshit blues posing. They got the notes but not the meaning.
Bet on that as well.
AG
Well…we’re all living in the past, Arthur–because the past ain’t past. I know you know this. Who do we study to emulate? Who do we discard to innovate? You say “living in the past” like it’s some kind of debilitating disease. “Living in the past” is just the long way of saying “living.”
As for equivalent talents now, well, they’re measured on a different scale. I know you know this, and you know it’s gotta be a sliding scale because, what–are we saying everyone’s gotta play like Blind Lemon Jefferson or else they’re posers? Sing like Billie or go home, baby? Get stuck on junk and quit cold-turkey to be as badass as Miles?
Throw anyone up against the creative giants of yesteryear and they will always fail. I won’t name today’s names because they’re only my opinion, and what’s that worth? A hobbyist bass player who’s forgotten how to read music? “Real” musicians laugh at the music I love, but you can’t eat piety, now can you? The smartest people balancing on the tight-rope of art and commerce at the moment surely know this, and they ain’t into necrophilia either. The race for authenticity is the death of art. I know you know this.
The only person who really seems to get the joke, and is still laughing all the way to the bank, is Dylan. That dude has been simultaneously one of the most, and least, authentic performers in the last century. Contradiction is balance, after all. He was just smart enough to realize what was happening, and it took decades turn his ship around in time to get rolling again, but he did–after a fashion–and now he makes a good living playing “pre-Dylan” music, and at 71 to boot.
And hey, I’ll even allow that the culture is fatally compromised, sure–but only on one level. There’s plenty of room for everyone to make new and real art–“the beat is not a dot to land upon, but a circle to land within” after all–but there’s no more room than there ever was for anyone to make a living at it without some kind of compromise. I know you know this. You’ve lived it.
The kid who’s compelled to create above all else is just as flawed or doomed or brilliant as Van Gogh or Bird or any other great dead human. The fact that this person lives in 2013 instead of 1913 or 1813 matters not. They and their work will transcend this age in ways you and I will never realize. I know you know this.
And if I know you know all this–which is a given, since you’ve seen much more of life, the universe and everything than I have–why should I bother to say anything at all? Don’t I know my place? Why resist the eminent wisdom of the Experienced? Because all this silliness about who’s awake and who’s asleep is a red herring.
We are all in varying states of both.
Nighty-night.
The way Dylan has brilliantly deconstructed and intentionally fucked with the exchanges between musical artists, journalists and their public has been another entertaining, valuable, lasting work of art.
I used the word “talents,” keirdubois. Equivalent talents. I didn’t say “people like Blind lemon Jefferson, Billie Holiday or Miles Davis.” People whose talent and (at least potential) achievement level is equivalent to that of those people. And I am not living in the past, I am in constant, almost daily contact in NYC with musicians whose “talent level” bumps right up on the talent levels of the giants of the past. People in their 20s and 30s and also people older than that. I am not comparing them to those past giants, so they cannot fall short. They simply have no avenues available to them that they can travel to realize those talents in the way that people had before the complete corporate, PermaGov takeover of the culture. The culture is now simply a massive wall of propaganda. Nothing more and nothing less. Our “stars” are just those with the most propagandist talents…talents that can be used by the corporations to shore up the ever-thickening media wall even further.
And…I am also saying that eventually this will not continue to work. That the very falseness implicit in such a structure will bring it down, that new blood and new ideas must be included in a culture for it to remain viable.
Kinda like a cultural Paul Revere.
Everybody gotta do something with their life, right?
Me too.
So it goes.
AG
Well ok then. Thanks for being patient with me & elaborating.
The “musicians” from Milli Vanilli. 😀
Girl you know it’s true.
Music pioneer. First AA to have his own label. Child drowned. Was shot by a hooker at the age of 33.
Still shocked that a biopic has not been made of his life after all of these years.
Great minds. Look at the time stamps.
hasn’t been made of his life yet. Anthony Mackie would be great in the role
If we are going to expand it beyond rock n roll we won’t be able to pick just the most tragic figure.
I got to mention this guy.
After Janis’s desperate life – Richard Manuel’s suicide at age 43 while on tour seems especially tragic to me.
I would probably argue John Lennon because of his transcendency. However Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain are also good candidates.
You could also argue for someone like Nick Drake. Or going in a completely different direction, Bob Marley, who was practically a religious figure at the time that he died.
For groups I’d throw in Moby Grape. Their manager Matthew Katz is the biggest douchebag in the history of Rock. (More so than Mike Love, and that’s saying something…)
Kinda surprised no one’s mentioned Jim Morrison. I wouldn’t choose him as the most tragic figure … Holly or Hendrix would get my vote first and frankly I never really “got” the Doors … but he’d be in any top ten list. Especially in the context of Riders on the Storm being his big hit at the time of his death.
I can’t argue with Lennon as a choice. Yes, his best creative years were probably behind him (as they certainly were for Paul and George) but I’m sure I’m not alone in saying no celebrity death had anywhere near as much of an emotional impact on me as did Lennon’s.
Speaking of Lennon and creative output, is there anyone else who, given all the historical context we have now, thinks that the “most valuable” Beatle was actually George Martin?
Morrison’s stage presence early on was huge.
No kidding.
I saw the Doors live at a tiny venue near Berklee in Boston before they hit it big. The gig started with the band warming into their first song….
Then Morrison leaped caterwauling onto stage center and the rocket blasted off. Holy guacamole but that was a wild evening.
All I recall from that summer 1967 concert was that Morrison was hot. And I wasn’t.
Perhaps because tragic seems to imply something unfair. Folks like Morrison, Bon Scott, Keith Moon et al. all died as they had lived.
For me? Richard Manuel.
http://theband.hiof.no/band_members/richard.html
If you include Motown, I’d have to add both Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye. Tammi, a beautiful, incredibly talented artist who died of brain cancer at the age of 24; and Marvin, who, while at home talking to his mother, was shot by his own father a day before his 45th birthday. He had given the gun to his father as a Christmas present.
D. Boon of The Minutemen deserves a mention here, especially given the political nature of his music. For instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDr25zjd4yM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Boon
Also, he doesn’t really get lumped into the “tragic rock stars” category normally because he didn’t die particularly young and didn’t drink himself to death or shoot himself, but Frank Zappa was such a terrible loss. He was as talented as any musisicion to ever walk the earth, and died just as he was realizing some of his grandest ambitions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr3y2MUdq7U
Buddy Holly.
Most of the rest of the alleged “tragedies” cited earlier killed themselves with their own behavior. That is not tragic, that is fucking stupid.
Does Otis Redding count? I guess he’s more properly labeled as a “soul” musician, but some of his tunes (like Tramp) rocked too, or came close to it. So young when he died–having done nothing to court or deserve death–and having already accomplished so much, he sure strikes me as about as tragic a figure as you could ask for. I guess he at least enjoyed the fruits of his success while he was alive.
Ritchie Valens seems tragic too, in the sense of a young talent just getting up and running, also cut down through no particular fault of his own.
Between the two, I’d lean Redding just because he has more of a record, and I personally like his music better, but Valens had almost literally an entire life ahead of him and it’s impossible to guess at what contributions he might have made. He might have flamed out.
I’d have to go with 2….
When the Music died: Holly and Valens leaving behind wives/girlfriends
Jim Croce: left behind a wife and unborn/newborn son
Since I’m picking on plane crashes, I’ll quote ‘Con-Air’….”Define ‘Irony’–bunch of idiots on a plane dancing around to a song by a group that died in a plane crash”
Duane Allman. Died way too young, wasn’t a suicide or drug casualty so you can’t really blame his actions for his death (although Greg did say Duane was a speed demon on that motorcycle, so…)and he was an absolutely amazing and innovative slide guitarist. Only got to make 1 and 1/2 albums with his band. Only got to make one album with Eric Clapton (and there’s a collaboration that really should have had more time – go back and listen to the guitar interplay on “Layla”. Mind blowing.) That such an amazing musician left such a small body of recorded work is my definition of “tragedy.”
Stevie Ray Vaughan. Absolutely amazing talent. Had finally gotten his life together after serious drug and alcohol issues. Was only getting better as a songwriter.
Of the countless Rock n Roll tragedies, those two really stand out to me.