Michael Fowler
I’m in my seventies and have been a fan of rock music since the mid-1960s. I was around for Top 40 AM radio, 3.2 beer, and the first stereo albums. You might say I was born to rock, or at least reached puberty to rock. I’ve heard thousands of records, attended hundreds of concerts, and was among the first in my college dorm to smoke weed. I still listen to a few rock artists, even ones younger than me, though not the ones millennials or Gen Z listen to. My ears don’t pick up on anyone too newfangled.
So naturally I’m saddened to see, as I do almost daily now on my news feed, an obit about the passing of one of my generation’s rockers, sometimes a landmark one, like Keith Richards—oh wait, by some miracle Keith’s still hanging on. Not still going strong, maybe, but hanging on. So are Dylan and McCartney, along with a lot of other near mummies with great health insurance.
But Keith, Bob, and Paul are the exceptions. Judging by the number of obits I see, the rockers of their era and mine are starting to die out. In fact they’re dropping like flies, seemingly at about the same rate that Americans become eligible for Medicare. Hence, a new obit for one of them appears on an almost daily basis.
Now, the obits often don’t specify what took these wonderful musicians from us. All we loyal fans read is that “Rock Star X died at age sixty-eight surrounded by his loving family, with the cause of death not disclosed to the public.” Sometimes the cause of death is “yet to be determined” instead of “not disclosed to the public,” or some other vanilla verbiage, but we know what went down: X died from some combination of old age, STDs, and a drug overdose, with probably the Big C tossed in. It’s bad, yes, but that’s what you get for being old, and the family or publicist or whoever wrote the obit might as well have laid the facts out straight for X’s grieving fans.
What disturbs me most about the recent deluge of obits, though, isn’t that I’m not told exactly how the musicians died, which I already know. It’s that I have no idea who the musicians are, and have never heard their music. When the drummer of the Rolling Stones passed away in 2021, I thought, Wow, Charlie Watts is gone, I practically grew up with him, though he lived in England I have never set foot outside of Ohio. Or when Prince left us in 2016, his greatest hits started playing in my head, even though I had to make up some of the lyrics to “Raspberry Beret.”
My musical knowledge is fairly deep, too. I know about Hubert Sumlin (died 2011) who played guitar for Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and Hal Blaine (died 2019), who played drums for almost every folk-rock band in the 1960s. I know that Laura Nyro (died 1997) had synesthesia, and “saw” music as colors. I even know that Frank Zappa (died 1993) named two of his kids Dweezil and Moon Unit. But deep as it is, my knowledge isn’t deep enough to recognize who most of these current obits are for. It seems like everyone who ever came near a musical instrument in the last sixty-odd years deserves an obit when they die. Either that, or news editors need some tragic filler for those daily feeds.
For example, what am I to make of an obit that reads: Billy Chalone, bassist for the 60s group A Band Named Kenneth whose single “Stones in My Passage” rose to #87 on the pop charts in 1965, has passed away at age sixty-seven in his hometown of Atana, Georgia. Billy, who began his music career as a singer in his church choir, formed A Band Named Kenneth after a brief stint in the army, and composed “Stones in My Passage” with guitarist Russ Rink, his former platoon leader and fellow drone enthusiast. Billy passed on at home surrounded by his adoring family. His cause of death has not been released.
Or this: Jamarr James, lead singer for the band Men Without Pinkies, who composed and sang 1966’s top-100 hit “Kiss Me Bloody,” died Sunday at age seventy-four. James began his music career as a teenager in Riverside, Texas, beating a tambourine on street corners and blowing on a blade of grass at the public library. Later, while working in his uncle’s car shop and playing bar mitzvahs after school, James got together with Otis Fuel, a Texas A&M dropout and forger, to play and write rhythm and blues and klezmer songs, and the two formed the band Men Without Pinkies. Aside from “Kiss Me Bloody,” Jamarr and Fuel wrote the ballad “Love Me, Love My Head Lice,” covered in 1986 by the Courtney Supine Ensemble. After a brief reunion of Men Without Pinkies last year, Jamarr passed away surrounded by friends and family at his home in Riverside. The cause of death has yet to be determined.
Now, I made up those names and bands, in case you didn’t guess, but that’s what the typical musical obit sounds like to me, and my reaction to them is, Who? What? Am I supposed to know these people? I’ve never heard of them or their songs. And given that they’re all about my age and have drug habits and likely cancer, the death notices keep pouring in. I’m sure I’ll be reading a new one every day for years to come, until I fall over dead myself.
I take nothing away from the musicians, of course. Hats off to the people who make music, any kind of music, even if I’ve never heard of them or their tunes. Someone knows them, their bereaved families certainly know them, and I should shut up and show some respect. If I’d made a record in 1965, I’d want to be remembered for it. But still…Who? What? Can it really be that most people around my age once recorded a hit I should recall? It sure seems that way.
Michael Fowler lives and writes in Ohio, USA, and is looking to monetize his old age. Please read his stage play “The Shelter” online at Cosmorama.
Featured photo by Kronos of Keith Richards Live in concert at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, 2003 (Wikimedia Commons)
