Ever wonder where Jerry Garcia had his ashes scattered? What Kurt Cobain wrote in his suicide note? Or, as I did listening to his final recording of "My Funny Valentine," if Chet Baker simply couldn't take it anymore? A handful of outstanding encyclopedic websites have the answers. They catalog the celebrated lives and tragic, often violent deaths of our favorite pop icons. Today, Dead Man's Curve is just a mouse click away
My hunt for Chet facts begins at Fuller Up: The Dead Musician Directory. The front page hotbutton for Bobby Fuller (whose post-Holly, pre-Clash "I Fought The Law" hit the Top 10 in 1966) takes me to an entry which sheds light on the site's curious name. Bobby Fuller's death was something straight out of a Tarantino screenplay: circumstances involving an LA crime syndicate, some "mean lookin' dudes" and a young lady named Melody led to the young singer's gruesome murder by "asphyxia through the forced inhalation of gasoline". Others listed with Fuller in the Mysterious Circumstances section include bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rolling Stone Brian Jones and . . . Chet Baker. As befits the category, his obituary is inconclusive. Says he either fell or jumped from an Amsterdam hotel window.
I detour into Fuller Up's "Grim Reaper Updates," where one can "search for the latest late musicians." Recent departures like new waver Ian Dury, jazz great Nat Adderly, mambo king Tito Puente and voodoo rocker Screamin' Jay Hawkins receive their due here. Music samples allow me to listen to Hawkins's "I Put A Spell On You" (immediately, I see Eszter Balint swaying through a dirty kitchen in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise) while reading, in Hawkins's obituary, that the song was later sampled by the Notorious B.I.G. (a prominently dead rapper) and that Screamin' Jay closed the Jarmusch circle by appearing in Mystery Train. Surprisingly, there's nothing here about the ongoing Internet search to locate and identify Hawkins's 57 children.
It's also possible to search Fuller Up by cause of death, be it golfing (Bing Crosby), inhalation of vomit (Bonham, Hendrix, Bon Scott, Tommy Dorsey) or that rock and roll perennial, poor maintenance (too many to mention). I choose one of the grimmest and, perhaps not coincidentally, largest categories: suicides. Here, to my horror, I find a pre-teen crush of mine, once famous for blowing up automobiles, chainsawing guitars and going onstage dressed in nothing but shaving lather. In a poignant tribute by Emma Taylor, I learn that former-Plasmatic Wendy O. Williams had hung up her chainsaw, settled down and become a kinder, gentler animal rehabilitator in Connecticut. And that she blew her brains out in 1998 at the age of 48.
The site's "shameful disclaimer" claims no "accuracy of truth on any of these pages, maybe just that the musicians listed and lauded over throughout this site are in fact dead". Dates and events are reported as "allegedly-thought-of-as-true-but-admittedly- flimsily-researched". Still, with front page updates like Iron Butterfly Mystery Solved, Four Years after Disappearance of Philip Taylor Kramer, site honcho Gordon Polatnick would seem to be running the site with the vigilance of a lifelong and dedicated fan.
My next stop is the Dead Rock Stars Club. This site's motto: "Welcome to the club rock stars are dying to get into". Rock star is defined loosely and applied to pre-rock influences; alongside Elvis, Jimi and Janis, the site honors the seminal jazz, blues and country artists who came and went before. Death notices date back as far 1894, starting with Antoine Joseph Sax, inventor of the saxophone. Oriville Gibson, founder of Gibson guitars, is here, as is Thomas Edison for inventing something called the phonograph. The entries at Dead Rock Stars Club are brief, but some link to lengthy, authoritative artist biographies. (Blind Blake's is so long I download it into a future reading folder.) And its rundown of Year 2000 deaths is exhaustive. Harmonica Fats, Bobby Warren, Q-Don . . . none of them were at Fuller Up. As for Chet Baker, this site doesn't rule out foul play. It says he either fell or was pushed.
Whereas Fuller Up is cheeky and the Dead Rock Stars Club dry as bones, the layout at Death Rock is hood-and-sickle gothic. Sections bear names like the Mausoleum and the Mortuary. There's overlap here, but Death Rock, billed as "Rock's Greatest Deaths and Personal Tragedies," is concise and striking. In the N-R category alone, I find Ricky Nelson (plane crash), Nico (bicycle crash), Notorious B.I.G. (gunned down), Berry Oakley (motorcycle crash), Felix Pappalardi (stabbed by girlfriend) and a dozen others. And with this third stop on my tour, some contradictions come to light. By now I've learned that Jeff Porcaro, drummer for the eighties hit machine Toto, passed on in 1992. Death Rock attributes Porcaro's demise to a "drug-induced heart attack at age 38", whereas at Fuller Up, a quote from Toto keyboardist David Paich refutes the drug rumors. "Jeff died from inhaling poisonous fumes from a dangerous insecticide. He was setting out a barbecue in his garden." Appropriately, the drummer's demise is included alongside various tractor-related tragedies in the Farming & Gardening category.
In the same Death Rock section, a listing for Keith Relf of the sixties supergroup the Yardbirds reports callously that singer Relf died after deciding to play his electric guitar while taking a bubble bath. Here again, Fuller Up seems to have got the facts straight; recent contributions place Relf less spectacularly in his basement studio, where he received a fatal shock from a guitar that wasn't properly earthed. In Death Rock's defense, myths like the bubble bath story have been around as long as rock and roll itself. (Paul is Dead, Elvis Lives et al.) It's hard to be accurate in a field as vast and muddled as pop deaths.
Death Rock fails to mention Chet Baker.
Ping-ponging back to my list of dead musician links, I discover a fascinating site that keeps me virtual-travelling for longer than I'd admit to an eye doctor. While not limited to musicians or even to famous people, the Find A Grave database does provide the interment details of 768 musical greats, from Roy Acuff to Frank Zappa. Now, next time I'm in California, I can drive to Inglewood Park Cemetery already equipped with Chet Baker's precise grave coordinates. (63 Elm, Division C, inside grave.) Then again, if Find A Grave has its way, I may soon be able to pay my respects with a trackball. "We aim to create a comprehensive 'virtual cemetery' where loved ones can visit graves, leave flowers, etc. when they cannot do so in real life," states the site's owner Jim Tipton.
They are already halfway there. Find A Grave's little headstone icons indicate that gravesite photos are posted. Choosing Buddy Holly at random, I find five pretty decent photos of his burial place at the City of Lubbock Cemetery (Buddy's surname is spelled "Holley", as it appeared on his birth certificate) and several more of the Iowa crash site memorial to Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens. I try downloading a picture of Jim Morrison's grave at the Pere Lachaise in Paris. IE 4.0 says uh-uh. Suddenly, all my dead musician links are . . . dead. An omen?
I shut down and move to my CD shelf to pick out some music. Live music. Listening to Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa while reading Kurt Cobain's goodbye to the world was not exactly a pick-me-up. (Though his suicide note is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the tortured soul.) As for Chet Baker? It looks like I'll be renting Let's Get Lost. I saw the documentary years ago, before I was even aware of him. And as I recall, he died during filming. Maybe the film solves the mystery. Maybe it'll remain unsolved.
Still, at the end of the day, I can answer the Jerry Garcia question: he had half his ashes scattered in the Ganges River in India, the other half beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. And I've got a jazzman anecdote so sad it makes you laugh. Late in his life, Chet Baker's boyish good looks had fallen prey to a long heroin addiction. His face was a mask of lines and wrinkles. Fellow trumpeter Jack Sheldon, after being told by Baker that they were laugh lines, remarked, "Nothing's that funny!".
(Special thanks to Gordon Polatnick and Jim Tipton for allowing me to plunder their sites. Photos are © Jim Tipton [Tommy Dorsey], © Wayne Rasmussen [Buddy Holly] and (c) Sean Means [Jim Tipton]. Next time, MSF promises to tune its ears to the living again.)
