Free The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars by Jeremy Simmonds Page A

sub-Woody Guthrie style around the country between jobs. Having been excused military service during the war due to his various ailments, Drake worked the shipyards, eventually taking a peacetime job as a truck driver, which prompted his best-known song, the curious ‘Transfusion’ (1956) – a dark tune telling of a trucker who in his career had caused countless accidents and now sought assistance from the local blood bank as he lay on his death bed.
    Drake was largely inspired by the fifties Bay Area broadcaster Red Blanchard, a DJ who had cut an album or two of mildly comic novelties with a teenage audience in mind. Changing his name to Nervous Norvus – this time in homage to one of Blanchard’s tunes – Drake, now in his forties, began peddling his somewhat derivative songs like pizza, i.e., one for seven bucks, two for eleven, etc. It was only once he’d hit upon the genuinely different ‘Transfusion’ that folk began to take notice. After some delay, the record – replete with ‘crashes’ and ‘skids’ inserted by Blanchard – unexpectedly made the US Top Ten, its follow-up ‘Ape Call’ further confounding critics by also making the Billboard chart a couple of months later. Briefly, ‘Norvus Fever’ was in (or at least on) the air. Although his success meant he was now able to take up music full-time, Drake’s reluctance to perform the songs publicly would foreshorten his moment in the spotlight.
    Various stories about Drake’s life suggest a solitary ‘mummy’s boy’ type who’d never had a relationship (odd, given that he had supposedly been married in 1942) and who drank himself to a premature death. The latter is, however, fairly likely: Drake died from cirrhosis of the liver at Almeida County Hospital. In good ‘Transfusion’ style, he donated his body to the University of California’s anatomy department.
    Wednesday 31
    Alexandra Nebedov
    (Doris Nebedov - Heydekrug, Prussia (Lithuania), 19 May 1942)

    Sensibly shedding her given name, Alexandra Nebedov was something of a prodigy – a gifted artist, actress, dancer and singer, as well as being fluent in several languages. The latter skills proved significant as she scored hit records in French, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew, her best-known English-language song being 1967’s ‘Golden Earrings’. Nebedov was to prove a popular draw in France: within two years of being discovered she had recorded with MOR stars Gilbert Bécaud and Yves Montand. She settled, however, in Munich with her young son.
    Constantly on tour, Nebedov was taking a rare vacation in Schleswig-Holstein with her family when her and her mother’s lives were ended by a collision with a truck they were attempting to pass in her Mercedes. What seemed like a tragic and un-avoidable accident was soon shrouded in mystery: it transpired that Nebedov had taken out life insurance that same week and that her son – who survived the crash – had had a year’s schooling pre-paid. The case was reopened in 2004, when reports emerged that the singer might have committed suicide because it had become known that her then-current lover, Pierre Lafaire, had been a US spy.
    AUGUST
    Monday 5
    Luther Perkins
    (Tennessee, 8 January 1928)
    The Tennessee Two

    Guitar-pickin’ Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant formed The Tennessee Two, a struggling but cheery country duo that moonlighted in Memphis bars and cathouses while holding down motor-sales jobs by day. Their major break came along in the shape of showroom-colleague Roy Cash’s younger brother Johnny, who fronted their act. The group was aware of its musical shortcomings, but Sam Phillips at Sun Records could hear a whole new sound in their apparent sparseness. Thus, throughout the late fifties and early sixties, as Johnny Cash’s reputation grew, Perkins and the band – latterly augmented by (unrelated) Carl Perkins – toured the US in Cash’s Plymouth, their genial rough ‘n’ ready style complementary to the