Rock History

2007 – Bill Pinkney, the last surviving member of the original Drifters passed away on July 4th from unknown causes. He was 81.

He’s up on the roof now!  God Bless!

2006 – Ronnie James Dio announce he’s reuniting with his old Black Sabbath chums–Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward–as Heaven and Hell.

Bill Miller

2006 – Bill Miller, who played piano with Frank Sinatra’s combo for over 40 years, dies aged 91. You can hear him tickling the ivories on evergreens like “My Way,” “Strangers in the Night” and “Young at Heart.”

2006 – Robert Plant leads the bill for a June 23 benefit concert for Love principal Arthur Lee, who is battling leukemia.

2005 – R.E.M. reunite with drummer Bill Berry at a roadie’s wedding, and play an 8-song set to the crowd at Kingpins Bowl and Brew in Athens, Ga. Berry left the band in 1997.

2005 – Marc Cohn survived being shot in the head during an attempted car jacking as he left a concert in Denver, Colorado. Cohn was struck in the temple by the bullet but it did not penetrate his skull. Police said a man tried to commandeer Cohn’s tour van as it left after a show, the attacker was fleeing police after trying to pay a hotel bill with a stolen credit card.

2005 – Onstage in Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen takes a stand against hunger by donating all of the proceeds from a tour rehearsal show to World Hunger Year (WHY), which was co-founded in 1975 by late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin and Bill Ayres.

2005 – Danny Sugerman, longtime manager of the Doors, dies in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer. He is 50.

Daniel Stephen Sugerman (aka Danny; October 11, 1954 – January 5, 2005) was the second manager of the Los Angeles based rock band The Doors, and wrote several books about Jim Morrison and The Doors, including No One Here Gets Out Alive co-authored with Jerry Hopkins, and the autobiography Wonderland Avenue. Sugerman replaced the original Doors manager, Bill Siddons, shortly after Morrison’s death in 1971. He helped film director Oliver Stone with the production of the 1991 movie The Doors.

Sugerman began working with The Doors when he was 12 years old, starting with answering their fan mail. As stated by The Doors’ drummer John Densmore, Danny was “the manager and driving force behind The Doors” who “guided our career for over 30 years”. He lived his life keeping the legacy of The Doors alive.

Sugerman also managed Iggy Pop, and produced his song “Repo Man.” He also wrote Appetite For Destruction: The Days of Guns ‘N Roses in 1991.

Sugerman was married to the former Fawn Hall of Iran-Contra fame. They briefly met MP3.com cofounder Rod Underhill while Hall was employed as an administrative assistant at the San Diego headquarters of the original MP3.com. Underhill, the founding Music Director of MP3.com, stated that “Sugerman was very interesting. He had appeared to go out of his way to appear visually like Jim Morrison. Same type of haircut, similar clothing. The similarity was uncanny.”

Sugerman was interested in working out a distribution deal with MP3.com for a number of live Doors recordings that were yet unreleased. No deal was forthcoming, and Sugerman later determined that it would be practical to offer the recordings on CD to fans via the Doors’ own official website.

Sugerman was a recovering heroin addict who found solace in Buddhism. He died in 2005 after a prolonged struggle with lung cancer due to years of smoking, and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

From:Rhino.

Danny Sugerman Dead at 50

Danny Sugerman, who first saw The Doors in concert in 1967 and landed a job at their West Hollywood office answering fan mail, eventually becoming the group’s manager, died last night, at the age of 50, after a long struggle with lung cancer. Born in L.A. in 1954, Sugerman attended Westchester High School and immediately became involved with The Doors. He co-wrote the 1981 N.Y. Times best-selling Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, with Jerry Hopkins, then followed up with the autobiographical Wonderland Avenue and books on Guns N’ Roses and The Doors. Sugerman also consulted Oliver Stone on his 1990 movie The Doors, which starred Val Kilmer as Morrison. Danny had been co-managing The Doors with Jeff Jampol and The Firm.

Said John Densmore, The Doors drummer, “Throughout his time with us that stretched from the 14-year-old kid who Jim Morrison suggested we hire to do our scrapbook, up until his passing on January 5th 2005, at age 50, Danny Sugerman has been the manager and driving force behind The Doors. He wrote a New York Times bestseller about the band and guided our career for over 30 years. I was with Danny a couple of hours before he passed, he knew he was going, and I only hope that when my time comes, I face it with as much courage and dignity as Danny did. He crossed over as a Bhodi Sattva.”

Sugerman is survived by a brother, Dr. Joseph, sister, Nan, and wife, the former Fawn Hall. A recovering addict, he was active with organizations like the Drug Policy Foundation, Musicians Assistance Program and NARAS’ MusiCares Foundation.

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2004 – Black Sabbath remove images from a film that plays during their Ozzfest set associating George W. Bush with Hitler after drummer Bill Ward posts his disapproval on his Web site.

2004 – A segment of Interstate 85 is declared “The Alan Jackson Highway” during a ceremony in the artist’s hometown, Newnan, Ga. The bill renaming the stretch of roadway between Palmetto and Highway 154, about an hour southwest of Atlanta, was introduced the previous fall and was subsequently signed by Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue.

Rascal Flatts

2004 – Rascal Flatts kicks off its tour in Kalamazoo, Mich., without Chris Cagle. Cagle is pulled off of the bill due to “extreme vocal rest” ordered by his doctor. The country artist is ordered to refrain from singing and speaking through June 1, 2004 after being diagnosed as having a polyp, an unspecified lesion, a cyst and a granuloma on his vocal chords.

2004 – James Lawrence, guitarist with Hope of the States, is found hanged at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios near Bath, where the UK art rockers were finishing work on their debut album. He was 26.

HOPE OF the States, for whom James Lawrence played guitar, was one of a new generation of British bands rekindling a sort of musical ambition reminiscent of the previously discredited prog-rock of the early 1970s, combined with the political, passionate commitment of punk.

Inspired by a series of late 1990s sonic adventurers – the doomy grandeur of Radiohead and Spiritualised, the neo-psychedelia of America’s Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, and the haunting, post- rock political diatribes of Canada’s Godspeed You Black Emperor! – the band joined young compatriots like Elbow and Muse in trying to throw off Britpop’s musically retrograde legacy. As their singer Sam Herlihy noted:

At the tail-end of Britpop . . . there was a weird atmosphere of people grasping at straws without having anything to believe. I’d like to think that maybe [our records] will be the start of something else. A kickstart.

Jimmi Lawrence was born in Chichester in 1977 and attended Chichester High School for Boys, where he met Herlihy and Ant Theaker. The three of them went on to form the early core of Hope of the States, with the current line-up established in 2002. The bands’s promise was apparent when they self-released the slow-building, eight- minute single “Black Dollar Bills”. Sony signed them on the strength of it in 2003, after a fierce bidding war. The major-label reissue of “Black Dollar Bills” gained minor notoriety when its video was banned by MTV2 during the second Gulf War, for “politically inappropriate”, animated images of B52 bombers.

Military uniforms and apocalyptic footage of devastated wastelands also featured in their intense live shows, in which Lawrence’s guitar interweaved with organs and violin.

When their second single, “Enemies; Friends” entered the Top Thirty last October, leading to a Top of the Pops appearance, their momentum was quietly maintained. Ken Thomas, producer of the atmospheric Icelanders Sigur Ros, collaborated on their debut album, which was recorded in locations typically chosen to avoid, in Herlihy’s words, the “ghosts” of earlier groups: a freezing Russian bunker, an isolated Irish farmhouse, and Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios, near Bath. The album was due to be completed next week, and released in the spring, with a single and gig both scheduled for February. In a feature in last week’s NME, which anticipated “one of the albums of 2004″, Herlihy talked buoyantly of the band’s prospects:

The isolation is really good . . . This might be the only record we’ll ever make, so we wanted to put a bit of romance into it, some Napoleonic folly.

Lawrence apparently committed suicide at Real World studios early on Thursday morning.

James Lawrence, guitarist: born Chichester, West Sussex 25 January 1977; died Box, Wiltshire 15 January 2004.

Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
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