Where Are They Buried? (70 page)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the second gate. Drive straight in and, after a hundred yards, you’ll see a pair of granite pillars on the right belonging to the New York Social Club. Joey’s grave is three rows back and five rows to the right of these pillars.

SEPTEMBER 18, 1952 – JUNE 5, 2002

A heroin addict and substance abuser for most of his adult life, Dee Dee left the band in 1989, and his departure signaled the end of an era, if not a style. He pursued an ill-fated rap career under the name Dee Dee King, formed a Ramones cover band, and became a painter. Dee Dee died at 49, the same age as Joey. After he was found in his Hollywood home with various drug paraphernalia, including a syringe, scattered about his kitchen, his death was ruled the result of an accidental drug overdose.

Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin) was buried at Hollywood Forever in Hollywood, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This cemetery is easy to find at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., just west of Highway 101.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn immediately left, then stop in front of the Grass mausoleum, which will be on your right at the next intersection. Dee Dee is buried in front of a tree just to the right of the mausoleum.

OCTOBER 8, 1948 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2004

Describing his youth as a period of glue-sniffing delinquency, Johnny was relegated to menial construction laborer jobs before the Ramones formed. Though his onstage image directly
contrasted with that of a business-minded conservative, he was recognized as the brains of the operation, an organizer and a peacemaker who kept his mates grounded and the band together through its many trials. The Ramones never canceled or arrived late to a show, largely thanks to Johnny’s willpower, and he handled situations requiring professional manners with ease. Bucking his teenage rebel persona even further, he belonged to the National Rifle Association and, upon the Ramones’ induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the lifelong Republican closed the band’s acceptance speech with, “God bless President Bush, and God bless America.”

In a signature knee-level stance with hard-to-imitate machine-gun speed, the rhythmist punished his axe with a primitive chording style that influenced a generation of musicians to strip the pomp and bravado from their sound. “I started doing up-and-down strumming, basically to keep time,” he explained. “And then I started realizing other players couldn’t do it.”

In 1981 a love triangle infected the band when Joey’s girlfriend left him for Johnny and the two later married. Johnny and Joey continued to perform together for fifteen years but the two almost never spoke, and though the tension sometimes simmered, it never boiled over. “I would be upset at times, but I never thought about quitting. It’s what I do,” said Johnny. “What am I going to do, throw away the only opportunity I have?” Even when Joey lay dying in the hospital, Johnny never acknowledged him, saying that a reunion would have been hypocritical, not to mention futile.

Never a smoker and rarely a drinker, Johnny was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1999. The disease killed him five years later at 55, and in the final painful weeks he bravely faced the ordeal naturally, refusing a morphine drip or painkillers right up to the end.

Johnny was cremated and a beautiful cenotaph to his memory was erected near Dee Dee’s grave at Hollywood Forever. Overlooking a little pond, Johnny poses with his Mosrite Ventures guitar in sculptural eternity. On an attached plaque Johnny reminds us, “If a man can judge success by how many friends he has, then I have been very successful.”

SEPTEMBER 9, 1941 – DECEMBER 10, 1967

In 1960 Otis Redding recorded a song he’d written entitled “Shout-Bama-Lama.” Though he seemed to have the ability and aspirations to be a star, the record was hampered by his reserved
demeanor. The next year, Otis drove a few music friends to a studio in Memphis where the friends had booked recording time. At the end of the day, with twenty minutes of pre-paid studio time remaining, they offered it to Otis. With a new self-confidence, he sang another of his original tunes “These Arms of Mine,” and it proved to be an R&B hit.

Otis won himself a recording contract and, when his series of releases over the next two years found favor with black record buyers, concert engagements followed. In 1965 he hit full stride with “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” while Aretha Franklin hit gold with his “Respect.” After enjoying a hugely successful European tour, then giving a knockout performance alongside Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, young music fans in white markets became interested in Otis’s sound and it seemed he was breaking out of the strict R&B format. At the end of 1967 he wrote and recorded “Dock of the Bay,” which would become his biggest hit, but tragedy struck and Otis never lived to enjoy its success.

Three days after recording “Dock of the Bay,” Otis and three of the four members of his touring band, the Bar-Kays, were killed in a late-night plane crash. After a show in Cleveland, they boarded Otis’s twin-engine Beechcraft airplane and flew to Madison, Wisconsin. Navigating through thick fog, the pilot became disoriented upon approaching the airport and, three miles from the runway, the plane slammed into Lake Monona, broke through the ice, and sank.

At 26, Otis was entombed in a white marble mausoleum at his Big O Ranch in Round Oak, Georgia.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Round Oak is a small, unincorporated village north of Macon and doesn’t appear on some Georgia maps. But if you follow Route 11 for fifteen miles south from its intersection with Route 83 in Monticello, you’ll see a sign signifying that you’ve entered Round Oak. Another two miles south, on the left, is Otis Redding Road (though the sign may not be there, as it has a habit of disappearing just a short time after a new one is erected).

Follow Otis Redding Drive for a mile and you’ll see the driveway to the Big O ranch on the right. Otis’s widow, Zelda, still lives there, and the gate to her private property is often closed. “This is not Graceland, this is my home,” she said recently.

A memorial plaque dedicated to Otis and the Bar-Kays can be found on the William T. Evjue Rooftop Garden of Monona Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed convention center adjacent to the lake where the musicians died.

In September 2002, a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Otis was unveiled at the trailhead of the new Ocmulgee Heritage Greenway at Gateway Park in Macon. The Ocmulgee River drifts slowly along behind the statue, an appropriate backdrop for a man whose life was washed away, but whose music rolls on.

DECEMBER 6, 1956 – MARCH 19, 1982

Randy Rhoads was a founding member of Quiet Riot, a heavy metal band rooted in Los Angeles, and in 1981 Randy was named new lead guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne’s band during his
Blizzard of Oz
and
Diary of a Madman
period.

While on tour in support of the
Madman
album, Ozzy and his entourage were en route to a show in Orlando when their tour bus driver, Andrew Aycock, stopped at an associate’s estate in Lees-burg, Florida. He had been at the wheel for ten hours driving from the band’s previous engagement in Knoxville, Tennessee.

While members of the band and entourage variously milled around the property or snoozed on the bus, Aycock, who had a pilot’s license, took a Beechcraft Bonanza airplane without permission from a hanger on the estate and invited people to join him for a spin. Aycock went up in the airplane with two people and, upon landing without incident, Randy, along with Rachel Youngblood, the group’s makeup artist and hairdresser, got in the plane to take a ride with Aycock. During this trip the plane began to fly low to the ground, even below tree level, and three times buzzed the tour bus. On a fourth pass, the plane’s left wing struck the bus and the plane hurtled through a pine tree and crashed into a garage, immediately erupting into a fireball.

Ozzy Osbourne, who had been asleep on the bus, initially thought it had been involved in a traffic accident, but the truth was far worse. All three people on the plane were killed instantly.

At 25, Randy was buried at Mountain View Cemetery in San Bernadino, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-215, take Exit 30 and follow Highway 210 east to Waterman Avenue (Route 18) south. At the second traffic light, turn left onto Highland Avenue and the cemetery is immediately to the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, bear left, and Randy’s mausoleum is immediately to the left.

OCTOBER 3, 1954 – AUGUST 27, 1990

Perhaps the leading rock and blues guitarist of his generation, the spellbinding Stevie Ray Vaughan rose from Texas obscurity to meteoric success in the early 1980s by virtue of a technical virtuosity not heard on blues guitar since Jimi Hendrix.

By the age of ten, Stevie was fairly accomplished on the guitar and, at sixteen, left school with his guitar and trademark bandito hat to become a stage fixture in Austin’s blues clubs. Stevie’s first big break came when David Bowie hired him as lead guitarist for his 1982
Let’s Dance
album, which led to a record deal for Stevie and his band, Double Trouble. In quick succession,
Texas Flood
and
Couldn’t Stand the Weather
were released, and the following years proved to be a roller-coaster ride for Stevie.

Rabid fans, contemporary guitar heroes, and even jaded music critics hailed the goateed musician as the electric guitar’s newest champion. But although his professional status soared, Stevie fell deep into alcoholism and drug addiction and, after an extensive American tour in 1987, he checked himself into a rehab program. Stevie was clean by 1989 and he soon released
In Step
, his fourth album and his most successful to date, which earned a Grammy and went gold within just a few months. Stevie was on top, professionally and personally, and the sky seemed to be the limit.

In the summer of 1990 Stevie and Double Trouble set out on a headlining tour and closed the night’s show at the Alpine Valley outdoor amphitheater in East Troy, Wisconsin, with a blazing encore, highlighted by a who’s-who of guitarists including Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie’s older brother and early mentor. The last song they played was “Sweet Home Chicago.”

After the musicians left the stage, Stevie jumped aboard a Bell 206B Jet Ranger, one of four waiting helicopters. The craft took off in fog around 12:40 a.m. but it never arrived in sweet Chicago. Instead, just a couple minutes after taking off, all aboard were killed when the helicopter suffered a “high-energy, high-velocity impact at a shallow angle” with the ground. Occurring on the far side of a nearby hill, the crash wasn’t heard by anyone leaving the noisy concert site, and a search was initiated only when a satellite picked up the craft’s emergency transmitter signal four hours later. At 7:00 a.m., searchers found the bodies of Stevie, the pilot, and three members of Clapton’s entourage. Later that morning, Clapton and Jimmie Vaughan identified the bodies.

At 35, Stevie was buried at Laurel Land Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-35E, take Exit 420 and the cemetery is on the east side of the highway.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Pull into the parking lot of the funeral home and you’ll see two entrances leading to the cemetery—one faces south, the other faces east. Enter through the easterly gate and proceed down that drive, continuing on as straight as possible. There will be a couple of jogs in the road but continue to head east. After a third of a mile you’ll come to an intersection and an island. This island, just past Section 38, is called the Vaughan Estate and is where Stevie rests.

FEBRUARY 27, 1958 – OCTOBER 12, 1978

MAY 10, 1957 – FEBRUARY 2, 1979