Where Are They Buried? (71 page)

When the Sex Pistols first surfaced on London’s 1975 music scene, nobody was quite sure what to make of the band or its heart-attack-paced, anti-love songs. The pack of spiky-cropped, incompetent misfits purported to carry the musical flag for rebellion and anarchy, but it soon became clear that perhaps the only ones less interested in their “music” were the Sex Pistols themselves. In their first interview, frontman Johnny Rotten (his surname earned through the decrepit condition of his teeth) made clear the band wasn’t “into music … we’re into chaos,” and he later expanded by declaring that money was their other key interest. The papers realized that the crew of cast-aways made for good copy and, buoyed by a stream of bizarre news clips, the band prospered.

By 1977 the Sex Pistols were the utter apotheosis of punk rock. In February the band’s bassist was replaced by John Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious, and the Sex Pistols metamorphosed into something else entirely. Little more than a criminally disturbed child possessed by a lust for fame, Sid personified all that the Sex Pistols purported to represent; he was cruel and self-destructive, doggedly pursued a heroin addiction, happily suffered through self-inflicted injuries, and lived his life in a brutally demented haze. But for Sid, sadly, none of this was an act. After Sid’s death, Johnny Rotten even confessed that Sid “was nothing more than a coat hanger to fill an empty space on stage.”

Remarkably, for a short time anyway, the Sex Pistols seemed to be on the verge of advancing from rock’s greatest failure to its greatest success when, nine months after Sid’s arrival, their much-anticipated album,
Never Mind The Bullocks—Here’s The Sex Pistols
, briefly topped the charts in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that many outlets refused to stock it. Despite that accomplishment, the band still managed to self-destruct within another year. After a glorious period of endless turpitude, at their sixth-ever U.S. concert Johnny Rotten declared the group finished.

After the Sex Pistols’ 1978 demise, Sid, with groupie-turned-girlfriend Nancy Spungen, circulated as the wandering-soul fun couple of the year. A troubled junkie herself, former go-go dancer Nancy was Sid’s most ardent fan, and her tempestuous relationship with him had started a year prior when she traveled to London with the sole intention of “bedding a Sex Pistol.” The bedding turned into an extended gothic romance highlighted by drug-crazed dysfunctional debauchery, and after the couple moved into Room 100 in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, their relationship turned even stormier.

After two months at the hotel, during which time Nancy worked as a prostitute to support their lifestyle and drug habits, one October morning Sid called the front desk to tell them he had awakened to find his girlfriend dead. When police arrived, they found Nancy, crumpled under the bathroom sink clad in blood-soaked bra and panties, with a single, deep stab wound to her abdomen inflicted by a hunting knife. Still in a drugged haze, Sid was charged with her murder and arrested, but a few days later was released when the band’s ex-manager posted a $50,000 bail telegraphed to him by Virgin Records.

Sid stayed in Manhattan upon his release, as his passport had been confiscated, and in December got into a fight at a disco and landed back at Riker’s Island prison, where he was put into a seven-week detox program. Released clean and sober from Riker’s on February 1, he was greeted that night by some of his junkie friends from the Chelsea. At a friend’s room, Sid jumped right back into the junk and later went back and collapsed into his bed. His mother Beverly had flown from England to care for her son and, ever fearful that Sid would be arrested in a drug buy on the street, she had bought a supply of heroin for him. He awoke sometime past midnight and, finding the heroin in his mother’s purse, he used it and drifted off again—this time permanently. The next morning Beverly found him nude on the floor, “lying there quite peacefully.” Sid’s mother shook him until she realized “he was very cold and dead.” Sid’s death at 21 was ruled accidental. But it was not unexpected.

At 20, Nancy was buried at King David Cemetery in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-95, take Exit 37 and follow Route 132 west for three miles. Turn right onto Richlieu Road and then, at Richlieu Road’s intersection with Bristol Road, turn left. The cemetery is a short distance ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Turn left into the cemetery at the second entrance, which is a double-wide drive. Stop when this drive intersects the big circular drive and, on the right near the curb, you’ll find a Goodman marker. Walk down the concrete path of Goodman and you’ll find Nancy’s plot at the seventeenth marker on the left.

Sid was cremated, and it’s been widely reported that his ashes were either scattered or buried at Nancy’s grave. That however seems a bit too romantic, and I’m sure the Spungen family would’ve
protested, considering the circumstances. Besides, in a press conference announcing the Sex Pistols 1996 reunion tour, Johnny Rotten remarked that he “was going to put a funeral urn on the table in his [Sid’s] place today but unfortunately his ashes were blown all over Heathrow Airport some time ago. I would have needed a Hoover.”

APRIL 4, 1915 – APRIL 30, 1983

McKinley Morganfield was born to a Mississippi Delta sharecropping family and, as the legend goes, he earned his moniker as a small child for always playing in the mud. But by thirteen Muddy had taken up guitar and developed an interest in blues music.

During a 1941 visit to the Delta region in search of artists to record for the Library of Congress folk-song archives, Alan Lomax found Muddy who, by then, had developed his own jagged bottleneck guitar-playing style. Prompted by Lomax, Muddy moved north to Chicago, where he soon went electric because, “couldn’t nobody hear you with an acoustic.” That provided the boost that lifted him above his contemporaries; Muddy’s earthy, traditional vocals layered over an urgently amplified sound touched off the modern Chicago-blues movement. Into the 1950s, Muddy refined his artistry in releases such as “Hoochie Coochie Man” and the anthemic “Got My Mojo Working,” and his style ultimately shaped the development of rock and roll music.

As the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, blues of the sort that Muddy performed so definitively became less and less relevant to black listeners, who increasingly involved themselves with soul music and its offshoots. But no matter—by this time, Muddy had been taken up by a new audience, anyway: the young, white middle class that had been born of the folk music revival. The taverns and back halls in which Muddy had performed in the previous decade gave way to college auditoriums, jazz clubs, and festival stages where he was widely accepted by the rock community and accorded the respectful adulation given a founding figure. In the last decade of his life, Muddy made three of his best-selling albums,
Hard Again, I’m Ready
, and
King Bee
, and he frequently performed with such acts as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, who regarded him as their mentor.

Muddy died in his sleep at 68, and was buried at Restvale Cemetery in Worth, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-294, take the Route 50 exit in Alsip and travel north for a few hundred yards. Turn left on 122nd Street and after a half-mile make a right on Laramie Avenue. The cemetery is a short distance ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and park your car. Muddy’s grave is in Section H to the left of the office, three stones from the drive marked with his given name.

One of the most enduring and influential rock groups of all time, the Who, featuring frontman Roger Daltrey, lead guitarist and primary songwriter Pete Townshend, solemn bassist John Entwistle, and wildman drummer Keith Moon, were originally called the Detours but, after discovering that another band of the same name already existed, changed the name to the ever-confusing moniker, the Who.

The group first caught the public’s attention around 1965 after becoming a cult act thanks to their energetic live show, which included a nightly onstage destruction of guitars and drum kits that quickly ate up the band’s profits. Royalties from early hits such as “Magic Bus” and “I Can’t Explain” helped pay the bills, but their real breakout came in 1969 when the Townshend-penned “rock opera”
Tommy
, the story of a handicapped youth who finds
salvation through pinball, remained on the charts for over two years. Over the next decade, through
Who’s Next
,
Quadrophenia
, and
Who Are You?
, the foursome crashed its way through a haze of rock and roll excess, emphasizing their art via ear-splittingly loud concerts while punctuating their tours’ with hotel room-destroying “Whooliganism.”

After Keith died in 1978, the band documented their 1982 “farewell” tour on the live album,
Who’s Last
, but the Who didn’t really disappear. Pete, Roger, and John pursued solo careers to various degrees of success, and 2002 marked the beginning of their fifth tour as the Who since their “farewell,” suggesting that, after 20 years, the Who still hadn’t finished saying goodbye.

AUGUST 23, 1946 – SEPTEMBER 7, 1978

Renowned for his ferocious and frenetic drumming, Keith Moon destroyed more drum kits in his lifetime than most musicians have had the opportunity to play. Though he often did only a mediocre job of timekeeping, he was certainly one of the most exciting drummers from an audience’s perspective, and his explosive rolls and frantic style contributed to the outrageous package that was the Who.

Though Keith liked to claim he’d never had drum lessons, he actually had, though the fib wasn’t hard to believe, as discipline was certainly not one of his attributes. As one of rock’s greatest drummers, Keith only played when he was with the Who, never practiced and, even after he was famous, never had a drum kit in any place that he lived. Instead, Keith’s time away from the band was an endless party, his hedonistic lifestyle perpetually in full swing. His fans revere him for driving a car into a swimming pool, but (sorry) it never happened.

In 1978 Keith was living in Mayfair, London, with his girlfriend, Annette, at Harry Nilsson’s pad at 9 Curzon Place—the same flat, Number 12 on the top floor, in which “Mama” Cass Elliot had died four years earlier. Keith had been taking pills that had been prescribed by his doctor to ease alcohol withdrawal. Before going to sleep at about three o’clock one morning, Keith took a handful of the pills. He awoke in a daze a few hours later, had a sizable meal, ingested another bunch of the pills, and returned to bed.

When Annette tried to rouse Keith later that afternoon, he wouldn’t be disturbed. The ultimate party animal, the poster-child
of recreational drugs and debauchery, had died of an accidental overdose of the prescription drug Heminevrin.

At 32, Keith was cremated at Golder’s Green Crematorium in London, and his ashes were scattered there at Section 3P. There is no plaque or memorial; the section is merely a flower-filled field of remembrance.

OCTOBER 9, 1944 – JUNE 27, 2002

Because the Who has only ever had a single guitarist, Pete Townshend, it was always vital that bassist John Entwistle play loud and complex bass lines to compensate for the absence of a rhythm guitar. The result was that John’s fills and counter-melodies, indeed all manner of his bass lines, stood out from the Who’s music like no other rock band’s, and he became acclaimed as one of rock’s premier bassists.

But though John’s musical mannerisms stood out, he did not. A tax clerk before joining the Who, he was content to be the quiet one whose calm, anchoring, presence contrasted with his bad-boy band mates’ energetic activities. John did, however, contribute a number of songs to the Who catalog, most notably “My Wife” and “Boris the Spider.” And, though they were characteristically uneven, John also had a half-dozen solo works to his credit.

The night before the Who were to kick off their 2002 tour, John died at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Though the cause of his death was determined to have been a heart attack, the coroner also stated that cocaine found in his system was a contributing factor.

At 57, John was buried under a simple monument at St. Edwards Church in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucester, England, a 1½ hour drive northwest of London.

JANUARY 21, 1938 – JULY 1, 1995

Disc jockey Wolfman Jack was the Elvis Presley of rock radio. He fine-tuned and repackaged work originated by black musicians, then became a phenomenon by feeding this music, in his own inimitable style, to a massive white audience hungry for something different and fresh.

During the early 1960s the airwaves were still more or less segregated, so Wolfman (whose real name was Bob Smith) created a shadowy wildman alter ego to play the black rhythm-and-blues records that he so loved. By broadcasting from XERF-AM, a station based just over the border in Mexico that boasted a signal ten times more powerful than any U.S. radio station, the Wolfman soon developed a national following. His trademark throaty voice and rough tongue, peppered with sporadic wolf howls and interjections of black slang, blanketed North America with a flavorsome stew of R&B, jazz, rockabilly, and rock and roll. The restless youth of America immediately embraced Wolfman Jack. Nobody else came close.