Dead Musicians' Elegies

Requiems for rock stars and not quite stars and other musos.  Not always entirely on the ball artistically (these rhymes, dashed off), but snapshot heartfelt.

Judee Sill

Judee, stick thin, but something there in her eyes. (Olive Oyl with a halo, but better.) Who would have guessed she was such a stick up gal, robbing...

Skip Spence

Skip Spence, hobo boy, homeless in the wake of Moby Grape , got outta jail, rode a Harley south and made an album in a heartbeat (or a week, makes...

Keith Moon

Did you know those skins you beat so madly was your own? Throw out that metronome - dear boy - don’t need that tick-tock here. Timing's celestial, if...

Frank Sinatra and the Whale

He thought it was Benny Goodman off the Jersey shore, but it was just a humpback who came close to land as he practised scales at Cape May. ‘Do be...
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The Goat and Brian Jones

An Incident in October 1968 The satyr Stone, alone, watched under the terracotta Moroccan sky as they led the goat to sacrifice in the ominous Atlas...
Cherry

Alex Harvey Paid the Ferryman (in 1982)

He paid his final dues, the journeyman, waiting for the Zeebrugge ferry the day before his forty-seventh birthday. Looking at the grey North Sea...

Praying to St Lou Reed

Lou Reed snarls at the opening syllables of beseechment, the skinny boy's prayer. Nobody told the boy to beware this saint. 'You only came to me...