Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays: The Day Music Died Pt 2

Greetings pop pickers! Please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and another of our fortnightly mastications upon the marshmallowy pillows of musical magnificence.

Tonight’s missive was originally entitled Splat!, but I thought that a trifle insensitive and more than a little tasteless. In truth it should probably be called Ivory Cutlery’s Day Off, as I’m currently honing my alcoholic tendencies on the sunny shores of Cypress with many G&Ts and the splendid company of a few old friends. Nevertheless, given the grim subject of tonight’s article, the title is as the title should probably be.

However, as I am technically still on holiday, tonight’s missive will inevitably be a shoddy and shambolic affair; a puerile stream of consciousness, rapidly written in a succession of sea-view bars, rumbustious taverns and friendly cafes.

And so, without further ado, laydees and gentlebodies, Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays proudly presents… um… some of my favourite… um… *shuffles frantically through notebook*… artists wot ‘ave popped their clogs in aeronautical incidents. Not Arf!

Plunging to an untimely death used to be a reasonably common fate for our rock n roll heroes. I guess it was because they did so much travel by air. Plus, of course, in the early days of commercial air travel, flying was not as safe as it is now (at least pre-DEI). I think Glenn Miller probably started this unhappy trend in 1944, when his plane disappeared over the English Channel whilst en route to gay Paris. After that very high profile incident, rapid, unplanned and deeply unfortunate descents seemed to become quite popular in entertainment circles.

A significant part of this problem was undoubtedly due to the relentless schedules faced by touring musicians in the second half of the 20th century – particularly when touring the USA. Small planes, hopping from city to city, were a very practical alternative to gruelling bus, car or train trips. However, the pressure to keep moving (due to a fixed schedule of pre-booked tour dates) could easily give rise to less than sensible decisions, e.g. flying in very bad weather, using less that ideal aircraft, or indeed using less than ideal pilots.

Don McLean’s American Pie was written (in part, at least) to mark “the day the music died” – a reference to the 1959 plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. However, to be fair, McLean’s song is as much about the cultural change and loss of innocence experienced by that early rock and roll generation as it is about that fatal plane crash.

Also – top trivia, pop pickers – American Pie held the record for the longest song to reach number one (in the U.S. at least) for almost half a century. However, it failed to reach a fabtastic fifty year landmark because of the magnificent magnificence of The Blessed Tay Tay and her peerless hit single All Too Well, which kicked American Pie up the ‘arris in 2021. Tay Tay’s number one, it would seem, is significantly longer than the Don’s.

Two huge stars of country & western music are our next victims on tonight’s grim roster: Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves. Cline was just 30 when her plane (piloted by her manager) crashed in 1963. Her flight was headed to Nashville after a show in Kansas City and bad weather had already caused them to stop several times. However, about 75 miles from Nashville it seems their luck ran out and the appallingly bad weather claimed its victims in a fatal crash.

Jim Reeves died about a year later in a very similar incident. This time the star was piloting and his manager was the passenger, but sadly the result was the same. Reeves and his manager were flying from Arkansas when they ran into some very bad weather. It is assumed Reeves became disoriented and lost control. The plane crashed and sadly both men died.

Otis Redding, easily one of my favourite soul singers of all time, lost his life in a plane crash in December, 1967, at the age of just 26. Redding seemed well on his way to the sunlit (and lucrative) uplands of super-stardom, so had purchased a twin-engine plane to shuttle between cities for his hectic series of high profile shows. His plane took off from Cleveland when the weather was very poor – cold, foggy, rainy, with temperatures near freezing – for a short flight of around 200 miles. However, about 4 miles from the town of Madison, the plane lost altitude and crashed into a lake. Witnesses reported sputtering engines and the plane breaking apart on impact. A subsequent investigation failed to pinpoint an exact cause of the crash (no flight recorders in small planes back then) but ice build-up, pilot error and mechanical failure were all suspected but never confirmed.

Redding had just recorded (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay. It was released posthumously and became the biggest hit of his career.

Next up on tonight’s grim roll call are Florida’s legendary, hard rockin’, good ol’ boys from Jacksonville: Lynyrd Skynyrd – Southern rockers par excellence.

On October 20, 1977, the band’s plane crashed into a wooded, swampy area near Gillsburg, Mississippi. The plane was en route from South Carolina, where the band had performed the previous night, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for their next scheduled show. Unfortunately the Convair CV-240 in which they were travelling ran out of fuel, mid-flight, as a result of inadequate flight planning and an engine malfunction that caused excessive fuel consumption.

The pilots attempted an emergency landing, but apparently clipped some trees and crashed about five miles north-east of Gillsburg. Six of the 26 people on board died instantly: both pilots, 3 band members and the band’s assistant road manager. Happily, 20 of the passengers survived. Less happily, several of the survivors were very seriously messed up indeed.

Additionally, the survivors faced a prolonged and gruelling ordeal as rescue efforts were hampered by the dense, swampy terrain into which the plane had crashed. As a result, it took many hours to extract the injured and recover the deceased. A subsequent investigation concluded the crash resulted from fuel exhaustion, poor flight planning and (in all likelihood) an undetermined engine issue.

I had seen Skynyrd perform a couple of times in the UK just a year or so before this terrible crash (including their now legendary Knebworth performance) and can confirm they were an utterly superb live act – frankly, one of the best I’ve ever seen. The band did eventually reform with the younger brother of their deceased singer now out in front and they are still going strong. In fact, I’ll be seeing them in concert, at Wembley Arena, this very summer.

Next up, John Denver, who lost control of his plane and died on the afternoon of October 12, 1997, when his light aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay near Pacific Grove in California. He was the pilot, the plane’s only occupant and, astonishingly to me at least, the plane he was flying was home made – apparently built from a kit of parts.

Denver was an experienced and very competent pilot with well over 2,700 flying hours under his belt. Unfortunately, he was not legally permitted to fly at the time of his crash as his pilot’s licence had been suspended due to several arrests for drunk driving. However, it was subsequently determined that drug or alcohol abuse played no part in the fatal incident, with a post-mortem examination finding absolutely no signs of booze or recreational pharmaceuticals in Denver’s body.

The accident investigation established the primary cause of the incident to be Denver’s inability to switch fuel tanks during flight due to the design of the aircraft. It is believed that when he did try to switch tanks he temporarily lost control of the aircraft, was unable to recover, and subsequently crashed into Monterey Bay.

And now, sadly, we have to turn our attention to one of the finest plank spankers to ever bestride the planet: Stevie Ray Vaughan – the renowned and supremely talented blues rock guitarist who died in a helicopter crash on August 27, 1990.

After performing at a seriously high quality blues guitar extravaganza (SRV, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray and Buddy Guy), four helicopters were on standby to transport the musicians and their entourages from the venue at Alpine Valley back to Chicago. The helicopter carrying Vaughn and several other passengers took off in dense fog and promptly crashed into a ski slope on the side of a hill at the Alpine Valley Resort.

The subsequent crash investigation determined the primary cause of the fatal crash to be pilot error. The pilot was not certified for instrument-only flight, is believed to have become disoriented in the dense fog and as a result failed to gain sufficient altitude to clear the nearby hill. The helicopter struck the ski slope at considerable speed and killed all five occupants.

Stevie Ray Vaughan was a massively talented individual, one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music, and without doubt one of the greatest electric guitarists of all time. His short career lasted only seven years, but during that time he completely revived the blues rock genre, paved the way for many other artists and left a catalogue of recordings that are still hugely influential – and his untimely death was without doubt a massive loss to contemporary music.

And, on that rather glum note, I think that’s probably quite enough of my sun-soaked and gin-fueled ramblings for this week’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday. My pineapple quiche has been scoffed, my Campari consumed and my un-lubed lederhosen are beginning to chafe. So I think we’ll wrap things up for this evening with an absolute banger of a performance from the late, great, Stevie Ray Vaughan.