Music journalist Chuck Klosterman probably thought he would uncover the meaning of life when he set out on a coast-to-coast odyssey visiting rock'n'roll death sites across America. After all, here was the perfect opportunity to riff on that wild notion about living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse behind. He would, he probably figured, get a few good yarns out of it.
What the Spin journo found instead was that he was taking a long trip through dullsville. There may have been a few seedy, sleazy dives along the way, but mostly it was just fields of green, fringed with trees and bushes. After a while, one field in Iowa begins to look very much like another field in Mississippi, regardless of whether it was Buddy Holly or Lynyrd Skynyrd whose plane came a-crashing out of the sky.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Klosterman turned Killing Yourself to Live, his book about this journey through rock's accident black spots, into a gonzo-lite meditation on his own life and girl- friends.
As he travelled the blue highways from one field
to the next, it probably dawned on Klosterman that the scuzzy sensationalism and seedy glamour which often surrounds rock'n'roll deaths is completely misplaced. Not for the last time, the reality is a whole lot different from the myth.
What should be legendary is what's left behind. In the last few weeks, another slew of musicians have shuffled off this mortal coil. None came crashing from the sky in a small plane or clocked out overdosing in a manky hotel room. None will ever feature in a tale such as the one Klosterman tells, yet few will ever forget the music that J Dilla, Ali Farka Toure and Ray Barretto produced in a hurry.
James "J Dilla" Yancey must have known for some time that his clock was running out. Suffering from a rare and incurable blood disease, the hip-hop producer had been in hospital for months receiving treatment. He had even moved his studio equipment in, so that he could work on material from his bed.
It was in this sterile environment that Yancey produced Donuts, his last album and one of the most infectious and heart-warming instrumental hip-hop records you will hear this year. Three days after Donuts was released, the 32-year-old producer, who had worked with Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, De La Soul, the Pharcyde and Q Tip, was dead.
Last year, Ali Farka Toure's duets with Malian kora player Toumani Diabate produced In the Heart of the Moon, an album which takes your breath away every time you hear it. It was further proof that Toure, the farmer from northern Mali, was someone who could join the dots between the past, present and future of African music.
A musical powerhouse in Mali long before Ry Cooder came along, it was the duo's 1994 Talking Timbuktu album which brought Toure to worldwide attention. Toure was already seriously ill with bone cancer at his final public performance last summer with Diabate. The pair also recorded another album together on that trip, which is currently in World Circuit's vaults awaiting release.
Ray Barretto first heard Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca and got the fever for the congas when he was stationed with the US army in Germany during the 1940s. While the New York-born musician worked with such greats as Charlie Parker and Tito Puente, it was Barretto's own band, mixing r'n'b and Afro-Cuban sounds, which really set things alight. Such dabblings with mambo, salsa, rock and soul would make Barretto one of the most influential Latin musicians of all time.
Yancey, Toure, Barretto: In all three cases, it was what they produced while they were alive rather than where or how they died which tells the real tale. Forget the shrines and pilgrimages and just play the music.
