“Old rockers never die, they just decompose.”
- John Sandford
This day I commemorate a couple of lost rock and roll voices, Brad Delp and Danny Joe Brown.
Brad Delp was the vocalist for the band Boston. Boston exploded onto the scene in 1976 with their self-titled debut album. It produced the monster hit, More Than a Feeling, but of the eight songs on the record, there was not one throw away. Not even close. Most bands would give away the farm just to have their name attached to any single one of them.
Boston was, by and large, the result of one man's genius, Tom Scholz. Scholz wrote most of the guitar and Hammond organ heavy songs, played most of the instruments and self-engineered and produced the record in his home studio. Boston was essentially Tom Scholz except he wasn't a singer…you gotta have a singer. Scholz knew a guy. Brad Delp.
With the exception of Steve Perry and Paul Rodgers, Brad Delp might have had the purest voice in rock music history. Having a great voice and being a great rock singer are two different things, of course, and all that's subjective, but Delp had and was both of those things. That's my opinion. Without his vocals, Boston would not have been the monster band is was. I saw them on January 13, 1979 in Fayetteville, NC. He was the real deal.
Boston's success continued with two more albums, but by the late 80s, things dried up. Delp worked on a number of side projects, including a Beatles tribute band. That had to be a real come down for someone once at the pinnacle of the art form…like Picasso reduced to drawing caricatures for tourists.
Delp committed suicide on March 9, 2007. He was 55.
Danny joe Brown was the lead singer of the southern rock band, Molly Hatchett. Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hatchett came out of Jacksonville, FL in the 1970s. They hit their stride in 1978 shortly after the Skynyrd plane crash. It was the salad days for southern rock and Hatchett, with their three-guitar assault and songs of gators, bounty hunters and hard livin' fit the bill.
I saw them once in 1978, also in Jacksonville, NC, at the Rockin' Redneck Saloon. Swarthy, Native-American lookin', Danny Joe Brown prowled the stage in his white loafers, commanding the proceedings with his baritone growl. He was every inch a rock front man.
He battled health problems all of his life including diabetes and later on a major stroke. He died on March 9, 2005. He was 53.