Dead Man Gnawing: Rock n Roll Dinner Demise II (1972)

Last week I wrote about Duane Allman’s death and the lore surrounding the band’s subsequent album, Eat a Peach.  Now on to Mama Cass.

Long before I knew who Duane Allman was, I knew that Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich.  I don’t know why I knew about Cass and not Duane, except maybe that my mother would have appreciated the Mamas and the Papas’ harmonies and have had no idea whatsoever of what to do with the Allman Brothers.  As I type this, though, I now recall a Scooby Doo episode with the Mamas and the Papas.  I never dug Scooby Doo that much, except for those celebrity guest stars.  Hello, Laurel and Hardy.  And didn’t Don Knotts and the Apple Dumpling Gang make an appearance?  Am I making this up?  Somebody help me out.

Anyway, word was that Cass choked to death on her sandwich in a London flat.  This word was passed because the doctor who pronounced her dead on the scene reported to The Daily Express, “She appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do.”

Firstly, why is the combo of sandwich and soda dangerous?  The implication is that drinking, say, water would be better if lying down.  Is there a similarity here to the stone-cold fact that you should never mix carbonated beverages with Pop Rocks?” Continue reading

Dead Man Gnawing: Duane Allman Was a Man of Peaches and Mutton (1971)

Dead rock stars occupy a strange place in the pantheon of Humanity’s heroes.  You’ve got brave, doomed soldiers and noble, self-sacrificing leaders and visionary, steadfast iconoclasts and idealistic, graceful martyrs.  And then 1938 rolls around, Robert Johnson is poisoned, and shortly thereafter you’ve got dudes who choke on their own vomit in the backseats of cars floating up to Heaven to chill with Hercules and Abe Lincoln and St. Thomas Aquinas.  Rock star deaths tend to be violent or self-indulgent, which upon reflection seems to make them the perfect heroes of the Western World’s 20th Century.

Plane crashes, car wrecks, and suicide aren’t the prerogatives of PitchKnives.  And though we do cover booze, instances of rock stars drinking themselves to death are pretty pedestrian.  There are, however, instances of food becoming entangled with the myths of pop’s premature deaths, one of which I’ll note now, the first in a short series.

Duane Allman was, I was shocked to discover when researching this piece, only 24 when he died.  Jesus Christ!  The mutton chops on the man made him look 40.  And mutton is certainly a food.  Continue reading