List with No Name #47

Posted on by Biblioklept
  1. Charles Weedon Westover killed himself on February 8th, 1990.
  2. He was 55.
  3. He shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
  4. Between the eye and the ear.
  5. The right eye and the right ear.
  6. The temple.
  7. Charles Weedon Westover was better known by his stage name, Del Shannon.
  8. The name printed on his death certificate is “Charles Weedon Westover” though.
  9. CWW found success as Del Shannon, performing and recording the song “Runaway.”
  10. The 7″ 45rpm recording of “Runaway” became a number one Billboard hit in the United States of America in February of 1961.
  11. “Runaway” was the number one hit in America for four weeks.
  12. It was later a number one hit in the United Kingdom.
  13. And Australia.
  14. But it was not a number one hit in 1967, when CWW as Del Shannon rerecorded it as “Runaway ’67.”
  15. In fact, “Runaway ’67” failed to chart.
  16. CWW, under the name Del Shannon, wrote “Runaway” with Max Crook.
  17. Crook played the strange, dark, jaunty, bipolar solo in “Runaway.”
  18. Crook played the solo on a musical instrument of his own invention, a type of early electronic synthesizer he called the Musitron.
  19. Crook’s Musitron was a modified version of an earlier synthesizer, the clavioline (similar, of course, to an ondioline).
  20. Perhaps Crook’s most significant modification was adding reverb to his organ via a custom-built echo chamber that incorporated garden gate springs.
  21. Crook’s solo is the haunting spirit of a haunting song.
  22. Or maybe the haunting spirit is actually CWW/DS’s falsetto, which cracks through the piano and baritone sax approximately 45 seconds into the song, announcing that the narrator wah-wah-wah-wah-wonders why why why why why why she ran away.
  23. The lyric is simple but also dark, portentous, loaded with a primal anxiety that hints at outright menace.
  24. Why a “runaway”?
  25. Why did she run away?
  26. And why does the narrator want her there with him, walking in the rain?
  27. (To end this misery).
  28. CWW continued recording and performing as Del Shannon for the rest of his life.
  29. His final performance was in Fargo, ND, not a week before his suicide.
  30. Of course he sang “Runaway” there.
  31. It was his biggest hit.
  32. None of his other songs came even close.
  33. He did the alcoholic thing, the drug addict thing, and then the AA thing.
  34. He was, by all accounts, a life-long manic depressive.
  35. And many claimed a kind man.
  36. A generous man.
  37. He played “Runaway” on the David Letterman Show in 1986, shouting the song but hitting the falsetto.
  38. (Back in 1961, Harry Balk, who produced “Runaway,” had to speed up the recording–from an A minor to a B flat–to match CWW’s vocal–he was nervous and flat).
  39. Shirley Westover, his wife of 31 years, had left him the year before his Letterman appearance.
  40. CWW remarried in 1987. He married a neighbor’s daughter, Bonnie Tyson (also known as LeAnne Gutierrez), who was half his age at the time of the marriage.
  41. Bonnie found CWW’s body.
  42. Slumped in a rocking chair, wearing his bathrobe but not his hair piece.
  43. He was working on music with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne around the time of his death.
  44. And clearly a Wilbury in spirit.
  45. CWW has no grave.
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