American rock legend Del Shannon “died violently after taking Prozac for only 15 days".
Del Shannon Historical Marker:
Dedicated September 29, 1990 in
Battle Creek, Michigan
Del Shannon
His voice is like a siren,” Mike Campbell (lead guitarist for Tom Petty) said. “There is only one voice that does that sound, and that is Del Shannon’s.”
That voice has now been silenced. Shannon is another casualty in the hidden war against artists.
Del Shannon – real name Charles Westover – was an American rock legend from the ’60s whose hit songs included “Runaway,” “Keep Searching (We’ll Follow The Sun),” “Little Town Flirt” and “Do You Want to Dance?” Shannon taught himself to play guitar at age 13 by listening to country-western singers on radio. By 27, he wrote the innovative song “Runaway” while working at a carpet store and recorded it on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. “The chord progressions, the drum lines, the falsetto – the whole thing was full of unorthodox ideas,” says Max Cook, the musician who recorded this with Shannon at the time. A professional recording of the song was done on January 21, 1961. By April 1, the song was number one in the nation. It would go on to become number one in 21 countries, and more than 200 artists, including Elvis Presley and Bonnie Raitt, would later cut versions of it.
Shannon would later say, “The screaming kids... when I got to number one, Lord, the fear was so great. I wanted to go back to Coopersville where I was picking strawberries. I said, ’What am I doing here?’” Alcohol would become his close friend, as Shannon described to the Los Angeles Times in 1987: “I hated the taste of booze, but I liked where it took me – into oblivion.”
After his initial success, musical tastes changed and his career declined in America, though he still enjoyed success as an artist and performer in England. Continuing to work in the music industry as a producer, he revived his singing career in the ’80s with an album produced by Tom Petty called “Drop Down and Get Me.” His cover version of “Sea of Love” rose to number 31 on Billboard’s national charts.
By 1990, he was well on his way to making a comeback, including scheduled tours in Australia, Canada, England and Japan. He was rumored to be chosen to become the late Roy Orbison’s replacement in the Traveling Wilburys with Petty, Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan and George Harrison.
However, the powerful psychiatric drug Prozac, which WHO magazine described as the drug “thought by some to have a darker side” would bring his renewed hopes and dreams of a revitalized career to an abrupt end.
Unlike many other performers, Shannon organized all of the scheduling of his shows, a stressful task considering he was planning a European tour. He’d recorded a new song which he believed destined to be a hit and was preparing for this. At the same time he and his wife LeAnne were moving to a new house and taxes were due: He was the artist, the manager, the booking agent – everything. In addition, Shannon had contracted a serious sinus infection that he couldn’t shake, and he’d been dieting. He consulted a psychiatrist in January of 1990 and returned home to tell LeAnne, “Look what I’ve got. It’s not really a drug, it’s a chemical. It’ll help me over the hump I’m in.” The “chemical” was Prozac.
It appears it didn’t take long for the “darker side” of the drug to have a devastating effect on Shannon’s life. LeAnne knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. He couldn’t eat and lost too much weight. He didn’t want to go to England. He didn’t want to compose or play music. He didn’t want to do anything. “I watched him turn into somebody who was agitated, pacing, had trembling hands, insomnia and couldn’t function.” These symptoms can be attributed to known side effects of the drug, which include suicidal tendencies.
Memorial at the Buddy Holly Crash Site
Just five days before Del Shannon pressed a .22 caliber to his head and pulled the trigger, leaving his wife to find him dead in the den with the rifle next to his body at their home in Santa Clarita, CA, he played the last gig of his life on February 3rd–the anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. He played it at the Civic Center in Fargo, ND–exactly where Buddy’s plane was headed the night it smashed into a frozen Iowa cornfield at 170 mph just minutes after taking off into a gusty snowstorm, leaving another wife to dig her way out of the wreckage of a broken heart just six months after marrying the man. She did, somehow–but not before miscarrying Buddy’s only child.
It was an especially inopportune time for Shannon to die–as if there is ever an “opportune” time. He had nearly completed a record with Jeff Lynne in the wake of Lynne’s monumental success producing The Traveling Wilburys’ debut and Tom Petty’s ridiculously successful Full Moon Fever album. Shannon was no stranger to success himself–his hit single “Runaway,” the song he would sing for the rest of his life, sold at a clip of 80,000 copies a day back in 1961–but, as with so many pop stars of Shannon’s era, the world with its ever-diminishing attention span quickly moved on to the next fad and the next (prog rock, punk, disco, new wave–none of them exactly suited to the quivering falsetto of a country rock has been.) Shannon’s response was not an unusual one: alcohol. Lots of it. Such cruel reversals of fortune are not easy on anybody, but for a former truck driver who worked his way out of a furniture factory and into the big time on nothing but raw talent, balls, and a song he wrote while working at a carpet store, it had to be an especially difficult wound to his pride.
Even more tragic was the quality of the music he’d been brewing with Lynne in those sessions, which produced the posthumous and poignantly titled Rock On! in 1991–an album that went on to become one of Shannon’s best-selling records. There was something about Lynne’s signature pop sound and the enduring miracle of Del Shannon’s voice that culminated in some of the finest music the man had ever made–tracks like “What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am” or “Walk Away” restored Shannon to the throne of his forgotten legacy, one that Richard Cromelin described as “haunting vignettes of heartbreak and restlessness [that] contain something of a cosmic undercurrent which has the protagonist tragically doomed to a bleak, shadowy struggle.” How was anyone to know, though, that all along he was singing about himself, that somewhere amid all the gloss and syrup of early ’60s pop production stood a man alone with demons he could only face in front of thousands of fans. Maybe that’s what Joan Baez meant when she said that “the easiest relationship is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.”
That’s both the mystery and tragedy of Shannon’s premature demise. He took his own life just as it seemed he was catching on again. Tom Petty, a friend of Shannon’s who infuriated him by stealing the equally doomed Howie Epstein from Shannon’s band when Ron Blair quit The Heartbreakers in 1976, reconciled enough with him to produce his Drop Down and Get Me LP in 1982, which featured Shannon backed by Petty’s Heartbreakers (“His voice is like a siren,” Mike Campbell would say.) The album wasn’t exactly a commercial success, but it earned Shannon a minor hit with his cover of Phil Phillips’s “Sea of Love,” reawakening critics to the flame of a talent that still burned as brightly as ever. Shannon scored another hit a few years later when Michael Mann chose “Runaway” as the theme song for his short-lived TV drama Crime Story in 1986. And it was yet another irony in Shannon’s life that another legend who died in the midst of a stunning resurgence–Roy Orbison–left a spot open for Shannon on the next Traveling Wilburys album, a no-brainer given Shannon’s established relationship with Petty and Lynne.
Del Shannon with Tom Petty
“It just doesn’t make sense,” so many would say to themselves as they turned on the news the night of February 9th to learn that Del Shannon had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head the night before. But who can say what tormented voices swarm the mind of a man who puts the butt of a gun to his head with the full intention of finishing the job? It’s only nonsensical to we who have not fallen victim to those demons. Though Shannon had reportedly quit the bottle years before when he returned from a creative oblivion to pair with Petty for Drop Down and Get Me, no amount of resurgent glory was powerful enough to push away his pain. “I hated the taste of booze,” Shannon would tell the NY Times of his alcoholism, “But I liked where it took me–oblivion.”
Shannon’s widow, Bonnie LeAnne Tyson, blames her husband’s suicide on the anti-depressants he was taking at the time, a known impetus for suicide. As an article at antidepressantfacts.com puts it, the morbid legacy of psychiatric drugs in the lives of people like Shannon constitutes a “hidden war against artists . . . the powerful psychiatric drug Prozac, which WHO magazine described as the drug ‘thought by some to have a darker side,’ would bring his renewed hopes and dreams of a revitalized career to an abrupt end.” Bonnie would later argue that her husband was “a well-informed and physically healthy man and father, [who] died violently after taking Prozac for only 15 days.” Ultimately, one can’t help but consider the bleak irony with which Del Shannon himself became the “Runaway” he always sang about
On February 8, 1990, Charles Westover shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. With him died the hopes, dreams and artistry of Del Shannon. According to LeAnne, her husband was “a well-informed and physically healthy man and father, [who] died violently after taking Prozac for only 15 days.”
In Memoriam: Del Shannon
Memorial at the Buddy Holly Crash Site
Just five days before Del Shannon pressed a .22 caliber to his head and pulled the trigger, leaving his wife to find him dead in the den with the rifle next to his body at their home in Santa Clarita, CA, he played the last gig of his life on February 3rd–the anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. He played it at the Civic Center in Fargo, ND–exactly where Buddy’s plane was headed the night it smashed into a frozen Iowa cornfield at 170 mph just minutes after taking off into a gusty snowstorm, leaving another wife to dig her way out of the wreckage of a broken heart just six months after marrying the man. She did, somehow–but not before miscarrying Buddy’s only child.
It was an especially inopportune time for Shannon to die–as if there is ever an “opportune” time. He had nearly completed a record with Jeff Lynne in the wake of Lynne’s monumental success producing The Traveling Wilburys’ debut and Tom Petty’s ridiculously successful Full Moon Fever album. Shannon was no stranger to success himself–his hit single “Runaway,” the song he would sing for the rest of his life, sold at a clip of 80,000 copies a day back in 1961–but, as with so many pop stars of Shannon’s era, the world with its ever-diminishing attention span quickly moved on to the next fad and the next (prog rock, punk, disco, new wave–none of them exactly suited to the quivering falsetto of a country rock has been.) Shannon’s response was not an unusual one: alcohol. Lots of it. Such cruel reversals of fortune are not easy on anybody, but for a former truck driver who worked his way out of a furniture factory and into the big time on nothing but raw talent, balls, and a song he wrote while working at a carpet store, it had to be an especially difficult wound to his pride.
That’s both the mystery and tragedy of Shannon’s premature demise. He took his own life just as it seemed he was catching on again. Tom Petty, a friend of Shannon’s who infuriated him by stealing the equally doomed Howie Epstein from Shannon’s band when Ron Blair quit The Heartbreakers in 1976, reconciled enough with him to produce his Drop Down and Get Me LP in 1982, which featured Shannon backed by Petty’s Heartbreakers (“His voice is like a siren,” Mike Campbell would say.) The album wasn’t exactly a commercial success, but it earned Shannon a minor hit with his cover of Phil Phillips’s “Sea of Love,” reawakening critics to the flame of a talent that still burned as brightly as ever. Shannon scored another hit a few years later when Michael Mann chose “Runaway” as the theme song for his short-lived TV drama Crime Story in 1986. And it was yet another irony in Shannon’s life that another legend who died in the midst of a stunning resurgence–Roy Orbison–left a spot open for Shannon on the next Traveling Wilburys album, a no-brainer given Shannon’s established relationship with Petty and Lynne.
Del Shannon with Tom Petty
Shannon’s widow, Bonnie LeAnne Tyson, blames her husband’s suicide on the anti-depressants he was taking at the time, a known impetus for suicide. As an article at antidepressantfacts.com puts it, the morbid legacy of psychiatric drugs in the lives of people like Shannon constitutes a “hidden war against artists . . . the powerful psychiatric drug Prozac, which WHO magazine described as the drug ‘thought by some to have a darker side,’ would bring his renewed hopes and dreams of a revitalized career to an abrupt end.” Bonnie would later argue that her husband was “a well-informed and physically healthy man and father, [who] died violently after taking Prozac for only 15 days.” Ultimately, one can’t help but consider the bleak irony with which Del Shannon himself became the “Runaway” he always sang about
Metro Digest / Local News in Brief
The widow of singer Del Shannon has sued Eli Lilly & Co., claiming an antidepressant drug made by the pharmaceutical giant led to her husband's suicide last year in his Santa Clarita home.
The Superior Court suit filed by LeAnne Westover seeks unspecified punitive damages and contends that the Indianapolis-based firm failed to warn the public and medical community about possible side effects of the drug Prozac. The drug can cause suicidal and violent behavior, said Westover's attorney, Leonard L. Finz.
The Superior Court suit filed by LeAnne Westover seeks unspecified punitive damages and contends that the Indianapolis-based firm failed to warn the public and medical community about possible side effects of the drug Prozac. The drug can cause suicidal and violent behavior, said Westover's attorney, Leonard L. Finz.
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