Singer and singer Jack Russell, who scored hard-rock visits in the 1980s with his band Great White and who survived a Rhode Island bar blaze in 2003 that killed 100 people, has died. He was 63.
His death at his home in Southern California was  , announced , Thursday in a speech on Instagram, which said he “passed calmly” in the presence of family members and friends. K. L. Doty, with whom Russell wrote a 2024 narrative, said the reason was Lewy body memory and several system degeneration, though she declined to say when Russell died.
The song revealed in July that those circumstances caused him to stop driving. ” I am unable to perform at the level I desire and at the amount you deserve”, he , wrote , on Instagram.
A solution of the Los Angeles club scene of the late 1970s, Great White played scuzzy but melodic stone in the happily debauched hair-metal history, Mark Kendall’s violins chugged and squealed, while Russell’s voice could generate the manly scream of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
The band initially charted on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1987 with the bluesy” Rock Me”, in which Russell assured a lady that “if you stay the night we’ll make the wrong seem appropriate”. Its biggest one was a noisy support of Ian Hunter’s” When Bitten, Twice Shy”, which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and drove the group’s record “…Twice Timid” to sales of more than 2 million files. At the Grammy Awards in 1990,” Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was nominated for best hard rock performance.
The group broke up in 2001 as a result of grunge and other rock dominating locks material on the television and MTV. Russell and Kendall split up in a fragment group called Jack Russell’s Great White, which soon started playing dates all over the nation.
On Feb. 20, 2003, a chemical show during the band’s set at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, ignited soundproofing coating lining the festival’s walls and ceiling, leading to a fire that immediately engulfed the team. Among the 100 people who died was the band’s guitar, Ty Longley, an extra 230 were reported injured.
Russell and other Great White members agreed to pay$ 1 million in a settlement with the fire’s survivors and their families after the group’s tour manager and the Station’s owners were later charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Russell, who was born in Montebello in 1960, continued to play with a reunited version of the original Great White until the strap reformed and he reformed Jack Russell’s Great White. That singer’s most recent album, a memorial to Led Zeppelin, came out in 2021, this month, Russell teamed with another hair-metal senior, Tracii Guns of L. A. Artillery, for a combo LP titled” Medusa”.
Russell’s victims include his wife, Heather Ann Russell, and his brother Matthew Hucko.
On Instagram on Thursday, his original friends in Great White sent their condolences to Russell’s household and , said , it was” a privilege and joy to share the stage with him — some displays, many yards and maximum rock”.
___
© 2024 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by , Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
