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Celebrity Death Pool - 2021

Wally Fairway

By Wally Fairway
in Daily Texan

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shadow_operative2.0

shadow_operative2.0 15669

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Interesting Rolling Stone article on a relatively famous groupie that kicked it Saturday. 

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“Sweet Sweet Connie” Hamzy, a famous groupie immortalized in Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” died Saturday in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. She was 66.

Allen Taylor, director for Little Rock’s Griffin Leggett Healey & Roth funeral home, confirmed Hamzy’s death to Rolling Stone. Taylor added that she had been put in hospice prior to her death, but a cause of death was not immediately available.

Hamzy is best known for her shoutout in the first verse of “We’re an American Band,” where drummer Don Brewer sang, “Out on the road for 40 days/Last night in Little Rock put me in a haze/Sweet, sweet Connie, doin’ her act/She had the whole show and that’s a natural fact.”

Hamzy recalled to KTHV that she first heard the song on her transistor radio when she was swimming at Lake No 1 in Little Rock following her high school graduation. “‘Folks, you’re not gonna believe what we just got in the studio, it’s the new release from Grand Funk Railroad!'” Hamzy recited. “‘And you know that dark-haired girl we see backstage a lot wandering around? Listen to the first few lyrics!’ …I was determined to become a famous groupie. I really was.”

“So sorry to hear of Connie’s death,” Brewer told Rolling Stone. “My memory of her is of a very outgoing ‘sweet’ girl that wanted to be famous. That was her goal in life. May she rest in peace.”

Hamzy was born on January 9th, 1955. She was just 15 years old when her mother dropped her off at the Barton Coliseum to see Steppenwolf. “She didn’t like to deal with parking, she didn’t like to deal with traffic,” Hamzy told KTHV. “So she’d take me out there to the fairgrounds early in the afternoon before the traffic got bad. And we’d go out there and would wander around in the backstage area and then one thing would lead to another.”

Hamzy linked up with her first musician that night — Steppenwolf drummer Jerry Edmonton — but she confirmed to Joan Rivers that she lost her virginity to Frijid Pink drummer Rick Stevers. As she told Howard Stern in 2010, “The drummers gravitated to me because they wanted to hear about John Bonham and Keith Moon…I haven’t had Neil Peart. That I regret.”

In addition to Bonham and Moon, Hamzy claimed to have been with Huey Lewis, Joe Walsh, Don Henley, Eddie Van Halen, Paul Stanley, Dr. John, Vanilla Ice, Dan Fogelberg, Neil Diamond, all three members of ZZ Top, and more. In both her Stern interview and the documentary Let’s Spend The Night Together: Confessions of Rock’s Greatest Groupies, she was quoted saying that Peter Frampton was “the smallest.”

“They’re passing you around like a plate of potatoes,” Stern told her. “Well, a plate of good potatoes,” she replied.

It’s rumored that Hamzy was also the subject of the 1985 Cheap Trick song “Standing on the Edge”: “Oh, Connie likes nighttime, every night/Connie likes candy, every bite/All day sucker, Connie might/Swallow that thing ’cause she does it right.” A representative for the band did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone for comment.

In 1995, Hamzy published the memoir Rock Groupie: Intimate Adventures of “Sweet Connie” From Little Rock. She was profiled by Cosmopolitan in 1974, and she wrote an article in Penthouse in 1992 detailing her adventures.

In the latter, she claimed she nearly had an encounter with Bill Clinton in the lobby of the North Little Rock Hotel in 1984. George Stephanopoulos, then the communications director on the 1992 Clinton campaign, recalled the controversy in his 1999 memoir All Too Human: A Political Education: “The governor was leaving a speech with a few associates when Hamzy, who had been sunbathing by the hotel, ran up to him, flipped down her bikini top, and asked ‘What do you think of these?’ Clinton seemed to take great pleasure in picturing the scene again. Hilary was less amused.”

Stephanopoulos was able to secure affidavits from witnesses to disprove the story. “We’d survived our first bimbo eruption,” he wrote. “The Hamzy episode was a test — of Clinton’s character, our campaign’s competence, and the media’s resistance to tabloid trash. We all passed. Too bad it was only a drill.”

Hamzy spent 12 years working as a substitute teacher in Little Rock. According to her Rivers interview, she was an only child. After her father’s death in 1984, she stopped speaking to her mother over issues with her father’s estate. She was engaged twice and kept the rings both times.

“I became a groupie at 15 and since then it has become an addiction,” Hamzy told the London Sun, quoted in New York’s Daily News in 1991. “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t give it up. It’s the thrill, the chase, the challenge of getting to meet a famous star that lures me back time and again.”

“When girls find out what they’re in for — group sex, kinky sex, sex with other women, and usually all of it in one night — they chicken out,” she added. “I didn’t. I felt as though I had arrived. I thought I was somebody.“

 

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davidg
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RIP Jerry Granelli, last surviving member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio.  Here is Jerry with his trio playing the song everyone knows.  What great style on the drums.    

Cheeseweasel
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Found Frank Stallone's account.

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SuingToGetAMessageBoard?

Doc: I've got some bad news.  It looks like you'll probably not live more than 10 Patient: 10 what? Doc: 9

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ztejas

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34 minutes ago, shadow_operative2.0 said:

Interesting Rolling Stone article on a relatively famous groupie that kicked it Saturday. 

 

A lot of that sounds illegal.

Although it was Arkansas in the 70s, so...

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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A guy I know who "knew" her said on Facebook "I remember the top her head quite well." 

This is Phil Kaufman, the dude who stole and burned Gram Parsons body. His real job was as "road mangler" for tons of musicians, a lot of whom were "problematic" with booze or drugs. If you wanted Joe Cocker to make it through the end of a tour, you hired the Mangler to keep him away from the rum. Even though he is a legend in that field, Connie must have been really efficient if she was able to work her way down to Phil. Managers are even behind roadies in that chase. 

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Sandman

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2 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

There was some article that came out a few years ago that said, essentially, to cheer up when it comes to dead musicians. It's only going to get worse. It's just simple math and the nature of modern day celebrity. We've been exposed to a lot more music than previous generations so there are a lot more of them we know, and the more people you know, the more death you will have to deal with.

 

 

This has really been hitting home for me lately. I'm rewatching the Ken Burns County Music doc and they interviewed Charley Pride, Mel Tillis and Merle before they all died. And then they have Loretta Lynn, Willie and others that probably don't have much longer, it really hits home that the entertainers that have been around since before my parents were born won't be here forever. It feels weird and scary.

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Burt

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Asner was suppose to come up and star in "God Help Us" at our local summer theatre last summer, but it was canceled because of Covid.  That was a huge deal for a tiny little theatre like ours to have someone like Asner on stage.  I had a feeling when it was shut down that we were likely missing out on our last opportunity for that to ever happen.

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

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On 8/24/2021 at 8:54 PM, shadow_operative2.0 said:

Interesting Rolling Stone article on a relatively famous groupie that kicked it Saturday. 

 

Just saw this article/post.  Crazy story.  Interesting life led I suppose.  But let's be honest, and not to speak ill of the recently departed, Vanilla Ice kinda sticks out like a sore thumb on that list.  

You think about the life she could have led had her mother not disliked parking lot traffic so much, but I guess it was her journey.  Kudos to her for taking it, RIP.  

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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3 hours ago, OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys said:

I believe both Snoop and Keema have been arrested for drugs since The Wire. Now Omar with heroin.  Great job everyone.  

DeAndre McCullough, who played one of Brother Mouzon's bodyguards, also died of an overdose. 

He was one of the primary subjects of David Simon / Ed Burns's book The Corner, which was kind of one half of the research that went into The Wire. They embedded themselves with a family in West Baltimore and DeAndre was the oldest son, and over the course of that year first he started dealing and then using...no more spoilers.

Anyway his mom Fran Boyd also had a bit part on The Wire and she wound up marrying one of the heavies who protected Omar in jail and on the outside...I forget that dude's name but he was "the real Omar." And he's dead too, but he was in his late 50s or 60s at least and I don't think he OD'd.  

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13269

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10 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

DeAndre McCullough, who played one of Brother Mouzon's bodyguards, also died of an overdose. 

He was one of the primary subjects of David Simon / Ed Burns's book The Corner, which was kind of one half of the research that went into The Wire. They embedded themselves with a family in West Baltimore and DeAndre was the oldest son, and over the course of that year first he started dealing and then using...no more spoilers. 

The Corner is under-appreciated. Don’t they show the real DeAndre at the end of it? I remember hoping that he found a way to not repeat his parents addictions but based on your info, sadly he didn’t.

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WhatTheBuck

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On 9/6/2021 at 10:01 PM, MaybeACoordinator said:

DeAndre McCullough, who played one of Brother Mouzon's bodyguards, also died of an overdose. 

He was one of the primary subjects of David Simon / Ed Burns's book The Corner, which was kind of one half of the research that went into The Wire. They embedded themselves with a family in West Baltimore and DeAndre was the oldest son, and over the course of that year first he started dealing and then using...no more spoilers.

Anyway his mom Fran Boyd also had a bit part on The Wire and she wound up marrying one of the heavies who protected Omar in jail and on the outside...I forget that dude's name but he was "the real Omar." And he's dead too, but he was in his late 50s or 60s at least and I don't think he OD'd.  

It was pretty wild to see Clarke Peters go from playing a junkie on The Corner to a cop on The Wire to a Mardi Gras Indian Chief on Treme. Every portrayal was unique and you never saw a hint of one character in another. He’s a brilliant actor. And yes, The Corner is a good read.

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 20856

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Not to get too far off track (haha, get it?), but one of my favorite anecdotes about The Wire is this one from Andre Royo, who played Bubbles. The way I've read it elsewhere is that the person said something to the effect of "I know you need this more than I do." 

 

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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On 9/7/2021 at 7:32 AM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The Corner is under-appreciated. Don’t they show the real DeAndre at the end of it? I remember hoping that he found a way to not repeat his parents addictions but based on your info, sadly he didn’t.

He didn't but the younger brother did. 

I hope -- he kind of fades away off the Internet about five years ago. 

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28574

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On 9/14/2021 at 6:51 PM, Underdog said:

Never clicked for me, just never thought he was that funny.  But damn courageous to battle Cancer in silence like he did. 

You never saw him parody Burt Reynolds on SNL’s  parody of Jeopardy? I mean, he was great as the host on Weekend Update but he absolutely killed as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy. One of the funniest things about it was, ‘How the fuck does anyone come up with that?’ It was hysterical. 

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RPM

RPM 26073

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4 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

And here I thought you were too young to remember when SNL was still funny.

I watched the first episode of NBC's Saturday Night when it aired. It was named that because Howard Cosell had a show on ABC named Saturday Night Live.

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