Singer and songwriter Jack Russell, who scored hard-rock hits within the Eighties together with his band Nice White and who survived a Rhode Island nightclub hearth in 2003 that killed 100 folks, has died. He was 63.
His demise at his residence in Southern California was introduced Thursday in an announcement on Instagram, which stated he “handed peacefully” within the presence of relations and pals. Ok.L. Doty, with whom Russell wrote a 2024 memoir, stated the trigger was Lewy physique dementia and a number of system atrophy, although she declined to say when Russell died.
The singer revealed in July that he was retiring from the street on account of these circumstances. “I’m unable to carry out on the stage I need and on the stage you deserve,” he wrote on Instagram.
A product of the Los Angeles membership scene of the late Seventies, Nice White performed scuzzy however tuneful rock within the proudly debauched hair-metal custom; Mark Kendall’s guitars chugged and squealed, whereas Russell’s voice might evoke the manly shriek of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
The band first charted on Billboard’s Sizzling 100 in 1987 with the bluesy “Rock Me,” through which Russell assured a lady that “in the event you keep the night time we’ll make the incorrect appear proper.” Its greatest single was a rowdy cowl of Ian Hunter’s “As soon as Bitten, Twice Shy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and drove the group’s album “…Twice Shy” to gross sales of greater than 2 million copies. “As soon as Bitten, Twice Shy” was nominated for finest laborious rock efficiency on the Grammy Awards in 1990.
Nice White’s industrial fortunes declined all through the ’90s as grunge and various rock displaced hair metallic on the radio and MTV; the band broke up in 2001. But the subsequent yr Russell and Kendall shaped a splinter group known as Jack Russell’s Nice White that started touring golf equipment across the nation.
On Feb. 20, 2003, a pyrotechnic show through the band’s set on the Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., ignited soundproofing insulation lining the venue’s partitions and ceiling, resulting in a hearth that shortly engulfed the membership. Among the many 100 individuals who died was the band’s guitarist, Ty Longley; an extra 230 had been reported injured.
The group’s tour supervisor and the Station’s house owners had been later charged with involuntary manslaughter; Russell and different Nice White members agreed to pay $1 million in a settlement with survivors and households of the hearth’s victims.
Russell, who was born in Montebello in 1960, went on to play with a reunited model of the unique Nice White till the band broke up once more and he reformed Jack Russell’s Nice White. That band’s most up-to-date album, a tribute to Led Zeppelin, got here out in 2021; this yr, Russell teamed with one other hair-metal veteran, Tracii Weapons of L.A. Weapons, for a duo LP titled “Medusa.”
Russell’s survivors embody his spouse, Heather Ann Russell, and his son Matthew Hucko.
On Instagram on Thursday, his former bandmates in Nice White despatched their condolences to Russell’s household and stated it was “a privilege and pleasure to share the stage with him — many reveals, many miles and most rock.”
