Two Sublime Eddie Cochran Covers from 1969

 

If you were a white rock and roll star in the 1950s the best way to demonstrate credibility and be a hardcore badass was to to die in an airplane or automobile crash. That’s what happened to Eddie Cochran in 1960 when the ascending earth angel entertainer died in a car accident at the age of twenty-one on the way to Heathrow Airport at the end of a successful UK tour. Witnesses to the accident describe Cochran throwing his body over his fiancée, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, to protect her during impact, perhaps in the process sealing his own fate. At the age of eighteen, in 1958, Sheeley wrote the hit “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson, which had the distinction of becoming the first number one hit on the inaugural Billboard Hot 100 chart. The sublime Eddie Cochran tune “Somethin' Else,” in all its pummelling sturm und drang commodity fetishism, peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and was written by Sharon Sheeley and Eddie’s older brother Bob. My goodness, now doesn’t that just look like a Freudian case study if anything ever did? I can see it on the billboards now: Kane and Abel Vs. the Kustom Kar Kommandos.    

Flamin' Groovies, "Somethin' Else"

NRBQ, "C'mon Everybody"