Joey Ramone

popular name: Nico

date_of_death: July 18, 1988

age: 49

cause_of_death: Cerebral hemorrhage after falling from a bicycle

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Nico was a German-born marginal singer, songwriter, musician, model, and actress. She had small roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1967, at the insistence of Warhol, she sang on four songs of the Velvet Underground's debut album "The Velvet Underground & Nico". At the same time, she started a solo career and released "Chelsea Girl". Neither of albums was a commercial success. In Los Angeles Nico's friend and lover, Jim Morrison, suggested that she start writing her own material. Soon after John Cale of The Velvet Underground became her musical arranger and produced The Marble Index, Desertshore, The End... and other subsequent albums. Yet despite having access to and working with Brian Jones (The Rolling Stones), Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), Lou Reed, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Jackson Browne, Nico was unable to find an audience larger than a small club. This was in part that she was notoriously unpleasant to work with, addicted to heroin, abused alcohol and was partial deaf which made it difficult to hold a tune. After a concert in Berlin in June 1988, she went on holiday in Ibiza to rest and died as the result of a cycling accident.

popular name: Tito Puente

date_of_death: May 31, 2000

age: 77

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: He has been called El Rey del Mambo, El Rey de los Timbales, The King of Latin Music, and with a hundred records and countless epic solos to his name, Ernesto “Tito” Puente - band leader, flamboyant timbales player and showman - has more than earned the title. A finely trained musician, Tito was also a lyrical vibraphonist and a gifted arranger who played piano, congas, bongos, and saxophone.

popular name: Mel Tormé

date_of_death: June 5, 1999

age: 73

cause_of_death: Stroke

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Singer, actor, writer, composer, arranger, drummer and pianist Mel Tormé was extraordinarily versatile, but he will primarily be remembered as one of the supreme popular vocalists of this century, a superb song stylist equally persuasive handling tender love-songs, swinging rhythm numbers or giving a cool jazz sound to the best of popular song. As a singer, his name ranks in the top echelon along with Crosby and Sinatra, but he excelled them when it came to jazz stylings, particularly with the series of superb recordings he made with arranger Marty Paich starting in the mid-Fifties. As a composer, his best-known work, "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . ."), is a perennial favourite. His own autobiography, It Wasn't All Velvet, is an oblique reference to the label given him by the disc jockey Fred Robbins, "The Velvet Fog", an attempt to sum up the warm, mellow timbre that gave Torme's voice its unmistakable individuality. Sadly on August 8, 1996, a stroke ended Tormé's 65-year singing career. In February 1999, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He died from another stroke on June 5, 1999, at the age of 73.