Ian Whitcomb, who had a rock ’n’ roll hit in 1965 with “You Turn Me On” before becoming a celebrated historian and performer of forms of popular music that peaked decades before rock, died on April 19 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78.
His wife, Regina Whitcomb, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2012 that had left him in declining health.
From the time he was a boy in Britain, Mr. Whitcomb was deeply enamored of ragtime and other older styles of music. After playing blues, jazz and skiffle music, he found widespread (if short-lived) fame with “You Turn Me On,” released while he was still a college student.
“I was ready to contribute to American popular culture: some finely wrought yet unpretentious work that might appeal to the masses,” Mr. Whitcomb wrote in “Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle of the Sixties” (1983), a memoir laced with history. “And what happened? The American people elevated me to fame with a trifle, a piece of piffle knocked off in a fit of absence of mind.”
“You Turn Me On,” an up-tempo number sung in a falsetto voice, complete with panting just risqué enough to appeal to teenagers and scandalize their parents, peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
On the strength of that single’s success, Mr. Whitcomb traveled to the United States and France, appeared on television shows like “American Bandstand,” and was billed alongside the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks and Sonny & Cher. But, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle did not suit him.
“My heart wasn’t in rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t my line,” he said. “I didn’t like the drug scene and the attitude. … I wanted to write books and do theatrical things.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/arts ... -dead.html
