Bottom Ten: 2010 Deaths

Chris Sievey

This is one I don’t think a lot of people know, and that’s sad. He was the lead guy in the brilliant power-pop band The Freshies, who only put out one album and some singles, but were great. Their best known is probably “I’m In Love With The Girl On The Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk”, but they’re all good. Other evidence that Chris Sievey was awesome? One of the single B-sides was a video game that he designed; you duped the audio to a cassette tape, and plugged the tape in your Sinclair Infoseek computer. How amazing is that? That, and the game is actually FUN. As amazing as the Freshies were, Sievey is probably best known for his character Frank Sidebottom, who had an enormous papier-mâché head. I don’t know as much about Frank as I’d like, but folks in the UK loved him. And I’m figuring they were right to. I sure love Chris Sievey.

Richard Dunn

This was sad for fans of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, as Richard Dunn was probably the breakout star of the show. He always played sort of mumbly, confused old men, even though he was neither in real life. (Though he was pretty old.) He died shortly before the airing of the final episode of Awesome Show, which was kind of appropriate, I suppose, along the lines of Charles Schulz dying the day the final Peanuts ran. Still, I’d take him being alive over an appropriately-dated death any day.

Ronnie James Dio

This one is just crazy. Dio can’t die, right? He’s fuckin’ DIO. Dude invented the Metal Sign. Dude WAS metal. And again, from all accounts, another super nice guy in real life. People gave him shit for replacing Ozzy in Sabbath, but, y’know what? There’s room for both.

Peter Steele

This was a tough year for metal. Peter Steele of Type O Negative, a favorite metal band of mine, had a heart attack. He’d gotten clean from what I’d heard, but it sounds like his previous drug use was what did him in. Boo to that. He had a great voice, great sense of humor, and he wrote some really great songs. (Apparently, he also had a great schlong, but I never felt compelled to look him up in Playgirl.) I’m really bummed that there’ll be no more Type O albums.

Art Clokey

I’ve heard he wasn’t the nicest of guys, but he did create Davey & Goliath. That tends to get him a free pass from me, since Davey & Goliath itself is so very good-natured. And that early synth version of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” they used as the theme of some of the episodes was AWESOME. I wasn’t as into Gumby, but that’s OK; it was technically pretty neat and Gumbtasia was pretty cool to watch. It’s neat to watch experimental animation from a guy you typically think of as doing only pretty straightforward stuff.

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