Death
On May 28, 1975, Emerson's body was found next to his bicycle, near the West Side Highway, in Manhattan. Emerson's death is listed officially as a hit and run. He was 30 years old. To date, no one has been arrested or charged in connection with his death. Following a weekend-long wake hosted by Max's Kansas City owner Mickey Ruskin, Emerson was buried in Wharton, New Jersey.
After Emerson's death, various reports surfaced that he was not killed in a hit and run accident, but overdosed on heroin in a different location, and was dumped as staged hit and run. These reports have never been substantiated, and Emerson's official cause of death has never been changed.
In the book Making Tracks, Debbie Harry provided an account of the circumstances surrounding Emerson's death:
One night we were over at Eric's apartment working on a tape of "Heart of Glass" on his Teac fourtrack tape recorder, when he suddenly staggered out of the kitchen looking ashen. He looked even more distraught and sad when we left. Being satisfied drove him crazy in the end, because he had everything so he didn't care about anything anymore. He used to go out jogging every day, and did feats of physical endurance like strapping twenty-pound weights to each ankle and then bicycling up to the Factory. The next day we were sitting around the house just after we woke up when Barbara called with the bad news. "Oh, Eric got hit by a truck." He had been a good friend and inspiration to so many people. We didn't quite understand what had happened, but we went up to a party/wake held for him and saw a lot of people from the earlier glitter days. Eric's death definitely marked an end to the glitter period. We still miss him.
Read more about this topic: Eric Emerson
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“My glass shall not persuade me I am old
So long as youth and thou are of one date,
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There is something antique, even, in his style of treating his subject, reminding us that Heroes and Demi-gods, Fates and Furies, still exist; the common man is nothing to him, but after death the hero is apotheosized and has a place in heaven, as in the religion of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.”
—Walter Reisch (1903–1963)