Death
During the evening of November 18, 1983, Evans argued with Joey Molland of Badfinger on the telephone, chiefly regarding potential publishing/ASCAP divisions of the song "Without You" whose ASCAP royalties accumulating for airplay had been funding Evans, with other potential publishing funds being held by Apple Corps Ltd. pending resolution of debate between the group members and manager Bill Collins. Early the following morning, 19 November, Evans was found dead by suicide; his body hanging in his back garden from a willow tree. Allegedly, he left no note, but family and friends have speculated he was overwhelmed by the combination of his conflicts with Molland, ex-manager Bill Collins and ex-bandmate Mike Gibbins over the pending royalties, plus the U.S. lawsuit he felt threatened his livelihood further. But a major factor of Evans' depression, alluded to by many friends and family members, was that he was never able to get over his former bandmate's Pete Ham's suicide. Marianne Evans, his wife, was quoted in a documentary stating "Tommy said 'I want to be where Pete is. It's a better place than down here' ...."
Evans is also survived by a son, Stephen.
In 1993, a CD of recordings made in the early 1980s by Evans and musician friend Rod Roach was posthumously released in the U.K. on Gipsy Records under the title Over You (The Final Tracks).
Read more about this topic: Tom Evans (musician)
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)
“And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)