en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Powell
TIL of drummer Cozy Powell's fatal car crash. He was traveling 104mph in the rain while drunk and talking on his phone with a woman who was cheating on her husband with him. He also had no seatbelt on, a leaking tire, and was still recovering from a recent motorcycle accident.
Million to one shot
Every proctologist story is the same
If you ever meet a proctologist at a party, don’t walk away. PLANT yourself there because you will hear the funniest stories you’ve ever heard.
Had a patient about 10yrs ago who had 24 inches of a pool noodle in his ass with the other 30+ inches still hanging out like a tail
I feel like I have a lot in common with them. I also work with assholes all day.
Sometimes these things just happen.
The lord works in mysterious ways
"... the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes, he’ll come in at an angle. Other times, he can hover, then swoop. Sometimes he can even come in from beneath, like a worm, or mole. The Lord, it’s his call how he chooses to manoeuvre.” ~ The padre
Unexpected Garth Marenghi.
A Saab 9000 can only protect you so much.
Very safe car. Need to wear the ol' seatbelt.
The design is very human
He wasn't wearing a seat belt apparently & went through the front windshield.
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22d
When you don’t wear a seatbelt
Great car
Probably still drivable. With a new tire. And windshield.
Just give my uncle a afternoon with it and we're good to go
A new driver as well. The last I one being dead and all...
A SAAB 9000S was my first car and I wouldn't exactly call it reliable. Occasionally when stopping, it would randomly die which was terrifying as a new driver. When it did continue to run while stopped, the speedometer would shoot up to 150mph (no idea why the speedometer went that high since 104 was likely its top speed). And for some reason the odometer was tied to that so the mileage climbed fast at long stops. I do have fond memories of the car, but looking back, it just had so many weird issues. After the second transmission died, my dad decided to sell it for parts.
Agree!I had a SAAB 9000 turbo - cost me a small fortune to keep it going mind, but man was it comfy and quick!
My Dad still has his fully working. Even the damn convertible top. Leather is blistered as if you roll the window down to the wrong angle it focuses the sun onto it. But aside from a replacement battery and an after market radio it's all pretty much as new. Lovely car .
It was a true Saab story
no so good safety record ?
the opposite.
Saab always made a huge effort to ensure their cars were incredibly safe. Couldn’t have picked a much better car to crash. However, nothing is idiot proof. If you’re going to drive like that without a seatbelt you can’t really blame the car
His last words were "oh shit"
Very likely my last words
I was in a very very close to fatal accident. I wasn't driving, three other people in the vehicle. I don't recall saying it, but according to them, as the car flipped onto it's side and started barreling toward the edge of a cliff I said (in a calm "inside" voice), "this part sucks".
I was in a rollover accident in Mexico. We (3) had borrowed a friend’s car and went to Baja to go surfing. As we rolled, the guy in the passenger seat said to the driver, “Mike (the owner of the car) is going to kick our ass.”
Gallows humor at its best!
Yeah. I can see that being my reaction too.
Absolutely makes sense to me. I just think it's funny.
“This part sucks can someone please stop the ride now..?”
That was my reaction when my car flipped, too.
"Well, damn. I should probably try to scrunch down in my seat for when the roof smashes in."
Totally calm. Freaked out the people who stopped to help me.
Weird isn't it?
"oh shit, my browser history"
Back in my day we used the buddy system. If one of you goes down, the other slips into your house while everyone is at the hospital and takes away all of your sick/twisted fantasy stuff. The VHS tapes, DVDs, magazines, photos, shameful toys, etc... all to be removed and destroyed before your wife or mother find out what kind of depraved bastard you were. You could probably have your PC or phone wipe itself automatically these days but a person you trust is a good option as well.
When my uncle passed, I volunteered to clean out his place. He was super fun but lived a drug fuled life, and even though my grandparents had their suspicions, I didn't want them confirmed.
All the drugs you collected were just a bonus right?
Lol, I'm not into hard drugs, but I did keep the garbage bag of weed I found in his tub.
I setmy PC up to autowipe history,browsing data, etc and have most folders hidden via a key combo + password system all built myself that's encrypted. By the time someone managed to actually get INTO my acct it'd be wiped and they still couldn't get naughty data. There's also a folder that says 'InCaseOfDeath' that has a bunch of financial info and such that they'd be able to find anyhow if I was dead and isn't useful UNLESS I'm dead and presented to someone.
I must be boring. The most controversial thing anyone might find is my secret Hotwheels collection.
The first question that comes to mind is “why would you need to keep your Hotwheels collection a secret?”
Yeah, collectors should be able to display their stuff without being judged!
Oh Jeff!
Your comment copied three times
Oh shit my comment button
Each time he was revived he said it.. Then just the sweet release knowing you did a factory reset...
You gotta mailbox on your bumper and a bald front tire.
Outta the car long haired (Louie)
I feel like that's pretty common.
Sipposedly it's one of the most frequent last words on a cockpit voice recorder before a plane crash.
Came here to say this, I read about engineering disasters a a lot and so I’ve read a lot of transcripts, it’s pretty common.
Also common is some variation of “here we go” which makes me think that pilots always have the possibility that they might die in a crash in the back of their mind, and that’s how they acknowledge it when it’s actually happening. :(
Yeah, the top 3 have got to be "oh, shit" "I could've sworn that thing was dead" and "no, fuck you!"
I was playing Helldivers with some friends, then there was a thud and over voice I said "A bomb landed right next to me and didn't..." <then it exploded>
“How am I s’posed to send this xxxx out” (couldn’t help it)
I feel like this should be the basis for every driver's ed video
I feel like these sorts of examples aren’t actually impactful as they are so easy to dismiss. “Well I wouldn’t be talking on my phone while drunk going 104 mph.” Bad driving is often much simpler than that and looks not so bad when compared to extreme cases.
"Also, I can't play drums"
" I wouldn't sleep with a married woman and I'm only doing 103 mph"
This is why I exclusively take mass transit to all my adulterous assignations.
This is why I refuse to learn how to play the drums.
You hit the drum with the stick. Now you know and there's no going back now.
Shit, and now I've just committed adultery. Better write my will.
Assignations? What, like Brazil?
If the documentary Spinal Tap has taught me anything, it's that being a drummer ups your chance of an early death by an exponential amount.
You don't want to choke to death on vomit.
Especially someone else's.
"I don't even like rock music. I like John Denver. That's why I don't fly."
Yeah, I never drink when I'm driving 104 in the rain distracted with no seat belt.
Smart move.
On a similar note, I never talk on the phone with the woman who’s cheating on her husband with me while I’m drinking and driving 104 in the rain with no seat belt.
It’s just too dangerous and irresponsible.
I would do all that, but only on tires that are fully inflated and after I have completely recovered from my most recent motorcycle accident.
The most surprising thing to me that no one seems to be talking about was, he had a phone in his car in 1998. You'd have to be rich to be able to afford the per minute(like I'm pretty sure we're talking at least what .25 or .35 per minute, right?)on that thing. Maybe that's why he was driving so fast, because the faster he got there, the fewer airtime minutes he'd be shelling out for on that thing.
Edit: I was being slightly facetious, I know there's been car phones a long time, though I will say I didn't realize how not ridiculous some of the plan pricing was. When I read the headline I was thinking guy on his cell phone per usual and then it said 1998 and then I remembered how old I am.
Lots of people had cell phones in 1998, and you certainly didn’t have to be rich, the 2G network was in place and a Motorola StarTAC was a popular flip phone. It was somewhat of a luxury item but lots of people had them through work, and it would have been an inconsequential cost to an accomplished rock drummer.
TIL: i was rich in '98! For real tho: first 10 seconds of my calls were free, so i called somebody, yelled: call me back! and didn't need to be rich, haha. Mobiles were already pretty common then, etiquette of using while driving not so much. Like, today? 🤷♂️
Car phones been around since 1946.
My dad had a car phone in the early 80s. We lived in a rowhouse just outside of Baltimore. We were definitely not rich.
Also, this guy was a top of his market drummer that appeared on over 60 popular albums and was touring with huge bands.
He was gettin paid.
As long as you're not recovering from a motorcycle accident you should be fine.
I only commit one sin at a time.
Don't ask me about the tables
But what does she DO, I don’t get it
TAY-BULLS!
You don’t know how to treat the customer. You don’t know how to treat the Crypt Keeper.
Her job is so confusing!
“It looks like he threw them in a MUD PUDDLE!”
Wow, pretty serious.
why is there swearing?
Do you understand what I'm saying? How the tables are my corn? Whoa!!~~
I don't think he should have yelled at Eddie.
Those tables were his livelihood.
Don’t say anything about them.
If you’re gonna be a home breaker, do it on a sunny day while sober
You don't think some impressionable teens wouldn't think it was a badass way to go out.
What about impressionable 35 year olds?
The most impactful driving safety epiphany I’ve ever had was that every driver in an accident was confident they were in control, as confident as they are every other second they were actually in control. This scares me to no end and now I am an extremely cautious driver and always scared.
The most shocking part to me was that he was 50 years old, and not just some dumb kid.
Live and learn … or not
You either live and learn, or die and teach
Unfortunately he he died before he could
The world has no shortage of older dumb motherfuckers.
sometimes you get lucky as a boy and dont drown/fall/crash, etc, so you make it to 50 on sheer chance. its a numbers game.
What's the saying? "You learn all your life and still die a fool."
He has probably been getting away with this type of behavior for the last 35 years so he had no reason to believe he wouldn't continue to do so.
Yeah. To have the wisdom of a 50 year old you need to have been, ya know, learning stuff during those 50 years. Not just fucking around without consequence.
Like in that timeless quip, live fast and die like kind of early, not old or anything, but not an absolute tragedy, you know? die that kind of death
50… He was a fuckin’ kid
20 years in the band…not a peep
Cozy Powell...whatever happened there
Age has no limits on age.
I, for example, have over 50 years experience at being 7 years old.
Some people grow up. Others, however, only grow old.
Got away with it for 30 years.
Most of the aggressive drivers I see on my 30 minute interstate commute are middle-aged white men alone in a giant empty pick up truck
Well, you don't need to go to an ivy league school to be a drummer.
Well, I suppose he shouldn't have done all those things, huh?
Well, it's possible he could've done all but one of those things and been ok.
Check your tire pressure regularly, folks.
Honestly if he'd been wearing his seatbelt he'd probably have survived. He died because he went through the front windshield IIRC.
There isn’t one thing that should be happening in that entire sentence
Except Cozy being a drummer... That's the one thing that was good. Entire modern Metal drumming wouldn't exist if not for that intro on Stargazer and speed metal double bass drumming in bloody 70s.
Love Rainbow and how Stargazer is Blackmore’s Kashmir but didn’t Bonham borrow that heavy double bass drumming from Carmine Appice before Powell tho
Ian Paice did it before Cozy also, Deep Purple - Fireball, 1971
Ian Paice. Now there's a drummer.
That's what Appice claims, and he had a pretty good case for it. Whatever - the good imitate and the great steal outright.
The rain?
Yeah but listen to the drum intro to Stargazer by Rainbow
Dude was a legend on percussion. Not much recognition of it in this thread tho.
I love Powell but I’m not too surprised. Rainbow never quite hit the mainstream long-term and his time with Black Sabbath was during a major dip in their popularity.
There’s flirting with death… but this like sending inappropriate DMs to death
Yeah, like unsolicited dick pics, captioned "see anything you like?"
When I was a kid we were driving home in the family car and this guy overtook us at breakneck speed, disappearing over a blind summit. I remember both my parents saying "holy shit." When we got over the hill, we saw he'd crashed. The car had come to a stop on its nose against a tree having overturned a few times. The guy was dead inside. A few days later, the full story hit the local news - the man had left his wife, and she'd called him to tell him she'd taken an overdose (she hadn't, it was a lie). So he was racing to her house to "save her," and crashed on the way.
good lord
Is there a word for something that’s technically not intentional, but basically is? This feels like it goes beyond reckless self-endangerment.
I like what they say in the UK. "Death by misadventure"
Probably in German there is.
"He'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!'”
-- Terry Pratchett
Live fast, die young and leave a mangled corpse.
He was 50 when he died.
Live fast, die middle-aged doesn’t sound too terrible.
You either die at around 24 or 48, nothing in the middle.
The 27 Club would like a brief word.
So if I choose the latter I have to stay alive during the part where I work grueling hours to build a career and spend all of my free time raising children and then I get to die? Where do I sign up?
Sounds like a poster boy for you can't fix stupid 🤷
Fate fixed it
What an idiot
I was gonna say something similar, but instead I will upvote your clear wisdom 😂
The two Rainbow albums with him and Dio are fucking magical
Cozy really was dancing with the devil on this one.
Knew a guy that always hanged out around the gym I go, one day I see him and he's all battered walking with crutches, I asked him what happened and he told me he crashed in his motorcycle. A couple months pass by and the guy is back in health. Suddenly he stops showing up again, finally I ask a guy from there if he knew about him. He had another crash and died. Some people never learn.
Sometimes you do everything right and bad things still happen.
If I'm honest I'm a bit disappointed to learn that a legendary rock drummer from my youth died in a Saab. It's the equivalent of overdosing on antihistamines.
If you do overdose on antihistamines it’s a pretty wild trip
But you're also overdosing on benadryl which is just kinda sad.
It is indeed. Being 17 was weird.
Saabs were amazing cars.
Saabs were turbo beasts
All the other dumb shit he was going while driving was to make up for owning a responsible car.
I'm thinking it was one of the few cars with stock boost.
Old Saabs were radically engineered and built like tanks.
So only drive 103 mph while drunk then?
There was a time in the early 90s when Emerson, Lake, and Powell played a concert in the same city as my university. I really wanted to see it, but I was scheduled to work on the air from 6-12 that night. A housemate I often traded shifts with was working as crew at that show, so he was unavailable. Different reasons kept me from trading with other student colleagues, so I wound up doing my announcer thing that evening.
Later that night as the weekend gaggle of stoners we often attracted blossomed into a proper house party, my housemate returned and informed me that I didn't miss a thing. To hear him tell it, the entire band showed up drunk, and they just kept crashing and burning even though they were playing their own material (albeit a lot of that material is complex art rock.) It sounds like, despite all his talent, Mr. Powell spent the last several years of his life constantly drunk as a lord and no longer able to deliver the rhythmic wonders from earlier in his career.
I seen him play with Peter Green's splinter group at
the Clapham Grand not long before he crashed out
of this world. He was on the ball that night. Even played
a solo.
Most normal drummer death
Sounds like his family needs to talk to a lawyer about that leaking tire.
Good drummer. Great look. Good drummer.
You can’t dust for vomit
Great drummer
Other than that, great guy
At least he didn’t take anyone else with him I guess.
Didn't he die in a bizarre gardening accident?
This post seems like a contest winner in the “Let’s see how many stupid and self defeating actions you can fit into one sentence” game show
The Angel of Death thoroughly prepared to ensure a successful mission🥀. All that was missing was to find out his shoelaces were untied!
Sources also report that he was a week from retirement and had stated he was “getting too old for this shit” just before getting in the vehicle
If he was younger the option is "showed a picture of the girl waiting back home to his buddy".
American who loves Cozy here. Dude was a phenomenal drummer and this was a hell of a way for a man to go down. RIP to the legend with the fifty pound hammer.
I was reading that too due to his connection with Brian May. Rushing over to someone's place is one thing, but at that speed and without wearing a seat belt. Tough to sympathize with a tragic accident like that.
Also he wasn't sitting in the driver seat, was wearing sunglasses, the car was overloaded, he had 10 dogs with him who were crawling all over the place, he was playing with a gameboy and tried to reprogram his radio at the same time.
I 100% did not expect to see cozy powell here. Absolutely legendary and underrated drummer. Listen to stargazer from rainbow if you are into drumming and thank me later
Dude was literally doing everything you shouldn't be doing all at once.
TIL he was dead. Seriously, had no idea. I only really ever listened to him w/ ELP and Whitesnake, and didn't really follow him or his career outside of those appearances.
In social science, we call this outcome "overdetermined".
So is that considered suicide?
Yeah. Just seems intentional at that point.
Drummers are a different breed
Sounds like he had a death wish.
Drummers, man...
And most certainly had beaten the shit out of a drumset within very recent memory of the crash.
Rip CP.
What could go wrong ?
A tragic unavoidable accident
The guy was a great drummer. So was Keith Moon and both of them died due to their own addictions and stupidity.
Sometimes these freak accidents just happen, out of the blue.
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22d
A true recipe for disaster. Sad story.
Sounds like there was no way this could have been avoided. Just a freak accident.