Singer-songwriter Jack Russell, who scored hard rock hits in the 1980s with his band Great White and survived a 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire that killed 100 people, has died. He was 63.
His death at his home in Southern California was announced Thursday in a statement on Instagram, which said he “passed away peacefully” in the presence of family and friends. KL Doty, with whom Russell wrote a memoir in 2024, said the cause was Lewy body dementia and multiple system atrophy, though he declined to say when Russell died.
The singer revealed in July that he was retiring from touring as a result of those conditions. “I can’t perform at the level I desire and at the level you deserve,” he wrote on Instagram.
A product of the late-1970s Los Angeles club scene, Great White played sleazy but tuneful rock in the proud, depraved tradition of hair-metal; Mark Kendall's guitars chugged and squealed, while Russell's vocals could evoke the manly screech of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant.
The band first appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1987 with the bluesy “Rock Me,” in which Russell assured a woman that “if you stay the night we'll make wrong seem right.” Their biggest hit single was a rowdy cover of Ian Hunter's “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and propelled the group's album “…Twice Shy” to sales of more than 2 million copies. “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was nominated for best hard rock performance at the 1990 Grammy Awards.
Great White's commercial fortunes declined during the '90s, as grunge and alternative rock displaced hair metal on the radio and MTV; the band broke up in 2001. The following year, however, Russell and Kendall formed a splinter group called Jack Russell's Great White that began touring clubs around the country.
On February 20, 2003, a fireworks display during the band's performance at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, ignited the soundproofing covering the venue's walls and ceiling, causing a fire that quickly engulfed the club. Among the 100 people who died was the band's guitarist, Ty Longley; another 230 people were reported to have been injured.
The group's tour manager and the station owners were later charged with involuntary manslaughter; Russell and other members of Great White agreed to pay $1 million in a settlement to survivors and the families of the fire victims.
Russell, who was born in Montebello in 1960, played with a reunited version of the original Great White until the band broke up again and he reformed Jack Russell's Great White. That band's most recent album, a tribute to Led Zeppelin, came out in 2021; this year, Russell teamed up with another hair-metal veteran, Tracii Guns of L.A. Guns, for a duet LP titled Medusa.
Russell's survivors include his wife, Heather Ann Russell, and his son, Matthew Hucko.
On Instagram on Thursday, his former Great White bandmates sent their condolences to Russell's family, saying it was “a privilege and a joy to share the stage with him – lots of shows, lots of miles and maximum rock.”
