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Anton Fier died on September 14, 2022 in Switzerland of assisted suicide at the age of 66. Anton’s death has left many questions. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted death in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question.
First reports came on September 21st from singer/songwriter and fellow Golden Palomino Syd Straw on her facebook: “Devastated to tell you of the sorry demise of Anton Fier, who never realized how loved he was.”
Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” “I’m not going to live to be 35.”
Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.
Film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, New Jersey, nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”
The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.
With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.
He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.
“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.
He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. It’s reported he stopped playing the drums in 2019. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”
Anton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.
Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”
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