Jack Russell scored hard-rock hits in the 1980s with his band Great White but was also known for a nightclub fire that killed 100 people in 2003.
Singer and songwriter Jack Russell, who scored hard-rock hits in the 1980s with his band Great White and who survived a Rhode Island nightclub fire in 2003 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 peacefully” in the presence of family members and friends. K.L. Doty, with whom Russell wrote a 2024 memoir, said the cause was Lewy body dementia and multiple system atrophy, though she declined to say when Russell died.
The singer revealed in July that he was retiring from the road as a result of those conditions. “I am unable to perform at the level I desire and at the level you deserve,” he wrote on Instagram.
A product of the Los Angeles club scene of the late 1970s, Great White played scuzzy but tuneful rock in the proudly debauched hair-metal tradition; Mark Kendall’s guitars chugged and squealed, while Russell’s voice could evoke the manly shriek of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
