Jack Russell, Great White frontman who survived deadly nightclub fire, dies at 63

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.

The band first charted on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1987 with the bluesy “Rock Me,” in which Russell assured a woman that “if you stay the night we’ll make the wrong seem right.” Its biggest single was a rowdy cover of Ian Hunter’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and drove 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 Grammy Awards in 1990.

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Great White’s commercial fortunes declined throughout the ’90s as grunge and alternative rock displaced hair metal on the radio and MTV; the band broke up in 2001. Yet the next year Russell and Kendall formed a splinter group called Jack Russell’s Great White that began touring clubs around the country.

On Feb. 20, 2003, a pyrotechnic display during the band’s set at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., ignited soundproofing insulation lining the venue’s walls and ceiling, leading to a fire that quickly engulfed the club. Among the 100 people who died was the band’s guitarist, Ty Longley; an additional 230 were reported injured.

The group’s tour manager and the Station’s owners were later charged with involuntary manslaughter; Russell and other Great White members agreed to pay $1 million in a settlement with survivors and families of the fire’s victims.

Russell, who was born in Montebello in 1960, went on to play 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 with another hair-metal veteran, Tracii Guns of L.A. Guns, for a duo LP titled “Medusa.”

Russell’s survivors include his wife, Heather Ann Russell, and his son Matthew Hucko.

On Instagram on Thursday, his former bandmates in Great White sent their condolences to Russell’s family and said it was “a privilege and joy to share the stage with him — many shows, many miles and maximum rock.”