Zapp Brothers Found Dead
Friends and colleagues are searching for a motive in the apparent
murder-suicide that claimed the lives of Roger and Larry Troutman,
two of the siblings that comprised the seminal funk outfit Zapp.|
No one has stepped forward as a witness to the incident, which
unfolded early Sunday morning at a Dayton recording studio operated
by Roger Troutman, Zapp’s leader, and a solo star in his own right.
Paramedics summoned by neighbors who heard gunshots arrived to find
Roger bleeding from several gunshot wounds. While he was clinging
to life when found, the forty-seven-year-old singer (dubbed “the
master of the vocorder” within the music industry) died in surgery
hours later. His fifty-four-year-old brother was found in his car,
several blocks away, felled by a single gunshot wound — which
police describe as “apparently self-inflicted” — to the head.
Business associates of the brothers, who had not worked together
professionally in more than a decade, aren’t commenting on the
matter, although a source close to the elder Troutman (who was
active in real estate management in the Dayton area) indicated that
relations between the pair were strained in recent times.
Zapp — which initially included brothers Lester and Terry Troutman
as well — emerged from a fertile Ohio funk scene in 1978,
stringing together such hits as “More Bounce to the Ounce” and
“Dance Floor,” which actually topped the charts at the tail end of
the disco era. Roger, as the acknowledged leader of the act, tested
the solo waters beginning in the early Eighties, racking up solo
hits with songs like “I Want to be Your Man” and a reworking of “I
Heard it Through the Grapevine.”
Although acknowledged as an inspiration by artists as varied as the
former Prince and East Coast hardcore rap group EPMD, commercial
success eluded Roger and Zapp for much of the past decade — until
Tupac Shakur called on his talents for “California Love” in 1996.
More recently, Troutman also turned in appearances on recordings by
Kool Keith and Gerald Levert.
A Dayton police spokesman says that an investigation is ongoing,
with ballistics and toxicology reports due later in the week.