Stewart Lupton, Singer for ’90s Band Jonathan Fire*Eater, Is Dead at 43

Stewart Lupton, the singer-songwriter whose short-lived ‘90s band Jonathan Fire*Eater burned fast and bright, falling short of major-label rock stardom but inspiring a wave of New York acts in the early 2000s, died Sunday in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was 43.

Walter Martin, a longtime friend and former bandmate, confirmed the death. Lupton’s family, in a statement, gave no cause of death but said it stemmed from a “desperate attempt to escape the voices that so tormented him.”

Jonathan Fire*Eater, with Lupton as its charismatic, frenetic frontman, released only two albums and a smattering of demos and EPs before its demise in 1998. Yet the band’s screechy, danceable post-punk sound, propelled by a rowdy organ and Lupton’s wails, helped plant the seed of the New York rock revival that would bring the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol and LCD Soundsystem to international acclaim.

Elegantly disheveled and with a sense of theater that Lupton said he had learned from visiting Day of the Dead celebrations in Oaxaca, Mexico, Jonathan Fire*Eater was known primarily for its chaotic live shows in dingy bars and clubs. Lupton described the group’s stage presence as “obtuse, literary poetic drama — we might start fighting, or we might fall apart. No one ever knew what was gonna happen, including us.”

Karen O, the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, said in the 2017 oral history “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001—2011,” by Lizzy Goodman, that Jonathan Fire*Eater “had enormous influence on me.” She recalled its members as “scrappy, skinny effeminate dudes” who had “primal sex oozing out of their pores.”

After inspiring a bidding war among labels, and ultimately signing to DreamWorks for its 1997 album “Wolf Songs for Lambs,” the band succumbed to rock ‘n’ roll dysfunction, attributable largely to Lupton’s tormented relationship to fame and his addiction to heroin. (The Los Angeles Times, in 1997, called the band “possibly the most hyped young group that nobody has ever heard of.”)

“I was powerless over it,” Lupton said of his drug addiction in a 2015 interview with the website Please Kill Me. “There is a toxicity there. When the self gets saturated and there is not enough God, you’re in for a rough ride.”

Born on March 29, 1975, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Lupton had a transient childhood owing to his father’s career in the Army. When Stewart was in the fourth grade, the family moved from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., where Lupton, armed with a Michael Jackson obsession and what he called a “syrupy accent,” met Martin and began playing in bands.

The Ignobles, a ska-turned-garage-rock group the two formed with classmates from the private St. Albans School, went from practicing in basements to opening for the punk band Fugazi.

But it was the group members’ arrival in New York to attend college — and Lupton’s switch from bass player to lead singer — that led them to form Jonathan Fire*Eater in 1993. After a year at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York, Lupton dropped out and moved to an apartment near the corner of East Houston and Suffolk streets in Manhattan.

“Everything was very new and dangerous and fun and cheap,” Lupton said. “It was kind of gutter glamorous on the Lower East Side back then.”

The band would release its debut album — titled simply “Jonathan Fire*Eater” — on Third World Underground Records in 1995, followed by an EP (with the same title) that would further establish its gnarled garage-punk sound. “Tremble Under Boom Lights,” released in 1996, increased the band’s buzz, and the labels came calling.

Even with the support of DreamWorks, a subsequent album, “Wolf Songs for Lambs,” underperformed commercially and the group, roiled by infighting and Lupton’s lack of reliability, hit a period of creative stagnancy. Following a July 1998 concert in Central Park, Jonathan Fire*Eater broke up, an occasion that Lupton marked by taking “some pills,” he said.

“I would cringe in my heart to think I somehow suggested that kind of physical and spiritual decadence is glamorous,” Lupton told The New York Post in 2005. “Hopefully if the word ‘drugs’ is in an article, it would be near the words ‘phase’ and ‘naive.'”

While his bandmates — including Martin, guitarist Paul Maroon and drummer Matt Barrick — went on to form the Walkmen with singer and songwriter Hamilton Leithauser, Lupton moved home to Washington, where he studied poetry at George Washington University. Though he rarely published his work, poetry “was the main positive force in his later life,” Martin said on Tuesday, calling Lupton’s writing “very magical stuff.”

Lupton is survived by his parents, George and Kennie Lupton. His family said he had been living in Los Angeles for the last three years. It was unclear why he was in Salt Lake City at his death.

He would go on to release folk-inspired music in the group the Chilballads in the mid-2000s, though it was hindered by unpredictable live performances as Lupton struggled to find stability.

“I’m sick to death of the road to excess,” he said in 2005. “The road to excess leads to central booking. Quite literally.”