Beloved Drummer Mark Cooper Has Died

Mark “Whitey” Cooper, the drummer for Norman Nardini & The Tigers, has died. Cooper passed away on Thursday, Aug. 1 following a battle with throat cancer and heart disease, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The son of an Air Force man, Cooper grew up in Hawaii, Alaska, and Maine before his family eventually settled in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, and was best known for his collaborations with Norman Nardini, a member of the major-label Pittsburgh glam-rock band Diamond Reo. Cooper was first introduced to Nardini through the Resistance, the band Cooper formed with Paul Shook, Nason Gieg, and Keith Giles after high school. Nardini helped with the band’s production and writing. After the Diamonds split in 1978, Nardini formed Norm Nardini & The Tigers, recruiting Cooper, Shook and Gieg.

“I just had to grab some guys, and I knew those guys didn’t mind getting in the truck and they weren’t gonna demand all kinds of money,” Nardini recalled. “Plus, we were all friends. They were rock ‘n’ roll guys and they didn’t mind all sleeping in one room.”

Nardini said Cooper, who played drums for the group, brought something unique to the band: “There’s a swingability to music that has been lost. The final days of drummers that had a swingability to them is when grunge music came in, in the ’90s. That was the end of a drummer being able to have a looseness, a swing, that goes back to the 1940s. Whitey had that. He studied all those big band drummers.”

Nardini also credited Cooper with singing “much better than I did. He just really did. I used his voice and his natural skills to help me, used his voice on all my harmonies to help me sound better.”

After Nardini & The Tigers split in ’87, Cooper maintained a working relationship with Nardini, backing him on his solo work. He also played drums on album by True Believers, the Austin band led by Alejandro Escovedo, and in the early ’90s, formed the ’50s oldies R&B band Blind Venetian. He reunited with Nardini in the early 2000s, working with him on several more albums as well as backing him at a celebration marking Nardini’s 50 years in music in 2018.

Although Cooper “was going to start working with me again,” according to Nardini, “his health wouldn’t permit it. He just said, ‘Dude, I can’t keep up with you.’” On Facebook, Cooper was candid about his health, revealing in his final July 8 post that his “cardio report shows no improvement- it’s only gotten worse.” He said his doctor told him “there’s not much they can do. He’s given me about a year to live.”

Outside of music, Cooper “tried to be a regular person a couple of times, but it never worked out. He didn’t have what it takes to be a regular person. He was too much of a rock ‘n’ roller to ever really blend in,” Nardini said. Cooper did have a few acting credits, appearing as The White Shirt Zombie in George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead.