His wife, Gail, 43, had called the police at 6 a.m., the police said. A .38caliber Derringer was recovered at the scene. Mrs. Pappalardi was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, according to Fred Elwick, a police spokesman.

Pappalardi, who was born in the Bronx, began his career as a folk artist in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and worked with such artists as Joan Baez, the Lovin' Spoonful and the Youngbloods. He made his name as producer for the rock band Cream. In 1969, Atlantic Records asked him to work with the Vagrants, a hardrock, high-decibel band that became Mountain. Pappalardi played bass and keyboard, sang backup vocals and acted as producer.

In recent years, Pappalardi worked as a record producer, but the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock says he had been made deaf by his appearances with Mountain." And there it was. Felix Pappalardi was never a true rock hero -- his name was not as well- known as those of Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Brian Jones or Keith Moon -- but in a way his death was more symbolic than the early deaths of those famous people. Pappalardi was one of the scores of young men who, in the late '60s and early '70s, met the era's demand for touring rock stars. For a while it seemed there was no limit to the number of big-name bands that young Americans would support; money was somehow plentiful, and for a few short years an entire age bracket was more than willing to spend a lot of that money on record albums and concert tickets.

For the young men who were allowed to provide the music on a national scale -- the Felix Pappalardis of this world -- it was a dream come true. Many of them worked menial jobs in their hometowns, playing in bars at night, and then -- on the whim of a West Coast record-company executive -- they found themselves in chartered jets, in lavish hotel suites, in the company of the most beautiful young women in every strange town they passed through. Every pleasure that was available in life was theirs.

Some of them were not terribly skilled -- many of the bands specialized in basic three-chord music that did not challenge a person's virtuosity -- but that did not matter. In the '50s and before, the American heroes may have been the Mickey Mantles and Joe DiMaggios; by the early '70s the heroes were the rock 'n' roll stars, and if the men on stage did not have the talent to play a Mozart sonata, the girls in the front row did not care. It probably seemed as if it would go on forever. When you become a star in your 20s, when you spend evening after evening looking off a stage at 10,000 rapt faces and more, it is probably too much to ask that you also maintain a sense of perspective. Only now, as we move inexorably into a decade that is entirely different in many ways, do we begin to see that of course it was not a dream; of course, for many of the young men, it was simply a brief, dizzy period that ended. You hear of them a lot: the men with names that were never as wellknown as the names of their bands, now trying to find work in the real world, or -- inevitably -- trying and failing to score again in a musical world dominated by other boys who are young right this minute. When you run into one of these men, and it is explained to you that he used to be a guitarist with a certain band, or a drummer with a certain group, it always strikes you as odd that he can seem so old at such a relatively youthful age.

The rock 'n' roll boys with the national bands got to live a life that we, their contemporaries, could only fantasize about; neither we nor they gave much thought to what they would do once the world moved on. In a way those rock 'n' roll boys, who seemed so glamorous with their jewelry and their high-heeled boots and their silk jackets and tailored velvet pants -- those rock 'n' roll boys, in retrospect, seem not so very different from the wrestling stars who thundered across television screens in the late '40s and early '50s. Both the wrestlers and the rockers were earnest young laborers dressing up and pretending to be something exotic and faintly dangerous for a new audience that was just inventing its own expectations; both the wrestlers and the rockers found out soon enough that the arenas of America can look shabby and empty and ultimately sad by the light of day, when the ticket-buyers have all gone home and the costumes have been packed away for the last time.

There's no fancy moral here, no lesson to be remembered. Most people do not receive obituaries at all; it probably is not life's worst tragedy to have a newspaperman on the night shift recall, for the record, that you have reportedly gone deaf from playing Mississippi Queen" too many nights on too many stages. Oh, how brightly those spotlights burned...