Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: November 19, 2024.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024

Lawrence, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all noted that two drummers for the Bee Gees have died in the past few days.

Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.

…

Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.

…

Mr. Bryon, born in Cardiff, Wales, was a part of the Bee Gees for many of its greatest hits in the 1970s, including “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep is Your Love,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “More Than a Woman” and the rest of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. He started playing drums when he was 14.

Arthur Frommer, travel book guy.

Mr. Frommer built an empire of guidebooks, package tours, hotels and other services on the bedrock of his first book, published in 1957, which sold millions of copies in annually updated editions until 2007. (It was “Europe From $95 a Day” by then.)

…

“This is a book,” he wrote, “for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.”

Thomas E. Kurtz, one of the great men of history. He co-created the BASIC computer language.

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command, “RUN,” into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.

Posted in Books, Geek, Music, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch; November 4, 2024.

Monday, November 4th, 2024

Quincy Jones. NYT.

Alan Rachins, actor. I watched enough “L.A. Law” that I remember him. THR.

Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Showgirls”, and the “Fear on Trial” TV movie, which some of us had to watch in high school.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 28, 2024.

Monday, October 28th, 2024

David Harris, actor. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “18 Wheels of Justice”, “Crime Story”, “Badge of the Assassin”, and “Cop Rock”.

Tom Jarriel, ABC reporter. He’s another one of those old-time guys I remember from watching the news when I was younger.

Phil Lesh, of the Grateful Dead.

Jeri Taylor. TV writer and producer.

Before embarking on her Star Trek voyage, the Indiana native wrote and produced episodes of such popular network crime fare as Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I., Jake and the Fatman and In the Heat of the Night. She was adept at writing about “character, of people and relationships and feelings,” she once noted.

…

Along the way, Taylor also wrote ABC Afterschool Specials, episodes of Little House on the Prairie, The Incredible Hulk, Blue Thunder and Father Dowling Mysteries and the 1987 CBS telefilm A Place to Call Home, starring Linda Lavin.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 30, 2024.

Monday, September 30th, 2024

Kris Kristofferson. THR.

He was a good Texas boy who did some acting in addition to his music career. There’s plenty of press coverage around this, but a few credits that aren’t covered in the articles: “Lone Star”, “Millennium”, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”, “Heaven’s Gate”, and let us not forget…

(I know both Lawrence and I have said this before, but “Passion & Poetry: Sam’s Trucker Movie”, which is on the blu-ray edition of “Convoy”, has a lot of Kristofferson in it. And I think it is almost more interesting than the movie itself.)

Dikembe Mutombo, Hall of Fame NBA player. ESPN.

I kind of disliked that commercial because I felt it made him look like a jerk (yes, I know it was playing off his signature move). But:

Mutombo often joked about how much in fines his showmanship had cost him under the league’s no-taunting rule. But four years into retirement he received ample payback, starring in an acclaimed Geico commercial created for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wagged his famous finger at people in various everyday activities.
He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the commercial had reestablished recognition “for me and for my foundation. I thank God for it.”

…

Mutombo’s mother, Biamba Marie, died at home in 1998 after having a stroke; he had been unable to get hospital care for her due to a government-enforced curfew. That year, he invited business and political insiders to a dinner in Washington to announce a fund-raising campaign for a hospital in Kinshasa to provide treatment for the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people within the N.B.A., two notable exceptions being Ewing and Mourning.
“I thought it would be easy, that I would call up all the rich people I knew from being a basketball player and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times weeks before the 300-bed hospital, named for his mother, opened in September 2006, on land donated by the government. He said that he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he had donated roughly $15 million to the project.
“This is going to be the proudest day of my life,” he said during the ceremonial opening.

John Ashton, actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Police Squad!” (In color), and “Columbo”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 27, 2024.

Friday, September 27th, 2024

Dame Maggie Smith. THR. Tributes. Other credits include “Richard III” (1995), “Murder By Death”, “Death on the Nile” (1978), “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, and voice work in “Sherlock Gnomes” and “Gnomeo & Juliet”.

Barbara Leigh-Hunt, actress. Other credits include “Oh Heavenly Dog”, “The Plague Dogs”, and “Longitude”.

Muriel Furrer, Swiss cyclist. She was 18. Her death was a result of head injuries she sustained in a crash yesterday during the UCI World Championships.

Frank Coppa died in October of 2023, but his death was not announced until recently.

In 2002, he was serving time for securities fraud when he was indicted on racketeering and extortion charges. Facing an even longer prison sentence, he notified the F.B.I. that he wanted to cooperate with the government.
It was the first time a Bonanno member had flipped, violating the mafia’s solemn oath of loyalty, Omertà.
Mr. Coppa’s decision to cooperate with federal prosecutors, knowingly putting his life at risk, led at least 10 other members to do the same and ultimately helped the government convict Joseph Massino, the Bonanno boss, of seven murder charges and immobilize his mafia family.

…

Mr. Coppa, known as Big Frank, spent two days on the witness stand describing a world seemingly drawn from a Mario Puzo novel, with characters nicknamed Bobby Wheelchairs, Sally Bagel, Gene the Hat, Patty from the Bronx and Little Nicky Eyeglasses.

…

Mr. Coppa also detailed his role in the death of Dominick Napolitano, a Bonanno member, known as Sony Black, who was executed in 1981 for unwittingly connecting the family with an undercover F. B.I agent, Joseph D. Pistone, who used the alias Donnie Brasco. Mr. Pistone later wrote a book about that experience and was played by Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco,” a 1997 film adaptation.
The night of Mr. Napolitano’s murder, Mr. Coppa testified, he had bought fried chicken for the hit men as they prepared for the execution, at a Bonanno member’s house in Queens.

…

Among law enforcement officials, Mr. Coppa was known as a clever wise guy. He made millions of dollars for himself and the Bonanno family in pump-and-dump schemes, boosting the value of penny stocks to quickly turn a profit. He also shook down underworld figures outside the Bonanno family who were engaging in securities fraud.
“He was one of the smartest mob guys you’re ever going to meet,” a former F.B.I. agent involved in the case said in an interview on the condition of anonymity so that he could speak about the investigation. “He understood how to engineer these financial frauds. He was at a completely different level when it came to most of these guys.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 20, 2024.

Friday, September 20th, 2024

Dr. John A. Clements, another big damn hero, passed away on September 3rd at 101.

Newborn babies sometimes have a problem called respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS. They can’t breathe, and they die. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the second son of JFK and Jacqueline, famously died from RDS. In the 1960s, RDS killed about 10,000 babies every year.

Dr. Clements first did the early work that determined the lungs used a surfactant to allow breathing. Then, two other researchers that he served as an advisor for determined that RDS was caused by an absence of surfactant in the baby’s lungs.

Then Dr. Clements developed an artificial surfactant.

His research led to the first synthetic lung surfactant, which the University of California licensed to the drugmaker Burroughs Wellcome and Company. Its drug Exosurf was the first replacement surfactant for clinical use approved by the Food and Drug Administration, in 1990.
Eventually, further study found that animal-derived surfactants worked better, and they are most often used today. Infant deaths from R.D.S. in the United States have declined to fewer than 500 a year.

JD Souther, musician and actor.

Mr. Souther was almost the fifth Eagle: He joined the quartet for an afternoon tryout at the Troubadour, but he decided that the band was already perfect, and that he’d rather write for them.
A string of songs followed, many of them hits and most of them written with Mr. Henley and Mr. Frey, including “The Best of My Love,” “Victim of Love,” “Heartache Tonight” and “New Kid in Town.”

…

In recent years he was better known, at least to younger fans, for his screen presence. In 2012 he joined the cast of “Nashville,” playing a veteran music producer, Watty White — a character that drew heavily on his own experiences in the industry. He appeared during the first season, and his character was popular enough that the showrunners brought him back for the fifth season.

Nobody else has bothered to report this yet, as far as I’ve seen, but: Nelson DeMille, thriller author.

His first novel was “By the Rivers of Babylon,” published in 1978.

I actually remember when that came out, and being interested in reading it. However, I had somewhat limited means at the time, and that was one of the books I never bought. Now that I’m older, I may have to pick it up, because what’s not to like about a book with two Concordes in it?

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 16, 2024.

Monday, September 16th, 2024

Dr. George Berci, Holocaust survivor, violinist, and big damn hero, passed away on August 30th. He was 103.

Dr. Berci was one of the pioneers of minimally invasive surgery.

Dr. Berci brought a precise eye and an inventor’s zeal to innovations that enabled doctors to better visualize the bladder, colon, esophagus, prostate, common bile duct and other body parts. Until earlier this summer, he was the senior director of minimally invasive surgery research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had worked since 1969.
His innovations were critical to the revolution in minimally invasive endoscopies and laparoscopies, which dramatically reduced the need for surgeons to make large incisions.
In endoscopies, doctors use a flexible tube with a light and a camera to examine the upper and lower digestive system. Dr. Berci focused mainly on the area around the throat and vocal cords.
In laparoscopies, surgeons place a thin rod with a video camera attached at the end through a small abdominal incision. Carbon dioxide is then used to inflate the space to give doctors enough room to use small instruments to, among other things, remove gallbladders, cysts, tumors, appendixes and spleens; diagnose endometriosis; and repair hernias.

…

“It is unlikely that there will ever be another surgeon who so single-handedly impacts an entire field of surgery as Dr. Berci did,” said Dr. Brunt, the producer of the documentary, who is a professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “He understood the potential for laparoscopy and its applications long before most surgeons saw any value in it.”

Tito Jackson. THR.

Herbie Flowers, session musician who played bass on “Walk on the Wild Side”.

Tommy Cash, Johnny’s brother, but he had a music career of his own. THR.

Posted in Heroism, History, Music, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: September 3, 2024.

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024

James Darren, actor and musician.

Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “S.W.A.T.” (the original), “Black Sheep Squadron” (aka “Baa Baa Black Sheep”), and “Renegade”.

Simon Verity, stone carver.

Mr. Verity was chosen to direct the St. John the Divine project in 1988. That venture placed him on a scaffold on Amsterdam Avenue for parts of nine years, leading a team that, using hammers, mallets and chisels, carved 31 biblical figures, including Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Abraham and Sarah, from limestone blocks in the niches that frame the great brass doors at the Portal of Paradise.
One carving, a reimagining of the burning of Jerusalem, depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center and other city landmarks under a nuclear mushroom. (It was created more than a decade before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.) The carving illustrates signs of a rebirth, building on the city’s ashes.
The Very Rev. Patrick Malloy, dean of the cathedral, said in a statement that many tourists visited the cathedral just to see the portal.
“Mr. Verity took the long-dead worthies of the Hebrew and Christian traditions and made them things of wonder for people in our own day,” he added. “Beyond this present age, his work will endure into a future beyond us.”

…

In the late 1970s, Mr. Verity visited Austria, where he became fascinated by a 17th-century grotto built for the prince-archbishop of Salzburg. He went on to restore centuries-old grottoes and designed and built new ones, both in Europe and in the United States.

…

One of his original grottoes was at Leeds Castle, in Kent, England, which visitors entered through a suite of rooms. Nearly all the rooms were encrusted, from ceiling to floor, with colorful mosaics made from minerals, shells and animal bones, and some of the walls were covered with elaborate limestone sculptures.
In addition, he carved statues of four whales and a fountain for King Charles III when Charles was the Prince of Wales; a teacup made of broken crockery for Elton John’s garden; a seated king in the front of Wells Cathedral, whose restoration he also worked on; and “The Agony in the Garden,” which depicts Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane before his betrayal.
Mr. Verity created fountains and a sundial at the American Academy in Rome and headstones for the writer Nancy Mitford; George Wein, the Newport Jazz Festival impresario, and his wife, Joyce (for which he sculpted a jazz band); and the British poet laureate John Betjeman.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Hooray!

Friday, August 30th, 2024

Big Boy is coming to Texas!

No, not that one.

Not them, either. They are (or were) already good Texas boys. But I threw that in because I recently discovered a fun fact about one of the Big Boys, which I will put at the bottom of this post.

This Big Boy is Big Boy 4014, the Union Pacific steam locomotive. It is the second largest steam locomotive ever built, and the largest still in operation.

You may recall that I linked to a couple of videos on Big Boy during the recent unpleasantness.

Here’s the UP schedule for the “Heartland of America Tour”. The tour has already kicked off, but it doesn’t look like Big Boy will reach Texas until September 17th.

It will be in:

  • Dallas, September 18th.
  • Houston, October 6th.
  • Bryan, October 8th.
  • Fort Worth, October 10th and 11th.

Check the schedule for more details, and keep in mind that the schedule may change due to mechanical or other issues.

I’m trying to decide if I want to go to Bryan, which is slightly closer, but is “viewing only”, or Houston, which is a little further away, but seems to be more open to the public for touring. If I can pull it together to do one or the other, I’ll post a report here.

That fun Big Boys fact I promised you? Tim Kopra, who played horns with the band, went on to bigger and better things. He became a NASA astronaut. Here’s his NASA biography.

Unusual career trajectory, I think.

Posted in Geek, Music, Trains | No Comments »

Obit watch: August 28, 2024.

Wednesday, August 28th, 2024

Things have been kind of slow on the obit front. I don’t know if it just too hot for people to die, or what’s going on, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot to report.

I have had this one in my pocket for a few days now. I’m wondering if it will ring a bell with any of my readers: Mitzi McCall.

Ms. McCall was a pretty successful entertainer. She had a comedy act with her husband, Charlie Brill.

They got a big break on the night of February 9, 1964. They were booked to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. The lists of acts that night included:

…Fred Kaps, a Dutch magician; the cast of the Broadway musical “Oliver!” (which included a then-unknown Davy Jones, soon to be a member of the Monkees); the impressionist Frank Gorshin; the music-hall singer and actress Tessie O’Shea; and, finally, McCall & Brill.

Oh, yeah, there was one other act booked that night: a group of obscure British musicians that called themselves the Beatles.

In their sketch, Mr. Brill played a producer casting a young actress for a new movie. Ms. McCall played his secretary and three other roles: a nervous former Miss Palm Springs, a pushy stage mother and a Method actor. The sketch fell with a thud, except for some chuckles when Ms. McCall tossed in an ad lib as the stage mother.
“My little girl was waiting outside, you know,” she said. “She used to be one of the Beatles.”
“Oh, what happened?” Mr. Brill asked.
“Somebody stepped on her.”

They bombed. Their agent didn’t call them for six months. But they recovered:

They performed their act — which Mr. Brill said was influenced by the comedy of Mike Nichols and Elaine May — until the mid-1980s, opening for Ann-Margret, Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich. They had a recurring role as the bickering “Fun Couple” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”; appeared on many variety and talk shows, and on game shows like “Tattletales”; and portrayed a detective and his fun-loving wife on the crime drama “Silk Stalkings” in the 1990s.

Ms. McCall was 93. Her husband, Mr. Brill, survives her.

On her own, Ms. McCall was seen on numerous sitcoms, including “Maude,” “Roseanne” and “Ellen,” and wrote episodes of “One Day at a Time” and “ALF.”

She was also the dry cleaner’s wife in that “Seinfeld” episode. Other credits include “Twilight Zone” (both the original and the 1986 revival), “The Jim Backus Show”, “The Dennis O’Keefe Show”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and “Madman of the People”.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 16, 2024.

Friday, August 16th, 2024

Peter Marshall. NYT (archived).

Marshall wasn’t really interested until he learned that if he didn’t take the job, it would go to comedian Dan Rowan. “I’ve only disliked two people in my life; Dan Rowan was one of them,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Archive of American Television.

…

Also, producer Abe Burrows wanted Marshall to star opposite Mary Tyler Moore in a production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s aiming for Broadway. Marshall assured him that The Hollywood Squares would last just 13 weeks and he would be available after that. But when the show was renewed for another 13 weeks, Burrows informed him that he was going with Richard Chamberlain.
“Well, I ran 16 years [on Hollywood Squares] and Breakfast at Tiffany’s closed in Boston,” Marshall said. “You never know.”

Greg Kihn. NYT (archived). Is it fair to call him a 2.5 hit wonder?

His first hit was “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em),” which got to No. 15 on the Hot 100 in May 1981.

…

The Greg Kihn Band released the danceable “Jeopardy” in January 1983, and only Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” kept from nabbing the No. 1 spot.

(I would also give him half-credit for “I Lost On Jeopardy”, thought I don’t know how many people would think that was a hit.)

Jack Russell, lead singer and co-founder of Great White.

In 2002, Mr. Russell and Mr. Kendall hired three new musicians and began playing in small clubs as Jack Russell’s Great White. In February 2003, while the band was performing at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., its pyrotechnics ignited a deadly fire that killed 100 people, including Great White’s guitarist, Ty Longley, and left 230 injured. It was one of the worst nightclub fires in U.S. history.

Posted in Music, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 1, 2024.

Thursday, August 1st, 2024

Greenspoint Mall in Houston.

At one point, it was the largest mall in Houston until the Galleria mall surpassed it with multiple expansions in the late 1980s and early 2000s.

That was the mall for my family for a long time. We saw “Star Wars” at the theater there, and I spent a lot of time as a teen in that mall. But Willowbrook Mall opened up closer to our house, and that became the mall of choice (unless there was some compelling reason to go to Greenspoint).

After we all moved away, the mall and the area around it went into decline. Crime got so bad, the mall was nicknamed “Gunspoint Mall” by locals.

Part of the area’s expansive campus will be transformed into a new apartment complex called Summit at Renaissance Park, developed by the Zieben Group. It will replace a vacant Sears Auto Center.

I’m sorry. Did someone say “Sears Auto Center”?

(I thought about putting a language warning on this, but: it’s Ron White. If you need a language warning on Ron White, well, welcome to our universe, I hope you enjoy your stay here.)

(And both Lawrence and I would be firmly in the “fark Sears Auto Center” camp, if Sears Auto Center still existed.)

I haven’t watched all of this yet, but here’s a “Dead Malls” YouTube video on Greenspoint:

This one’s for Mike the Musicologist: Richard Crawford.

“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.

…

“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Mr. Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.
“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”
Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African-American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Mr. Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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