Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch (the lighter side): December 9, 2022.

Friday, December 9th, 2022

A couple of quick obits that I felt were just too un-serious to be included in the previous two obit watches.

“A Very Backstreet Holiday”, the Backstreet Boys holiday special. It was supposed to be on ABC Wednesday night (December 14th) but got canned because of rape accusations against Nick Carter.

“Monarch“. I confess: I was sort of vaguely interested in this. A trashy Fox soap opera about a country music dynasty? Sounds like the sort of thing I can sit down in front of and turn off my brain for a while. Plus: Susan Sarandon.

When the rubber met the road, though, I never watched an episode. I also kind of expected it to be cancelled after two episodes, like “Lone Star” or “Viva Laughlin“. (Also, the reviews spoiled the fact that Susan Sarandon dies in the first episode, though she apparently shows up in flashbacks later on.)

I guess if I want country music drama, I’ll have to stick with reading the transcripts of “Cocaine and Rhinestones” episodes, and waiting for a new batch to drop.

At some point in 1978, Jones, DeeDoodle and the Old Man began making lists of the people they wanted to kill.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: December 2, 2022.

Friday, December 2nd, 2022

Frederick Swann, organist.

Mr. Swann was well known in New York as organist and music director at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he began playing in the 1950s.
In 1982 he reached a much wider audience when he moved to the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the television evangelist. There he appeared each week on “Hour of Power,” one of the most widely watched religious programs in the country, with a viewership in the millions.
Before retiring in 2001, he also served for three years as organist at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, which has one of the largest pipe organs in the world. He also played thousands of recitals all over the United States and beyond.

…

“Fred was a genius at controlling and maximizing the potential of very large pipe organs,” the organist John Walker, who succeeded Mr. Swann as music director at Riverside, said in a phone interview. “Every organ is absolutely unique. They are custom-made works of art, and Fred was so uniquely skilled at uncovering the timbres in each instrument that he was regularly invited to give inaugural recitals” — that is, the first public performance on a new or rebuilt organ.
He filled that role in 2004 for the formidable organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a 6,134-pipe instrument designed by Frank Gehry. His program that night included pieces by Bach, Mendelssohn and Josef Rheinberger.
“In all three,” Mark Swed wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times, “the stirring deep pedal tones produced a sonic weight that seemed to anchor the entire building, while the upper diapason notes were clear and warm. The delicate echo effects in the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s sonata spoke magically, as if coming from the garden outdoors.”

…

Mr. Walker said that Mr. Swann held four centuries’ worth of music in his head and generally played from memory. He played recitals of all kinds, sometimes as the featured attraction and sometimes accompanying a vocalist, and released numerous albums. Mr. Walker said his playing for religious services was particularly poignant.
“In playing a hymn,” he said, “he would be able to express the meaning of an individual word in such a poignant way that I would just immediately tear up.”

Brad William Henke, former NFL player and actor.

He played prison guard Desi Piscatella on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black over seasons four and five. Henke was among the series’ co-stars to be awarded with the Screen Actors Guild Award for best cast in a comedy in 2016.

Wait, wait: “Orange Is the New Black” was a comedy? By the way, he was also “Coover Bennett” in season 2 of “Justified” (working opposite Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale).

Frank Vallelonga Jr. Other credits include “The Sopranos” and “The Birthday Cake”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 1, 2022.

Thursday, December 1st, 2022

Sgt. Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura (US Army – ret.)

Sgt. Miyamura received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Korean War. He was the first living Japanese-American MoH recipient. (Pvt. Sadao Munemori received the MoH in 1946, but his award was posthumous.)

Mr. Miyamura was drafted in 1944 and assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese American unit that compiled a storied World War II combat record in Europe while people of Japanese heritage on the West Coast were placed under armed guard at desolate inland internment camps, feared as security risks, which they were not.

He stayed in the reserves post-WWII and was called up to serve in Korea.

He became a squad leader in the Third Infantry Division in an integrated Army, the military having been desegregated after World War II.

From his Medal of Honor citation:

Cpl. Miyamura, a member of Company H, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. On the night of 24 April, Company H was occupying a defensive position when the enemy fanatically attacked, threatening to overrun the position. Cpl. Miyamura, a machine-gun squad leader, aware of the imminent danger to his men, unhesitatingly jumped from his shelter wielding his bayonet in close hand-to-hand combat, killing approximately 10 of the enemy. Returning to his position, he administered first aid to the wounded and directed their evacuation. As another savage assault hit the line, he manned his machine gun and delivered withering fire until his ammunition was expended. He ordered the squad to withdraw while he stayed behind to render the gun inoperative. He then bayoneted his way through infiltrated enemy soldiers to a second gun emplacement and assisted in its operation. When the intensity of the attack necessitated the withdrawal of the company Cpl. Miyamura ordered his men to fall back while he remained to cover their movement. He killed more than 50 of the enemy before his ammunition was depleted and he was severely wounded. He maintained his magnificent stand despite his painful wounds, continuing to repel the attack until his position was overrun. When last seen he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers. Cpl. Miyamura’s indomitable heroism and consummate devotion to duty reflect the utmost glory on himself and uphold the illustrious traditions on the military service.

He was taken prisoner and spent 28 months as a POW.

The medal had been awarded in December 1951, eight months after Corporal Miyamura was captured. He was listed as missing at the time, but some four months after the honor was bestowed in secret, his name was included in a partial list of POWs provided by the Chinese.
The Army did not reveal the awarding of the medal until he was released, since it feared his captors would take vengeance on learning of it. As General Osborne told him, “You might not have come back alive.”
In October 1953, Mr. Miyamura, then a sergeant, was formally presented with the medal, the military’s highest award for valor, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a White House ceremony.

Noted:

After the war, Miyamura met Terry Tsuchimori, a woman from a family who had been forced to live at the Poston internment camp in southwestern Arizona following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They married in 1948 and had three children.

Terry died in 2014. Sgt. Miyamura was 97 when he passed. His death leaves Col. Ralph Puckett Jr. as the only surviving MoH recipient from the Korean War.

Lawrence has also posted an obit, which I commend to your attention.

Gaylord Perry, legendary spitballer.

He became the first of six pitchers to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues, capturing it as the American League’s best pitcher with the Cleveland Indians (now named the Guardians) in 1972 and the National League’s leading pitcher with the San Diego Padres in 1978. His older brother, Jim Perry, won the award in 1970 with the A.L.’s Minnesota Twins.
Gaylord Perry, who pitched for eight teams, was a five-time All-Star, pitched a no-hitter for the San Francisco Giants against the St. Louis Cardinals in 1968 and won at least 20 games five times. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.
He combined with his brother Jim for 529 victories, No. 2 on the career list for brothers, behind Phil and Joe Niekro’s 539.

…

Perry wrote that his Giants teammate right-hander Bob Shaw taught him the spitter in 1964, when he was first starting to develop his legal pitches.
He said that after wetting the ball with saliva, he graduated over the years to “the mud ball, the emery ball, the K-Y ball, just to name a few.”
“During the next eight years or so, I reckon I tried everything on the old apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce toppin’,” he wrote in the vernacular of his rural North Carolina roots.

…

Perry was a brilliant pitcher with or without a spitter. His 3,534 strikeouts are No. 8 on the career list, and his 5,350 innings pitched are No. 6. He threw 303 complete games.
But he reached the postseason only once, winning one game and losing one when his Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1971 National League Championship Series.

…

Gaylord Perry had 314-265 record, having pitched, in order, for the Giants, Indians, Texas Rangers, Padres, the Rangers again, the Yankees, the Atlanta Braves, the Mariners and the Royals.

Christine McVie, of Fleetwod Mac fame. I’m sorry if I’m giving this one short shrift, but I feel like it has been well covered by others who are better qualified to talk about her (and the band’s) legacy.

Posted in Heroism, History, Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 26, 2022.

Saturday, November 26th, 2022

Irene Cara. THR.

For the record: NYT obit for John Y. Brown Jr.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 18, 2022.

Friday, November 18th, 2022

Ned Rorem, Pulitzer Prize winning classical composer.

The prize was awarded for “Air Music,” a suite commissioned for the American bicentennial by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Though he wrote many other orchestral works as well — including his Symphony No. 3, which was given its premiere by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein in 1959 — Mr. Rorem’s enduring appeal rested more on his vocal pieces.
Robert Shaw, who was America’s foremost conductor of choral music, called him the greatest art-song composer of his time. And it was a remarkably long time.
Mr. Rorem was 74 when his masterwork “Evidence of Things Not Seen” was first performed, in 1998. An evening-long song cycle for four singers and piano, incorporating 36 poems by 24 authors, it was praised by the New York magazine critic Peter G. Davis as “one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs” by any American composer.
Mr. Rorem had no use for avant-garde theories or their proponents — modern masters like Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter included. In turn, some critics found him short of original ideas and dynamism, a miniaturist unable to sustain longer pieces. Reviewing “Miss Julie,” the Rorem opera based on Strindberg’s drama, when it was presented by New York City Opera in 1965, Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote, “His melodic ideas are utterly bland, lacking in profile or distinction.”

Marcus Sedgwick, author. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

For the record: NYT obit for Robert Clary.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 17, 2022.

Thursday, November 17th, 2022

Robert Clary, who played “Corporal LeBeau” on “Hogan’s Heroes”. He was “the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast”. (Kenneth Washington, who joined the show in the final season, is still alive.)

Other credits include “Days of Our Lives” and “The Bold and the Beautiful”.

Noted:

Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. At age 12, he began singing and performing; one day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Flax in late 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
Clary’s parents were murdered in the gas chamber that day.
At Buchenwald, Clary sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he told Flax.
Clary was incarcerated for 31 months (he worked in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels each day) and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive.

…

Did Clary have any reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps?
“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

…

He sang on several jazz albums that featured the work of songwriters like Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. (Also a part of his discography: Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII, recorded with his castmates Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon.)

I can’t find the album anywhere, but the memoir is available from Amazon.

Edited to add: Thanks to Joe D. for his comment, which I greatly appreciate. Also, while I still can’t find the “Hogan’s Heroes” album, Mike the Musicologist pointed out that Robert Clary’s “Meet Robert Clary” (1955) and “Hooray for Love” (1956) are available on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Posted in Books, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 9, 2022.

Wednesday, November 9th, 2022

Leslie Phillips. THR.

Other credits include “The Longest Day”, “Love on a Branch Line”, and “The Last Detective” TV series.

Susan Tolsky. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” is on my Amazon list: I need to pull the trigger on that and talk the Saturday Movie Group into it. Other credits include “Barney Miller”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Crazy Like a Fox”.

Jeff Cook, co-founder of Alabama.

Dan McCafferty, lead singer for Nazareth.

I wasn’t a big enough fan of either Alabama or Nazareth to be able to comment intelligently on either of these deaths. But my readers are welcome to comment if they’d like.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 1, 2022.

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022

Gael Greene, noted restaurant reviewer for New York magazine.

After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”

…

In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” she wrote in one review. “Here the spleen is infinitely more memorable than the sweetbreads.”

Julie Powell, of the “Julie/Julia Project” and later Julie and Julia: My Years of Cooking Dangerously (affiliate link). She was 49.

In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.

…

Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.
Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”

Posted in Books, Elvis, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 30, 2022.

Sunday, October 30th, 2022

Thomas Cahill, author. (How the Irish Saved Civilization)

D.H. Peligro, drummer for the Dead Kennedys. (Actually, he replaced the original drummer, “Ted”, in early 1981. Also, if you haven’t looked at the recent history of the Dead Kennedys, it’s a pretty sad story.)

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2022.

Saturday, October 29th, 2022

Jerry Lee Lewis. THR. Variety. Pitchfork.

Noted: Jimmy Swaggart is still alive. (As you may recall, Mickey Gilley died in May.)

I feel like I’m not giving the Killer the coverage he deserves, and I’m sorry for that. At the same time, I’m really not a music guy and don’t have the knowledge to put him in context. Plus, everyone is on this story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation.

“Patrick”, also known as “Patrick Non-White” formerly of Popehat. He passed away in September, and I had noticed his Twitter feed had been silent for a while. But I did not become aware of his death until yesterday.

I feel like Patrick and I would have disagreed somewhere between 25% and 50% of the time. But our disagreements would have been based on reason, not personalities. Patrick was incredibly kind to me when I first started out blogging, and I regret having lost touch with him. I knew he was having health problems, but I thought he was over the hump on those. I regret that I never got to eat barbecue with him.

Thinking about him, I kind of like this as a eulogy:

But whatever I may have to say of him hereafter I want to say this thing of him here, that his bigotry and his vanities were builded on the foundations of a man. He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do, and he faced the Judge calmly above his great black stock.

I didn’t know Patrick, but I doubt that he ever in his life glanced around him to see what other men would do before doing what he thought was right.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch note.

Friday, October 28th, 2022

While the death of Jerry Lee Lewis is being reported, it was also reported earlier in the week by an unreliable source I don’t link to, and that report turned out to be false.

The latest report is apparently from the AP, and seems more reliable. But I am still going to wait until tomorrow to post the obit watch.

Posted in Admin, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 28, 2022.

Friday, October 28th, 2022

Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.

It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.

Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.

Robert Gordon, musician.

Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.

Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.

Posted in Art, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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