Florian Schneider, co-founder of Kraftwerk.
Gil Schwartz, former spokesman for CBS. He also wrote columns for Esquire and Fortune magazines, and a bunch of books, under the pseudonym “Stanley Bing”.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Obit watch: May 7, 2020.
Thursday, May 7th, 2020Obit watch: April 27, 2020.
Monday, April 27th, 2020Harold Reid, leader of the Statler Brothers.
The Statlers imbued contemporary country and folk material with traditional gospel harmonies, helping to usher Southern gospel music into the cultural mainstream while paving the way for the arrival of crossover-minded blockbuster country vocal groups like the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama.
“We took gospel harmonies and put them over in country music,” Mr. Reid was quoted as saying in the Encyclopedia of Gospel Music.
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One of my favorite Statler Brothers songs:
Steve Dalkowski, minor league pitcher. This is actually one of those sad stories: he was famous for spending nine seasons in the minor leagues, mostly with the Baltimore Orioles’ teams. He apparently had an amazing fastball, but was also erratic as a pitcher. (“He walked batters almost as often as he struck them out..”) Supposedly, he inspired “Nuke LaLoosh”, the pitcher in “Bull Durham”.
He also had problems with alcohol. At the time of his death, he’d been in a nursing home with “alcohol-induced dementia” for 26 years.
Gene Dynarski. He was “Izzy Mandelbaum Jr.” on “Seinfeld”, appeared on two episodes of a minor SF series, and had guest shots on a lot of other TV, including multiple stints on “Banacek”…
…and, yes, “Mannix”. (“Fly, Little One”, season 3, episode 21. He’s credited as “Killer”.)
Bruce Allpress, New Zealand actor who was in “The Two Towers” and a few other things.
(Hat tip on the last two to Lawrence.)
Musical interlude.
Monday, April 20th, 2020Today is my birthday.
It may actually come as a surprise to some of you that I expect blogging to be light, at least for a little while. After all, what else am I going to do?
I’m thinking about making a run down to Cabela’s to scope out the situation for myself, and I’ll probably be putting up an obit and a jail post later on today.
In the meantime, please enjoy this vintage musical interlude:
Trivia.
Sunday, April 12th, 2020I discovered this last night: it’s an odd bit of trivia that I didn’t know previously, and I thought it was worth sharing.
The last resident of 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles was Trent Reznor. Not only that, but he set up a recording studio in the house called “Pig”.
…was the site of recording sessions for most of the Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral (1994)
Okay, so what, who cares? Well, 10050 Cielo Drive had a history…
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I’ll be honest: I’ve never liked Nine Inch Nails, or Trent Reznor’s music, very much. However, the part of the Rolling Stone interview quoted in the Wikipedia entry is actually kind of thought provoking, and softens my attitude towards the man a bit:
Reznor moved out in December of 1993, and the house was demolished in 1994. The owner built a new house on the property, and had the address changed to 10066 Cielo Drive.
Obit watch: April 9, 2020.
Thursday, April 9th, 2020Hal Willner, who the Times describes as “matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on ‘Saturday Night Live'”.
I have a couple of those Willner tribute albums. “Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill” in particular is a swell album, and I wish someone would re-release that digitally.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Thomas L. Miller, TV producer. (“Full House”, “Family Matters”.)
Linda Tripp. For my younger readers, Ms. Tripp was a central figure in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of the 90s.
When Ms. Lewinsky confided in Ms. Tripp that she had had a physical relationship with the president, Ms. Tripp got in touch with Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent who had once reached out to her for information on Vincent Foster, the White House lawyer who committed suicide in 1993.
More recently, Ms. Tripp had been working on a book proposal tentatively titled “Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw Inside the Clinton White House.” Now she had a hook.
Ms. Goldberg suggested, among other things, that Ms. Tripp tape her telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky. That was legal in the District of Columbia and in 39 states, but not in Maryland, where Ms. Tripp was living.
More than 20 hours of audiotapes were turned over to Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor handling the Clinton investigation.
Obit watch: April 8, 2020.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2020Damn.
I wouldn’t say I was a big Prine fan, but he did a fair number of songs that I’m partial to. Here’s one of my favorites:
Edited to add: Borepatch has a nice tribute up, with some of Mr. Prine’s deeper cuts.
Robert Barth. He was a pioneering Navy diver: he was the only person involved with both the Genesis dry land test and all three iterations of the Sealab underwater habitats.
The dangerous experiments Mr. Barth took part in paved the way for exploits of deepwater espionage, undersea construction and demolition projects around the world.
He never achieved conventional fame, but he was the “ultimate aquanaut,” said Leslie Leaney, the executive director of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. “His contributions benefited the world of science and national security, but also the economies of all nations that explored for offshore oil.”
In 2010, the Navy named its aquatic training facility in Panama City for Mr. Barth. “Nothing that Navy divers do is one guy,” he said at the dedication. “There is always a whole bunch of people involved in it.”
By way of Lawrence, Allen Garfield. He was in a whole bunch of stuff, including “The Conversation” and “Nashville”.
Also by way of Lawrence, George Ogilvie, co-director of “Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome”.
The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Ira Einhorn.
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It was a measure of his ability to make important connections that after he was charged with murder, his lawyer was Arlen Specter, the city’s former district attorney who was then in private practice and who went on to become a United States senator.
Mr. Specter managed to get Mr. Einhorn’s bail reduced to $40,000. To be released from custody, Mr. Einhorn had to put up only 10 percent, or $4,000. It was paid by a Canadian socialite, one of several well-off people who supported him financially and who doubted he could have been involved in murder.
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But his darker side and a monumental ego were emerging, most noticeably during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, when 20 million people across the country gathered to draw attention to environmental problems.
As two environmental activists later wrote in an op-ed in The Inquirer, Mr. Einhorn had made himself unwelcome at organizational meetings in advance of Earth Day, and then, at the actual event, he “grabbed the microphone and refused to give up the podium for 30 minutes, thinking he would get some free television publicity.”
He later falsely claimed to have been a founder of Earth Day, a title generally accorded to Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat.
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Obit watch: April 3, 2020.
Friday, April 3rd, 2020Great and good FOTB Borepatch tipped me off to the death of Bill Withers. The paper of record has a preliminary obit up, which will probably be replaced with a full one later.
The NYT does have what I think is a fascinating obit for William Frankland. Dr. Frankland was a pioneering allergist.
Dr. Frankland was best known in professional circles for a number of groundbreaking clinical studies. In 1954, he proved that pollen proteins were the parts of plants most useful in preseason allergy inoculations, and in 1955, he debunked the efficacy of treating asthma with bacterial vaccines.
He was an early proponent of using allergen injections to desensitize patients with severe allergies and developed immunotherapy serums for hay fever sufferers with pollen from one of the world’s largest pollen farms, which he operated outside London until the late 1960s.
It was while investigating desensitization to insect bites that Dr. Frankland allowed the South American insect Rhodnius prolixus to bite his arm at weekly intervals. The eighth bite sent him into life-threatening anaphylaxis, from which a nurse revived him with repeated shots of adrenaline.
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He worked with Alexander Flemming, treated Saddam Hussein, and spent time during WWII as a Japanese prisoner of war.
Dr. Frankland was 108 when he died.
Rod Dreher has a nice post up about Terry Teachout and the death of Mr. Teachout’s wife.
Obit watch: April 2, 2020.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2020I’ve been an irregular reader of Terry Teachout’s “About Last Night” blog for a while now. I don’t watch that much theater, in NYC or elsewhere, but I enjoy reading his writing. And I also enjoy the historical videos he posts on a regular basis.
I’ve been following him more closely in the past few weeks. Mr. Teachout’s wife has been mortally ill with pulmonary hypertension, and (after months of waiting) received a double lung transplant in early March.
She passed away on Tuesday. I’m heartbroken for Mr. Teachout (even though I don’t know him personally), and extend my condolences to him from afar.
Lawrence sent over the obit for Adam Schlesinger, Fountains of Wayne guy and film and television composer.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 2
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020Continuing with the “random stuff that popped up in my YouTube recommendations” theme, here’s one of those Navy training videos. This one is actually better quality than some of the other ones I’ve been watching, and contains a lot of nice action shots: “The Job Of The EA-6B Prowler”:
Bonus video #1: this actually wasn’t a random YouTube recommendation, but something McThag linked to a while back that might be interesting to some folks: “Defensive Electronic Countermeasures”, a 1962 training film about various then current ECM gear. It is a little longer than I’d like (close to 30 minutes instead of 15), but I think it is a nice historical artifact.
Bonus video #2: also not random, and nothing to do with military aviation. I actually saw this on whatever the broadcast game show channel was this morning, and was amused: Robert Moog (and two other guys) on “To Tell the Truth”:
It particularly amuses me that the first question asked…is about P.D.Q. Bach.
Obit watch: March 30, 2020.
Monday, March 30th, 2020Krzysztof Penderecki, noted contemporary classical composer.
Mr. Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland’s ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination, and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony. Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them “more destructive than constructive” and changed course toward neo-Romanticism.
(His decision to move on was partly political: The Polish avant-garde movement had created an unhealthy illusion of freedom in a country living under Communism, he said. But it was also artistic: Experimentation had reached an impasse, he told a Canadian interviewer in 1998, because “we discovered everything!”)
Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), “Polymorphia” (1961) and the “St. Luke Passion” (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.
The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts. Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation. Yet it was said that Mr. Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.
John Callahan, soap opera actor. (“Falcon Crest”, “Santa Barbara”, “All My Children”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Days of our Lives.”)
David Schramm. He was “Roy Biggins” on “Wings”, and also did some Broadway and off-Broadway work.
Joe Diffie, country music star. Borepatch has a much better tribute than I could write.
Obit watch: March 24, 2020.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2020Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.
Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.
As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.
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When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.
Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”
When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.
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Obit watch: March 21, 2020.
Saturday, March 21st, 2020…
Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.
There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.