Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: July 24, 2019.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

Art Neville, of the Neville Brothers.

Among those announcing the death was Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, who said in a statement that Mr. Neville “took the unique sound of New Orleans and played it for the world to enjoy.” Mr. Neville’s brother Aaron, in a post on his Facebook page, called him “the patriarch of the Neville tribe, big chief, a legend from way way back, my first inspiration.”

David Hedison, who had an interesting career. He played Felix Leiter in two Bond films, was pretty fly for a white guy in the 1958 “The Fly”, was in “The Lost World”, and turned down Robert Reed’s role in “The Brady Bunch”.

He was most famous as the submarine captain (opposite Richard Basehart’s admiral) in “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (which you can still catch very early Sunday morning on ME TV). He also did some soaps, “Love Boat”, and “Fantasy Island”.

Oddly, from my point of view, he apparently never did a “Mannix”, though he did do other 70s cop shows. Both Mr. Hedison and Mike Connors were of Armenian descent: I’m sure he didn’t directly control the casting, but you’d figure Mr. Connors would want to help a brother out.

I don’t want to seem obsessed, but I thought this tribute from Stephen Wolfram to the late Mitchell Feigenbaum was worth sharing, especially since it gives a good explanation of the math behind his work.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Friday, July 12th, 2019

In keeping with our baseball theme, some lazy stupid blogging.

Actually, I wanted to pull together a longer post, but I’m all out of energy this week, plus I’ve posted on this subject before, so:

Ladies and Germans, today is the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.

“I thought these fans in Chicago were the best because they’re saying `Let’s go Sox! Let’s go Sox!’ ” Petry recalled last weekend at Comerica Park. “They were really chanting `Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!’”

There’s a book (co-written by Steve Dahl).

And the Sox commemorated the occasion before last night’s game, with Steve Dahl throwing out the first pitch.

Enough time has passed for the Sox to come to terms with Disco Demolition’s place in the team’s annals. They showed highlights of that night on the video board, including video of fans storming the field and damaging it so much the Sox had to forfeit the second game of that day’s doubleheader against the Tigers.
“It’s absolutely cool that it’s just part of the history, and not a shameful part of the history,” Dahl said. ‘It’s just something that happened, and honestly, it was just about the music.”

Posted in History, Hysteria, Music, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2019.

Thursday, July 11th, 2019

I am not a musician or a musicologist. I have no talent for music, and I try to leave the musicology to Mike.

But there’s something about the obit for Vivian Perlis that I find touching and interesting. Back in the day, she was a research librarian at the Yale School of Music. She went to pick up some archival material from one of Charles Ives’s business partners.

Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard-of-hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives.
This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives’s hometown, recounted playing baseball with “Uncle Charlie.” The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the “old days,” when the “sissies,” meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives’s flinty music.

This was the seed crystal from which grew the Yale University Oral History of American Music.

The oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an “incomparable resource.”

…

“Most composers are part of a neglected minority and are very grateful to have the opportunity to speak,” she told The Times in 2005. “They don’t have another chance to answer critics and say what they think and feel.”

Also among the dead: Jim Bouton. WP (and a tip of the hat to Borepatch for the heads-up.) He was a pitcher with several teams (Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and even the Astros). Apparently, he was not an outstanding pitcher (the paper of record uses the phrase “a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast”).
He went on to greater fame as the author of Ball Four, one of the early “inside baseball” books.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.

…

In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.
Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.

…

“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third-best book written on sports, after A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”

I’ve never read Ball Four, though I’ve heard it described as sceamingly funny. But the obits make it sound like the book is as much about a man struggling to hold on to his dream of being a major league pitcher as much as it is a tell-all about the wild antics of players in the late 60s – early 70s.

“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton,” Dick Young wrote in The Daily News. “He is a social leper. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”

As a side note, Mr. Bouton has a limited career as an actor: there was apparently a short-lived “Ball Four” TV series in 1976 that I don’t remember. He was also “Terry Lennox” in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye“, a movie you do not want to get me started on.

Edited to add 7/12: Wow. Neil deMause over at “Field of Schemes” has a really nice tribute to Mr. Bouton up.

The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 9, 2019.

Tuesday, July 9th, 2019

Ross Perot. (Edited to add: Lawrence. Dallas Morning News.)

He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. In 1979 he staged a commando raid that freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”

…

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend.

…

His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some.
In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC.

You know, I need to read that book. (Also The Pillars of the Earth.)

Also among the dead: Jack Renner, co-founder of Telarc and a good Cleveland boy.

In 1978 the company made what Mr. Renner said was the first commercially released digital recording of symphonic music in the United States, featuring Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds.
“It created a lot of stir among audiophiles,” he said. “It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn’t.”

Back in the day, I had a fair number of Telarc CDs (including some of their P.D.Q. Bach).

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 26, 2019.

Wednesday, June 26th, 2019

Steve Dunleavy, noted tabloid journalist.

Mr. Dunleavy exposed Elvis Presley’s addiction to prescription drugs in Star and in a best-selling book that rankled Presley fans; scored exclusive interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler; and championed police officers, smokers and gun owners, among others.
During his run on “A Current Affair,” from 1986 to 1995, he wrestled a bear in one segment and, in another, was bitten by a witness in a rape case when he confronted her with nude photographs of her.

That book, by the way, was: Elvis: What Happened?.

His columns in Star typically echoed the company’s conservative line, so much so that they earned him the “American of the Year” award from the right-wing John Birch Society — even though he was not a United States citizen and never became one.

…

Pete Hamill, who worked for both The Post and The News, was impressed by his drive. “I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked,” Mr. Hamill said.

Rod Dreher has a tribute up as well, in which he quotes Hamill (after Dunleavy’s foot was run over by a snowplow):

“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

NY Post.

By way of Lawrence: Herbert Meyer.

It was Meyer who, in a famous memo to Reagan in November 1983 when things were very tense with our intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe, wrote: “if present trends continue, we are going to win the Cold War.” Over eight vivid and tightly argued pages, Herb laid out the reasons that subsequently came to pass over the next decade.

Also by way of Lawrence: Desmond Amofah, YouTuber (under the handle “Etika”). He was 29.

His belongings were found on Manhattan Bridge on Monday. He had uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in which he talked about suicide.
Etika was popular for playing and discussing Nintendo games on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Not quite an obit, but:

The head of the Massachusetts motor vehicle division has resigned after her agency failed to terminate the commercial driving license of a man whose collision with a group of motorcyclists on a rural New Hampshire road left seven bikers dead.

Posted in Books, Elvis, Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 15, 2019.

Saturday, June 15th, 2019

Franco Zeffirelli.

A whirlwind of energy, Mr. Zeffirelli found time not only to direct operas, films and plays past the age of 80, but also to carry out an intense social life and even pursue a controversial political career. He had a long, tumultuous love affair with Luchino Visconti, the legendary director of film, theater and opera. He was a friend and confidant of Callas, Anna Magnani, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Coco Chanel and Leonard Bernstein.

Twice elected to the Italian Parliament, Mr. Zeffirelli was an ultraconservative senator, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a 1996 New Yorker article, he declared that he would “impose the death penalty on women who had abortions.” He said his extreme views on the subject were colored by the fact that he himself was born out of wedlock despite pressure brought to bear on his mother to terminate her pregnancy.

Did everybody born after…1964? see “Romeo and Juliet” in high school? Or was that a limited local phenomenon?

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

…

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 11, 2019.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.

Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…

Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.

You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.

Noted:

In the 1990s, he announced that he was renaming himself Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funk Stay High Dollar Billstir.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2019.

Friday, June 7th, 2019

Malcolm John (Mac) Rebennack Jr.

You know him better as Dr. John.

Mr. Rebennack belonged to the pantheon of New Orleans keyboard wizards that includes Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey (Piano) Smith and Fats Domino. What distinguished him from his peers was the showmanship of his public persona.
Onstage as Dr. John, he adorned himself with snakeskin, beads and colorful feathers, and his shows blended Mardi Gras bonhomie with voodoo mystery.
He recorded more than 30 albums, including jazz projects (“Bluesiana Triangle,” 1990, with the drummer Art Blakey and the saxophonist David Newman), solo piano records (“Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack,” 1981) and his version of Afropop (“Locked Down,” 2012). His 1989 album of standards, “In a Sentimental Mood,” earned him the first of six Grammy Awards, for his duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee!”

…

As many albums as he made, however, Mr. Rebennack said he had earned more money cutting jingles. His clients included Popeyes chicken, Scott tissue and Oreo cookies. He also reached younger generations with his theme songs for the sitcom “Blossom” and the cartoon show “Curious George,” and through his Muppet musician doppelgänger, Dr. Teeth, leader of the Electric Mayhem.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

…

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

…

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

…

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Posted in Books, Clothing, Cops, Food, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2019.

Friday, May 31st, 2019

Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.

Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.

The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…

Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.

His 45-year tenure was the longest of any currently serving member of Congress. His 39 years in the Senate was the 10th-longest stretch in history, and he was that body’s third longest-serving incumbent, behind only Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.

Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.

Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.

I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)

Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2019.

Monday, May 13th, 2019

Doris Day.

I can’t find a good clip, but I rather liked Ms. Day in the 1956 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. (I liked Jimmy Stewart in that movie, too, but I think the 1934 version moves faster and has a more satisfying climax. Don’t get me wrong: both are good Hitchcock films.)

Peggy Lipton, of “Mod Squad” and “Twin Peaks” fame. I wish I had more to say about her, but I was just a little too young for “The Mod Squad” and pretty much missed “Twin Peaks” the first time around.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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