Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: February 6, 2024.

Tuesday, February 6th, 2024

Toby Keith. THR. Tributes. Pitchfork.

No offense to Mr. Keith, who died far too young, but: I kind of like “Beer For My Horses”, the song, for many of the same reasons I like “Make My Day” (the T.G. Sheppard/Clint Eastwood duet). They’re both kind of silly but fun songs with a point about as subtle as a man painted purple dancing naked on a harpsichord singing “Subtle points are here again”.

On the other hand, the video for “Beer For My Horses” is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen.

I am assuming Mr. Keith did not have a lot of input into the video. If he did, I’m sure he was dazzled at the thought of working with Willie and didn’t really think it through. No matter what, his legacy isn’t going to stand or fall on that one video.

Wayne Kramer, of the MC5.

Bob Beckwith, the firefighter who posed with George W. Bush after 9/11. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 24, 2024.

Wednesday, January 24th, 2024

Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.

While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.

Dr. Penzias (pronounced PEN-zee-as) shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now the widely accepted explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the prize, for unrelated advances in developing liquid helium.)

…

In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.

Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.

Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.

Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.

Posted in Geek, History, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 22, 2024.

Monday, January 22nd, 2024

Norman Jewison. THR.

What a career. Other credits include “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming”, “A Soldier’s Story”, and…

Mary Weiss, lead singer of the Shangri-Las.

Beatrix Potter.

Okay, in a restricted technical sense, Beatrix Potter died on December 22, 1943. This is from the paper of record’s “Overlooked No More” series. While the paper of record ran followup articles after her death, for some reason (and even the NYT staff can’t figure out that reason) they never actually ran an obit for her until now.

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

Obit watch: January 17, 2024.

Wednesday, January 17th, 2024

Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

Damn it.

I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)

Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)

Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.

Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.

Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.

True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.

He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.

I was lucky enough to see him in performance…

In his early, supple years, he often slid down a rope suspended from the first balcony; on at least one occasion he ran down the aisle, vast suitcase in hand, as if delayed at the airport; on another he entered, pursued by a gorilla.

…when he could still climb down a rope.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:

“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”

John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.

Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.

Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.

Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.

Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.

Posted in Beef, Food, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Monday, December 25th, 2023

All of my readers this year have been good. So I’m not going to post any of the accordion versions of “I Saw Three Ships” I found on YouTube.

A short one from AvE:

May 2024 be better for everyone than 2023.

“Thank’ee,” said Scrooge. “I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!”

Posted in Christmas, History, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 6, 2023.

Wednesday, December 6th, 2023

Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., another one of those unsung big damn heroes.

His most famous invention was probably the plastic blood bag:

Developed with a colleague, Dr. Carl W. Walter, in 1949-50, the bags are light, wrinkle-resistant and tear proof. They are easy to handle, preserve red blood cells and proteins, and ensure that the blood is not exposed to the air for at least six weeks. Blood banks, hospitals and other medical storage facilities depend on their longevity. Drones drop them safely into remote areas.

…

Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston physician, was also widely credited with early advances in the development of pacemakers to stabilize erratic heart rhythms, of artificial kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and of many sterile devices, including trays, scalpel blades, syringes, catheters and other surgical and patient-care items that are used once and thrown away.

Norman Lear. THR. Variety.

No matter what I may have thought of Lear’s politics, he served honorably in WWII (52 combat missions in B-17s).

John Nichols, author. (The Milagro Beanfield War)

Denny Laine, of the Moody Blues and Wings.

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

Obit watch: November 30, 2023, part 2.

Thursday, November 30th, 2023

Shane MacGowan. Pitchfork. NYT. THR.

I’ve never been a Pogues fanatic. I pretty much missed them when they were an operational band, and the first thing I ever heard from them was “Fairytale Of New York”. I think we can play that now. After all, it is the Christmas season.

Later on, I picked up some more Pogues by way of “The Wire”. Unfortunately, I can’t find a clip of a drunk McNulty (not the valued commenter here, the other one) repeatedly ramming his car into a bridge abutment while playing “Transmetropolitan”…

And Shane MacGowan was Irish, but I think I’d be willing to grant him honorary US citizenship just for this song, which should probably be the national anthem. (Well, either that, or “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”.)

Frances Sternhagen, actress. THR. Other credits include “Law and Order”, “Up the Down Staircase”, and “Communion”.

Posted in Christmas, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 19, 2023.

Sunday, November 19th, 2023

I’m aware of Rosalynn Carter, but I think it’d be better to wait until tomorrow to post an obit roundup.

Captain Don Walsh (USN – retired). Regular readers of this blog might recall the name. For everyone else: on January 23, 1960, Lt. Walsh and Jacques Piccard descended in the bathyscaph Trieste seven miles under the ocean, to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, into the Challenger Deep.

Late in life, Dr. Walsh began to revisit his pioneering dive site. In 2012, at age 80, he advised the filmmaker James Cameron when he became the first person since Dr. Walsh and Mr. Piccard to make a dive into the Challenger Deep. “I feel so fortunate,” Dr. Walsh said at the time. “Dudes my age are mostly sitting in rockers passing around snapshots of grandkids and great-grandkids.”
He also advised the undersea explorer Victor L. Vescovo when he dived into the Challenger Deep in 2019. The next year, Mr. Vescovo once again made the dive; this time, he took Dr. Walsh’s son, Kelly, as a passenger. The two men spent four hours exploring the planet’s deepest spot.

He was 92. According to his son, he died “sitting in his favorite chair”.

Viktor Belenko passed away on September 24th, but his death was not widely reported back then. Mr. Belenko was the Soviet pilot who defected to Japan in his MIG-25 in 1976.

The MiG-25 turned out to be a paper eagle. Its giant wingspan was not for maneuverability but simply to lift the plane and its 15 tons of fuel off the ground. It couldn’t even do its job: Though it flew fast, it was no match for the American aircraft it was meant to take down.
Of great value, though, was what Lieutenant Belenko told the Americans about conditions and morale within the Soviet armed forces.
American officials had long believed that Soviet military personnel were chiseled supermen. Lieutenant Belenko revealed that they were often half-starved and beaten down, forced into cramped living spaces and subject to sadistic punishment at the tiniest infraction.
During a visit to a U.S. aircraft carrier, he was astonished that sailors were allowed unlimited amounts of food, at no cost. He once bought a can of cat food at a grocery store, not knowing it was for pets; when someone pointed out his error, he shrugged and said it still tasted better than the food sold for human consumption in the Soviet Union.

John Barron’s book MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko is available in a Kindle edition.

David Del Tredici, composer. I remember hearing the name a lot in the 80s and 90s when I was buying music, but I don’t think I ever owned a Tredici recording.

Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted. But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them. And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase “Bad Boy of Music,” Mr. Del Tredici could easily have adopted it himself.

…

But his fascination with Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books led him toward the lushness of a neo-Romanticism that erupted with full force in “Final Alice” (1975), a 70-minute score for soprano and a huge orchestra that was packed with hummable melodies, as well as just enough chaotic brashness to keep its late-20th-century provenance clear.
Some atonalists regarded “Final Alice” as a betrayal. But a PBS broadcast and a recording by the soprano Barbara Hendricks, with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which had commissioned the work), brought “Final Alice” to a large audience that embraced it enthusiastically — as did many musicians.

…

Some modernists looked askance at the work. But Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, found it heartening. After a Carnegie Hall performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1978, he wrote: “‘Final Alice’ may not be a profound score, and some of it is kitsch, but it does have life, imagination and — mirabile dictu! — audience appeal. People were coming out of Carnegie Hall humming and whistling the ‘Alice’ theme.”

Suzanne Shepherd, actress. Other credits include the LawnOrder trifecta (original recipe, “Criminal Intent”, Sport Utility Vehicle), “Uncle Buck”, and “Requiem for a Dream”.

Posted in Geek, Music, Obits, Planes, Politics, TV | 1 Comment »

What to do? What. To. Do?

Friday, November 17th, 2023

I could do three, maybe four, very short posts covering and updating about various news items.

Or I could do one post hitting all of those items, even though it wouldn’t be as organized as doing multiple posts. But it’d just be one post, and maybe slightly more substantial. So one post it is.

Obit watch: A.S. Byatt, noted British author (Possession).

George Brown, drummer for Kool & the Gang.

Non-flaming non-hyenas watch: Mike the Musicologist sent over a link (but I’m using the Post‘s instead) stating that the gun charges against NYC Councilwoman Inna Vernikov are going to be dropped. Turns out that her gun was unloaded and also missing the recoil spring assembly, so it couldn’t be fired.

“In order to sustain this charge, it must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the weapon in question was capable of firing bullets,” Brooklyn DA spokesman Oren Yaniv said in a statement. “Absent such proof, we have no choice but to dismiss these charges.”

This actually makes me feel less sympathetic to her. It seems like she was carrying the gun as a prop, not because she felt a need for protection. And that doesn’t strike me as being very smart.

Firings watch: Chris Partridge, linebackers coach at the University of Michigan. This does seem to be tied to the ongoing scandal.

There are somewhat more than hints in that article and this one that UMich has found out some things about what’s been going on that are causing tsuris.

Sources told ESPN that university leadership this week has shifted its tone from the stern rebuke of the league’s sanctions to a growing acceptance that the football program may be dealing with significant NCAA infractions that could include a failure to properly monitor the program on Harbaugh’s part.

Posted in Books, Firings, Guns, Law, Music, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 2, 2023.

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023

Bobby Knight. NYT. ESPN.

Tribute from ESPN by Jay Bilas.

Knight’s acts of kindness were rarely publicized, and if I had publicized those I knew of while he was alive, he would not have liked it. Knight played for the legendary Fred Taylor at Ohio State, and near the end of Taylor’s life, Knight would sneak into Taylor’s hospital room to hold his hand. When a legendary basketball talent evaluator was having financial difficulty late in life, Knight paid his outstanding bills and rent, without telling a soul.

Don Laughlin. You may never have heard of him, but you’ve heard of the town he created: Laughlin, Nevada.

Taking chances seemed to come naturally to Donald. As a teenager, he stockpiled cash from trapping mink and muskrat and used it to buy mail-order slot machines, installing them himself in local pubs.
Demand was high, and before long he was making $500 a week (nearly $7,000 in today’s money).
The principal of the one-room schoolhouse he attended for high school was not amused. “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school,” Mr. Laughlin told The Review-Journal. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door.’”

David Mitchell. Here’s another person who you may not have heard of. I had, because this is a great story.

In 1975, Mr. Mitchell and his then-wife bought a struggling weekly newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.

In 1973, a grand jury raised questions about fiscal improprieties and child abuse by Synanon, which had once been widely respected but had devolved into an authoritarian cult that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — to become tax exempt. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco found that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, Calif., less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding what turned out to be $60,000 worth of weapons.
Mr. Mitchell began his own investigation that same year, joined by his wife; their one reporter, John Maddeen; and Richard J. Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. To them, it was a story in their own back yard that they couldn’t ignore.

…

The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.
In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security force had conspired to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon disbanded in 1991.

The Point Reyes Light won the Pulitzer for public service in 1979 for the Synanon stories.

The lawyer and the rattlesnake.

It was said to have been only the fourth time since the prizes were first presented in 1917 that a weekly or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. Mr. Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe.

One other aspect of the story I remember: most of the Pulitzer prizes come with a cash award. The public service prize does not. Which was sort of unfortunate, as the Light was a constantly struggling newspaper. (The Times blames Mr. Mitchell’s divorce from his second wife on the financial pressures involved in keeping the paper alive.)

Dwight Twilley, musician. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a music guy and rely on other people for music commentary, but the name rings a faint bell with me…

Posted in Media, Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 24, 2023.

Tuesday, October 24th, 2023

Dr. Donlin Long, big damn hero.

Dr. Long was one of the pioneers of the insulin pump.

In addition to the insulin pump, Dr. Long, as an expert in relieving chronic pain, also had a collaborative hand in introducing, in 1981, the first battery-powered, rechargeable, implantable electronic device to stimulate peripheral nerves to relieve pain, according to Johns Hopkins. The device, known as TENS, for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator, became a standard medical tool.

He was a neurosurgeon.

As an accomplished practitioner of skull base surgery, Dr. Long was also instrumental in the first successful separation of twin infants born conjoined at the head. The operation, performed in 1987, involved 70 surgeons, nurses and assistants and lasted 22 hours.
The twins’ brains were separated, and one of the infants’ skulls was closed by Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, whom Dr. Long, the founding chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had recruited to the university…
…Dr. Long, Dr. Carson’s mentor, closed the other boy’s skull during the operation.
Drs. Long and Carson had just one hour to accomplish final separation, to reconstruct the divided brain cavities and veins, and to restart the hearts in the infants, both of them boys.

And he was a mentor to people other than Dr. Carson:

Many of the surgeons trained during Dr. Long’s tenure at Johns Hopkins were hired as full professors, as leaders of neurosurgery departments at hospitals and universities, and as heads of professional associations.
“Neurosurgeons everywhere stand on his shoulders,” Dr. Connolly said.

…

Remembered for his equanimity, his role as a mentor and his can-do passion, Dr. Long often told his children and grandchildren, “There is no try, only did and did not.”

Elizabeth Hoffman, actress. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Cutter to Houston”, “Blue Thunder”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Angelo Bruschini, guitarist for Massive Attack.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 12, 2023.

Thursday, October 12th, 2023

Walt Garrison, legendary Dallas Cowboy, rodeo competetor, and Skoal endorser.

His best season was 1971, where he scored 10 touchdowns and had 1,174 total yards, and it was capped off by a 24-3 Super Bowl victory over Miami. He was named to the Pro Bowl that season.
A knee injury Garrison suffered while steer wrestling in 1975 ultimately ended his NFL career. He retired from Dallas as the third-leading rusher and fourth-leading receiver in team history.

Phyllis Coates, actress. Other credits include three appearances on “Perry Mason”, “Midnight Caller”, “The Untouchables”, and “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”.

Jeff Burr, director. IMDB. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Michael Chiarello, celebrity chef.

Rudolph Isley, of the Isley Brothers.

Rudolph left the Isley Brothers in 1989 to pursue becoming a Christian minister. However, he has often reunited with his brothers over the years, including when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, an honor that was presented to them by Little Richard.

Posted in Food, Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

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