Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: October 6, 2023.

Friday, October 6th, 2023

Dick Butkus, one of the greats. ESPN.

At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, good size for his era, Butkus stuffed running plays up the middle. He was also speedy and mobile enough to drop back and foil opponents’ pass plays. He was cited as a first-team All-Pro five times and was chosen for the Pro Bowl game eight times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.
Sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, so the number of times Butkus smothered opposing quarterbacks remains unrecorded. But he was considered to have intercepted 22 passes and recovered 27 fumbles while playing for the Bears from 1965 to 1973.

…

Butkus was chosen by the Bears in the first round, third overall, in the 1965 N.F.L. draft and by the Denver Broncos of the American Football League in its second round. He went with his hometown team, a storied N.F.L. franchise owned and coached by the future Hall of Famer George Halas. In his rookie season, he intercepted five passes and recovered seven fumbles.
But the Bears fell on hard times during Butkus’s years. They won 49 games, lost 74, tied four and never reached the playoffs. In his last few seasons, Butkus played on with a badly injured right knee despite having undergone surgery. In May 1974, having retired, he sued the Bears for $1.6 million, contending that the team had not provided him with the medical and hospital care it had promised in a five-year contract he signed in July 1973. The case was settled out of court.

He also did some acting.

IMDB.

Joe Christopher, one of the original 1962 Mets.

He was a part-time player in 1962 — the perfectly awful “Amazin’ Mets,” as their manager, Casey Stengel, called them, had a 40-120-1 record that season — when he got batting tips from a Mets coach, the renowned Rogers Hornsby, who hit over .400 three times in the 1920s.
“He was sitting in hotel lobbies,” Christopher recalled in an unpublished interview in 2010 with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times. Christopher recalled Hornsby telling him that the secret of hitting was “don’t let the pitcher jam home plate” and “it’s not about contact, it’s impact.”

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In June, when he was hitting .307, he talked about getting a chance to play full time.
“I always knew I could hit, but nobody up here believed me,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always hit well in the minors, but when I got to the majors nobody had any confidence in me.” He added, “They just wouldn’t give me a chance to play regularly. There was always that worry that if I went 0 for 4 I’d be on the bench the next day.”
He finished the season at .300, 16th best in the National League and only the third time a Met had reached that level. (The Mets’ Ron Hunt hit .303 that season.) He also led the Mets with 76 runs batted in and was second in home runs with 16.

…

He had a career batting average of .260, with 29 home runs and 173 R.B.I.

Keith Jefferson, actor. IMDB.

Russell Sherman, pianist.

Mr. Sherman, who gave his last recital at 88, made his name performing virtuoso works such as Franz Liszt’s daunting “Transcendental Études.” Referring to the composer’s reputation as a showman, Mr. Sherman told The New York Times in 1989 that he was engaged in a “lifelong battle to reconstitute Liszt as a serious composer.”

…

Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.
On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.

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Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”
Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.

…

Mr. Sherman married Wha Kyung Byun, a Korean-born former student of his, in 1974; she began teaching at the New England conservatory in 1979. They sometimes celebrated their anniversaries by performing together.

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

Obit watch: September 27, 2023.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Brooks Robinson.

In his 23 seasons with the Orioles, from 1955 to 1977, Robinson became known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner for his ability to snare just about anything hit his way.
Charging topped grounders or bunts, backhanding smashes, ranging to his left or his right, he won 16 consecutive Gold Glove awards as the American League’s leading fielder at third base. Only the pitcher Greg Maddux, with 18 Gold Gloves, has exceeded Robinson’s total.Robinson played on four pennant-winning teams, two of them World Series champions. He was the most valuable player of the 1970 World Series, in which the Orioles beat the Cincinnati Reds in five games, for his spectacular plays and for his hitting: He had a .429 batting average and hit a pair of home runs. (The Orioles also beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games in the 1966 Series.)
Robinson had 2,848 hits, 268 home runs and a career batting average of .267. He was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, when he hit 28 homers, had a league-leading 118 runs batted in and batted .317, all career highs. But he was best known for his fielding.
Robinson was named an All-Star every season from 1960 to 1974. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, his first year of eligibility, with almost 92 percent of the votes.

Edited to add: Dave Barry on Brooks Robinson.

Phil Sellers. He was a dominant player for Rutgers in the 1970s:

He was called “Phil the Thrill,” and, with Sellers leading a team that also included Eddie Jordan, Mike Dabney and Hollis Copeland, Rutgers kept improving. During Sellers’s junior year, when he averaged 22.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game, Rutgers had a record of 22-7 and played in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, losing in the first round.
Rutgers was undefeated in 26 games during the 1975-76 regular season, Sellers’s senior year. Late in a conference tournament game against St. John’s University that preceded the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, Sellers clashed with his coach, Tom Young.
“Give me the ball,” Young recalled Sellers saying when he described the incident to The New York Times in 1983. “I said, ‘Phil, we’re going to run our offense.’ He said it three times, ‘Give me the ball.’”
Sellers scored six points in the next 90 seconds, and Rutgers won.
Rutgers then won its first three games in the N.C.A.A. tournament, despite subpar scoring performances from Sellers, to raise its record to 31-0. But the Scarlet Knights lost the semifinal game to Michigan, 86-70, with Sellers scoring only 11 points against the strong defense of Michigan’s Wayman Britt.
Sellers’s college career totals of 2,399 points and 1,115 rebounds are still Rutgers records.

Terry Kirkman, of the Association. This is another one of those groups that was a little before my time – though I have heard of Terry Kirkman – so I’m going to leave comment on this up to my music consultant.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 22, 2023.

Friday, September 22nd, 2023

Stephen Gould, tenor best known “as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner”.

Bayreuth Festival website.

Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.
He first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.
“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”
He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”

Posted in Music, Obits, Wagner | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 11, 2023.

Monday, September 11th, 2023

Mangosuthu Buthelezi. I went back and forth about noting this, as I’m pretty far from being an expert in South African politics in the 1990s. What pushed me into it was that Lawrence posted a good obit at his site, which I encourage you to read.

Charlie Robison, noted Texas country musician. All the “local” obits I’ve found pull from the same AP obit.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 7, 2023.

Thursday, September 7th, 2023

Dr. Ferid Murad, Nobel prize winner.

He shared the prize in 1998 with Dr. Louis J. Ignarro and Dr. Robert F. Furchgott for their work on nitric oxide.

The researchers, working separately but in close communication, pressed ahead, and by the end of the 1980s had established that nitric oxide worked as a sort of signaling agent in the cardiovascular system, similar to hormones or neurotransmitters.
The discovery made possible a wide variety of drugs, most famously Viagra, which facilitates erections by increasing blood flow to the penis. It also saved the lives of countless premature babies, whose underdeveloped lungs needed stimulation, and patients with cardiovascular disease, which restricts blood flow.

Gloria Coates, composer.

Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”

Gary Wright, musician.

Marcia DeRousse, actress. Other credits include “The Fall Guy” and “St. Elsewhere”.

Giuliano Montaldo, Italian director and writer. IMDB.

From the “not quite an obit” department: Stephen Wolfram on Doug Lenat.

Posted in Geek, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 4, 2023.

Monday, September 4th, 2023

Somebody out there is listening to me.

NYT obit for Marilyn Lovell (archived).

On Christmas Day 1968, while Mr. Lovell was on the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon, Ms. Lovell answered her door to find a representative from Neiman Marcus carrying a large box with moon-themed décor. In it was a mink coat and a note The New York Times would later describe as “the most romantic card in the universe”: “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon.” Ms. Lovell did her household chores that day in pajamas and her new mink.
On that mission, Mr. Lovell named a triangle-shaped mountain on the lunar surface Mount Marilyn. It would later serve as a landmark for astronauts, and in 2017, after campaigning by Mr. Lovell, the name was officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.

…

When Ms. Lovell’s 12-year-old daughter, Susan, became hysterical on seeing a priest at their door, Ms. Lovell found a way to soothe her. “Do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?” she asked her daughter, according to Mr. Lovell’s memoir.
Reporters with notebooks, microphones and television cameras filled up the Lovell family lawn and driveway. She fielded a call from President Richard M. Nixon: “I just wanted you to know, Marilyn, that your president and the entire nation are watching your husband’s progress with concern,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring Jim home.”

…

When parachutes were seen on TV billowing out from the spaceship, guiding it safely to the ocean surface, a couple of famous astronauts in Ms. Lovell’s living room, Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, opened champagne. President Nixon called with a new message: “I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
She replied, “Mr. President, I’d love to.”

NYT obit for Douglas Lenat (archived).

Running across dozens of computers, Eurisko could discover possibilities that Dr. Lenat — and other humans — had not. But it needed help from human judgment. Machines could not be truly intelligent, he realized, unless they too had common sense.
The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project. But he was determined to try.
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many leading researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.

My favorite Dr. Lenat story is partially in the article: the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron story.

In brief: Game Designers Workshop used to (still may) run a contest where you had a trillion “credits” to design the best possible fleet, according to the rulebook. The contestants were pitted against each other until one fleet won. Dr. Lenet fed the rules into Eurisko and iterated until it came up with what seemed to him to be an optimal strategy. He entered the 1981 tournament with his Eurisko designed fleet…and won.

The next year, GDW changed the rules. Dr. Lenet fed the revised rules into Eurisko, entered the tournament again…and won.

What the NYT obit doesn’t say: The third year, GDW told Dr. Lenet that if he entered the tournament with one of his weird computer designed fleets, they’d just cancel it completely. According to the Traveller wiki, he agreed to accept “the title ‘Grand Admiral’ as consolation.

Steve Harwell, former lead singer of Smashmouth. THR. Pitchfork.

Not much to say about this, really. 56 is awfully young, but all the stories go out of the way to mention his issues. And I was never a big fan of the band, with the possible exception of “Walkin’ on the Sun”.

Gayle Hunnicutt. Other credits include “Mister Roberts” (the TV series), “Get Smart”, and “Marlowe” (the 1969 movie with James Garner). (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Geek, History, Movies, Music, Nixon, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 2, 2023.

Saturday, September 2nd, 2023

Jimmy Buffett. THR. Pitchfork.

Thing I did not know: Mr. Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker were buddies.

Buffett’s time in the Florida locale, and, in fact, some time away from Key West, ultimately led to his defining song: “I came to Austin a lot in those days. I made it there by getting these college bookings and getting on Willie [Nelson]’s second Fourth of July picnic,” Buffett recalled in the wake of Walker’s death in 2020. “I played Castle Creek many times. I think it was after one of those shows, the next morning I had a hangover and I had to fly home that afternoon. I went to El Rey, a Mexican restaurant on Anderson Lane for lunch. I had a margarita, which helped with the hangover, and in the car on the way to the airport the chorus of a new song started to come to me. I wrote a little more on the plane and finished the rest of ‘Margaritaville’ back in Key West.”

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After seeing what a success his beach-bum image was, Buffett decided to expand his brand, becoming not only a performer but a businessman. He came out with several books, beach-themed clothing, a Margaritaville restaurant chain, hotels, resorts and more.

The Margaritaville Store on Amazon, just in case you want your own frozen concoction maker. Frankly, $350 seems steep.

It looks like the nearest Margaritaville restaurant to me is in San Antonio. But there is one in Tulsa, Mike.

Apart from music, the musician has also made appearances in television and movie projects over the years, including Jurassic World, Billionaire Boys Club, Hawaii Five-0 and Blue Bloods.

IMDB. That was the bad “Hawaii Five-0”. He was also in “Repo Man” (!!!!).

His claim to squandering his wealth notwithstanding, Mr. Buffett proved to be a shrewd manager of his considerable fortune; Forbes this year estimated his net worth at $1 billion.

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Mr. Buffett was also an accomplished author; he was one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both The Times’s fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales From Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 best sellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he once embraced.
“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”
“I still have a very happy life,” he went on. “I just don’t do the things I used to do.”

…

An avid pilot, Mr. Buffett owned several aircraft and often flew himself to his shows. In 1994, he crashed one of his airplanes in waters near Nantucket, Mass., while taking off. He survived the accident, swimming to safety with only minor injuries.
In 1996, another of his planes, Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by the Jamaican police, who suspected the craft was being used to smuggle marijuana. Onboard the airplane, which sustained little damage, were Bono of U2; Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and Mr. Buffett’s wife and two daughters. The Jamaican authorities later admitted that the incident was a case of mistaken identity, inspiring Mr. Buffett to write the song “Jamaica Mistaica,” a droll sendup of the affair.

I’ve never been a Parrot Head, but I did own a copy of “Margaritaville” on a 45 RPM single. (Kids, ask your parents, etc.) I may have a rare (for me) margarita tonight in his honor.

Posted in Music, Obits, Planes | 1 Comment »

Quick and dirty updates.

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

The Elvis gun went for $199,750. I don’t know if that’s inclusive of the bidder’s premium. (Previously.)

I wrote a while back about the criminal charges against Thomas Moyer, Apple’s security head and the somewhat related (I think) case against former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.

I missed, however, that the case against Moyer was dismissed in 2021.

But: a California appellate court reinstated the charges last week.

Friday’s opinion, written by Justice Daniel Bromberg, joined by Justices Adrienne Grover and Cynthia Lie, claimed that the evidence presented to the grand jury was “sufficient to raise a reasonable suspicion of such bribery.”

Appellate decision here. Interesting quote:

During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued CCW licenses. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so. Only Sheriff Laurie Smith and a small number of others in the Sheriff’s Office had the authority to give such instructions. One of those individuals was Rick Sung, who appears to have run Sheriff Smith’s 2018 re-election campaign and after the election became the undersheriff, second in command to the sheriff. Undersheriff Sung also had authority to place license applications on hold even after licenses were signed by the sheriff.

Posted in Apple, California Über Alles, Elvis, Guns, Law, Music, Politics, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 27, 2023.

Sunday, August 27th, 2023

Bob Barker. THR. Tributes. Variety.

Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of Pablo and administrator of his estate (through July of this year).

Alexandra Paul, Olympic figure skater from Canada. She was 31.

David LaFlamme, of It’s a Beautiful Day. As usual, I feel guilty not saying more about this, but the band was…not exactly before my time, but I was terribly young then.

Arleen Sorkin, actress. Other credits include “Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss” (which was the last Perry Mason movie with Raymond Burr), “Frasier”, and “The New Mike Hammer”.

Posted in Art, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Short random gun crankery, with a patriotic and historical bent.

Saturday, August 12th, 2023

One of the guns that is currently high on my want list is a Smith and Wesson Model 53.

The Model 53 is a weird gun. It was designed and chambered to shoot the .22 Jet cartridge, which is a .357 Magnum necked down to take a .222 bullet. This was a relic of the time when people were experimenting with odd .22 caliber wildcat cartridges in revolvers.

I’ll probably write some more about the Jet when I get mine, but for now I’ll just say the .22 Jet and the Model 53 were not a complete success. Fortunately, the Model 53 can also bet set up to fire .22 LR: either by swapping out the .22 Jet cylinder for a .22 LR cylinder (it was fairly common for the guns to ship with both) or by using special inserts in the .22 Jet cylinder.

The 53 shipped with 4″, 6″, and 8 3/8″ barrels. I’m pretty set on getting one with a 8 3/8″ barrel, as that seems ideal for varmint hunting.

I’ve actually just found a really nice Model 53 with an 8 3/8″ barrel and both .22 LR and .22 Jet cylinders…that I won’t be buying.

Why?

Three reasons:

1) The estimated auction price is between $60,000 and $90,000.

2) It is really really really nice. Too nice to shoot.

3) (related to #2 above): it was Elvis’s gun.

“Elvis’ Guns: The Bicentennial Smith & Wesson” from Rock Island Auction.

Elvis Presley loved guns. He loved buying them, shooting them, gifting them, and showing them off. As his fame grew, threats came and he regularly went armed as well as arming the men who surrounded him. At the time of his death at the age of 42, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, reportedly owned 37 firearms and a machine gun.

RIA lot number 1504: Elvis Presley’s Exhibition Quality S&W Model 53 Revolver.

I saw this gun, up close and personal like, at the 2022 S&WCA Collector’s Association Symposium. it is a beautiful gun, and if any of my readers have a spare $90,000 I encourage you to submit a bid. Better photos than I can take are in the RIA listing.

Posted in Elvis, Guns, History, Music, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 10, 2023.

Thursday, August 10th, 2023

Robbie Robertson. THR. Pitchfork.

Their final performance on Thanksgiving in 1976 was documented by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz, which was released in 1978 and is widely considered an all-time classic music documentary.

I haven’t seen “The Last Waltz” and kind of want to (it is available on Criterion) but I’ve seen it described as “Martin Scorsese interviews Robbie Robertson. Also, he interviews some of Robbie Robertson’s friends about how great Robbie Robertson is.”

In 2020, Scorsese produced Once Were Brothers, a documentary about the Band based mostly on Robertson’s accounts.

…

Some of the Band’s biggest songs were “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek.” Music from Big Pink, 1969’s The Band, and 1970’s Stage Fright were critical and commercial hits, with Robertson taking the bulk of the songwriting credit and thus getting a larger share of the group’s money. Helm was consistently vocal in his claim that the majority of their songs had been written collaboratively and that Robertson’s publishing share was unfair. In the 2020 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, Robertson—one of two living members of the band upon its release—claimed that the others had not contributed due to their drug use.

I may be being a little unfair to Mr. Robertson, but it seems like everyone in The Band who wasn’t Robbie Robertson didn’t get along with him. When one person has an issue, okay, one person has an issue. But when the entire band has issues…

On a related side note, should I give pigpen51 a guest account here and leave writing the music-related obits up to him?

This is breaking news: Johnny Hardwick, who voiced “Dale Gribble” on “King of the Hill”. IMDB.

Edited to add: THR obit for Johnny Hardwick.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 9, 2023.

Wednesday, August 9th, 2023

I’m home now. Regular blogging will resume later, including something of a trip report. And some more gun book blogging is coming soon.

In the meantime:

Robert Swan, actor.

Other credits include “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America”, “Somewhere in Time”, and (interestingly) the “Nightcrawlers” episode of the 1985 “Twilight Zone” revival. Lawrence is right: that is one heck of a segment.

Rodriguez, the singer/songwriter who was the subject of “Searching for Sugar Man”. I feel bad whenever I post a music related obit, as I just don’t have the knowledge to be able to do these well. pigpen51, would you like to step in here?

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

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