Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: September 29, 2022.

Thursday, September 29th, 2022

Bill Plante, CBS news guy. I sort of vaguely remember him, but my family and I were never big CBS news people.

Coolio (Artis Leon Ivey Jr.). THR. Tributes.

David Foreman, founder of “Earth First!”.

Some of the actions he advocated were benign guerrilla theater, like dressing in hazmat suits outside national parks to highlight the risk of pollution. Others were more menacing, like driving metal spikes into trees to damage chain saws — and potentially kill their operators.

…

Still, even some in the movement found him beyond the pale. Murray Bookchin, a philosopher and environmental theorist, called him an eco-fascist for statements that appeared to prioritize animals over people, like when he seemed to endorse famine in Ethiopia and immigration restrictions in the United States as means to reduce the human population. (In both cases he had misspoken, he said.)

…

The stress of the legal proceedings nevertheless created fissures in the organization, as did the arrival of a new, younger cohort of activists who wanted to inject social justice issues into Earth First!’s environmentalism. Mr. Foreman, who called himself “a redneck for the environment,” had never shown much interest in left-wing politics, and in 1990 he and his wife, Nancy Morton, publicly split with Earth First!
The group, they wrote in a letter to its members, had become dominated by an “overtly counterculture/anti-establishment style.”
“We feel,” they added, “like we should be sitting at the bar of a seedy honky-tonk, drinking Lone Star, thumbing quarters in the country western jukebox, and writing this letter on a bar napkin.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 28, 2022.

Wednesday, September 28th, 2022

Robert Cormier, actor. He was 33: according to reports, he died from “injuries suffered in a fall”.

Venetia Stevenson. Other credits include “77 Sunset Strip”, “The Third Man” (the TV series), and “The Sergeant Was a Lady”.

Ray Edenton, noted Nashville studio musician.

Ms. Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” were among the blockbuster country singles, many of them also pop crossover successes, that featured his guitar work.

…

On the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love,” both of which reached the pop, country and R&B Top 10 in 1957, Mr. Edenton played driving, syncopated acoustic guitar riffs alongside Don Everly.

…

Mr. Edenton’s work as a session musician reached beyond country music, with singers like Julie Andrews, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr. as well as rock acts like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Sir Douglas Quintet. He played on Mr. Young’s acclaimed 1978 album, “Comes a Time.”

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

Obit watch: September 24, 2022.

Saturday, September 24th, 2022

This is shaping up to be another one of those busy weekends: Mike the Musicologist is in town and we’re going to a fun show.

However, I have a few minutes, and I didn’t want to let Louise Fletcher get past me. THR.

Other credits include “Perry Mason” (the original, twice), “Maverick”, “The Untouchables”, and several appearances on one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Edited to add: slipping another one in. John Hartman, drummer for the Doobie Brothers. I apologize that I don’t have more time to go into detail: I might try to do a musical interlude on Monday.

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

Obit watch: August 26, 2022.

Friday, August 26th, 2022

Joe E. Tata, actor.

Credits other than “Beverly Hills, 90210” include “Monster Squad”, the 1966 “Batman” series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “Lost in Space”.

He also did a fair number of cop/PI/procedural shows, including “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “The F.B.I.”, “Cannon”, “Quincy M.E.”, eight episodes of “The Rockford Files”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A World Without Sundays”, season 7, episode 8. “A Problem of Innocence”, season 6, episode 23. “What Happened to Sunday?”, season 4, episode 15.)

E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.

By way of Mike the Musicologist: a nice tribute to Richard Taruskin from Alex Ross. (Link goes to archive.is because I’m not sure how long that will stay available for non-subscribers.)

By way of The Mysterious Bookshop: Michael Malone, novelist and TV writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for “One Life to Live”, and an Edgar Award in 1997 (Best Short Story for “Red Clay”, in the anthology Murder for Love).

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

Obit watch: August 25, 2022.

Thursday, August 25th, 2022

Jerry Allison, drummer with the Crickets.

Mr. Allison was still a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, when he began playing with Mr. Holly, who was three years older and had already made a tentative start on a music career, releasing a few records in Nashville that did not do well. Back in Lubbock, he, Mr. Allison, Niki Sullivan on guitar (soon replaced by Sonny Curtis, Tommy Allsup and others) and Joe B. Mauldin on bass began honing a sound that drew on Elvis Presley and on country and, especially, Black music.

…

Then, in May 1956, he and Mr. Holly went to see a new John Wayne movie, “The Searchers,” in which one of Mr. Wayne’s most memorable lines was “That’ll be the day.”
Days later, according to an account written for the Library of Congress, Mr. Holly suggested that he and Mr. Allison write a song together, and Mr. Allison, imitating the Wayne line, said, “That’ll be the day.”
“Right away, Buddy starts fiddling around with it,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing newspaper. “In about a half-hour, we had it.”
Mr. Holly cut a country version of the song in Nashville that was unloved (a producer there is said to have called it “the worst song I’ve ever heard”), but in 1957 he and the Crickets, as his Lubbock group was called, recorded a rock ’n’ roll version that became a national hit and remained in Billboard’s Top 30 for three months. Mr. Holly, Mr. Allison and the producer who recorded that version, Norman Petty, got the songwriting credit, and in 2005 the record was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Gerald Potterton. He directed the 1981 “Heavy Metal”. Other credits include some work on “Yellow Submarine” and “The Railrodder“. (I have previously covered that Buster Keaton film in this space, but the videos are no longer available on the ‘Tube. There is a version that’s not from the Canadian NFB, but I can’t vouch for it.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Quick flaming hyena update.

Thursday, August 18th, 2022

By way of Lawrence: remember the police chief and his Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band?

15 years in prison.

Posted in Law, Music, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 12, 2022.

Friday, August 12th, 2022

Bill Pitman, one of the members of the Wrecking Crew. He was 102.

In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything — television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.
“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in L.A., the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”
Jumping from studio to studio — often playing four or five sessions a day — members of the crew accompanied the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee and scads more — nearly every prominent performer of the era.

There’s an interesting mixture of obit and feature story in the NYT about Mario Fiorentini, who died at 103.

Mr. Fiorentini, whose father was Jewish, was one of the last survivors from the resistance groups who fought the German forces that had taken control of northern and central Italy in 1943. About 2,000 partisans who fought in the war are still alive, said Fabrizio De Sanctis, the president of a local branch of A.N.P.I., “but the pandemic and the heat this summer have been dealing harsh blows,” he added.
On Wednesday evening, two partisans and old friends of Mr. Fiorentini — Gastone Malaguti and Iole Mancini — paid their respects and for several minutes stood silent guard next to his coffin.

According to the NYT, he was the most decorated member of the resistance. He was also a passionate mathematician.

“Remember,” he told Mr. De Sanctis, the local A.N.P.I. official, “the resistance to Nazi fascism is the most beautiful page of our history, but mathematics is more important.”

(Alternative link for those who might want one.)

Kamoya Kimeu. He was a Kenyan fossil hunter who worked closely with the Leakeys.

Most paleontologists go years between uncovering hominid fossils, and the lucky ones might find 10 in a career. Mr. Kamoya, as he was called, who had just six years of primary school education in Kenya, claimed at least 50 over his half-century in the field.
Among them were several groundbreaking specimens, like a 130,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull, which he found in 1968 in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. The discovery pushed back paleontologists’ estimate for the emergence of human beings by some 70,000 years.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Science | 2 Comments »

I’ve been in a mood.

Thursday, August 11th, 2022

So here are two swell stories, about things I’m not even particularly a fan of.

1. American Girl dolls.

2. J-pop.

Edited to add: And from the Department of It Never Fails, shortly after I posted this, something else happened that put me in a better mood. I can’t talk about it now (I hope to be able to in the future), but: go buy stuff from Hornady. Yes, this is an endorsement. No, they haven’t given me anything for this endorsement.

Posted in Endorsements, Guns, Music | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 11, 2022.

Thursday, August 11th, 2022

Gary C. Schroen, CIA officer.

He was most famous for leading the first team of CIA people – probably the first team of Americans, period – into Afghanistan after 9/11.

Mr. Schroen selected seven men and gathered the weapons, outdoor gear and food they would need. The mission was code-named Jawbreaker. At least one representative from the military was supposed to join them, but the Pentagon pulled out of the mission at the last minute, declaring it too dangerous.
“There was no rescue force,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. case officer who worked frequently with Mr. Schroen, said in a phone interview. “If they got in trouble, there were no American troops to come rescue them.”
Before Mr. Schroen left for the mission, Mr. Black took him aside.
“I want to make it clear what your real job is,” Mr. Schroen recalled Mr. Black telling him. “Once the Taliban are broken, your job is to find bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back on dry ice.”

He also wrote a book, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (affiliate link).

Darryl Hunt, bass player for the Pogues. I apologize for not inserting a musical interlude here, but I couldn’t find one that featured Mr. Hunt. If anybody has one, they are more than welcome to put a link in comments.

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | 2 Comments »

The Audio Files.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

This is a couple of days old, but I don’t think it has gotten a lot of attention, and it lightly pushes some of my buttons.

There’s a company called Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi. They press records. They also have some recordings available in SACD format, and sell record accessories and electronics. I talked to Mike the Musicologist, and he owns some of their SACD recordings, which I will take as a qualified endorsement.

MoFi’s big deal was that they supposedly used “original master tapes” for their recordings.

In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.

Mike Esposito runs a record store in Phoenix, “The ‘In’ Groove”. He put up a video on July 14th claiming that, contrary to their advertising, MoFi “had actually been using digital files in its production chain” for their re-issues. (And apparently it wasn’t just re-issues of material that was originally recorded digitally.)

(Remember the early days of CD audio and the SPARS code? Wasn’t that a time?)

Anyway, a lot of audiophiles attacked Mr. Esposito for posting the video and implying MoFi’s claims were not legit.

MoFi, for their part, invited Mr. Esposito to visit them in California. So he went out there, and sat down with some of MoFi’s engineers…

That visit resulted in a second video, published July 20, in which MoFi’s engineers confirmed, with a kind of awkward casualness, that Esposito was correct with his claims. The company that made its name on authenticity had been deceptive about its practices. The episode is part of a crisis MoFi now concedes was mishandled.

I think this is that video.

“They were completely deceitful,” says Richard Drutman, 50, a New York City filmmaker who has purchased more than 50 of MoFi’s albums over the years. “I never would have ordered a single Mobile Fidelity product if I had known it was sourced from a digital master.”

…

“Not that you can’t make good records with digital, but it just isn’t as natural as when you use the original tape,” says Bernie Grundman, 78, the mastering engineer who worked on the original recordings of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”

As you know, Bob, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the kind of audiophile who spends $5,000 on a turntable for their 78 RPM records. On the other hand, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for companies that get people to buy stuff by lying to them. On the gripping hand, who am I to look down on these people, when I spend a fair amount of my disposable income on obscure Smith and Wessons and first editions?

Mobile Fidelity and its parent company, Music Direct, were slow to respond to the revelation. But last week, the company began updating the sourcing information on its website and also agreed to its first interview, with The Washington Post. The company says it first used DSD, or Direct Stream Digital technology, on a 2011 reissue of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” By the end of 2011, 60 percent of its vinyl releases incorporated DSD. All but one of the reissues as part of its One-Step series, which include $125 box-set editions of Santana, Carole King and the Eagles, have used that technology. Going forward, all MoFi cutting will incorporate DSD.

…

Marketing has been a key element of the MoFi model. Most releases include a banner on the album cover proclaiming it the “Original Master Recording.” And every One-Step, which cut out parts of the production process to supposedly get closer to the original tape, includes a thick explainer sheet in which the company outlines in exacting detail how it creates its records. But there has been one very important item missing: any mention of a digital step.
The company has obscured the truth in other ways. MoFi employees have done interviews for years without mentioning digital. In 2020, Grant McLean, a Canadian customer, got into a debate with a friend about MoFi’s sourcing. McLean believed in the company and wrote to confirm that he was right. In a response he provided to The Post, a customer service representative wrote McLean that “there is no analog to digital conversion in our vinyl cutting process.”

…

The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good that they can fool even the best of ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer’s and Esposito’s own lists of the best-sounding analog albums.

What else is there to say? Other than, if you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?

Posted in Geek, Music | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 9, 2022.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

I’m thinking about no longer posting obits.

Recently, it seems like as soon as I post one obit watch, two or three or more people die. Clearly, correlation implies causality: my posting obits is making people die, therefore, if I stop posting, people will stop passing away. Right?

Well, it’s a theory, anyway.

David McCullough, historian and author. It is an odd thing: I enjoy history, but I mostly haven’t read any of McCullough’s work, and I don’t know why. (I say “mostly” because we did have some of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volumes around the house when I was very young, and one of them had The Johnstown Flood in it. I remember being fascinated, but more for the account of the actual flood itself than the human and engineering factors leading up to it. I should probably grab a copy of the real book somewhere and read it.)

Olivia Newton-John.

In 1970, she was asked to join a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, formed by the American producer Don Kirshner in an attempt to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction film written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both projects tanked.
“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later told The New York Times.

The name of the film is also “Toomorrow“, as best as I can tell. There’s a PAL DVD listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable”, but you can get the soundtrack on vinyl.

Lawrence emailed the obit for Lamont Dozier.

In collaboration with the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Mr. Dozier wrote songs for dozens of musical acts, but the trio worked most often with Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack”), the Four Tops (“Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) and especially the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love”). Between 1963 and 1972, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for more than 80 singles that hit the Top 40 of the pop or R&B charts, including 15 songs that reached No. 1. “It was as if we were playing the lottery and winning every time,” Mr. Dozier wrote in his autobiography, “How Sweet It Is” (2019, written with Scott B. Bomar).

…

Sometimes he would have an idea for a song’s feel: He wrote the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” thinking about Bob Dylan’s phrasing on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Sometimes he concocted an attention-grabbing gimmick, like the staccato guitars at the beginning of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” that evoked a radio news bulletin.
And sometimes Mr. Dozier uttered a real-life sentence that worked in song, as he did one night when he was in a Detroit motel with a girlfriend and a different girlfriend started pounding on the door. He pleaded with the interloper, “Stop, in the name of love” — and then realized the potency of what he had said. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team quickly hammered the sentence into a three-minute single, the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Music, Obits | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: August 6, 2022.

Saturday, August 6th, 2022

Today’s kind of a run-down of people who aren’t as famous as I usually cover, but whose obits I find interesting in one way or another.

Dee Hock. He’s generally credited with having built the consortium that became Visa into what it is today.

As chief executive, he oversaw the development of the first electronic authorization system and the first interbank electronic clearing and settlement system. Banks would issue the cards, not Visa, and they were mandated to add the magnetic stripe to their cards.

Melissa Bank. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a big deal (I never read it). Her follow-up book seems to have been well regarded, but didn’t do as well, and she was working on a third book when she died at 61.

Mary Ellin Barrett. She was one of Irving Berlin’s daughters, and wrote a book about her father (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir).

In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.
That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”

Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary at Angola.

Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.

Sid Jacobson, comics writer.

Posted in Books, Law, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 1, 2022.

Friday, July 1st, 2022

Richard Taruskin, musicologist.

An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.
“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”

…

His words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”

…

Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.
“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”

…

“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.
Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”

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

Thing I did not know.

Friday, June 24th, 2022

The director of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special (Steve Binder) also directed…”The Star Wars Holiday Special”.

Posted in 1970s, Bagatelle, Elvis, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 10, 2022.

Friday, June 10th, 2022

Julee Cruise, musician. You probably recognize the name from “Twin Peaks”:

Cruise’s best-known work is her single “Falling,” whose instrumental version written by composer Angelo Badalamenti, served as the theme song for Lynch’s belovedly weird 1990 Twin Peaks TV series, later winning a Grammy for best pop instrumental. The singer with the haunting voice also had cameos as a roadhouse crooner in the series and the 1992 spinoff movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; she sang the closing credits on an episode of the 2017 Showtime TV reboot, Twin Peaks: the Return.

She also toured with the B-52s (“from 1992-1999 as a fill-in for member Cindy Wilson“).

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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