Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: December 16, 2025.

Tuesday, December 16th, 2025

Joe Ely, one of the great Texas musicians. Variety. NYT (wow!).

I’m generally a little cynical about Texas musicians, but even I have to acknowledge that he was one of the greats. And I could just post YouTube videos all day.

This isn’t an Ely original, but I prefer this to Robert Earl Keen. That is a controversial opinion, I know.

Lawrence describes this as the greatest song ever written about a fighting rooster. Can’t argue with that.

Interestingly, he was an early adopter: he had a BBS system, back in the day when BBS systems were a thing.

After the show, Mr. Strummer and Mr. Jones took the Ely band on a tour of London’s late-night demimonde, an eye-opening experience even for someone as well-traveled as Mr. Ely. He returned the favor when the Clash came through Texas on their first U.S. tour, in 1979. He took them around Lubbock, to sites including Buddy Holly’s grave, where they all got stoned on laughing gas and beer.

…

“I had teachers tell me I wouldn’t make it to 21 when I was going to high school, so I beat the odds, you know?” he told Lone Star Music magazine in 2011. “I’ve traveled millions of miles, zigging and zagging in every kind of vehicle known to man, trying to get from one place to another to create some more music.”

He was 78.

Anthony Geary, actor. Other credits include “UHF”, “Project U.F.O.”, “Shaft” (the TV series)…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. He was “Eddie Decken”.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Music, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: December 11, 2025.

Thursday, December 11th, 2025

Three obits today for people who aren’t as notable as usual, but who I find interesting for one reason or another.

Stephen Downing. He was a police officer with the LAPD. One day he picked up the phone at the precinct.

Jack Webb was on the other end of the line. He was looking for a technical advisor for “Adam-12”.

Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”

He continued to write scripts (under pen names) while still working for the LAPD.

As Michael Donovan, he wrote 21 episodes of “Adam-12,” 11 of a “Dragnet” reboot in the late 1960s that starred Mr. Webb and Harry Morgan, and 13 of “Emergency!,” a show Mr. Webb produced in the 1970s about Los Angeles paramedics. Under the name Sean Baine, Mr. Downing’s writing credits included “Police Woman,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Kojak” and “Police Story.”

…

After retiring from the L.A.P.D. in 1980, he produced and wrote, under his own name, action series like “T.J. Hooker,” a police procedural set in Los Angeles that ran on ABC and then CBS from 1982 to 1986 and starred William Shatner, and for ABC’s “MacGyver,” with Richard Dean Anderson as an agent whose only weapon is a Swiss Army knife.

IMDB.

Donald McIntyre, opera singer.

The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.

I don’t get to use my “Wagner” tag enough. But anyway:

By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”

There’s something to be said for that.

George Altman, baseball player. He was one of only three people who played in the Negro Leagues, MLB, and in Japan. (Don Newcombe and Larry Doby are the other two.)

At Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University), he played basketball and baseball. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in physical education, he landed a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team managed by Buck O’Neil.
Altman took batting practice with the Monarchs before one of their games.
“Evidently I must have impressed them a little bit because as I was getting comfortable on the bench, sitting back to just enjoy the game, Buck came up to me and said, ‘Boy, you’re in there,’” Altman wrote. “It almost scared me to death.”

…

After three months with the Monarchs, he signed with the Cubs and was assigned to the Burlington Bees, in Iowa, in the minor leagues. He was drafted into the Army in 1956, and then rejoined the Cubs organization in 1958. He was promoted to the major leagues the next year.
“The thing I like about Altman is the fact that he knows where the strike zone is,” [Ernie] Banks told The Sporting News in 1959. “That’s one thing most young ballplayers don’t know about. They swing at anything they can reach with the bat. Altman waits for his pitch.”
In need of pitching, the Cubs traded Altman to the Cardinals in 1962. St. Louis traded him to the Mets the next year, and the Mets traded him back to the Cubs before the 1965 season. By then, he was struggling with injuries, once joking that he played for Blue Cross.
After Altman hit just .111 in 15 games in 1967, his career in the majors was over. Unwilling to quit playing, he joined the Tokyo Orions in Japan. During seven seasons with the team, he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases.

Baseball Reference.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, Law, Music, Obits, Sports, TV, Wagner | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 4, 2025.

Thursday, December 4th, 2025

Several people sent me obits for Steve Cropper, of Booker T. and the MG’s, and the Blues Brothers.

As a member of Booker T. & the MG’s, the house rhythm section at Stax, Mr. Cropper played the snarling Fender Telecaster lick on “Green Onions,” the funky hit instrumental by the MG’s from 1962. He also contributed the ringing guitar figure that opened Sam & Dave’s gospel-steeped “Soul Man,” the 1966 single on which the singer Sam Moore shouted, “Play it, Steve!” to cue Mr. Cropper’s stinging single-string solo on the chorus. Both records were Top 10 pop hits and reached No. 1 on the R&B chart.

…

Mr. Cropper achieved further acclaim in the late 1970s for his work with the Blues Brothers, the musical side project of the “Saturday Night Live” co-stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. By then, Stax had closed, having fallen into insolvency in 1975, and Mr. Cropper had begun immersing himself in freelance session and production work with artists like Art Garfunkel and Ringo Starr.
“Briefcase Full of Blues,” the Blues Brothers’ first album, included a remake of “Soul Man,” complete with a reprise of the shout “Play it, Steve!” from Mr. Belushi on the chorus. The single reached No. 14 on the pop chart in 1979, anticipating the release of the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers,” starring Mr. Belushi and Mr. Aykroyd and featuring Mr. Cropper as Steve “the Colonel” Cropper, who plays in a band called Murph and the Magic Tones. (Born of Mr. Cropper’s tendency to take charge of situations, the Colonel was a childhood nickname that stuck with him even after he established himself as a musician.)

Here’s a blast from the past for you: Eugene Hasenfus.

“Eugene who?”

Yeah, that’s what Ronald Reagan said.

Mr. Hasenfus emerged out of obscurity on Oct. 5, 1986, when a missile fired by troops fighting for Nicaragua’s leftist government downed his plane while it was on a run to drop arms to right-wing rebel forces, known as contras, who were seeking to overthrow the country’s leaders.
The pilot, co-pilot and radio operator of the plane — a twin-engine turboprop of 1950s vintage — died in its fiery crash in a patch of jungle in southern Nicaragua. Mr. Hasenfus, who had been responsible for packing and dropping the arms, was the lone survivor.
An experienced skydiver and the only crewman with a parachute, he had leaped from the cargo compartment, which had been blasted open by the missile, as the aircraft began plummeting to earth.

He was captured and put on trial.

While awaiting his trial, Mr. Hasenfus told the CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace for a segment of “60 Minutes” that when he joined the mission, he believed that he was working for the C.I.A. Asked what an average American would think about the shoot-down, he replied, “He’s going to make that the government is backing this 100 percent, and that’s what I believe, too.”
President Ronald Reagan’s administration initially denied any American involvement in the flight. Those denials began unraveling when it was reported that the cargo plane belonged to Southern Air Transport, a charter carrier based in Miami that was formerly owned by the C.I.A.
Mr. Hasenfus’s capture led to investigations by Congress and by an independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, and ultimately to revelations that the administration, defying Congress, had illegally sold arms to Iran and used some of the proceeds to secretly support the contras. The scandal shadowed the Reagan administration and later the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who was Mr. Reagan’s vice president before succeeding him in 1989.

…

He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison but was freed in December 1986 in what Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who is now the country’s autocratic president, called an act of good will toward the United States.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 24, 2025.

Monday, November 24th, 2025

Udo Kier, actor. THR.

275 credits in IMDB, including “Iron Sky: The Coming Race”, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”, and “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated”.

Jimmy Cliff. THR.

Mr. Cliff won two Grammy Awards over his decades-long career: best reggae recording in 1986 for “Cliff Hanger” and best reggae album in 2013 for “Rebirth.” But his breakthrough in the United States came when he starred as an actor in “The Harder They Come,” a 1972 movie about a struggling Jamaican musician who turns to crime.

That film became a cult favorite in the United States, running for years in midnight slots at theaters. It won Mr. Cliff a wide base of fans, many of whom bought the movie’s soundtrack, which included “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come” as well as Mr. Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Sitting in Limbo.”

Lee Tamahori, New Zealand director who went on to a Hollywood career. IMDB.

I never saw any of his Hollywood films. But I did see “Once Were Warriors” in a theater, and it blew me away. I highly recommend that, but be warned: it isn’t a light and happy movie.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who was also known as H. Rap Brown.

Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.
An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he preached armed resistance and separatism, declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners.
Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.

He had a long history of “involvement”, so to speak, with law enforcement.

Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.
Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.
By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam. By his account, he had become a new man with a new name. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice, and publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions of his youth.

He was convicted of shooting two sheriff’s deputies – killing one – in 2000, and died in a federal medical center.

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

Obit watch: October 17, 2025.

Friday, October 17th, 2025

The archiving service I use has been having issues all day, so I’m going to put this up without some links. If they fix the problems in the next day or two, I’ll go back and add them.

Kanchha Sherpa has passed away at the age of 92. (Paywalled link. Sorry.) He was the last surviving member of the Hillary-Norgay team that climbed Mount Everest.

Mr. Kanchha carried 60 pounds of gear, fixed ropes and scouted the trail for the team. Despite injury, cold, illness and hardship, “I got good work,” he told Climate Wire in 2011. “I got good clothing. It was good for me.”

…

More recently, he expressed concern about the large numbers of people climbing Everest and the environmental damage they caused.Still, as a mountain guide, he told Climate Wire: “If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don’t have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit.”

Ace Frehley, of KISS. NYT (share link, should be free).

I don’t have much to say about Mr. Frehley, and I feel a little bad. But I was never a fan of Knights In Satan’s Service.

Susan Stamberg, NPR host famous for her “cranberry relish” recipe. Recipe here. NYT (non-archived, paywalled link. Sorry.)

American Handgunner, the print edition. The brand is going to continue in the form of online “newsletters”, and I think Guns is still going to be around.

But to me, this is awful news. AH is one of the few gun magazines I subscribed to, and I’m not sure if signing up for all the newsletters will get me the content I want. Sure, Dr. Dabbs will still be around, but what about the “Ayoob Files” and Ayoob’s monthly column? Will the “Guncrank Diaries” still exist? If not, who’s going to tell me stories, like the one about Elon Musk’s dad killing three cannibals with two bullets? And what if I want to go back and refer to something? The website is a little skirty about pulling up older articles, even if you are a paid subscriber.

I think I understand the reasons, and I still support the AH staff. But the older I get, the more change stinks.

Posted in Guns, History, Media, Music, Obits, Radio | 2 Comments »

Oh my God, it’s (NOT!) a mirage…

Thursday, October 16th, 2025

This is a story that’s mostly local, but it pushes enough of my buttons to document here.

The Brooklyn Mirage, a 32,000-square-foot open-air concert hall in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is slated to be razed following ongoing financial distress and a failed return this summer, according to demolition permits.

“Razed”.

The seasonal music venue is part of the 80,000-square-foot Avant Gardner complex, which also hosts The Great Hall and Kings Hall – both indoor venues which have shows scheduled through Dec. 6.

I can’t tell if the two halls are connected to the Mirage, or if they are stand-alone entities.

The Department of Buildings revoked the venue’s temporary occupancy certificate just days before its anticipated opening, which was set to feature headliners like Sara Landry, Alesso and Peggy Gou.

Who?

The agency had numerous objections “both safety-related and technical in nature,” the DOB wrote at the time, according to Brooklyn Paper. Some of those issues included inadequate accessibility requirements, toilets and automatic fire sprinklers.

This is the part that got me.

“From [the venue’s] questionable footing to the large truss at its zenith, from its cantilevered mezzanines to its exterior walls, it was potentially unsteady, combustible, illegal, and no place to put 6,000 people,” Buildings Commissioner Jimmy Oddo said in a statement.

“unsteady, combustible, illegal, and no place to put 6,000 people”. Sounds like somebody messed up badly. Or else they didn’t bribe the right people.

The parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August, calling the Mirage closure “catastrophic” for company finances in court documents.

Yes, I would imagine that not being able to open would be “catastrophic”.

Bankruptcy records show that the venue owes various vendors more than $10 million, including a cool $1.8 million to the DJ Black Coffee Entertainment from South Africa.

…

The parent company is now selling off its assets to an “affiliate” of the company’s lender, according to The Real Deal (the company has up to $500 million in liabilities and only at most $100 million in assets).

All of these problems make me think there’s one thing going on…

Posted in Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 1, 2025.

Wednesday, October 1st, 2025

Jane Goodall has passed away. She was 91.

It goes against my usual policy, but here’s a NYT obit from today that seems pretty comprehensive. I’ll try to post an updated version tomorrow if it is justified.

NYT obit for Thomas Perry. Fun fact I didn’t know: he and his wife worked as TV writers and producers. Credits include “Simon and Simon”, “Snoops”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Viv Prince, drummer for the Pretty Things. I’d never heard of the Pretty Things (pigpen51?) but the paper of record describes them as a “ruder, cruder version of the Rolling Stones”. And the obit is entertaining, especially if you’re a fan of Spinal Tap.

An appreciation published in The Guardian after his death unearthed a 1965 interview with Mr. Prince from Record Mirror, the British music newspaper, in which he was grilled about his antics with the band during a scorched-earth tour of New Zealand that year.
In the interview, Mr. Prince denied lighting fires onstage but did admit to sabotaging a performance by the teen idol Eden Kane by laying carpet onstage while Mr. Kane was performing. “Everyone was digging it,” Mr. Prince said.
And he addressed news accounts that he had released live crayfish in an airport lounge. “The fish were dead when we bought them,” he said. “They always are. How on earth can dead fish run around?”

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

Obit watch: September 9, 2025.

Tuesday, September 9th, 2025

Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor and a good Cleveland boy.

A German of Hungarian extraction, Mr. Dohnanyi (pronounced DOKH-nahn-yee) served as Cleveland’s music director from 1984 to 2002, during which time the orchestra was widely described as one of the foremost in the world. At his death, he was the ensemble’s music director laureate.

…

Mr. Dohnanyi was esteemed for his meticulous, unfussy interpretations; fealty to composers’ intent; and broad historical compass. He was associated in particular with the music of Germanic composers — his Brahms was especially admired — and he was also an ardent champion of 20th-century repertoire, a notoriously hard sell for contemporary American audiences.

…

Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra is the youngest of the so-called Big Five — the cohort of high-wattage American ensembles that also includes the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Dohnanyi was only the sixth music director to serve in Cleveland, succeeding Lorin Maazel, who had in turn succeeded Szell, whose masterful, iron-fisted quarter-century tenure was considered chiefly responsible for the orchestra’s impeccable sheen, precision and transparency.
Mr. Dohnanyi was widely credited with having restored that sheen, which many reviewers described as having coarsened during the Maazel years. He was also lauded for his tightly disciplined yet strikingly democratic control of the orchestra’s musicians, among the most skilled in the world: “this Rolls-Royce of orchestras,” he called the ensemble.
Under his stewardship, the Cleveland Orchestra attracted younger audience members, recorded prolifically and commissioned new works from the German composer Matthias Pintscher, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and the American Philip Glass, among many others.

Rick Davies, of Supertramp.

Mark Volman, of the Turtles.

Tom Shipley, of Brewer & Shipley.

Ruth Paine, historical footnote. She rented her home in suburban Dallas to Marina Oswald and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Dr. David Baltimore, Nobel prize winning biologist.

Dr. Baltimore was only 37 when he made his Nobel-winning discovery, upending what was called the central dogma, which stated that information in cells flowed in only one direction — from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Dr. Baltimore showed that information can also flow in the reverse direction, from RNA to DNA. The key was finding a viral enzyme, called a transcriptase, that reversed the process.
The discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V., that use this enzyme. Today, gene therapies with disabled retroviruses are used to insert good genes into patients’ DNA to correct genetic diseases.

…

…a decade after his Nobel, Dr. Baltimore found himself ensnared in a scandal and the subject of attacks that tested his resolve and resilience.
It began when a postdoctoral fellow, Margot O’Toole, accused a researcher, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of misreporting data in a paper that was published in the journal Cell. Dr. Baltimore was an author of that paper, although the work was not done in his lab.
The case escalated, with investigations by the National Institutes of Health and the Secret Service, which conducted a forensic study of Dr. Imanishi-Kari’s notebooks. There were also contentious hearings led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr., who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As a Nobel laureate, Dr. Baltimore became fodder for the case; he held his ground, standing up to Mr. Dingell in hearings and insisting that there had been no fraud…
Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Imanishi-Kari were finally vindicated in 1996, when an appeals panel found the accusations of fraud unfounded. But, Dr. Baltimore said, the case had taken its toll.
“I will never be able to forget it,” he said in an interview at the time. He said he had kept all the front-page New York Times articles about the accusations in his basement, unread, hoping someday to have the stomach to look at them.

Jacques Charrier. I want to make an argument that he was the luckiest man in the world. He was a huge movie star in France in the late 1950s.

…Mr. Charrier gained custody of their son, and the onetime movie idol began a slow slide into obscurity. He acted in over a dozen films through the 1960s and ’70s, including several directed by Claude Chabrol and one by Jean-Luc Godard (“Anticipation, ou l’Amour en l’An 2000,” 1967). But he quit the movie business after a 1975 film he produced (but did not act in) — “Il Pleut sur Santiago,” centered on the 1973 coup in Chile — bombed. (The film, which starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, was spoiled by its “didacticism,” Le Monde wrote.)

So why was he lucky? He married Brigitte Bardot. Then again, he may not have been that lucky: Ms. Bardot does not come across well in the obituary.

Their unhappiness was intensified by Ms. Bardot’s pregnancy — “nine nightmarish months,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B.” She made it clear then and afterward that the birth of her only child, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, was deeply unwelcome. She would have preferred “giving birth to a dog,” she wrote.

…

Mr. Charrier had been discreetly out of the public eye for nearly three decades when Ms. Bardot published her memoirs, which included a section viciously attacking him as a bourgeois loser, a freeloader and an egotist. As for her son, she wrote, when he was presented to her at his birth, “I started to cry, begging that he be taken off of me.”

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 4, 2025.

Monday, August 4th, 2025

Loni Anderson. NYT.

“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)

Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:

Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?

Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.

He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.

Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)

He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.

In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”

…

Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.

Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.

David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?

In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.

Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.

Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.

The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 31, 2025.

Thursday, July 31st, 2025

Robert Wilson, “theater director, playwright and visual artist”, and a good Texas boy.

Time was an important element for Mr. Wilson, too. Where playwrights traditionally compressed time in their works, Mr. Wilson expanded it. His stage work “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE,” which had its premiere in 1972 at the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, ran 168 hours and was presented over 10 days. Viewers were astonished and outraged to see actors taking hours to complete actions as simple as walking across the stage or slicing an onion.

…

By contrast, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into opera, and his first collaboration with Mr. Glass, “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), is a comparatively trim five-hour work. It has no plot, but its tableaux touches on nuclear power, space travel and even Einstein’s love of playing the violin. And while it has plenty of text — counting sequences, solfège syllables, the lyrics to the pop song “Mr. Bojangles” and sections of poetry and prose by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs — none of it is dialogue. The audience, free to leave and return during a performance, is presented with ideas about Einstein by inference and metaphor rather than directly.

…

“Einstein,” which had its premiere at the Festival d’Avignon in France in July 1976 and was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, has proved to be among the most durable works in Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Glass’s catalogs. It has been recorded three times and revived regularly, with world tours in 1985, 1992 and 2012-15.

…

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass teamed up again, in 1984, to produce “The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down,” the fifth act, called “the Rome Section,” of what was to be a 12-hour opera, with other sections composed by Jo Kondo, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others. Because of funding problems, the full work was never produced. But Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass went on to produce two more operas, “White Raven” and “Monsters of Grace” (both 1998). In 2022, Mr. Wilson produced “H-100 Seconds to Midnight,” a work inspired by the physicist Stephen Hawking, with texts by Etel Adnan and music by Mr. Glass and Dickie Landry.

…

Mr. Wilson’s other notable collaborations include Euripides’s “Alcestis” (1986) with Laurie Anderson; “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, “Great Day in the Morning” (1982), and stagings of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (1995) and Schubert’s “Winterreise” (2001) for the soprano Jessye Norman; “The Old Woman” (2013) with the choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the actor Willem Dafoe; and “Bach 6 Solo,” a staging of Bach’s unaccompanied violin works, played by Jennifer Koh and choreographed by Ms. Childs.
He also worked several times with Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called “Video Portraits” of her.

Laura Dahlmeier.

Ms. Dahlmeier won the sprint and pursuit events in biathlon at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and added a bronze in the individual event. In Germany, she had helped boost the popularity of the biathlon, a cross-country ski race in which participants also shoot at targets. She won five gold medals at the 2017 world championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, among a total of seven in her career.

She was 31, and died in a climbing accident in Pakistan.

Posted in Music, Sports, Thanks | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 28, 2025.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

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Obit watch: July 25, 2025.

Friday, July 25th, 2025

Hulk Hogan. THR. NYT. WWE. Legal Insurrection. McThag has a nice obit up which I can’t link to directly: search for “Another One”. IMDB.

Lawrence was trying to convince me yesterday that we should watch “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”. I countered with “Thunder In Paradise”, which appears to be available on DVD as three movies cut together from episodes of the TV show. (See also: “The Master“.)

Lawrence: That’s the one that’s “Airwolf, on a boat, except stupid”?

And “Suburban Commando” is, arguably, a genre film.

Chuck Mangione. THR.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 23, 2025.

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025

Ozzy Osbourne roundup: THR. NYT. ASM826 by way of Borepatch.

In honor of Mr. Osbourne and ASM826’s obit, please feel free to share your favorite “inappropriate public urination” story in the comments below. You can remain monogamous if you’d like: I’m certainly not going to out anybody.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

…

Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.

Sarah Morlok Cotton. She was the last survivor of the Morlok quadruplets. And this is one of those sad stories from before my time. I think this is sort of before my mother’s time, even.

They were born in 1930.

Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.
“Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.”
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide.

The Great Depression was ongoing, so their mom turned them into song and dance performers. All four girls were also abused by their father.

He banged the sisters’ heads together when they wouldn’t go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that there were germs on the books. Worst of all, Ms. Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.

When the girls were in their 20s, they began to show signs of mental illness.

Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.

…

Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Ms. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
“She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn’t,” Ms. Farley said in an interview. “And she always had survivor’s guilt about that.”

…

Sarah met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
Mr. Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Mrs. Cotton is survived by four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003 and Edna in 2015.

Posted in Music, Obits, Urine | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 18, 2025.

Friday, July 18th, 2025

NYT (archived) and ESPN obits for Felix Baumgartner.

Alan Bergman. He and his wife, Marilyn (who passed away in 2022) were a formidable team of lyricists.

The Bergmans regularly collaborated with prominent composers like Marvin Hamlisch, with whom they wrote “The Way We Were,” from the 1973 Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford romance of the same name, and Michel Legrand, with whom they wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from the 1968 crime movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. They also wrote the lyrics to Mr. Legrand’s score for Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” for which they won their third Academy Award.
The Bergmans were among the favored lyricists of stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and especially Ms. Streisand, who in 2011 released the album “What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.” The album’s 10 tracks included “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Nice ’n’ Easy,” “That Face” and the title song, none of which were among the numerous Bergman lyrics Ms. Streisand had recorded before. Promoting the album, she described the Bergmans as having “a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart.”
Between 1970 and 1996, the Bergmans received a total of 16 Oscar nominations. One year, 1983, they claimed three of the five best-song nominations, for “It Might Be You” from “Tootsie,” “If We Were in Love” from “Yes, Giorgio” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from “Best Friends.” (They lost to “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman.”)

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Obit watch: July 17, 2025.

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

Connie Francis. NYT.

She made her stage debut at 4, singing “Anchors Aweigh” and accompanying herself on the accordion at Olympic Park in Irvington, N.J.
At 11, she was a regular on “Marie Moser’s Starlets,” a local television variety show. After she appeared on Ted Mack’s “Original Amateur Hour” and “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” Mr. Mack advised her to lose the accordion, and Mr. Godfrey advised her to change her last name to Francis.

…

“I often say, I’d like to be remembered not for the highs I’ve reached but for the depths from which I’ve risen,” she told Mr. James. “There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.”

Joanna Bacon, British actress. Other credits include “The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells”, “The Bill”, and “EastEnders”.

Bryan Braman, former NFL linebacker. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Braman was part of the first playoff team in Texans history after signing with Houston as an undrafted free agent out of West Texas A&M. He was a regular on Houston’s special teams, with his most memorable moment coming in a helmet-less tackle of a Tennessee Titans kick returner in the 2011 regular-season finale. Braman was also a 2012 Pro Bowl alternate with Houston, and he finished his career with four years with the Philadelphia Eagles.

This is just in, and should be considered breaking news: Felix Baumgartner, noted skydiver and daredevil.

In 1999, he set the world record for the highest parachute jump from a building when he took a leap from the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
That same year, he set a record for the lowest BASE jump ever, hurtling himself from the 85-foot arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.
Then in 2003, Baumgartner became the first person to skydive across the English Channel with the help of a custom-designed carbon fiber wing, leaping from the craft at a height of more than six miles over Dover, England before landing safely in Cap Blanc-Nez in France.
His most famous jump was in 2012, when Baumgartner jumped 24 miles from a helium balloon, reaching a top speed of Mach 1.25 (843.6 mph) and becoming the first person to ever break the sound barrier without a vehicle.
He descended from the stratosphere in full free-fall for four minutes and 19 seconds before deploying his parachute.

This broke Joe Kittinger’s old record. (Col. Kittinger assisted with planning the jump.)

The 56-year-old Austrian extreme sports enthusiast reportedly fell ill while flying a motorized paraglider in the Italian coastal town of Porto Sant’Elpidio, crashing the craft into a hotel swimming pool.
He reportedly died instantly during the freak accident, according to media reports. A hotel employee was also injured after being struck by the glider and taken to the hospital with neck injuries.

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

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