Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: October 29, 2020.

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Cecilia Chiang has passed away at 100.

She was the woman who brought traditional Mandarin cooking to America.

The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.
This was traditional Mandarin cooking, a catchall term for the dining style of the well-to-do in Beijing, where family chefs prepared local dishes as well as regional specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Canton.
In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”

The NYT obit mentions Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America (affiliate link), in which The Mandarin is profiled. My copy was a Christmas gift last year from my beloved and indulgent sister, and it is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend. (Here’s a pretty good interview with Mr. Freedman from the “Eat My Globe” podcast.)

Billy Joe Shaver, Texas musician.

He was a close friend and associate of Connie Nelson’s ex-husband, Willie Nelson, who recorded many of Shaver’s songs over the years. He performed here often, in settings ranging from the Austin City Limits Music Festival to honky-tonk haven the White Horse. He appeared four times on the TV show “Austin City Limits.”
In addition to releasing his debut album “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in 1973, he wrote almost all the songs on Waylon Jennings’ landmark album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” released that same year.
A song Jennings and Shaver co-wrote, “You Asked Me To,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975. That was just one of many Shaver songs eventually recorded by hundreds of artists. Among them: “Ride Me Down Easy” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Georgia on a Fast Train” (Johnny Cash), “Black Rose” (Willie Nelson) and “Live Forever” (actor Robert Duvall, on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”). Nelson also included Shaver’s song “We Are the Cowboys” on his latest record “First Rose of Spring,” released in July.
Shaver released more than two dozen albums of his own across the ensuing decades, initially for major labels such as Columbia Records and later for indies like New West and Houston-based Compadre. The most recent, “Long in the Tooth,” came out in 2014 on the Lightning Rod label.

South Texas Pistolero has a nice tribute up to Mr. Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker.

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

Obit watch: October 26, 2020.

Monday, October 26th, 2020

Jerry Jeff Walker.

A waltzing ballad about an old street dancer Mr. Walker had met in a New Orleans drunk tank, “Mr. Bojangles” was first recorded by Mr. Walker for the Atco label in 1968. The song achieved its greatest success in a folk-rock version that reached the pop Top 10 in 1971 with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and went on to be covered by a wide range of artists, among them Nina Simone, Neil Diamond and even Bob Dylan. Sammy Davis Jr. included it in his stage show and performed it on television.

…

The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the only original of his — he typically performed songs written by others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play, they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”

…

In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”

“Viva Terlingua,” recorded live in Luckenbach, Texas, included other tracks that became signature recordings for Mr. Walker: among them are a dissolute take on Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backsliders Wine,” and “London Homesick Blues,” a tribute to Armadillo World Headquarters, written and sung by Gary P. Nunn of Mr. Walker’s band, with Mr. Walker on backing vocals. With a memorable refrain that began, “I wanna go home with the armadillo,” “London Homesick Blues” later became the theme song of the long-running PBS concert series “Austin City Limits.”

“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 21, 2020.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Spencer Davis, of the Spencer Davis Group.

Mr. Davis co-wrote “Gimme Some Lovin’,” his group’s biggest hit. He played rhythm guitar in the band and occasionally sang lead vocals, lending his baritone voice mostly to blues-oriented material.
But it was Mr. Winwood, who was only 15 when Mr. Davis discovered him, who emerged as the group’s star, singing lead on its hit singles and later becoming an essential figure in British rock through his work with the bands Traffic and Blind Faith and in a long solo career.
After Mr. Winwood abruptly left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, Mr. Davis kept the band going through multiple incarnations. In 1968, a new iteration of the Spencer Davis Group enjoyed two Top 40 hits in Britain, “Time Seller” and “Mr. Second Class.”
The band did not have similar success in the United States, but a song co-written by Mr. Davis and recorded by the band that year, “Don’t Want You No More,” became significant in 1969 when the Allman Brothers recorded a cover version as the opening track on their debut album.

Jon Gibson, minimalist saxophonist.

…best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 until last year. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like “Music in Twelve Parts” and “Einstein on the Beach” and performed with Mr. Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure in 2019. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Mr. Glass’s sound.
“His technical abilities were beyond what anyone else was able to do,” Mr. Glass said in a phone interview, “and he brought everyone else around him up to his level. He was very gentle with everyone, and very generous.” Without Mr. Gibson, Mr. Glass added, “the music wouldn’t have grown in a certain way that it could grow.”
Mr. Gibson collaborated as well with the other three composers now recognized for establishing Minimalist music in the United States: He participated in the world premieres of Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” and he was briefly a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. An inveterate and eager collaborator, Mr. Gibson also worked with composers who had little or no connection to Minimalism, including Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood.
As a composer, he pursued a panoramic span of disciplines, from unaccompanied saxophone performance and tape collage to fully staged opera. His most ambitious creations include “Voyage of the Beagle,” a music theater piece about Charles Darwin, which Mr. Gibson created with the director JoAnne Akalaitis from 1983 to 1987; and “Violet Fire,” an opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was introduced in Belgrade in 2006 and staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same year.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 15, 2020.

Thursday, October 15th, 2020

Erin Wall.

She was a soprano.

Lyric Opera [of Chicago] was an artistic home base for Ms. Wall, who received her professional start as a member of the company’s prestigious young artist program, now known as the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center. Chicago was the site of the dramatic season-opening performance that jolted her nascent career in 2004, when she jumped in with just a few hours’ notice to replace an ill colleague as Donna Anna in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

…

From Rice, she entered Lyric Opera’s young artist program in 2001. She swiftly established herself as a rising talent: a lyric soprano with a full-bodied yet agile voice and dazzling facility in her top register. It was an instrument ideal for youthful roles like Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” which she sang in Chicago in 2003, as well as Mozart’s Donna Anna, Pamina (in “The Magic Flute”) and Konstanze (in “The Abduction From the Seraglio”).
“The voice definitely evolved,” Michael Benchetrit, Ms. Wall’s manager, said in an interview. “The middle and lower parts became richer with time.”
This evolution came as she increasingly took on Strauss roles that benefited from more tonal opulence, like Arabella, Chrysothemis (in “Elektra”) and Daphne. When she starred in “Daphne” at the Santa Fe Opera in 2007, Mr. Benchetrit said, the effect was overwhelming.

…

Ms. Wall made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2009, as Donna Anna. She returned as Helena in Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 2013 and Arabella in 2014. Though acclaimed in staged opera, she concentrated more of her time on concert work, in pieces like Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” Britten’s “War Requiem,” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, especially, Mahler’s mighty choral Eighth Symphony, in which she was captured on several recordings.
She was a frequent partner of prominent conductors, including Donald Runnicles, Christoph Eschenbach, Michael Tilson Thomas, Andris Nelsons and, perhaps most notably, Mr. [Andrew] Davis [Lyric Opera’s music director – DB]. Earlier this year, he and Ms. Wall released a recording of Massenet’s “Thaïs,” an opera they also performed together in concert at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011.

She was only 44 years old. Cancer got her.

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 8, 2020.

Thursday, October 8th, 2020

Johnny Nash, musician (“I Can See Clearly Now”).

Mr. Nash was a singer, an actor, a record-label owner and an early booster of Bob Marley in a varied career that began in the late 1950s when, as a teenager, he appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s CBS-TV variety show. He also sang on Mr. Godfrey’s popular radio broadcasts.

…

When Mr. Nash traveled to Jamaica to promote “Let’s Move,” he became enamored of the emerging reggae sound. He recorded at Federal Studios in Kingston, bought a house in the city and one night in 1967, at a Rastafarian ceremony, met a young Bob Marley and heard him sing.
Mr. Nash and Mr. Sims were so impressed that they signed Marley and his group, the Wailers, to their label (now called JAD), with the idea that he would write material for Mr. Nash to sing.
In his book “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” (2007), Christopher John Farley described a complicated relationship between the two singers. Mr. Nash promoted Marley to international audiences, bringing the Wailers to London in 1972 as his opening act and recording Marley’s songs. But to Marley’s ears, an American singer doing a commercial take on reggae was inauthentic.
“He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t know what reggae is,” Mr. Farley quoted Marley as saying. “Johnny Nash is not Rasta; and if you’re not a Rasta, you don’t know nothin’ about reggae.”

Peregrine Worsthorne, who the paper of record describes as “an arch-Conservative newspaper editor, contrarian columnist and defender of empire and aristocracy”. I highlight this obituary for two reasons:

1) I don’t believe in making fun of people’s names: that’s the lowest form of insult humor. However, I have to say: you don’t run across people with names like “Peregrine Worsthorne” much these days.

2) This extremely annoying passage from the NYT obit:

In 1973, in what Mr. Worsthorne had described as a rehearsed and knowingly provocative episode, he appeared on British television and was asked to comment on the likely public reaction to news of a sex scandal involving a Conservative government minister, Lord Lambton, the Earl of Durham (who would, by coincidence, become his father-in-law).
Mr. Worsthorne forecast public indifference, using a four-letter word that later crept into use on cable television and in some general interest publications, but which in 1973 was wholly forbidden. His remark was long credited as only the second use of the word on British television after the theater critic Kenneth Tynan uttered it in 1965 in what became a cause célèbre in a national debate about public morality.
Mr. Worsthorne’s language caused a stir with both the BBC and the owners of the Telegraph newspaper group, very likely costing him any chance of becoming editor of The Daily Telegraph, the flagship of Conservatism at the time.
“I still don’t know why I made such a fool of myself,” he wrote in the liberal newspaper The Guardian in 2004. “Foolhardiness, I suppose. It seemed the mot juste, and I could not resist the temptation to make a splash. As a result, I shall be remembered, if at all, as the second person to say” — and here he said it again — “on British TV. What a deservedly horrible fate.”
Later he suggested that the episode may not have been spontaneous, since it followed private conversations at El Vino, a notorious wine bar and eatery on Fleet Street, then the hub of many British newspapers. Contrarianism, he once remarked, was synonymous with “the pure pleasure and enjoyment of annoying people.”

(According to The Guardian, that word was “fuck”.)

Posted in Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 7, 2020.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2020

A lot of folks told me about Eddie Van Halen: I decided to hold the obit until today because, when I looked, the NYT only had their preliminary obit up.

I know a lot of folks who I respect liked Van Halen, but I really don’t have anything to add to what’s out there already.

Thomas Jefferson Byrd. He was in several Spike Lee films, and also did some theater:

Mr. Byrd was a regular on Off Broadway and regional stages, appearing frequently in August Wilson plays, among them “The Piano Lesson” at San Jose Repertory Theater in California in 2001, “Seven Guitars” with the St. Louis Black Repertory Company in 2002 and “Gem of the Ocean” at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky in 2006.
He was a late addition to the Broadway cast of Mr. Wilson’s “Ma Rainey,” taking over the role of Toledo, the reflective, philosophizing piano player in the title character’s band. The cast was headed by Whoopi Goldberg in the title role and Charles S. Dutton as the trumpeter Levee. Though the production, which ran for 68 performances, drew mixed reviews, Mr. Byrd and the actors playing two other musicians, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Carl Gordon, drew widespread praise. Mr. Byrd was nominated for the Tony for best featured actor in a play.

Murray Newman posted a very nice obit a few days ago for Harris County legal figure Mike Hinton, which I encourage folks to go read. Mr. Hinton sounds like an amazing gentleman who I would have enjoyed knowing.

Seasonally appropriate note: Mr. Hinton prosecuted Ronald Clark O’Bryan.

Posted in HCDA, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 30, 2020.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2020

Bad day for music.

Helen Reddy.

Ms. Reddy’s first hit was a 1971 cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a hit from the award-winning stage show “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The success of “I Am Woman,” with Ms. Reddy’s lyrics and Ray Burton’s music, came a year later.
Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early ’70s on variety, music and talk shows like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The David Frost Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” “The Helen Reddy Show” (1973) was an eight-episode summer replacement series on NBC.
She made her big-screen debut in the disaster movie “Airport 1975” (released in 1974) as a guitar-playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast.

,,,

Ms. Reddy’s Broadway career consisted of replacing the lead in “Blood Brothers,” a musical set in Liverpool, for a few months in 1995. But she had a busy stage career elsewhere, starring in productions of “Anything Goes,” “Call Me Madam” and “Shirley Valentine” in England and in the United States, from Provincetown to Sacramento.

Mac Davis, good Lubbock boy.

Mr. Davis enjoyed early success as a songwriter in the late 1960s, supplying Presley with Top 10 pop hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” after spending much of the decade working in sales and publishing for independent record companies.
He also wrote “Something’s Burning,” a Top 20 pop single in 1970 for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, and “I Believe in Music,” which was recorded by the Detroit pop group Gallery, reaching the Top 40 in 1972.
“I Believe in Music” was recorded by scores of artists and became Mr. Davis’s signature song; he closed his concerts with it for decades. “Watching Scotty Grow,” another of his best-known compositions, stalled just outside the pop Top 10 for Bobby Goldsboro in 1971.

…

Genial, photogenic and fit, Mr. Davis had his own television variety hour, “The Mac Davis Show,” from 1974 to 1976 on NBC and was a regular guest on “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows in those years. He made his acting debut in the 1979 movie “North Dallas Forty,” a comedy that starred Nick Nolte as an aging football star and Mr. Davis as a calculating quarterback.
More recently, after years of inactivity on the charts, Mr. Davis enjoyed a revival as a songwriter, collaborating with latter-day pop artists like Avicii, the Swedish D.J. with whom he wrote the 2014 global pop hit “Addicted to You.” (Avicii died at 28 in 2018.)
He also wrote “Young Girls” with the pop star Bruno Mars; a version released by Mr. Mars in 2012 was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Mr. Davis’s other projects over the last few years included collaborations with the country star Keith Urban and the singer Rivers Cuomo of the band Weezer.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 28, 2020.

Monday, September 28th, 2020

A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.

Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.

Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.

The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.

…

The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.

Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.

Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”

…

Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”

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

Somebody ought to write a book. (Part 1)

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

Book ideas, free for the taking! My only ask is: if you end up writing this book, please send me one autographed copy.

Somebody should do a really nice coffee table type book with lots of color photos about Steinway pianos. Especially the custom ones.

Now, I have no discernible musical talent (as confirmed by highly sensitive instruments placed in orbit by NASA) and my photography skills are questionable. But I was struck by this when I read it:

Steinway had made many beautiful instruments over the years—not just the classic ebonized concert grands, but also a number of art-case pianos. Among the best known are an elaborate white-and-gilt decorative piano mode for Cornelius Vanderbilt, with paintings of Apollo surrounded by cherubs, and a piano created for the White House, with legs formed of carved eagles. For the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Steinway had built a tortoiseshell decoration surmounted by a candelabrum. For the oil magnate E.L. Doheny, the company designed a gilded piano in a Louis XV style with carved legs and elaborate moldings. Even Steinway’s standard-issue polished-ebony concert grands were stately and handsome, if also austere.

—Katie Hafner, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (affiliate link)

Those were not the only folks to commission art-case Steinways. “The Steinway firm received orders for “fancy pianos” from America’s illustrious and wealthy citizens: F. W. Woolworth, E. L. Doheny, Sen. Thomas F. Walsh, Henry G. Marquand, George J. Gould, Stanford White, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc. They also produced decorated instruments for the crowned heads of European countries and influential and wealthy people throughout the world.”

It seems like someone could put together a really nice photo book with these, plus some of the more famous non-art-case Steinway piano (Glen Gould’s, obviously, but also Vladimir Horowitz’s, and I’m sure there are more artists that I’m not aware of yet). Accompany that with documents from the Steinway archives (I wonder if they have photos as well)…I’m certain you can get a book out of this.

That book may already exist, to be honest, but I can’t tell. There’s a book called Steinway that was published in 2002, “with more than 200 photos, designs, sketches, and paintings”, but I don’t have it (and don’t want to spend $70 to get it from Amazon) so I’m not sure if it covers this territory.

(I did do some research. I found an auction listing from 2018 for what may be the Vanderbilt Steinway. The White House Steinway is currently in the White House Museum. I can’t find anything on the Waldorf’s Steinway, though they do still have Cole Porter’s Steinway. I found a reference to a reproduction of the Doheny piano, and a LAT story about an auction of the Doheny collection in 1987.)

(One way to know if a book is really good: it gives you ideas for a different book. One way to know if a book is really bad: it gives you ideas for a better book on the same subject.)

(Final side note: it’s kind of fun to see E.L Doheny pop up again. The Doheny family and their scandals are a large part of Richard Rayner’s A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age (affiliate link) which I read a couple of months ago at the recommendation of friend Dave, and heartily recommend. The family was also a large influence on Chandler’s work.)

Posted in Books, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2020.

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

Gale Sayers, one of the great NFL players.

A consensus all-American at the University of Kansas — where he was called “the Kansas Comet” — Sayers chose to play for the Bears of the established N.F.L. over the Kansas City Chiefs of the upstart American Football League in 1965. He went on to have one of the greatest rookie seasons ever.
He led the league in all-purpose yards (rushing, receiving and runbacks) with 2,272 yards, scored 22 touchdowns, six of them in one game, and was named to the all-league team for the first of five consecutive years.

He was injured in 1968, went through knee surgery, and came back in 1969.

But 1969 became a somber season. For two years the Bears had matched players by position when they shared hotel rooms on the road. Sayers, who was Black, was paired with his backup, Brian Piccolo, who was white — apparently the first time a Black and white player had shared a hotel room for an N.F.L. team. The two men bonded, partly through racial jokes.
But in November that year Piccolo was found to have embryonic cell carcinoma of the lungs. Sent to the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor, but doctors found that the disease had spread to other organs.
The following May, Sayers was given the George S. Halas Award for the Most Courageous Player. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I love Brian Piccolo. I might have received this award tonight, but tomorrow I will take it to Brian Piccolo at Sloan Kettering. When you hit your knees tonight, please pray for Brian Piccolo.”
Piccolo died on June 16, 1970, at 26. Sayers was a pallbearer at his funeral.

…

An injury to his left knee held Sayers to only two games in both 1970 and 1971. After fumbling twice in three carries in an exhibition game in 1972, he retired. He had scored 39 touchdowns in only 68 pro games and compiled a career average of 5.0 yards per carry.
In 1977, Sayers was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at 34; he remains the youngest person to receive the honor. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame the same year.

Tommy DeVito, one of the original members of the Four Seasons. Interesting fact:

The actor Joe Pesci, a friend since childhood (whose character in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” is named for Mr. DeVito), had lived with Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including “Casino” (1995), also directed by Mr. Scorsese.

Ron Cobb, noted production designer and artist for SF films.

He created some creatures that appeared in the cantina scene of “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” in 1977. He was also asked to help with spaceship illustrations for a movie pitch that would eventually become the 1979 blockbuster “Alien,” starring Sigourney Weaver.
Mr. Cobb’s work has appeared in several movies that have become classics of science fiction and fantasy. He designed scenes and costumes for the 1982 movie “Conan the Barbarian.” And he was a consultant for “Back to the Future” in 1985, helping to design the famous DeLorean time machine that transported Marty McFly, the character played by Michael J. Fox, back and forth through time.

…

“He was passionate about making the science correct,” Ms. Love said. “He wanted accurate science, and he wanted great design.”
Mr. Bissell said Mr. Cobb devoured knowledge wherever he could find it and shared books on subjects including philosophy, technology and evolution. “Here’s a guy who actually just never cared about money,” Mr. Bissell said. “He always just cared about his work.”

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

Obit watch: September 17, 2020.

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Lawrence sent over a pointer to the NYT obit for Stanley Crouch.

Mr. Crouch defied easy categorization. A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.
All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.

…

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

…

After transplanting himself to New York in 1975, Mr. Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.
“The two best things that have ever happened to me were being fired by The Voice and being hired by The Voice, in that order,” he told The New Yorker.

…

Mr. Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking.
“These people were on a mission,” he said of his teachers. “They had a perfect philosophy: You will learn this. If you came in there and said, ‘I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single-parent household,’ they would say, ‘Boy, I’m going to ask you again, What is 8 times 8?’
“When I was coming up,” he continued, “there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family. Eight times eight was going to be 64 whether your family was dysfunctional or not. It’s something you needed to know!”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 1, 2020.

Tuesday, September 15th, 2020

Apparently, the NFL started their regular season this weekend.

I just barely noticed.

It isn’t so much the politics, although McThag has a good post up on that. I’m just finding it really difficult to care.

Still, one of the motivations for starting this blog was the NFL loser update, and as a wise man once said…

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

San Francisco
Carolina
Tampa Bay
Atlanta
Dallas
Philadelphia
New York Football Giants
Minnesota
Detroit
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Denver
Indianapolis
Houston
New York Jets
Miami

In other semi-related football news, I have been reading as much of Gregg Easterbrook’s Twitter as I can stomach, and there has been no mention of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” at all. Not just a lack of pointers to the current column, but also a lack of “if you liked it, write our sponsor” messages. I have to assume that he’s not doing it this year, though his silence on the subject is a little strange.

Posted in Loser, Music, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: September 13, 2020.

Sunday, September 13th, 2020

Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals.

Lawrence has a good tribute up.

Kevin Dobson. He never did a “Mannix”, but he did a fair number of other cop shows. His two most famous roles were as Kojak’s sidekick, and as a detective on “Knots Landing”.

Mr. Dobson was less active on the big screen than the small one, but he did appear in some notable films, including “Midway” (1976), as part of an all-star cast that also included Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, and the 1981 romantic comedy “All Night Long,” in which his character was married to Barbra Streisand’s.
In 1981 he played Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective created by Mickey Spillane, in the CBS television movie “Margin for Murder.” “Mr. Dobson is given a valuable opportunity to step outside of his usual ‘nice guy’ image,” John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote in a review. “He makes the most of it, reinforcing Mike’s toughness with an impeccably accurate New York accent.”

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 166

Saturday, September 12th, 2020

My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.

So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.

First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”

(Numbers Stations Research and Information Center. Which is kind of a misnomer, because they cover things that aren’t numbers stations as well.)

Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.

Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.

Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.

Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.

Posted in Bookmarks, History, Music, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 8, 2020.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

By way of Hacker News, I found this obituary for Verne Edquist on the Glenn Gould Foundation website.

Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts and was nearly blind. He trained as a professional piano tuner.

Years later, Verne often took to quoting his tuning teacher, J. D. Ansell, whose favorite aphorism was “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” To give Verne experience, Ansell started taking his young protégé into town to tune pianos in private homes. Verne was allowed to keep the money – $2.50 per piano, and sometimes, when he got lucky, $3.00 – which he put toward some basic tools: a tuning wrench, a tuning fork, needle-nose pliers, gauges for measuring the diameter of piano wire, and rubber wedges for muting strings.

He moved around a lot, sometimes working for piano makers, sometimes working as a freelance tuner.

One afternoon about a year after Verne started at Eaton’s, Miss Mussen sent him across town to Glenn Gould’s apartment to tune Gould’s old Chickering. All Gould wanted, he told Verne, was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose they needed to be replaced.
Verne’s stubborn insistence on doing things his way had endeared him to Gould, and the encounter galvanized what was to become a decades-long association between a pianist and his technician.
Verne tuned for many famous musicians over the years, including Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Victor Borge, and Liberace. But it was the business he got from Gould that eventually enabled him to quit Eaton’s employ and sustain his family for two decades.
Each tolerated the other’s idiosyncracies, which were in ample evidence in both men. Gould’s quirks, of course, were legion and legendary. One of their earliest conversations was about Verne’s physical limitations. “I can’t see very well, but I get the job done,” Verne told Gould. And Gould replied that of this he had no doubt. Nothing further on the topic was ever said.

…

All his life, Verne heard music through his own particular synaesthesia – in colors. If you asked him how he knew that an F was an F, he would say, “oh that’s blue.” C was a slightly lime green. The key of D was a sandy hue, E was yellowy-pink, A was white, G orange and B dark green. For years he was ashamed of this rather oddball talent. When he finally told Glenn Gould about it, his boss reacted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

…

When I interviewed Verne for my book, I was struck by what a kind and gentle man he was. It came as a surprise to hear him voice some reservations, even a little bitterness, about his most famous client. Although Gould had often gone out of his way to accommodate Verne’s schedule and never uttered an unkind word to him, nor did he, in the two decades they worked together, gone out of his way to praise Verne’s tuning. To have gone so many years without hearing so much as a “nice job” had clearly taken its toll.

I’m not a musician, or a piano tuner, but that Katie Hafner book (affiliate link) sounds fascinating to me for some reason.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »