Paul English, Willie Nelson’s drummer. (Hat tip: Lawrence.)
For the historical record: the NYT obit for Dyanne Thorne.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Obit watch: February 14, 2020.
Friday, February 14th, 2020Obit watch: February 11, 2020.
Tuesday, February 11th, 2020I’m not sure I would have posted an obit for Terry Hands, former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, if it hadn’t been for one particular element in his resume.
Mr. Hands was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost a quarter-century, joining it in 1966 to run Theatregoround, an outreach program. In 1978 he became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn, and from 1986 until his departure in 1990 he was the company’s chief executive.
One highlight of his tenure there was his work with the actor Alan Howard, whom he directed in an ambitious staging of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975, with Mr. Howard starting out as Prince Hal in the first play in the cycle and growing into the title character in “Henry V.”< Another noteworthy pairing came in the 1980s, when Mr. Hands directed Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack starred in both, as Cyrano and Roxane in the first and as Benedick and Beatrice in the second. Mr. Hands moved both productions to Broadway in 1984, running them in repertory.
So what was that element? He also directed the original 1988 Broadway production of “Carrie”.
With music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, the show had had a rocky start at Stratford-upon-Avon, but Mr. Hands, who directed, took it to New York anyway. Critics were unkind, to say the least. Mr. Rich, singling out a scene involving the slaughter of a pig, invoked another famous Broadway flop.
“Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of ‘Carrie’ from the ‘Moose Murders’ of Broadway lore,” he wrote in his review.
“Carrie” closed three days after it opened and has been something of a theatrical reference point — and not in a good way — ever since. Mr. Hands, though, who during his Royal Shakespeare tenure had pushed to expand that company beyond its comfort zone, had known that failure was a possibility and had embraced the challenge.
Joseph Shabalala, founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The current NYT obit is an early incomplete one, with promises of a full obit later.
Mr. Shabalala began leading choral groups at the end of the 1950s. By the early 1970s his Ladysmith Black Mambazo — in Zulu, “the black ax of Ladysmith,” a town in KwaZulu-Natal Province — had become one of South Africa’s most popular groups, singing about love, Zulu folklore, rural childhood memories, moral admonitions and Christian faith.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s collaborations with Paul Simon on the 1986 album “Graceland,” on the tracks “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” introduced South African choral music to an international pop audience.
Obit watch: February 3, 2020.
Monday, February 3rd, 2020A little bit of catch up:
Mary Higgins Clark, noted suspense author.
Peter Serkin. I swear I’ve heard this name somewhere before, but I can’t place where. He was a pianist, came from a prominent musical family, and was a child prodigy.
…
Throughout his career, he presented recital programs that juxtaposed the old and the new: 12-tone scores and Mozart sonatas; thorny pieces by the mid-20th-century German composer Stefan Wolpe and polyphonic works from the Renaissance. Admirers of his playing appreciated how he drew out allusions to music’s past in contemporary scores, while conveying the radical elements of old music.
He played almost all the piano works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Wolpe. He also introduced dozens of pieces, including major works and concertos, written for him by composers like Toru Takemitsu, Charles Wuorinen and, especially, his childhood friend Peter Lieberson.
…
…
Just in this morning: Bernard J. Ebbers, convicted WorldCom CEO.
Obit watch: January 28, 2020.
Tuesday, January 28th, 2020Heavy on the art today.
Jason Polan. I hadn’t heard of him, but this is an interesting obit. The paper of record describes him as “one of the quirkiest and most prolific denizens of the New York art scene”.
…
Mr. Polan’s other creations included the Taco Bell Drawing Club, a loose group that initially consisted of anyone who joined Mr. Polan, who lived in Manhattan, at a Taco Bell outlet off Union Square and drew something. As the group expanded, any Taco Bell would do for club gatherings.
“If I am out of town,” he told The New York Times in 2014, “I will try to have meetings wherever I am. Luckily, there are a lot of Taco Bells.”
He was 37. The NYT quotes his family as saying cancer got him.
Lawrence sent me a couple over the weekend that I’ve been holding:
Wes Wilson, noted San Francisco poster artist.
Barbara Remington. She illustrated the Ballantine Books first paperback editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Finally (and breaking with the theme): Bob Shane, last surviving original member of the Kingston Trio.
Mr. Shane, whose whiskey baritone was the group’s most identifiable voice on hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Scotch and Soda,” sang lead on more than 80 percent of Kingston Trio songs.
He didn’t just outlast the other original members: Dave Guard, who died in 1991, and Nick Reynolds, who died in 2008; he also eventually took ownership of the group’s name and devoted his life to various incarnations of the trio, from its founding in 1957 to 2004, when a heart attack forced him to stop touring.
…
The Kingston Trio’s critical reception did not match its popular success. To many folk purists, the trio was selling a watered-down mix of folk and pop that commercialized the authentic folk music of countless unknown Appalachian pickers. And mindful of the way that folk musicians like Pete Seeger had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, others complained that the trio’s upbeat, anodyne brand of folk betrayed the leftist, populist music of pioneers like Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.
Members of the trio said they had consciously steered clear of political material as a way to maintain mainstream acceptance. Besides, Mr. Shane said, the folk purists were using the wrong yardstick.
“To call the Kingston Trio folk singers was kind of stupid in the first place,” he said. “We never called ourselves folk singers.” He added, “We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff.”
I would link to “M.T.A” as a hattip to Borepatch and Weer’d Beard, but that’s already in the NYT obit. So instead I’ll embed this, which I’ve liked ever since it was used on the soundtrack for “Thank You For Smoking“.
Obit watch: January 22, 2020.
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020I’m slightly behind the curve on the Terry Jones obits because my office is like Australia at the moment. (Everything’s on fire.)
This is actually a good thing, as Borepatch has a much better obit up than I could have written.
I rather liked this:
There were camps and alliances within the Pythons. Mr. Jones generally wrote with Mr. Palin. He was said not to get along with Mr. Cleese, although he shrugged off such claims.
“I only threw a chair at John once,” he told Vice in 2008. In a different interview his recollection was “John Cleese only threw a chair at me once.”
And now for something completely different: Egil Krogh, one of Nixon’s “Plumbers”.
In November 1973, Mr. Krogh, known as Bud, pleaded guilty to “conspiracy against rights of citizens” for his role in the September 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Plumbers, a group of White House operatives, were tasked with plugging leaks of confidential material, which had bedeviled the Nixon administration. Mr. Ellsberg, a military analyst, had been responsible for the biggest leak of all: passing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times earlier that year.
The Plumbers were hoping to get information about Mr. Ellsberg’s mental state that would discredit him, but they found nothing of importance related to him.
…
He was the first member of the president’s staff to receive a prison sentence; he was given two to six years but was released after four and a half months.
Mr. Krogh was disbarred in 1975 but was readmitted to the bar in 1980. Thereafter he concentrated on issues and clients related to energy.
Historical side note: Mr. Krogh was also an advisor to Nixon on drug policy…and, in that capacity, he arranged the legendary December 21, 1970 meeting between the president and Elvis Presley.
Obit watch: January 11, 2020.
Saturday, January 11th, 2020Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.
Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?
Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.
Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.
Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.
Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.
By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.
Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)
Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.
Obit watch: January 2, 2020.
Thursday, January 2nd, 2020Don Larsen, pitcher for the Yankees and the only man ever to pitch a perfect game in a World Series. ESPN.
Jack “Only A Bill” Sheldon. Mark Evanier has a nice tribute up at his blog, with two funny stories about the late Mr. Sheldon (who, in addition to his “Schoolhouse Rock” work, did several appearances on the late 60’s/early 70s “Dragnet”).
Martin West. He did bit parts on a lot of stuff, including “Ironside”, “The Invaders”, and “Hill Street Blues”.
(Hattip on all three of these to Lawrence.)
For the historical record: David Stern. ESPN. Field of Schemes.
Obit watch: December 30, 2019.
Monday, December 30th, 2019Neil Innes, musical humorist.
In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote the group’s biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968.
In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the groundbreaking six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but also made films, most notably the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.
Sleepy LaBeef, noted rockabilly musician.
Lee Mendelson, producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Tweet of the day.
Tuesday, December 17th, 2019No particular reason, other than I really needed a laugh today (after dealing with, among other things, car insurance companies), and this filled the bill:
My wife left me home alone with the kids to go out drinking with her friends. A lesser man might whine and complain, but instead I'm just playing Chumbawamba's 1997 hit "Tubthumping" over and over and over. On the jukebox at their bar. Using the TouchTunes app. pic.twitter.com/jqhbOLdddQ
— Henpecked Hal (@HenpeckedHal) December 17, 2019
(Related note: I remember when the first part of this story was circulating on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:
The contempt hearing for Chris Hooks, the CA lawyer who sent dozens of profanity-filled emails to opposing counsel, is basically a greatest hits list of things a lawyer does not want to hear from the judge https://t.co/BytdYcPepb
— Owen Barcala (@obarcala) December 17, 2019
And the general theme of the comments was, “Yeah, his conduct was kind of unprofessional. But, on the other hand, he was dealing with Allstate.”)
Obit watch: December 16, 2019.
Monday, December 16th, 2019Anna Karina, French New Wave star. She was in a whole bunch of Jean-Luc Godard’s stuff, including “Band of Outsiders”, “Made in U.S.A.”, and (of course) “Alphaville“.
Gershon Kingsley, Moog guy. You perhaps knew him best as the composer of “Pop Corn”. And I was going to embed the Muppet version here, but the paper of record has saved me the effort.
The most fun I’ve had recently with my clothes on…
Thursday, November 14th, 2019…or, for that matter, off.
I’ll start with the musical interlude. I rather like this, though the banjo player should put on a damn shirt.
So, last night, I was down at the Austin Film Society. (It sounds more amusing if you say it with kind of a snooty accent.) What was I doing there? Getting some culture into my system…
Obit watch: October 29, 2019.
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019For the historical record (and as a general matter of policy): Kay Hagan, former Senator from North Carolina.
This is scary:
Robert Evans, noted Hollywood producer and figure. THR. Variety.
He was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980, though that conviction was later expunged.
I mentioned this in passing a few weeks ago at movie night, and it didn’t ring any bells with anyone: the “Cotton Club” murder.
Paul Barrere, of Little Feat.
Mr. Barrere wrote or co-wrote some of Little Feat’s best-known songs, including “All That You Dream,” “Time Loves a Hero” and “Old Folks Boogie.” He occasionally sang lead, although Mr. George remained the band’s focal point. Mr. George died in 1979, and Little Feat broke up that year.
Mr. Barrere went on to work with the group the Bluesbusters and recorded two albums as a leader, but he was largely inactive until Little Feat reunited in 1987. To fill the gap left by Mr. George’s death, the band added two members, and Mr. Barrere began doing more of the lead singing and songwriting, as well as taking more of the guitar solos.
Obit watch: October 7, 2019.
Monday, October 7th, 2019Ginger Baker, noted drummer.
Random thought: could Mr. Baker play “YYZ”?
Mr. Baker’s appearance behind the drum kit — flaming red hair, flailing arms, eyes bulging with enthusiasm or shut tight in concentration — made an indelible impression. So, unfortunately, did his well-publicized drug problems and his volatile personality.
Mr. Baker, who by his own count quit heroin 29 times, was candid about his drug and alcohol abuse in his autobiography, “Hellraiser,” published in Britain in 2009.
Got to give it to the man: he was persistent.
Lawrence put “Beware of Mr. Baker” on our big movie list. We actually want to watch this, but man! That is a hard movie to find: the DVD and Blu-Ray are “unavailable” from Amazon, and they do list it under “Prime Video” but it’s currently “unavailable” there as well. The movie’s website is apparently now owned by a domain squatter who uses it to advertise casinos, and we haven’t been able to check Netflix or Hulu (not being subscribers to either one).
Rip Taylor, comedian and game show guy.
Mr. Taylor was often confused with the character actor Rip Torn, who died in July.
This.
I kind of got overtaken by stuff over the weekend, so here’s your historical record obit for Diahann Carroll. Little mentioned in her obits, but well known to us common sewers connoisseurs: she was also in “The Star Wars Holiday Special“.
Obit watch: October 3, 2019.
Thursday, October 3rd, 2019Bill Bidwill, owner of the Arizona (formerly St. Louis) Cardinals.
I’m wondering if we’re going to see an NFL team for sale soon, and if that’s going to result in a possible relocation. LA and Las Vegas are off the map…but with the St. Louis Rams gone, and a past history for the Cardinals there…?
John Rothman. Kind of an obscure figure, but interesting: he pioneered electronic access to the NYT archives.
…
In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper’s archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper’s in-house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that “once the basic methods” of searching the Information Bank were mastered, “retrieving the information is quite simple.”
In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
I’ve been running behind, so for this historical record: Jessye Norman.
Obit watch: September 25, 2019.
Wednesday, September 25th, 2019Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Reason. Rolling Stone.
I have to be honest: I am not a DeadHead. Never have been. I’m not really the person to look to for an obit or an appreciation. But i do think he did some good work. How about a musical interlude?
(I actually really like the Indigo Girls cover of this, but I can’t find a good version on YouTube.)
(Obligatory.)
Dr. Robert McClelland. He was one of the surgeons who treated John F. Kennedy at Parkland.
Inside, as doctors began lifesaving measures, it was clear that Kennedy’s condition was grave. His face was swollen, his skin bluish-black and his eyes protuberant, suggesting great pressure on his brain, Dr. McClelland told the Warren Commission in 1964 during its investigation of the assassination.
The lead surgeon, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry II, asked Dr. McClelland to assist in an emergency tracheotomy, and Dr. McClelland inserted a retractor into the incision that Dr. Perry had made in Kennedy’s neck to help accommodate a breathing tube.
Dr. McClelland’s position at the head of the gurney on which Kennedy lay gave him a close look at the severe wound at the back of the president’s head that had been caused by a second bullet.
The “posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted,” he told the commission. About a third of the president’s brain tissue was gone, he said.
Ironically, Dr. McClelland also treated Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot.
A. Alverez, “British poet, critic and essayist” who had an unusual relationship with Sylvia Plath before she died. He also wrote about suicide and about the World Series of Poker: I’m pretty sure I’ve read The Biggest Game in Town, but I don’t know where my copy is right now.
I have one more obit to post, but that will go up later: I’m running out of time before work starts, and I want to do it right. Look for that one around mid-morning or posslbly lunch. Hint: this person was a big damn hero.