Patrick Stewart. Tributes. NYT (share link, may require).
Other credits include “Lifeforce”, “L.A. Story”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (the 1979 version: he was “Karla”), and Lynch’s “Dune”. And I had forgotten that he was “Sejanus” in “I, Claudius”: that startled me when I watched it.
Rosalind Ashford, of Martha and the Vandellas.
Next to Diana Ross and the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas were Motown’s premier female act during the 1960s.
The Supremes were silky smooth, but Martha and the Vandellas had a grittier, more soulful sound, drawing on the counterpoint between Ms. Reeves’s powerhouse alto and Ms. Ashford’s soprano. (The group’s third spot was held by various women over the years, including Lois Reeves, Ms. Reeves’s sister.)
Gary Stephen “Angry” Anderson, frontman for the Australian group Rose Tattoo.
Mr. Anderson, swathed in tattoos, with a cue-ball pate, was the last surviving member of Rose Tattoo, after the deaths of several other members who cycled through the band over the decades. The group, formed in Sydney in the mid-1970s, was an institution among Aussie headbangers, specializing in the down-and-dirty hard rock of their friends in AC/DC, which is considered a national treasure.
The Rose Tattoo sound was “totally aggressive, take no prisoners, spare no one, ‘have no mercy’ type music,” Mr. Anderson said in a 2001 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “The more out of control we became,” he added, “the bigger crowds we’d pull, and that feeds the beast.”
He also played “Ironbar” in “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”.
Mike Beigel. You may not know the name, but you’ve heard his work. He invented the Mu-Tron III.
The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals — or stomp boxes, as they are also known to guitarists and other musicians — that Mr. Beigel (pronounced “beagle”) invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972.
The company produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.
“Effects pedals,” Vintage Guitar magazine observed in 1997, “would probably still be considered novelties instead of serious tools for professional musicians had it not been for the ambitious efforts of the Musitronics company in the ’70s.”
The Mu-Tron III — there was no I or II; Mr. Beigel just liked the Roman numeral III — was also known as the Auto Wah. Considered the first commercial envelope filter pedal, the device allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound, producing a distinctive quack or bark, with a slight underwater feel, as well as mellower swells.
“When it comes to envelope follower effects,” Guitar World magazine observed in 2012, “the Mu-Tron III is the big, pimpin’ mack daddy of them all.”
It depresses me that I can’t share this obit with Andrew. He would have enjoyed talking about effects pedals over sushi.