Lee Hazlewood, the reclusive songwriter and producer behind a slew of hits by Duane Eddy, Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the 1950s and 1960s, including Ms. Sinatra’s No. 1 smash “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” died on Saturday in Henderson, Nev. He was 78.
The cause was renal cancer, said his publicist, Perry Serpa.
Mr. Hazlewood was also an eccentric visionary who pioneered several genres. As a solo artist, he created a sound often referred to as “cowboy psychedelia” for its fusion of country-western, symphonic pop orchestration and trippy decadence. A hard-living crank with a trademark mustache, he sang his wry tales of losers and jilted lovers in a striking, world-weary baritone.
“It has a gravity that allows him to be sincere and tongue-in-cheek at the same time,” the rocker Beck told The New York Times earlier this year. “It’s that immense voice of experience, not expecting any kindness from humanity other than a spare cigarette.”
The son of an oil wildcatter, Mr. Hazlewood was born in Mannford, Okla., on July 9, 1929. After an itinerant childhood, he attended high school in Port Neches, Tex., served in the Korean War, attended broadcasting school and eventually found work as a D.J. in Arizona, where he met the guitarist Duane Eddy.
In 1955 Mr. Hazlewood formed Viv Records, a country-oriented label. A year later Sanford Clark recorded Mr.. Hazelwood’s rockabilly song “The Fool,” his first hit as a songwriter.
Meanwhile, as Mr. Eddy’s co-writer and producer, Mr. Hazlewood helped invent twang-rock by sticking a microphone and an amp in a grain elevator, creating a ghostly reverb effect. Together they enjoyed a long string of hits, including “Rebel Rouser.” Mr. Hazlewood also helped develop country-rock; he released an album by Gram Parsons’s early group the International Submarine Band on his LHI label in 1968.
After an underappreciated solo album, “Trouble Is a Lonesome Town,” in 1963, Mr. Hazlewood, who had relocated to Los Angeles, found himself embraced by the Rat Pack. At Frank Sinatra’s request, he began working with his daughter Nancy.
“He was part Henry Higgins and part Sigmund Freud,” Ms. Sinatra told The Times this year, referring to Mr. Hazlewood’s campaign to change her image. Cheeky video footage for “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” turned her into a major sex symbol in the mid-’60s. That song has since been used in scores of movies, television shows and commercials, and performed or recorded by hundreds of artists.
“If I didn’t have any other hit but ‘Boots,’ I should be a thankful person,” Mr. Hazlewood said in January. “It’s eternal, I guess — a living thing.”
Mr. Hazlewood recorded many hit duets with Ms. Sinatra in the 1960s, including “Some Velvet Morning.” But at the height of his success, he left for Sweden, where he recorded experimental solo albums in the 1970s.
He moved about Europe and the United States in relative obscurity until alternative rockers began to rediscover him in the 1990s, including Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, who reissued Mr. Hazlewood’s solo albums on his Smells Like Records label. Mr. Hazlewood began touring and recording again.
Mr. Hazlewood is survived by his wife, Jeane; his son, Mark; his daughters, Debbie and Samantha; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
On his final album, this year’s “Cake or Death” (Ever Records), he addressed his mortality without his usual irreverence on the ballad “T.O.M. (The Old Man).”
“In this place called forever,” he wondered, “will there be any songs to sing?”
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I have the LP "Nancy and Lee" on vinyl. I was listening to that when I was nine or ten. I love the song "Summer Wine" "Lady Bird" "Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman". Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. There version of "Jackson" was the first one I ever heard. I like to try to do it like that with my girl to this day. Also like "Some Velvet Morning" That Album helped form my taste in music. From there I move on to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin..Many, Many other influences..
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Anyone sung "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" in memory of Phil Rizzuto yet?
[ August 16, 2007, 09:35 AM: Message edited by: jason e. power ]
-------------------- Karaoke With Jason & Friends "where stars become friends" Posts: 582 | From: richmond virginia | Registered: May 2000
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Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83 By PETER KEEPNEWS Published: August 16, 2007
Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York. He was 83.
His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.
As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.
Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.
He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers. Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”
He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.
He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.
In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.
Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.
Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”
In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.
Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.
He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”
Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.
In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.
Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.
The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.
Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.
The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.
“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”
“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”
As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.
Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.
He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.
Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”
This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.
By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.
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From the online NY Times this afternoon - I'm sure they will have a more detailed obit later tonight/tomorrow.
I think I posted an earlier NY Times article when CBGBS closed last year - it's probably still around in the arhives here.
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A Rock Midwife, Hilly Kristal, Is Dead at 75
By BEN SISARIO Published: August 30, 2007
Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of New York punk and art-rock in the 1970s and was the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives around the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 75.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son, Dana, said yesterday.
Looking more like a lumberjack than a punk rocker, with his bushy beard and ever-present flannel shirt, Mr. Kristal cut an unusual figure as the paterfamilias of the noisy downtown music scene. But for nearly 33 years his club was an incubator for generations of New York rock bands, and performing within its dank, flier-encrusted walls became a bragging right for musicians everywhere.
Thousands of bands played CBGB, from its opening in December 1973 until a dispute with its landlord forced it to close last October. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the bar became by default the headquarters for innovative local groups like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth, who in the club’s early days had few other places to play.
“There was no real venue in 1973 for people like us,” Ms. Smith said in an interview yesterday. “We didn’t fit into the cabarets or the folk clubs. Hilly wanted the people that nobody else wanted. He wanted us.”
Hillel Kristal grew up on a farm in Hightstown, N.J., and studied classical violin as a child. He moved to New York and sang in the chorus at Radio City Music Hall and managed the Village Vanguard before he opened his Bowery bar. A lifelong lover of folk music, he kept an acoustic guitar at his desk and named the club CBGB & OMFUG, an abbreviation for the kind of music he had intended to present there: “country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers.”
Within months after CBGB opened, young musicians and poets like Tom Verlaine and Ms. Smith became curious about the bar as they passed it on their way to visit the beat writer William S. Burroughs, who lived a few blocks down the Bowery. Mr. Verlaine persuaded Mr. Kristal to book his band, Television, and others followed suit, including Ms. Smith and her band, which had a seven-week residency in 1975. Record executives soon joined the neighborhood punks as habitués at CB’s, as it was familiarly called.
Mr. Kristal was quick to recognize the new scene’s potential, and though he professed a cantankerous distaste for some of the music, he had a keen ear.
“He might have tried to give the impression of being outside of it,” said Tom Erdelyi, a k a Tommy Ramone, the Ramones’ first drummer and only surviving original member. “But I don’t think that was the case. He understood instinctively that what was going on was something special and important.”
Mr. Kristal decreed that bands had to perform original material. His policy fostered creativity, but it was also a way to avoid paying performance royalties. Mr. Kristal had other schemes. In the ’70s he ran a moving company that hired some CB’s regulars, and in time the club’s distinctive logo became a valuable copyright to exploit for T-shirts and other memorabilia. By 2005 he was making $2 million a year through his CBGB Fashion line.
As time left its mark on CBGB’s walls in the form of stickers and taped-up fliers left by musicians and fans — as well as damage to its notoriously unpleasant bathrooms — the club’s interior itself became a tourist draw, as both a relic of rock history and a kind of living museum of graffiti. Mr. Kristal, who kept office hours until the end, answering the phone “CB’s” in a phlegmatic baritone, resisted any changes to the club, a narrow, dark room that still held remnants of its history as a 19th-century saloon.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the club began presenting metal bands and especially young, hard-core punk groups in all-ages matinees. Though less celebrated than the ones in the club’s 1970s glory days, these shows drew in new generations of fans. They also allowed the club to book two shows a day, one in the afternoon for fans under 21, and another at night for a drinking crowd. Critics began to complain that CBGB had lost its edge.
In 2005, Mr. Kristal became embroiled in a real-estate battle with the club’s landlord, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit group that aids homeless people. The committee said that CBGB owed $75,000 in unpaid rent increases. Mr. Kristal, disputing that claim, fought the landlord in court and in the news media for months, enlisting the help of celebrities like David Byrne of Talking Heads and Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and “The Sopranos.”
At the prodding of a judge, Mr. Kristal agreed to close the club. Ms. Smith played its final show, on Oct. 15. The exterior of the club, at 315 Bowery, at Bleecker Street, is now a frequent stop on walking tours of the Lower East Side and East Village.
Besides his son, of Manhattan, Mr. Kristal is survived by a daughter, Lisa Kristal Burgman, also of Manhattan; a former wife, Karen; and two grandchildren.
Facing eviction, Mr. Kristal frequently said that he was considering reopening CBGB in Las Vegas, Tokyo or any other city that would have him. But in an interview at the club with The New York Times, as tourists walked in and out and bought T-shirts, he said that he wanted to hold onto the corner of the Bowery that he had made famous.
“Millions and millions of musicians in this world think of CBGB as a home base,” he said.
[ August 30, 2007, 01:05 PM: Message edited by: BC/Studio Manager ]
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The New York Times reporting on Luciano Pavarotti’s passing.
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Luciano Pavarotti, Italian Tenor, Is Dead at 71 By BERNARD HOLLAND Published: September 6, 2007
Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, died early this morning at his home in Modena, in northern Italy. He was 71.
His death was announced by his manager, Terri Robson. The cause was pancreatic cancer. In July 2006 he underwent surgery for the cancer in New York and had made no public appearances since then. He was hospitalized again this summer and released on Aug. 25.
“The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life,” said an e-mail statement that his manager sent to The Associated Press. “In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness.”
Like Enrico Caruso and Jenny Lind before him, Mr. Pavarotti extended his presence far beyond the limits of Italian opera. He became a titan of pop culture. Millions saw him on television and found in his expansive personality, childlike charm and generous figure a link to an art form with which many had only a glancing familiarity.
Early in his career and into the 1970s he devoted himself with single-mindedness to his serious opera and recital career, quickly establishing his rich sound as the great male operatic voice of his generation — the “King of the High Cs,” as his popular nickname had it.
By the 1980s he expanded his franchise exponentially with the Three Tenors projects, in which he shared the stage with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, first in concerts associated with the World Cup and later in world tours. Most critics agreed that it was Mr. Pavarotti’s charisma that made the collaboration such a success. The Three Tenors phenomenon only broadened his already huge audience and sold millions of recordings and videos.
And in the early 1990s he began staging Pavarotti and Friends charity concerts, performing side by side with rock stars like Elton John, Sting and Bono and making recordings from these shows.
Throughout these years, despite his busy and vocally demanding schedule, his voice remained in unusually good condition well into middle age.
Even so, as his stadium concerts and pop collaborations brought him fame well beyond what contemporary opera stars have come to expect, Mr. Pavarotti seemed increasingly willing to accept pedestrian musical standards. By the 1980s he found it difficult to learn new opera roles or even new song repertory for his recitals. And although he planned to spend his final years, in the operatic tradition, performing in a grand worldwide farewell tour, he completed only about half the tour, which began in 2004. Physical ailments, many occasioned by his weight and girth, limited his movement on stage and regularly forced him to cancel performances. By 1995, when he was at the Metropolitan Opera singing one of his favorite roles, Tonio in Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment,” high notes sometimes failed him, and there were controversies over downward transpositions of a notoriously dangerous and high-flying part.
Yet his wholly natural stage manner and his wonderful way with the Italian language were completely intact. Mr. Pavarotti remained a darling of Met audiences until his retirement from that company’s roster in 2004, an occasion celebrated with a string of “Tosca” performances. At the last of them, on March 13, 2004, he received a 15-minute standing ovation and 10 curtain calls. All told, he sang 379 performances at the Met, of which 357 were in fully staged opera productions. In the late 1960s and 70s, when Mr. Pavarotti was at his best, he possessed a sound remarkable for its ability to penetrate large spaces easily. Yet he was able to encase that powerful sound in elegant, brilliant colors. His recordings of the Donizetti repertory are still models of natural grace and pristine sound. The clear Italian diction and his understanding of the emotional power of words in music were exemplary.
Mr. Pavarotti was perhaps the mirror opposite of his great rival among tenors, Mr. Domingo. Five years Mr. Domingo’s senior, Mr. Pavarotti had the natural range of a tenor, leaving him exposed to the stress and wear that ruin so many tenors’ careers before they have barely started. Mr. Pavarotti’s confidence and naturalness in the face of these dangers made his longevity all the more noteworthy.
Mr. Domingo, on the other hand, began his musical life as a baritone and later manufactured a tenor range above it through hard work and scrupulous intelligence. Mr. Pavarotti, although he could find the heart of a character, was not an intellectual presence. His ability to read music in the true sense of the word was in question. Mr. Domingo, in contrast, is an excellent pianist with an analytical mind and the ability to learn and retain scores by quiet reading.
Yet in the late 1980s, when both Mr. Pavarotti and Mr. Domingo were pursuing superstardom, it was Mr. Pavarotti who showed the dominant gift for soliciting adoration from large numbers of people. He joked on talk shows, rode horses on parade and played, improbably, a sex symbol in the movie “Yes, Giorgio.” In a series of concerts, some held in stadiums, Mr. Pavarotti entertained tens of thousands and earned six-figure fees. Presenters, who were able to tie a Pavarotti appearance to a subscription package of less glamorous concerts, found him a valuable loss leader.
The most enduring symbol of Mr. Pavarotti’s Midas touch, as a concert attraction and a recording artist, was the popular and profitable Three Tenors act created with Mr. Domingo and Mr. Carreras. Some praised these concerts and recordings as popularizers of opera for mass audiences. But most classical music critics dismissed them as unworthy of the performers’ talents.
Ailments and Accusations
Mr. Pavarotti had his uncomfortable moments in recent years. His proclivity for gaining weight became a topic of public discussion. He was caught lip-synching a recorded aria at a concert in Modena, his hometown. He was booed off the stage at La Scala during 1992 appearance. No one characterized his lapses as sinister; they were attributed, rather, to a happy-go-lucky style, a large ego and a certain carelessness.
His frequent withdrawals from prominent events at opera houses like the Met and Covent Garden in London, often from productions created with him in mind, caused administrative consternation in many places. A series of cancellations at Lyric Opera of Chicago — 26 out of 41 scheduled dates — moved Lyric’s general director in 1989, Ardis Krainik, to declare Mr. Pavarotti persona non grata at her company.
A similar banishment nearly happened at the Met in 2002. He was scheduled to sing two performances of “Tosca” — one a gala concert with prices as high as $1,875 a ticket, which led to reports that the performances may be a quiet farewell. Mr. Pavarotti arrived in New York only a few days before the first, barely in time for the dress rehearsal. The day of the first performance, though, he had developed a cold and withdrew. That was on a Wednesday.
From then until the second scheduled performance, on Saturday, everyone, from the Met’s managers to casual opera fans, debated the probability of his appearing. The New York Post ran the headline “Fat Man Won’t Sing.” The demand to see the performance was so great, however, that the Met set up 3,000 seats for a closed-circuit broadcast on the Lincoln Center Plaza. Still, at the last minute, Mr. Pavarotti stayed in bed.
Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy, on Oct. 12, 1935. His father was a baker and an amateur tenor; his mother worked at a cigar factory. As a child he listened to opera recordings, singing along with tenor stars of a previous era, like Beniamino Gigli and Tito Schipa. He professed an early weakness for the movies of Mario Lanza, whose image he would imitate before a mirror.
As a teenager he followed studies that led to a teaching position; during these student days he met his future wife. He taught for two years before deciding to become a singer. His first teachers were Arrigo Pola and Ettore Campogalliani, and his first breakthrough came in 1961 when he won an international competition at the Teatro Reggio Emilia. He made his debut as Rodolfo in Puccini’s “Bohème” later that year.
In 1963 Mr. Pavarotti’s international career began: first as Edgardo in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, and then in Vienna and Zurich. His Covent Garden debut also came in 1963, when he substituted for and Giuseppe di Stefano in “La Bohème.” His reputation in Britain grew even more the next year, when he sang at the Glyndebourne Festival, taking the part of Idamante in Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”
A turning point in Mr. Pavarotti’s career was his association with the soprano Joan Sutherland. In 1965 he joined the Sutherland-Williamson company on an Australian tour during which he sang Edgardo to Ms. Sutherland’s Lucia. He later credited Ms. Sutherland’s advice, encouragement and example as a major factor in the development of his technique.
Further career milestones came in 1967, with Mr. Pavarotti’s first appearances at La Scala in Milan and his participation in a performance of the Verdi Requiem under Herbert von Karajan. He came to the Metropolitan Opera a year later, singing with Mirella Freni, a childhood friend, in a production of “La Bohème.”
A series of recordings with London Records had also begun, and these excursions through the Italian repertory remain some of Mr. Pavarotti’s lasting contributions to his generation. The recordings included “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “La Favorita,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “La Fille du Régiment” by Donizetti; “Madama Butterfly,” “La Bohème,” “Tosca” and “Turandot” by Puccini; “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore,” “La Traviata” and the Requiem by Verdi; and scattered operas by Bellini, Rossini and Mascagni. There were also solo albums of arias and songs.
In 1981 Mr. Pavarotti established a voice competition in Philadelphia and was active in its operation. Young, talented singers from around the world were auditioned in preliminary rounds before the final selections. High among the prizes for winners was an appearance in a staged opera in Philadelphia in which Mr. Pavarotti would also appear.
He also gave master classes, many of which were shown on public television in the United States. Mr. Pavarotti’s forays into teaching became stage appearances in themselves, and ultimately had more to do with the teacher than those being taught.
An Outsize Personality
In his later years Mr. Pavarotti became as much an attraction as an opera singer. Hardly a week passed in the 1990s when his name did not surface in at least two gossip columns. He could be found unveiling postage stamps depicting old opera stars or singing in Red Square in Moscow. His outsize personality remained a strong drawing card, and even his lifelong battle with his circumference guaranteed headlines: a Pavarotti diet or a Pavarotti binge provided high-octane fuel for reporters.
In 1997 Mr. Pavarotti joined Sting for the opening of the Pavarotti Music Center in war-torn Mostar, Bosnia, and Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney on a CD tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. In 2005 he was granted Freedom of the City of London for his fund-raising concerts for the Red Cross. He also received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and holds two spots in the Guinness Book of World Records — one for the greatest number of curtain calls (165), the other, held jointly with Mr. Domingo and Mr. Carreras, for the best-selling classical album of all time, the first Three Tenors album (“Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti: The Three Tenors in Concert”). But for all that, he knew where his true appeal was centered.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a musician,” he told the BBC Music Magazine in an April 1998 article about his efforts for Bosnia. “I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”Mr. Pavarotti’s health became an issue in the late 1990s. His mobility onstage was sometimes severely limited because of leg problems, and at a 1997 “Turandot” performance at the Met, extras onstage surrounded him and literally helped him up and down steps. In January 1998, at a Met gala with two other singers, Mr. Pavarotti became lost in a trio from “Luisa Miller” despite having the music in front of him. He complained of dizziness and withdrew. Rumors flew alleging on one side a serious health problem and, on the other, a smoke screen for Mr. Pavarotti’s unpreparedness.
The latter was not a new accusation during the 1990s. In a 1997 review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini accused Mr. Pavarotti of “shamelessly coasting” through a recital, using music instead of his memory, and still losing his place. Words were always a problem, and he cheerfully admitted to using cue cards as reminders.
A Box-Office Powerhouse
It was a tribute to Mr. Pavarotti’s box-office power that when, in 1997, he announced he could not or would not learn his part for a new “Forza del Destino” at the Met, the house scrapped its scheduled production and substituted “Un Ballo in Maschera,” a piece he was ready to sing.
Around that time Mr. Pavarotti also made news by leaving his wife of more than three decades, Adua, to live with his 26-year-old assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani, and filing for divorce, which was finalized in October 2002. He married Ms. Mantovani in 2003. She survives him, as do three daughters from his marriage to the former Adua Veroni: Lorenza, Christina and Giuliana; and a daughter with Ms. Mantovani, Alice. Mr. Pavarotti had a home in Manhattan but also maintained ties to his hometown, living when time permitted in a villa outside Modena.
He published two autobiographies, both written with William Wright: “Pavarotti: My Own Story” in 1981, and “Pavarotti: My World” in 1995. In interviews Mr. Pavarotti could turn on a disarming charm, and if he invariably dismissed concerns about his pop projects, technical problems and even his health, he made a strong case for what his fame could do for opera itself.
“I remember when I began singing, in 1961,” he told Opera News in 1998, “one person said, ‘run quick, because opera is going to have at maximum 10 years of life.’ At the time it was really going down. But then, I was lucky enough to make the first ‘Live From the Met’ telecast. And the day after, people stopped me on the street. So I realized the importance of bringing opera to the masses. I think there were people who didn’t know what opera was before. And they say ‘Bohème,’ and of course ‘Bohème’ is so good.’ ”
About his own drawing power, his analysis was simple and on the mark.
“I think an important quality that I have is that if you turn on the radio and hear somebody sing, you know it’s me.” he said. “You don’t confuse my voice with another voice.” _____________________________________________
AN APPRAISAL A Master of Italian Operatic Artistry By ANTHONY TOMMASINI Published: September 6, 2007
In the old days of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, a popular feature on the “Texaco Opera Quiz,” as the intermission show used to be called, involved playing recordings of several artists singing the same well-known aria and asking the panelists to identify the singers. It was surprising how often even opera experts would confuse one great artist with another.
But no one ever mistook the voice of Luciano Pavarotti. There was the warm, enveloping sound: a classic Italian tenor voice, yes, but touched with a bit of husky baritonal darkness, which made Mr. Pavarotti’s flights into his gleaming upper range seem all the more miraculous.
And it wasn’t just the sound that was so recognizable. In Mr. Pavarotti’s artistry, language and voice were one. He had an idiomatic way of binding the rounded vowels and sputtering consonants of his native Italian to the tones and colorings of his voice. This practice is central to the Italian vocal heritage, and Mr. Pavarotti was one of its exemplars.
For intelligence, discipline, breadth of repertory, musicianship, interpretive depth and virile vocalism, Mr. Pavarotti was outclassed by his Three Tenors sidekick and chief rival, Plácido Domingo. But for sheer Italianate tenorial beauty, Mr. Pavarotti was hard to top. That was certainly the position of his former manager, Herbert Breslin, who combined his own promotional savvy with his chief client’s vocal greatness to produce the moneymaking phenomenon that was Mr. Pavarotti’s career. Call it Pavarotti Inc.
“Nobody in the tenor world has Luciano’s sound, that Italian sound,” Mr. Breslin told Manuela Hoelterhoff for her wonderful 1998 book “Cinderella & Company.” “Domingo,” he added, “would have to go pray in 17 churches in Guadalajara to find that sound.”
However partisan that zinger may have been, there was some truth to it. To hear Mr. Pavarotti at his best in a role like Riccardo in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” — spinning lyrical phrases with bel-canto elegance, then stunning you with visceral vocal outbursts — was to hear Italian operatic artistry at its finest.
In a career quirk, a French role became the vehicle of Mr. Pavarotti’s breakthrough to the big time in the early 1970s: Tonio in Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment,” written for the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Mr. Pavarotti’s French may have sounded like French-tinged Italian, but it didn’t matter. The opera has a showpiece aria in which, over a breezy oom-pah-pah accompaniment, Tonio must dispatch nine very exposed high Cs. Other great tenors, like Alfredo Kraus, had excelled in the role. But no one ever tossed off those high Cs with the ease, pinging tone and utter glee of Mr. Pavarotti in those years. He was quickly promoted as the King of the High Cs, and so began his 30-year conquest of the public.
By natural endowment Mr. Pavarotti was essentially a lyric tenor, ideally suited to lighter roles in Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi requiring lyrical grace and agile passagework. Yet his voice, like everything about him, was uncommonly large. With that big throbbing sound, he was tempted into weightier repertory requiring dramatic power and heft, like Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot.” Some opera purists maintain that Mr. Pavarotti erred by straying from the lyric terrain. Don’t tell that to anyone lucky enough to have heard him sing “Nessun dorma” in his prime, not just as a signature aria for televised stadium concerts, but in the context of a full production of “Turandot.” Wow!
Mr. Pavarotti, who was 19 when he finally began serious studies in voice, could barely read music. In itself this need not have been a problem. Enrico Caruso also had only rudimentary knowledge of music theory, and that didn’t hurt him any. But this deficiency clearly set Mr. Pavarotti apart from Mr. Domingo, who grew up preparing orchestrations for his parents’ zarzuela company.
Still, in singing, knowledge is not enough. Musical instinct is crucial, and Mr. Pavarotti had powerful instincts. He was never as interesting a singer as Mr. Domingo, but at his best he could be inspired and, in his way, profound. Moreover, he genuinely liked performing and pleasing people, which made up for his limited capabilities as an actor.
During the first half of his career he worked hard to compensate for his late start and minimal knowledge. Though he sang only 26 roles on stage, some involved risky ventures into less familiar repertory, like Fernando in Donizetti’s “Favorita,” filled with taxing spans of ornate vocal lines.
Yet ultimately, for all that Mr. Pavarotti gave to opera, it’s hard to avoid feeling that he never completely fulfilled his potential, that he squandered some of his awesome talent by letting his enablers turn him from a hard working artist into an overindulged and sometimes clownish superstar.
In the disappointing last decade of his career he coasted on his talent and popularity. His old friend and colleague Joan Sutherland dropped hints in interviews that he should retire. For me, the low point came in 1997, seven years before his last Met appearances, when he sang a recital on the Met stage as a pension-fund benefit, a program of songs by Schubert, Scarlatti and others, with a few hit arias. He was shockingly unprepared, glued to his music stand even during staples like Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” He tried to sing a selection of lighter Italian songs by Tosti from memory. But his pianist had to feed him the first word or two of nearly every line, as one could hear from Row L. What did this performance say to aspiring singers about the prerogatives of fame and fortune?
But this is a day to remember the glory of Luciano Pavarotti, like the Met’s 1996 production of Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” mounted for him. He hardly cut the figure of a dashing revolutionary poet in late-18th-century France. And if he was no longer the King of High Cs, he dispatched some kingly high B flats and a high B that was at least princely. Still, there was revolutionary ardor in the melting warmth, power and urgency of his singing. And there was that sound.
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Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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Beverly Sills needed a singing partner....R.I.P. Luciano !!!!!
-------------------- Karaoke With Jason & Friends "where stars become friends" Posts: 582 | From: richmond virginia | Registered: May 2000
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Another great musical pioneer passes away. "Birdland" by Weather Report remains one of the most powerful expressions of pure musical joy I've ever heard.
From the NY Times this past Wednesday.
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Joe Zawinul, 75, Jazz Fusion Pioneer, Dies
By PETER KEEPNEWS Published: September 12, 2007
Joe Zawinul, a classically trained Austrian pianist who achieved fame as a co-leader of the electrified jazz band Weather Report, died yesterday in Vienna. He was 75 and lived in Malibu, Calif.
The cause was Merkel cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer, said a spokesman for Heads Up International, his American record label. Mr. Zawinul had been hospitalized since last month.
Weather Report, which Mr. Zawinul led with the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, was in the front ranks of the music that came to be called fusion. But he already had an impressive list of accomplishments before Weather Report recorded its first album in 1971, and he remained active and influential after the group disbanded in 1986.
He first attracted worldwide attention as a member of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s band, one of the most popular in jazz, from 1961 to 1970. In addition to playing piano, he wrote several staples of the group’s repertory, most notably “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” the biggest hit of Adderley’s career, which reached No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart in 1967.
It was also one of the first jazz records to feature an electric piano. Mr. Zawinul’s solo on that instrument caught the ear of Miles Davis, who brought Mr. Zawinul into the studio in 1969 as one of three keyboardists on what would become Davis’s first electric album, “In a Silent Way.” Mr. Zawinul composed that album’s title track and also contributed, as keyboardist and composer, to Davis’s next album, “Bitches Brew.”
Those albums helped plant the seeds for a musical development that remains controversial: The emergence of fusion, a heavily amplified, rhythmically insistent blend of jazz and other music that attracted young audiences and alienated jazz purists. Mr. Zawinul became both celebrated and vilified as one of the architects of that movement when he formed Weather Report with Mr. Shorter, a veteran of Davis’s band, and the bassist Miroslav Vitous.
Mr. Vitous soon left, and the band underwent numerous personnel changes over the years, with Mr. Zawinul and Mr. Shorter its only constants. Its greatest success came in the late 1970s, when the young electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius was a member and Mr. Zawinul’s composition “Birdland” became an international hit.
Although Mr. Shorter and Mr. Pastorius wrote for the band, Mr. Zawinul was its principal composer, and Weather Report came to be defined primarily by the wide range of sounds and textures he created on synthesizers and other electric keyboards.
“Weather Report was an entity of its own,” Mr. Zawinul said in an interview for The New York Times last year. “You can’t call it rock or fusion or all these comical words.”
Two years after he and Mr. Shorter went their separate ways, Mr. Zawinul formed the Zawinul Syndicate. Like Weather Report, that group, which celebrated its 20th anniversary with an extensive tour this year, underwent frequent personnel changes. Unlike Weather Report, it was unambiguously Mr. Zawinul’s project: The music, incorporating ideas from Africa and other parts of the world, was almost all composed by him, and his vast array of electronic keyboards was always front and center.
Josef Erich Zawinul was born on July 7, 1932, in Vienna. His first instrument was the accordion, which he began playing at 6, but by his teenage years he was a pianist, a student at the Vienna Conservatory and a devoted jazz enthusiast. When he moved to the United States in 1959, he had been a professional musician for close to a decade.
His progress after that was rapid. Shortly after arriving in New York he was hired by the trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and he went on to work with the singer Dinah Washington before joining the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1961.
It was uncommon then for a black bandleader like Adderley to hire a white sideman like Mr. Zawinul and touring could be problematic.
“I often had to sit in the bottom of the car when we drove through certain parts of the South,” Mr. Zawinul said in a 1997 interview with Anil Prassad of Innerviews magazine. But, he added, with characteristic bravado, “Those kinds of things never fazed me; I wanted to play music with the best, and I could play on that level with the best.”
Mr. Zawinul’s wife, Maxine, died this year. He is survived by his sons Erich, Ivan and Anthony. Although Mr. Zawinul’s music tended to receive mixed reviews, his influence on young musicians was profound and widespread, as he learned when hiring sidemen for the Zawinul Syndicate.
Most of the musicians who passed in and out of that group were from Africa or Latin America. Asked last year how he found his young sidemen, he answered: “They find me, man. All these kids in my band, they knew me from since they were young. Like I grew up with Ellington and Count Basie, they grew up with Weather Report.”
Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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"Put another nickle in.....in the nickelodeon,all I want is loving you and Music, Music, Music........"
Rest In Peace: Teresa Brewer
[ October 18, 2007, 03:15 AM: Message edited by: jason e. power ]
-------------------- Karaoke With Jason & Friends "where stars become friends" Posts: 582 | From: richmond virginia | Registered: May 2000
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Sad news. I remember my brother and sister playing "Music, Music, Music" on a 78 rpm record my dad bought when we lived in Canton, Ohio. We were just little kids back then and danced around the house to the music played on an Aircastle phonograph my folks bought from a Spiegel catalog as a family Christmas gift.
East Toledoan who sang her way to fame dies Article published Thursday, October 18, 2007 TERESA BREWER, 1931-2007
Teresa Brewer, 76, a native of the Birmingham neighborhood of East Toledo who went on to international fame in the 1940s and 1950s with such chart-topping hits as “Music, Music, Music,” and “Till I Waltz Again with You,” died of a neuromuscular disease yesterday at her New Rochelle, N.Y.
Her four daughters were at her bedside, Bill Munroe, a family spokesman, said.
Ms. Brewer had scores of hits, beginning with “Music, Music, Music” in 1949 and continuing with “Let Me Go, Lover,” and “Ricochet.”
Ms. Brewer had a burgeoning film career too, but pared down her public life to raise her children. She re-emerged later to perform with such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Wynton Marsalis.
“She was just a wonderful, lovely lady,” said Mr. Munroe, a longtime family friend and president of her fan club.
“Her career was always a hobby with her; her family always came first,” Mr. Munroe said. “She always considered her legacy not to be the gold records and the TV appearances, but her loving family.”
She was first Theresa Breuer, born in a house on York Street to Helen and Louis Breuer. The family later lived on Valentine Street.
She began her singing career in 1934 on the Lutz Bakery Kiddie Carnival on WSPD Radio, 1370. She was paid in cookies.
She won an amateur contest at the Paramount Theater in downtown Toledo. Then at 6, she was a winner on Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a prominent national radio show. She was part of a Major Bowes’ touring company for about six years and performed around the nation.
Ms. Brewer returned to Toledo and attended Waite High School.
She resumed her career in the late 1940s, changed her name and, by 18, was singing in prominent New York City clubs.
Ms. Brewer had close to 40 songs that topped the charts, Mr. Munroe said, including “Till I Waltz Again with You,” “Dancin’ with Someone,” “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,” “Ricochet,” and “Let Me Go, Lover.”
In 1953, “Till I Waltz Again With You” sold more than 1.4 million copies.
That year she also won a poll conducted by Paramount Pictures to select the country’s most popular female singer to cast in the studio’s 3-D Technicolor movie, Those Redheads from Seattle.
She landed one of the title roles, and the reviews were rave. Paramount offered her a seven-year contract, but she declined, choosing instead to stay in New Rochelle.
Ms. Brewer continued to record and make TV appearances, but she had four girls by then and spent most of her time raising them, Mr. Munroe said.
Throughout her decades-long career, Ms. Brewer performed on TV with Mel Torme, sang with Tony Bennett, and guest-hosted several variety shows. She appeared 39 times on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even guest-hosted the popular television program.
She was popular in Las Vegas, receiving up to $40,000 a week.
She told The Blade in 1991 that during a Las Vegas engagement in 1971, Elvis Presley sent a messenger to her dressing room because he wanted to meet her. He told her that she got him started in show business because the first song he sang in public was “Till I Waltz Again With You.”
Ms. Brewer was inducted into the Birmingham Hall of Fame in 1982. She also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She and her first husband, Bill Monahan, divorced. In 1972, she married legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele. He died in 1996.
Duke Ellington’s last studio recording in 1974 was a collaboration with Ms. Brewer.
She continued recording into the 1990s.
For many years, she returned home annually to Toledo — the Birmingham neighborhood — to visit family and friends.
“I don’t need to be in the spotlight to be happy,” Ms. Brewer told The Blade in 1991. “I am just as happy when I cook, or when I clean. I enjoy it when I am on the stage, but I don’t need it. I think that’s the key to being happy.”
Surviving are her four daughters, four grandsons, and five great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are pending, Mr. Munroe said.
Posts: 356 | From: Omaha, NE | Registered: Apr 1999
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Joey Bishop and Deborah Kerr......also.....a sad week in hollywood
-------------------- Karaoke With Jason & Friends "where stars become friends" Posts: 582 | From: richmond virginia | Registered: May 2000
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Joey was the "Rat Pack's" last surviving member. Peter Lawford died in 1984, Sammy Davis Jr. in 1990, Dean Martin in 1995, and Frank Sinatra in 1998.
Deborah is an actress we'll always remember. Her roles in "The King and I" and "From Here To Eternity" are just two of the films I recall. Although she was nominated six times for an Oscar she had never received one and her lifetime acheivement award in 1994 was long overdue.
Both Joey and Deborah, gone but not forgotten.
[ October 18, 2007, 05:57 PM: Message edited by: Frank V. ]
Posts: 356 | From: Omaha, NE | Registered: Apr 1999
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Porter Wagoner, Singer, Dies at 80 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: October 30, 2007
Porter Wagoner, a country singer who mixed rhinestone suits, a towering pompadour and cornball jokes with direct, simple songs over a career best known for his partnership with Dolly Parton, died last night in Nashville. He was 80.
His death, in a Nashville hospice, was announced by the Grand Ole Opry. Mr. Wagoner, who survived an abdominal aneurysm last year, was hospitalized this month with lung cancer, his publicist, Darlene Bieber, had said. Mr. Wagoner had 81 singles on the country charts, 29 of them in the Top 10. His many hits, typically songs seeking honest answers to hard questions, included “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Skid Row Joe” and “The Cold Hard Facts of Life.”
For 21 years, appearing on television in flashy suits and a cotton-candy pompadour, he was the host of “The Porter Wagoner Show,” which was eventually syndicated in 100 markets, reaching 3.5 million viewers a week.
Mr. Wagoner recorded some of country music’s earliest concept albums, in which individual tracks combine in a thematic whole. On one, titled “What Ain’t To Be Just Might Happen” (1972), he explored insanity with songs that included “Rubber Room,” derived from his experience in a psychiatric ward. He won three Grammys for gospel recordings he made with the Blackwood Brothers.
For more than half a century, Mr. Waggoner was a fixture of the Grand Ole Opry; in 1992, after the death of Roy Acuff, he became its unofficial spokesman. And if Mr. Wagoner did not exactly discover Ms. Parton, her regular appearances on his television show were the foundation of her career. They won the Country Music Association’s award for duo of the year three times.
Though Mr. Wagoner never achieved the sort of country music sainthood accorded Hank Williams, Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, his pure adherence to traditional forms became esteemed. Waylon Jennings once said, “He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”
In its citation honoring his induction in 1992, the Country Music Hall of Fame called Mr. Wagoner “one of country’s elder statesmen.”
Yet he was hardly shy about making waves. After Ms. Parton left his show in 1974, there ensued a six-year, very public legal mess — and not a few tawdry tabloid headlines. One asserted that Mr. Wagoner’s wife had found him and Ms. Parton in bed and shot both.
“There wasn’t nothing to that,” Mr. Wagoner said “with a wink” in an interview with The Tennessean in 2000. “She didn’t even hit Dolly.”
Mr. Wagoner riled country traditionalists in 1979 by inviting James Brown, the godfather of soul, to the Opry. Though Mr. Brown performed the country standards “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Tennessee Waltz,” which Mr. Wagoner had taught him, his rendition of his own “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” generated hate mail.
Mr. Wagoner’s life had elements of an old-fashioned country song. He was born on Aug. 12, 1927, on a farm where mules still pulled the plow, not far from West Plains, Mo., in the Ozark mountains. He sold the pelts of rabbits he trapped to scrape together the $8 he needed to buy his first guitar, a National, from Montgomery Ward. He spent hours pretending that the stump of a felled oak tree was the Opry stage and that he was introducing country stars.
After the family was forced to auction off their farm in the Depression, they moved to West Plains, where a local butcher hired Mr. Wagoner. When he heard him play the guitar, he put him on the radio to sing advertisements. Mr. Wagoner then moved to a station in Springfield, Mo., and signed a record contract in 1952 with Steve Shoals, the same RCA producer who signed Elvis Presley three years later.
In 1953, Mr. Wagoner spent $350 to buy his first Nudie suit, one of the extravagant rhinestone-studded creations by the tailor Nudie Cohn. Mr. Wagoner’s was a peach-colored number with wagon wheels on it. He eventually owned 50 of them, for which he paid as much as $12,000 apiece. A special feature on most was the word “Hi!” in foot-high letters on each side of the lining. He would throw the jacket open when he saw somebody snapping his picture.
Mr. Wagoner recorded, performed in a local television show, joined the Opry and in 1960 started his own television show. In 1967, his vocal partner, Norma Jean, left, and Ms. Parton succeeded her. In addition to doing the show, the two recorded and toured together. They had a string of hit duets, including “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me,” which they wrote. It was No. 1 in October 1974.
Mr. Wagoner had several long periods when he did not record or tour. He sometimes explained that there was little good material available. The lyrics in at least two of his songs came from spending time in a Nashville mental hospital. One, “Committed to Parkview,” was written by Johnny Cash about a Nashville institution in which both men had stayed. It is part of an album Mr. Wagoner released last year, “The Rubber Room: The Haunting Poetic Songs of Porter Wagoner, 1966-1967.”
As a teenager Mr. Wagoner was married for a short time to Velma Johnson. In 1946, he married Ruth Olive Williams; they separated in 1966 and divorced in 1986. He is survived by his children, Richard, Denise and Debra.
As a songwriter, Mr. Wagoner was known for producing surprising literary twists. At the end of “Green, Green Grass of Home,” it is revealed that the story about a happy homecoming is the dream of a prisoner. On “I Knew This Day Would Come,” a young woman leaves her aging husband for a young lover, only to find herself in the same situation years later.
For all Mr. Wagoner’s accomplishments, he could not escape a certain question.“Did you sing with Dolly?” too many people asked.
“No,” he would say with a smile. “She sang with me.”
Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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yeah, I saw where he had entered the hospital on yahoo yesterday... wondered if it wasn't going to be fatal.
The world mourns the loss of a truly great singer and songwriter! I wasn't too crazy about classic country music, but he was one of the few I truly liked and respected!
-------------------- Matt Posts: 3332 | From: Independence, mo | Registered: Oct 2001
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One of Porter's signature song is "Carroll County Accident" which charted at #2 on Billboard in 1969.
It would be a good song to consider if SC does a Classic Country disc in the future.
Posts: 356 | From: Omaha, NE | Registered: Apr 1999
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Another giant in Country music passed away. Here's the story in the New York Times this week.
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Hank Thompson Is Dead; Country Singer Was 82 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: November 8, 2007
Hank Thompson, a sequined singer and songwriter who fused jazz-inflected Western swing and hard-edged honky-tonk to produce seven decades of musical musings, seasoned with sly humor, on loving, drinking and dying, died on Tuesday at his home in Keller, Tex. He was 82.
His death was announced on www.hankthompson.com, which said, “There’s a new star in heaven.”
Tracy Pitcox, president of Heart of Texas Records, said the cause was lung cancer, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Thompson sold more than 60 million records. He scored 29 Top 10 country hits from 1948 to 1975, and had 19 more in the Top 20, putting him in a league with other country legends like Tex Ritter, Hank Snow and Faron Young.
From “Humpty Dumpty Heart” in 1948 to “Gotta Sell Them Chickens,” a duet with Junior Brown in 1997, Mr. Thompson made the charts in six consecutive decades. With characteristic offbeat wit, he said in an interview with The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1997 that this was “a lot easier than doing it in six nonconsecutive decades.”
Mr. Thompson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989, and his band, the Brazos Valley Boys, was Billboard’s top-ranked country band from 1953 to 1965, a record that has never been broken.
Mr. Thompson was perhaps the most prominent representative of a new sort of country music that emerged from the juke joints favored by oil-field roughnecks and roustabouts in the 1940s. It mixed big bands and theatrical vocalists with fiddles and steel guitars. It was meant for dancing.
With his height, Stetson, silver-toed boots and rhinestone suits — and a gravelly, booming baritone voice — Mr. Thompson symbolized the brash new musical synthesis. Unlike Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who strove for a unified sound in the manner of Ellington or Basie, Mr. Thompson wanted his own voice to be the primary thing.
“I want Hank Thompson up front and the Western swing sound behind me,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1997. In the 1950s, his biggest decade, Mr. Thompson was big indeed. He had 21 songs that reached the Top 20 on the country charts, including five Top 10s in 1954. Some of those 1950s hits included “Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” “Waiting in the Lobby of Your Heart” and “Squaws Along the Yukon.”
In 1952 “The Wild Side of Life” was the No. 1 country song of the year and Mr. Thompson was the No. 1 country artist.
His popularity stayed strong into the 1960s, and in 1960 he recorded “A Six-Pack to Go,” one of his biggest numbers in terms of longevity and status as a standard. Though his record sales declined in ensuing decades, he remained in strong demand as a performer, and his influence is often said to be evident in stars like George Strait and Lyle Lovett.
Bob Dylan once commented, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to Newsweek that he had never felt all that at home with the New York folk-music crowd because one of his own major influences had been Hank Thompson.
Mr. Thompson helped lead the development of the art and business of modern country music. He was host of a variety show in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, said to be one of the first variety shows broadcast in color. He was one of the first country performers to do a straight country show in Las Vegas; earlier, performers like Eddy Arnold had simply inserted themselves into another production. In 1961 his “At the Golden Nugget” was the first live album by a solo country performer.
Mr. Thompson was also among the first country singers to have a corporate sponsor, Falstaff Beer.
Henry William Thompson was born in Waco, Tex., on Sept. 3, 1925, and as a boy won a case of Pepsi by playing the harmonica in a contest. Like his hero Gene Autry, he wanted to sing at the same time he played, so he switched to guitar. His parents bought him a secondhand one for $4. By the time he was 16 he had his own radio show, called “Hank the Hired Hand.”
He enlisted in the Navy, served in the Pacific theater in World War II and then studied electronics at several universities, including Princeton. His expertise meant that he was one of the first traveling country acts to have a sophisticated light-and-sound system.
After the war Tex Ritter helped Mr. Thompson land a recording contract with Capitol Records, which released “Humpty Dumpty.” He went to Nashville to star on a weekly radio show. Ernest Tubb got him a shot at the Grand Ole Opry, but he felt uncomfortable with Nashville’s more bluegrass-influenced music. Not even Hank Williams could talk him out of returning to the Texas honky-tonks. In lieu of a funeral, his memorial celebration will be held in one of them, Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth.
Mr. Thompson is survived by his wife, the former Ann Williams. In 1970 he and his first wife, Dorothy Jean Ray, divorced. Dorothy had persuaded him to record “The Wild Side of Life” despite Mr. Thompson’s reservations that the tune had already been used in two previous country hits. Mr. Thompson’s version contained the line, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels.”
The song’s immense popularity prompted one of the most famous answer songs of country music: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” by Kitty Wells. (Errant husbands did, she sang.) It made her the first woman in country music to have a million-seller. _____________________________________________
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posted
also would like to acknowledge George Osmond...... father of the Osmond family.............R.I.P.
[ November 11, 2007, 03:07 AM: Message edited by: jason e. power ]
-------------------- Karaoke With Jason & Friends "where stars become friends" Posts: 582 | From: richmond virginia | Registered: May 2000
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Quiet Riot Silenced by Josh Grossberg Mon, 26 Nov 2007 02:36:17 PM PST
Quiet Riot is marking a moment of silence for its fallen frontman.
Kevin DuBrow, the zebra-pantsed singer for the hit-making heavy metalheads, was found dead in his home in Las Vegas Sunday. He was 52.
News of DuBrow's death was announced on Riot drummer Frankie Banali's Website.
"I can't even find words to say," he wrote. "Please respect my privacy as I mourn the passing and honor the memory of my dearest friend, Kevin DuBrow."
Police and paramedics were alerted by a concerned neighbor Sunday afternoon.
"We got a call to do a welfare check," a Las Vegas Metro Police spokeswoman told E! Online, adding that there were no signs of foul play.
The rocker was pronounced dead at approximately 5:20 p.m.
The cause of death has not been announced. The Clark County coroner will conduct an autopsy and toxicology tests this week, but the official results won't be known for several weeks.
In a statement posted online, Quiet Riot bassist Kelly Garni asked fans to reserve judgment until the coroner issues a report.
"I ask that no one here offer any speculation or opinions, theories or other things that could be construed as negative or, and I'm sorry for this, even sympathetic, right at this immediate time," Garni wrote on a tribute Website dedicated to Riot cofounder Randy Rhoads.
"I am already, within hours of this, having to deal with untrue rumors and speculation and that only adds fuel to that. There is a tendency for the subject of Kevin to incite flames on every board, and now is not the time for that. I will explain to everyone here the facts and the truth in the next 24 to 48 hours as I realize this will affect us all. So please, until then be patient."
According to MTV.com, DuBrow appeared to be in good health and was in New Orleans just before Halloween to celebrate his birthday.
With DuBrow on vocals, Quiet Riot became the first hair metal band to score a Top 5 hit with its cover of Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize" off the monster 1983 LP Metal Health, thanks to heavy video airplay on MTV. The album itself made history as the first metal release to top the Billboard album charts, supplanting the Police's Synchronicity.
Quiet Riot was formed by Rhoads and Garni in the mid-1970s, with DuBrow and drummer Drew Forsyth. The band broke up when Rhoads left to play guitar for Ozzy Osbourne in 1979. After Rhoads died in a 1982 plane crash, DuBrow relaunched Quiet Riot without any of the founding members.
The rebooted band reached its zenith with Metal Health, which sold 6 million copies and spawned the Top 40 singles "Slick Black Cadillac" and "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)."
While the follow-up Condition Critical was certified platinum and scored two hit singles, "Party All Night" and another Slade cover, "Mama Weer All Crazee Now," the band was eclipsed by other hair bands.
After a succession of lineup changes, Quiet Riot disbanded again in 1989, with the other members actually firing DuBrow after the end of a tour.
The metal mavens reunited in the mid-'90s and continued to play the club circuit. After a brief breakup in 2003, DuBrow issued the 2004 solo album In for the Kill, before the band once again reformed for a 2005 tour with Cinderella, Ratt and Firehouse.
In October 2006, the band released its final studio album with DuBrow, Rehab, on Chavis Records.
"As I mourn his death with a heavy heart, I will remember hearing his voice and the music for the very first time on the radio back in 1983," said label boss Bill Chavis. "I will remember all the great music Kevin and Quiet Riot gave to so many of us over the years, and I will say, 'Thank you, Kevin. May you rest in peace.' "
Funeral plans have not yet been finalized.
<b>Quiet Riot singer overdosed on cocaine</b>
Mon Dec 10, 8:46 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow, who was found dead at his Las Vegas home last month, was found to have died of an accidental cocaine overdose, the celebrity Web site TMZ.com said on Monday, citing Nevada authorities.
DuBrow's body was found November 25 and an autopsy conducted the following day could not determine the cause of death pending toxicology tests.
TMZ.com reported that the tests had shown his cause of death to be an accidental overdose of cocaine. A spokeswoman for the Clark County Coroner's Office could not immediately be reached by Reuters for comment.
Founded in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, rock band Quiet Riot shot to the top of the Billboard charts with their 1983 album "Metal Health." It sold more than 6 million copies and is considered by many to be the first heavy metal record to top the pop charts.
The album's sales were spurred by the quartet's monster hit, a cover of Slade's "Cum on Feel the Noize," featuring DuBrow's powerhouse vocals, and the song's video, which was played in heavy rotation on MTV.
Quiet Riot's subsequent albums did not sell nearly as well and DuBrow was essentially fired from the band amid the ensuing rancor.
DuBrow regrouped Quiet Riot in the 1990s and the band has played sporadically, last releasing an album in October 2006.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Eric Walsh)
posted
Just got word on Yahoo that Evel Knievel passed away earlier today at age 69. He'd been ill with diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis (the same thing that killed Robert Goulet).
Best,
Mark
Posts: 1595 | From: Willoughby Hills, Ohio, USA | Registered: Apr 1999
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He was one of the very first musicians to record what became known as rock and roll and watch as the whole world inexorably changed.
Unfortunately, for a long, long time, he’ll only be remembered as a vicious, wife-beating pr***.
This is from tonight's online NY Times.
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Ike Turner, Musician, Dies at 76
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: December 12, 2007 Filed at 7:33 p.m. ET
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Ike Turner, whose role as one of rock's critical architects was overshadowed by his ogrelike image as the man who brutally abused former wife Tina Turner, died Wednesday at his home in suburban San Diego. He was 76.
Turner died at his San Marcos home, Scott M. Hanover of Thrill Entertainment Group, which managed Turner's career, told The Associated Press.
There was no immediate word on the cause of death, which was first reported by celebrity Web site TMZ.com.
Turner managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat in later years, touring around the globe with his band the Kings of Rhythm and drawing critical acclaim for his work. He won a Grammy in 2007 in the traditional blues album category for ''Risin' With the Blues.''
But his image is forever identified as the drug-addicted, wife-abusing husband of Tina Turner. He was hauntingly portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in the movie ''What's Love Got To Do With It,'' based on Tina Turner's autobiography.
Tina Turner declined to comment on her ex-husband's death.
''Tina is aware that Ike passed away earlier today. She has not had any contact with him in 35 years. No further comment will be made,'' said her spokeswoman, Michele Schweitzer.
In a 2001 interview with The Associated Press, Turner denied his ex-wife's claims of abuse and expressed frustration that he had been demonized in the media while his historic role in rock's beginnings had been ignored.
''You can go ask Snoop Dogg or Eminem, you can ask the Rolling Stones or (Eric) Clapton, or you can ask anybody -- anybody, they all know my contribution to music, but it hasn't been in print about what I've done or what I've contributed until now,'' he said.
Turner, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is credited by many rock historians with making the first rock 'n' roll record, ''Rocket 88,'' in 1951. Produced by the legendary Sam Phillips, it was groundbreaking for its use of distorted electric guitar.
But as would be the case for most of his career, Turner, a prolific session guitarist and piano player, was not the star on the record -- it was recorded with Turner's band but credited to singer Jackie Brenston.
And it would be another singer -- a young woman named Anna Mae Bullock -- who would bring Turner his greatest fame, and infamy.
Turner met the 18-year-old Bullock, whom he would later marry, in 1959 and quickly made the husky-voiced woman the lead singer of his group, refashioning her into the sexy Tina Turner. Her stage persona was highlighted by short skirts and stiletto heels that made her legs her most visible asset. But despite the glamorous image, she still sang with the grit and fervor of a rock singer with a twist of soul.
The pair would have two sons. They also produced a string of hits. The first, ''A Fool In Love,'' was a top R&B song in 1959, and others followed, including ''I Idolize You'' and ''It's Gonna Work Out Fine.''
But over the years their genre-defying sound would make them favorites on the rock 'n' roll scene, as they opened for acts like the Rolling Stones.
Their densely layered hit ''River Deep, Mountain High'' was one of producer Phil Spector's proudest creations. A rousing version of ''Proud Mary,'' a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit, became their signature song and won them a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance by a group.
Still, their hits were often sporadic, and while their public life depicted a powerful, dynamic duo, Tina Turner would later charge that her husband was an overbearing wife abuser and cocaine addict.
In her 1987 autobiography, ''I, Tina,'' she narrated a harrowing tale of abuse, including suffering a broken nose. She said that cycle ended after a vicious fight between the pair in the back seat of a car in Las Vegas, where they were scheduled to perform.
It was the only time she ever fought back against her husband, Turner said.
After the two broke up, both fell into obscurity and endured money woes for years before Tina Turner made a dramatic comeback in 1984 with the release of the album ''Private Dancer,'' a multiplatinum success with hits such as ''Let's Stay Together'' and ''What's Love Got To Do With It.''
The movie based on her life, ''What's Love Got To Do With It,'' was also a hit, earning Angela Bassett an Oscar nomination. But Fishburne's glowering depiction of Ike Turner also furthered Turner's reputation as a rock villain.
Meanwhile, Turner never again had the success he enjoyed with his former wife.
After years of drug abuse, he was jailed in 1989 and served 17 months.
Turner told the AP he originally began using drugs to stay awake and handle the rigors of nonstop touring during his glory years.
''My experience, man, with drugs -- I can't say that I'm proud that I did drugs, but I'm glad I'm still alive to convey how I came through,'' he said. ''I'm a good example that you can go to the bottom. ... I used to pray, `God, if you let me get three days clean, I will never look back.' But I never did get to three days. You know why? Because I would lie to myself. And then only when I went to jail, man, did I get those three days. And man, I haven't looked back since then.''
But while he would readily admit to drug abuse, Turner always denied abusing his ex-wife.
After years out of the spotlight his career finally began to revive in 2001 when he released the album ''Here and Now.'' The recording won rave reviews and a Grammy nomination and finally helped shift some of the public's attention away from his troubled past and onto his musical legacy.
''His last chapter in life shouldn't be drug abuse and the problems he had with Tina,'' said Rob Johnson, the producer of ''Here and Now.''
Turner spent his later years making more music and touring, even while he battled emphysema.
Robbie Montgomery -- one of the ''Ikettes,'' backup singers who worked with Ike and Tina Turner -- said Turner's death was ''devastating'' to her.
''He gave me my start. He gave a million people their start,'' Montgomery said.
Accolades for Turner's early and later work continued to come in as he grew older, and the once-broke musician managed to garner a comfortable income as his songs were sampled by a variety of rap acts.
In interviews toward the end of his life, Turner would acknowledge having made many mistakes, but maintained he was still able to carry himself with pride.
''I know what I am in my heart. And I know regardless of what I've done, good and bad, it took it all to make me what I am today,'' he once told the AP.
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Dan Fogelberg, Lyric Rocker, Dies at 56 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: December 17, 2007
Dan Fogelberg, the singer and songwriter whose hits “Leader of the Band” and “Same Old Lang Syne” helped define the soft-rock era, died Sunday at his home in Maine after battling prostate cancer. He was 56.
His death was announced Sunday in a statement released by his family through the firm Scoop Marketing and also posted on his Web site.
Mr. Fogelberg learned he had advanced prostate cancer in 2004. In a statement then, he thanked fans for their support. “It is truly overwhelming and humbling to realize how many lives my music has touched so deeply all these years,” he wrote. “I thank you from the very depths of my heart.”
Mr. Fogelberg’s music was powerful in its simplicity. He did not rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions; instead, they came through in his soft, tender delivery and his poignant lyrics. Songs like “Same Old Lang Syne,” in which a man reminisces after meeting an old girlfriend by chance during the holidays, became classics not only for his performance, but also for their engaging story lines.
Mr. Fogelberg’s heyday was in the 1970s and early ’80s, when he scored several platinum and multiplatinum records fueled by such hits as “The Power of Gold” and “Leader of the Band,” a touching tribute he wrote to his father, a bandleader. Mr. Fogelberg put out his first album in 1972.
Mr. Fogelberg’s songs tended to have a weighty tone, reflecting on emotional issues in a serious way. But in an interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1997, he said it did not represent his personality.
“That came from my singles in the early ’80s,” he said. “I think it probably really started on the radio. I’m not a dour person in the least. I’m actually kind of a happy person. Music doesn’t really reflect the whole person.
“One of my dearest friends is Jimmy Buffett. From his music, people have this perception that he’s up all the time, and, of course, he’s not. Jimmy has a serious side, too.”
Later in his career, he would write material that focused on the state of the environment, an issue close to his heart.
Mr. Fogelberg’s last album was 2003’s “Full Circle,” his first album of original material in a decade. A year later his cancer was diagnosed, forcing him to forgo a planned tour.
Survivors include his wife, Jean.
Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Wow... I was totally out of the loop this week. Dan Fogelberg was one of the chief reasons I even picked up a guitar to play. My first kisses with a girl were backed by hanging out (skipping school), drinking tea and listening to the Souvenirs album.
I'm at a loss. Gonna have to sing on my show Wednesday...
"Love when you can, cry when you have to- be who you must, that's a part of the plan, await your arrival with simple survival, and one day we'll all understand...."
-------------------- one of the last legitimate karaoke hosts in the Pacific Northwest... Posts: 750 | From: Portland, OR, USA | Registered: Aug 2000
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Longer than there've been fishes in the ocean Higher than any bird ever flew Longer than there've been stars up in the heavens I've been in love with you
What great lyrics and what a great melody...
Posts: 687 | From: seattle,wa,usa | Registered: Oct 2003
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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: December 24, 2007
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Lydia Mendoza, a Tejano music pioneer known as the Lark of the Border, died here on Thursday. She was 91.
She had lived in the nursing home portion of the Chandler Estate, a retirement community. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Yolanda Hernandez.
Ms. Mendoza, who scored her first big hit, “Mal Hombre,” in the 1930s, became one of the first Mexican-American superstars by singing to the poor and downtrodden.
Her memorable musical style earned her a National Medal of Arts and a National Heritage Award fellowship. She was also asked to sing at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977.
Ms. Mendoza recorded more than 200 songs on more than 50 albums, including boleros, rancheras, cumbias and tangos, for labels including RCA, Columbia, Azteca, Peerless, El Zarape and Discos Falcon. In addition to pursuing a solo career, she also enjoyed performing with her family.
“Mal Hombre” (“Evil Man”), released in 1934 on the Bluebird label, became a hit on both sides of the border and was her signature song. Other hits included “La Valentina” and “Angel de Mis Anhelos.”
“She set the trend for others: Las Hermanas Cantu, Chelo Silva, Las Rancheritas and other women who followed Mendoza’s lead in the world of Spanish music,” said Lupe Saenz, executive director of the South Texas Conjunto Association. “Mendoza will be remembered for her unique style of the 12-string guitar and unique voice and style of singing.”
Born in Houston, Ms. Mendoza learned to sing and play the 12-string guitar before she was 12, and later learned to play violin and mandolin. In 1928 her family landed a recording session at the Blue Bonnet Hotel in San Antonio with the Okeh label, which generated five singles.
In 1999 Ms. Mendoza received the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony in which she shared the stage with Aretha Franklin, the producer and director Norman Lear, the architect Michael Graves and the sculptor George Segal.
“Lydia learned much from the oral tradition of Mexican music that her mother and grandmother shared with her,” President Bill Clinton said at the time. “In turn, she shared it with the world, becoming the first rural American woman performer to garner a large following throughout Latin America.”
Ms. Mendoza, who was the guest of honor at a 2006 tribute concert in San Antonio, was also inducted into the Tejano Music Awards, Tejano Conjunto Festival and Texas Women halls of fame.
She is survived by her daughter. Two other daughters, Lydia Alvarado Davila and Leonor Salazar, died before her.
Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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DUBLIN, Ireland - Joe Dolan, one of Ireland's first pop music stars who entertained audiences for decades with Vegas-style showmanship, has died from a brain hemorrhage, his family announced. He was 68.
Dolan collapsed at his family home in suburban south Dublin on Christmas night and died Wednesday after falling into a coma at a hospital.
He was the most celebrated — and fondly caricatured — survivor of Ireland's bygone "showband" era of the 1960s and 1970s, when homegrown rock 'n' roll acts toured the country playing cover versions of international hits.
His biggest hit in 1969, "Make Me an Island," reached No. 3 in Britain and No. 1 in 14 other countries. Other hits that climbed the European charts included "You're Such a Good-Looking Woman" in 1970, "Lady in Blue" in 1975 and "I Need You" in 1977.
His last Irish No. 1 came in 1997, when he re-recorded "Good-Looking Woman" with a popular fictional TV comedian, a puppet named Dustin the Turkey.
"He was a fantastic showman, had great stage presence, had a distinctive singing voice and never forgot his roots," said Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.
Dolan, with a bushy brow and beaming smile, was known for the power and quality of a voice that fell somewhere between Tom Jones and Tony Bennett. Unlike other showband stars, he found success overseas with original material.
He had an irreverent sense of humor, most recently demonstrated when he underwent a hip replacement operation in 2005 — and had his original hip bone sold for charity on eBay.
In recent years, Dolan kept touring and recording regularly, and was in the middle of a concert series in Dublin in November when he left the stage after just four songs, suffering from exhaustion. He canceled a planned Christmas tour.
Dolan, a lifelong bachelor, was survived by his brother Ben — who performed with him in his original 1960s showband, The Drifters — his other brothers Paddy and Vincent, and his sisters Dympna and Imelda.
posted
If you believe in forever Then life is just a one-night stand If there's a rock and roll heaven Well you know they've got a hell of a band, band, band
posted
Another behind the scenes guy passes - Ken Nelson, who influenced the entire country music profession, as well as many early rock pioneers in the 50's and 60's, and helped invent the Bakersfield country music sound. _____________________________________________
Ken Nelson, Record Producer Behind Bakersfield Sound, Dies at 96
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN Published: January 10, 2008
Ken Nelson, the record producer behind the twangy Bakersfield Sound made popular by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, died on Sunday at his home in Somis, Calif. He was 96.
He died of natural causes, his daughter told The Associated Press.
Although best known for his work with Mr. Owens and Mr. Haggard, Mr. Nelson also helped reinvent country music when 1950s rock ’n’ rollers like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins began supplanting perennial hitmakers like Red Foley and Eddy Arnold on the country charts.
Rather than treating the big-beat incursion of Mr. Presley and Mr. Perkins as a threat, Mr. Nelson, then the head of the country division of Capitol Records, saw it as an opportunity to take rural music in a more sophisticated direction.
First he persuaded a rising singer named Sonny James to record “Young Love,” a smooth romantic ballad, which topped both the country and the pop charts in 1957. He also recruited the Jordanaires, the uptown vocal chorus that had already backed Mr. Presley and Mr. James, to sing on “Gone,” a No. 1 country hit for the crooner Ferlin Husky, which reached the pop Top 5.
Both “Young Love” and “Gone” became prototypes for the Nashville Sound, which would give country music more mainstream appeal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Nelson had signed several young rockabilly acts of his own, most notably Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. For Mr. Vincent he produced the hiccupping “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” a Top 10 hit on the pop, country and R&B charts in 1956. With Ms. Jackson Mr. Nelson cut the raucous “Let’s Have a Party” in 1960.
A musical omnivore who briefly oversaw the Capitol label’s jazz division as well, Mr. Nelson recorded a broad array of music under the country rubric in his nearly three decades there. The harmony duo the Louvin Brothers, the swing-inflected band of Hank Thompson and the colorful Maddox Brothers & Rose all came under his direction.
Known for being a hands-off producer who let his artists record with their touring bands instead of insisting that they work with studio professionals, Mr. Nelson consistently supervised a roster of acts whose music demonstrated how durable and elastic the country genre could be.
Kenneth F. Nelson was born on Jan. 19, 1911, in Caledonia, Minn. Placed in an orphanage by his mother when he was an infant, he spent his childhood in Chicago, where he would go on to work in a music store and, later, at a radio station, WJJD. Promoted to music director at the station, Mr. Nelson did everything from announcing broadcasts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to scouting talent for its “hillbilly” variety show, “Suppertime Frolic.”
After serving in the Army during World War II, Mr. Nelson returned to Chicago and WJJD. He also began producing sessions for Capitol, eventually moving to Hollywood in 1948 to work for the label full time. By his retirement in 1976 he had produced around 100 chart-topping country hits, including “The Wild Side of Life,” a No. 1 record for Mr. Thompson for 15 weeks in 1952.
Mr. Owens and Mr. Haggard accounted for more than three dozen of Mr. Nelson’s No. 1 recordings. Many of these were unvarnished, emotionally direct performances that reached beyond country audiences to influence rock acts like the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Mr. Nelson’s wife June died in 1984. He is survived by his daughter, Claudia Nelson, and three grandchildren.
A co-founder of the Country Music Association, Mr. Nelson was president of that organization’s board in 1961 and 1962. In 2001 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He published an autobiography, “My First 90 Years Plus 3,” last year.
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posted
Another behind-the-scenes type songwriter/artist, who had one big hit.
From the NY Times.
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John Stewart, Who Wrote Monkees Hit, Dies at 68 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 21, 2008
LOS ANGELES — John Stewart, who wrote the Monkees hit “Daydream Believer” and helped create the style that came to be called Americana, died on Saturday at a San Diego hospital. He was 68.
Mr. Stewart, who came to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the folk group the Kingston Trio, had a brain aneurysm, according to a statement on the group’s Web site, kingstontrio.com.
Mr. Stewart, who left the trio shortly before the Monkees released “Daydream Believer” in 1967, went on to record nearly four dozen solo albums, including “California Bloodlines” and “Bombs Away Dream Babies.”
But Mr. Stewart was best known for writing songs for others, including Joan Baez (“Strange Rivers”) and Rosanne Cash (“Runaway Train”).
A husky-voiced singer and accomplished guitarist who delivered his lyrics in a poignant, often longing voice, Mr. Stewart created music that fell somewhere within rock, country and folk genres, and came to be called Americana.
He joined the Kingston Trio in 1961, replacing Dave Guard in the group that had helped usher in an American folk-music revival in the late 1950s. He recorded more than a dozen albums with the trio before beginning his solo career.
He is survived by his wife, Buffy, and his children, Mikael, Jeremy, Amy and Luke.
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posted
From the Obits in today's NY Times - another guy whose name most people today probably don't know, but who was a part of changing the world back in the 60's, and whose records influenced all rock and rock/soul records that came after (and continue today, whether they know it or not).
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Mike Smith, Lead Singer of Dave Clark 5, Is Dead
Published: February 29, 2008
Mike Smith, the lead singer of The Dave Clark Five, died Thursday outside London, less than two weeks before the band is to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was 64.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2003 that had left him paralyzed below the ribs, according to Margo Lewis, his agent in New York.
The Dave Clark Five, part of the so-called British Invasion of the early 1960s, recorded a string of hits including “Glad All Over,” “Catch Us If You Can” and “Over and Over.” The band made 12 appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show by 1966. Mr. Smith also played keyboards and helped write songs for the band, which was founded by its drummer, Dave Clark.
In 2006, he told the British newspaper The Daily Mail that he had injured his spinal cord when he fell while climbing over a locked seven-foot-high garden gate behind his home in the Costa del Sol region of Spain.
Mr. Smith had been in a hospital outside London since shortly after the accident and was released in December. He had been living near the hospital when he was admitted again on Wednesday, Ms. Lewis said.
After his accident, Mr. Smith drew support from, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt and Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, who helped to defray medical costs through donations and fund-raisers.
In 2005, Paul Shaffer, the “Late Show With David Letterman” bandleader, helped to organize a benefit concert in New York featuring many of Mr. Smith’s fellow British Invasion stars, including The Zombies and Peter & Gordon. A DVD of the concert is to be released in March.
Michael George Smith was born in 1943 in Edmonton, England. He is survived by his wife, Arlene, who is known as Charlie.
After the Dave Clark Five disbanded in 1970, Mr. Smith performed for a time in a new band with Mr. Clark but worked mainly as a producer and songwriter. He began performing again in the 1990s and had formed a new band, “Mike Smith’s Rock Engine,” when he was injured.
Before his death, preparations were under way to transport Mr. Smith to New York so that he could attend the Hall of Fame induction ceremony on March 10, Ms. Lewis said. Besides Mr. Smith and Mr. Clark, the band included Lenny Davidson on lead guitar, Rick Huxley on bass guitar and Denny Payton on saxophone, harmonica and guitar.
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posted
Unfortunately, here's a name more people will recognize. Even though most know him from his association with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles was already a bigtime name/star within the music business before he hooked up with Band Of Gypsies. The Electric Flag, as short-lived as it was, gave him credence, because it was Mike Bloomfield's band (also dead), and he was the first American guitar hero (recognized before Clapton, too).
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Buddy Miles, 60, Hendrix Drummer, Dies
By JON PARELES Published: February 29, 2008
Buddy Miles, the drummer in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys and a hitmaker under his own name with the song “Them Changes,” died on Tuesday at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 60.
His death was announced on his Web site, which said he had been battling congestive heart disease.
Mr. Miles played with a brisk, assertive, deeply funky attack that made him an apt partner for Hendrix. With his luxuriant Afro and his American-flag shirts, he was a prime mover in the psychedelic blues-rock of the late 1960s, not only with Hendrix but also as a founder, drummer and occasional lead singer for the Electric Flag. During the 1980s, he was widely heard as the lead voice of the California Raisins in television commercials.
George Allen Miles Jr. was born in Omaha and began playing drums as a child. An aunt gave him his nickname, after the big-band drummer Buddy Rich.
Mr. Miles was 12 years old when he joined his father’s jazz group, the Bebops. As a teenager, he also worked with soul and rhythm-and-blues acts, among them the Ink Spots, the Delfonics and Wilson Pickett. By 1967, he had moved to Chicago, where he was a founding member of the Electric Flag.
That band included a horn section and played blues, soul and rock; it made its debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and released its first album in 1968. But the Electric Flag was short-lived. Mr. Miles then formed the Buddy Miles Express; its second album, “Electric Church,” was produced in part by Hendrix, whom he had met when both were sidemen on the rhythm-and-blues circuit.
Mr. Miles also appeared on two songs on “Electric Ladyland,” the groundbreaking Hendrix double album released in 1968. After Hendrix disbanded his group the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose two other members were British, he formed a new trio, Band of Gypsys, with African-American musicians, Mr. Miles and Billy Cox on bass.
On the last night of the 1960s, a New Year’s Eve show at the Fillmore East, they recorded “Band of Gypsys,” an album that included “Them Changes.”
Mr. Miles also worked in the studio with Hendrix and appears on “The Cry of Love,” which was released after Hendrix died in 1970. Mr. Miles rerecorded “Them Changes” with his own band, and it became a hit and a blues-rock staple; Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood performed it on Monday at Madison Square Garden.
Through the 1970s, Mr. Miles made albums with his own bands. He also made a live album with Carlos Santana in 1972 and sang on the 1987 Santana album “Freedom.” In all, he appeared on more than 70 albums, working with Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Barry White, John McLaughlin and George Clinton, among other musicians.
Mr. Miles served a prison term for grand theft in the late 1970s and later another term for auto theft in the early ’80s. After he emerged in 1985, advertising recharged his career. He sang lead vocals for the California Raisins, a fictional group whose Claymation commercials were so popular that they led to a string of albums. Two of them, “California Raisins” and “Meet the Raisins,” were certified platinum for shipping a million copies each.
Mr. Miles also produced commercials for Cadillac and Harley Davidson and performed on them. He and Mr. Cox recorded an album, “The Band of Gypsys Return,” in 2004. Mr. Miles continued to perform even after suffering a stroke in 2005. He is survived by his partner, Sherrilae Chambers.
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Jeff Healey passed, poor guy, lifelong cancer victim. He will be missed.
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Blind Guitarist Jeff Healey Dies at 41 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: March 3, 2008 Filed at 9:00 a.m. ET
TORONTO (AP) -- Blind rock and jazz musician Jeff Healey has died after a lifelong battle against cancer. He was 41.
Healey died Sunday evening in a Toronto hospital, said bandmate Colin Bray, who was in the room with Healey's family when the guitarist died.
The Grammy-nominated Healey rose to stardom as the leader of the Jeff Healey Band, a rock-oriented trio that gained international acclaim and platinum record sales with the 1988 album ''See the Light.'' The album included the hit single ''Angel Eyes.''
Healey had battled cancer since age 1, when a rare form of retinal cancer known as Retinoblastoma claimed his eyesight.
Due to his blindness, Healey taught himself to play guitar by laying the instrument across his lap.
His unique playing style, combined with his blues-oriented vocals, earned him a reputation as a teenage musical prodigy. He shared stages with George Harrison, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Bray said he and many others expected the guitarist to rally from this latest illness.
''I don't think any of us thought this was going to happen,'' Bray said. ''We just thought he was going to bounce back as he always does.''
Healey had undergone numerous operations in recent years to remove tumors from his lungs and leg.
Bray and fellow bandmate Gary Scriven remembered their frontman as a musician of rare abilities with a generous nature and wicked sense of humor.
Healey's true love was jazz, the genre that dominated his three most recent albums.
His love of jazz led him to host radio shows in Canada where he spun long-forgotten numbers from his personal collection of over 30,000 vinyl records.
His death came weeks before the release of his first rock album in eight years.
''Mess of Blues'' is slated for a North American release on April 22.
He is survived by his wife, Christie, and two children.
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Jeff Healey, Guitarist and Singer, Dies at 41
By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: March 4, 2008
Jeff Healey, a Canadian guitarist, singer and songwriter whose band sold millions of blues-rock records and who also pursued a passion for old-time jazz, playing the trumpet and clarinet, died on Sunday in Toronto. He was 41.
He died of lung cancer, his publicists said.
Mr. Healey, who was blind, played his guitar with the instrument flat on his lap, resulting in what Guitar Player magazine called “astoundingly fluid bends and vibrato.” He blended jazz, rock and the blues.
Mr. Healey’s greatest success came in the late 1980s, when his band recorded the album “See the Light.” It reached platinum status in the United States by selling more than one million copies and eventually two million worldwide. A single from that album, “Angel Eyes,” was the Jeff Healey Band’s only Top 40 hit, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1989.
The same year the band performed the soundtrack for “Road House,” a movie starring actor Patrick Swayze. The band also had speaking parts. Soon the group was big enough to be booked in stadiums.
Mr. Healey also played the trumpet and clarinet in his own traditional jazz band, the Jazz Wizards. He collected as many as 30,000 old-time jazz records, mainly those on 78 r.p.m., which he played as the host of an hour-long radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Mr. Healey, son of a firefighter, was born and raised near Toronto. He lost his sight to eye cancer when he was a year old and was given his first guitar two years later. At a school for the blind, he was shown how to play the guitar the usual way but found it felt more comfortable on his lap.
At a Toronto-area high school he played the guitar and trumpet in school bands. His early guitar inspirations were country stylists like Chet Atkins, but he moved on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and B. B. King, according to the reference work Contemporary Musicians. He studied music theory on his own.
He formed the Jeff Healey Band in 1985, with the drummer Tom Stephen and the bassist Joe Rockman. The trio gave as many as 300 concerts a year for about two years before signing with Arista Records in 1988. Their second album for the label (after “See the Light”) was “Hell to Pay,” which featured guest artists including George Harrison.
As the group’s popularity grew, so did their concert venues. Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times in 1989, described the band’s music as “showy, arena-style blues rock,” although he praised Mr. Healey’s technique.
In 1990, a reader poll in Guitar Player magazine named Mr. Healey the best blues guitarist and best new talent.
Mr. Healey is survived by his wife, Christie; his daughter, Rachel; and his son, Derek.
By 2002, Mr. Healey had opened a music club named after himself in Toronto; he later closed it to open a larger one. In 2003, he started his jazz band.
He made a total of 10 albums, including both jazz and blues-rock; it would be hard to guess that some of the albums were by the same artist. In January 2007, Guitar Player said, “Jeff Healey may be the only cat around who can play the prewar jazz of Louis Armstrong on the trumpet, and the heavy electric blues-rock of ZZ Top on the guitar.”
[ March 04, 2008, 10:29 AM: Message edited by: BC/Studio Manager ]
Posts: 4262 | From: Charlotte, N.C., USA | Registered: Oct 1999
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This is another name not really well-known far and wide, but he helped start what is now a double digit part of today's music world/sales.
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Larry Norman, Singer of Christian Rock Music, Dies at 60
By DENNIS HEVESI Published: March 4, 2008
Larry Norman, a singer and songwriter considered by many to be the father of Christian rock despite years of being shunned by more traditional Christians, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Salem, Ore. He was 60.
The cause was heart failure, his brother, Charles, said.
Although most of Mr. Norman’s dozens of albums, recorded over nearly 40 years, carried conventional spiritual messages, his hippie-length hair, ragged jeans and sometimes radical social themes kept his recordings off the racks of most Bible stores for much of his career. Some of his songs protested racism and poverty; others tried to raise awareness of sexually transmitted diseases.
With its hard-rock rhythm and volume, Mr. Norman’s 1972 song “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” especially rattled devotees of traditional hymns.
Still, according to his profile for the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 2001, it was Mr. Norman “who first combined rock ’n’ roll with Christian lyrics.”
“His style of music had been controversial for almost 15 years before the Jesus Movement sprang up,” according to the profile, which but “in later years he began to gain wider acceptance.”
A 1995 article by Nicholas Dawidoff in The New York Times Magazine about the rise of Christian rock said: “Contemporary Christian music (C.C.M., to industry insiders) was created in the late 1950s by a guitar-strumming, longhaired Jesus freak named Larry Norman, who sang hymns about venereal disease to astonished parishioners in California churches. Sometimes Norman was invited back. Mostly he wasn’t.”
Larry David Norman was born in Corpus Christi, Tex., on April 8, 1947, one of four children of Joe and Margaret Norman. His father was a high school English teacher. The family moved to California in the 1950s, and Larry began performing his own rock ’n’ roll songs at school.
Besides his brother, Charles, of Salem, Ore., Mr. Norman is survived by two sisters, Kristy Norman, also of Salem, and Nancy Overmeyer of Davis, Calif.; and a son, Michael, of Portland, Ore.
In the 1960s, Mr. Norman moved to San Jose and began playing with a band called People! The band was signed by Capitol Records and began opening for the Grateful Dead, the Doors, the Byrds and other rock groups.
Mr. Norman left that band in the early ’70s and later started his own record label, Solid Rock. His first album was titled “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus, and a Lot Less Rock and Roll.”
That song’s lyrics departed from the message of “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”
Part of the controversial 1972 song says: “They say rock ’n’ roll is wrong, we’ll give you a chance./I say I feel so good I gotta get up and dance.” Another part says: “There’s nothing wrong with what I play./’Cause Jesus is the rock and he rolled my blues away.”
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