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May 25, 2022
Sonny Boy Williamson II, blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, died 57 years ago today
Sonny Boy Williamson II, blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, died 57 years ago today.
Upon his return to the United States from a European tour, Williamson resumed playing the King Biscuit Time show on KFFA, and performed in the Helena, Arkansas area.
As fellow musicians Houston Stackhouse and Peck Curtis waited at the KFFA studios for Williamson on May 25, 1965, the 12:15 broadcast time was closing in and Sonny Boy was nowhere in sight. Curtis left the radio station to locate Williamson, and discovered his body in bed at the rooming house where he had been staying — dead of an apparent heart attack suffered in his sleep.
Williams is acknowledged as one of the most charismatic and influential blues musicians, with considerable prowess on the harmonica and highly creative songwriting skills. He recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s, and had a direct influence on later blues and rock performers.
Some of his better known songs include "Don't Start Me To Talkin'" (his only major hit, it reached the #3 position on the national Billboard R&B charts in 1955),"Fattenin' Frogs for Snakes," "Keep It To Yourself," "Your Funeral and My Trial," "Bye Bye Bird," "Nine Below Zero," "Help Me," "Checkin' Up on My Baby" and the infamous, "Little Village," with Leonard Chess.
In interviews in The Last Waltz, roots-rockers The Band recount jamming with Miller prior to their initial fame as Bob Dylan's electric backing band, and making never-realized plans to become his backing band.
Many of his most famous recordings appeared on The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson and His Best. Williamson had an influence on modern day blues and blues rock artists. Here, Robbie Robertson of the Band remembers Williams.
Jessi Colter is 79 years old today
Jessi Colter is 79 years old today.
Colter is country music artist who is best known for her collaboration with her late husband, Waylon Jennings, the country singer and songwriter. She was one of the few female artists to emerge from the mid-1970s “outlaw” movement.
After meeting her future husband, Colter pursued a career in country music, releasing her first studio LP in 1970, A Country Star Is Born. In 1975, Colter was signed with Capitol Records. On the label, she released her debut single, “I'm Not Lisa.”
The song was Colter’s breakthrough single, reaching #1 on the country chart and also peaked at #4 on the pop chart, becoming a crossover hit in 1975. Her second album, “I'm Jessi Colter,” was also released that year and debuted at #1 on the country albums chart and #50 on the Billboard 200.
The follow-up single from her album, “What's Happened to Blue Eyes,” was also very successful, peaking at #5 on the country chart and #57 on the pop chart. The single’s B-side, “You Ain't Never Been Loved (Like I'm Gonna Love You),” charted among the Top Pop 100 also in 1975.
In 1976, Colter released her second and third Capitol studio albums, “Jessi,” and “Diamond in the Rough.” Both albums were as successful as Colter's 1975 album, both debuting at #4 on the country albums chart. The lead single from her Jessi album, "It's Morning (And I Still Love You)" was a Top 15 country hit in 1976.
In 1976, she was also featured on the collaboration, LP Wanted: The Outlaws, which became a Platinum album, and helped her become one of the few female outlaw country stars.
Colter was born Miriam Johnson and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, in a strict Pentecostal home. Her mother was a Pentecostal preacher and her father was a race car driver. At age 11, Colter became the pianist at her church. After high school (Mesa High, Arizona, 1961), she began singing in local clubs in Phoenix.
In 1970, Jennings and Colter sang duet on two Top 40 country chart hits that also helped Colter gain a recording contract with RCA Records the same year. She released her debut album, A Country Star is Born, on RCA, with Jennings and Chet Atkins co-producing. The album was not successful and it was Colter’s only album for RCA.
In 1981, Colter and her husband returned to release a duet album, “Leather and Lace.” The album's first single, “Storms Never Last,” was written by Colter, and the second single, “The Wild Side of Life”/“It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was also a major hit in 1981 — peaking at #10 on the country chart.
Stevie Nicks wrote the title track of the album. However, after receiving word that Colter and Jennings might divorce, Nicks released her own version of the song as a duet with Don Henley. It peaked at #6 on pop chart, also in 1981.
Colter released her final studio album on Capitol records in 1981, “Ridin' Shotgun,” which also spawned her last charting single on the country charts, “Holdin’ on.” As the decade progressed, Colter’s decided to let her recording career decline in order to help take care of and nurse her husband through his drug abuse and various medical problems. She remained active during this time.
In 2000, Colter performed on Jennings’s live album, “Never Say Die,” released two years before his death in 2002. Jennings was 64 when he died. In 2006, Colter returned to recording with a new studio album — Out of the Ashes — which was released on the Shout! Factory label.
Out of the Ashes was Colter’s first studio album in over 20 years. The album was produced by Don Was and reflected on Jennings’s passing away. Her late husband, Waylon Jennings, had an unused vocal, “Out of the Rain,” which was featured on the track.
Colter and Jennings had one son, Waylon Albright “Shooter” Jennings, who was born May 19, 1979.
On April 11, 2017, Colter released a tell-all memoir titled, "An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith That Brought Me Home."
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born 219 years ago today
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born 219 years ago today.
Emerson was an essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.
Emerson disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. He gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.
Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech — "The American Scholar" — in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print.
His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking. They include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.
Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. He wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.
Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him.
When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."
Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau.
Raymond Carver was born 84 years ago today
Raymond Carver was born 84 years ago today.
Carver was an American short story writer and poet, and contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.
Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Elta Beatrice (Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. He had one brother.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.
After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June, 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December, 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year when Carver was 20.
He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson and waitress.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. He attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist, John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.
His first published story, The Furious Seasons, appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. Furious Seasons was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in the recent collections, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.
Carver’s first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. During his years of working different jobs, rearing children and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily.
By his own admission, eventually he more or less gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing.
The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism. However, he continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times (between June, 1976 and February or March, 1977), Carver began his "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carver — who continued to smoke marijuana and experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City — believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking.
On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50.
Above, Carver in 1984
Photo by Bob Adelman
Tom T. Hall was born 86 years ago today
Tom T. Hall at his Franklin, Tennessee homestead
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Tom T. Hall was born 86 years ago today.
Born in Olive Hill, Kentucky, Hall was a retired country music singer-songwriter. He wrote 11 #1 hit songs, with 26 more that reached the Top 10, including the #1 international pop crossover, "Harper Valley PTA" and "I Love," which reached #12 on the Hot 100.
Hall became known to fans as "The Storyteller," thanks to his storytelling skills in his songwriting. As a teenager, he organized a band called the Kentucky Travelers that performed before movies for a traveling theater. During a stint in the Army, he performed over the Armed Forces Radio Network and wrote comic songs about his Army experiences.
His early career included being a radio announcer at WRON, a local radio station in Ronceverte, West Virginia. Hall was also an announcer at WSPZ, which later became WVRC Radio in Spencer, West Virginia in the 1960s.
Hall's big songwriting break came in 1963, when country singer Jimmy C. Newman recorded his song, "DJ For a Day." Soon, Hall moved to Nashville, and within months, he had songs climbing the charts. He has written songs for dozens of country stars, including Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Alan Jackson and Bobby Bare.
One of his earliest successful songwriting ventures, "Harper Valley PTA," was recorded in 1968 by Jeannie C. Riley. It hit #1 on the pop and country charts at the same time and sold over six million copies. The song would go on to inspire a motion picture and television program of the same name.
Hall himself recorded this song, on his album The Definitive Collection (as track #23).
Hall's recording career took off after Ms. Riley's rendition of the song, and he had such hits as "A Week in a Country Jail," "(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine," "I Love," "Country Is," "The Year Clayton Delaney Died," "I Like Beer" and "Faster Horses (the Cowboy and the Poet)."
Hall died at his home in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 20, 2021 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head; the cause of death went unreleased and had been presumed to be natural until the Williamson County medical examiner released his findings in November.
Hall left no suicide note, had chlordiazepoxide (used to treat anxiety and alcohol withdrawal) in his system at the time of his death and was rumored to have been suffering from numerous old age-related illnesses at the time.
May 24, 2022
Bob Dylan is 81 years old today
Bob Dylan, Beacon Theatre, Dec. 1, 2018
Photo by Frank Beacham
Bob Dylan is 81 years old today.
A musician, singer-songwriter, music producer, artist and writer, Dylan has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades. He is often referred to as the Shakespeare of our times.
Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," became anthems for the U.S. civil rights and anti-war movements.
Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single, "Like a Rolling Stone," radically altered the parameters of popular music in 1965. His recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics have incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture.
Initially inspired by the performance style of Little Richard, and the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning more than fifty years, has explored many of the traditions in American song — from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour.
His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally considered to be his songwriting. In Oct. 13, 2016, the Nobel Prize committee announced it had awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
Since 1994, Dylan has published several books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries throughout the world.
As a songwriter and musician, Dylan has sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
Here, Dylan performs “Blowin’ in the Wind” in March, 1963
Dylan, United Palace Theatre, 2009, New York City
Photo by Frank Beacham
Bob Dylan performs "Pretty Saro"
Bob Dylan performing in the Rolling Thunder Review, April 25, 1976, Gainesville, Florida
On the drums is Howie Wyeth, on the Congas is Gary Burke. Steven Soles is to the right on guitar in the black vest. The two people closest to Joan Baez are crew members. Rob Stoner plays guitar behind Dylan.
Photo by Frank Beacham
Bob Dylan performs "Tangled Up In Blue"
Photo by Frank Beacham
After 14 years and 27 deaths while being constructed, the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River in New York City opened on this day in 1883 — 139 years ago
After 14 years and 27 deaths while being constructed, the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River in New York City opened on this day in 1883 — 139 years ago.
The bridge connected the great cities of New York and Brooklyn for the first time in history. Thousands of residents of Brooklyn and Manhattan Island turned out to witness the dedication ceremony, which was presided over by President Chester A. Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland.
Designed by the late John A. Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge was the largest suspension bridge ever built to that date.
Roebling, born in Germany in 1806, was a great pioneer in the design of steel suspension bridges. He studied industrial engineering in Berlin and at the age of 25 immigrated to western Pennsylvania, where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to make his living as a farmer. He later moved to the state capital in Harrisburg, where he found work as a civil engineer. He promoted the use of wire cable and established a successful wire-cable factory.
Meanwhile, he earned a reputation as a designer of suspension bridges, which at the time were widely used but known to fail under strong winds or heavy loads.
Roebling is credited with a major breakthrough in suspension-bridge technology: a web truss added to either side of the bridge roadway that greatly stabilized the structure. Using this model, Roebling successfully bridged the Niagara Gorge at Niagara Falls, New York, and the Ohio River at Cincinnati, Ohio.
On the basis of these achievements, New York State accepted Roebling’s design for a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan – with a span of 1,595 feet – and appointed him chief engineer. It was to be the world’s first steel suspension bridge.
Just before construction began in 1869, Roebling was fatally injured while taking a few final compass readings across the East River. A boat smashed the toes on one of his feet, and three weeks later he died of tetanus. He was the first of more than two dozen people who would die building his bridge.
His 32-year-old son, Washington A. Roebling, took over as chief engineer. Roebling had worked with his father on several bridges and had helped design the Brooklyn Bridge. The two granite foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge were built in timber caissons — or watertight chambers — sunk to depths of 44 feet on the Brooklyn side and 78 feet on the New York side.
Compressed air pressurized the caissons, allowing underwater construction. At that time, little was known of the risks of working under such conditions, and more than a hundred workers suffered from cases of compression sickness.
Compression sickness, or the “bends,” is caused by the appearance of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream that result from rapid decompression. Several died, and Washington Roebling himself became bedridden from the condition in 1872. Other workers died as a result of more conventional construction accidents, such as collapses and a fire.
Roebling continued to direct construction operations from his home, and his wife, Emily, carried his instructions to the workers. In 1877, Washington and Emily moved into a home with a view of the bridge. Roebling’s health gradually improved, but he remained partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.
On May 24, 1883, Emily Roebling was given the first ride over the completed bridge, with a rooster — a symbol of victory — in her lap. Within 24 hours, an estimated 250,000 people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, using a broad promenade above the roadway that John Roebling designed solely for the enjoyment of pedestrians.
The Brooklyn Bridge, with its unprecedented length and two stately towers, was dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world.” The connection it provided between the massive population centers of Brooklyn and Manhattan changed the course of New York City forever.
In 1898, the city of Brooklyn formally merged with New York City, Staten Island and a few farm towns, forming Greater New York.
In the above image, fireworks open of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883
Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The bridge at sunset on May 18, 2019
Photo by Frank Beacham
Patti LaBelle is 78 years old today
Patti LaBelle is 78 years old today.
A singer, author and actress, LaBelle has spent more than 50 years in the music industry. For 16 years, she was lead singer of Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, who changed their name to Labelle in the early 1970s and released the disco song, "Lady Marmalade."
LaBelle started her solo career shortly after the group disbanded in 1977 and crossed over to pop music with "On My Own," "If You Asked Me To," "Stir It Up,” and "New Attitude." She has also recorded R&B ballads such as "You Are My Friend," "If Only You Knew" and "Love, Need and Want You."
LaBelle possesses the vocal range of a soprano and has sold over 50 million records worldwide.
Rosanne Cash is 67 years old today
Rosanne Cash performs at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 2012
Photo by Frank Beacham
Rosanne Cash is 67 years old today.
A singer-songwriter and author, Cash is the eldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin.
Although Cash is often classified as a country artist, her music draws on many genres, including folk, pop, rock and blues.
In the 1980s, she had a string of chart-topping singles, which crossed musical genres and landed on both C&W and Top 100 charts. Her most commercially successful came in 1981 with the breakthrough hit, "Seven Year Ache," which topped the U.S. country singles charts and reached the Top 30 on the U.S. pop singles charts.
In 1990, Cash released, Interiors, a spare, introspective album which signaled a break from her pop country past. The following year Cash ended her marriage with Rodney Crowell and moved from Nashville to New York City, where she continues to write, record and perform.
In 1995, Cash married producer/songwriter/guitarist John Leventhal, with whom she had co-produced, The Wheel. Since 1991, she has released several albums, written two books and edited a collection of short stories.
Her fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford-American, New York Magazine and various other periodicals and collections. Cash has had 11 #1 country hit singles, 21 Top 40 country singles and two gold records.
Born in Memphis just as father Johnny was recording his first tracks at Sun Records, the family moved to California in 1958, first to Los Angeles, then Ventura, where Cash and her sisters were raised by mother, Vivian. Johnny and Vivian separated in the early 1960s and divorced in 1966.
After graduating from high school, she joined her father's road show for two and a half years, first as a wardrobe assistant, then as a background vocalist and occasional soloist.
In 1976, Cash briefly worked for CBS Records in London before returning to Nashville to study English and drama at Vanderbilt University. She then relocated to Los Angeles to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood.
On November 27, 2007, Cash was admitted to New York's Presbyterian Hospital for brain surgery. In a press statement, she announced that she suffered from Chiari Malformation Type I and expected to "make a full recovery." The surgery was successful, though recovery was slow, and in March, 2008 she was forced to cancel her spring tour dates for further recuperation.
She wrote about the experience in her New York Times article, "Well, Actually, It Is Brain Surgery." She resumed writing, recording and performing in late summer of 2008.
Cash released her next studio album — The List — on October 6, 2009. The album is based on a list of 100 greatest country and American songs that Johnny Cash gave her when she was 18. Cash picked twelve songs out of the 100 for the album. The album features vocal duets with Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright.
On September 9, 2010, the Americana Music Association named The List the Album of the Year. Cash signed with Blue Note Records in 2013 to release a new original album. The River & the Thread was released on January 14, 2014. It was her first album in more than four years and many consider it her masterpiece.
The River & the Thread was inspired by trips through the American South by Cash and her husband. Cash describes the album as “a mini-travelogue of the South, and of the soul.”
The Journey included visits to father Johnny Cash’s childhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, her own early childhood home in Memphis, William Faulkner’s house, Dockery Farms in Cleveland, Mississippi, the plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton worked and sang, Natchez, Mississippi, the blues trail, the Tallahatchie Bridge, as well as a visit with Natalie Chanin, a master seamstress in Florence, Alabama.
Throughout 2014, Cash toured extensively with partner Leventhal, performing The River & The Thread in sequence with first-person stories woven through historical time to much critical acclaim. The album was the #1 album of 2014 on Americana radio, and was honored by by many publications and awards
Here, Cash performs “A Feather's Not A Bird” from The River & the The Thread, 2014
Rosanne Cash and John Prine, Beacon Theatre, New York City, 2013
Photo by Frank Beacham
On May 24, 1844 — 178 years ago today — Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with a message that was fitting given the invention’s future effects on American life
What hath God wrought?
In a demonstration before members of Congress, inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatched a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland.
The message — “What Hath God Wrought?” — was telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail. The question, taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the daughter of the commissioner of patents.
Morse, an accomplished painter, learned of a French inventor’s idea of an electric telegraph in 1832 and then spent the next 12 years attempting to perfect a working telegraph system.
During this period, he composed the Morse code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages, and convinced Congress to finance a Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line.
On May 24, 1844 — 178 years ago today — he inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with a message that was fitting given the invention’s future effects on American life.
Just a decade after the first line opened, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country. The rapid communication it enabled greatly aided American economic expansion and the rest is history.
May 23, 2022
Douglas Fairbanks was born 139 years ago today
Douglas Fairbanks was born 139 years ago today.
An actor, screenwriter, director and producer, Fairbanks was best known for his swashbuckling roles in silent films such as The Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood and The Mark of Zorro. He spent the early part of his career making comedies.
An astute businessman, Fairbanks was a founding member of United Artists, and a founding member of The Motion Picture Academy. He hosted the first Oscars Ceremony in 1929.
With his marriage to Mary Pickford in 1920, the couple became Hollywood royalty and Fairbanks was referred to as "The King of Hollywood," a nickname later passed on to actor Clark Gable.
His career rapidly declined however with the advent of the "talkies." His final film was The Private Life of Don Juan in 1934.
Above Fairbanks and Mary Pickford at their home, Pickfair
Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer, was born 88 years ago today
Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer, was born 88 years ago today.
Founder of Moog Music, Moog was a pioneer of electronic music. His innovative electronic design is employed in numerous synthesizers including the Minimoog Model D, Minimoog Voyager, Little Phatty, Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, Moog Minitaur and the Moogerfooger line of effects pedals.
A native of New York City, Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University.
During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Moog gave an enthusiastically-received lecture at the 2004 New Interfaces for Musical Expression, held in Hamamatsu, Japan's "City of Musical Instruments," in June, 2004. He was the inspiration behind the 2004 film, Moog.
The Moog synthesizer was one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. He created the first voltage-controlled subtractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller and demonstrated it at the AES convention in 1964. He is a listed inventor on ten U.S. patents.
Moog had his theremin company (R. A. Moog Co., which later became Moog Music) manufacture and market his synthesizers. Unlike the few other 1960s synthesizer manufacturers, Moog shipped a piano-style keyboard as the standard user interface.
Moog also established standards for analog synthesizer control interfacing, with a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering signal.
The first Moog instruments were modular synthesizers. In 1971, Moog Music began production of the Minimoog Model D, which was among the first synthesizers that was widely available, portable and relatively affordable.
One of Moog's earliest musical customers was Wendy Carlos, whom he credits with providing feedback valuable to further development. Through his involvement in electronic music, Moog developed close professional relationships with artists such as Don Buchla, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, John Cage, Gershon Kingsley, Clara Rockmore, Jean Jacques Perrey and Pamelia Kurstin.
In a 2000 interview, Moog said: "I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers. They use my tools."
Moog was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor on April 28, 2005. He died at the age of 71 in Asheville, North Carolina on August 21, 2005.
Here, Moog demonstrates the Minimoog
Building a Theremin: My Personal Odyssey
In October, 1994, at the New York Film Festival, I watched a powerful documentary by Steven M. Martin about the creation of the world's first electronic musical instrument.
Billed as part biography, part social history and part detective story, the film — "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" — told the remarkable story of Leon Theremin, a Russian-born inventor whose adventures spanned the avant garde music world in New York City in the 1920s to the clandestine world of the KGB in the 1930s and 40s.
In 1922, Theremin demonstrated an early version of his strange new music machine for Nikolai Lenin, the U.S.S.R.'s leader. Five years later, he played his instrument for a group of American VIPs in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It was received into America's Jazz Age culture with awe and excitement.
The original theremin, which resembled a wooden speakers' podium with a loop of metal extending from one side and a vertical metal antenna on the other, was a real curiosity in the early radio days.
Audiences were mesmerized by a new breed of instrument whose music was generated not from physical contact but from hand movements made in the air around the two protruding antennas.
By controlling the pitch with the right hand and the volume with the left, it's possible to create music that suggests — as the New York Times put it — "a violin or a soprano or a Martian making a landing. It is surpassingly strange."
For about two years beginning in 1929, RCA manufactured and sold 500 theremins. From 1930 until his mysterious disappearance in 1938, Leon Theremin built the instruments for customers in his New York studio on West 54th Street.
That disappearance makes the Theremin legend even more strange and fascinating.
The inventor was apparently kidnapped by Soviet agents from his New York establishment and taken to Russia where, after a period of imprisonment, he was engaged by the government to design electronic eavesdropping technology for spies in World War II.
Long assumed dead in the West (a German newspaper reported his demise), he was spotted by chance one day at the Moscow Conservatory of Music by a visiting reporter for the New York Times. This led to his emotional return to the United States in 1991 (an event portrayed in the film).
Whether we realize it or not, most of us are familiar with the wavering vibrato sound of the theremin from dozens of 1950's-era science fiction and horror movies. Films like Spellbound, The Lost Weekend and The Day the Earth Stood Still used theremins on their soundtracks. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations is perhaps the best known use of a theremin in a pop music recording.
The theremin caught the imagination of Robert Moog, who started building the instruments as a teenager and began to manufacture them again for sale in 1954 — 16 years after Leon Theremin's disappearance. A decade later Moog made music history when he invented the Moog synthesizer, the first in a successful line of electronic music synthesizers.
I met Moog at the film festival and quickly became enamored by the theremin. At the time, Moog made theremins at Big Briar, Inc., his company located in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.
Taking advantage of the explosion of new interest in theremins after the release of the film, Moog introduced an affordable Theremin called the Etherwave. It was a no compromise, fully professional instrument that had the tone color and playing characteristics of Theremin's original. A Etherwave kit cost $229 at the time.
Nostalgic for my old Heathkit days and fascinated by the idea of owning such an oddball instrument (though I had no ability to play it), I purchased an Etherwave kit from Big Briar. It came with an unfinished wood cabinet, nickel-plated brass antennas, a pre-assembled circuit card, a power supply and several bags of parts. Also included was an instructional video and a CD of theremin music by the inventor's protégé, Clara Rockmore.
The Big Briar brochure said "if you can read a diagram, solder and use basic home tools, you should be able to build this theremin in an evening or two." As with Heathkits, Big Briar (actually Robert Moog personally) didn’t let me fail. I got Moog on the phone a couple of times and he was most helpful. He nursed me through the project. When I turned on the power switch of the Etherwave, it worked perfectly.
When I finished the kit, I asked Robert Moog if he could explain why such a cult-like following has developed around this instrument — with more than 50 professional musical acts at the time using theremins in performance throughout the world.
Moog said several factors contributed to its appeal. "For one thing the instrument is responsive," he said. "With a keyboard you put your finger on a key and the note plays. That's it. This is just the opposite. The note keeps changing with every single motion of your hand. People like that. They enjoy that responsiveness.
"Another part of it," he continued, "is that's all in the air. There's something ethereal about that. Something gossamer. Back in the earlier days it was an elitist thing. It was rather sensational, but there were very few people who actually got up and played it. Now that's changed. It's much better established now than in the past. People are engrossed in it. It's almost a cult thing."
(P.S. Though I sold my home-built theremin to a professional musician who could play it, I'm still fascinated by the instrument. Now I have a theremin ring tone on my iPhone. People do a doubletake every time it rings!)
In the above photo, I attempt to play my finished theremin.
Tommy — the fourth studio album by The Who — was released 53 years ago today
Tommy — the fourth studio album by The Who — was released 53 years ago today.
The album was mostly composed by guitarist Pete Townshend as a rock opera that tells the story about a deaf, dumb and blind boy, including his experiences with life and the relationship with his family. Townshend came up with the concept of Tommy after being introduced to the work of Meher Baba, and attempted to translate Baba's teachings into music.
Recording on the album began in September, 1968, but took six months to complete as material needed to be arranged and re-recorded in the studio. It was released on this day in 1969. Tommy was acclaimed upon its release by critics, who hailed it as the Who's breakthrough. Its critical standing diminished slightly in later years. Nonetheless, several writers view it as an important and influential album in the history of rock music.
The Who promoted the album's release with an extensive tour, including a live version of Tommy, which lasted throughout 1969 and 1970. Key gigs from the tour included appearances at Woodstock, the Metropolitan Opera House and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The live performances of Tommy drew critical praise and rejuvenated the band's career.
Subsequently, the rock opera developed into other media, including a Seattle Opera production in 1971, an orchestral version by Lou Reizner in 1972, a film in 1975 by director Ken Russell and a Broadway musical in 1992.
The original album has sold 20 million copies. It has been reissued several times on CD, including a remix by Jon Astley in 1996, a deluxe Super Audio CD in 2003 and a super deluxe box set in 2013, including previously unreleased demos and live material.
Above, Eric Clapton appearing with The Who in the film, Tommy, directed by Ken Russell.
Tom Petty declared bankruptcy on this day in 1979 — 43 years ago — in an effort to free himself from his contract with Shelter Records
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, 1979
The music industry was notorious for its creative accounting practices and for onerous contracts that could keep even some top-selling artists perpetually in debt to their record labels. In a typical recording contract back in the day, a record label advanced an artist a certain sum of money against future earnings from royalties.
But because the cost of things like studio time, marketing support and tour expenses must be "recouped" by the label before an artist earned any royalties, many artists who signed recording contracts never sold enough records to "earn out" their advance.
Where this system truly broke down was when a top-selling artist or group like TLC or Run-DMC found itself deeply in debt to its record label despite having sold millions of records.
Those are but two groups that pursued a strategy made famous by Tom Petty when he declared bankruptcy on this day in 1979 — 43 years ago — in an effort to free himself from his contract with Shelter Records.
At the time of Tom Petty's bankruptcy filing, he had little to show financially for the two hit albums already behind him: 1976's Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (featuring the hit singles "Breakdown" and "American Girl") and 1978's You're Gonna Get It!
Unhappy with the terms of his contract with Shelter Records, Petty seized upon the sale of Shelter by ABC to industry giant MCA as justification to declare himself, in effect, a free agent.
In his own words, he would not be "bought and sold like a piece of meat." (Never mind the fact that the deal was actually a re-acquisition, since Shelter — and with it Petty's contract — had actually been owned by MCA before being acquired by ABC.)
Petty refused to allow his next album to be released, even going so far as to bear the cost of recording it personally, leaving him some $500,000 in debt. This was when he filed for bankruptcy, hoping to gain leverage in the brewing legal dispute by having the bankruptcy court declare null and void an extremely unfavorable contract that Petty felt he had signed under duress.
Ultimately, MCA blinked, agreeing to release Petty from his existing contract but immediately re-signing him to a $3 million contract with a brand-new subsidiary label created especially for this purpose.
The album that Petty had held back, Damn The Torpedoes (featuring the singles "Refugee" and "Don't Do Me Like That"), would go on to be certified Double Platinum and make Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers into true superstars.
But if MCA thought that its squabbles with Petty were behind them at that point, they were sorely mistaken. In 1981, Petty once again threatened to withhold his new album, Hard Promises, when MCA announced its intention to sell it for $9.98 — a full dollar more than the typical retail price at the time.
"If we don't take a stand, one of these days records are going to be $20," Petty said at the time. And once again, MCA finally agreed, selling the album at retail for the then-customary $8.98.
Here, Petty performs “Refugee” from Damn the Torpedoes in 1985
Thanks History.com
Scatman Crothers was born 112 years ago today
Scatman Crothers was born 112 years ago today.
An actor, singer, dancer and musician known for his work as Louie the Garbage Man on the TV show, Chico and the Man, Crothers also played Dick Hallorann in the Stanley Kubrick film, The Shining, in 1980.
Crothers was also a prolific voiceover artist, and provided the voices of Meadowlark Lemon in the animated TV version of The Harlem Globetrotters, Jazz the Autobot in The Transformers, the title character in Hong Kong Phooey and Scat Cat in the 1970 animated Disney film, The Aristocats.
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Crothers got the nickname “Scatman” when he auditioned for a radio show in 1932 at the former WSMK (now WING) in Dayton, Ohio. The director didn't think his given name Benjamin was catchy enough, so Crothers quickly concocted the handle, Scat Man, although this talent, scat singing, would develop later. He continued to enjoy this talent throughout his career, even teaching scat singing to college students.
Later, the nickname was condensed to Scatman by Arthur Godfrey. In his early career, he also associated with many Cleveland-based acts.
Crothers started his musical career as a 15-year-old drummer in a speakeasy band in his home town of Terre Haute. He played a variety of instruments, including drums and guitar, on jazz club band circuits in his early days as an entertainer. Among the people for whom he performed was the notorious gangster, Al Capone.
Crothers formed his own band in the 1930s and traveled to Oakland, California with the band in 1948. He played piano at the Port O' Call and Walt's 405 Club. He also appeared in a 1950 episode of The Phil Harris/Alice Faye Radio Program performing "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" with Harris, who introduced him as Scatman Roth. He left Oakland to stay in Los Angeles in 1952.
Crothers made his official debut in the movie, Meet Me at the Fair (1953). He worked in both movies and television, often taking bit parts. He also made musical shorts and played drums with Slim Gaillard in the mid-1940s. Crothers then landed a major supporting role in the 1970 animated film, The Aristocats, from Walt Disney Productions, providing the voice of "Scat Cat."
He also performed the film's theme song, "Ev'rybody Wants to be a Cat." Good friends with Jack Nicholson, he appeared in four of his films: The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), The Fortune (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Shining (1980).
A heavy smoker most of his life, Crothers was diagnosed with lung cancer in late 1985. But he kept his condition a secret in order to continue working. The cancer eventually spread to his esophagus by mid-1986 and he was unable to speak.
He died of pneumonia on November 22, 1986 at his home in Van Nuys, California at age 76.
Here Crothers performs in “The Shining” in 1980. He explains what the Shine is.
In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library — the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States — was dedicated in New York City on this day in 1911 — 111 years ago
In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library — the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States — was dedicated in New York City on this day in 1911 — 111 years ago.
Occupying a two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, the monumental beaux-arts structure took 14 years to complete at a cost of $9 million. The day after its dedication, the library opened its doors to the public, and some 40,000 people passed through to make use of a collection that already consisted of more than a million books.
In the late 19th century, New York had surpassed Paris in population and was quickly catching up with London, then the world’s most populous city. Unlike these cities, however, it lacked a public library large enough to serve its many occupants.
In 1886, former New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden died, bequeathing to the city $2.4 million to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.”
The gift remained unspent until May 23, 1895, when New York’s two largest libraries — the Astor and Lenox libraries — agreed to combine with the Tilden Trust to form a new entity that would be known as The New York Public Library. Sixteen years later to the day, the main branch of the library was dedicated in midtown Manhattan.
During the next few decades, thanks in large part to a $5.2 million gift from steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, a system of branch libraries opened throughout New York City.
Today, the New York Public Library is visited and used annually by more than 10 million people, and there are currently well over two million cardholders — more than for any other library system in the nation.
Above, the library on opening day in 1911
Georges Claude, French inventor who died on this day in 1960, discovered Neon
George Claude, circa 1926
Georges Claude, French inventor who died on this day in 1960, discovered a mechanism to trap gas in a tube and zap it with electricity. His invention is now better known as neon — the technology that spawned millions of neon signs.
Claude’s invention turned the ordinary extraordinary. Called the Edison of France, Claude demonstrated his neon invention at the Paris Motor Show in 1910 with two 40-foot tubes that glowed a brilliant orange-red. Two years later, he installed the first neon advertising sign in a barbershop on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris.
Neon lighting took off, and became an important cultural phenomenon in the United States. By 1940, the downtowns of nearly every U.S. city were bright with neon signage. Times Square in New York City was known worldwide for its neon extravagances. There were 2,000 shops nationwide designing and fabricating neon signs.
The popularity, intricacy and scale of neon signage for advertising declined in the U.S. following the Second World War (1939–1945), but development continued vigorously in Japan, Iran and some other countries. In recent decades, architects and artists, in addition to sign designers, have again adopted neon tube lighting as a component in their works.
Several museums in the United States are now devoted to neon lighting and art, including the Museum of Neon Art (founded by neon artist Lili Lakich, Los Angeles, 1981), the Neon Museum (Las Vegas, founded 1996), the American Sign Museum (Cincinnati, founded 1999) and the Neon Museum of Philadelphia (founded by Len Davidson, Philadelphia, 1985).
These museums restore and display historical signage that was originally designed as advertising, in addition to presenting exhibits of neon art. Several books of photographs have also been published to draw attention to neon lighting as art. In 1994, Christian Schiess published an anthology of photographs and interviews devoted to fifteen “light artists.”
Thanks New York Times!
Mac Wiseman was born 97 years ago today
Mac Wiseman, 2008
Photo by Tom Pich
Mac Wiseman was born 97 years ago today.
A bluegrass singer, nicknamed “The Voice with a Heart,” Wiseman was one of the cult figures of bluegrass.
Born in Crimora, Virginia, he studied at the Shenandoah Conservatory in Dayton, Virginia — before it moved to Winchester, Virginia in 1960. He started his career as a disc jockey at WSVA-AM in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Wiseman’s musical career began as upright bass player in the band of country singer, Molly O'Day. When Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left Bill Monroe's band, Wiseman became the guitarist for their new band, the Foggy Mountain Boys. Later he played with Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys.
After a performance on Louisiana Hayride, he became popular as solo artist. In the 1950s, he was the star of The Old Dominion Barn Dance on WRVA in Richmond, Virginia.
During the folk revival in the 1960s, Wiseman performed successful concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall. He joined producers Randall Franks and Alan Autry for the In the Heat of the Night cast CD, Christmas Time’s A Comin,’ released on Sonlite and MGM/UA. It became one of the most popular Christmas releases of 1991 and 1992.
Wiseman’s substantial girth and light tenor voice gave rise to the quip that "Mac Wiseman sings like Gene Vincent looks, and looks like Ernest Tubb sings."
Wiseman died in Nashville on February 24, 2019. The cause of death was kidney failure.
Lauren Chapin, child actress who played “Kathy Anderson” on Father Knows Best, is 77 years old today
Lauren Chapin, child actress who played “Kathy Anderson” on Father Knows Best, is 77 years old today.
Chapin was nicknamed "Kitten" on Father Knows Best, which was produced between 1954 and 1960. Her co-stars in the series were Robert Young, Jane Wyatt, Elinor Donahue and Billy Gray.
Before, during and after the show was in its run, Chapin had a troubled childhood. Her father sexually abused her and her mother battled alcoholism. Following the cancellation of Father Knows Best, Chapin married at age 16, was divorced at 18, became a drug addict, turned to prostitution to secure her habit and was sent to a mental institution after she attempted suicide.
After these troubles, Chapin turned to religion in 1979, which she credits with saving her life. She currently manages singers and actors. She also performs in a live interactive version of Father Knows Best for cruise lines, conventions and other events.
She is the co-author of Father Does Know Best — The Lauren Chapin Story (1988) with Andrew Collins. Chapin is a licensed and ordained Christian evangelist and advocate for Israel. She is the younger sister of former child star, Billy Chapin.
General Norman Johnson was born 81 years ago today
General Norman Johnson was born 81 years ago today.
The frontman of Chairmen of the Board and an R&B songwriter and record producer, Johnson made an early start in music when he began singing in his church choir at the age of six. His recording debut came six years later on Atlantic Records, who recorded his group, the Humdingers. The group’s tracks remain unreleased.
In 1961, and following a change in name to The Showmen, Johnson and the group released the single, “It Will Stand,” on Minit Records. The track was a chart hit in both 1961 and 1964 and was a major beach music hit on the Carolina coast.
Although The Showmen recorded other offerings for Minit and Swan, including such hits as "39-21-46"— another beach music hit — they split up in 1968.
Johnson attempted an abortive solo career before joining the then new Invictus label in Detroit. Steered by Holland-Dozier-Holland, Johnson recruited Danny Woods (ex-The Showmen), Harrison Kennedy and Eddie Curtis. He also created Chairmen of the Board.
Their debut single, "Give Me Just a Little More Time," rose to #3 in the U.S. Billboard R&B chart in 1970. Further hits included "(You've Got Me) Dangling on a String" and "Everything's Tuesday."
Johnson commenced a career as songwriter with "Pay to the Piper," becoming a modest success for Chairmen of the Board. Other songs he wrote were successful when recorded by other musicians. These included "Patches" for Clarence Carter (Jerry Reed also recorded a country music cover version).
Invictus Records label-mates Honey Cone recorded the Johnson penned tracks "Want Ads,""Stick Up" and "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show." Also Johnson wrote "Bring the Boys Home" for Freda Payne.
Chairmen of the Board's popularity diminished in the middle of the 1970s, although Johnson and Woods remained together re-billed as the Chairmen.
Johnson tried a solo career again in 1979, and his debut solo album on Arista Records was a modest success. He teamed up again with Woods in the following decade, making a living on the beach music circuit.
In 1993, having lost little of his distinctive vocal style, Johnson released another album, What Goes Around Comes Around, recorded with Woods.
Johnson died on October 13, 2010 at age 69 of lung cancer in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.
Actress Betty Garrett was born 103 years ago today
Betty Garrett: A Personal Story
Garrett, born 103 years ago today, was an actress, comedienne, singer and dancer who originally performed on Broadway before being signed to a film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. While there, she appeared in several musical films before returning to Broadway and making guest appearances on several television series.
Later, she became known for the roles she played in two prominent 1970s sitcoms: Archie Bunker's liberal neighbor, Irene Lorenzo, in All in the Family and landlady, Edna Babish, in Laverne & Shirley.
Very early in her career, Garrett also performed with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre company during the production of Danton’s Death in the 1930s. Her fellow cast members were Joseph Cotten, Ruth Ford, Martin Gabel and Arlene Francis.
In 2001, Garrett returned to Broadway to perform in a revival of Follies at the Belasco Theatre in New York.
I wanted to interview Garrett for an Orson Welles project I was working on. So I sent a letter and flowers to her backstage at the theatre. It worked!
After a performance of Follies, Ms. Garrett invited me, along with my writing partner, George Demas, to a coffee shop near the theatre. She was gracious and talkative and we had wonderful evening.
One story sticks with me. Garrett made her Broadway debut in 1942 in the revue, Of V We Sing. One day while sitting in her dressing room, a security guard called her and said two kids who were trying to sneak into the theatre had used her name when they were caught. She asked the guard to bring them to her dressing room.
Garrett said the young men had no money, but had wanted to see her perform. Instead, they got caught.
Feeling sorry for them, Garrett told them to come back at performance time and she would leave their names and comp tickets at the box office. The kids got very excited and thanked her profusely. Garrett forgot about the incident.
Thirty-one years later, in the fall of 1973, while grocery shopping in LA, a man approached her in the market and told her he was one of the kids she had let in the theatre in New York. Moved, she gave the man tickets for he and his friend to a one-person show she was doing in LA. at the time.
After that show, the two men came back stage to meet her. They told her they were now writers for the hit sitcom, All in the Family, and asked her to audition for a new regular cast member on the show. She auditioned and got the part. This, she said, opened the door to an entire new second career for her on television.
The moral to the story, she said, is to be nice to everyone along life’s journey. You never know when the smallest act of kindness will change your future and result in a profound effect on your life.
Betty Garrett died of an aortic aneurysm in Los Angeles on February 12, 2011 at the age of 91.
Her autobiography, Betty Garrett and Other Songs: A Life on Stage and Screen, is outstanding. It is a book about life in the theatre and the cruel damage done by the Hollywood Blacklist.
A great read!
Above is Garrett with Jack Lemon in My Sister Eileen, 1955
Artie Shaw was born 112 years ago today
Artie Shaw was born 112 years ago today.
A clarinetist, composer and bandleader, Shaw was also an author who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Widely regarded as "one of jazz's finest clarinetists," Shaw led a popular big band in the late 1930s through the early 1940s.
The band’s signature song, a 1938 version of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," was wildly successful and one of the era's defining recordings. Musically restless, Shaw was also an early proponent of Third Stream, which blended classical and jazz. He recorded some small-group sessions that flirted with be-bop before retiring from music in 1954.
In addition to hiring Buddy Rich, Shaw signed Billie Holiday as his band's vocalist in 1938. He became the first white bandleader to hire a full-time black female singer to tour the segregated Southern United States.
However, after recording "Any Old Time," she left the band due to hostility from audiences in the South, as well as from music company executives who wanted a more "mainstream" singer. His band became enormously successful, and his playing was eventually recognized as equal to that of Benny Goodman. Longtime Duke Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard cited Shaw as his favorite clarinet player.
In response to Goodman's nickname, the "King of Swing," Shaw's fans dubbed him the "King of the Clarinet." Shaw, however, felt the titles were reversed. "Benny Goodman played clarinet. I played music," he said.
In 1938, DownBeat Magazine's readers agreed with Shaw's evaluation and named Artie Shaw as the King of Swing. Shaw took himself seriously as an artist and valued experimental and innovative music rather than generic dance and love songs, despite an extremely successful career that sold more than 100 million records.
He fused jazz with classical music by adding strings to his arrangements, experimented with bebop and formed "chamber jazz" groups that utilized such novel sounds as harpsichords or Afro-Cuban music.
Shaw died in 2004 at the age of 94.
May 22, 2022
On this day in 1958 — 64 years ago — Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis arrived at Heathrow Airport with his new "child bride." It changed his career
The arrival in the United Kingdom of one of the biggest figures in rock and roll was looked forward to with great anticipation in May, 1958.
Nowhere in the world were the teenage fans of the raucous music coming out of America more enthusiastic than they were in England, and the coming tour of the great Jerry Lee Lewis promised to be a rousing success.
"Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls Of Fire" had both been massive hits in the UK, and early demand for tickets was great enough that 27 appearances were booked in what promised to be the biggest tour yet by an American rock and roll star.
There was just one problem: Unbeknownst to the British public and the organizers of the coming tour, Jerry Lee Lewis would be traveling to England as a newly married man, with his pretty young wife in tow.
Just how young that wife really was would be revealed on this day in 1958 — 64 years ago — when Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis arrived at Heathrow Airport with his new "child bride."
It was an inquisitive reporter for the Daily Mail named Paul Tanfield who unwittingly broke the scandal when he inquired as to the identity of an especially young woman he'd spotted in the Killer's entourage.
"I'm Myra, Jerry's wife," said Myra Gail Lewis.
Tanfield followed up with a question for the Killer himself:
"And how old is Myra?"
It was at this point that Jerry Lee must have cottoned to the fact that the rest of the world might take a somewhat skeptical view of his third marriage, because the answer he gave was a lie:
"Fifteen."
Myra Gail Lewis was actually only 13-years-old, a fact that would soon come out along with certain other details, such as the fact that she was Jerry Lee's first cousin (once removed) and that the pair had married five months before his divorce from his second wife was made official.
Jerry Lee tried to set minds at ease on this last point — the second marriage was null and void, he explained, because it had taken place before his divorce from his first wife — but even the most skilled public-relations expert would have had a hard time spinning the unfolding story in Jerry Lee's favor.
As the press hounded Jerry Lee and Myra Gail Lewis over the coming week, the Killer tried to go on with business as usual, but his first three shows drew meager audiences, and those that did buy tickets showered him with boos and catcalls.
When the Rank chain of theaters cancelled the rest of his dates and his fashionable Mayfair hotel encouraged him to seek lodging elsewhere, Jerry Lee Lewis left the UK — less than a week after his dramatic arrival on this day in 1958.
Back home, he would face a blacklisting from which his career would never fully recover.
Thanks History.com
Where is Myra, Jerry Lee Lewis’s former wife, today?
Now 77, Myra Gale Brown resides in Duluth, Georgia. Since 1980, she has been a real estate agent in Atlanta.
She married her third husband, Richard Williams, in 1984, and joined his Century 21 office. She became a licensed broker in 1984, and is a recipient of the Million Dollar Life Time Award 2003.
She co-wrote the book, Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis (1982), which was adapted into the film, Great Balls of Fire! (1989). In 2016, she published her memoir, The Spark That Survived.
This week in 1895 — 127 years ago — curiosity seekers filed into a store on lower Broadway in New York City to see the first commercial movie
This week in 1895 — 127 years ago — curiosity seekers filed into a store on lower Broadway in New York City to see two boxers — Albert Griffiths and Charles Burnett — do battle in the ring. The fight they were witnessing, however, had happened weeks before.
The images the audience watched were made of shadow and light — projected onto a screen by a machine called a Panoptikon. It was believed to be the first showing of a motion picture to a paying audience.
“There is considerable room for improvement and many drawbacks have yet to be overcome,” The Photographic Times wrote of the event.
Even so, the magazine continued, “the results obtained are most interesting and often startling. Quite a crowd of people visit the store at each performance, many making their exit wondering ‘how it’s done.’ ”
Thanks New York Times!
Charles Aznavour was born 98 years ago today
Charles Aznavour, his wife, Ulla, with their daughter, Katia, and son, Misha, go swimming at Pampelone Beach, St.-Tropez, June, 1974
Photo by James Andanson
Charles Aznavour was born 98 years ago today.
Aznavour was a French-Armenian singer, songwriter, actor, public activist and diplomat. Besides being one of France's most popular and enduring singers, he was also one of the best-known French singers in the world.
Aznavour is known for his unique tenor voice: clear and ringing in its upper reaches, with gravelly and profound low notes. He appeared in more than sixty movies, composed about a thousand songs (including at least 150 in English, 100 in Italian, 70 in Spanish and 50 in German) and sold well over 100 million records.
He has been recognized as the century's outstanding performer, with nearly 18 percent of the total vote, edging out Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.
Aznavour has sung for presidents, popes and royalty, as well as at humanitarian events, and is the founder of the charitable organization Aznavour for Armenia along with his long-time friend impresario, Levon Sayan.
In 2009, he was appointed ambassador of Armenia to Switzerland, as well as Armenia's permanent delegate to the United Nations at Geneva.
In 2017, his tour continued in Brazil (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro), Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Vienna and Australia (Perth, Sydney, Melbourne).
On October 1, 2018, Aznavour was found dead in a bathtub at his home at Mouriès at the age of 94. He died of cardiorespiratory arrest complicated by an acute pulmonary edema.
Aznavour performs "Yesterday When I Was Young"
Charles Aznavour and Michèle Mercier in Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, 1960
Bernie Taupin is 72 years old today
Bernie Taupin with Elton John, circa 1970s
Bernie Taupin is 72 years old today.
An English lyricist, poet and singer, Taupin is best known for his long-term collaboration with Elton John. He wrote the lyrics for the majority of John’s songs, making them some of the best known in pop-rock's history.
In 1967, Taupin answered an advertisement in the UK's music paper, New Musical Express, that was seeking new songwriters. About the same time, Elton John submitted samples of his work to the paper, and the pair were brought together, collaborating on many projects since.
In 1971, journalist Penny Valentine wrote that "Bernie Taupin's lyrics were to become as important as Elton [John] himself, proved to have a mercurial brilliance. Not just in their atmospheric qualities and descriptive powers, but in the way he handled words to form them into straightforward poems that were easy to relate to."
Much of Taupin's childhood is reflected in his lyrics and poetry. He was born at Flatters Farmhouse, which is located between the village of Anwick and the town of Sleaford in the southern part of Lincolnshire, England. At age 15, he left school and started work as a trainee in the print room of the local newspaper, The Lincolnshire Standard, with aspirations to be a journalist.
He soon left and spent the rest of his teenage years hanging out with friends, hitchhiking the country roads to attend youth club dances in the surrounding villages, playing snooker in the Aston Arms Pub in Market Rasen and drinking. He had worked at several part-time, dead-end jobs when, at age 17, he answered the advertisement that eventually led to his collaboration with Elton John.
Taupin sometimes wrote about specific places in Lincolnshire. For example, "Grimsby" on Caribou was a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a nearby port town often visited by Taupin and his friends. More famously, "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" was inspired by Taupin's experiences in the dance halls and pubs of his youth. More often he wrote in more general autobiographical terms, as in his reference to hitching rides home in "Country Comfort."
These autobiographical references to his rural upbringing continued after his departure for London and a life in show business, with songs such as "Honky Cat," "Tell Me When The Whistle Blows" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," in which he thinks about "going back to my plough."
Taupin's most important influence was his interest in America's Old West, imbuing Tumbleweed Connection and recent songs such as "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore."
When Taupin and Elton decided to write an autobiographical album in 1975, Taupin dubbed himself, "The Brown Dirt Cowboy," in contrast to Elton's "Captain Fantastic." In 1973, Taupin collected all his lyrics up through the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album into a book — Bernie Taupin: The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John.
In addition to the lyrics from the albums, this book contained the lyrics to all the single B-sides, various rarities and Taupin's 1970 spoken-word album. The songs are illustrated by various artists, friends and celebrity guests such as John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. The book is in black and white, except for the cover.
Taupin moved to Southern California from England in the mid-1970s. Since the 1980s, he has been living on a ranch north of Los Angeles near Santa Ynez, California. He co-owned a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles called "Cicada" with then-wife Stephanie Haymes. He co-owned a PBR bucking bull named Little Yellow Jacket, which was recently retired as an unprecedented three-time world champion.
Here is Taupin and Elton John on The Arsenio Hall Show, 1992
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes, was born 163 years ago
It's the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes. He was born 163 years ago.
Doyle was born in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he met Dr. Joseph Bell, a teacher with extraordinary deductive reasoning power. Bell partly inspired Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, years later.
After medical school, Doyle moved to London, where his slow medical practice left him ample free time to write. His first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. Starting in 1891, a series of Holmes stories appeared in The Strand magazine.
The Holmes character enabled Doyle to leave his medical practice in 1891 and devote himself to writing, but the author soon grew weary of his creation. In The Final Problem, he killed off both Holmes and his nemesis, Dr. Moriarty, only to resuscitate Holmes later due to popular demand.
In 1902, Doyle was knighted for his work with a field hospital in South Africa.
In addition to dozens of Sherlock Holmes stories and several novels, Doyle wrote history, pursued whaling and engaged in many adventures and athletic endeavors. After his son died in World War I, Doyle became a dedicated spiritualist.
He died in 1930.
Above, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his garden, Bignell Wood, New Forest, 1927
Photo from Fox Photos
Laurence Olivier was born 115 years ago today
Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier on the set of The Prince and The Showgirl, 1957. Olivier also directed the film and was producer.
Olivier showed a strong dislike of Monroe during the production of the film. The relationship between Olivier and Monroe worsened when Olivier said "try and be sexy" to her. She never forgave him for the comment.
The production of this film served as the backdrop for the 2011 film, My Week with Marilyn.
Laurence Olivier was born 115 years ago today.
An English actor, director and producer, Olivier is considered one of the greatest actors of the 20th century. During a six-decade career, he played many roles on stage and screen. His three Shakespeare films as actor-director, Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), are among the pinnacles of the bard at the cinema.
On stage, his more than 120 roles included Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo, Hamlet, Uncle Vanya and Archie Rice in The Entertainer. He appeared in nearly sixty films, including William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939) and Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940).
Olivier was the founding artistic director of the National Theatre Company in 1963, a post in which he remained for a decade. He had earlier filled the same post at the Old Vic after the Second World War. The largest stage in the National Theatre building was later named after him.
Olivier retired from the stage in 1974, but his work on-screen continued until the year before his death in 1989.
For television, among the works he starred in were Long Day's Journey into Night (1973), The Merchant of Venice (1973), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), Brideshead Revisited (1981) and King Lear (1983). His later films for cinema included Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth (1972), John Schlesinger's Marathon Man (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978).
Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was "the greatest actor in the English-speaking world" and others said he was the best in the world, or that he was the best they would ever see perform. Director Jonathan Miller (who directed Olivier in The Merchant of Venice) warned: "I hope that no actor tries to copy him."
Olivier's received twelve Oscar nominations, with two wins (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was the youngest actor to be knighted as a Knight Bachelor in 1947. He was the first to be elevated to the peerage two decades later. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright.
Here is Olivier’s “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet, 1948
May 21, 2022
On this day in 1955 — 67 years ago — an unknown Chuck Berry paid his first visit to a recording studio and cut the record that would make him famous: "Maybellene"
Chuck Berry, New York City, June 16, 2006
Photo by Frank Beacham
John Lennon once famously said that "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'"
That's how foundational Berry's contributions were to the music that changed America and the world beginning in the mid-1950s.
Even more than Elvis Presley, who was an incomparable performer, but of other people's songs, Chuck Berry created the do-it-yourself template that most rock-and-rollers still seek to follow.
If there can be said to be a single day on which his profound influence on the sound and style of rock and roll began, it was this day in 1955 — 67 years ago — when an unknown Chuck Berry paid his first visit to a recording studio and cut the record that would make him famous: "Maybellene."
Berry was a part-time professional musician in his native St. Louis and primarily a performer of the blues. But he was also an avid experimenter with other sounds.
On a visit to Chicago in May, 1955, Berry approached his idol, the great bluesman Muddy Waters, to ask for career advice. Waters pointed him in the direction of his record label, Chess Records, where Berry managed a face-to-face meeting with Leonard Chess and an invitation to return for an audition later that week.
When Berry returned, he hoped that Chess would sign him on the strength of one of his blues numbers, but it was a strange rhythm-and-blues/country-western hybrid called "Ida Red" that caught Chess's ear. Before it was recorded, "Ida Red' got new lyrics to go with a new title — "Maybellene" — but it retained the totally original sound that Berry had given it.
Berry returned to St. Louis unsure of what would come of his Chicago recording session. In the meantime, Leonard Chess made a business deal that was commonplace at the time, trading co-songwriting credit and a third of royalties to the prominent DJ — Alan Freed — in exchange for his help in promoting "Maybellene."
While audiences legitimately went wild over the backbeat-meets-hillbilly sound of "Maybellene," it surely did not hurt the record's chances of success to have Freed play the single for two hours straight during his WINS radio show in the early summer of 1955.
Chuck Berry had returned to his part-time job in construction and begun training to be a hairdresser when "Maybellene" hit the airwaves.
After "Maybellene" became a #1 R&B hit and a #5 pop hit — the first hit rock-and-roll single by a black performer — Berry set down his hammer and scissors in favor of his Gibson ES-350T and major place in American cultural history.
Here, Berry performs “Maybellene” on Midnight Special, 1973
Thanks History.com
Ron Isley of the Isley Brothers is 81 years old today
Ron Isley is 81 years old today.
A recording artist, songwriter, record producer and occasional actor, Isley was the lead singer and founding member of the Isley Brothers.
Ronald Isley was born the third of six brothers (O'Kelly Isley, Jr., Rudolph Isley, Ronald, Vernon Isley, Ernie Isley, Marvin Isley) to Sallye Bernice (Bell) and O'Kelly Isley, Sr. Like many of his siblings, Isley began his career in the church. He began singing at the age of three, winning a $25 war bond for singing at a spiritual contest at the Union Baptist Church.
By the age of seven, he was singing on-stage at venues such as the Regal Theater in Chicago, alongside Dinah Washington and other notables. By his early teens, he was singing regularly with his brothers in church tours and also first appeared on TV on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.
In 1957, sixteen-year-old Ronald and his two elder brothers, Kelly, 19, and, Rudy, 18, moved to New York City, recording doo-wop for local labels before landing a major deal with RCA Records in 1959, where the trio wrote and released their anthemic, "Shout."
By the summer of 1959, the Isley family had moved from Cincinnati to a home in Englewood, New Jersey. For much of the Isley Brothers' duration, Ron Isley would remain the group's consistent member of the group as well as the lead vocalist for most of the group's tenure with sporadic lead shares with his older brothers.
In 1969, Ron and his brothers reformed T-Neck Records in a need to produce themselves without the control of record labels, forming the label shortly after ending a brief tenure with Motown.
In 1973, the group's style and sound drastically changed following the release of the 3 + 3 album, where brothers Ernie Isley and Marvin Isley and in-law Chris Jasper permanently enter the brothers' lineup, writing the music and lyrics to the group's new sound.
The younger brothers had been providing instrumental help for the brothers since the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, Ronald was living in Teaneck, New Jersey.
After Kelly Isley's death in 1986 and Rudy Isley's exit to fulfill a dream of ministry in 1989, Ronald has carried on with the Isley Brothers name either as a solo artist or with accompanying help from the group's younger brothers, much more prominently, Ernie Isley.
In 1990, Isley scored a Top 10 duet with Rod Stewart with a cover of his brothers' hit, "This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)."
In 2003, Ronald recorded a solo album, Here I Am: Bacharach Meets Isley, with Burt Bacharach. In addition, he became a sought-after hook singer for R&B veteran R. Kelly, and hip-hop acts such as Warren G., 2Pac and UGK.
Ronald released his first solo album, Mr. I, on November 30, 2010. The album includes the first single "No More." It debuted at #50 on the Billboard 200, selling 22,243 copies. It was his first solo album to crack that chart. In 2013, Ronald released his second solo album with eOne. The album includes the first single, "Dinner and A Movie."
Isley was charged with and convicted of tax evasion charges. The Hollywood Reporter reports Isley was sentenced to 37 months in prison, instead of the maximum sentence, which would have sent Isley to jail for 26 years.
Isley's sentence was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, and was released in 2010.
Fats Waller was born 118 years ago today
Fats Waller was born 118 years ago today.
Born as Thomas Wright Waller, Fats was a jazz pianist, organist, composer, singer and comedic entertainer. He was the youngest of four children born to Adeline Locket Waller and Reverend Edward Martin Waller. He started playing the piano when he was six and graduated to the organ of his father's church four years later.
At 14, Waller was playing the organ at Harlem's Lincoln Theater. Within a year, he had composed his first rag. His first piano solos, "Muscle Shoals Blues" and "Birmingham Blues," were recorded in October, 1922 when he was 18 years old.
Waller was the prize pupil — and later friend and colleague — of stride pianist, James P. Johnson. Overcoming opposition from his clergyman father, Waller became a professional pianist at 15, working in cabarets and theaters. In 1918, he won a talent contest playing Johnson's "Carolina Shout," a song he learned from watching a player piano perform it.
Waller was one of the most popular performers of his era, finding critical and commercial success in his homeland and in Europe. He was also a prolific songwriter and many songs he wrote or co-wrote are still popular, such as "Honeysuckle Rose," "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Squeeze Me."
Fellow pianist and composer, Oscar Levant, dubbed Waller "the black Horowitz." Waller composed many novelty tunes in the 1920s and 1930s and sold them for relatively small sums. When the compositions became hits, other songwriters claimed them as their own. Many standards are alternatively and sometimes controversially attributed to Waller.
Waller's son, Maurice, wrote in his 1977 biography of his father, that once he was playing "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby” his father complained. Waller admonished his son never to play that song in his hearing, saying that he had to sell that song when he needed some money.
He even made a recording of it in 1938 with Adelaide Hall who, coincidentally, had introduced the song to the world (at Les Ambassadeurs Club in New York in 1928), in which he played the tune but made fun of the lyrics. Likewise, Maurice noted his father's objections whenever he heard "On the Sunny Side of the Street" played on the radio.
The anonymous sleeve notes on the 1960 RCA (UK) album, Handful of Keys, state that Waller copyrighted over 400 new songs, many of which co-written with Andy Razaf, his closest collaborator. Razaf described his partner as "the soul of melody...a man who made the piano sing...both big in body and in mind...known for his generosity...a bubbling bundle of joy.“
Gene Sedric, a clarinetist who played with Waller on some of his 1930s recordings, is quoted in these same sleeve notes recalling Waller's recording technique with considerable admiration: "Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number."
His playing once put him at risk of injury. Waller was kidnapped in Chicago leaving a performance in 1926. Four men bundled him into a car and took him to the Hawthorne Inn, owned by Al Capone. Waller was ordered inside the building, and found a party in full swing. Gun to his back, he was pushed towards a piano and told to play.
A terrified Waller realized he was the "surprise guest" at Capone's birthday party, and took comfort that the gangsters did not intend to kill him. According to rumor, Waller played for three days. When he left the Hawthorne Inn, he was very drunk, extremely tired and had earned thousands of dollars in cash from Capone and other party-goers as tips.
In 1926, Waller began his recording association with Victor Records, his principal record company for the rest of his life, with the organ solos "St. Louis Blues" and his own composition, "Lenox Avenue Blues."
Although he recorded with various groups, including Morris's Hot Babes (1927), Fats Waller's Buddies (1929) (one of the earliest interracial groups to record) and McKinney's Cotton Pickers (1929), his most important contribution to the Harlem stride piano tradition was a series of solo recordings of his own compositions: "Handful of Keys," "Smashing Thirds," "Numb Fumblin'" and "Valentine Stomp" (1929).
Waller contracted pneumonia and died at age 39 on a cross country train trip near Kansas City on December 15, 1943, after making a final recording session with an interracial group in Detroit that included white trumpeter Don Hirleman.
He was on his way back to Hollywood for more film work, after the smash success of "Stormy Weather." Coincidentally, as the train with the body of Waller stopped in Kansas City, so stopped a train with his dear friend Louis Armstrong on board.
Marc Ribot is 67 years old today
Marc Ribot, New York City, 2007
Photo by Frank Beacham
Marc Ribot is 67 years old today.
A guitarist and composer, Ribot’s work has touched on many styles, including no wave, free jazz, rock and Cuban music.
Born in Newark, Ribot has worked extensively as a session guitarist, performing and recording with Tom Waits, John Zorn, David Sylvian, Jack McDuff, Wilson Pickett, The Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsay, T-Bone Burnett, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Cibo Matto, Elysian Fields, Sam Phillips, Elvis Costello, David Poe, Allen Ginsberg, Foetus and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
Add to that Susana Baca, The Black Keys, Stan Ridgway, Vinicio Capossela, Alain Bashung, Lyenn, Hector Zazou, McCoy Tyner, Elton John, Madeline Peyroux, Marianne Faithfull, Leonid Fedorov, Tonio K, Andres Calamaro, Anarchist Republic of Bzzz, Diana Krall and Mike Patton.
Ribot's earliest session work was featured on Tom Waits' Rain Dogs (1985) and helped define Waits' new musical direction. Ribot worked with Waits on many of his following albums including Franks Wild Years (1987), Big Time (1988), Mule Variations (1999), Real Gone (2004), Orphans (2006) and Bad as Me (2011). He has appeared on Elvis Costello's Spike, Mighty Like a Rose (1991) and Kojak Variety (1995).
Ribot appeared on numerous recordings by John Zorn, including many of Zorn's Filmworks recordings, solo performances on Zorn's Masada Guitars (also featuring Bill Frisell and Tim Sparks) and is a member of Zorn's Bar Kokhba Sextet and Electric Masada.
Ribot's first two albums featured The Rootless Cosmopolitans, followed by an album of works by Frantz Casseus for solo guitar. Further releases found him working in a variety of band and solo contexts including two albums with his self-described "dance band," Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), featuring compositions by Arsenio Rodríguez.
Ribot admitted to Guitar Player a relatively limited technical facility due to learning to play right-handed despite being left-handed: "That's a real limit, one that caused me a lot of grief when I was working with Jack McDuff and realizing I wasn't following in George Benson's footsteps. I couldn't be a straight-ahead jazz contender if you held a gun to my head, but that begs the question of whether I would want to be one."
He currently performs and records with his group, Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog, with bassist, Shahzad Ismaily, and drummer, Ches Smith, of the avant-garde band, Secret Chiefs 3.
A biographical documentary film about Marc Ribot was made, called The Lost String.
Here, Ribot and Ceramic Dog perform “Masters of the Internet”
Robert Creeley, poet, was born 97 years ago
Robert Creeley, poet, was born 97 years ago.
Creeley wrote more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.
Creeley served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo.
Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine; Buffalo, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Creeley died at sunrise on March 30, 2005 in Odessa, Texas of complications from pneumonia.
Above, Creeley in 1972
Photo by Elsa Dorfman
Albert Grossman was born 96 years ago today
Albert Grossman was born 96 years ago today.
Grossman was the manager of many of the most popular and successful performers of folk and folk-rock music, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Band and Odetta.
Grossman was born in Chicago, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who worked as tailors. He attended Lane Technical High School and graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago with a degree in economics.
After university, he worked for the Chicago Housing Authority — leaving in the late 1950s to go into the club business. Seeing folk star Bob Gibson perform at the Off Beat Room in 1956 prompted Grossman's idea of a “listening room” to showcase Gibson and other talent, as the folk revival movement grew. The result was the Gate of Horn in the basement of the Rice Hotel, where Jim (later Roger) McGuinn began his career as a 12-string guitarist.
Grossman moved into managing some of the acts who appeared at his club and in 1959, he joined forces with George Wein, who had founded the Newport Jazz Festival, to start up the Newport Folk Festival. At the first Newport Folk Festival, Grossman told New York Times critic Robert Shelton: "The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music."
Because Grossman was committed to commercial success for his clients, and was frequently surrounded by socialist enthusiasts of the American folk music revival, his manner could generate hostility. This is illustrated by this description of Grossman's presence in the Greenwich Village folk scene by Dylan biographer and critic Michael Gray:
"He was a pudgy man with derisive eyes, with a regular table at Gerde's Folk City from which he surveyed the scene in silence, and many people loathed him.
“In a milieu of New Left reformers and folkie idealists campaigning for a better world, Albert Grossman was a breadhead, seen to move serenely and with deadly purpose like a barracuda circling shoals of fish."
In 1961, Grossman put together Mary Travers, Noel Stookey and Peter Yarrow as the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. They quickly achieved success when their eponymous first album entered the Billboard Top Ten in 1962.
The group had been avidly pursued by Atlantic Records, who were on the verge of signing them when the deal inexplicably fell through. The group signed with Warner Bros. Records instead.
Atlantic's executives later discovered that it was because music publisher Artie Mogull had introduced Grossman to Warner executive Herman Starr, from whom Grossman was able to extract an unprecedented deal that gave the trio complete creative control over the recording and packaging of their music.
Over the course of his career, Grossman's client list included Todd Rundgren, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, John Lee Hooker, Ian and Sylvia, Phil Ochs (early in his career), Gordon Lightfoot, Richie Havens, The Pozo-Seco Singers, The Band, the Electric Flag, Jesse Winchester and Janis Joplin.
On August 20, 1962, Dylan signed a contract which made Grossman his manager. Grossman also extended hospitality to Dylan at his home in Woodstock in upstate New York. Dylan liked the area so much he purchased a house there in 1965.
The cover of Dylan's album, Bringing It All Back Home, was photographed at Grossman's home in Woodstock. The woman in the cover photo with Dylan, in the red trouser suit, was Grossman's wife, Sally.
Having returned to Woodstock at the end of his grueling 1966 World Tour, Dylan was reportedly on his way home from Grossman's house in West Saugerties when he suffered the legendary motorcycle accident that precipitated his eight-year withdrawal from touring.
When managing both Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Grossman brought the trio Dylan's song, "Blowin' in the Wind," which they promptly recorded (on a single take) and successfully released.
In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan describes first encountering Grossman at the Gaslight cafe: "He looked like Sydney Greenstreet from the film, The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence, always dressed in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at his corner table. Usually when he talked, his voice was loud like the booming of war drums. He didn't talk so much as growl."
When Bob Dylan was about to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival in August, 1969, English critic Michael Gray asked Grossman about the rumor that The Beatles might appear on-stage with Dylan. Grossman replied, sotto voce: "Of course, the Beatles would like to join Bob Dylan on stage. I should like to fly to the moon."
The contracts between Dylan and Grossman were officially dissolved on July 17, 1970, prompted by Dylan's earlier realization that Grossman had taken 50 percent of his song publishing rights in a hastily signed contract.
When Grossman signed Janis Joplin and her four bandmates from Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1967, he told them he would not tolerate any intravenous drug use, and all five agreed to abide by the rule. When he discovered, in the spring of 1969, that Joplin was injecting drugs anyway, he did not confront her.
Instead, in June, 1969, he took out a life insurance policy guaranteeing him $200,000 in the event she died in an accident. His yearly premium was $3,500.
On October 4, 1970, Grossman's most famous remaining client, Janis Joplin, died suddenly from a heroin overdose. Grossman refused to say a word about her death to any journalists or colleagues in the music business, leaving his employee, Myra Friedman, to handle the phone calls that flooded their office.
According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, Grossman's "feelings about the loss of his most valuable client are not known." What is known is that in 1974, by which time his only living clients were the members of The Band, he kept busy with Joplin's legacy.
The San Francisco Associated Indemnity Corporation challenged him on his collection of $200,000 from his life insurance policy, which led to a bizarre civil trial in the spring of that year. The insurer tried to prove that the singer's death was a suicide, not an accidental overdose, as had been determined by Dr. Thomas Noguchi.
Grossman testified that he had never known the extent of Joplin's substance abuse when she was alive, and that he secured the accidental death policy "with air crashes in mind." He won the case and collected $112,000.
In 1974, he also assisted Howard Alk with the creation of the feature-length documentary, Janis, locating and using black and white film footage in which the singer says she is satisfied with Grossman as her manager.
In 1969, Grossman established the Bearsville Recording Studio near Woodstock, and in 1970 he founded Bearsville Records, which evolved from his brief partnership with the Ampex company to establish a record label of the same name.
Although that venture was short-lived — Todd Rundgren's debut solo album, Runt, was one of its few successful releases — this soon led to the establishment of Grossman's own Bearsville Records label, which was originally distributed through Ampex, and then by Warner Bros. Records.
As well as Rundgren's solo recordings and those of his band, Utopia, the label also recorded acts including Jesse Winchester, Foghat, Gil Evans, Paul Butterfield, Sparks, Felix Cavaliere, Randy Vanwarmer, Lazarus, Jesse Frederick, Roger Powell, NRBQ and The dB's.
Grossman died of a heart attack on January 25, 1986, while flying on the Concorde, at age 59. He was en route to London with a plan to sign an unknown British singer to a contract. He is buried behind his own Bearsville Theater near Woodstock, New York.
Grossman charged his clients 25 percent commission (industry standards were 15 percent). He is quoted as saying, "Every time you talk to me you're ten percent smarter than before. So I just add ten percent on to what all the dummies charge for nothing."
Grossman with Bob Dylan in London, 1966
Above photo by Barry Feinstein
Touch of Evil, classic thriller written, directed and starring Orson Welles, was released in New York City 64 years ago today
Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan, a dirty cop who rules a corrupt, drug-infested border-town in Touch of Evil, 1958
Touch of Evil, classic thriller written, directed and starring Orson Welles, was released in New York City 64 years ago today.
The screenplay for Touch of Evil was loosely based on the novel, Badge of Evil, by Whit Masterson. Along with Welles, the cast includes Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich.
Touch of Evil is one of the last examples of film noir in the genre's classic era from the early 1940s until the late 1950s. Since its release, the film's reputation has grown in stature, and it is now widely regarded as one of Welles's strongest films.
There are two stories as to how Welles ended up directing Touch of Evil.
Charlton Heston recalled that Welles was originally hired to act in the film only, not to direct or write. Universal was keen to secure Heston for the lead, but he wanted the studio to confirm the director before he signed on. After learning that Welles was in the cast, Heston expressed his greater interest in starring if Welles were directing.
The other story is that Welles had recently worked with producer Albert Zugsmith, known as the "King of the Bs," on a film called Man in the Shadow and was interested in directing something for him. Zugsmith offered him a pile of scripts, of which Welles asked for the worst to prove he could make a great film out of a bad script. At the time, the script was called Badge of Evil, after a Whit Masterson novel on which it was based.
Welles did a rewrite and took it into production. After a decade in Europe during which he completed only a few films, Welles was eager to direct for Hollywood again, so he agreed to take only an acting fee for the role of Quinlan.
A number of notable actors pop up in roles. Dennis Weaver plays a night clerk at a motel. Heston liked Weaver and his film acting work. Zsa Zsa Gabor, who appears briefly as the impresario of a strip club, was a friend of the producer. Welles's old friend, Joseph Calleia, portrays Quinlan's betrayed partner. Many of the actors worked for lower wages just to make a film with Welles.
Marlene Dietrich's role was a surprise to the producers and they raised her fee so they could advertise her involvement. Welles's friend and Mercury Theatre colleague, Joseph Cotten, appears uncredited as a police officer.
Welles wrapped production on time, delivered a rough cut to Universal and was convinced that his Hollywood career was back on the rails. However, the film was then re-edited (and in part re-shot) by Universal International pictures.
The editing process was protracted and disputed, and the version eventually released was not the film Universal or Welles had hoped for. It was released as a B-movie, the lower half of a double feature.
The A-movie was The Female Animal, starring Hedy Lamarr, produced by Albert Zugsmith and directed by Harry Keller, whom the studio had hired to direct the re-shot material in Touch of Evil. The two films even had the same cameraman, Russell Metty. Welles's film was given little publicity despite the many stars in the cast.
Though it had little commercial success in the U.S., it was well received in Europe, particularly by critics like future filmmaker, François Truffaut. Welles's rough cut as submitted to Universal no longer exists. That cut was worked on and trimmed down by Universal staff, and in late 1957 Universal decided to perform some reshoots.
Welles claimed these were done without his knowledge, but Universal claimed that Welles ignored the studio's requests to return and undertake further work. It was at this point that Keller came aboard. Some of his material was entirely new, others replaced Welles scenes.
Welles screened the new cut and wrote a 58-page memo to Universal's head of production, Edward Muhl, detailing what he thought needed to be done to make the film work. However, many of his suggestions went unheeded and Touch of Evil was eventually released in a version running 93 minutes.
In the mid-1970s, Universal discovered that it held a 108-minute print of Touch of Evil in its archives. Aware that there was a growing audience of cineastes with a strong interest in Welles's work, the studio released this version to cinemas in 1976 and later issued it on video, billing it as "complete, uncut and restored."
In fact, this print was not a restoration at all, but a preview version which post-dated the Welles memo but pre-dated the release version. While it did feature some vital Welles scenes that Universal cut from the release version, the preview version also featured more of Keller's material than the release version.
In 1998, Walter Murch, working from all available material, re-edited the film based on the Welles memo, with Bob O'Neil, Universal's director of film restoration, and Bill Varney, Universal's Vice President of Sound Operations, participating in the restoration.
As Welles's rough cut no longer exists, no true "director's cut" is possible, but Murch was able to assemble a version incorporating most of the existing material, omitting some of the Keller scenes (though some were retained, either because they had replaced Welles scenes which no longer existed and were necessary to the plot, or because Welles had approved of their inclusion). In addition, some of Welles's complaints concerned subtle sound and editing choices, and Murch re-edited the material accordingly.
Notable changes include the removal of the credits and Henry Mancini's music from the three-minute opening shot, crosscutting between the main story and Janet Leigh's subplot, and the removal of Harry Keller's hotel lobby scene.
Rick Schmidlin produced the 1998 edit, which had a limited but successful theatrical release (again by Universal) and was subsequently made available on DVD. The DVD includes a reproduction of the 58-page memo.
Originally scheduled to be premiered at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival with Janet Leigh, Walter Murch and Rick Schmidlin attending, the screening was canceled at the eleventh hour after threats of litigation from Welles's daughter, Beatrice Welles. She issued similar threats against some parties who tried to show or alter her father's work (such as the completion of Welles's film, The Other Side of the Wind). The reason given for the litigation was that Beatrice Welles was not consulted for the restoration.
The film opens with a three-minute, twenty-second tracking shot widely considered by critics as one of the greatest long takes in cinema history.
In 1993, Touch of Evil was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Charlie's Place: Photo Essay
- The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
Mill Town Murder: Photo Essay
- On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
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