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September 25, 2021
Ian Tyson, of the 1960s duo, Ian and Sylvia, is 88 years old today
Ian and Sylvia, 1974
Photo from the Toronto Telegram
Ian Tyson is 88 years old today.
The Canadian singer-songwriter, best known for his song "Four Strong Winds,” was half of the duo, Ian & Sylvia.
Tyson was born to British immigrants in Victoria in 1933, and grew up in Duncan B.C. A rodeo rider in his late teens and early twenties, he took up the guitar while recovering from an injury he sustained in a fall.
He made his singing debut at the Heidelberg Café in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1956 and played with a rock and roll band, "The Sensational Stripes." After graduation from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958, Tyson moved to Toronto, Ontario where he worked as a commercial artist.
There he performed in local clubs and in 1959 began to sing on occasion with Sylvia Fricker. By early 1959, Tyson and Fricker were performing part-time at the Village Corner as "Ian & Sylvia." The pair became a full-time musical act in 1961 and married four years later.
In 1969, they formed and fronted the group, The Great Speckled Bird. Residing in southern Alberta, Tyson toured all over the world. Tyson's first marriage, to Sylvia Fricker Tyson, ended in an amicable divorce in 1975.
Their son, Clay, (Clayton Dawson Tyson, born 1966) was also a musical performer. He later moved to a career modifying racing bikes.
In 1989, Tyson was inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame.
Here, Tyson performs his song, “Saddle Bronc Girl,” 2011
Ian & Sylvia Tyson are interviewed in Studio Q
Ian and Sylvia perform Dylan’s “Tears of Rage,” 1970
Sylvia Tyson of Ian and Sylvia and Terri Thal, Bob Dylan’s first manager and the former wife of Dave Van Ronk, in Washington Square Park, 2015
Photo by Frank Beacham
Erik Darling, a songwriter and a folk music artist who was an important influence on the folk scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was born 88 years ago today
Erik Darling, a songwriter and a folk music artist who was an important influence on the folk scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was born 88 years ago today.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Darling was inspired by The Weavers. In the '50s, he formed The Tunetellers, which evolved into The Tarriers with actor/singer, Alan Arkin. Their version of the "Banana Boat Song" reached #4 on the Billboard charts.
In April, 1958, Darling replaced Pete Seeger in The Weavers, although he continued working club dates with The Tarriers until November, 1959. Darling also recorded three solo albums. His second solo effort, True Religion, for Vanguard in 1961 was influential on younger folkies of the day.
Darling left the Weavers in June, 1962 to work as a soloist on the emerging coffeehouse circuit. That summer he formed a jazz-folk trio, The Rooftop Singers, with longtime friend, Bill Svanoe, and jazz singer, Lynn Taylor. Intended as a studio-only project for Vanguard, the group landed an unexpected #1 pop hit with the song, "Walk Right In."
Don McLean who became friends with Darling in 1961, looked back on Darling as “a genuine philosopher and perfectionist.” McClean said he appreciated the time Darling spent with him in his early days. “Undivided mental attention to every aspect of music making and performing is a hallmark of Erik’s work, and I believe some of that rubbed off on me,” McClean said.
In 1967, Darling and Paul Bennett were co-credited for writing the song, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," by Quicksilver Messenger Service, which appears to be a medley of Darling's 1958 song "St. John's River," and Joan Baez's recording of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," originally written by Anne Bredon.
Darling died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2008 from lymphoma at the age of 74.
Here, Darling performs “On My Journey” with the Weavers at Carnegie Hall in 1960
The Weavers with Erik Darling perform “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”
F for Fake, the iconic documentary by Orson Welles, was released 48 years ago today
F for Fake, the iconic documentary by Orson Welles, was released 48 years ago today.
Known as Truths and Lies in French, F for Fake was directed by and starred Welles and co-written with Oja Kodar, his companion. It focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger.
de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres and has been described as a kind of film essay.
Far from serving as a traditional documentary on Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion, Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving and Welles as himself.
In addition to the 85-minute film, Welles also shot and edited a self-contained nine-minute short film as a "trailer," almost entirely composed of original material not found in the main film itself.
Several narratives are woven together throughout the film, including those of de Hory, Irving, Welles, Howard Hughes and Kodar. About de Hory, we learn that he was a struggling artist who turned to forgery out of desperation, only to see the greater share of the profits from his deceptions go to doubly unscrupulous art dealers.
As partial compensation for that injustice, he is maintained in a villa in Ibiza by one of his dealers. What is only hinted at in Welles's documentary is that de Hory had recently served a two-month sentence in a Spanish prison for homosexuality and consorting with criminals. de Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles' film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities.
Irving's original part in F for Fake was as de Hory's biographer, but his part grew unexpectedly at some point during production. There has not always been agreement among commentators over just how that production unfolded, but the now-accepted story is that the director, François Reichenbach, shot a documentary about de Hory and Irving before giving his footage to Welles, who then shot additional footage with Reichenbach as his cinematographer.
In the time between the shooting of Reichenbach's documentary and the finishing of the Welles film, it became known that Irving had perpetrated a hoax of his own, namely a fabricated "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes (the hoax was later fictionalized in the film, The Hoax).
This discovery prompted the shooting of still more footage, which then got woven into F for Fake. Interweaving the narratives even more, there are several pieces of footage in the film showing Welles at a party with de Hory, and, at one point, de Hory even signs a painting with a forgery of Welles' signature.
Some of Hughes' career is outlined in the form of a parody of the "News on the March" sequence in Citizen Kane.
Welles also draws parallels between the de Hory and Irving hoaxes and his own brush with early notoriety by including a recreation of part of his 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama, which had simulated a newscast about a Martian invasion and sparked panic among some listeners.
Exactly one hour before narrating Kodar's story, Welles promises that everything in the next hour of his film will be true. Exactly one hour later, the film tells a story where Kodar sits for a series of nudes for Pablo Picasso after getting him to agree to give her the finished portraits, and then selling not those very portraits but fake Picassos in their place.
The story climaxes with Welles and Kodar re-enacting a tense exchange between Picasso and Kodar's grandfather, the alleged forger of the paintings, before Welles reminds the viewer that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour and that "for the last 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off."
John Howard Lawson — one of the "Hollywood Ten" writers who went to jail — was born 127 years ago today
The Hollywood Ten
John Howard Lawson — one of the "Hollywood Ten" writers who went to jail — was born 127 years ago today.
A writer, Lawson was head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA. He was also the organization's cultural manager, and answered directly to V.J. Jerome, the Party's New York-based cultural chief.
He was the first president in the Writers Guild of America, West after they changed from their name from Screen Writers Guild.
In 1928, Lawson moved to Hollywood where he wrote scripts for films such as The Ship for Shanghai, Bachelor Apartment and Goodbye Love. In the winter of 1930-1931, it was at this time during the Great Depression that Lawson wrote Success Story.
The Theatre Guild rejected the script, but Harold Clurman, a reader for them, had recently just formed the Group Theatre (New York) and needed new scripts. Clurman and Lawson reworked the play during the summer of 1932, and Success Story opened on September 26, 1932 for 121 performances.
During the 1930s, leftists accused Lawson of having a lack of ideological and political commitment. New Playwrights Theatre associate Mike Gold attacked him in The New Masses on April 10, 1934, calling him a "A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time" who wrote adolescent works that lacked moral fiber or clear ideas.
Lawson responded a week later in The New Masses in the article "'Inner Conflict' and Proletarian Art." He cited his middle-class childhood as the reason why he could fully understand the working people. He also recognized that his prosperity and Hollywood connections were suspect in the fight for workers' rights.
Due to the criticism, Lawson joined the Communist Party and began a program of educating himself about the proletarian cause. He would soon travel throughout the poverty-stricken South to study bloody labor conflicts in Alabama and Georgia.
While in the South, he would submit articles to the Daily Worker which got him arrested numerous times. These experiences would inspire his next play, Marching Song. It was put on by the radical Theatre Union and it opened on February 17, 1937 and ran for sixty-one performances.
Lawson, who joined the American Communist Party in 1934, made several films that were political, including Blockade (1938), which starred Henry Fonda. It was a film on the Spanish Civil War for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story.
Lawson also wrote Counter-Attack (1945), a tribute to the Soviet-USA alliance during the Second World War. He also wrote more innocuous films, such as the critically acclaimed, Algiers (1938), and the Humphrey Bogart vehicles, Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic, in 1943.
After the World War II, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. In September 1947, the HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood.
These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses.” During their interviews they named several individuals whom they accused of holding left-wing views.
Lawson appeared before the HUAC on October 29, 1947, but like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and Ring Lardner Jr, he refused to answer any questions.
Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The HUAC and U.S. appeals courts, however, disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress and Lawson was sentenced to twelve months in Ashland Prison and fined $1,000.
Blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, Lawson moved to Mexico where he began writing Marxist interpretations of drama and film-making such as The Hidden Heritage (1950), Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) and Film: The Creative Process (1964). He also wrote one of the first anti-apartheid movies, Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym.
After he was blacklisted, he taught at several universities including Stanford University, Loyola Marymount University and Los Angeles University of Judaism.
In his book, Film in the Battle of Ideas, Lawson asserted that "the rulers of the United States take the film very seriously as an instrument of propaganda" and that the influence of Hollywood movies is utilized to "poison the minds of U.S. working-class people" and that inaccurately describes the reality of U.S. working-class life.
Lawson’s writing on techniques in play and screenwriting are highly respected today.
Robert McKee used Lawson’s work in courses I took from him over the years and later borrowed and credited Lawson for many key ideas in his book, Story.
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes was born 85 years ago today
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes, Chicago, 1991
Photo by James Fraher
Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes was born 85 years ago today.
A Delta blues guitar player and vocalist, Barnes — along R. L. Burnside, Big Jack Johnson, Paul "Wine" Jones and James "Super Chikan" Johnson — were present-day exponents of an edgier, electrified version of the raw, uncut Delta blues sound.
Born in Longwood, Washington County, Mississippi, Barnes got his start in 1960 as a member of the Swinging Gold Coasters, a local Mississippi blues band. He relocated to Chicago in 1964, where he played in bars and clubs, but returned to Mississippi in 1971 and continued to perform locally into the early 1980s.
In 1985, he opened a nightclub, the Playboy Club, and played there with a backing group called the Playboys. They became regional blues favorites and eventually signed to Rooster Blues, who released Barnes's debut effort in 1990.
The album was hailed by Allmusic as "an instant modern classic,” and Guitar Player called Barnes "a wonderfully idiosyncratic guitar player and an extraordinary vocalist by any standard.” Barnes toured the U.S. and Europe following the album's release.
Barnes's career was interrupted in the middle of the decade when he was diagnosed with cancer, and he died of the disease in 1996 in Chicago at age 59.
Here, Barnes performs “I’m Going Back Home” and “Bluebird” in Oxford, Mississippi in 1983
Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 years ago today
Shel Silverstein, circa 1968
Photo by Alice Ochs
Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 years ago today.
Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and attended Roosevelt High School. Later, he went the University of Illinois before he was expelled. He then attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Roosevelt University for three years, until 1953 when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan and Korea.
Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp. "When I was a kid — 12 to 14, around there — I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.
“I had developed my own style. I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."
After returning to Chicago, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.
In 1957, Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments called "Shel Silverstein Visits..." as a feature for Playboy.
Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the Chicago White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa.
Silverstein's passion for music was clear early on as he studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. His musical output included a large catalog of songs — a number of which were hits for other artists, most notably the rock group, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.
He wrote Tompall Glaser's highest-charting solo single "Put Another Log on the Fire," "One's on the Way" (a hit for Loretta Lynn) and "25 Minutes to Go," sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on Death Row with each line counting down one minute closer.
Silverstein also wrote one of Johnny Cash's best known hits, "A Boy Named Sue." Other songs co-written by Silverstein include "the Taker" by Waylon Jennings and "On Susan’s Floor” by Gordon Lightfoot and a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" called: "Father of a Boy Named Sue" which is less known, but he performed the song on television on The Johnny Cash Show.
He also penned a song entitled "F*** 'em" which is lesser known and contained a reference to "f*** children."
Silverstein styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies.
On May 10, 1999, Silverstein died at age 68 of a massive heart attack in Key West, Florida.
William Faulkner was born 124 years ago today
William Faulkner was born 124 years ago today.
A writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career.
He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs in Marshall County.
Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams.
Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Two of his works, A Fable (1954), and his last novel, The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, as sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century. Also on the list were, As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).
Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing. He wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters.
His characters included former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian or working-class Southerners and Southern aristocrats.
Faulkner suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction, at age 64, on July 6, 1962.
September 24, 2021
The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 52 years ago today
Photo by Richard Avedon
The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with the responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 52 years ago today.
The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.
Bobby Seale, the eighth man charged, had his trial severed during the proceedings, lowering the number of defendants from eight to seven. The group was charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. All but Seale were represented by attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass.
The trial, presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman, turned into a circus as the defendants and their attorneys used the court as a platform to attack Nixon, the war, racism and oppression. Their tactics were so disruptive that at one point, Judge Hoffman ordered Seale gagged and strapped to his chair.
The Chicago Seven were indicted for violating the Rap Brown law, which had been tagged onto the Civil Rights Bill earlier that year by conservative senators. The law made it illegal to cross state lines in order to riot or to conspire to use interstate commerce to incite rioting. President Johnson's attorney general, Ramsey Clark, refused to prosecute the case.
When the trial ended in February, 1970, Hoffman found the defendants and their attorneys guilty of 175 counts of contempt of court and sentenced them to terms between two to four years. Although declaring the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, the jury found all but Froines and Weiner guilty of intent to riot. The others were each sentenced to five years and fined $5,000.
However, none served time because in 1972, a Court of Appeal overturned the criminal convictions and eventually most of the contempt charges were dropped as well.
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas born blues singer and guitarist, was born 128 years ago today
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas born blues singer and guitarist, was born 128 years ago today.
Jefferson was one of the most popular blues singers of the 1920s, and has been titled "Father of the Texas Blues." His singing and self-accompaniment were distinctive as a result of his high-pitched voice and originality on the guitar.
Though his recordings sold well, he was not so influential on some younger blues singers of his generation, who could not imitate him as they could other commercially successful artists.
However, later blues and rock and roll musicians attempted to imitate both his songs and his musical style. His recordings would later influence such legends as B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Son House and Robert Johnson.
Lemon Henry Jefferson was born blind near Coutchman, Texas in Freestone County, near present-day Wortham, Texas. He was one of eight children born to sharecroppers Alex and Clarissa Jefferson.
Jefferson began playing the guitar in his early teens, and soon after he began performing at picnics and parties. He became a street musician, playing in East Texas towns in front of barbershops and on corners.
According to his cousin, Alec Jefferson, quoted in the notes for Blind Lemon Jefferson, Classic Sides: “They were rough (times). Men were hustling women and selling bootleg and Lemon was singing for them all night... he'd start singing about eight and go on until four in the morning... mostly it would be just him sitting there and playing and singing all night.”
By the early 1910s, Jefferson began traveling frequently to Dallas, where he met and played with fellow blues musician, Lead Belly.
In Dallas, Jefferson was one of the earliest and most prominent figures in the blues movement developing in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas. He likely moved to Deep Ellum in a more permanent fashion by 1917, where he met Aaron Thibeaux Walker, also known as T-Bone Walker. Jefferson taught Walker the basics of blues guitar, in exchange for Walker's occasional services as a guide.
Until Jefferson, very few artists had recorded solo voice and blues guitar, the first of which was vocalist Sara Martin and guitarist Sylvester Weaver. Jefferson's music is uninhibited and represented the classic sounds of everyday life from a honky-tonk to a country picnic to street corner blues to work in the burgeoning oil fields, a further reflection of his interest in mechanical objects and processes.
Jefferson did what very few had ever done — he became a successful solo guitarist and male vocalist in the commercial recording world. Unlike many artists who were "discovered" and recorded in their normal venues, in December, 1925 or January, 1926, he was taken to Chicago, Illinois, to record his first tracks.
Uncharacteristically, Jefferson's first two recordings from this session were gospel songs ("I Want to be like Jesus in my Heart" and "All I Want is that Pure Religion"), released under the name, Deacon L. J. Bates. This led to a second recording session in March, 1926.
His first releases under his own name — "Booster Blues" and "Dry Southern Blues" — were hits. This led to the release of the other two songs from that session, "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues," which became a runaway success, with sales in six figures.
He recorded about 100 tracks between 1926 and 1929. Forty-three records were issued, all but one for Paramount Records. Unfortunately, Paramount Records' studio techniques and quality were bad, and the resulting recordings sound no better than if they had been recorded in a hotel room.
In fact, in May, 1926, Paramount had Jefferson re-record his hits, "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues," in the superior facilities at Marsh Laboratories, and subsequent releases used that version. Both versions appear on compilation albums and may be compared.
It was largely due to the popularity of artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and contemporaries such as Blind Blake and Ma Rainey that Paramount became the leading recording company for the blues in the 1920s.
Jefferson's earnings reputedly enabled him to buy a car and employ chauffeurs. He was given a Ford car "worth over $700" by Mayo Williams, Paramount's connection with the black community. This was a frequently seen compensation for recording rights in that market.
Jefferson is known to have done an unusual amount of traveling for the time in the American South, which is reflected in the difficulty of pigeonholing his music into one regional category. It was Jefferson's old-fashioned sound and confident musicianship that made him easy to market. His skillful guitar playing and impressive vocal ranges opened the door for a new generation of male solo blues performers, including Furry Lewis, Charlie Patton and Barbecue Bob.
Jefferson died in Chicago on December 19, 1929 of what his death certificate called "probably acute myocarditis." For many years, apocryphal rumors circulated that a jealous lover had poisoned his coffee, but a more likely scenario is that he died of a heart attack after becoming disoriented during a snowstorm.
Some have said that Jefferson died from a heart attack after being attacked by a dog in the middle of the night. More recently, the book, Tolbert's Texas, claimed that he was killed while being robbed of a large royalty payment by a guide escorting him to Union Station to catch a train home to Texas.
Jefferson was buried at Wortham Negro Cemetery (later Wortham Black Cemetery). Far from his grave being kept clean, it was unmarked until 1967, when a Texas Historical Marker was erected in the general area of his plot, the precise location being unknown.
By 1996, the cemetery and marker were in poor condition, but a new granite headstone was erected in 1997. In 2007, the cemetery's name was changed to Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery and his gravesite is kept clean by a cemetery committee in Wortham, Texas.
Here, Jefferson performs “Black Snake Moan”
Gerard "Gerry" Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers, was born 79 years ago today
Gerry Marsden sings “You'll Never Walk Alone” to the Anfield crowd ahead of the European Cup game with HJK Helsinki, November 2, 1982
Gerard "Gerry" Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers, was born 79 years ago today.
An English musician and television personality, Marsden was born at 8 Menzies Street, Toxteth, Liverpool, and his interest in music began at an early age. He remembered standing on top of an air raid shelter singing "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" and getting a great reception from onlookers. He said to himself then, "This is what I want to do.”
Gerry and the Pacemakers was the second group signed by Brian Epstein and remained among his favorite artists. Their first single was "How Do You Do It," recommended by George Martin after it was initially given to The Beatles. This was the first #1 hit for the Pacemakers. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and was released on EMI's Columbia label.
The band's second #1 was "I Like It," followed by "You'll Never Walk Alone." Other singles included "It's Gonna Be Alright," "I'm the One," "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying" and "Ferry Cross the Mersey."
After leaving the Pacemakers — made up of his brother, Fred Marsden, Les Maguire and Les Chadwick — Marsden maintained a low-key career on television, and starred in the West End musical, Charlie Girl, alongside Derek Nimmo and Anna Neagle.
Marsden returned to #1 in the charts twice during the 1980s with re-recordings of two of his old hits, with all profits going to charity.
In 1993, Marsden published his autobiography — I'll Never Walk Alone — co-written with former Melody Maker editor, Ray Coleman.
In September, 2003, Marsden had triple bypass heart surgery at Broad Green Hospital in Liverpool. He had a second heart operation in 2016, and announced his retirement in November, 2018 (nevertheless, he appeared with Take That at their concert at Anfield in June, 2019).
Marsden died on January 3, 2021 at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside, after being diagnosed with a blood infection in his heart. He was 78 years old.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born 125 years ago today
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born 125 years ago today.
An author of novels and short stories, Fitzgerald’s works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.
Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.
The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years; 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000 and 2013. In 1958, his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.
While at a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (1900–1948), the "golden girl," in Fitzgerald's terms, of Montgomery, Alabama youth society. Fitzgerald attempted to lay a foundation for his life with Zelda. Despite working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement.
Scott returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul, to revise The Romantic Egoist. Recast as This Side of Paradise, about the post-WWI flapper generation, it was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919 and Zelda and Scott resumed their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became one of the most popular books of the year.
Scott and Zelda were married in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921 and died on June 16, 1986.
Paris in the 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, considered his masterpiece, was published in 1925.
Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous, as many of Fitzgerald’s relationships would prove to be.
Hemingway, however, did not get on well with Zelda. In addition to describing her as "insane," he claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Scott from his work on his novel."
As did most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly and Esquire.
Fitzgerald also sold his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. This “whoring,” as Fitzgerald and, subsequently, Hemingway called these sales, was a sore point in the authors’ friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in “twists that made them into salable magazine stories.”
Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. He suffered two heart attacks in late 1930. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion.
He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Ave., one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Ave. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment. Graham's was on the ground floor.
On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. As the two were leaving the Pantages Theater, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater. He said to Graham: "They think I am drunk, don't they?"
The following day, as Fitzgerald ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp and fall to the floor.
She ran to the manager of the building, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon entering the apartment to assist Fitzgerald, Culver said, "I'm afraid he's dead."
Fitzgerald had died of a massive heart attack. He was 44.
In 1966 — 55 years ago today — Jimi Hendrix arrived in London with his new manager, Chas Chandler, on a flight to stardom
In 1966 — 55 years ago today — Jimi Hendrix arrived in London with his new manager, Chas Chandler, on a flight from New York City.
With only the clothes he was wearing, Hendrix had sold his other belongings to pay a hotel bill in New York. He left the United States because he felt no one there understood his music.
One of the first things he did after arriving in England was to legally change his name from James to Jimi.
Shortly after that, he would became a major star.
Linda Eastman McCartney was born 80 years ago today
Linda Eastman McCartney was born 80 years ago today.
McCartney was a musician, photographer and animal rights activist. She was married to Paul McCartney, a founding member of the Beatles.
Her father, Lee Eastman, practiced entertainment law in New York for well-known clients, including bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters Harold Arlen and Jack Lawrence, and fine artists such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
In 1969, Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman, and their marriage was blessed at St John's Wood Church. Later, they formed McCartney's band, Wings.
In the same year, Paul adopted Heather Louise, Linda's daughter from her first marriage to Joseph Melville See. The McCartneys had three children: Mary Anna, Stella Nina and James Louis.
She wrote several vegetarian cookbooks, became a business entrepreneur (starting the Linda McCartney Foods company with her husband) and was a professional photographer, publishing Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era.
McCartney was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, and died at the age of 56 on April 17, 1998, in Tucson, Arizona, where the McCartneys had a ranch.
Above photo of Paul and Linda McCartney by Bill Bernstein
September 23, 2021
Bruce Springsteen — “the Boss” — is 72 years old today
Bruce Springsteen performs at The Clearwater Concert for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday.
The concert was held on May 3, 2009 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Over 40 performers from various genres performed at the event.
Photo by Frank Beacham
Bruce Springsteen — “the Boss” — is 72 years old today.
A singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who records and tours with the E Street Band, Springsteen is known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey and his lengthy and energetic stage performances.
His concerts, from the 1970s to the present decade, can run up to an uninterrupted 250 minutes in length. Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works.
His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life.
Springsteen has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide. He was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual award to figures from the world of arts for their contribution to American culture, in December, 2009.
President Obama gave a speech in which he talked about how Springsteen has incorporated the life of regular Americans in his expansive palette of songs and how his concerts are beyond the typical rock-and-roll concerts, how — apart from being high-energy entertainment events — they are "communions.”
He ended the remark "while I am the president, he is The Boss.”
Here, Springsteen performs “Fire”
Bruce Springsteen on stage with Jen Chapin, Harry Chapin's daughter, and her baby on Jan. 28, 2006, New York City
Photo by Frank Beacham
On this day in 1944 — 77 years ago — President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to answer critics who made his Scottish terrier, Fala, a campaign issue in the heat of his re-election race
Fala with President Roosevelt
On this day in 1944 — 77 years ago — President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to answer critics who made his Scottish terrier, Fala, a campaign issue in the heat of his re-election race.
They claimed that Roosevelt had left Fala behind after a visit to the Aleutian Islands, and then sent a military ship to rescue the dog. The accusation was never proved.
“I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them,” Roosevelt said, in a rebuttal inspired by his friend, Orson Welles.
“You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog,” the president said.
Roosevelt’s words delighted the public and the controversy was dropped.
Fala often slept at the foot of F.D.R.’s bed and was close to him until the end of the president’s life. The dog attended the Roosevelt funeral.
After the president’s death, Fala went to live with Mrs. Roosevelt in Val-Kill. The dog survived Roosevelt by seven years and was buried beside him. The relationship of Roosevelt and Fala is immortalized by a statue at Roosevelt’s memorial in Washington, D.C.
Thanks New York Times!
Ani DiFranco is 51 years old today
Photo by Jen Cray
Ani DiFranco is 51 years old today.
DiFranco is a singer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, poet and songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums and is widely considered a feminist icon.
Although DiFranco's music has been classified as both folk rock and alternative rock, she has reached across genres since her earliest albums incorporating punk, funk, hip hop and jazz influences.
She was one of the first independent musicians to create her own record label, Righteous Babe, a move that has given her significant creative freedom.
From the earliest days of her career, DiFranco has lent her voice and her name to a broad range of social movements, performing benefit concerts, appearing on benefit albums and speaking at rallies.
Through the Righteous Babe Foundation, DiFranco has backed various grassroots cultural and political organizations, supporting causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility.
DiFranco released an album on January 17, 2012, titled “Which Side Are You On?” It includes collaborations with Pete Seeger, Ivan Neville, Cyril Neville, Skerik, Adam Levy, Righteous Babe recording artist Anaïs Mitchell, CC Adcock, and a host of New Orleans-based horn players known for their work in such groups as Galactic, Bonerama and Rebirth Brass Band.
John Coltrane was born 95 years ago today
Photo by Charles Vlen
John Coltrane was born 95 years ago today.
A jazz saxophonist and composer, Coltrane worked in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career and helped pioneer the free jazz movement.
Coltrane organized at least fifty recording sessions as a leader during his recording career, and appeared as a sideman on many other albums, notably with trumpeter, Miles Davis, and pianist, Thelonious Monk.
As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. His second wife was pianist, Alice Coltrane, and their son, Ravi Coltrane, is also a saxophonist.
Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant tenor saxophonists in jazz history. He received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane.
In 2007, Coltrane was awarded the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz."
Coltrane died from liver cancer at Huntington Hospital on Long Island on July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.
His funeral was held on Friday, July 21 at St. Peters Lutheran Church in New York City. The Albert Ayler Quartet and The Ornette Coleman Quartet respectively opened and closed the service.
Coltrane’s death surprised many in the musical community who were not aware of his illness. Miles Davis commented: "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good... But I didn't know he was that sick — or even sick at all."
The influence Coltrane has had on music spans many different genres and musicians. His massive influence on jazz, both mainstream and avant-garde, began during his lifetime and continued to grow after his death. He is one of the most dominant influences on post-1960 jazz saxophonists and has inspired an entire generation of jazz musicians.
In 1972, A Love Supreme was certified gold for selling over half a million copies in Japan. This album, as well as My Favorite Things, was certified gold in the United States in 2001.
Here, the John Coltrane Quartet performs “Impressions.” McCoy Tyner is on piano.
Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, 1958
Photo by Dennis Stock
John Lomax, pioneering musicologist and folklorist who preserved many American folk songs, was born 154 years ago today
John Lomax visits with Alabama musician, Uncle Rich Brown, in Sumterville, Alabama, 1940
John Lomax, pioneering musicologist and folklorist who preserved many American folk songs, was born 154 years ago today.
He was the father of Alan Lomax, who followed in his work.
The Lomax family originally came from England in the 18th century when William Lomax settled in a colony in North Carolina. In December, 1869, the family traveled by ox cart from Mississippi to Texas.
John Lomax grew up in central Texas, just north of Meridian in rural Bosque County. His father raised horses and cattle and grew cotton and corn on the 183 acres of bottomland he had purchased near the Bosque River.
The cowboy songs he was exposed to during his childhood influenced him in such a way that his future choice of career already seemed confirmed. About 1876, the nine-year-old Lomax met and became close friends with Nat Blythe, a former slave who had just been hired as a farmhand by his father. The friendship, "which perhaps gave my life its bent," lasted three years, and was crucial to Lomax's early development.
On September 26, 1906, Lomax jumped at the chance to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student, having previously received a $500 stipend: The Austin Teaching Fellowships. Here he had the opportunity to study under Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, two renowned scholars who actively encouraged his interest in cowboy songs.
Harvard, in fact, was the center of American folklore studies (then viewed as a subsidiary of English literature, itself a novel field of scholarship in comparison with the more traditional study of rhetoric focused on classical languages and geared to preparing lawyers and clergy).
Kittredge, in addition to being a well-known scholar of Chaucer and Shakespeare, was the son-in-law of renowned ballad scholar, Francis James Child, whose professorship of English literature he inherited. Kittredge continued Child's work in folklore.
It was Kittredge who pioneered modern methods of ballad study, and who encouraged collectors to get out of their armchairs and library halls and to go into the countryside to collect ballads first hand. When he met John Lomax in 1907, this was what he encouraged him to do. The cowboy songs Lomax had been writing down were glimpses into a whole new world.
He told Lomax he should follow up on his work. "Go and get this material while it can be found," Kittredge told the young Texan. "Preserve the words and music. That's your job."
Lomax's second son (and third child), Alan, was born on January 15, 1915. In time, Alan Lomax would prove a worthy successor of his father. About this time portable disc recorders became available and Lomax obtained one through private grants in exchange for traveling the country making field recordings.
In 1934, Lomax was named Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song, a title he held until his death in 1948. His work, for which he was paid a salary of one dollar, included fund raising for the Library, and he was expected to support himself entirely through writing books and giving lectures.
He and Alan recorded Spanish ballads and vaquero songs on the Rio Grande border and spent weeks among French-speaking Cajuns in southern Louisiana. Thus began a ten-year relationship with the Library of Congress that would involve not only John but the entire Lomax family, including his second wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, Professor of Classics and Dean of Women at the University of Texas, whom he married in 1934.
All four of John’s children assisted with his folksong research and with the daily operations of the Archive. Alan Lomax who accompanied John on field trips and who from 1937–42 served as the Archive’s first paid (though very nominally) employee as Assistant in Charge.
In a successful grant application, Lomax wrote that prisoners, "Thrown on their own resources for entertainment . . . still sing, especially the long-term prisoners who have been confined for years and who have not yet been influenced by jazz and the radio, the distinctive old-time Negro melodies."
He toured Texas prison farms recording work songs, reels, ballads and blues from prisoners such as James "Iron Head" Baker, Mose "Clear Rock" Platt and Lightnin’ Washington.
In July, 1933, the group acquired a state-of-the-art, 315-pound phonograph uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly," whom they considered one of their most significant finds.
During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South. In contrast to earlier amateur collectors, the Lomaxes were among the first to attempt to apply scholarly methodology in their work. They wrote elaborate descriptions and photographed all their work.
The Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress contains songs collected in thirty-three states of the Union and certain parts of the West Indies, the Bahamas and Haiti. As Curator and Assistant in Charge of the Folk Song Collection, John and Alan Lomax supervised and worked with many other folklorists, musicologists and composers — amateur and professional — all over the country.
They amassed over ten thousand records of vocal and instrumental music on aluminum and acetate discs along with many pages of written documentation.
Lomax died of a stroke in January, 1948 at age 80.
Ray Charles was born 91 years ago today
Ray Charles performs at Carnegie Hall in 1966
Ray Charles was born 91 years ago today.
Charles was a pioneer of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel and blues into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records — most notably with his Modern Sounds albums.
While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company. Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”
The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown and Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse and stride piano styles.
In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"
In 1979, Charles was one of the first of the Georgia State Music Hall of Fame to be recognized as a musician born in the state. Ray's version of "Georgia On My Mind" was made the official state song for Georgia.
In 1981, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was one of the first inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural ceremony in 1986. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986.
In 1991, he was inducted to the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1998, he was awarded the Polar Music Prize together with Ravi Shankar in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2004, he was inducted to the Jazz Hall of Fame, and inducted to the National Black Sports & Entertainment Hall of Fame.
Charles died in 2004 as a result of liver failure from hepatitis C at age 73.
Here, Charles sings “Georgia On My Mind”
Ray Charles without his trademark glasses rests before a performance
Mickey Rooney, actor of film, television, Broadway, radio and vaudeville, was born 101 years ago
Mickey Rooney with Judy Garland in 1941 when they starred in “Babes on Broadway”
Mickey Rooney, actor of film, television, Broadway, radio and vaudeville, was born 101 years ago.
Beginning as a child actor, his career extended over 90 years, making him one of the most enduring performers in show business history. He appeared in more than 300 films and was one of the last surviving stars of the silent film era, having one of the longest careers in the medium's history.
At the height of a career that was marked by precipitous declines and raging comebacks, he played the role of Andy Hardy in a series of fifteen films in the 1930s and 1940s that epitomized American family values.
A prolific talent, he became a noted character actor later in his career, and could sing, dance, clown and play various musical instruments.
Laurence Olivier once said he considered Rooney "the greatest actor of them all," and Clarence Brown, who directed him in two of his earliest dramatic roles, National Velvet and The Human Comedy, said he was "the closest thing to a genius I ever worked with."
Rooney first performed in vaudeville as a child and made his film debut at age six. At age thirteen, he played the role Puck in the play and later the film, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in an acclaimed performance, which critic David Thomson praised as "one of cinema's most arresting pieces of magic."
He co-starred in Boys Town (1938) with Spencer Tracy, who won an Oscar for his role. At nineteen, he was the first teenager to be nominated for an Oscar, for his leading role in Babes in Arms, co-starring Judy Garland, and was awarded a special Juvenile Academy Award in 1939.
Overall, between the age of 15 and 25, while at his peak, he made forty-three pictures and co-starred alongside leading actors, including Judy Garland, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. Rooney developed into one of MGM's most consistently successful actors, and a favorite of studio head, Louis B. Mayer.
He was the top box office attraction of 1939, but his career never rose to such heights again. He was drafted into the Army during World War II, serving nearly two years entertaining over two million troops on stage and on the radio. He was awarded a Bronze Star for performing in combat zones.
After he returned from the war in 1945, too old for juvenile roles but too short to be a movie star, he was not able to obtain acting roles as significant as before.
Nevertheless, Rooney was tenacious and he rebounded, his popularity renewed with well-received supporting roles in films such as Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Black Stallion (1979), for which he was Oscar nominated.
In the early 1980s, he returned to Broadway in Sugar Babies and once more was a celebrated star. He also made hundreds of appearances on TV, including dramas, variety programs and talk shows. During his career, he received four Academy Award nominations and was nominated for five Emmy Awards, winning one.
Rooney's personal life was as tumultuous as his career. He struggled with alcohol and pill addiction, and was married eight times, the first time to actress Ava Gardner. Despite earning millions during his career, he had to file for bankruptcy in 1962 due to mismanagement of his finances.
Shortly before his death in April, 2014 at age 93, he alleged mistreatment by some family members, and testified in Congress about what he alleged was physical abuse and exploitation by family members.
By the end of his life, his millions in earnings had dwindled to an estate that was valued at only $18,000, and he died owing back taxes and medical bills, with contributions solicited from the public.
Roy Buchanan, highly influential blues guitarist and pioneer of the Telecaster sound, was born 82 years ago today
Roy Buchanan performs live at Paradiso in Amsterdam, February 20, 1985
Photo by Frans Schellekens
Roy Buchanan, highly influential blues guitarist and pioneer of the Telecaster sound, was born 82 years ago today.
Buchanan was both a sideman and solo artist, with two gold albums early in his career, and two later solo albums that made it on the charts. Born in Ozark, Arkansas, he was raised there and in Pixley, California, a farming area near Bakersfield. His father was a sharecropper in Arkansas and a farm laborer in California.
Buchanan told how his first musical memories were of racially mixed revival meetings he attended with his mother, Minnie. "Gospel," he recalled, "that's how I first got into black music."
In fact, Buchanan drew upon many disparate influences while learning to play his instrument (though he later claimed his aptitude derived from being "half-wolf"). He initially showed talent on steel guitar before switching to guitar in the early 50s, and started his professional career at age 15 in Johnny Otis's rhythm and blues revue.
In 1958, Buchanan made his recording debut with Dale Hawkins, including playing the solo on "My Babe" for Chicago's Chess Records. Two years later, during a tour through Toronto, Buchanan left Dale Hawkins to play for his cousin, Ronnie Hawkins, and to tutor Ronnie's guitar player, Robbie Robertson.
Buchanan plays bass on the Ronnie Hawkins single, "Who Do You Love?” He soon returned to the U.S. and Ronnie Hawkins' group later gained fame as The Band. At the end of the 1960s, with a growing family, Buchanan left the music industry for a while to learn a trade. For a while, he studied to be a hairdresser.
In the early '70s, Buchanan performed extensively in the Washington D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area with the Danny Denver Band, which had a large following in the area. Buchanan's life changed in 1971, when he gained national notice as the result of an hour-long PBS television documentary, Introducing Roy Buchanan.
The film earned a record deal with Polydor and praise from John Lennon and Merle Haggard, besides an alleged invitation to join the Rolling Stones (which he turned down).
Buchanan was arrested for public intoxication after a domestic dispute. He was found hanged from his own shirt in a jail cell on August 14, 1988 in the Fairfax County, Virginia Jail.
According to Jerry Hentman, who was in a cell nearby Buchanan's, the Deputy Sheriff opened the door early in the morning and found Buchanan with the shirt around his neck. Buchanan's last show was on August 7, 1988 in Guilford, CT.
His cause of death was officially recorded as suicide, a finding disputed by Buchanan's friends and family. One of his friends, Marc Fisher, reported seeing Roy's body with bruises on the head.
Buchanan has influenced many guitarists, including Gary Moore, Danny Gatton and Jeff Beck. Beck dedicated his version of "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" from Blow by Blow to him. His work is said to "stretch the limits of the electric guitar," and he is praised for "his subtlety of tone and the breadth of his knowledge, from the blackest of blues to moaning R&B and clean, concise, bone-deep rock 'n' roll."
Here, Buchanan performs “The Messiah Will Come Again” in 1976
September 22, 2021
Melvin Van Peebles, the father of black cinema, dies at 89
Melvin Van Peebles performs at the Triad Theater, New York City, 2009
Photo by Frank Beacham
We lost a giant in American filmmaking today. Melvin Van Peebles, 89, broke all the rules and lived his life as a true artist in everything he did. He never gave up. It is a terrible loss.
I knew and got to work with Melvin. I learned a lot just watching him and hearing his many tales. Here is what I wrote after an all-nighter working with him in a film. RIP, Melvin!!!
———
It was April 2, 2006, when I answered the call from Melvin Van Peebles to be in his movie, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha.
Yes, that's the title and the spaces are as they are meant to be.
To say I didn't know what I was getting into is a gross understatement. I was to play a redneck truck driver who gets shot. Melvin did not give me an advance script. He said the lines would be easy to learn on location.
We shot the film during the night at a private wooded estate in Rye, New York. The only thing that would end it was the rising sun many hours later. A makeup artist reddened my beard and I was handed a script. The lines were much more extensive than I had anticipated.
I'm no actor, so it was a big challenge, especially when I learned that Melvin wanted me to say the words with a poetic beat. I struggled to get it right. I guess he either gave up or found my performance acceptable. I'm still not sure.
But the really hard part was ahead. The getting shot part, I mean. The red dot on my head and shirt in the photo are where the guns were aimed. That was a T-shirt, by the way, and the night was very cold.
We did 16 takes altogether. I was surrounded by gunmen in dark woods. Each time I was shot, I had to fall down hard, hitting what felt like frozen earth.
Finally, it was over. When I got home, showered and got into bed, I was sore. So sore and bruised I would find, I stayed in bed for two days.
In 2008, when the film was released, I saw it at the New York Film Festival. The pain came racing back again.
So much for my "acting" career.
Frank Beacham and Melvin Van Peebles after the film shoot in 2006
John Houseman, film producer and actor, was born 118 years ago today
Orson Welles and John Houseman in the theatre during rehearsals of Horse Eats Hat in 1936
John Houseman, film producer and actor, was born 118 years ago today.
The Romanian-born British-American actor and film producer became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director, Orson Welles, from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of the classic film, Citizen Kane.
Houseman is perhaps best known for his role as Professor Charles Kingsfield in the 1973 film, The Paper Chase, for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. He reprised his role as Kingsfield in the subsequent TV series adaptation of The Paper Chase.
Houseman produced numerous Broadway productions, including Heartbreak House, Three Sisters, The Beggar's Opera and several Shakespearean plays, including a famous "Blackshirt" Julius Caesar directed by Orson Welles in 1937.
In 1934, Houseman was looking to cast a play he was producing based on a drama by Archibald MacLeish concerning a Wall Street financier whose world crumbles about him when consumed by the crash of 1929.
Although the central figure is a man in his late fifties, Houseman became obsessed by the notion that a young man named Orson Welles he had seen in a Cornell Company production of Romeo and Juliet was the only person qualified to play the leading role.
In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theatre performers and employees to work. Within a year of its formation, the project had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll at an average wage of approximately twenty dollars a week.
Houseman and Welles ran a WPA unit in midtown Manhattan for classic productions called Project #891. The following year Project #891 would produce their most controversial work, The Cradle Will Rock.
Written by Marc Blitzstein, the musical was about Larry Foreman, a worker in Steeltown (played in the original production by Howard Da Silva), which is run by the boss, Mister Mister (played in the original production by Will Geer).
The show was thought to have had left-wing and unionist sympathies (Foreman ends the show with a song about "unions" taking over the town and the country), and became legendary as an example of a "censored" show.
Shortly before the show was to open, Federal Theatre officials in Washington announced that no productions would open until after July 1, 1937, the beginning of the new fiscal year.
All the performers had been enjoined not to perform on stage for the production when it opened on July 14, 1937. The cast and crew left their government-owned theatre and walked 20 blocks to another theatre, with the audience following.
No one knew what to expect. When they got there, Blitzstein himself was at the piano and started playing the introduction music. One of the non-professional performers, Olive Stanton, who played the part of Moll, the prostitute, stood up in the audience, and began singing her part.
All the other performers, in turn, spontaneously stood up in the audience to perform their parts. Thus the "oratorio" version of the show was born.
Apparently, Welles had designed some intricate scenery, which ended up never being used. The event was so successful that it was repeated several times on subsequent nights, with everyone trying to remember and reproduce what had happened spontaneously the first night.
The incident, however, led to Houseman being fired and Welles's resignation from Project #981.
That same year, 1937, after detaching themselves from the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Welles founded the acclaimed New York drama company, The Mercury Theatre.
Beginning in the summer of 1938, the Mercury Theatre was featured in a weekly dramatic radio program on the CBS network, initially promoted as First Person Singular before gaining the official title, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
The show became famous for its notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which had put much of the country in a panic. By all accounts, Welles was shocked by the panic that ensued.
According to Houseman, "he hadn't the faintest idea what the effect would be.” CBS was inundated with calls. Newspaper switchboards were jammed. The Welles-Houseman collaboration continued in Hollywood.
In the spring of 1939, Welles began preliminary discussions with RKO's head of production, George Schaefer, with Welles and his Mercury players being given a two picture deal, in which Welles would produce, direct, perform and have full creative control of his projects. Welles decided to make “Citizen Kane.”
During a corporate dinner for the Mercury crew, Welles exploded, calling Houseman a "bloodsucker" and a "crook.” As Houseman attempted to leave Chasen’s Restaurant, Welles began hurling dish heaters at him, setting curtains on fire in the restaurant. The act effectively ending both their partnership and friendship.
Houseman would later, however, play a pivotal role in ushering Citizen Kane (1941), which starred Welles. Welles telephoned Houseman asking him to return to Hollywood to "babysit" screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz, while he completed the script, and keep him away from alcohol.
Still drawn to Welles, as was virtually everyone in his sphere, Houseman agreed.
Although Welles took credit for the screenplay of Kane, Houseman stated that the credit belonged to Mankiewicz, an assertion that led to a final break with Welles. Houseman took some credit himself for the general shaping of the story line and for editing the script.
Among the many Houseman achievements, he was the founding director of the Drama Division at The Juilliard School where his first graduating class included Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone.
Unwilling to see his first class immediately disbanded by the commercial world of stage and screen, he formed them into a touring repertory company appropriately named the Group 1 Acting Company (later shortened to, The Acting Company).
John Houseman: A Personal Remembrance
In 1985, as a young producer working for Orson Welles, the great director regaled me with stories during a leisurely three-hour lunch on a Saturday afternoon at the Ma Maison Restaurant on Melrose Ave. in Los Angeles.
It was a rare day for Orson, who didn’t like to “walk down memory lane.” But on this day, Orson was in a lighter mood than usual and told me the incredible story of the staging of “The Cradle Will Rock” in 1937.
I was spellbound. Few people could tell a story like Orson Welles. It was about the only time in U.S. history the military had been sent out to shut down a Broadway play. Orson and his acting company defied the government and became famous for it. During Orson’s telling of this epic tale, I was on the edge of my seat, and hung on to his every word.
Orson told me he had wanted to produce and direct the story himself and had written a script about it. But the money had fallen apart just before production was to begin. “The story of my life,” he said, sadly. Then he suggested that I might want to produce it.
A short time later, Orson died and the project I was doing with him — Orson Welles Solo — went up in smoke. I was in shock and needed to do something...anything. I vividly remembered The Cradle Will Rock story and decided to tackle it. After a visit with Marc Blitzstein’s sister in Philadelphia, I obtained the film rights from his family.
John Houseman had written about The Cradle Will Rock in one volume of his autobiography, Run Through. I had long admired Houseman and had grown up watching “The Paper Chase” on television. I contacted Houseman, and inadvertently entered the long-running feud he had with Orson.
Unwittingly, I sent Houseman the Orson Welles’ script of The Cradle Will Rock. It irritated him immensely, projecting only Orson’s view of what had happened. “It must never be made,” Houseman told me in his most intimidating Professor Kingsfield voice. (I later discovered that Kingsfield arrogance was really Houseman. No acting involved!)
The anger and disdain Houseman had for Welles continued to burn bright long after Orson’s death. In fact, it didn’t subside until Houseman’s own death three years later in 1988 at age 86.
I wanted to option Houseman’s material on Cradle, assuring him I would not use the Welles script but would commission a totally new one. Houseman had cancer at this point and was near death.
From his death bed, he said to me, “Mr. Beacham, you shall pay me $5,000 now or you shall pay much more after I expire.”
To make a long story short, I told this story to a stranger in an LA bar later that night, having run out of options to raise additional money. He was so entranced by the story, he wrote me a check after we hammered out an agreement on the back of a bar napkin. Talk about luck!
The next day, after this stranger’s check cleared, I gave the money to Houseman, who scribbled his signature on the option agreement. I had all the needed rights to do a film.
I took the story to a young director and actor, Tim Robbins, sensing he would he would interested. He was, and we worked together over ten years to make a film. I was an executive producer of “Cradle Will Rock,” which was released by Disney’s Touchstone company in 1999. Tim wrote the script and directed the film. Cary Elwes played Houseman in the movie.
Whenever I want to be reminded of the real John Houseman, I watch a re-run of The Paper Chase. That was the man I knew and experienced. He may have won an Academy Award for playing a role, but he was just being himself. That I know.
Joan Jett is 63 years old today
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Photo by Mike Coppola
Joan Jett is 63 years old today.
A rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer and occasional actress, she is best known for her work with Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, including their hit cover, "I Love Rock 'n' Roll,” which was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 from March 20 to May 1, 1982.
Jett’s other popular recordings including "Crimson and Clover,” "I Hate Myself for Loving You,” "Do You Want to Touch Me,” "Light of Day,” "Love Is All Around" and "Bad Reputation.”
She has three albums that have been certified Platinum or Gold, and she has been referred to as the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll" many times during her career.
Here, Jett and the Blackhawks perform “I Hate Myself for Loving You”
On September 22, 1953 — 68 years ago today — the first four-level (or "stack") interchange in the world opened in Los Angeles at the intersection of the Harbor, Hollywood, Pasadena and Santa Ana freeways
On September 22, 1953 — 68 years ago today — the first four-level (or "stack") interchange in the world opened in Los Angeles at the intersection of the Harbor, Hollywood, Pasadena and Santa Ana freeways.
It was, as The Saturday Evening Post wrote, "a mad motorist's dream" — 32 lanes of traffic weaving in eight directions at once.
Today, although the four-level is justly celebrated as a civil engineering landmark, the interchange is complicated, frequently congested and sometimes downright terrifying. As its detractors are fond of pointing out, it's probably no coincidence that this highway octopus straddles not only a fetid sulfur spring but also the former site of the town gallows.
Before the L.A. four-level was built, American highway interchanges typically took the form of a cloverleaf, with four circular ramps designed to let motorists merge from one road to another without braking. But cloverleafs were dangerous, because people merging onto the highway and people merging off of the highway had to jockey for space in the same lane.
Four-level interchanges, by contrast, eliminate this looping cross-traffic by stacking long arcs and straightaways on top of one another. As a result, each of their merges only goes in one direction — which means, at least in theory, that they are safer and more efficient.
When the iconic Hollywood-Harbor-Pasadena-Santa Ana four-level was born, it was the most expensive half-mile of highway in the world, costing $5.5 million to build. (Today, highway engineers estimate, $5.5 million would pay for just 250 feet of urban freeway.)
Roadbuilders disemboweled an entire neighborhood — 4,000 people lost their homes — and excavated most of the hill it stood on, dumping the rubble in the nearby Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium stands today.
Though its design has inspired dozens of freeway interchanges across the United States, many Angelenos dread their encounters with the four-level. It's as crowded (500,000 drivers use it every day), stressful and treacherous as the cloverleafs of yesteryear.
Welcome to the car culture, which can be attributed to those “futurists” who created this monster in the last century.
Thanks History.com
Nick Cave is 64 years old today
Nick Cave is 64 years old today.
Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983. The group is known for its eclectic influences and musical styles.
Before that, he had fronted the group, The Birthday Party, in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic, challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by free jazz, blues and post-punk.
In 2006, he formed the garage rock band, Grinderman, that released its debut the following year.
Cave's music is generally characterized by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.
Here, Cave performs Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”
Nick Cave and guitarist, Mick Harvey, London, May 17, 1981
Photo by David Corio
Corio wrote of the photo: “I first met Nick Cave and guitarist Mick Harvey of the Birthday Party in 1980 a couple of days after they had immigrated to London from Australia. The Birthday Party were a tight-knit group of old school pals who weren’t very interested in being photographed despite their publicists’ encouragement. However they were good fun and Nick clowned around wearing plastic devil’s horns on his head.
I photographed the band about four or five times and I always had to convince them that we couldn’t shoot yet another session in their local pub. This photo was taken in a London squat soon after their arrival from Australia.”
The first Farm Aid concert was held on this day in 1985 — 36 years ago
Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and friends at Farm Aid, 1985
The first Farm Aid concert was held on this day in 1985 — 36 years ago.
The concept for the annual series of concerts began with an offhand remark by Bob Dylan during his performance at Live Aid, the massive fundraising concert held at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in the early summer of 1985.
As television viewers around the world phoned in donations in support of African famine relief, Dylan said from the stage: "I hope that some of the money...maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe...one or two million, maybe...and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks."
Dylan would come under harsh criticism from Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof for his remarks ("It was a crass, stupid and nationalistic thing to say," Geldof would later write), but he planted a seed with several fellow musicians who shared his concern over the state of the American family farm.
Less than one month later, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp announced plans for "Farm Aid," a benefit concert for America's farmers. The concert was held in Champaign, Illinois on Sept. 22, 1985.
As one might have expected of a concert staged to "raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land," Farm Aid featured a number of performers from the worlds of country, folk and rootsy rock music.
There were the three main organizers and the instigator, Bob Dylan. Also joining them were Hoyt Axton, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie and Charley Pride.
But the first Farm Aid, more than any of the annual Farm Aid concerts since, was a bit of a stylistic free-for-all, featuring artists united only by their interest in supporting a good cause.
"As soon as I read in the paper that there was gonna be such a thing," Sammy Hagar told MTV's cameras on the day of the show, "I called my manager and said, 'I wanna do it.' And he said, 'It's all country.' I said, 'I don't care. It's America. I wanna do it.'
If there was anything more surprising than hearing Hagar perform his hard-rock anthem, "I Can't Drive 55," on the same stage that had earlier featured the quiet folk of Arlo Guthrie, it was hearing Lou Reed perform "Walk On The Wild Side" on a stage that had featured John Denver.
The star studded line-up also included: Alabama, Glen Campbell, Charlie Daniels Band, John Denver, John Fogerty, Vince Gill, George Jones, Roger Miller, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bonnie Raitt and Kenny Rogers.
Over the years since its first charity concert on this day in 1985, the Farm Aid organization has raised more than $50 million to support small farmers, promote sustainable farming practices and encourage consumption of "good food from family farms."
This year, Farm Aid will be held live on Sept. 25 in Hartford, Connecticut.
Thanks History.com
A video on the meaning of Farm Aid
Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Randy Newman at the first Farm Aid Concert, September, 1985
Photo by Ian Weston
Bob Dylan performs "Shake" at Farm Aid, 1985
September 21, 2021
Leonard Cohen was born 87 years ago today
Leonard Cohen, 2009
Photo by Frank Beacham
Leonard Cohen was born 87 years ago today.
A Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist, Cohen often explored religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships.
The critic Bruce Eder wrote an assessment of Cohen's overall career in popular music, writing, "[Cohen is] one of the most fascinating and enigmatic. . . singer/songwriters of the late '60s. . . [and] has retained an audience across four decades of music-making. . . Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon) [in terms of influence], he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century."
The Academy of American Poets has commented more broadly on Cohen's overall career in the arts, including his work as a poet, novelist and songwriter, stating that "[Cohen's] successful blending of poetry, fiction, and music is made most clear in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, published in 1993, which gathered more than two hundred of Cohen's poems . . . several novel excerpts, and almost sixty song lyrics. . .While it may seem to some that Leonard Cohen departed from the literary in pursuit of the musical, his fans continue to embrace him as a Renaissance man who straddles the elusive artistic borderlines."
Cohen was born in Westmount, an English-speaking area of Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Marsha (Masha) Klonitsky, was the daughter of a Talmudic writer, Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.
His paternal grandfather, whose family had emigrated from Poland, was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan Cohen, who owned a substantial clothing store, died when Cohen was nine years old.
On the topic of his family, Cohen said "I had a very Messianic childhood." He told Richard Goldstein in 1967: "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest."
Cohen attended Roslyn Elementary School and, from 1948, Westmount High School, where he was involved with the student council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called The Buckskin Boys.
Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him "a few chords and some flamenco." Cohen frequented Saint-Laurent Boulevard where he went for fun, and ate at places such as the Main Deli Steak House.
According to journalist David Sax, the Main Deli was where Cohen and one of his cousins would go to "...watch the gangsters, pimps and wrestlers dance around the night."
Cohen also enjoyed visiting the previously raucous bars of Old Montreal as well as Saint Joseph's Oratory, which had the closest restaurant near Westmount where he and his friend, Mort Rosengarten, could go for coffee and a smoke. After moving out of Westmount, Cohen purchased a place in the previous working-class neighborhood of Montreal's Little Portugal on Saint-Laurent Boulevard where he read his poetry at various surrounding clubs.
It is also during his time there in the small neighborhood that he wrote the lyrics to what would become some of his most famous songs.
In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union and won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for the poems "Sparrows" and "Thoughts of a Landsman."
Cohen published his first poems in March, 1954 in the magazine CIV/n. The issue also included poems by Cohen's poet-professors (who were also on the editorial board), Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. Cohen graduated from McGill the following year with a B.A. degree.
His literary influences during this time included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton (who taught political science at McGill and became both Cohen's mentor and friend), Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca and Henry Miller.
His first published book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published by Dudek as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series the year after Cohen's graduation. The book contained "poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty." Cohen dedicated the book to his late father. The well-known Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye, wrote a review of the book in which he gave Cohen "restrained praise."
After completing his undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in McGill's law school and then a year (1956–1957) at the School of General Studies at Columbia University. Cohen described his graduate school experience as "passion without flesh, love without climax."
Consequently, Cohen left New York and returned to Montreal in 1957, working various odd jobs and focusing on the writing of fiction and poetry, including the poems for his next book, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), which was the first book that Cohen published through the Canadian publishing company, McClelland & Stewart.
Fortunately for Cohen, his father's will provided him with a modest trust income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions for the time, and The Spice-Box of Earth was successful in helping to expand the audience for Cohen's poetry, helping him reach out to the poetry scene in Canada, outside the confines of McGill University. The book also helped Cohen gain critical recognition as an important new voice in Canadian poetry.
One of Cohen's biographers, Ira Nadel, stated that "reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring...the critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was 'probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.'"
Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. While living and writing on Hydra, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).
His novel, The Favourite Game, was an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man who discovers his identity through writing. Beautiful Losers received a good deal of attention from the Canadian press and stirred up controversy because of a number of sexually graphic passages.
In 1966, Cohen also published, Parasites of Heaven, a book of poems. Both Beautiful Losers and Parasites of Heaven received mixed reviews and sold few copies. Subsequently, Cohen published less, with major gaps, concentrating more on recording songs.
In 1978, he published his first book of poetry in many years, Death of a Lady's Man (not to be confused with the album he released the previous year with the similar title, Death of a Ladies' Man).
It was not until 1984 that Cohen published his next book of poems, Book of Mercy, which won him the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry. The book contains 50 prose-poems, influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen writings. Cohen himself referred to the pieces as "prayers.”
In 1993, Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, and in 2006, after 10 years of delays, additions and rewritings, Book of Longing. The Book of Longing is dedicated to the poet, Irving Layton.
Also, during the late 1990s and 2000s, many of Cohen's new poems and lyrics were first published on the fan website, The Leonard Cohen Files, including the original version of the poem "A Thousand Kisses Deep" (which Cohen later adapted for a song).
Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is "like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."
In 1967, disappointed with his lack of financial success as a writer, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk music singer-songwriter. During the 1960s, he was a fringe figure in Andy Warhol's "Factory" crowd. Warhol speculated that Cohen had spent time listening to Nico in clubs and that this had influenced his musical style.
His song, "Suzanne," became a hit for Judy Collins and was for many years his most covered song. After performing at a few folk festivals, he came to the attention of Columbia Records representative, John H. Hammond, who signed Cohen to a record deal.
Cohen's first album was Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). Although Hammond was originally supposed to produce the record, he was ill and was replaced by the producer, John Simon. Simon and Cohen clashed over instrumentation and mixing. Cohen wanted the album to have a spare sound, while Simon felt the songs could benefit from arrangements that included strings and horns.
According to biographer, Ira Nadel, although Cohen was able to make changes to the mix, some of Simon's additions "couldn't be removed from the four-track master tape." Nevertheless, the album became a cult favorite in the U.S., as well as in the UK, where it spent over a year on the album charts.
Several of the songs on that first album were covered by other popular folk artists, including James Taylor and Judy Collins. Cohen followed up that first album with Songs from a Room (1969) (featuring the often-recorded "Bird on the Wire") and Songs of Love and Hate (1971).
Both of these albums were produced in Nashville by Bob Johnston, who helped Cohen achieve the sparer sound that he'd been after on his first album. Johnston also joined Cohen on two subsequent live tours, playing organ and piano. In 1970, Cohen toured for the first time, with dates in the United States, Canada and Europe, and appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival.
He toured again in Europe and Israel in 1972 with some of the same band-mates, including Charlie Daniels and his producer, Bob Johnston. The band was nicknamed "The Army." Both tours were represented on the Live Songs LP. Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 was released in 2009.
The 1972 tour was also filmed by Tony Palmer under the title, Bird on a Wire, which was shown re-cut under Cohen's guidance in 1974. It was only released to the public in 2010, reconstructed according to Palmer's original version.
In 1971, the film director, Robert Altman, featured "The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" (all from Cohen's debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen) on the soundtrack for his Western film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
In 1976, Cohen embarked on a new major European tour with a new band and changes in his sound and arrangements, again, in support of his The Best of Leonard Cohen release (in Europe retitled as Greatest Hits).
Laura Branigan was one of his back-up singers during the tour, and the set-list included the unreleased songs "Everybody's Child" (a.k.a. "Blessed Is the Memory") and "Storeroom" (both released as bonus tracks to 2007 reissue of Songs of Leonard Cohen), and the new song "Do I Have to Dance All Night?" (which was released as a single with the song, "The Butcher," in a single available in Europe only).
From April to July, Cohen gave 55 shows, including his first appearance at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival. After the European tour of 1976, Cohen again attempted a new change in his style and arrangements. His new 1977 record, Death of a Ladies' Man (one year later, in 1978, was released.
Cohen also released a volume of poetry with the coyly revised title, Death of a Lady's Man), was co-written and produced by Phil Spector, known as the inventor of the "Wall of Sound" technique, which backs up pop music with many layers of instrumentation, an approach very different from Cohen's usually minimalist instrumentation.
The recording of the album was fraught with difficulty — Spector reportedly mixed the album in secret studio sessions, and Cohen said Spector once threatened him with a crossbow. Cohen thought the end result "grotesque," but also "semi-virtuous."
The record was released by Spector's label, Warner, and was returned to Columbia's Cohen catalog in the late 1980s. Cohen did not take part in the album's promotion, but in his tours of 1979, 1980 and 1985, he performed two songs from the album, "Memories" and "Iodine." However, Cohen chose not to include any of the album's songs on his later compilations, More Best of Leonard Cohen and The Essential Leonard Cohen.
"Hallelujah" was first released on Cohen's studio album Various Positions in 1984. The song had limited initial success, but found greater popularity through a 1991 cover by John Cale which formed the basis for a later cover by Jeff Buckley. "Hallelujah" has been performed by almost 200 artists in various languages.
The use of the album track, "Everybody Knows," from I'm Your Man in the 1990 film, Pump Up the Volume, helped expose Cohen's music to a younger audience. The song also featured prominently in fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan's 1994 film, Exotica.
In 1992, Cohen released The Future, which urges (often in terms of biblical prophecy) perseverance, reformation and hope in the face of grim prospects. Three tracks from the album – "Waiting for the Miracle," "The Future" and "Anthem" – were featured in the movie, Natural Born Killers, which also promoted Cohen's work to a new generation of U.S. listeners.
In 1994, Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what became five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name Jikan, meaning "silence." He served as personal assistant to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
Although around 2000 there was a public impression that Cohen would not resume recording or publishing, he returned to Los Angeles in May, 1999. But there was trouble ahead.
Sylvie Simmons explains, in her 2012 biography on Cohen that Kelley Lynch, Cohen's longtime manager, "took care of Leonard's business affairs … [and was] not simply his manager but a close friend, almost part of the family."
However, Simmons notes that in late 2004, Cohen's daughter Lorca began to suspect Lynch of financial impropriety, and when Cohen checked his bank accounts, he noticed that he had unknowingly paid a credit card bill of Lynch's for $75,000 and also found that most of the money in his accounts was gone (including money from his retirement accounts and charitable trust funds).
Cohen would discover that this theft had actually begun as early as 1996 when Lynch started selling Cohen's music publishing rights despite the fact that Cohen had no financial incentive to do so at the time.
On October 8, 2005, Cohen sued Kelley Lynch, alleging that she had misappropriated over $5 million from Cohen's retirement fund leaving only $150,000. Cohen was sued in turn by other former business associates. These events placed him in the public spotlight, including a cover feature on him with the headline, "Devastated!," in Canada's Maclean's magazine.
In March, 2006, Cohen won a civil suit and was awarded $9 million by a Los Angeles County superior court. Lynch, however, ignored the suit and did not respond to a subpoena issued for her financial records. As a result it has been widely reported that Cohen never was able to collect the awarded amount.
In 2007, U.S. District Judge Lewis T. Babcock dismissed a claim by Cohen for more than $4.5 million against Colorado investment firm Agile Group, and in 2008 he dismissed a defamation suit that Agile Group filed against Cohen. Cohen has been under new management since April, 2005.
On March 1, 2012, Kelley Lynch was arrested in Los Angeles for violating a permanent protective order that forbade her from contacting Cohen, which she had ignored repeatedly. On April 13, the jury found her guilty on all charges. On April 18, she was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years probation.
Cohen told that court, "It gives me no pleasure to see my onetime friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the services of darkness, deceit and revenge. It is my prayer that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform."
To replenish his bank accounts, Cohen went back on tour — his first in 15 years. It began on May 11, 2008 in Fredericton, New Brunswick to wide critical acclaim, and was extended until Winter of 2010. The schedule of the first leg in Summer of 2008 encompassed Canada and Europe, including performances at The Big Chill, the Montreal Jazz Festival and on the Pyramid Stage at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival.
Cohen died on November 7, 2016, at the age of 82 at his home in Los Angeles. Cancer was a contributing cause. According to his manager, Cohen's death was the result of a fall at his home on the night of November 7, and he subsequently died in his sleep. His death was announced on November 10.
Leonard Cohen performs “Tower of Song”
Leonard Cohen performs "Closing Time," 1992
Leonard Cohen performs “Leaving the Table,” a posthumous video
Leonard Cohen: A Thousand Kisses Deep
Video by Frank Beacham
Leonard Cohen meets Allen Ginsberg after a concert of Ginsberg’s poetry at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, 1988
Photo by Frank Beacham
Henry Butler was born 73 years ago today
Photo by Frank Beacham
Henry Butler was born 73 years ago today.
A jazz pianist from New Orleans, Butler was known for his percussive piano technique and his ability to play in many styles of music.
Referred to by Dr. John as "the pride of New Orleans,” Butler was his generation's representative in the Crescent City's lineage of piano players such as Professor Longhair, James Booker, Tuts Washington and Jelly Roll Morton.
Blinded by glaucoma since birth, Butler pursued photography as a hobby. Some of his photographs were shown in galleries in New Orleans. He is a 1974 graduate of Michigan State University and received the MSU Distinguished Alumni Award in 2009.
Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Butler left New Orleans and relocated to Colorado. As of September, 2009, he moved New York City.
Butler recorded for several record labels, including Impulse, Windham Hill and Basin Street Records.
Butler died of end-stage cancer on July 2, 2018 in New York City at the age of 69.
Here, Butler performs “Let It Roll” at Mendocino College, 2009
Henry Butler volunteers as the bartender for one night at 78 Below in Manhattan, 2012.
Being blind, he did an excellent job — pouring over the top drinks for everyone in the house.
Photo by Frank Beacham
On September 21, 1968 — 53 years ago today — Jeannie C. Riley became the first female performer to top the Billboard Country and Pop charts simultaneously, with Harper Valley P.T.A.
Elvis Presley and Jeannie C. Riley, 1969
When the singer Jeannie C. Riley said the word "men," it came out sounding like "min." And when she said "eyes," it came out sounding like “Ahhs."
In New York or Los Angeles, her deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas accent might have been as big an impediment as Eliza Doolittle's Cockney lilt in London society, but in Nashville, the capital of country music, it was her ticket to pop immortality.
With her career-defining hit song, 23-year-old Jeannie C. Riley accomplished a crossover feat that no other woman would match for another dozen years: On September 21, 1968 — 53 years ago today — she became the first female performer to top the Billboard Country and Pop charts simultaneously, with "Harper Valley P.T.A."
Perhaps never in pop history has one voice been more right for one song than Jeannie C. Riley's was for "Harper Valley P.T.A." Indeed, it was her speaking voice, and not her singing, that got Riley noticed and picked out for the song.
She had come to Nashville from her native Anson, Texas, in her early 20s to pursue a singing career. But it was on her day job as a receptionist that she was noticed by the legendary country-music record producer, Shelby Singleton.
Recognizing her voice as perfect for the protagonist in songwriter Tom T. Hall's crypto-feminist tale of a small-town Southern widow's fight for her right to wear her skirts short and her heels high, Singleton had Riley record "Harper Valley P.T.A." as her first professional demo. It was released as a single that charged up the pop and country charts in mid-summer, 1968.
But as big a hit as "Harper Valley P.T.A." was for the aspiring star plucked from obscurity to record it, rarely in pop history has a star grown to be as uncomfortable with her signature hit as Riley did with hers.
Many fans wanted to believe that Jeannie C. Riley really was the Hester Prynne-meets-Daisy Duke protagonist of "Harper Valley P.T.A.," and for a time at least, she was willing to indulge the misconception and dress the part.
Eventually, though, Riley sided rather publicly with the conservative values "Harper Valley P.T.A." derided by becoming a born-again Christian and refusing to perform her biggest career hit.
Riley is now 73. In the 1990s, she suffered from clinical depression after a split from her husband and severing ties with a manager that left her broke. She was bed-ridden for six years and was receiving disability payments as her weight expanded from a size 6 to a size 26.
After family intervention and subsequent treatment for her depression, Riley said: "I've never been so happy in all my life. I've never had such peace of mind. I trust the Lord with everything."
Here, Riley performs her hit song.
Thanks History.com
H.G. Wells — pioneer of science fiction — was born 155 years ago today in Bromley, England
H.G. Wells — pioneer of science fiction — was born 155 years ago today in Bromley, England.
Wells was born near London and received a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London. After school, he worked as a draper's apprentice and bookkeeper before becoming a freelance writer. His lively treatment of scientific topics quickly brought him success as a writer.
In 1895, he published his classic novel, The Time Machine, about a man who journeys to the future. The book was a success, as were his subsequent books, The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898).
Passionately concerned about the fate of humanity, Wells joined the socialist Fabian Society but quit after a quarrel with George Bernard Shaw, another prominent member.
He was involved romantically for several years with Dorothy Richardson, pioneer of stream-of-consciousness writing.
In 1912, the 19-year-old writer Rebecca West reviewed his book, Marriage, calling him "The old maid among novelists." He asked to meet her, and the two soon embarked on an affair that lasted 10 years and produced one son, Anthony.
Wells died in 1946 at age 79.
Thanks History.com
In the above photo, Wells measures a move in a war game, 1913
Photo by Mary Evans
Bill Murray is 71 years old today
Bill Murray is 71 years old today.
An actor and comedian, Murray first appeared on Saturday Night Live and later went on to star in comedy films, including Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Scrooged (1988), What About Bob? (1991) and Groundhog Day (1993).
Murray got critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), which earned him a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
He also received Golden Globe nominations for his roles in Ghostbusters, Rushmore (1998), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) and St. Vincent (2014). He appeared in Cradle Will Rock (1999), a film on which I was executive producer.
He has collaborated more than once with such notable film directors as Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Frank Oz and the Farrelly brothers.
Being very detached from the Hollywood scene, Murray does not have an agent or manager and reportedly only fields offers for scripts and roles using a personal telephone number with a voice mailbox that he checks infrequently.
This practice has the downside of sometimes preventing him from taking parts in films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Monsters, Inc., The Squid and the Whale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Little Miss Sunshine.
When asked about this practice, however, Murray seemed content with his inaccessibility, stating, "It's not that hard. If you have a good script that's what gets you involved. People say they can't find me. Well, if you can write a good script, that's a lot harder than finding someone. I don't worry about it; it's not my problem."
Stephen King is 74 years old today
Stephen King is 74 years old today.
King is an author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many of them have been adapted into feature films, television movies and comic books.
King has published fifty novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has written nearly two hundred short stories, most of which have been collected in nine collections of short fiction. Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.
King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards and British Fantasy Society Awards. His novella, The Way Station, was a Nebula Award novelette nominee. His short story, The Man in the Black Suit, received the O. Henry Award.
In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
King has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).
King is a fan of the Ramones, to the extent that he wrote the liner notes for the 2003 Ramones tribute album, We're a Happy Family. He is also a fan of hard rock such as AC/DC; he arranged for their album, Who Made Who, to feature as the score for the film he directed in 1986, Maximum Overdrive.
King has also stated that he likes heavy metal and has named bands like Anthrax, Judas Priest and Metallica as amongst his favorites to write to. King collaborated with Michael Jackson to create Ghosts (1996), a 40-minute musical video, and collaborated with Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for their album, Black Ribbons. King also wrote a musical play Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with John Mellencamp.
King played guitar for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, several of whose members are authors. Other members have included Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry and Greg Iles.
King and the other band members collaborated to release an e-book called Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (June 2013).
Stephen King performs with the Rock Bottom Remainders
September 20, 2021
Sophia Loren is 87 years old today
Sophia Loren, Italy, 1961
Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt
Sophia Loren is 87 years old today.
Loren is widely recognized as the most awarded Italian actress.
She was the first actress of the talkie era to win an Academy Award for a non-English-speaking performance, for her portrayal of Cesira in Vittorio De Sica’s, Two Women.
In 1995, she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements, one of many such awards.
Her films include Houseboat (1958), El Cid (1961), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian-Style (1964) and A Special Day (1977).
In later years, she has appeared in American blockbusters such as Grumpier Old Men (1995) and Nine (2009).
In 1994, she starred in Robert Altman's film, Prêt-à-Porter, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination the same year. She has also achieved critical and commercial success in TV movies such as Courage (1986).
Loren first met Carlo Ponti in 1950 when she was 15 and he was 37. They married on Sept. 17, 1957.
However, Ponti was still officially married to his first wife Giuliana under Italian law because Italy did not recognize divorce at that time. The couple had their marriage annulled in 1962 to escape bigamy charges.
In 1965, Ponti obtained a divorce from Giuliana in France, allowing him to marry Loren on April 9, 1966.
They later became French citizens after their application was approved by then French President Georges Pompidou. Loren remained married to Ponti until his death on January 10, 2007 of pulmonary complications.
When asked in a November, 2009 interview if she is ever likely to marry again, Loren replied "No, never again. It would be impossible to love anyone else."
Sophia Loren visits with Elvis Presley at the Paramount Studios cafeteria while he was making King Creole, February, 1958
Photo by Bob Willoughby
According to Willoughby, Loren spotted 23-year-old Presley eating lunch in the Paramount commissary and decided to go over and introduce herself. Which is to say, she promptly sat in his lap, gave him a kiss and began mussing his carefully sculpted pompadour. He didn't mind.
“I bet you wish they would stop screaming,” said the beautiful Italian actress to Elvis
“Never,” Elvis answered. “And I'll tell you why; they cover up my mistakes. Lots of times when I start reaching for a high note I know I'm not going to make it so I just make some crazy movement and the kids scream and no one knows the difference.”
When she left, Loren told Elvis “I think you are a very nice boy.”
“Thanks a lot!” answered Elvis. “You know that’s the worst thing you can say about me.”
On Sept. 20, 1963 — 58 years ago —an optimistic and upbeat President John F. Kennedy suggested that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. The Soviets and many Americans were caught off guard
On Sept. 20, 1963 — 58 years ago —an optimistic and upbeat President John F. Kennedy suggested that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. The proposal caught both the Soviets and many Americans off guard.
In 1961, shortly after his election as president, John F. Kennedy announced that he was determined to win the "space race" with the Soviets. Since 1957, when the Soviet Union sent a small satellite — Sputnik — into orbit around the earth, Russian and American scientists had been competing to see who could make the next breakthrough in space travel.
Outer space became another frontier in the Cold War. Kennedy upped the ante in 1961 when he announced that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Much had changed by 1963, however.
Relations with the Soviet Union had improved measurably. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had been settled peacefully. A "hot line" had been established between Washington and Moscow to help avert conflict and misunderstandings. A treaty banning the open air testing of nuclear weapons had been signed in 1963.
On the other hand, U.S. fascination with the space program was waning. Opponents of the program cited the high cost of the proposed trip to the moon, estimated at more than $20 billion.
In the midst of all of this, Kennedy, in a speech at the United Nations, proposed that the Soviet Union and United States cooperate in mounting a mission to the moon. "Why," he asked the audience, "should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?"
Kennedy noted "the clouds have lifted a little" in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations. "The Soviet Union and the United States, together with their allies, can achieve further agreements — agreements which spring from our mutual interest in avoiding mutual destruction," Kennedy said.
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko applauded Kennedy's speech and called it a "good sign," but refused to comment on the proposal for a joint trip to the moon. In Washington, there was a good bit of surprise — and some skepticism — about Kennedy's proposal.
The "space race" had been one of the focal points of the Kennedy administration when it came to office, and the idea that America would cooperate with the Soviets in sending a man to the moon seemed unbelievable. Other commentators saw economics, not politics, behind the proposal.
With the soaring price tag for the lunar mission, perhaps a joint effort with the Soviets was the only way to save the costly program. What might have come of Kennedy's idea is unknown — just two months later, he was assassinated in Dallas.
His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, abandoned the idea of cooperating with the Soviets but pushed ahead with the lunar program. In 1969, the United States landed the first men on the moon, thus winning a significant victory the "space race."
Thanks History.com
Above, Sputnik digital artwork by Erik Simonsen
In 1975 — 46 years ago — “Fame” gave David Bowie his first #1 in the U.S.
In 1975 — 46 years ago — “Fame” gave David Bowie his first #1 in the U.S.
The song was co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.
With the Young Americans sessions mostly concluded by late 1974, the material was delayed while Bowie extricated himself from his contract with manager, Tony Defries. During this time, he was staying in New York, where he met John Lennon. The pair jammed together, leading to a one-day session at Electric Lady Studios in January, 1975.
There, Alomar had developed a guitar riff for Bowie's cover of "Footstompin'" by The Flairs, which Bowie thought was "a waste" to give to a cover. Lennon, who was in the studio with them, sang "ame" over the riff, which Bowie turned into "Fame" and he thereafter wrote the rest of the lyrics to the song.
Bowie would later describe the song as "nasty, angry," and fully admitted that the song was written "with a degree of malice" aimed at the Mainman management group with whom he had been working at the time.
In 1990, Bowie reflected: "I'd had very upsetting management problems and a lot of that was built into the song. I've left that all that behind me, now... I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants."
Bowie would later claim that he had "absolutely no idea" that the song would do so well as a single, saying "I wouldn't know how to pick a single if it hit me in the face.”
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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