The pioneer of "gonzo" journalism — Hunter S. Thompson — was born on this day 86 years ago
Hunter S. Thompson, New York City, 1984
Photo by Frank Beacham
The pioneer of "gonzo" journalism — Hunter S. Thompson — was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on this day 86 years ago.
By age 10, Thompson was publishing his own two-page newspaper, which he sold for four cents. By his early teens, he had already began the life of drinking, vandalism and pyromania that would turn him into a bestselling writer.
At age 18, he was jailed for robbery. After serving 30 days of his 50-day sentence, he was released after promising to join the Air Force. While serving on a Pensacola, Florida, Air Force base, he became sports editor of the base newspaper and later went to work for a paper in New York, where he was fired for kicking a vending machine.
He wrote conventional journalism pieces for various magazines, and in 1967 he expanded one of his articles into his first book, Hells Angels, which became a bestseller.
In 1970, while covering the Kentucky Derby, Thompson went on a weeklong bender and developed severe writer's block. He handed his scrawled notes to the copy boys. His editors sent after him. The result, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," was hailed as a landmark in journalism.
One of his editors dubbed the new style "gonzo," for its wild, careening style.
Politically minded, Thompson ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in 1970, on the Freak Power ticket. He became well known for his inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon, who he claimed represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character."
In 1972, Thompson's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, became a bestseller, as did his 1972, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, about the Nixon-McGovern presidential election.
Thompson's output notably declined from the mid-1970s, as he struggled with the consequences of fame, and he complained that he could no longer merely report on events as he was too easily recognized.
He was also known for his lifelong use of alcohol and drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. He remarked: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
After a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67 at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., on February 20, 2005. Death came from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In accordance with his wishes, Thompson’s ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend, Johnny Depp, and attended by friends including then-Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson.
Hari Kunzru wrote that "the true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist ... one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him."
Thanks History.com.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1972.
Poster for the book by Ralph Steadman
Dion, New York City, 2017
Photo by Frank Beacham
Dion DiMucci is 84 years old today.
DiMucci, known in his younger days simply as “Dion,” is a singer-songwriter whose work has incorporated elements of doo-wop, pop oldies music, rock and R&B styles — and, most recently, straight blues.
Dion was one of the most popular American rock and roll performers of the pre-British Invasion era. He had more than a dozen Top 40 hits in the late 1950s and early 60s. He is best remembered for the 1961 singles, "Runaround Sue" and "The Wanderer," written with Ernie Maresca.
Dion's popularity waned in the mid-1960s, perhaps due to the public's changing taste in pop music, and perhaps in part due to personal difficulties he had during this period. But toward the end of the decade, he shifted his style and produced songs with a more mature, contemplative feeling, such as "Abraham, Martin & John." He became popular again in the late 1960s and into the mid-1970s, and he has continued making music ever since.
Critics who had dismissed his early work, pegging him as merely a teen idol, praised his later work. He has influenced many other musicians.
Born to an Italian-American family in the Bronx, as a child Dion accompanied his father, Pasquale DiMucci, a vaudeville entertainer, on tour and developed a love of country music — particularly the work of Hank Williams. He also developed a fondness for the blues and doo-wop musicians he heard performing in local bars and on the radio. His singing was honed on the street corners and local clubs of the Bronx, where he and other neighborhood singers created a cappella riffs.
In early 1957, he auditioned for Bob and Gene Schwartz, who had just formed Mohawk Records. They recorded Dion singing lead on a song which had been arranged by Hugo Montenegro and pre-recorded with everything, but the lead vocals. The backing vocals were by a group called "The Timberlanes," whom Dion had never met.
The resulting single, "The Chosen Few," was released under the name, Dion and the Timberlanes, and became a minor regional hit. Writing about this experience later, in his autobiography, The Wanderer, Dion said that that he had never met the Timberlanes and didn't even know who they were.
"The vocal group was so white bread, I went back to my neighborhood and I recruited a bunch of guys — three guys — and we called ourselves Dion and the Belmonts." The new group's breakthrough came in early 1958, when "I Wonder Why" (on their newly formed "Laurie" label) made #22 on the U.S. charts.
Dion said of the Belmonts; "I'd give 'em sounds. I'd give 'em parts and stuff. That's what 'I Wonder Why' was about. We kind of invented this percussive rhythmic sound. If you listen to that song, everybody was doing something different.
“There's four guys, one guy was doing bass, I was singing lead, one guy's going 'ooh wah ooh,' and another guy's doing tenor. It was totally amazing. When I listen to it today, often times I think, 'Man, those kids are talented.'"
Dion and Bob Dylan are the only two rock artists to be featured on the album cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Dion and Dylan would later perform on the same bill in New York City in 2009.
Here, Dion is joined by Aaron Neville performing “Abraham, Martin and John” on Nashville Now.
On this day in 1953 — 70 years years ago — Elvis Presley, then a truck driver, made his first ever recording when he paid $3.98 at the Memphis recording service singing two songs, “My Happiness” and “That's When Your Heartaches Begin.”
The so-called vanity disc was a gift for his mother. It would surface 37 years later as part of an RCA compilation called “Elvis — the Great Performances.”
In 2015, the recording was auctioned and sold for $300,000 to musician and Nashville recording studio owner, Jack White. White did a digital transfer and the recording was released on a 10-inch 78 RPM pressing on 2015 Record Store Day.
The reissued disc kept the same simple typewritten label that is on the original, which was actually typed onto the back of a leftover Sun label for a recording by the vocal group the Prisonaires.
Clifford Odets, playwright, screenwriter and director, was born 117 years ago today.
In 1931, Odets became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential New York theatre company that utilized an acting technique new to the United States. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director, Constantin Stanislavski.
It was further developed by Group Theatre director, Lee Strasberg, and became known as The Method or Method Acting. Odets eventually became the Group's primary playwright.
Odets pursued acting with great passion and ingenuity. At the age of 19, he struck out on his own, billing himself as ″The Rover Reciter.″ Under this moniker, he procured bookings as a radio elocutionist.
He moved away from his parents to Greenwich Village, where he acted with the Poet's Theatre under the direction of Village legend, Harry Kemp. Odets claimed to have become America's first real disc jockey at about this time, at radio station WBNY, as well as a drama critic.
In this capacity, he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. O'Casey's work would prove to be a powerful influence on Odets. Following stints as a dramatics counselor at Catskill summer camps and periods of employment in stock companies, Odets got his Broadway break in 1929. He was cast as understudy to Spencer Tracy in Conflict by Vincent Lawrence.
In the fall of 1929, he landed his first job with the prestigious Theatre Guild as an extra playing bit parts. Odets acted in small roles in a number of Theatre Guild productions between 1929 and 1931. It was at the Theatre Guild that he befriended the casting director, Cheryl Crawford.
Crawford suggested that Harold Clurman, then a play reader for the Guild, invite Odets to a meeting to discuss new theatre concepts they were developing with Lee Strasberg. Odets was mesmerized by Clurman's talks, and became the last actor chosen for the Group Theatre's first summer of rehearsals in June, 1931, at Brookfield Center in Connecticut.
From the start, Odets was relegated to small roles and understudying other actors. With the extra time on his hands and at Clurman's urging, he began to write plays. In late 1932, Odets began writing a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, initially called, I Got the Blues. He worked diligently on this play, sharing drafts of it with Clurman and promising parts to his fellow actors – often the same parts.
While at Green Mansions, their 1933 summer rehearsal venue in Warrensburg, New York, the Group performed Act II of the play, now retitled, Awake and Sing,! for other camp residents. The audience was enthusiastic, but the Group's leadership, Lee Strasberg in particular, was still, at this point opposed to producing it.
Odets trained with the Group at their various summer rehearsal headquarters located in the Connecticut countryside and the Catskills. In addition to Brookfield Center and Green Mansions, these venues included Dover Furnace in Dutchess County (1932) and a large house in Ellenville, New York (1934).
The Group spent the summer of 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Their final summer retreat was in 1939 at Lake Grove in Smithtown, New York. Odets's Group training under Strasberg's tutelage was essential to his development as a playwright.
He said in an interview late in life that ″My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company. . . . And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays.″
Odets's first play to be produced was the one-act, Waiting for Lefty, on January 5, 1935 at the Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York City. The piece is a series of interconnected scenes depicting workers for a fictional taxi company, but inspired by an actual taxi strike. The focus alternates between the drivers' union meeting and vignettes from the workers' difficult and oppressed lives.
Not all are taxi drivers. A young medical intern falls victim to anti-Semitism, a laboratory assistant's job is threatened if he doesn't comply with orders to spy on a colleague and couples are thwarted in marriage and torn apart by the hopelessness of economic conditions caused by the Great Depression. The climax is a defiant call for the union to strike, which brought the entire opening night audience to its feet.
The play can be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. Waiting for Lefty's unexpectedly wild success brought Odets international fame.
Awake and Sing!, produced in February, 1935, is generally regarded as Odets's masterpiece. It has been cited as ″the earliest quintessential Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre." The play concerns the Berger family, living in the Bronx under the shadow of economic collapse.
The 1935 one-acts, Waiting for Lefty, and Till the Day I Die, along with a number of other plays produced by the Group Theatre, are harsh criticisms of profiteers and exploitative economic systems during the Great Depression.
The highly successful Golden Boy (1937) portrays a young man torn between artistic and material fulfillment. Ironically, it was the Group Theatre's biggest commercial success. From Golden Boy on, Odets's work focused more on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as affected by the moral dilemmas of individual characters.
Odets' dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk. Arthur Miller observed that, with Odets' first plays, ″For the very first time in America, language itself . . . marked a playwright as unique.″
Odets' use of ethnic and urban speech patterns reflects the influence of another socialist playwright with proletarian concerns, Sean O'Casey. Other hallmarks of Odets' style are his humanistic point of view, and his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, reflecting the influence of Anton Chekhov.
On July 23, 1963, Odets was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles to undergo treatment for stomach ulcers. During surgery, doctors discovered that he had stomach cancer. He received bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg and Paula Strasberg, Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Shirley MacLaine and Danny Kaye.
On August 14, 1963, Odets died of stomach cancer at the age of 57.
Odets has been looked on by many as an icon of the American theatre. According to Arthur Miller, ″An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the press, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves and our prospects.″
Marian Seldes wrote that, ″Paddy Chayefsky, who felt competitive with Odets, . . . told an interviewer, ′There isn't a writer of my generation, especially a New York writer, who doesn't owe his very breath — his entire attitude toward theatre — to Odets.’”
Convicted of murder on meager evidence, Joe Hill, the singing Wobbly, was sentenced to be executed in Utah on July 18, 1914 — 109 years ago today.
A native of Sweden who immigrated to the U.S. in 1879, Hill joined the International Workers of the World (IWW) in 1910. The IWW was an industrial union that rejected the capitalist system and dreamed one day of leading a national workers' revolution.
Members of the IWW — known as Wobblies — were especially active in the western United States, where they enjoyed considerable success in organizing mistreated and exploited workers in the mining, logging and shipping industries.
Beginning in 1908, the IWW began encouraging its membership to express their beliefs through song. The group published its Little Red Song Book, otherwise known as the I.W.W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.
A few years later, the witty and handsome Joe Hill became one of the Wobblies' leading singers and songwriters. Hill composed many of the IWW's best-loved anthems, including "The Preacher of the Slave" which introduced the phrase "pie in the sky."
By 1915, Hill was one of the most famous Wobblies in the nation. Public notoriety, however, could prove dangerous for a radical union man. In 1915, Hill was arrested and charged with murdering two Salt Lake City policemen during a grocery store robbery.
Although the evidence against Hill was tenuous, a jury of conservative Utahans convicted him on this day in 1914 and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad the following year.
Ever since, scholars have debated whether Hill was actually guilty or was railroaded because of his radical politics. Regardless of his guilt or innocence, Hill became a powerful martyr for the IWW cause by telegramming his comrades with a famous last-minute message: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."
Here, Joan Baez performs Earl Robinson’s “Joe Hill” at Woodstock, 1969.
Jim Kweskin is 83 years old today.
Kweskin is most notable as the founder of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, with Fritz Richmond, Geoff Muldaur, Bob Siggins and Bruno Wolfe. They were active in Boston in the 1960s.
Maria D'Amato, known after her marriage to Geoff Muldaur as Maria Muldaur, formerly with the Even Dozen Jug Band, joined the band in 1963.
During the five years they were together, the jugband successfully modernized the sounds of pre-World War II rural music.
Kweskin released six albums and two greatest hits compilations on Vanguard Records between 1963 and 1970. These included Jim Kweskin's America on Reprise Records in 1971 and four albums on Mountain Railroad Records between 1978 and 1987.
Kweskin is probably best known as a singer and bandleader, but he is also known for his guitar stylings, adapting the ragtime-blues fingerpicking of artists like Blind Boy Fuller and Mississippi John Hurt while incorporating more sophisticated jazz and blues stylings into the mix.
In the year of 2013, the band held a reunion tour that included Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur, Geoff Muldaur, Richard Greene, Bill Keith, Cindy Cashdollar and Sam Bevan — most of whom were amongst its original members.
Here, Kweskin performs “Cuckoo” at McCabes in 2012. Padrick Peper is on harmonica.
Lonnie Mack was born 82 years ago today.
A rock, blues and country guitarist and vocalist, Mack was best known for his 1963 instrumental, "Memphis." He was "a pioneer in rock guitar soloing," as well as rock's first "virtuoso" lead guitarist and rock's first "guitar hero."
In 1963 and early 1964, Mack recorded a succession of full-length electric guitar instrumentals that combined a blues style with fast-picking country techniques and a rock beat. Among these were "Memphis," "Wham!" and "Chicken Pickin'."
These recordings are said to have formed the leading edge of the virtuoso "blues rock" lead guitar genre. In 1979, music historian Richard T. Pinnell called 1963's "Memphis" a "milestone of early rock guitar." The pitch-bending tremolo arm found on some electric guitars reportedly became known as the "whammy bar" in recognition of Mack's aggressive, rapid manipulation use of the device in 1963's Wham!"
Mack is widely regarded today as a pivotal historical figure in expanding the role of the electric guitar in rock music. He also brought a strong gospel sensibility to his vocals, and is considered one of the finer early "blue-eyed soul" singers.
Crediting both Mack's vocals and his guitar solos, music critic Jimmy Guterman ranked Mack's first album, The Wham of that Memphis Man!, #16 in his book, The 100 Best Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time.
Mack released several singles in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1963 and 1990, he released thirteen original albums spanning a variety of genres. He enjoyed his greatest recognition as a blues-rock singer-guitarist, with especially productive periods during the 1960s and the latter half of the 1980s.
Mack switched musical genres and idled his career as a rock artist for lengthy periods, due to an aversion to notoriety and a preference for simple country living.
Mack died of natural causes on April 21, 2016, at a country hospital near his log-cabin home, seventy miles east of Nashville. He had often told friends of a lifelong recurring dream, set near his childhood home, in which "his body [flew] effortlessly across the Ohio River."
Here, Mack performs “Satisfy Susie”at Carnegie Hall, 1986.
Snapshot from Hollywood Blvd.