The less I say about this, the better, but it is true: while I am on the books for another 60 days, I am effectively no longer working for Jazzed.com or its parent company, eHarmony.com. It’s nothing to do with me personally, and I don’t feel a grudge; it’s been nearly 12 years for me at eHarmony, and it was time to move on, for everybody. A lot of people are in my same shoes today. We will survive, and so will eHarmony.
Banjo picker and bluegrass pioneer Earl Scruggs passed away today in Nashville.
Scruggs’ son Gary said his father passed away Wednesday morning at a Nashville, Tenn., hospital. Gary Scruggs said his father died of natural causes.
He was a titan in his field, an innovator, and it was a supreme pleasure to interview Mr. Scruggs and his son Gary many years ago, as one of my first assignments for L.A. RECORD. He will be missed.
Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton was found dead today. He was only 60.
Though all obituaries about him will start by mentioning his work with the Stooges, including mine, I think perhaps he’d prefer to be remembered for some of his work without Iggy Pop. So here it is, a track from his mid-seventies hard rock band, the New Order:
It’s a shame to think I’ll never get to see him play live. I loved him in the super group Wylde Ratttz from the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, and I think his avant-noise band Destroy All Monsters sounds pretty rad, too, if I can ever get my hands on a fucking copy of their collected recordings.
The singer of the Four Tops died Friday at the age of 72.
I think for years, I eshewed the music of the Four Tops because of this man’s voice. I preferred the refreshing sweetness of Curtis Mayfield in the Impressions, and the horny bleating of Smokey Robinson with the Miracles, to Stubbs’s rough, manly shouting (not to mention Holland-Dozier-Holland’s plinky choral building blocks that the songs were composed of). It somehow all seemed trite and bullying.
Only now that I’m older do I realize that the Four Tops did a rare feat, combining the classy (okay, sometimes simply chintzy) sophistication of Motown with the raw, more greasy R&B that they had been a part of for a decade before joining the Motown ranks. And Levi Stubbs was a big part of that, lending a voice of pain but also one of connection to the slick sounds that threatened to wash over him in each song, but which he always beat back. It’s a really original sound, and it is elegant. And though never delicate, it now feels strong and sophisticated to my aural palate.
Of course, you can hardly blame a punk rocker from the sticks (me!) for missing the greatness of a band consistently overplayed on oldies radio his entire life. So let me send off Stubbs with a song you may not have heard played this weekend on K-Earth:
One of the best actors in filmic history died today. Paul Newman, the other guy from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the guy whose star shone so brightly that even Tom Cruise looked like Oscar material when standing beside him, finally lost a battle with cancer.
You’ve got to give credit to Paul Newman not just for his good-natured humanitarianism and his un-Hollywood-like work ethic, but also just for his sheer acting ability. This man, who couldn’t help but be pretty damned good-looking even into his later life, rarely played the smartest guy or the dumbest, the best or the most evil, but generally excelled at roles where the character’s brains, emotions, sensitivity and needs all duke it out for which will have mastery over that character’s soul.
And let’s not forget his ability to bring levity to tragedy, and stoicism to comedy. Newman’s best role of all time, in my opinion, has to be the comedy that out slaps, out swears, and outlaughs all other blue collar comedies–Slapshot!
If you haven’t seen this film, do yourself a favor and just rent it and put it on. From frame one, this is a classic. My Uncle Buddy, my great-uncle and the quintessential black sheep of the family, gave this to me on video when I was about 12 and told me he saw this movie at a time in his life “when I just needed a good laugh.” The dialogue, which seems so rough-and-tumble and quintessentially masculine, was actually written by one Nancy Dowd, a criminally under-utilized writer who also went on to do Ladies and Gentlemen… the Fabulous Stains!
But I digress. Even at 83, Paul Newman made me in a way proud to be an American, and the world misses him. My girlfriend and I bought our doggy a can of Newman’s Own organic dog food in his honor.
P.S. Yes, I know Newman’s Own isn’t vegan, but I haven’t yet worked that out with the dog and the missus. At least the money goes to pet charities. And Fido won’t contract Mad Cow Disease.
P.P.S. I wonder if Paul, in his dying breath, thought to himself “What a Way to Go!”
For anyone who loves the early Pink Floyd sound and despises their later stuff, it’s worth noting that Roger Waters basically kicked Rick out of the band just as they were starting to suck, probably because Wright refused to suck as much as the Seventies crapola-fest fans demanded. And so the wonderfully psychedelic phantom of the opera keyboard sounds that made their first albums sound so good fell at the wayside.
Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets are such monumental albums, and such influences on my own keyboard experiments. Somewhere in Lucifer’s shining barleycorn mansion in the heart of the sun, Syd Barrett and Rick Wright are working up an album to send beams of celestial rabies right into Roger Waters’ brain.
Sandra Elaine Allen, the World’s Tallest Woman, died today.She was only fifty three.While I never knew Ms. Sandy Allen, I’ve known about her work for some time, which IMDB only scratches the surface of.I’ve seen her playing herself in various documentaries about “freaks” and their experiences in life, and she’s always carried herself with dignity.She seems like the kind of person you’d want to spend a lot of time with, who would be fun to talk to and also very caring and empathetic.She provided a warm glow in the otherwise bleak and stale Sid & Marty Krofft produced made-for-TV horror movie, Side Show, and as I just learned today, she was even in Fellini’s Casanova film!
Here she is in her youth, when a letter sent to the Guinness Book people landed her a listing and a job.Doesn’t she act like someone who’s finally coming into her own and getting some long overdue recognition?I know we’ve seen a lot of very talented people go in just a few short weeks, but this is one obituary that broke just a little bit of my heart to write.
Former press secretary and Fox News fuck Tony Snow died of cancer today.
I’m sure in a bit, we’ll see blogs such as Crooks and Liars do a polite little obit, in which they ask their readers to “leave tasteful comments” while we all pretend that there’s a final dignity in death that allows us to forgive.
But bullshit on that. I’m glad the fucker is dead. Let me be more clear–very few people deserve death more than Tony Snow. He was a smart guy who got paid to put a positive spin on his dumb and evil bosses, who used every trick in the book, especially charisma, to take the 20% of people who approve of Bush and try to make it 30%.
As press secretary, Snow brought partisan zeal and the skills of a seasoned performer to the task of explaining and defending the president’s policies. During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing.
Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation. He was the first press secretary, by his own accounting, to travel the country raising money for Republican candidates.
I don’t believe in karma, but there’s something so right and so just about a man brimming with evil also discovering that he’s brimming with cancer. I hope when he arrives in Hell, the millions of Iraqis who died from Bush’s policies get to pelt him with flaming sulphur.
I didn’t become aware of Russert until I was in college. I was taking a journalism class, and one of the requirements was that we watch Meet the Press each week and report on the subjects they talked about as if itwere news that we were writing a story on. Since I lived with a bunch of college kids who were kind of unreliable when it came to leaving the VCR set to record, I basically had to wake up early every Sunday morning (which would be hellish now, but seems unthinkable for a college man with an appreciation for booze), watch the show, take notes, then hit the sheets again until the afternoon.
Now, liberal-minded people like myself have pointed out the many times in this decade that Russert took Bush and crony talking points and repeated them on his show–but in my memory, Russert will always be the guy from my Sunday mornings in the nineties, the guy with the big head and the tough questions, who seemed polite to his guests while still asking probing questions that attempted to peel away the veneer of PR spin presented by, say, the Ken Starrs and Pat Buchanans who populated the news then. He really could make an interview about war preparations, campaign finance, and governmental procedure seem interesting. And Timmy cracked more than a few kernels of policy corn that I might otherwise not have understood or cared about.
In the end, Russert was both entertaining and informative, the best of what a talking head is supposed to be. And at only 58, he died way too young. For my YouTube tribute to the man, here he is, interviewing a journalist from the other end of the spectrum.
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