Okay. This thing has hit the 24-month mark. We’re entering the terrible-twos so expect a lot of oppositional no’s for the next year. So hit the subscribe button and let your friends know where they can find a good read about great people who have slipped the surly bonds of earth to quote a President who did just that. But we all will someday. We have also made it to Spring which for those of us still here beckons a new beginning. Flowers busting through the terra firma, more sunlight in the evening and warmer temps. We made it… although some did not and that is why we are here. Lots to write about so I’ll start right in.
I was going to start this month with Wayne Shorter but then Willis Reed died at 80. I am not a huge professional basketball fan but if you lived in New York back in the late 60’s early 70’s, the Knicks ruled the City. It shows you what winning in New York can be. Namath, Messier and Reed are gods to championship-starved New Yorkers. The Yankees, by the way, don’t count. Reed was a deserving champion. Together with Walt Frazier, Dick Barnett , Earl Monroe, Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere, they were “it” in New York sports. And Reed was their leader. The most amazing thing about him was his willingness to play hurt. I mean really hurt. Bernard king-type hurt. Actually it was the other way around. Bernard King played Reed-like hurt. His game seven performance in the 1970 NBA Championship finals was nothing short of miraculous. In game five of the series, when driving against the Lakers’ Wilt Chamberlain, Reed tore his right tensor muscle. When I tear a nail on my pinky, I am not ready for service so whatever the right tensor muscle is, that can’t be good. He missed game six but wondrously, in game seven, he returned, limping onto the Court and turning in an incredible and gutsy performance where the wounded warrior scored 36 points, and had 19 assists in willing the Knicks to the Championship. I don’t believe I have seen a gutsier performance in a game that meant so much in my lifetime. While a gentle guy off the court, he was not to be messed with on the hardwood. He once got into it with Lakers’ player Rudy LaRusso who had been riding him during a game. After complaining to the refs and getting no response Reed elbowed LaRusso in the head. When LaRusso punched Reed, he blew up and floored LaRusso with a punch, then broke the nose of John Block who tried to step in between the two and ultimately chased LaRusso to the Lakers’ bench almost clearing it with his fury. After the game he bemoaned his teammates not supporting him to which Barnett claimed there was no need to since he was clearly winning. After his 10 year career, he was in the front offices for the Knicks, Nets and New Orleans Hornets. He coached the Knicks for slightly over a year before being fired fourteen games into year two. He was also the head coach at Creighton for four years and was an assistant coach for the Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings. After the game seven performance, Howard Cosell said to Reed on National television: “You exemplify the very best that the human spirit can offer.” Cosell had it right there.
As noted, Wayne Shorter died at 89. His imprint on jazz cannot be minimized. He came up playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz messengers, a true proving ground for many jazz players, went on to play with Miles Davis and then formed Weather Report which changed the landscape of jazz. He was awarded 12 Grammy awards (as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award) and was a perennial winner of Downbeat magazine’s best sax player. As a bandleader he released 20 albums. Like so many greats in the arts, he was born in Newark, New Jersey. Not sure what was in the water but I drank it for 18 years and it did nothing for me. Shorter studied at NYU and after college spent two years in the army. After getting discharged he played with Maynard Ferguson. Later in his career he collaborated with Joni Mitchell and Carlos Santana. He played the sax solo on Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” and Steely Dan’s “Aja.” Of Shorter, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff wrote that he is “probably Jazz’ greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improvisor.” Pretty decent accolades.
Sticking with music, who among us hasn’t screamed out “Freebird,” after exhausting the calls for “Whipping Post” at a concert where neither Lynyrd Skynyrd nor the Allman’s were playing. It’s a passage of rock n’ roll youth. I would occasionally throw in “Whammer Jammer” just for the hell of it. In any case, Gary Rossington, the guy who wrote “Freebird” along with his bandmates and played that soaring slide guitar on the tune, died at 71, the last living member of the original band. He could have died a lot younger. In 1977 three members of the band died when their charter flight ran out of gas and crashed. Not sure who was watching the gas gauge on that aircraft but you would think when the warning light went on someone would have taken action. It’s not like you can just pull off on the side of the road. Rossington and others survived but Ronnie Van Zandt, Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie Gaines, who was a backup singer, the band’s road manager and the pilot and co-pilot all died in the crash. Rossington’s dependance on painkillers from injuries sustained caused addiction problems that he eventually kicked. Rossington, Van Zandt and drummer Bob Burns played on rival baseball teams in Jacksonville Florida. Rossington claimed to have been a good ballplayer and had hopes of signing with the Yankees. After Van Zandt injured Burns with a hit ball, the three decided to play some music while Burns recuperated. They liked what they heard and after adding additional members named the band after a mean high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, whose name they bastardized. The band was eventually “discovered” by Al Kooper who signed them to a deal and produced their first album. Rossington wrote “Sweet Home Alabama” a huge hit for the band which was penned in response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” After the plane crash, Rossington and Allen Collins, another surviving band member, formed the Rossington-Collins band. Ten years after the crash, the surviving members got together with Johnny Van Zandt, Ronnie’s brother, for a one-time tribute concert that continues to this day. The band is scheduled to tour with ZZ Top later this year. Rossington had cut back on his appearances with the band for health reasons. He will always “play it pretty for Atlanta.” And you can get some tickets, scream Free Bird all you want and not feel bad about it.
Jim Gordon, Born in Bayonne NJ, and a member of the famed Wrecking Crew, and someone Eric Clapton referred to as the greatest rock n’ roll drummer who ever lived, died in prison at 77. Gordon, who suffered from schizophrenia has been in prison since 1983 for killing his mother after years of hearing her voice in his head. As this blog believes that everyone contains goodness, matricide is not a disqualifier provided you possess the talent of Mr. Gordon. He played on everyone’s records. Jackson Brown, John Lennon, Carly Simon, George Harrison, Steely Dan, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Delaney and Bonnie, Joe Cocker. I could go on. He literally played on everyone’s sessions as a member of the Wrecking Crew, a mythical group of L.A. session musicians. He appeared on some of the greatest albums ever. “Pet Sounds” by the Beachboys (there you go Jimmy), “Imagine,” and Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.” He was the Drummer for Clapton on the “Layla” album and, having stolen a piano piece from a one-time girlfriend, Rita Coolidge, appended it to the title track and took writer’s credit it. Coolidge recalls that the piano piece was part of a song she and Gordon had written called “Time (don’t get in our way)” and played it for Clapton. The next she heard of it, the piano piece was part of Layla. She was infuriated but felt she couldn’t go against the rock powers to gain proper credit. Rita, if you reading this, I could get you the last six year’s earnings on that bad-boy. At some point, Gordon began hearing voices and acting erratically. He once punched Ms. Coolidge, flooring her. He told musicians at sessions they were the devil and eventually lost everything because he couldn’t work due to his behavior. He was treated in hospitals and began to have hallucinations. In 1983 he attacked his mother in her home, killing her. He was convicted of her murder even though he was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia. His defense of insanity was rejected and he has been in jail since. Better insanity defense may have been that he was a drummer, or even that he was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. It is a sad end to an amazing life.
A more upbeat story would be that of David Lindley, who like Gordon, was largely a session musician who played with loads of people, but unlike Gordon, hasn’t killed anyone, died at 78. Lindley played pretty much anything with strings. He played with Warren Zevon, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Jackson Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen and many others. It is his slide guitar and falsetto voice you hear on Jackson Brown’s extended version of “The Loadout/Stay.” Early in his career he started a band known as kaleidoscope which Jimmy Page referred to as “my favorite band of all time, my ideal band; absolutely brilliant.” Not wanting to do the things that require stardom, the band floundered and Lindley took up session work. Later in his career he formed El Rayo-X which played an eclectic mix of rock, ska and reggae. Onstage he was known for wearing explosively colored polyester which, while it was not rocker clothing, fit with the fact that he did not live the life of a successful rock musician. Characterizing himself as a “social misfit,” he shunned the rockstar life and lived quietly with his wife in Claremont California. The anti-rockstar.
This is sort of music related in that one-half of the pair that came to be one of the symbols of the summer of love has gone to the Yasgur’s farm in the sky. Bobbi Ercoline, who is seen on the cover of the Woodstock album hugging her boyfriend with a blanket wrapped around them died at 73. She (then Bobbi Kelly) and her then boyfriend, Nick Ercoline, along with some friends who all lived around the Middletown, New York area, not far from Bethel, the site of the three day festival of “peace and music,” had decided that the $18 admission fee seemed too steep to them. However, after hearing reports about all the chaos after the first day, they all headed to see what it was about. They took Mr. Ercoline’s mother’s car, figuring they could return the next day and say they were at church, and headed to the festival. They had to ditch the car along with way and Mr. Ercoline picked up the blanket somewhere along the line. A freelance photographer, Burk Uzzle, decided that it was better to photograph what was going on outside the festival rather than in it, caught the now famous hug and ultimately it was chosen to grace the cover of the Woodstock album. The couple married and remained so until Ms. Ercoline’s death. They had two children and after raising them she became a school nurse. Mr. Ercoline was a union carpenter. They would often recreate the hug and were frequently interviewed about the festival, explaining that their marriage was a testament to the spirit of the event. They never tried to make money from their picture. They didn’t even know they were on the cover until they bought the record and saw themselves. They then had to fess up to their parents that rather than being in church like they said, they had instead snuck away to the Woodstock festival. Lives as nice as the intent of the festival’s promoters.
Keith Reid, who played no instrument yet wrote the lyrics to every Procol Harum tune save for the songs on their 2017 album entitled Novum, “skipped the light fandango” at 76. He was not technically in the band but attended nearly every one of the band’s live performances. He would write the lyrics and generally give them to Gary Brooker who was the singer, keyboard player who would generally write the music although the other members, including the great guitarist, Robin Trower, would also take part in putting the lyrics to music. I was a fan of the band and got to see them at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. Their album with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra still holds up today. Perhaps their biggest hit was a “Whiter Shade of Pale,” quoted in part above. In 1986, after the band broke up, he moved to New York and wrote songs for the likes of Annie Lenox and Willie Nelson. He also put out two albums called the Keith Reid project which featured performances by Southside Johnny, and John Waite. “Now many moons and many Junes; Have passed since we made land; A salty dog, the seaman's log
Your witness, my own hand.”
Back to sports, Joe Pepitone died at 82. There was a time (mercifully) when the Yankees sucked and Joe Pepitone was one of the bright spots of an otherwise boring team. Pepi, as he was known, was brash, outlandish and sort of Joe Namath-y before there was Joe Namath. He was the first player to bring a blow-dryer into the clubhouse and he would hit all of the nightclubs. A three-time all-star and gold-glover, Pepitone’s on-field prowess was often offset by his somewhat chaotic personal life, whether it was marriage woes (he had three of them), money problems or general carousing. All of this would eventually end his career but make him a forever-memorable Yankee. As a high school student he was shot in an accident and nearly died. He claimed to have introduced Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford to marihuana and admitted to using stronger drugs in his life. The Yankees traded him to the Houston Astros who sold him to the Chicago Cubs. He played a year in Japan and as a kid from Brooklyn, was somewhat surprised that the Japanese didn’t speak English. After his playing career he was a bar owner, professional softball player and sometime coach. People though will always remember him as a flamboyant Yankee.
Jean Faut, a great pitcher for the South Bend Blue Sox of the All American Girls Professional Baseball team that operated during WWII and which was the model for the Penny Marshal film “A League of Our Own,” died at 98. During her career she pitched two no hitters in addition to two perfect games (very Koufax-like), had 140 wins in her eight-year career with an ERA of 1.23 with puts her in the rarified air of folks like Jacob deGrom. As a kid she shagged fly balls and occasionally pitched batting practice for a local semi-pro team. She was working in a clothing factory when a scout called and told her about a new league that was forming and holding tryouts. She left the factory in a heartbeat and made the cut, eventually chosen by the Blue Sox. She twice won the Triple-Crown and in addition to pitching, she played third-base. She was the women’s equivalent of Shohei Ohtani. After her playing career she was a professional bowler and bowled on a men’s team. As we know, nothing beats a strike from the Brooklyn side. She was also an avid golfer. We will remain happy with her loss because as Tom Hanks has taught us, there is no crying in baseball.
Dick Fosbury, the Olympic high jumper and originator of the “Fosbury flop,” a method now adopted by everyone who tries to clear the bar, died at 76. The Fosbury Flop, according to his New York Times obituary, is like “a corpse being pushed out of a window.” Before the flop, high jumpers would jump over the bar using a straddle method, which was a complicated maneuver that had them land on their feet. Hitting the bar using the “straddle” method also had its own form of danger for the men. Because if you did it right you wound up on your feet, the landing pit was generally sawdust. Fosbury started experimenting with his technique in high school and benefitted from the fact that the sawdust in the pit was being replaced with foam landing pads which permitted him to land on his back. Not all pits had been upgraded and Fosbury did compress some disks in his back landing in sawdust. He went to the University of Oregon where he perfected his technique and in the 1968 Olympics the world was introduced to the Fosbury Flop as he won the gold medal. In solidarity to black athletes, he raised his fist after the National Anthem but did not receive the kind of backlash that Tommy Smith and John Carlos, both black, received. After Olympic fame and college, he co-owned an engineering firm in Ketchum Idaho. He remained involved with the US. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. He also taught high jumping into has later years. He leaves a high-jumping legacy as the Fosbury Flop is now the universal manner of jumping.
Jesus Alou, the youngest of the three professional baseball-playing Alou’s, died at 80. Along with his brothers Matty (died in 2011) and Felipe (still with us at 87) , they were the first three brothers to play together in a major league baseball game when they all played the outfield for the San Francisco Giants in 1963. Jesus went on to pay 15 seasons of pro ball. He was selected by the Montreal Expos in the expansion draft and traded to the Houston Astros for Rusty Staub (Le Grand Orange). He was then traded to the Oakland A’s when they were World Champions in 1973 and 74 and then to the Mets when they won nothing. His career was decent but as one of three, he merits some ink here.
To me, Robert Blake, who died at 89, is the functional equivalent of OJ but he has gotten off relatively easy. I asked a few people after his death what they remember about him and not a single person mentioned that he may have killed his wife. I then asked them about OJ and “wife-killer” was the first thing they said. Blake’s and OJ’s stories are similar save for the color of their skin which I would tend to believe made a difference. On May 4, 2001, Blake took his wife out to dinner in Studio City. She was fatally shot in the head while sitting in Blake’s car which was parked around the corner from the restaurant. Blake claimed that he had gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a gun (not the murder weapon which was found in a nearby dumpster) and when he returned, he found her dead. Blake was charged with his wife’s murder about a year later after what the LAPD said was an exhaustive investigation. Two people who had worked with Blake as stuntmen said that Blake had tried to hire them at different times to kill his wife, a woman he married after he impregnated her out of some sense of duty. There was no physical evidence tying Blake to the murder and there was no gunpowder residue on his hands. He chose not to testify. The jury acquitted him. Like OJ, the family sued him and the civil jury, which admittedly works on a lower standard of proof (more likely than not as opposed to beyond a reasonable doubt) found him responsible for the murder and assessed $30 million of damages. Thus, Blake’s and OJ’s stories are in some ways strikingly similar but OJ has been vilified in ways that Blake never was. Mind you, I am not apologizing for what I believe OJ did, but we have a criminal justice system that is human and makes it hard to convict certain celebrities. Blake, however, never received the type of public rebuke that OJ did. Go figure. As for his career, like Jim Gordon’s, it was interesting. He was born in Nutley , New Jersey and was a child actor who was one of the “Little Rascals” that I watched as a kid. He also was in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” which starred Humphry Bogart. As an adult, he was in the army (he failed to sign up as required and was conscripted and sent to Alaska) and upon discharge was depressed at not being able to find work and spent a few years experimenting with drugs. He was offered and turned down the role of Little Joe Cartwright on Bonanza which went to Michael Landon. Somehow, I can’t imagine Blake as a cowboy. He acted in many movies, most notably “In Cold Blood,” but earned a reputation of being hard to work with. He eventually moved to television although he made it clear such work was beneath him and gained fame as Tony Baretta in the series that was a sort of spinoff or reworking of the show “Toma” that had gone off the air after the lead character quit the series. The network utilized the same premise and “Baretta” was born. Blake won an Emmy and Golden Globe for his performance. He was always drawn to society’s underbelly once telling CNN “I was born lonely, I live lonely and I’ll die lonely.” Sad but true.
On to more brighter stories, Gordon Moore, who had a PhD. in chemistry and was one of the founders of Intel, died at 94. He once applied for a job with Dow chemical and while he was found to be technically proficient, the psychologist noted that he would never manage anything. He ultimately went into business with eight people he met while working at a West Coast Bell Labs spinoff, each pooling $500 of their own money which he ultimately parlayed into billions with Intel. He postulated what came to be known as Moore’s Law which predicted that at certain intervals the number of transistors that would fit onto a silicon chip would double. Intel was one of the companies that insured that the technology we have all come to take for granted today was possible. Intel could have been an even greater force, not that it has not done well. Well before Steve Jobs and the Woz came up with the Apple home computer, one of Intel’s engineers wanted Intel to build a computer for use in the home. Moore dismissed the idea, according to his New York Times obit, asking the engineer: “what the heck would anyone want a computer for in his home?” In other areas of management and foresight, however, he was genius. Later in his life he turned to philanthropy starting the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation seeding it with 175 million shares of Intel. That ain’t chump change. It is the work of the Foundation that will certainly outlive him and continue his legacy.
Mel Zuckerman, who, along with his wife, founded the Canyon Ranch died at 94. As someone who struggled with his weight, he could not ever complete the regimes at the “fat farms” he went to. Along with his wife, and a trainer he met at one of the camps, he came up with the concept of a fat-farm that was fun. Mr. Zuckerman was a builder who lived a stressful life with the ups-and-downs of the real estate market and would often soothe himself with a half-gallon of ice cream. Today it would be a gummy which is far less caloric. Born in New Jersey (anyone keeping count here?) he was diagnosed with asthma and told not to exert himself. It wasn’t until he went to a weight loss clinic in California and met a trainer who told him to start walking for a mile that he made progress with his weight. He protested at first, invoking his asthma but she refused that as an excuse. His first mile took 25 minutes but eventually he started jogging the mile and could do it in eight minutes. With his wife’s prodding, at age 77, they invested $714,000 to buy the 42 acres in Tucson that would become the first Canyon Ranch. Its concept is to spend time pampering oneself, eating well and exercising appropriately for a healthy, more zen-like lifestyle. There are now Canyon Ranches in Tucson, Lenox MA, Woodside CA and Las Vegas, NV and they have become the gold standard for pampering oneself. He believed his success with the ranches quite ironic in that he ran places where people could find the inner peace, he was never able to achieve.
One of the things that you would never find at a Canyon ranch is an Arby’s roast beef sandwich. One of the co-founders, along with his brother Forrest, of that chain, Leroy Raffel, died at 96. While people may scoff at red meat, Mr. Raffel did outlive Mr. Zuckerman and I found no record of him ever going to the Canyon Ranch. When burgers were selling for 15 cents, he and his brother gambled on people willing to pay 69 cents for a beef sandwich that was not chopped. Catering to the wealthy. Arby’s is a play on RB which could stand for roast beef or Raffel brothers. After stumbling a bit in the 70’s, the company went through a bankruptcy reorganization and was sold to Royal Crown Cola Company which owned it for a time. When asked how he was able to deal with the stress of navigating the company through its rocky financial times he answered “it’s because I’m a tough son-of-a-bitch.” An ingredient for success for sure. I guess that is the opposite end of the spectrum from downing a half-gallon of ice cream. Note no mention of heading to Arizona to the Canyon Ranch because that is not what tough son-of-a-bitches do. Hope when he got to whatever there is at the end of this road he didn’t look around and say “where’s the beef.”
Okay, I know that artificial Intelligence or IA is all the rage, so I figured I would check it out to see how easily I could be replaced. I chose John Jenrette, Jr, who died at 86. He was on the bubble and but for his wife, the lovely Rita Jenrette, he probably wasn’t going to make the cut. Anyway, I tasked ChatGBT to write a “witty obituary” for John Jenrette, JR. Chat GBT, in case you have not heard of it, is being used by every college kid to write their term papers. It came up with Mr. Jenrette’s obit for me in about 90 seconds. Try it. Go into the thing and ask it to write anything and it will come up with something. I can use it with impunity because its product is not copyrightable because only things created by humans are subject to that protection according to the Courts. In any event, here is what it came up with:
John Jenrette, Jr., a man of many titles and few inhibitions, has passed away at the age of 76. John was a congressman, a convict, and a self-proclaimed ladies' man. He will be missed by those who knew him and those who wish they didn't.
John's life was not without controversy. He was known for his flamboyant personality, his love of the limelight, and his questionable ethics. In 1980, he was caught in a bribery scandal and sentenced to prison. Despite his fall from grace, John remained unapologetic and continued to live life on his own terms.
John was a man of many interests. He loved politics, power, and beautiful women. He was also a fan of fine wine, fast cars, and expensive suits. He lived life to the fullest, never one to let a little thing like the law get in his way.
John's passing leaves a hole in the hearts of those who knew him. Whether you loved him or hated him, there's no denying that John Jenrette, Jr. was a force to be reckoned with. Rest in peace, John. We hope they have plenty of champagne and beautiful women in heaven.
Okay, for now I think I am safe. No specific reference to Abscam and his getting caught on tape in response to a bribery offer of $100,000 with $50,000 up front saying “I have larceny in my heart. I’d take it in a second.” Never a good thing to be heard saying on an FBI tape. Especially as a sitting United States Congressman. Also, no mention at all of his wife Rita who soon after his conviction wrote a piece in the Washington Post entitled, “Diary of A Mad Congresswife ,”in which she wrote of disdain for her life and wrote about her husband’s drinking. Soon thereafter she posed for Playboy and told about having sex with Mr. Jenrette on the steps of Congress. That is the fodder that gets you in this rag and ChatGBT totally missed it. The idea of alcohol for the afterlife, though, ain’t too bad.
Alright, this thing has gone on long enough. Probably would have taken Chat GBT all of five minutes to write. Alert your friends. Year three here we come.
Charlie, you've outdone yourself with this edition. Very interesting and informative (and funny)!
Good one, Charlie. I thought I was the only person who bought the Procol Harum “Live With the Edmonton Symphony” album, a favorite in my high school daze.