We have rounded the Memorial Day holiday, where we honored all those whose lives were lost to secure the freedom that we have and are of late perhaps squandering. We are now headed firmly into the summer. The wine is less red and often white, the beer flows, the skin burns and the BBQ’s light. Enjoy it in all its glory because we will be shoveling snow before we know it. I missed Richard Lewis last month (sorry Mike) but truth-be-told, he didn’t rate all that high on my list. I’ll try to capture the key and some not-so-key players this month. You all need to capture all that summer has to offer so put down this dreck, get off your asses and get outside to enjoy the joys of the season.
I am not a big basketball fan although watching the Knicks playoff run, I marveled at the athleticism of these huge men. Oh, and Caitlin Clark was great too. A great shooter but a better passer in my mind. Anyway, when people talk basketball greats they often go to Jordon, and Johnson and Kareem and Bird and Russell and Wilt and LeBron. They rarely bring up Bill Walton who died this month at 76. They should. He was a standout in high school and led UCLA to two National Championships along the way supporting and 88 game winning streak. He was the national college player of the year in 1972, 73 and 74. There are those who say he was the best all-around college player ever to grace the court. He was the number one pick in the NBA draft and took the Portland Trailblazers to the National Championship in 1977 while earning the League’s Most Valuable Player award. Later in his career, coming off the bench in a more supportive role, he helped the Boston Celtics to a National Championship while earning the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award. His career was beset by injuries to his knees and feet. His injury problems started in high school (where he broke an ankle, a leg, several bones in his feet and had knee surgery) and he endured 36 additional surgeries during his life, sometimes missing entire playing seasons due to injury. Perhaps, he is not considered so readily among the greats because he was also known for many other things. He had a stellar career as a broadcaster who would bring, at times, rather oddball takes to the situation at hand. In one instance, Dana Jacobson, the host of ESPN’s cold Pizza, asked Walton what he thought of Amar’e Stoudemire’s opening day performance against the Lakers, to which Walton answered:
Dana, from the valley of the sun I am perched high above the desert floor, the red streaks of the morning dawn are illuminating this glorious sky. I am perusing Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitude” here and on opening day the songs are just running through this smoking crater. I’ve been listening to Bob Dylans newest album “Modern Times,” which is absolutely remarkable. “Thunder on the Mountain,” “Spirit on the Water,” “Rolling and Tumblin’,” which all go to describe Stoudemire. But the songs I can’t get out of my head today, John Fogarty’s “Center Field,” put me in coach, I’m ready to play, or Bob Dylan’s “New Morning,” what could be better than opening day?
And only then, 45 seconds into has answer, did he talk about Stoudemire’s performance. That was vintage Walton. Walton loved music and went to over 850 Grateful Dead concerts. Mickey Hart, one of the the Dead’s drummers called Walton his best friend. And, what endears him most to me is that he was a big bike rider. And he rode a big bike. A custom-made 70 cm bike that he rode slowly but deliberately. He told the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay (my favorite sports columnist, by the way), “My bike is my medicine. I’m always sick of something, or somebody, and I know that when I get on my bike, my bike makes me happy.”
Two paragraphs for Bill. He always seemed happy and up-beat and positive. He was a firm believer in civil rights and was from his childhood days. He was arrested while at UCLA for protesting the Vietnam war. And he once appeared at a press conference with leftist radicals who were accused of harboring Patty Hearst after her kidnapping. He was very socially aware and at a time when black athletes spoke out about civil rights, he was perhaps the only white guy to take a hard stand, once telling The Nation, “[t]he Blacks have gotten a raw deal for a long time. A lot of my teammates are Black and I really admire the way they’ve risen above their raw deal. They’re my friends and I feel for them. I know I’ve gotten twice as much as I deserve because I’m white.” Once, while a trailblazer, he referred to the FBI as “the enemy,” and asked the “world to stand with us in our rejection of the United States government.” This led to an outpouring of vitriol against him causing the Trailblazers to issue a statement that y “deplored Bill Walton’s statements” about the U.S. Government. He was a man of principal and grew up, as did many children of the 70’s, to be revered across the Country that he really did love. It was his indomitable, happy, optimistic spirit that I will remember . He was a man for everyone, a great athlete, a great sportscaster, and a great human being, even though I am not a Deadhead. People like him are too rare these days and he will be missed.
When I was a kid there was not the worldwide focus on money that there is today. Money is the be-all-end-all of most of America, if not the entire world, nowadays. Perhaps there was always a segment that chased wealth relentlessly but it was not the way people operated in the main. In the mid-seventies and into the 80’s chasing wealth rather than the comfortable middle class became what life was all about and the person who perhaps best exemplified that, Ivan Boesky, died this month at 87. In a 1986 commencement speech at the University of California at Berkley of all places, he told the graduates (to great applause I might add) “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Those words and Mr. Boesky became the model for the movie Wall Street where Michael Douglass played the role of Gordon Gekko, modeled after Mr. Boesky. Money seemed all that mattered to Boesky and he made plenty of it. Turns out, though, that he was not the prescient stock-picker many thought him to be. Suitcases of cash paid to the right people yielded the names of takeover targets in which Mr. Boesky invested millions, often financed by his friend Michael Milken, and made even more. The feds started investigating him after a prosecution of Dennis Levine, a low level Drexel Burnham Lambert banker, provided intelligence that he was being paid by Boesky. Another recipient of Boesky payoffs for inside-information was Martin Siegal of Kidder Peabody & Company. With the feds on his tail, Boesky quietly cut a deal with the government and began taping people such as Michael Milken in order to ensnare them in illegal activity. Millken’s arrest brought down Drexel Burnham where hundreds of innocent people lost their jobs. The lot of them went to prison, Boesky for 18 months of a three year sentence. His wife divorced him and, claiming to be broke, he settled the divorce for $20 million, proving that while crime doesn’t pay, it can yield pretty good dividends. Boesky lived out his life in La Jolla, California where he remarried and had another child. Not sure what the admission price is for a happy afterlife so I don’t know if he had enough for entry.
At the opposite end of the investing spectrum from Mr. Boesky, who resorted to subterfuge to win, was Jim Simons, a gifted mathematician, who built a wildly successful investment firm, who died this month at 86. After graduating from MIT and earning his doctorate in Mathematics from Berkley at 23, he taught at both M.I.T. and Harvard while simultaneously working for the Institute for Defense Analyses as a Russian code-breaker (he was fired for opposing the Vietnam war). Ultimately, he worked at Stoney Brook, part of the SUNY system, where he was Chairman of the mathematics department. When he hit 40, even though he had never taken a finance course, he opened what would become Renaissance Technologies in a strip mall in Setauket, Long Island. Eschewing norms, he did not hire analysts or MBA’s, but rather mathematicians, statisticians and scientists, whom he gave access to advanced computers so that they could process data and build mathematical models to guide investments. Utilizing these quant methods, their four funds earned an average 66% yearly profits over a 30 year period, killing pikers like Buffet and Maurice Greenberg. He retired in 2010 with a net worth of $11 billion which doubled in ten years. He devoted his time to philanthropy, largely directed at scientific endeavors. He gave $500 million to Stoney Brook alone. Perhaps more interesting than his ability to make money, was the fact that he was a lifelong chain-smoker who lived to be 86. How’d he figure that out? He would smoke regardless of the laws or rules, simply paying whatever charges were assessed against him. Wonder if he smoked Lucky’s?
The MC-5 has come to the end of a bad run. In February, their guitarist, Wayne Kramer, died and in April, their manager, John Sinclair, who played a major role in crafting both their music and their politics died. This month, their drummer and the last remaining member of the band played his last paradiddle at 75. No longer being able to write about the band or its members robs from me the ability to type “Kick Out the Jams Motherfuckers,” which I will miss. Thompson played loud and fast, partially, he has said, because the band turned their amps up to 10 (not 11 mind you) and since they had no money to buy microphones for the drums, he had to bang as hard as possible. Hence, guys like Dave Grohl loved his style. So be careful the next time the MC-5 tours and stops in your city. They are all dead. Stop the madness. Don’t buy tickets.
Speaking of the last living members of bands, Doug Ingle, the keyboard player and founding member of Iron Butterfly, and the guy who penned and sang “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vita,” Died at 78 . The song, probably the first one to be dubbed heavy metal, ran some 17 minutes and four seconds, and took the entire second side of the band’s second album. If it did nothing else, it permitted disk jockeys to take extended bathroom breaks. I think I wrote about this when the bands drummer, Ron Bushy, died, but it is worth repeating. Apparently, the drummer, Bushy, returned to the house he was sharing with Ingle, who had consumed a gallon of wine (according to reports) while writing a song. The name of the song was “In the Garden of Eden” and was a love song about Adam and Eve. When Bushy asked Ingle the name of the tune, Ingle slurred out what Bushy wrote to down to be In-A-Gadda-Da-Vita. When Ingle sobered up, he decided to keep the name because it sounded mystical. It wasn’t meant to actually be on a record but when the band was recording at Ultrasonic Studios in Hempstead, New York, the engineer asked them to play something while he set the levels on the instruments. They chose to play “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vita.” The engineer, who had hit the record button while he worked, recorded the entire 17 minute tune and they decided to put it on the record. The album spent some 140 weeks on the album charts and sold over 30 million copies. One writer, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, described it as “the epitome of heavy psychedelic excess, encapsulating the most indulgent tendencies of the era.” It was perhaps the drum solo that was most memorable and Ringo Star used it as the template for his own rare solo on “The End” Watch it. A three minute version of the tune, released as a single (no deejay bathroom breaks here), made it to number 30 on the singles chart. In a Simpsons episode, Bart tricks the family minister into including the song “In the Garden of Eden, by I. Ron Butterfly into the weekly hymnal and the congregants wind up singing the entire 17 minutes of the tune. The church organist collapses after performing the opus. I challenge anyone to recall any other song by the band. I didn’t know any. The other side of the album (remember them?) contained “Most Anything You Want,” “Flowers and Beads,” “My Mirage,” “Termination,” and “Are You Happy.” That said, when you record a song that is an anthem for a generation, there is no need to have other recordings remembered. And like the MC-5, with Ingle’s demise, all of the Iron Butterfly members are dead, so don’t buy their concert tickets.
Saxophone players are everywhere but ask people to name them and they are generally at a loss beyond Clarence Clemmons. Pressed, they can probably get to Michael Brecker and then David Sanborn, who died this month at 78. Their music, however, is much better known than they are. For instance, even those who couldn’t name Mr. Sanborn are very familiar with his work such as the sax work on David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” An alumnus of the Saturday Night band and a regular with the Late Show with David Letterman band, he played with about everyone. He was on the “Born to Run” album and in addition to Bowie and Bruce, he played with Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Cat Stevens, Roger Daltry, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Steeley Dan, Billy Joel, the Eagles, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones and Toto. It is really a matter of who didn’t he play with. The Phoenix Times wrote that “anyone with a record collection more than a foot wide probably owns a piece of David Sanborn’s unmistakable sound but doesn’t know it.” He played Woodstock with the Paul Butterfield Bluees Band. He was the recipient of one platinum album, eight gold albums, and six Grammy’s. He co-hosted a music show, Night Music, where he interviewed and played with an eclectic group of musicians. He also had a syndicated radio show. But it was live where he loved to play, touring until recently. As a kid he contracted polio and spent a year in an iron lung. His doctor thought the saxophone would be a good way for him to build up lung capacity. H probably wasn’t thinking Grammy’s but you never know. His sweet sound that populated far more records than we knew, will be missed.
A producer on Broadway is someone who finances the play or project. A producer in the music realm is someone who helps an artist get the right sound for their records. Producers generally work behind the scenes and, save for a few who have garnered a lot of accolades (Don Was for instance, or Phil Spector), you generally don’t hear about them. Some producers are very involved picking the songs and hiring the musicians, the studio and the engineer, and some are very minimalist, letting the artist deal with all of that. Some go for big productions (think Todd Rundgren who produced Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”) and others are more minimalist (as in Nick Lowe’s production of early Elvis Costello material). Lowe once said, I find the band’s flaws and try and play them up. One of the producers who was more to the Lowe end of the spectrum, Steve Albini, died this month at 61. He worked largely with indie bands, a genre that I did not follow closely, so, truth be told, I was not really aware of him but reading about him for this piece made me respect what he did greatly. I was on the fence about him but Zach Intrater lobbied passionately for him and sent me material that turned me around. I might have taken Zach for a Carpenters listener but I am apparently wrong, wrong, wrong. Albini is sort of the EVH of production, even though he would probably chafe at the use of the term producer, preferring engineer instead. But he was much more than an engineer. He produced hundreds of albums by bands such as the Pixies, Fugazy, Nirvana, the Breeders, and PJ Harvey. He was also a performer who played in (unless your Zach you wouldn’t know them) Shellac and Big Black. In a letter to Nirvana, when he was pitching them to let him produce, er, engineer their record, “In Utero,” he wrote about his view of the role he would play. “I consider the band the most important thing as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day.” He went on, “I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record where every note and syllable is in place and every drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates samplers, and sequencers then the record may not be incompetent but is certainly won’t be exceptional.” That is my kind of guy. And producers generally get a percentage of the record sales, say 1 or 1.5 points which can translate into hundreds of thousands or millions if the record is a hit. Albini didn’t believe in that. In his letter to Nirvana he wrote, “I explained this to Kurt but thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band wrote the songs. The band plays the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.” He went on, “I would like to be paid like the plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will want me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales [“In Utero” sold some 15 million] , that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.” This is my kind of guy. In an interview with The Guardian, he was asked how he would like his career to be viewed to which he said: “I don’t give a shit. I’m doing it and that’s what matters to me – the fact that I get to keep doing it. That’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it.” Someone who I am sure would tell the RRHOF to go shit in its hat. Sorry I didn’t learn of this guy sooner.
Duane Eddy, one of the original guitar heroes, who influenced guitarists from Geroge Harrison to Jeff Beck and who Bruce Springsteen paid homage to with the guitar on “Born to Run,” died at 86. You probably know him as the guitarist on the “Peter Gunn” television theme. Eddy perfected the twangy guitar sound that was, and is, so often imitated. He had 15 top 40 hits during the years between 1958 through 1963. Ironically, his career pretty much dried up with the onset of the British Invasion led by guitarists who imitated his style. John Fogarty referred to Eddy as “the first Rock-N-Roll guitar god.” Always an instrumentalist, when asked by Conan O’Brien what his greatest contribution to music was, he answered “not singing.” When you can play the guitar like he did, why bother.
Anyone who has ever taken a kid to Disney and waited in line at the “It’s A Small World” ride, wanted to choke the life out of the person responsible for that song that reverberates in your head for weeks after the trip. It’s like the “Kars for Kids” jingle on steroids, constantly running as you wait and wait until you want to go insane. Well your chance to kill the author ended because Richard Sherman died at 95. He and his brother Robert (who died in 2012) wrote many tunes for Disney including “Supercalifragilisticexpialidpcious” (We had a cat by that name) and “Just a spoonful of Sugar,” and “Chim Chim Cheree,” among many other Disney classics. Of “It’s A Small World,” the brothers said, that “people either want to kiss us or kill us.” I fell firmly into the latter camp. They oversaw much of Disney’s musical film work such as “Mary Poppins,” “Jungle Book,” “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too,” and on and on. Writing songs ran in the family as Sherman’s dad, Avrum (Al) Sherman, wrote “You Gotta Be a Football Hero,” “For Sentimental Reasons,” and “He’s So Unusual” which Cyndie Lauper used as “She’s So Unusual,” the tile of her smash debut album. Back to Richard. He and Robert wrote, “You’re Sixteen (You’re Beautiful and you’re Mine),” which Ringo made a hit after it was originally done by Johnny Burnett. Grammy’s and Academy Awards adorned his walls. Aside from the Disney musicals and other songs, they wrote for Broadway as well, although their real success was the numerous Disney works they did. Some of it was truly great. But then there is “It’s a Small World.” A small price to pay for all that success. “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
Dabney Coleman, who played characters people loved to hate, will be hated no more as he died this month at 92. Because he generally played despicable louts, he might not have made me spill ink on him but then I was reminded that he had a role in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” a show that I loved. He was also in a spinoff, “Forever Fernwood,” where he played, Merle Jeeter, Fernwood’s guileful mayor. Thus, me makes the cut. Probably best known for his character Bill Bittinger, on the TV series, “Buffalo Bill,” and for playing Frank Hart, the loathsome, sexist, egotistical, over the top (enough adjectives?) boss on the movie “9 to 5.” He also played a loudmouthed sports reporter in “Slap Maxwell,” but then a lot of sports reporters are loudmouths. He was also in some big movies including “Tootsie,” “On Golden Pond,” and “You’ve got Mail.” On television, he was on “Boardwalk Empire” and “Yellowstone,” among a ton of other shows. A pretty amazing career although I was unable to confirm that he appeared in an episode of “The Love Boat.” You can’t have it all.
When I was a kid, one year the airwaves were flooded with commercials importuning people to get their “Rubella Umbrella.” That is because Rubella, or German Measles, an illness that reared its head every six to nine years, was raging in 1964 and 1965. To those who got it, it was like and itchy rash. To pregnant mothers, it was ruinous, causing loss of the pregnancy or birth defects. During that period, Rubella was responsible for 11,000 miscarriages, 2,100 infant deaths and approximately 20,000 birth defects in children. The man responsible for finding a vaccine that had wiped the disease out in America by 2015, Dr. Paul Parkman, died at 91. Obviously, it takes a team to isolate and find a vaccine for a virus but Dr. Parkman is the man who gets most of the credit. Dr. Parkman worked closely with Dr. Harry M. Meyer in perfecting the vaccine and when it was perfected, they turned over their patents to the National Institute of Health so that it could be manufactured and distributed in a quick and fair manner. According to Dr. Parkman, “I never made a nickel from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everybody.” In his retirement years, he bemoaned what he referred to as “vaccine nihilism.” In a Food and Drug Administration consumer journal he wrote: “with the exception of safe drinking water, vaccines have been the most successful medical interventions of the 20th century.” Unfortunately, the me-first world we live in no longer fully subscribes to that pro Rubella Umbrella theory.
I bemoan the state of Rock radio today because it is, like sports, ruled by statisticians who have made radio so formulaic, it is unlistenable save for WFUV, run by my alma mater. I have sadly been driven to sports-talk radio where I can occasionally hear Richard Neer talk sports and some music. In the day, I was a WNEW-FM adherent and rarely travelled down the dial to WPLJ, whose call letters came from the first track on the Mothers of Invention album “Burnt Weeny Sandwich.” It’s not We Play Lots of Junk, but rather White Port and Lemon Juice. Anyway, the point is that Tony Pigg, a major DJ on what was that station, died at 85. Prior to his stint at PLJ, he was big in the Haight Ashbury scene working at KSAN and being close with the Grateful Dead. He had a smooth voice and was the announcer for years on “Live with Regis and Kathy Lee,” which morphed into “Live with Kelly and Mark.” He left that gig in 2019. Pigg’s mantra was to “shut up and play the music.” Now there’s a theory. He did do a stint on ‘NEW when PLJ surrendered to Christian radio.
Some guys are just impressive. J. Gary Cooper, who died at 87, is one of them. He retired from the military as a two star general and was the first Black man (or woman for that matter) to lead a marine infantry company in combat. Mind you, he didn’t do this in todays, far from perfect but more race-conscious environment. He did it in 1966. After college (Notre Dame), where he was in the ROTC, he joined the Marines. Ultimately he was sent to Vietnam and like many other Blacks, was given a support role which he found to be racist. He took the then perilous route of demanding a meeting with the commanding General and made his case. Ultimately, he was awarded a marine command, the first ever to a man of color. According to the General who gave him the command, “the best way to describe Gary is, if he could be quiet, and be effective, he was – and if he had to make noise, he would.” During his command he was shot twice receiving two Purple Hearts. After his active service (he remained in the reserves) he went back to Mobile, Alabama, where he grew up (he was born in Lafayette, Louisiana). His family owned an insurance company and funeral home (how’s that for synergy). As a kid, his father tried to send him to an all-white catholic school but the Bishop barred him. When he came home to run the family business, the local chamber of commerce refused to admit him. When he went to get a marriage license, he had to sign a separate “colored register.” When he was elected to the Alabama Houe or Representatives, he blocked the bill to fund the retirement of the probate judge who kept the “colored register” until he abandoned the practice. How can you not love this guy? President Bush named him the Ambassador to Jamaica, he was the CEO of Commonwealth National Bank in Mobile and was on the Boards of PNC Financial Services, Protective Life Insurance Company, and U.S. Steel, where he would remind his fellow Board members that he was the only one of them who actually worked in a steel mill, which he did one summer during his time at Notre Dame. We need more like this guy.
Okay, put this down and get to the beach.
So where did you get your own radio to listen to when we were kids? Paper route paid for it?
Another great entry, Charlie! I really loved the information about WNEW and WPLJ, my two favorite radio stations way back when!