Category Archives: obit

OBIT: Charlie Haden

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I’ve seen Charlie Haden play many times in the last 20 years or so. In 2005 he reconvened the Liberation Music Orchestra to protest the War in Iraq, and I saw them in an explosive show in the Village.

A year or two later his family, musicians all, including his daughter Petra, who we’ve featured here a couple of times, put together a country band in honor of the Haden Family Band that toured the country when Charlie was a boy. I saw them at an outdoor festival near Lincoln Center. And some time earlier I saw an amazing show with Haden and Thad Jones at Iridium, when that club was in that fantastic space across the street from Lincoln Center.

In between I fell deeply in love with a gentle album of Latin American melodies and tunes performed with the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, though I never got the chance to see the two of them perform.

A few weeks ago I posted Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman here. Charlie Haden played bass on that classic, and much of the early Ornette stuff. His straightforward melodic bass lines were the spine that held together Ornette’s and Don Cherry’s raucous soloing in those free jazz days.

One of my favorite Haden stories in his obit in the Times today involved a show he was performing in Lisbon with Coleman in the early 70s, during which he dedicated Song for Che to the black resistance fighters in Mozambique and Angola, Portuguese colonies. He was promptly put in jail.

A detail I didn’t know about Haden’s life. He played only country music until he was 21, when he saw a Charlie Parker show in Omaha. He was inspired, started to play jazz and moved to LA, where he met and played with Hampton Hawes and Paul Bley and eventually hooked up with Coleman.

This tune is from a 1989 show with the great drummer Paul Motian and the pianist Rubalcaba. It combines the lyricism with the wildness the was a part of Haden’s whole package.

And here’s some Liberation Music Orchestra.

OBIT: Bobby Womack, “It’s All Over Now”

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I somehow missed that he’d died late in June, but the last few days came upon RIP Playlists and other indications that Womack had passed.

I came to know him via the Rolling Stones, whose cover of his (and Shirley Womack’s) tune It’s All Over Now was a favorite.

But of course, Bobby had started in a somewhat different place. His version of the song entered the charts in June 1964. The Stones recorded the song a few weeks later and by the end of July their cover was their first No. 1 song in the UK.

Womack hadn’t wanted the Stones to cover the tune. He reportedly told Jagger, “Get your own song,” but when the royalty check arrived at the end of the year he told the Stones they could have any song of his they wanted. He worked with the band years later, on their Dirty Work album.

In the meantime, Ry Cooder did an ace reggae cover of the song on his Paradise and Lunch album.

RIP: Gerry Goffin, It Might as Well Rain Until Forever

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In 1958, I was first really hit by pop music and the radio. That is when I first heard Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue, at the tender age of five. There are other tunes from around that period of my life that I remember–Gypsy Woman, Little Star, Sorry, I Ran All the Way Home, Come Softly to Me–but at that age I also played with army men and cowboys and well, I did not own a radio. Not to mention the radios we did have were controlled by my parents.

But, it was in the summer of 1962, when I was 10 and we were at a family camp near Lake Tahoe, I heard the incredible machine gun drums and droning saxes of what was the huge hit that summer, The Locomotion for the first time, and if Buddy Holly was the first nail of my rock and roll coffin, that moment was second.

The Locomotion was penned by Carole King and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, and was the first hit for their Dimension record label, but in reality, the team of Goffin and King had been cranking out hits as members of the Brill Building for years.

The Brill Building was the songwriting haven for luminaries that included Lieber and Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, all of which is documented beautifully in the book Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson.

The Locomotion led to a request for a radio for the bedroom I then shared with my brother, and that Xmas we were given a white Packard Bell. As if that were not enough, our family also got a Motorola phonograph which played all speeds–16, 33.3, 45, and 78 RPM–of records.

We also got a copy of The First Family album, a political parody of the Kennedy family that was a huge hit at the time, and that started me on my path to collections of records and CDs along with a room full of musical instruments and playing in bands and pretty much a lifelong love of music in all forms. It started me on parodies, too.

Though I would have probably been hooked by music pretty soon anyway (I’m thinking had it not been The Locomotion, it would have been the Rockin’ Rebels Wild Weekend a few months later).

Wild Weekend was not written by Goffin and King, but it was a seriously rocking aong and one that hit me at the time like my mate Steve here notes KISS hit him. Don’t forget, I was just 11-years old then.

But, back to Goffin and King, among the wonderful hits the pair wrote are:

  • Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (The Shirelles)
  • Take Good Care of my Baby (Bobby Vee)
  • Might as Well Rain Until September (The Shirelles/Carole King)
  • One Fine Day (The Chiffons)
  • Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees)
  • Up on the Roof (The Drifters)
  • I’m into Something Good (Herman’s Herrmits/Earl-Jean)
  • Don’t Bring Me Down (The Animals)
  • (You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman (Aretha Franklin)

Now, you have to remember that at the time a lot of the rock and roll was laughable by today’s standards. The wonderful and visceral and sexual Little Richard, for example, was sanitized by the awful Pat Boone for white kids (remember too this music was burgeoning around the time of the Civil Rights movement in the early).

But, much like Hip Hop was developed by the African American community, and the form was then “appropriated” for even broader commercial exploitation (and believe me, I am not talking the Beastie Boys here) earlier, rollicking rhythm and blues was swiped a la Richard to Boone.

At the time, though, Tutti Fruitti as performed by Little Richard was akin to Jimi Hendrix humping his Strat-O-Caster, or Wendy giving Prince a quasi blow job in the Purple Rain film (she does play a Rickenbacker, though), or anything current from Beyoncé on out.

Still, pop music, which was not necessarily rock and roll, was similarly tamer, and more orchestrated, an off-shoot of Broadway and tin pan alley largely still without the dominance of the electric guitar. Though that was indeed coming.

And, whether it floats your boat or not, or if the songs sound horribly dated and silly, the tunes of Goffin and King, I think, are still just lovely little masterpieces, much in the same league of Phil Spector. In fact, John Lennon noted that he wanted his songs with Paul McCartney to of the same ilk as those of the Dimension duo.

I still feel Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is among the sweetest of love songs.

One of the things that always nailed me about this production is the beautiful tremoly rake of the electric guitar on the “one” of each measure. Such a simple and sweet effect, and one that has impressed me to the tune that I try to employ it often when I am playing rhythm guitar.

By the time Pleasant Valley Sunday hit it, the Beatles had come and guitars were happening and even Hippies were here, criticizing the plastic life of the suburbs, so Goffin came up with this:

Oddly this is a song I always kind of wanted to cover in some band or another.

So, last week, Goffin passed away at the age of 75.

Though I have been so remiss at contributing here at the site–it is hard once my work week begins to find time for much else, but, well, 185 more calendar days–I could not let his passing go without honoring and thanking just a great songwriter and influence on my life.

So, I will close with one other tune from the pair, and the one that introduced me to the voice of Carole King:

Thanks Gerry. Peace out.

 

Obit: Arthur Smith

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The movie Deliverance was a horror movie based on the idea that educated adventurers rafting through West Virginia were somehow better than the impoverished folks who lived there. But one of the movie’s most memorable scenes was a bit of music that was written by a man named Arthur Smith, who died earlier this week, which showed a shared core of delightful string picking.

Smith had a long career as a songwriter, performer and television host. He also owned a recording studio in Charlotte, N.C., where James Brown recorded Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.

The NY Times obit ends with an anecdote. It seems that when the guitarist in a fledgling rock band called the Quarrymen bungled the lead line in Smith’s Guitar Boogie, the band moved Paul McCartney to bass player and brought in George Harrison as a guitarist.

Breakfast Blend: Peter Callandar is Dead.

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When I think of the worst song of all time I think of two songs that played incessantly in the storm window factory I worked in the summer after I graduated from high school. That would be Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods’ “Billy Don’t Be A Hero.” Both had lyrics written by the Englishman Peter Callander, may he rest in peace. The music for these two 1974 No. 1 hits can be credited to Mitch Murray. It should be noted that Paper Lace did a version of Billy Don’t Be a Hero that is not as good as the Heywoods’ version.

RIP: Scott Asheton

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He was the only drummer the Stooges had until he was cut down by a stroke a few years ago. And while he stopped touring he still played. He died today, some five years or so after his brother Stooge and brother brother Ron died of a heart attack.

Iggy released a statement saying he’d never heard any drummer play with more meaning than Scott, which sounds perfect.

Obit: Maggie Estep, “Hey Baby”

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Maggie Estep died yesterday in Hudson NY of a heart attack. She was 50.

I vaguely remember her as a spoken word poet sort back in the 90s, but not much about her but her name. But her obituary in today’s Times says that this song became popular after it was featured and mocked on Beavis and Butthead.

I think that’s kind of amazing.

RIP: Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014)

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 Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the chameleon of contemporary actors, was found dead Sunday, ostensibly the victim of a self-inflicted heroin overdose.

bangsAt age 46, this is a sad loss as Hoffman was just a great talent, so able to look and act differently depending upon the role.

Hoffman did win an Oscar for his role as writer Truman Capote in the 2005 film, Capote.

But, there are basically three films Hoffmans, I really loved, all three of which had great music floating around in a direct or indirect fashion.

Boogie Nights-Hoffman played the sexually confused Scotty J, a sort of Gaffer in the world of porn film:  an insecure nerd who has somehow stumbled into the dream world of the repressed voyeur.

The Big Lebowski-This time Hoffman plays Brandt, instead of a Gaffer, he is a gopher for David Huddleston’s other Lebowski, a wonderfully restrained brown-noser. My favorite line of Hoffman’s is “Well Dude, we just don’t know.”

Almost Famous-My favorite of Hoffman’s roles, as he plays the great–and also sadly late and nihlistic–rock critic Lester Bangs. Bangs, who penned the iconic definitive rock critique book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, died of alcohol and drug abuse, and now Hoffman has followed.

So sad.