News just breaking that Brian Wilson has left the building. Apparently he was diagnosed with dementia last year, as if the poor bastard didn’t have a life full of problems… one of the biggest of which, of course, was Eugene Landy, who I’m glad Brian outlived and achieved things without (wish he could’ve outlived the scumbag Mike Love too, but we can’t have everything, I suppose). Brian lived a more difficult life than most people in the world of pop music, and he’s at rest at last, and I suppose we can be grateful for that for him.
Sly Stone, the American musician who lit up generations of dancefloors with his gloriously funky and often socially conscious songwriting, has died aged 82.
“After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a family statement reads. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.” […]
Among those paying tribute to Stone was musician Questlove, whose documentary about Stone, Sly Lives!, was release earliest this year. “From the moment his music reached me in the early 1970s, it became a part of my soul,” he wrote on Instagram. “Sly was a giant — not just for his groundbreaking work with the Family Stone, but for the radical inclusivity and deep human truths he poured into every note … His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.”
I’ve got to say, the timing of this news is kind of hilarious, given that it comes only a few months after Sly Lives!, the title of which was supposedly a dig at people who, understandably, could’ve sworn the artist formerly known as Sylvester Stewart had in fact ceased to be with us many years ago. Well, he’s definitely not now… The amazing thing about him dying now, of course, is that somehow he lived long enough to do so; given the amount of drugs he was hoovering up during the 70s (which I suspect contributed to at least some of those undefined “underlying health issues”), I’m surprised he made it out of the decade, never mind this far into this one. The band itself was probably doomed to a short life, especially once the drugs took over, but that was a mightily bright flare-up while it lasted… by way of an example, here they are on TV in 1968 before things started to go downhill:
Loretta Swit, who played Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on seminal TV comedy “MASH,” died Friday at her home in New York City. She was 87.
Her rep Harlan Boll said she died of natural causes.
For her work on “MASH” Swit was Emmy nominated for outstanding performance by a supporting actress in a comedy every year from 1974-83, winning the Emmy in 1980 and 1982.
Her “MASH” co-star Alan Alda remembered her on X, writing “Loretta was a supremely talented actor. She deserved all her 10 Emmy nominations and her 2 wins. But more than acting her part, she created it. She worked hard In showing the writing staff how they could turn the character from a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person — with real feelings and ambitions. We celebrated the day the script came out listing her character not as Hot Lips, but as Margaret. Loretta made the most of her time here.”
A damned shame. Margaret was a great TV character, and though I’ve always been dubious about the show’s gradual turn from a comedy into a drama as it got older, she definitely benefitted from it.
Well shit, RIP Frank. Not exactly a surprise, I know, and yet… somehow it is, despite that. He seemed to be doing well after getting out of hospital, well enough to do his Easter business just yesterday. Suppose his timing was good if nothing else. Maybe the thought of having to deal with J. Divans was what finished him off.
I am, alas, inclined to agree with Father Nathan here:
Yeah. With the general rightwards shift going on around the world, I can easily imagine the church doing the same. Not that I think it’s ever been a force for progress as such, but I think old Jorge was more forward-looking than most, and there’s going to be plenty of people in the Vatican who’ll be glad to see the back of him so they can let the Vatican slide backwards…
News just coming through now indicates Blondie drummer Clem Burke has lost the quiet battle he’d been fighting with cancer. He had a pretty extensive career outside Blondie, including a brief stint with the Ramones, and was apparently a large part of why Blondie didn’t break up almost as soon as they’d formed (having rather quickly lost both Ivan Kral to Patti Smith and Fred Smith to Television), and was with them to the end.
I’ve seen stories online recently about David Johansen, the last of the New York Dolls, being super-ill with cancer, as he apparently had been for a number of years. With news just coming through of his passing, it obviously looks like he was even more ill than I realised he was… Alas. That band’s all gone now apart from their fill-ins from the later period of the band and their resurgence in the oughts, but we still have the music. Fuck Whispering Bob Harris for calling this “mock rock”:
Memorial notices go out today to two kind of disparate figures behind the drum kit…
Rick Buckler from The Jam, who I’ve never really considered a particularly favourite band as such but goddamn there are some mighty singles in that discography. I’ve always liked this one, the only single written by all three of the band, and apparently it peaked at #4 on the UK chart so it was a reasonable hit; I always thought it had a sound kind of bordering on early goth, particularly when you hear the drums, and on listening to it again before posting this I could definitely imagine Killing Joke in that era doing this. I suppose at least Paul Weller will never be asked again about getting the band back together now…
And then Jamie Muir from King Crimson, pictured here in a photo grabbed from Bill Bruford’s FB (John Wetton’s not in it for some reason); he wasn’t so much a drummer as an all-purpose percussionist for whom drums were just part of a panoply of things he could hit. Crimson was an infamously unstable band many of whose members were kind of short-lived, and Muir’s departure from the band would be notably abrupt after his own brief tenure, but that tenure would be influential as well. Unfortunately Beat-Club don’t let you embed their YT videos, so you’ll just have to click here to see him in action.
Also, as Bill Bruford notes, Muir met Jon Anderson from Yes at Bruford’s wedding in 1973, a conversation which led to Muir suggesting Anderson read Autobiography of a Yogi, which means he was inadvertently responsible for this:
RIP Mike Ratledge, composer and keyboardist primarily for Soft Machine, who has left us at the age of 81. Ratledge possessed one of the more formidable bits of rock’n’roll facial hair—albeit I think he may have been trumped on that front by his later Softs bandmate Karl Jenkins—and I will confess to being amused that the Instagram post where I got the above picture also included this one of the early band where he wears neither the ‘tache nor the shades that he was otherwise known for:
Young master Wyatt’s scrappy facial hair here barely hints at his own future beards, of course
A couple of musical examples, then. Any of the first three albums are good value, but I have always held this up as their masterpiece:
And here’s him plus fellow Softs Hugh Hopper and Robert Wyatt guesting for Syd Barrett:
RIP Marianne Faithfull. Given the life she lived from the late 60s into the 80s, I wonder if she ever imagined she’d eventually live long enough to just die of old age… albeit old age with quite a lot of health complications along the way and not just from the many years of substance abuse. But certainly when she did bounce back from all that, she not only survived but evidently thrived. It was a hell of a life.
Good rest, pupper. Didn’t know exactly how old he was, but I saw him on Threads recently and was impressed to discover he was still with us, though clearly elderly (he passed just short of his 16th birthday)… alas, I also saw about him going to the vet’s with kidney problems the other day and had a feeling that his time wasn’t long (though not as short as it turned out to be). Of indeterminate if not actually confused breed, Norbert spent most of his little life as a therapy dog at a children’s hospital, making things better for a lot of people, and that’s something worth celebrating. An Exceptionally Good Boy.
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