Category: [RIP]

RIP Margaret

Loretta Swit, ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on ‘MASH,’ Dies at 87

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.

Non habemus papam

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…

RIP Elvis Ramone

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.

RIP David Johansen

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”:

Give the drummers some

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

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:

So long Marianne

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.

RIP Norbert

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.

RIP Garth

Garth Hudson, second from right in the above photo of The Band, has left us at the age of 87. I was surprised to discover he was actually the last surviving member; either I’d forgotten that Robbie Robertson passed in 2023 or somehow I never got that news. I always loved the story that he only joined The Band on condition that they buy him a new organ and take him on as their “instructor” so that his parents would think he had a real job instead of just hanging out with some rock’n’roll band. Great player, great beard, even better forehead.

Happy 50th, “Double Jay”

It’s 50 years today since the entity now called Triple J began life, and the entity now called Double J has dusted off “the first day of Triple J”, sic, and is replaying it throughout the day… just been rather amused to hear the DJ admit they were having trouble rounding up enough Australian artists for their first day, which I suppose is less of a problem now (and grumbling too about how many months it took some records to appear in Australia after their international release). Kind of impressed they actually recorded the first day and kept it all this time… but listening back to it now it feels very strange (not just because it’s in glorious AM mono). Graham Berry just announced that later in the evening they’d have some live Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd plus Cheech & Chong and Ravi Shankar. And look at the playlist! Opening with “You Just Like Me Cos I’m Good in Bed” was a fairly controversial act, I know, but… Rolling Stones 2nd? Paul McCartney 3rd? Leo Sayer 4th? Led Zeppelin a couple of tracks later? Beatles, Deep Purple, Bad Company, Elton John, Maria Muldaur, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, CSN, Santana, “La Grange” by ZZ Top, “Radar Love” by Golden Earring, Steely Dan, JOHN FUCKING DENVER, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by BTO, “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, Tim Buckley… Portsmouth Sinfonia is probably the most radical choice so far, that Cheech & Chong “Mr Dope America” skit wouldn’t have passed on commercial radio… But really, how much of this would you think of as “youth radio” or “alternative” now?

And yet I suppose it must have been in 1975, which I daresay shows how much has changed over 50 years… I mean, those four specific songs just embody more of the Triple M classic rock ethos than they do anything, but I don’t suppose they felt that way at the time (not least because Triple M didn’t actually exist yet, but you know what I mean). And a few years later 2JJ would give Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh” a boost when other stations wouldn’t touch it. Now it seems like a veritable Triple M anthem. Have things just changed so much that it’s now almost inconceivable (for me anyway) that this was, you know, alternative then? The kids must’ve been different in 1975 and so must the music, and when I listen to this sort of thing now I’m doing so with years of knowledge of the music that came after it… Radio Birdman hadn’t yet started the Oxford Funhouse scene. A little bit over two years later we got the first Saints album. Must’ve been unimaginable on January 19th 1975. I don’t know, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this (you may have noticed). It’s just been intriguing to realise just how must of a foreign country the past can be.

Of course, the day is darkened a little by the passing of Arnold Frolows a few days ago…

In the mid-1970s, Frolows was delivering flowers around Sydney when the opportunity to interview for a role at the ABC’s brand-new youth radio station came up.
Marius Webb and Ron Moss had been tasked with building the station and they hired Frolows before its launch after a tip from Webb’s then secretary.
“Arnold joined Double J before it went to air, indeed, he was one of the first of its very first employees,” long-term colleague Stuart Matchett said at Frolows’s retirement party in 2014.
“He acquired much of the vinyl that made up the original music library. He programmed the music for many of the shows on Double J.” […]
Frolows began at the ABC in November 1974 as a research assistant in the Contemporary Radio Unit, before becoming a presenter and producer on the new 2JJ from July 1975.
His initial stint at the ABC was short, as he decamped overseas in 1977 where he took up other music-industry roles.
By 1981, Frolows was back in Australia and back on the station now known as triple j. He worked as a presenter and producer on various programs, including the Sunday night program, Ambience, which became a cult hit as it introduced audiences to downbeat, often hypnotic music rarely heard on other stations.
His role as music director became official in 1993, but this didn’t stop him from being on the tools. He served as the producer for Helen Razer and Mikey Robins’ triple j breakfast program in the 1990s and would appear on triple j programs presenting new music through the early 2000s. […]
Frolows left triple j in May of 2003. Before his departure, he’d been subject to a raft of commentary regarding his suitability for the role given his age. But he left the role of his own choosing, and never believed his age precluded him performing his job effectively.

I’d quit listening to the Js myself before that, and even more years have passed to the point where “youth radio” is comfortably ensconced in its middle age, but to give Arnold credit, his tenure as music director was better than Kingsmill’s seems to have been (at least if the annual Hottest 100 results are indicative). RIP to him. I bet a bunch of that music I was listening to while writing this came from him, too.