Our Daily Dead

Welcome to the Our Daily Dead weblog and darned if we don’t have to start off with an “Oh Dear” and bemoan the cruelties of the universe. First Luther Vandross wanders off the stage and now Wilson Pickett does the exit. Would one of you out there kindly run out and check up on Smokey Robinson, James Brown and Prince will you? Oh you’d best drop by Dionne Warwick’s place too. On second thought, call Dionne first as we seem to remember that she really doesn’t like surprise visits.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: weblog, Luther Vandross, Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson, James Brown, Prince, Dionne Warwick

LA Times
Wilson Pickett, the Alabama-born soul singer who brought a raw groove and growling energy to 1960s R & B music, with hits such as “In the Midnight Hour” and “Mustang Sally,” died Thursday. He was 64.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member died at a hospital near his Reston, Va., home after suffering a heart attack, according to a statement released by his personal manager, Margo Lewis. Chris Tuthill, of the management company Talent Source, said Pickett had been suffering from health problems for the last year.

His career spanned four decades and, before slowing down in 2005, he had continued to perform, earning a Grammy nomination for the 1999 album “It’s Harder Now,” which also received three W.C. Handy Awards, the in-genre trophy for blues and soul recordings.

Despite his longevity as a recording artist, his career was truly defined by his raspy, forceful delivery on a run of ’60s R & B hits, among them “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Funky Broadway” and the telephonic “634-5789.”

The singer was nicknamed “the Wicked Pickett” for his gruff power, and no recording captured that intensity more famously than the revving 1966 hit “Mustang Sally,” released by Atlantic Records. That song and “In the Midnight Hour” were touchstone hits for young 1960s music fans, and they were revived memorably for a new generation by the 1991 Alan Parker film “The Commitments” and its hit soundtrack. The popular film’s plot is about a scruffy collective of young Irish musicians and their ill-fated attempt to meet and perform with their hero, Pickett.

Pickett never actually appears in the film (he did show up in two less-celebrated movies, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” in 1978, and “Blues Brothers 2000″) but he tapped into the film’s spirit and success by performing at the Los Angeles and New York premieres of the movie.

That was a shining moment, but his own youth had been as gritty and melancholy as the hard-luck north Dublin characters in “The Commitments.”

Pickett was born March 18, 1941, in Prattville, Ala., and his earliest music experience was in Baptist church choirs. His home life, as the youngest of 11 children, was less uplifting.

“The baddest woman in my book … my mother,” the singer told author Gerri Hirshey for the book “Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music.” “I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood … [one time I ran away and] cried for a week. Stayed in the woods, me and my little dog.”

Pickett recalled that he got another beating when his preacher grandfather caught him with a copy of Louis Jordan’s raucous but tame hit, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens.”

Eventually he had enough, and as a teen he went north to live with his father in Detroit. There, Pickett performed in the gospel harmony group the Violinaires in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade he was pushing into more secular sounds, as were many of his contemporaries who had brought their Southern church sounds north but were ready to move on.

In 1959, Pickett became a member of the Falcons, along with future Memphis soul notables Joe Stubbs (brother of Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops), Sir Mack Rice and Eddie Floyd. The Falcons’ hit “I Found a Love” helped land Pickett a deal with Atlantic Records. There he hooked up with renowned producer Jerry Wexler.

Wexler would be a guiding hand during the 1965 sessions for Stax Records that included the memorable recording of “In the Midnight Hour,” a hit that found Pickett delivering a performance that was somehow both polished and raw at the same time. Wexler, who had worked with Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Dusty Springfield, said those Pickett sessions were easily among his most memorable moments.

“There was something about those records and Wilson’s voice — those were some of the funkiest, deepest-grooving, in-the-pocket recordings I ever heard,” Wexler said Thursday from his home in Florida. “The thing about Wilson was he was just a great screamer, but he did it with control. James Brown would scream and it was a scream, but Wilson could scream notes. His voice was powerful, like a buzz saw, but it wasn’t ever out of his control, it was always melodic.”

Technorati Tags: Wilson Pickett, soul singer, R & B, music, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Grammy, Joe Stubbs, Four Tops

Independent Online Edition
Mark Spoon, one half of the pioneering trance music dance duo Jam & Spoon, has been found dead in his Berlin home. He was 41. According to unconfirmed reports, Spoon (real name Markus Loffel) died of cardiac arrest.

In the early Seventies, German groups like Tangerine Dream and [/tag]Kraftwerk[/tag] and the Italian-born producer Giorgio Moroder pioneered various forms of electronic music, such as ambient, robotic pop and disco, which influenced the next two generations of soundtrack composers and rap and dance artists around the world.

Twenty years later, the German duo Jam & Spoon (respectively Rolf Ellmer and Markus Löffel) put a new spin on house music from Chicago and techno from Detroit - two genres heavily indebted to Kraftwerk and Moroder - and created a mellower hybrid called “trance” after the hypnotic, trance-like effect it had on club-goers.

In 1993, Jam & Spoon scored a hit across Europe with “Right in the Night (Fall in Love with Music)” featuring the female vocalist Plavka, a tune so infectious it charted in Britain twice and became a club favourite over the next two years. Tripomatic Fairytales (2001), the duo’s début album, also made the British charts in 1994 while two follow-up singles, “Find Me (Odyssey to Anyoona)” and “Angel (Ladadi O-Heyo)”, reached the UK Top Forty.

Ellmer and Löffel also recorded under the names Tokyo Ghetto Pussy and Storm and created dance-floor fillers with “Everybody on the Floor (Pump It)” in 1995, as well as “Time to Burn” and “Storm Animal” in 2000.

Technorati Tags: Mark Spoon, trance music, Jam & Spoon, Markus Loffel, Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, robotic pop, Rolf Ellmer, music, Moroder, club-goers, Plavka, Tripomatic Fairytales, Tokyo Ghetto Pussy, Time to Burn, Storm Animal

Be a dear and swing out for some beer, a couple of steaks and an old Kurt Vonnegut novel or two. Montana Wildhack will drop by for some drinkies later and Billy Pilgrim, while still unstuck in time, will be doing a poetry reading that covers fluctuating gravity. Billy says he will end every stanza with a rousing “Hi Ho”. Now if we can just find a 300 hp Messerschmitt engine to power the local volunteer fire department siren why then things will be just peachy…provided of course the whole thing doesn’t end up locked up in the Ice-Nine.

Oh, and BTW OurDailyDead.com news welcomes these ODDguests today-

Washington Post
Joseph Waksberg, who helped invent a widely used method of conducting phone surveys so they efficiently reach people with unlisted as well as listed phone numbers, has died. He was 90.

Waksberg died Tuesday night at a Washington-area hospital, said fellow survey researcher Warren Mitofsky.

With Mitofsky, Waksberg developed methods that improved the efficiency in drawing a representative sample of the population using random digit dialing, a crucial technique in telephone polling.

Waksberg, who was born in Poland and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1921, joined the Census Bureau in 1940 and stayed there for 33 years. He retired as the agency’s associate director for statistical methods, research and standards. He then joined the Maryland statistical research firm Westat and became chairman of the board in 1990.

He served for 30 years as a consultant on election night predictions for CBS and later for a cooperative of news media.

Technorati Tags: Joseph Waksberg, phone surveys, Warren Mitofsky, telephone polling, Census Bureau

NY Times
Jim Gary, an internationally noted sculptor in metal whose best-known work transformed the skeletons of derelict cars into the hulking, playful and surprisingly graceful skeletons of dinosaurs, died on Saturday in Freehold, N.J. He was 66 and lived in Farmingdale, N.J.

The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage he suffered last month, said Arlene Berg, a longtime friend and Mr. Gary’s former business manager.

For the last three decades, Mr. Gary made his art from the detritus of postwar American consumer culture. Entirely self-taught, he haunted junkyards, where he dug up the bones of familiar bygone species - the gas-guzzling behemoths that roamed the earth in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s - to reassemble them into far more exotic ones. Old Chryslers, he often said, made the finest dinosaurs.

Welded by hand and painted in vivid colors, Mr. Gary’s sculptures were almost life-size, as much as 60 feet long and 20 feet high. Each comprised hundreds of car parts - it could take 10 automobiles to build a single dinosaur - and took up to a year to complete. His largest pieces sold for close to $100,000, Ms. Berg said.

Featured frequently in the news, Mr. Gary’s art has been exhibited at museums throughout the country, among them the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Boston Children’s Museum. A traveling exhibition of his work, “20th-Century Dinosaurs,” has toured worldwide since the late 1970’s.

In Mr. Gary’s surgically precise anatomy, a brake shoe became a foot, an oil pan a jaw, an axle a femur. He turned leaf springs into rib cages and generator fans into huge lash-ringed eyes. For the spinal plates of a stegosaurus, he used part of a garbage truck’s compactor. For its tail spikes, he used Chevrolet shock absorbers. He also built smaller pieces, among them humpbacked turtles that began life as Volkswagen Beetles.

Mr. Gary’s other work included furniture, stained glass and a widely exhibited sculpture, “Universal Woman,” a sinuous female torso made of welded-together metal washers. The recipient of many commissions for art in public spaces, he designed the Sept. 11 memorial for Colts Neck, N.J., unveiled in 2002.

Jim Gary His Life and Art

Technorati Tags: Jim Gary, sculptor, 20th-Century Dinosaurs, Universal Woman, sinuous female torso

For today’s ODDguests listed below you will find Joan Root a wildlife conservationist, Col. Edward Hall a major force behind the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the US and Hugh Thompson a hero from the My Lai massacre. A mixed bag that might make for an interesting group to invite to dinner.

Perhaps the most compelling storyline here belongs to Thompson. A helicopter pilot he used the gunships under his command to try to halt the killings at My Lai. Once back to base he gave a full report to his CO only to find that he was the object of scrutiny and the entire situation was white-washed.

Finally in March of 1998 Thompson and the bravery of his fellow crew members was recognnized in a ceremony at the Vietnam memorial. But just to get this ceremony to happen took a nine year letter writing campaign and the insistance of Thompson that the ceremony be public and at the Vietnam memorial.

As you might imagine all of this took quite the toll on Hugh Thompson.

From one side of fighting to another: Col. Hall was an intelligence officer who shifted through the wreckage of V2 rockets to learn their secrets, made his way to Camp Dora to learn more and then used the knowledge gained to deliver the Minuteman missiles into the American arsenal.

Our last ODDguest fought a different kind of battle - wildlife conservation. Ms. Root made several wildlife documentaries, including “Mysterious Castles of Clay” about the lives of termites, and “Secrets of the African Baobab”. BTW both these films required patience - the cameras were trained on the termite mound for 30 some days before capturing the footage desired and in the Baobab movie a camera stayed inside the hornbills’ nest for TWO YEARS before the birds returned. Have a beer and put your feet up…this may take awhile.

And in other news we learn that Michael Jackson at least does not abuse his orangutans. Best guess is that it is the orange hair or long arms that bother him…or the simple fact that they are probably stronger than he is. Oh well, score one in a row for MJ, eh?

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Joan Root, Edward Hall, Hugh Thompson, My Lai, Camp Dora, Minuteman, Mysterious Castles of Clay, Secrets of the African Baobab, Michael Jackson

The Sydney Morning Herald
Hugh Thompson, who has died aged 62, was the helicopter pilot who tried to halt the My Lai massacre of more than 500 villagers by US troops during the Vietnam War. At one point, he rescued 15 defenceless civilians while training his machine-guns on US infantrymen commanded by the infamous Lieutenant William Calley, threatening to shoot if they did not stop the slaughter.

By the time he arrived in Vietnam in late December 1967, Thompson was a chief warrant officer reconnaissance pilot with the 123rd Aviation Battalion. On March 16, 1968, he was flying his H-23 scout helicopter, with its three-man crew, over a part of Quang Ngai province known as Pinkville, supporting a three-company search-and-destroy assault on several villages, which faulty intelligence had indicated were heavily defended by Vietcong troops.

The US 1/20th Infantry Battalion attack was led by Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina, who sent in the 1st platoon, led by Calley, to clear out My Lai and several neighbouring hamlets.

Charlie Company was bent on revenge; days earlier several of its members had been killed by Vietcong mines and booby traps. Without a shot being fired against them, Calley’s men began slaughtering anyone they could find - old men, women and children. Groups of villagers, 20 and 30 at a time, were lined up and mown down. In the four-hour assault, the men of the 2nd and 3rd platoons joined in.

Early on, Thompson spotted a young woman injured in a field. He dropped a smoke canister to indicate she needed medical help; he claimed in a court martial later that Medina went over and shot her. During the massacre, Thompson discovered the bodies of 170 executed villagers in a drainage ditch. One of his crew rescued a child, who was flown to hospital at Quang Ngai.

In another incident, Thompson challenged Calley to help a group of civilians hiding in a bunker rather than attack them. When Calley refused, Thompson ordered his helicopter gunners to open fire on the 1st platoon if they advanced any closer. He then called down gunships to rescue the civilians.

On returning to Chu Lai military base, Thompson reported everything to his commanding officer. But a local inquiry whitewashed his complaints, claiming the civilian deaths had been caused by artillery fire; an elaborate cover-up ensued.

Thompson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the lives of Vietnamese civilians “in the face of hostile enemy fire”, but he threw the medal away, believing his commanders wanted to buy his silence.

A year later, the Pentagon learnt the truth and a high-level inquiry was conducted by Lieutenant-General William Peers. Thompson later appeared as a witness at the courts martial of several men involved in the massacre or the cover-up, though the only person convicted was Calley, who served a few months in jail before having his life sentence reduced and being given parole.

During his time in Vietnam, Thompson was shot down five times, finally breaking his backbone. He received a commission, but back in the US some colleagues regarded him as a turncoat. When evidence of the atrocity was finally made public in late 1969, he was castigated by pro-Vietnam War politicians in Washington.

It was only 30 years later that Thompson was recognised as a genuine American hero by the Pentagon, after a nine-year letter-writing campaign. The US Army had initially wanted his Soldier’s Medal, the military’s highest award for bravery in peacetime, to be presented quietly, preferring to keep what happened at My Lai in the background. But Thompson resisted. He wanted a ceremony at the Vietnam memorial in Washington, and the bravery of his fellow crew members recognised as well. In March 1998, he finally got his wish.

Thompson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to strict Episcopalian parents, and moved to nearby Stone Mountain when he was three years old. His father served with the US Army and Navy during World War II and spent 30 years with the naval reserve.

His paternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee, forced off tribal land in North Carolina in the 1850s and resettled in Georgia. Thompson joined the navy in 1961, and spent three years with a construction unit. After a brief return to civilian life in 1964, during which he became a funeral director, Thompson re-enlisted in the army, as it was becoming engaged in Vietnam.

The My Lai experience affected him badly. He grappled with alcohol and had several failed marriages. After service in Korea, he returned to the US, dropping the name Hugh and calling himself Buck as a way of distancing himself from past events.

He left the army briefly then re-enlisted, flying with medical evacuation units and instructing trainee pilots. He retired from the army in 1983 and worked as a helicopter pilot for oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico.

Later he was involved with the Louisiana Department of Veteran Affairs, giving lectures to students and schoolchildren, and speaking about ethics to military academies.

After his role in trying to stop the massacre was recognised in the US, Thompson and his surviving crew member, Larry Colburn, were taken back to My Lai, where they were introduced to three women who had survived it. On a second visit three years later, he met an electrician from Ho Chi Minh City who, aged nine, had been one of the children Thompson had rescued from the bunker.

Technorati Tags: Hugh Thompson, My Lai massacre, Lieutenant William Calley, Louisiana Department of Veteran Affairs

NY Times
Col. Edward N. Hall, an engineer who as an intelligence officer scrutinized the V-2 rockets of Nazi Germany and went on to supervise programs leading to the development of the United States’ intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the Minuteman, died on Jan. 15 in Torrance, Calif. He was 91.

His daughter, Sheila Hall, announced his death.

As relations with the Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated after World War II, fears surged in the American military that the Russians were gaining superiority in missile technology. As hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into a crash program to jump-start the American effort, Colonel Hall emerged as a technical leader, particularly in the rush to develop rockets using solid, not liquid fuel.

This was an important priority because solid-fuel missiles promised to be lighter, faster to launch and easier to control. The result was the Minuteman, the first 10 of which were installed in nearly impregnable underground silos in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. Ultimately 1,000 were positioned in hidden locations in the Midwest.

The missile evolved through three generations, from Minuteman I to II to III. The warhead of the Minuteman III is armed with three independently targetable hydrogen bombs: in effect, three ICBM’s in one. Arms treaties have reduced the number now in place to 500.

On Feb. 12, 1958, Air Force headquarters directed its Western Development Division in Los Angeles to develop a solid-fuel propellant system “as soon as possible.”

Colonel Hall immediately approached his superior officer, Gen. Charles H. Terhune, to ask him for three hours to brief top brass on a plan for a distinctive Air Force solid-propulsion intercontinental ballistic missile. With General Terhune, Colonel Hall briefed Gen. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force deputy chief of staff, on the potential of solid-propellant ICBM’s, which he saw as a relatively light three-stage missile.

General LeMay was so impressed he arranged for Colonel Hall to brief the secretary of defense, Thomas S. Gates, who supported acceleration of the Air Force effort with $50 million.

“He really pulled together the concept for the Minuteman,” General Terhune said.

In 1999, J. D. Hunley, an Air Force historian, wrote that even considering the technical complexity of weapons programs, where assigning individual credit is exceedingly difficult, Colonel Hall was “pivotal to the development” of the missile.

At the time of the Minuteman project, Colonel Hall had already led development of some of the principal liquid-fuel missiles, the Atlas, Titan and Thor.

Edward Nathaniel Hall was born in Forest Hills, Queens, on Aug. 4, 1914. He was the son of a furrier who went bankrupt in the Depression, but he was able to attend the City College of New York, which was then free, where he earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemical engineering. Later, while in the Air Force, he earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering (propulsion option) from the California Institute of Technology.

In September 1939, as war was beginning in Europe, he joined the Army Air Corps as an enlisted man. Engineers were not given automatic commissions at the time of his enlistment, but he was made a second lieutenant after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

He was sent to England to repair Boeing B-17 bombers and Martin B-24’s, both used in the bombing of Germany. In 1943, as a captain, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, an unusual award for a junior officer, for devising a way to repair a bomber’s fuselage rapidly.

His introduction to missiles came near the end of the war, when he was assigned to acquire intelligence on Germany’s wartime propulsion work. He analyzed parts recovered from exploded V-2 rockets or retrieved by spies.

At war’s end, he led a group to Germany to study underground missile assembly facilities at Camp Dora. He assisted in the division of captured missile equipment between England and the United States.

Technorati Tags: Col. Edward N. Hall, V-2, intercontinental ballistic missiles, Minuteman III

NY Times
Joan Root, an animal lover and conservationist who collaborated with her husband, Alan, on a series of wildlife documentaries in the 1970’s, was killed Friday in Naivasha, Kenya. She was 69.

Ms. Root was shot to death by assailants who invaded her lakefront farmhouse, the police said. Two men were arrested but the motive remains unknown, officials said.

Ms. Root was an active conservationist, combating illegal fishing on the lake in recent years. Her 88-acre property was a refuge for orphaned animals, including an aardvark, a hippo and an African porcupine that would shake its quills on her command. She once slept with a caracal, a wildcat, to get it used to humans and make it easier to capture on film.

Joan Thorpe, the daughter of a British coffee farmer, was born in Nairobi. She married Mr. Root, an amateur filmmaker, in 1961. Before they divorced in 1981, they collaborated on a variety of attention-getting nature films. “Mysterious Castles of Clay,” narrated by Orson Welles, showed the inner workings of a termite mound. It was nominated for an Oscar in 1978. Other films included “Balloon Safari” in 1976 and “Lights, Action, Africa” in 1980.

The couple used a hot-air balloon for some of their filming, capturing the vast savannahs of the Masai Mara Game Reserve and ascending over Mount Kilimanjaro.

In “Secrets of the African Baobab,” they put a camera inside a hornbill’s nest and waited two years for the birds to return.

For the film about termites, they trained their lens on a termite mound and waited 30 days for the alates, the winged stage of the termite life cycle, to emerge.

Technorati Tags: Joan Root, Naivasha, Orson Welles, Masai Mara Game Reserve