Our Daily Dead

ODDapologies of course to Don McClean, American Pie and, no wait, NOT THAT American Pie!, and Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper. The Day The Music Died just worked as the bestest title for today’s ODDguest list so there you have it. We promise to listen to ‘Vincent’ over and over again with ear in hand as our punishment. (Now if we could oh please, oh please just get that image of Lou Diamond Phillips out of our head…)

Each of our ODDguests was a music man - Bob Feldman ran Red House Records, Bob Weinstock founded Prestige records and Alex St Clair (nèe Alex Snouffer) has been labeled as THE Captain Beefhart. A heady lineup indeed. (Mind you we did search for another Bob to roundout the list since 3 is a lucky number and because we really, really wanted to steal another title and call today’s blog What About Bob?, but then we came across Alex while wandering in England again and there you have it.)

BTW - a couple interesting bits about Alex St. Clair: he was a high school mate of Frank Zappa and, at least according to the snippet in his obit, he had some influence on Jimi Hendrix. Alex did get around. And because we are By-The-Waying: one review of a Captain Beefheart album said something like this - I can only take Captain Beefheart in small doses as they are well beyond the weirdest stuff ever released by my favorite band King Crimson. Surely that should help dial it in for you, yes? If you need more help just take a peek at the cover art for the Court of the Crimson King.

From King Crimson we end up here - you should consider Gerald Ford on the ODD On Deck list. Just in case you are keeping score at home. Or in case you are looking to score. Or whatever…

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Don McClean, American Pie, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, The Day The Music Died, ODDguest, Bob Feldman, Red House Records, Bob Weinstock, Prestige, Alex St Clair, Alex Snouffer, What About Bob?, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, Gerald Ford

Captain Beefheart Radar Station
Alex St. Clair, one of the original Magic Band guitarists, can justifiably be known as the original ‘Captain Beefheart’, being the prime mover to get the band together and the musical director and organiser in the early days. In an interview in 1973 Don van Vliet was asked how it all started and he had this to say:-

Alex St. Claire called me - you know, the fellow who was on ‘Safe As Milk’. He had a great influence on Jimi Hendrix when he was in England. Anyway, he calls me and says: ‘I’m putting a group together and we’re gonna play tonight. You’re gonna sing, van Vliet’. He is a real Prussian, you know? I said: ‘give me a minute, will you? I never sang anything. I don’t know anything about music'’ and he says: ‘Tonight you’re going to sing’. I must have sounded like a burro or something. And he says: ‘That’s horrible, man’. I say: ‘I told you’. But he says: ‘We’re gonna do it anyway, and it’ll get better’.

Known as ‘Butch’ at school, the teenage Alexis Clair Snouffer, had a reputation around Lancaster as a tough nut. He wasn’t someone you messed with. Playing trumpet in the high school band he befriended the drummer, Frank Zappa. Within a short time both had acquired guitars and were furiously practising so they could play the R&B and blues music they both liked.
Zappa formed a band called The Blackouts which Alex may or may not have played with. But when it disbanded in 1958 Alex got together with some of the ex-members to form The Omens, a good time partying R&B group. Alex would also hang out at Zappa’s Studio Z in Cucamonga which had become a focal point for many Lancaster musicians and weirdoes including all of the early Magic Band members. They’d meet there and jam, some of which would get recorded.

Technorati Tags: Alex St. Clair, Magic Band, Captain Beefheart, Don van Vliet

NY Times
Bob Weinstock, who founded the independent jazz record label Prestige in 1949 and ran it for more than 20 years, died on Saturday at a hospice in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 77 and lived in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

He died of complications of diabetes, said his daughter-in-law, Barbara Weinstock.

Mr. Weinstock produced and released some of the most important jazz recordings in the beginning years of the LP era. Prestige releases - and those of its related imprints, including Par, Swingville, Moodsville, Bluesville and Tru-Sound - weren’t known for perfection. Mr. Weinstock generally set up recording sessions with no rehearsal time. (One of the exceptions to this rule was the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose pianist, John Lewis, insisted on rehearsals before making the albums “Django” and “Concorde.”)

But Mr. Weinstock did a remarkable job of flooding the market with the work of many of the greatest small-group jazz bandleaders during an exceptionally fertile time for jazz in New York. They ranged from King Pleasure’s “Moody’s Mood for Love” - a national hit that saved the label from financial ruin when it was released as a 78 single in 1952 - to two all-day sessions with Miles Davis’s quintet in 1956, with no second takes, a stockpiling of material Mr. Weinstock demanded in return for letting Davis out of a contract. It resulted in four separate important LP’s: “Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet” and its companion volumes, “Relaxin’,” “Workin’,” and “Steamin’.” Mr. Weinstock’s label also released hundreds of recorded sessions by John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Gene Ammons, Red Garland, Coleman Hawkins and Annie Ross and others before it was finally sold to Fantasy Records.

Mr. Weinstock grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With the encouragement of his uncle, Philip Hunt, who ran a successful chemical business serving the motion picture industry, and his father, Selig Weinstock, known as Sol, a shoe salesman, he began as a jazz-record retailer while a teenager, shipping and selling records out of his home through ads in Record Changer magazine.

He rented retail space inside the Jazz Record Center, a shop on 47th Street near Sixth Avenue, owned by the former prizefighter Big Joe Klauberg. He was beginning to frequent the Royal Roost, a Midtown club that was starting to book more and more bebop groups, and Mr. Weinstock converted from swing and New Orleans music to the newer style.

In January 1949, when he was 20, he made his first recordings, of Lennie Tristano’s quintet, releasing them on a label that he called New Jazz. Less than year into his business, he realized that he was recording so many saxophonists that he started a new line, Prestige, with a saxophone logo; eventually Prestige won out as his overall imprimatur. His records, including several by Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt and Annie Ross’s “Twisted,” were finding success on the radio and in jukeboxes. Phobic about airplane travel, Mr. Weinstock traveled around the country by bus, talking to distributors and disc jockeys, and with his father’s help he set up an effective promotion and distribution system.

Technorati Tags: Bob Weinstock, Prestige, Par, Swingville, Moodsville, Bluesville, Tru-Sound, Modern Jazz Quartet, King Pleasure, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Gene Ammons, Red Garland, Coleman Hawkins, Annie Ross, Lennie Tristano’s quintet, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt

LA Times
Bob Feldman, 56, a force in folk music and the president of Red House Records, died Wednesday at his home in St. Paul, Minn. The cause of death was not immediately known.

In 1983, Feldman restarted Red House, Iowa, singer-songwriter Greg Brown’s dormant independent label. The small business that Feldman ran out of his apartment grew to employ nine people and gross between $2 million and $3 million a year, according to the St. Paul-based label.

Over two decades, Red House released almost 200 titles by artists such as Robin and Linda Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, Bill Staines and Lucy Kaplansky.

Feldman grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., and saw his first folk festival in second grade. While teaching entrepreneurship to high school students, he connected with Brown after hearing the folk singer at a coffee shop.

To figure out how to run a record label, Feldman went to the library. “I found this book called ‘How to Make and Sell Your Own Record’ and I read it like it was a textbook,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 1994

How to make and sell your own record: The complete guide to independent recording

Technorati Tags: Bob Feldman, Red House Records, Greg Brown, Robin and Linda Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, Bill Staines, Lucy Kaplansky

ODD note to Selves: if we find our ODDselves wandering about London Dazed and Confused in a Zeppelin-esque way, remember to stop into Selfridges department store and gain clarity from an iPod Survival Lesson. (Subsequent note to Selves: do skip, however, the London dating scene.)

News Flash! Dateline January 16, 1968: Youth International Party founded by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, amongst others. What is the Youth International Party? Tis where we get the Yippie label of course and the idea to advance a pig (recall “Pigasus the Immortal”) as candidate for President.

Shelley Winters passed away late last Friday. Ms. Winters had one of those storybook Hollywood careers you will note. She was a high school dropout who modeled in the garment industry by day and attended the New Theater School at night, and spent two summers doing sketches on the borscht circuit in the Catskills.

Bit part by bit part she finally got her break as the waitress who was strangled by Ronald Colman’s jealous actor in “A Double Life” in 1947. Her first break turned out to be a character type she would repeat many more times. She was tough-talking and ooze sex appeal, and noted to be vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. She always seemed to land the role of the working-class woman who gets violently discarded by the leading man after he had used and abused her.

And all we get now is Jessica Simpson.

Eric Namesnik is also an ODDguest today. Eric was an Olympic class swimmer and holder of silver medals from the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. Eric, at only 35, died from injuries sustained in a tragic car crash on icy roads. Deeply involved in passing along his love of swimming, Eric ran the Wolverine Aquatics Swim Club.

Our third ODDguest today is Bill DeArangowho died in a nursing home in Cleveland, Ohio. An All-American Jazz Band member, Mr. DeArango was part of several early Bebog recordings playing along side the likes of Charlie Parker,Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.

As you are wandering with that iPod of yours if you happen to see Joe Pichler phone it in won’t you? He seems to be missing. You might remember Joe from the Beethoven movies.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: ODD, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Yippie, Shelley Winters, Jessica Simpson, Eric Namesnik, Bill DeArango, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Pichler

NY Times
Shelley Winters, who once described her life as a “rocky road out of the Brooklyn ghetto to one New York apartment, two Oscars, three California houses, four hit plays, five Impressionist paintings, six mink coats and 99 films,” died yesterday. She was 83, although some sources say she was 85.

Ms. Winters died of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist, Dale Olson, said. She had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.

A major movie presence for more than five decades, Shelley Winters turned herself from a self-described “dumb blond bombshell” in B pictures to a widely respected actress who was nominated four times for Academy Awards.

Her first Oscar, for best supporting actress, was for her performance in “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959) as the middle-age Mrs. Van Daan, one of eight Dutch Jews hiding from the Nazis in an attic.

She won again for best supporting actress as the vicious mother of a blind girl in “A Patch of Blue” (1965).

After a series of bit parts, Ms. Winters received her first big break as the waitress who was strangled by Ronald Colman’s jealous actor in “A Double Life” in 1947.

Four years later, she dyed her hair brown, rubbed the polish off her fingernails, and convinced the director George Stevens that she could play the mousy factory girl who was made pregnant and then drowned by Montgomery Clift so that he could marry the rich Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun.” She was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress for that performance.

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Ms. Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. In movie after movie, she played working-class women who were violently discarded by men who had used them.

When her gullible waitress couldn’t lead the hymn-singing preacher to a cache of stolen money in “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), he slit her throat.

As a rich man’s poor mistress in “The Great Gatsby” (1949), she was casually run over by her lover’s wife.

In Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” (1962), James Mason married her to get close to her young daughter; when she finds this out she blindly runs in front of a car and is killed.

Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Ms. Winters often played vulnerable monsters. As Ma Barker in the 1970 cult classic “Bloody Mama” - in which she is first seen giving her four grown sons their Saturday-night baths - she was murderously maternal while brandishing a tommy gun.

Shrieking, shrewish, slutty or silly, Ms. Winters always seemed larger than life on screen. The critic Pauline Kael called her lovelorn culture-vulture Charlotte Haze in “Lolita” a “triumphant caricature, so overdone it recalls Blake’s ‘You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.’ ”

Off screen Ms. Winters lived with an equal gusto, which she captured in her best-selling 1980 autobiography, “Shelley, Also Known as Shirley,” and in a second book, “Shelley II.” With a hearty appetite for food and men, she was not hesitant about naming the actors with whom she had shared a bed, including Sean Connery, Errol Flynn, Farley Granger, Sterling Hayden, William Holden and Burt Lancaster. Ms. Winters and Mr. Holden had a “Same Time, Next Year” relationship, meeting in his Paramount dressing room on Christmas Eve for five years. Her two- year relationship with Mr. Lancaster was more serious. She ended the affair when the actor’s wife became pregnant with his third child.

Shelley Also Known As Shirley Shelly II

Technorati Tags: Shelley Winters

NY Times
Eric Namesnik, who won silver medals in swimming in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics and became a coach of several Olympians, died Wednesday at a hospital in Ypsilanti, Mich., four days after he was critically injured in an automobile accident on an icy road. He was 35 and lived in Saline, Mich.

Eric Namesnik at the 1996 Olympics. USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, said he died of brain injuries sustained in the two-car crash. After the crash, he was placed in a medically induced coma to reduce swelling surrounding the brain.

Namesnik, known as Snik, won Olympic medals in the 400-meter individual medley. In 1992, he finished second to Tamas Darnyi of Hungary, and in 1996, he finished behind Tom Dolan, his teammate at the University of Michigan.

“Snik pushed me harder in training than anyone,” Dolan said on a CarePages Web site after Namesnik’s death. “That challenge was in my face each day in the lane next to me. We pushed each other to heights beyond our dreams.”

In 1991 and 1993, Namesnik was ranked first in the world in the 400 individual medley, which combines four strokes. He was the first United States swimmer to finish the event in less that 4 minutes 15 seconds, and he broke the American record four times and won eight national titles. From 1989 to 1993, he swam on four Michigan teams that won Big Ten Conference championships.

From 1997 to 2004, he was an assistant at Michigan, where he helped coach 11 Olympians. When Jon Urbanchek retired in 2004 as the head coach, Namesnik was a candidate to replace him. The job went to Bob Bowman, who was coaching Michael Phelps and other club swimmers in Baltimore.

“Eric didn’t get the job,” Urbanchek said in a telephone interview, “because Bob had more experience. Eric left the university and took over Wolverine Aquatics Swim Club, an age-group club. He started with 60 kids, and in a year and a half had it up to 180 kids.”

The day before the accident, Namesnik merged his club with Club Wolverine, which Bowman also coached.

Technorati Tags: Eric Namesnik, USA Swimming, Snik, Tom Dolan, Bob Bowman

LA Times
Bill DeArango, an innovative jazz guitarist of the 1940s, died Dec. 26 at a nursing home in East Cleveland, Ohio. He had Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. He was 85.

Few guitarists were part of the revolutionary bebop movement led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie until DeArango joined the New York jazz scene in 1944. He jumped into the lively nightclub action of 52nd Street, finding an immediate home with musicians who were taking jazz in bold new directions.

He was known for his lightning-fast runs, playing cascades of single notes that matched the speed and complexity of the saxophonists and pianists he modeled his playing after.

“I listened very closely to pianists and horn men as well as guitarists,” he said in a 1996 interview with Guitar Player magazine. “I used to play along with Art Tatum’s records, and Lester Young had a thing I wanted, playing out and intricate but still laid-back.”

In 1946, Esquire magazine selected DeArango for its All-American Jazz Band and praised his “fleet, fevered single-string solo work.”

He was in steady demand in nightclubs and recording studios in the mid-1940s and was a member of saxophonist Ben Webster’s group from 1945 to 1947. He also led his own group, recording with an array of jazz stars, including vocalist Sarah Vaughan, saxophonist Don Byas and vibraphonists Milt Jackson and Red Norvo.

He performed on several early bebop recordings, including Parker’s “Anthropology,” Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia” and Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme.”

DeArango was born Sept. 20, 1921, in Cleveland and studied at Ohio State University.

While in a Dixieland band, he became drawn to the more progressive music of modern jazz.

Later, as he was gaining prominence as one of the premier guitarists of the bebop era, he grew irritated with increasing commercial pressures in music and abruptly left New York for Cleveland in 1948.

Except for occasional club work in his hometown and a well-received record he made in 1954, he all but dropped out of sight. During the 1960s and ’70s, he ran a music store that became a center of the music scene in Cleveland.

Unlike many musicians of his generation, DeArango took a strong interest in rock music and adapted his style to fit the times.

Inspired by Jimi Hendrix, he attached a wah-wah pedal to his guitar to distort its tone. In 1993, he made his final recording, “Anything Went,” a free-jazz romp with saxophonist Joe Lovano.
Anything Went  Anthropology

Technorati Tags: Bill DeArango, bebop movement, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie

Do you have triskaidekaphobia - the fear of the number 13? (And no, not TRICK-a-NELL-o-sis, that is something entirely different.) Or perhaps paraskavedekatriaphobia - fear of Friday the 13th? Various studies report millions lost because of this day, but Happy Friday the 13th to you all anyway even if you are reading this from under the covers.

Our Daily Dead welcomes Birgit Nilsson to our ODD guests lineup today. In her obit you’ll notice that she is described as having been a “… big, blunt woman with a wicked sense of humor.” If your mind’s eye has a spot of trouble conjuring up a big, blunt woman who sang Wagner, then let us nudge you along with a wee small picture. Think Viking hat, breast plate, spear and most importantly presence and voice. Berserker heartthrob, riktig?

Also appearing today is ODD guest Ofelia Fox formerly known as the First Lady of the Tropicana nightclub in Cuba. The Tropicana was the playground of the stars - at least until a certain revolution took place in 1959. No more parties once the new owner took over…at least until the 1990s when said owner decided a bit of tourism might be nice. Word has it that the Tropicana revue was changed out a year ago or so for Tambores en Concierto - Drums in Concert.

And let us end with one other Friday 13th happening: Happy Birthday to the Frisbee. Another Sputnik year event it was: January 13th, 1957 - the birthdate of everyone’s favorite flying disc the Frisbee. The little disc was born in California, but given the name ‘Frisbee’ thanks to a pie-plate tossing craze at Yale and one Mr. Frisbie’s pie tins.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: triskaidekaphobia, paraskavedekatriaphobia, Our Daily Dead, Birgit Nilsson, ODD guests, Wagner, ODD guest, Ofelia Fox, Tropicana, Tambores en Concierto, Friday 13th, Sputnik, Frisbee

NY Times
Ofelia Fox, once known as the first lady of the Tropicana nightclub in Havana, where Hollywood stars mingled and performers like Nat King Cole ruled the stage, died on Monday in Burbank. She was 82.

The cause was cancer and complications of diabetes, said Rosa Sanchez, her companion of more than 40 years.

In her memoir, “Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub,” written with Rosa Lowinger and published last fall, Ms. Fox recounted life at the casino and dance club owned by Martin Fox, whom she married in 1952.

Celebrities like Ava Gardner, Tyrone Power and Ernest Hemingway gathered at the Tropicana, known for its casinos and all-night partying. Showgirls, lavish productions, congas and domino tournaments added to the air of a “paradise under the stars,” as the club was called.

The revelry stopped after the Cuban revolution of 1959, when Fidel Castro took possession of the club and Ms. Fox and her husband fled to Miami. Ms. Fox’s husband, Martin, suffered a stroke and died in the mid-1960’s.

She had no children and decided to move with Ms. Sanchez to Los Angeles. Her house in Glendale became a gathering place for Cuban-American neighbors and other friends, where domino tournaments and avid socializing were common.

Born Ofelia Suarez in Havana, the youngest of four, she published several books of poetry while she lived in Cuba. In Los Angeles, several of her bilingual plays were staged by the Cuban Cultural Club in Monterey Park.

Technorati Tags: Ofelia Fox, Tropicana, Fidel Castro

NY Times
Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano with a voice of impeccable trueness and impregnable stamina, died on Dec. 25 in Vastra Karup, the village where she was born, the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported yesterday. She was 87.

A funeral was held yesterday at a church in her town, the presiding vicar, Fredrik Westerlund, told The Associated Press.

Ms. Nilsson made so strong an imprint on a number of roles that her name came to be identified with a repertory, the “Nilsson repertory,” and it was a broad one. She sang the operas of Richard Strauss and made a specialty of Puccini’s “Turandot,” but it was Wagner who served her career and whom she served as no other soprano since the days of Kirsten Flagstad.

A big, blunt woman with a wicked sense of humor, Ms. Nilsson brooked no interference from Wagner’s powerful and eventful orchestra writing. When she sang Isolde or Brünnhilde, her voice pierced through and climbed above it. Her performances took on more pathos as the years went by, but one remembers her sound more for its muscularity, accuracy and sheer joy of singing under the most trying circumstances.

Her long career at the Bayreuth Festival and her immersion in Wagner in general, began in the mid-1950’s. No dramatic soprano truly approached her stature thereafter, and in the roles of Isolde, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde, she began her stately 30-year procession around the opera houses of the world. Her United States debut was in San Francisco in 1956. Three years later she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Isolde under Karl Böhm, and some listeners treasure the memory of that performance as much as they do her live recording of the role from Bayreuth in 1966, also under Böhm. The exuberant review of her first Met performance appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Dec. 19, 1959, under the headline, “Birgit Nilsson as Isolde Flashes Like New Star in ‘Met’ Heavens.”

Playing opposite Karl Liebl as Tristan, Howard Taubman wrote, “she dominated the stage and the performance.”

When she appeared at the end of the first act to take a solo bow, he wrote, the audience “roared like the Stadium fans when Conerly throws a winning touchdown pass.”

Like so many distinctive artists, Ms. Nilsson considered herself self-taught. “The best teacher is the stage,” she told an interviewer in 1981. “You walk out onto it, and you have to learn to project.” She deplored her early instruction and attributed her survival to native talent. “My first voice teacher almost killed me,” she said. “The second was almost as bad.”

Technorati Tags: Birgit Nilsson, Wagner, Isolde, Brünnhilde