Our Daily Dead

Here we go again Alex…we’ll take Music Producers for $500….From Pierre Perrone
at the Independent Online comes word that Colin Thurston, perhaps best know as the producer for Duran Duran, died on January 15. The cause of death is at present unknown.

“When the budding record producer Colin Thurston was taken to see Duran Duran in 1980, he wasn’t in the best of moods. He had just flown back from the United States and the jet-lag was catching up with him. However, as soon as they began playing ‘Girls on Film’, Thurston snapped out of his torpor. By the end of their set, he knew he had found the next band he wanted to work with. Producer and musicians sealed their partnership with a four-day session during which they aimed to record both sides of a single but actually completed half of Duran Duran, the group’s début album for EMI.”

“Issued in June 1981, in the wake of the Top Forty success of the singles ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Careless Memories’, Duran Duran began a steady climb up the charts. The band’s good looks and emerging pin-up status did the rest. By autumn 1981 … Beatlemania-like pandemonium followed them everywhere, with teenage girls climbing over cars to try and reach their idols.”

Thurston was also an engineer on David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ and producer on Human League’s ‘Reproduction’ and ‘Travelogue’, Magazine’s ‘Secondhand Daylight’ and Howard Jones ‘Human Lib’.

Over at the official Duran Duran web site bassist John Taylor says:

“Without Colin’s depth of vision, we would never have become the band we became. He will be remembered as an important musical stylist who was a major catalyst for the Eighties sound.”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Colin Thurston, Duran Duran, died, Top Forty, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Human League, Howard Jones

From the Angry Ape web site (and others): Hip hop producer David Shayman committed suicide yesterday, January 23rd, aged just 27.

Shayman AKA Disco D had previously worked with such names as 50 Cent (on The Sky Mask Way), Nina Sky (Turnin’ Me On), Trick Daddy and Lil’ Scrappy.

According to various sources, Disco D had been diagnosed as bi-polar recently and was suffering from depression.

His loss has come as a great shock to the hip hop community, but fans can leave their respect at D’s MySpace page.

From the University of Michigan Living Music web site comes a bit more insight into Shayman’s past:

He was originally from Ann Arbor and attended the University of Michigan where he received his business degree in 2002. He recorded his first EP at age 17 and is known as one of the originators of Detroit Ghettotech — an urban hybrid of Detroit techno and electro, Chicago booty house and Miami Bass. He now lives in New York City where he has stepped into the commercial hip-hop, R&B and dance hall music production scene.

Paul: So how did you get the name ‘Disco D’?
Disco D: Someone took a picture of me, maybe when I was 15, I was trying to do a trick and I f**ked up and it looked like I was disco dancing. They e-mailed it around and said ‘Disco D’ cuz my name was David. And when I started DJaying, it was a distraction from my parents divorce, and I couldn’t think of a name and that was a nickname I had so that was it and it just stuck. It has nothing to do with music.

Read the rest of the interview over at the Living Music interview web site.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: David Shayman, suicide, Disco D, 50 Cent, Nina Sky, Trick Daddy, Lil’ Scrappy, bi-polar, depression, hip hop, techno, electro, R&B

We checked in with Dan over at Infospigot and found one more go around on the James Kim and family story. Recall that James and family were attempting to make the southern Oregon coast via backroads, became lost, got snowed in, and ran out of gas.

From Kati:

[She] remembers that he left at “exactly 7:46” Friday morning. James was going to cut strips of cloth and tie the strips to trees so that he could mark his way back to the car. James was to turn around by 1 o’clock that afternoon. He never returned. james had a watch on when he left. [She] states that it was not working when the watch was returned to her later, after James was found.

He died of exposure. Dan has more of Kati Kim’s story so you can get one more view of this tragedy.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: James Kim, Oregon, died, exposure, Kati Kim, tragedy

Sticking with the category Alex, we’ll take Literature for $1,000….and from Radio Polonia we read that the internationally-renowned Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has died in a Warsaw hospital at the age of 74.

“Foreign travels took Kapuscinski to many hotbeds of tension and scenes of upheavals. He witnessed 27 revolutions, mostly in Africa where he was Poland’s only foreign correspondent in the 1960s and 70s. Hampered by the constraints of newspaper articles, he soon turned to writing books.”

“One of the best-known of his 19 books, ‘The Emperor’, was an account of the downfall of Ethiopia’s dictator Haile Selassie. For Polish readers, it brought to mind their own totalitarian leaders. ‘The Shah of Shahs’ described the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. In his books, Kapuścinski explored the structure of power in today’s world. “

“The most important problem is that we’re living in the world in which the fruits of progress and development are very unjustly divided, and people, thanks to the TV and the media, the poor people, who are the majority, are feeling very strongly, very deeply this injustice, this situation to be marginalized. And this has produced among them a very strong feeling of frustration, of unhappiness. Eventually of hate and revenge.”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Ryszard Kapuscinski, died, Warsaw, Haile Selassie, Shah of Iran

Out of the depths of the OC comes word that Barbara Seranella, an auto mechanic-turned mystery writer, died Sunday in Cleveland, Ohio, of end-stage liver disease while awaiting a third liver transplant. She was 50 years old.

“After writing her first book, ‘No Human Involved,’ which was published in 1997 and was No. 5 on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list, she gained popularity for suspense novels based on the adventures of Munch Muncini, a female auto and motorcycle mechanic/detective with a checkered past not unlike that of the author.”

“She went on to see seven more books in that series published. A new book, ‘Deadman’s Switch,’ based on a different character, is expected to be released in April.”

“Born in Santa Monica, Seranella grew up in Pacific Palisades and ran away from home at age 14, joining a hippie commune in San Francisco and riding with an outlaw motorcycle gang known as the Heathens. During that time, she became all too familiar with drugs, alcohol and jail time. She was arrested 13 times for various offenses.”

“At age 22, she got sober and decided to settle down. She worked at an Arco station in Sherman Oaks for five years, then for a Texaco station in Brentwood, where she became service manager and married her boss, Ron Seranella, in 1994. They had homes in Laguna Beach and in La Quinta.”

Her web site - BarbaraSeranella.com has a link to some of her short pieces including her first published bit titled “Biker Wedding”:

“Do you, Michael Sanderson, aka James Sanderson, aka Michael Bennett, aka Randy Ross, aka Driveshaft Randy, aka Crazy Mike,” the preacher asked, “take this mama, Barbara Waller, aka Barbara Sampson, aka Claretta Washington, aka Snaggletooth, aka Crazy Barbara, as your lawfully wedded whatizzit?”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: OC, Barbara Seranella, mystery writer, died, Munch Muncini, Heathens, drugs, jail time, Brentwood, Laguna Beach, La Quinta

By way of the AP Wire and CentreDaily.com comes that E. Howard Hunt, the man who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

Hunt died after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son, Austin Hunt.

The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre.

Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn’t - a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term “Watergate conspirator.”

“I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars - Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

“According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign,” Hunt told CNN in February 1992. “And the idea was … that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found.”

The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal.

And in case you missed it, the E stands for Everette.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: E. Howard Hunt, Watergate, break-in, scandal, Richard Nixon, died, burglar, Bay of Pigs

Over at the Toronto Star we found out that James Hiller, co-inventor of the electron microscope died recently at the age of 91.

After winning a scholarship to attend the University of Toronto, he studied mathematics and physics, earning a master’s degree in 1938 and a doctorate in physics in 1941.

“He was very humble, very humble, but he was inwardly also very proud (of his work),” said his son, J. Robert Hillier.

While at the University of Toronto, Hillier and fellow student Albert Prebus designed and built a microscope in 1938 that passed a beam of electrons instead of a beam of light through a specimen.

The device magnified an image 7,000 times – three times more powerful than what could be done optically at the time.

Today, the modern equivalent of his device – now known as the electron microscope – can magnify objects to more than 2 million times their actual size. However, each generation of the instrument has been based on the principles developed by Hillier’s original work.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: James Hiller, electron microscope, died, Albert Prebus, electrons

Over at The Rock Radio web site we read that “…Denny Doherty who was an original member of the Mamas & the Papas, died on Friday (January 19th) at his home in Mississauga, Ontario. Doherty, who was 66 years old, had been battling some unspecified health issues late last year and underwent surgery last month, which forced him to begin kidney dialysis treatments.”

“His groupmate Michelle Phillips is also in disbelief. She talked to Doherty last Thursday (January 18th) and said, ‘He was extremely funny and jovial as always, and he was just my same old Denny. I’m still in shock that he didn’t survive this.’ Phillips is now the sole surviving member of the Mamas & the Papas — ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot died in 1974, and John Phillips went in 2001.”

“Denny Doherty began his career in a group called the Colonials, which became the Halifax Three. While in that group, the husband-and-wife team of John and Michelle Phillips heard Doherty sing and invited him to join the group they were forming, along with Cass Elliot. They rose to fame in 1966 with their first single, ‘California Dreamin,’ and had continued success with hits including the Number One ‘Monday, Monday,’ and the Top Five hits ‘I Saw Her Again,’ ‘Words Of Love,’ ‘Dedicated To The One I Love,’ and ‘Creeque Alley,’ and five other Top Forty singles. However, the run ended in 1968, when the group broke up because Elliot wanted to go solo.”

“Following the breakup of the Mamas & the Papas, Doherty launched an acting career in Canada, and he also did all the voices for the children’s TV series Theodore Tugboat. In addition, he wrote a biographical play about the Mamas & the Papas titled Dream A Little Dream that had successful runs in Toronto and off-Broadway in New York City.”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Rock Radio, Denny Doherty, died, Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliot, John Phillips, Theodore Tugboat