Sam Andrew, Guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company

Sam Andrew with Janis Joplin at the Filmore East in New York in 1968. Credit Elliott Landy/landyvision.com, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Jack Bruce

Jack Bruce, Former Cream Frontman is the headline of a small NY Times piece.  Jack Bruce, who formed influential British rock band Cream in the 1960s with guitarist Eric Clapton, has died aged 71, his family said on Saturday. Bruce co-wrote some of Cream's biggest hits including "Sunshine of Your Love" and "I Feel Free" before the band broke up after only two years in 1968. Bruce, who was born in Glasgow, began playing bass as a teenager and dropped out of music school because he was not allowed to play jazz.

Jack Bruce, former Cream man is the headline in the obit in the Guardian. Bruce played bass, sang and was the principal songwriter in Cream, but even leaving aside that group, in which he played with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, his CV reads like a comprehensive guide to the British blues boom, with spells in Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc, the Graham Bond Organisation, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Manfred Mann.
  Embedded, it has video of Cream playing White Room live in 1968. That led me to finding a film made about the end of the group in 1968.

• 
  Jack Bruce: five songs that chart his journey through the 60s to Cream
  Here are five performances tracing the late Jack Bruce's journey from 19-year-old upright bass player to part of rock's first supergroup

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

Look back at Lou Reed's remarkable career in photos

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."

Ray Manzarek

Keyboardist and a Founder of the Doors

Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

“We knew what the people wanted: the same thing the Doors wanted. Freedom.” The Doors around 1970. From left: Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Jim Morrison. 

 Listening to Light my Fire while walking up to Country Village and Herbie Lee — must have been the summer of 1967, for I knew them in junior high school, and the Doors website lists 1967 as when it was first performed — is a very fond memory.

Richie Havens

NY Times obit — others

Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung.“That’s how I first met Bob Dylan,” Mr. Havens said.

Alvin Lee - Ten Years After

 L.A. Times obit

At the Woodstock music festival in 1969, the British blues-rock band Ten Years After burst onto the U.S. music scene with a searing rendition of "I'm Going Home" featuring the fleet-fingered Alvin Lee whaling away on guitar. When the "Woodstock" documentary was released the next year, the band's 11-minute version of the song — and Lee's guitar virtuosity — were regarded as a highlight. His speedy, taut playing would earn him the unofficial title of "the fastest guitar in the West."

Pioneer of FM Rock

Pete Fornatale, a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66. 

Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts. 

Levon Helm

Levon Helm, who helped forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y. (Times obit)

Released on July 1, 1968, the year after “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,“ “Music From Big Pink“ was “rebelling against the rebellion,” Mr. Helm wrote. There were no elaborate studio confections, no psychedelic jams, no gimmicks; the music was stately and homespun, with a deliberately old-time tone behind the enigmatic lyrics. Sales were modest but the album’s influence was huge, leading musicians like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead back toward concision.

(Rolling Stone obit)

A website for the Band.

Photos: Levon Helm Through the Years

60s Session Guitarist

Billy Strange, a prolific Los Angeles session guitarist who recorded with Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys, wrote a No. 1 single for Chubby Checker and arranged Nancy Sinatra’s No. 1 pop hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” died on Wednesday in Franklin, Tenn. He was 81.  A mainstay of the celebrated team of Hollywood studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Strange played on psychedelic touchstones like the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and Love’s “Forever Changes.” In 1962 he arranged and played on Cole’s hit “Ramblin’ Rose.”

Hit Maker Kirshner

Don Kirshner was lauded in the music business for his "golden ear" and claimed to have sent 500 records up the pop charts starting in the late 1950s. Known to a later generation primarily as the late-night impresario and host of the syndicated "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," Mr. Kirshner was one of the seminal forces behind the rise of rock music, especially bubblegum pop. Mr. Kirshner, who died Thursday at age 76, was at first a music publisher who purchased songs and matched them up with performers.

WSJ obit: Thanks in part to his efforts, Little Eva had a hit with "The Locomotion," The Shirelles topped the charts with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," and the Righteous Brothers scored with "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling," said by BMI to be the most-broadcast song of the 20th Century. Mr. Kirshner in person bore next to no resemblance to the stiff, monotonic television host, parodied by Paul Shaffer on "Saturday Night Live." He was instead a profane fast-talker with a reputation for honesty in a business that wasn't always on the level.
 
Raised in Manhattan and the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Kirshner was the son of a tailor whose clients included Dina Washington and Pearl Bailey. He caught the music bug at an early age, and while attending Upsala College in East Orange, N.J., teamed with a young performer named Robert Walden Cassotto to write songs. The pair met with little success outside of selling an advertising jingle to a New Jersey furniture store, and the partnership soon foundered, though the friendship endured. Both parties were headed for pop-music glory. Mr. Cassotto soon became famous, renamed Bobby Darin.

 Mr. Kirshner put under contract a stable of young writers who were identified with Manhattan's Brill Building, including Carole King, Gerry Goffin and Neil Diamond.

And the obit in the Times: Don Kirshner, Shaper of Hit Records, Dies at 76

Manager of Stars, Big Fan of Lawsuits

Herb Cohen managed seminal rock and pop acts of the 1960s and '70s including Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Tom Waits, and Linda Ronstadt. But Mr. Cohen's wildest act may have been his own, as a fireplug-shaped music-business eminence with a reputation for litigiousness.

Herb Cohen in February 1971. He managed stars including Frank Zappa.

Mr. Cohen, who died March 16 at age 78, was a progenitor of the Los Angeles folk-music scene in the 1950s. His Unicorn Coffee House, where patrons could take a banjo down from the wall and entertain the crowd, was reputedly the first institution of its kind south of San Francisco.

In the 1960s Mr. Cohen began managing acts, starting with the Modern Folk Quartet and then the Mothers. With Mr. Zappa, he founded record labels including Straight, Bizarre and DiscReet, which released albums by Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the Amboy Dukes (Ted Nugent's early outfit), and the comic Lenny Bruce. He later ran a music publishing company, Third Story Music.

Mr. Cohen "wasn't one to coddle his artists," says Ms. Ronstadt, whom Mr. Cohen signed after watching her sing at an open microphone night at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. "He didn't let me get caught up with my reflection in the mirror."

Mr. Cohen's relations with his biggest stars—Mr. Zappa, Mr. Waits, Ms. Ronstadt—all ended with lawsuits, although in Ms. Ronstadt's case a friendship was salvaged. "Something always went wrong at the end," says Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, who released recordings by another of Mr. Cohen's clients, Tim Buckley.

Raised in the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Cohen was the son of a veteran of the Russian Revolution. After stints in the merchant marine and the Army, Mr. Cohen moved to the West Coast. In the mid-1950s, he moved in folk-music circles, befriending singers Odetta and Theodore Bikel. Mr. Cohen had a reputation as an intimidator, as attested to by Mr. Zappa, who in 1966 said Mr. Cohen "likes to hit people in the face," according to Zappa biographer Barry Miles. But Mr. Cohen also insisted that the Mothers join the Musicians' Union, which increased their income. He remained Mr. Zappa's manager until an acrimonious split in the mid-1970s.

Other rumors had Mr. Cohen driving around Los Angeles with a crate of hand grenades in the trunk, and running guns for the revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Ms. Ronstadt said she once witnessed him threatening a boisterous bar patron with what he said was a gun. But Mr. Cohen's main weapon was the lawsuit. In 2009, for instance, he sued for defamation over claims made in a biography of Tom Waits that Mr. Cohen stole from Mr. Waits.

"Herbie was a guy who approached everything as if it were a meal, knife and fork at the ready," says Mr. Holzman of Elektra Records.

In addition to the lawsuits with clients, Mr. Cohen was sued in 1993 by the artist/rock groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster for the return of a collection of moldings made from the genitalia of rock stars. The collection had come to Mr. Cohen via Mr. Zappa, who had helped sponsor Ms. Plaster Caster. It languished in a cabinet in his office.

"You'd open the cupboard and see all the casts," recalls Ms. Ronstadt. "I remember being shocked. I mean I was just this girl from Tucson and I had no idea people did things like that."
By STEPHEN MILLER
* REMEMBRANCES
* MARCH 26, 2010

Herb Cohen 1932-2010

Box Tops hit "The Letter"

This obituary appeared in the Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee

Memphis music loses ‘Big Star’ — singer, songwriter Alex Chilton dies at 59

Alex Chilton, the pop hitmaker, cult icon and Memphis rock iconoclast best known as a member of 1960s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the 1970s power-pop act Big Star, died Wednesday at a hospital in New Orleans. The singer, songwriter and guitarist was 59.


"I'm crushed. We're all just crushed," said John Fry, owner of Memphis' Ardent Studios and a longtime friend of Chilton's. "This sudden death experience is never something that you're prepared for. And yet it occurs."

Photo by The Commercial Appeal files.Alex Chilton in an undated early photograph. For nearly a decade starting in 1962, American Sound Studios in Memphis churned out hit after hit: including The Letter and Cry Like a Baby by the Box Tops (with a young Alex Chilton). By the 1980's, Chilton and Big Star, would foster a generation of rock bands. Chilton died Wednesday, March 17, 2010, in New Orleans.

Chilton had been complaining about his health earlier Wednesday, Fry said. He was taken by paramedics from his home to the emergency room but could not be revived. Chilton and Big Star had been scheduled to play Saturday as part of the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The band was also scheduled to play at the Levitt Shell in Memphis on May 15. It's unknown what will happen to those shows.


The Memphis-born Chilton rose to prominence at age 16 when his gruff vocals powered the massive Box Tops hit "The Letter," as well as "Cry Like a Baby" and "Neon Rainbow."

I loved those songs, especially Letter.

After the Box Tops broke up in 1970, Chilton had a brief solo run in New York before returning to Memphis. He soon joined forces with a group of Anglo-pop-obsessed musicians -- fellow songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens -- to form Big Star.

Alex Chilton leads a reunited Big Star on Oct. 29, 1994, at the New Daisy Theatre for its first Memphis concert in more than 20 years. Two nights later, Big Star performed on 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.'

Photo by Karen Pulfer Focht

Alex Chilton Remembered

The group became the flagship act for Ardent's Stax-distributed label. Big Star's 1972 debut album, #1 Record, met with critical acclaim but poor sales. The group briefly disbanded, but reunited without Bell to record the album Radio City. Released in 1974, the second album suffered a similar fate, plagued by Stax's distribution woes. The group made one more album, Third/Sister Lovers, with just Chilton and Stephens -- and it, too, was a minor masterpiece. Darker and more complex than the band's previous pop-oriented material, it remained unreleased for several years.


In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named all three Big Star albums to its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. "It's a fork in the road that a lot of different bands stemmed from," said Jeff Powell, a respected local producer who worked on some of Chilton's records. "If you're drawing a family tree of American music, they're definitely a branch."

In the mid-'70s, Chilton began what would be a polarizing solo career, releasing several albums of material, including 1979's Like Flies on Sherbet -- a strange, chaotically recorded mix of originals and obscure covers that divided fans and critics. Chilton also began performing with local roots-punk deconstructionists the Panther Burns. In the early '80s, Chilton left Memphis for New Orleans, where he worked a variety of jobs and stopped performing for several years. But interest in his music from a new generation of alternative bands, including the Replacements and R.E.M., brought him back to the stage in the mid-'80s. He continued to record and tour as a solo act throughout the decade. Finally, in the early '90s, the underground cult based around Big Star had become so huge that the group was enticed to reunite with a reconfigured lineup. The band, featuring original member Stephens plus Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, continued to perform regularly over the next 16 years. Big Star became the subject of various articles, books and CD reissue campaigns, including the September 2009 release of the widely hailed box set, Keep an Eye on the Sky.

"I played with Alex for eight or 10 years regularly, and he was one of the best musicians I ever knew," said Doug Garrison. "That's what really locked the first time I played with him, this feel on the guitar. He just played flawlessly. He had a limited technique, but he did what he did really well." Chilton was often described as "mercurial," but those who knew him well described a man with a keen sense of humor, a tremendous musician and a generous friend. "He was the only person on a record I've ever worked with where you'd come up with a horn arrangement, and he'd say, 'Look, I'm going to make you guys a co-writer on the song now,'" said Jim Spake, who played sax on the most recent Big Star record.

Chilton is survived by his wife, Laura, a son, Timothy, and a sister, Cecilia.

"When some people pass, you say it was the end of an era. In this case, it's really true," said Van Duren, a fellow Memphis musician who knew Chilton for decades. "It puts an end to the Big Star thing, and that's a very sad thing."

-- Bob Mehr: 529-2517
-- Jody Callahan: 529-6531

Alex Chilton, 1950-2010
— Born December 28, 1950, in Memphis
— Was the lead singer for the Box Tops in the 1960s; recorded "The Letter," which hit No. 1 on the pop charts
— Formed Big Star in 1971 with guitarist/singer Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens
— Big Star put out two albums -- #1 Record and Radio City
— Group broke up in 1975 while working on a third album, which was eventually released overseas called Third/Sister Lovers
— Moved to New Orleans in early 1980s and released some solo albums on Ardent label
— Reunited with Big Star in the mid-1990s
— Rhino Records released a four-disc, 98-song retrospective in September 2009 called Keep an Eye on the Sky
— Band had been scheduled to launch the spring 2010 season at the Levitt Shell at Overton Park with a benefit concert on May 15

* By Jody Callahan, Bob Mehr
* Posted March 17, 2010 at 7:31 p.m. , updated March 17, 2010 at 11:29 p.m.

Hello, Love — this is Ron Lundy

Ron Lundy, who wrapped his on-air exuberance in a soft Southern drawl during more than 30 years as a rock ’n’ roll D.J. in New York City, died Monday in Oxford, Miss. He was 75 and lived in Bruce, Miss. (population 2,097). The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Shirley.

“Hello, Love — this is Ron Lundy from the greatest city in the world!” was his longtime catchphrase.

“He made everybody feel good with that signature,” said Joe McCoy, who was Mr. Lundy’s program director at WCBS-FM for 13 years. “He laughed and laughed while he was on the air.”


Along with the likes of Bruce Morrow (known as Cousin Brucie), Dan Ingram, Dan Daniel, Scott Muni, Herb Oscar Anderson and Jack Spector, Mr. Lundy was among the popular broadcasters in New York during the heyday of rock radio. He was at WABC-AM from 1965 to 1982, and was at the microphone beside Mr. Ingram when the station played its last Top 40 tune on May 10, 1982, before switching to a talk-radio format. From February 1984 to September 1997, he filled the 9 a.m.-to-noon slot at WCBS, reprising oldies from the ’50s and ’60s.

Well I remember the name. WABC (or, as it was called then, W-a-Beatles-C) was my radio station in the mid-1960s.

Fred Ronald Lundy was born in Memphis on June 25, 1934, the only child of Fred and Mary Lundy. His father was a railroad engineer. Besides his wife of 53 years, the former Shirley Barnes, he is survived by a daughter, Jana Haggerty; a son, Fred Jr.; and two grandchildren. After graduating from high school, Mr. Lundy served in the Marine Corps in the early 1950s, then returned to his hometown. “To be quite truthful, he didn’t want to work, so he went to radio school in Memphis on the G. I. Bill,” his wife said.

Soon after, Mr. Lundy landed an off-air job at WHHM in Memphis. “He was working in the record library at the station and somebody didn’t show up that night, so he went on air, and that was it,” Mrs. Lundy said. Mr. Lundy went on to work at stations in Greenville, Miss.; Baton Rouge, La.; and St. Louis before being hired by WABC in New York. After retiring from WCBS 13 years ago, he and his wife returned to the South.


“We put our feet up on the porch,” Mrs. Lundy said. “It’s so quiet down here, no fire engines; and dark, not like New York City.” 

March 16, 2010
Ron Lundy, a Rock D.J. in New York, Is Dead at 75
By DENNIS HEVESI