Ron Dante & Tony Burrows: Two Men, Many Bands

21 Mar 2021 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

(via CultureSonar) BY MARK DAPONTE

Singers Ron Dante and Tony Burrows are and were not a household name, but for a spell, a family with a working radio couldn’t keep their voices out of their house.

Dante’s first foray into being a household name was singing for The Detergents, who unleashed a 1964 parody of the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” called “Leader of The Laundromat.”  Sadly, some people (like the three writers of “Leader of the Pack”) couldn’t take a joke and took the Detergents to the cleaners in the form of a lawsuit.  Five years later, one of “the Pack’s” composers, Jeff Barry, co-wrote (with Andy Kim) “Sugar, Sugar,” the biggest hit Ron ever sang on.  The song’s success compelled Ed Sullivan to ask Dante’s group, The Archies, to appear on Ed’s variety show.  Alas, the cartoon Archies were the Gorillaz of their time: an animated band whose members were heard and not seen which meant Ron sang as Reggie Mantle in his only appearance on Ed’s show…

Read more: Ron Dante & Tony Burrows: Two Men, Many Bands – CultureSonar

Tina Turner says goodbye to fans with doc amid PTSD, stroke, cancer

17 Mar 2021 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

Tina Turner performing in 1990.
Redferns

(via the New York Post) By Rod McPhee

Tina Turner bids a final farewell to her fans in a touching new film that shows how she has overcome her painful past and finally found happiness.

In the feature-length documentary, simply titled “Tina,” the singer looks back on camera for the first time at her younger years filled with struggle and pain, then the true love and global fame she found as a middle-aged woman.

Now 81 and plagued by ill health, including a stroke and cancer, the soul and rock music legend also suffered kidney failure that led to a transplant in 2017.

In the film, she tells how she wants to enter the third and final chapter of her life out of the spotlight, and it is revealed that she has a form of post-traumatic stress disorder from the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband and music partner, Ike Turner.

Looking back, Tina reflects: “It wasn’t a good life. The good did not balance the bad.

“I had an abusive life, there’s no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. It’s a truth. That’s what you’ve got, so you have to accept it…

Read more: Tina Turner says goodbye to fans with doc amid PTSD, stroke, cancer (nypost.com)

Great Writers on the Power of Music

12 Mar 2021 1 Comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

(via brainpickings) BY MARIA POPOVA

“Music is the best means we have of digesting time,” Igor 

Stravinsky once remarked (a remark often misattributed to W.H. Auden). “Music is the sound wave of the soul,” the wise and wonderful Morley observed. Psychologists have studied why playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity and how listening to music enraptures the brain. But, more than that, music works over the human spirit and stands as a supreme manifestation of our very humanity — something Carl Sagan knew when he sent the Golden Record into the cosmos as a representation of the most universal truths of our civilization.

Gathered here are uncommonly beautiful reflections on the singular power of music by some of humanity’s greatest writers, collected over years of reading — please enjoy.

Susan Sontag spent the majority of her adult life reading between eight and ten hours a day, and never fewer than four. Her intense love of literature was paralleled by a commensurate love of music. In a diary entry found in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 (public library) — the spectacular volume that gave us young Sontag on personal growth, art, marriage, the four people a great writer must be, and her duties for being a twenty-something — she writes at age 15:

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts — it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure — and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

In his final essay collection, A Man Without a Country (public library) — the source of his abiding wisdom on the shapes of stories — Kurt Vonnegut wrote that music, above all else, “made being alive almost worthwhile” for him. He synthesized the sentiment in an extra-concentrated dose of his wry irreverence:

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Read more: Great Writers on the Power of Music – Brain Pickings

Did You Ever Realize…

11 Mar 2021 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in Did You Ever Realize, General Posts Tags: , , ,

Whatever Happened To… Steve Perry’s Journey After Journey

11 Mar 2021 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

(via Culture Sonar) by Will Wills

Did you know that Journey had a singer before Steve Perry?  The band had been around since 1973, with plans to be a backing group for solo acts. Then they switched to being a jazz fusion band with Gregg Rolie on vocals.  That particular incarnation of Journey released a few albums through 1977 that only charted as high as #85 on the Billboard Top 200.

In 1977, the band hired Robert Fleischman to take over lead vocals and transitioned to a musical style more rock than jazz. They opened for acts such as Judas Priest, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. And while they found slightly more success, it wasn’t until Steve Perry was snuck onto the stage during a soundcheck that it was immediately decided that he would be their new lead singer…

Read more: Steve Perry’s Journey…After “Journey” – CultureSonar

Some Important Observations On Steeleye Span, Experiments In Folk Rock And Cows

02 Mar 2021 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

(via The ARTery) uly 20, 2015 by Chris Braiotta

I want to talk to you about what it means to experiment. Let’s begin with the following sentence: “We did try a reggae ‘Spotted Cow’ and we weren’t terribly convinced by it, so we stopped doing it.”

You’ll be needing a little context for that. “Spotted Cow” is a song from around 1740. It’s about a woman who’s lost her cow. She complains about it to this guy she runs into. He’s like, “Lady, I am game to help you find your cow. Let us do this.” They go off to a field to find it. Obvious place to start, right? Before long … well, you know how fields are. Sexiest thing in nature. So they decide to do what comes naturally to a man and a woman in a field, which isn’t really looking for cows. From then on, whenever the lady’s looking for a bit of you-know-what, she finds some guy and tells him about her cow.

The speaker of that sentence was Maddy Prior, singer of the great English folk-rock band Steeleye Span. This is a band that she’s led since 1969.

So, to sum up: ‘70s English folk-rock band, cow used as cover story for Georgian booty call. And then: reggae.

“When you’re experimenting with things they can’t all be winners,” she says. “I’m pleased that we tried things.”

I don’t care how “out there” you think your favorite band is. This is what it means to be fearless. This is what experimenting is…

Read more: Some Important Observations On Steeleye Span, Experiments In Folk Rock And Cows | The ARTery (wbur.org)

See also: Recommended Albums #47 | Every Moment Has A Song (edcyphers.com)

See also: Songs You May Have Missed #200 | Every Moment Has A Song (edcyphers.com)

Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries