LOS ANGELES TIMES: Donald G. Fisher, who launched the Gap clothing chain 40 years ago and helped build it into one of the world’s leading apparel retailers, died Sunday. He was 81. A former real estate developer, Fisher switched to retailing at age 41 after he tried to return a pair of ill-fitting jeans at a local department store. Finding the store messy and its selection of sizes and styles limited, Fisher decided he could do better. With $63,000 in capital, the Fishers came up with a concept for a store that would feature a broad selection of Levi’s, neatly […]
RIP: Folk Singer Mary Travers Dead At 72
LOS ANGELES TIMES: It wasn’t all free love and hallucinogens in the ’60s. Hundreds of thousands marched for civil rights and peace, and folk music was the galvanizing voice of freedom and change. Peter, Paul and Mary, the legendary trio who helped promulgate that spirit of activism, could be considered relics of a decade of chaos and transmutation, but for the fact that they’ve kept the faith for more than 30 years. Together and separately, Peter Yarrow, Noel (Paul) Stookey and Mary Travers have raised their voices for peace, for a nuclear-free America, to support the homeless and to protest […]
THIS JUST IN: Patrick Swayze Dead At 57
CBS NEWS: Patrick Swayze has died after a nearly two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Swayze’s publicist Annett Wolf says the 57-year-old “Dirty Dancing” actor died Monday with family at his side. He came forward about his illness last spring, but continued working as he underwent treatments. It was 1987 when Swayze became a star with his performance in “Dirty Dancing,” a coming-of-age story set in a Catskills resort. The 1990 film “Ghost” cemented his status as a screen favorite. MORE NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Swayze’s cancer was diagnosed in January 2008. Six months after that, he had already outlived his […]
RIP: Basketball Diaries Author Jim Carroll Dead At 59
NEW YORK TIMES: Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife. As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during […]
BREAKING: DJ AM Found Dead In New York
NBC: Celebrity disk-jockey DJ AM was found dead in SoHo today, sources told NBC New York. He was 36 years old. The body of DJ AM, also known as Adam Goldstein, was found on the seventh floor of an apartment building at 215 Lafayette Street, law-enforcement sources said. Goldstein, along with drummer Travis Barker, barely escaped death in a small plane crash in South Carolina on Sept. 19, 2008. That incident left him badly burned, but four others died in the accident. The details of his demise are still unclear, but police sources said investigators are looking into the possibility of a drug overdose, as drug […]
RIP: Pop Songstress Extraordinaire Ellie Greenwich
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Ellie Greenwich emerged as a songwriter when America itself was on the cusp of everything, a whole set of conventions unspooling under the power of rock ‘n’ roll, the civil rights movement and the incipient counterculture. Her American polyglot upbringing prepared Greenwich, who died today at age 68 of a heart attack, for what she became: one of the great sound alchemists who turned the ambiguities of youth into the essence of American pop. Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York’s Brill Building, where […]
BREAKING: Ted Kennedy Is Dead
BOSTON GLOBE: Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who carried aloft the torch of a Massachusetts dynasty and championed a liberal ideology during almost a half century in the Senate, but whose personal and political failings may have prevented him from realizing the ultimate prize of the presidency, died Tuesday night at his home in Hyannis Port. He was 77 and had been Senator Edward M. Kennedy battling brain cancer. Senator Edward M. Kennedy Overcoming a history of family tragedy, which included the assassinations of a brother who was president and another who sought to occupy the White House, Kennedy seized on […]
RIP: Legendary Memphis Producer Jim Dickinson
MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL: The North Mississippi Allstars have lost their father, Bob Dylan has lost a “brother,” rock and roll has lost one of its great cult heroes and Memphis has lost a musical icon with the death of Jim Dickinson. The 67-year-old Dickinson passed away early Saturday morning in his sleep. The Memphis native and longtime Mississippi resident had been in failing health for the past few months and was recuperating from heart surgery at Methodist Extended Care Hospital. MORE BILL BENTLEY: There aren’t many shamans still in our world. Most have been ground down to dust, and those […]
Rock N’ Roll Game-Changer Les Paul Dead At 94
Les Paul & Mary Ford Show: World Is Waiting For The Sunrise NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the […]
RIP: Director John Hughes Dead At 59
BBC: The US film director John Hughes, who created some of the most famous comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, has died at the age of 59. The director died after a heart attack in New York, his spokeswoman said. Mr Hughes was the director of such successful films as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. He was also a leading script writer, penning films such as Pretty in Pink and Home Alone. The spokeswoman, Michelle Bega, told Associated Press that Mr Hughes had been in Manhattan on a family visit and died after […]
RIP: Author Frank McCourt Dead At 78
NEW YORK TIMES: Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to […]
THIS JUST IN: DN Pays Tribute To Swells
BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH FOR THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS: … But what I’ll remember most is the sarcastic encouragement Swells gave an intern for no other reason than that he believed in me. And oh the trouble he gave me. When I let slip that I wasn’t into Britney Spears or the Monkees, I was doomed. The next week, I was the target of a piece in the Guardian about his attempts to educate me about music: Undaunted by the massive task before me, I then proceeded to lecture Tad . . . on just how . . . extraordinarily […]
RIP: Oscar Mayer, Hot Dog King, Dead At 95
LOS ANGELES TIMES: His bologna had a first name. His bologna had a last name. So did he. More than simply a brand name or the punchline to a catchy ad jingle, Oscar G. Mayer, the former chairman of his family’s eponymous meat products company has died. He passed away Monday at the age of 95 in a hospice facility in Fitchburg, Wis., reports the Daily Herald. Founded by three German immigrant brothers, Gottfried, Max and Oscar Mayer, the company began selling sausages in Chicago in the 1890s. The basis of their success was the bratwurst, weisswurst and liverwurst made […]