ASSOCIATED PRESS: Randy Cain [pictured, above right], a founding member of the soul group the Delfonics, which had such hits as “La La Means I Love You,” has died. He was 63. Cain’s death Thursday at his home in Maple Shade, N.J., was confirmed by investigator Rob O’Neal of the Burlington County medical examiner’s office, who declined to release other details. MORE WIKIPEDIA: The Delfonics are a Philadelphia soul singing group, most popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their most notable hits include “La-La (Means I Love You)“, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” “Break Your Promise,” […]
RIP: The Shirt Corner
[Photo by SYNDPROD] INQUIRER: The Shirt Corner, the Market Street clothing emporium that celebrates Philadelphia’s distinctive but rapidly vanishing style of retail hucksterism, will shut its doors today, opening the way for demolition of its ebullient, red-white-and-blue-painted building and six of its Old City neighbors. Although the properties remain in the hands of the Shirt Corner’s 77-year-old owner, Marvin Ginsberg, a potential buyer is scheduled to appear today before a Historical Commission subcommittee to request permission to tear down the row of mid-19th-century structures. The vivid facades, with their overscaled graphic signs, account for about half the frontage on the […]
RIP: Ricardo Montalban Dead At 88
ASSOCIATED PRESS: A Los Angeles city councilman says Ricardo Montalban has died. He was 88. The Mexican-born actor, who became a star in splashy MGM musicals and later the wish-fulfilling Mr. Roarke in TV’s “Fantasy Island,” died at his home in Los Angeles, City Council President Eric Garcetti (gar-SET’-ti) said Wednesday. Montalban lived in Garcetti’s district in Los Angeles. MORE WIKIPEDIA: Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán Merino KCSG (November 25, 1920 – January 14, 2009) was a Mexican television, theatre, and film actor. He had a career spanning decades and multiple notable roles. During the late 1970s, he was the spokesperson […]
RIP: Stooges Guitarist Ron Asheton Dead At 60
NME: Ron Asheton, the guitarist and bassist with The Stooges, has been found dead today (January 6). He was 60. Asheton was found at his home in Ann Arbor this morning, according to police. A cause of death is yet to be confirmed, although initial reports suggest that Asheton died of a heart attack. Detective Sgt Jim Stephenson told local paper Ann Arbor News that foul play is not suspected. He added that Asheton‘s body was found on a living-room sofa, and that he appeared to have been dead for at least several days. Autopsy and toxicology results are pending. […]
DEATH OF PURRFECTION: Eartha Kitt RIP
NEW YORK TIMES: Ms. Kitt, who began performing as a dancer in New York in the late ’40s, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of […]
CHARLIE DON’T SURF: Actor Sam Bottoms, AKA Lance The Surfer In Apocalypse Now, Dead At 53
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Sam Bottoms, a film and television actor who played the role of California surfer-turned-GI Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” has died. He was 53. Bottoms died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles of glioblastoma multiforme, a virulent brain cancer, said his wife, Laura Bickford. Bottoms was 20 in 1976 when he was cast to play surfer Lance Johnson in “Apocalypse Now,” in which he was one of the young sailors who accompany Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) up river in a gunboat for his rendezvous with Marlon Brando’s renegade […]
TRAGIC: Bettie Page Is Dead
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85. Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler. A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur […]
WE SHALL OVERCOME: Folk Icon Odetta Dead At 77
NEW YORK TIMES: Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob […]
RIP: Studs Terkel, Voice Of The Face In The Crowd
TEXAS OBSERVER: He is beloved “Uncle Studs” to many who grew up listening to WFMT, the Chicago radio station that broadcast his eclectic daily mix of music and interviews from 1952 to 1997. To anyone who has ever heard his raspy, empathetic voice, there is only one Studs: Studs Terkel, singer of the unsung American. Louis Terkel acquired his nickname in the 1930s while performing in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. He was carrying around books by fellow Chicagoan James T. Farrell, and to differentiate Terkel from two others in the cast also named Louis, members of the Chicago Repertory […]
All Of This Happened While You Were Sleeping
Dead pigeon, 20th & Spring Garden, October 1st [photo by RAY SKWIRE]
GOODBYE COOL HAND LUKE: Paul Newman Is Dead
NEW YORK TIMES: Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83. The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicists. If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy. He acted in more than 65 movies over […]
SEE YOU ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: Pink Floyd Keyboardist, Rick Wright, Dead At 65
ASSOCIATED PRESS: LONDON (AP) — Richard Wright [pictured, far left], a founding member of the rock group Pink Floyd, died Monday. He was 65. Pink Floyd’s spokesman Doug Wright, who is not related to the artist, said Wright died after a battle with cancer at his home in Britain. He says the band member’s family did not want to give more details about his death. Wright met Pink Floyd members Roger Waters and Nick Mason in college and joined their early band, Sigma 6. Along with the late Syd Barrett, the four formed Pink Floyd in 1965. The group’s jazz-infused […]
INFINITE JEST: David Foster Wallace Kills Self
NEW YORK TIMES: David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said. Mr. Wallace, 46, best known for his sprawling 1,079-page novel “Infinite Jest,” was discovered by his wife, Karen Green, who returned home to find that he had hanged himself, a spokesman for the Claremont, Calif., police said Saturday evening. MORE NEW YORK TIMES: David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer […]