DETROIT NEWS: One of Motown Records’ most memorable voices is gone, as balladeer Jimmy Ruffin died at a Las Vegas hospital late Monday. He was 78. Ruffin’s most enduring hit has to be 1966’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” with its majestic, stately rhythm and Ruffin’s deeply soulful, sorrowful vocal. He followed up that Top 10 hit with “I’ve Passed This Way Before” in 1967. In 1980 he enjoyed a comeback hit with “Hold on to My Love.” Ruffin was born May 7, 1936 in Collinsville, Mississippi, the older brother of singer David Ruffin. The brothers made their way north, […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: On the air, the brothers were a team, swapping stories, chortling at each other’s jokes. Ray, who is 12 years younger, has a higher-pitched voice; Tom had the deeper voice and a laugh that tended to run away with itself. Both had unmistakable Boston accents. When asked who was Click and who was Clack, “they said they didn’t know,” Mr. Berman recalled. Another favorite line, he said, was “that they shared one brain, and were each working with a half.” Thomas Louis Magliozzi (pronounced mal-YOT-zee) was born on June 28, 1937, in a largely Italian-American section […]

  CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER: Guided by Voices has broken up. The Dayton, Ohio indie-rock stalwart has canceled a tour that included shows in September and October, including an Oct. 5 date at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights. The band Twitter page was announcing new shows being added to its fall tour as recently as 10:56 a.m. today – in Columbus (Nov. 28) and Detroit (Nov. 29). But in a statement posted this afternoon on gbv.com, the band said: “Guided By Voices has come to an end. With 4 years of great shows and six killer albums, it was a […]

  DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD: The towering actor who played the mercenary assassin Jaws in a pair of Roger Moore-era 007 movies and the enigmatic alien in one of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone died today. Richard Kiel would have turned 75 on Saturday. His agent of 35 years, Steven Stevens Sr, told Deadline that Kiel died this ToServeManafternoon at St. Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, CA. The 7-foot-2 actor with the crooked smile got his start in early-1060s TV, appearing in such series as Laramie, Thriller and The Rifleman. He appeared in the 1962 sci-fi feature The Phantom […]

Joan Rivers circa 1967 NEW YORK TIMES: Joan Rivers, the raspy loudmouth who pounced on America’s obsessions with flab, face-lifts, body hair and other blemishes of neurotic life, including her own, in five decades of caustic comedy that propelled her from nightclubs to television to international stardom, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81. […] Vivacious even as a nipped-and-tucked octogenarian, flitting from coast to coast and stage to studio in a whirl of live and taped shows, publicity stunts and cosmetic surgery appointments, Ms. Rivers evolved from a sassy, self-deprecating performer early in her career into a coarser […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: Bobby Womack, who spanned the American soul music era, touring as a gospel singer in the 1950s, playing guitar in Sam Cooke’s backup band in the early ’60s, writing hit songs recorded by Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones and composing music that broke onto the pop charts, has died, a spokeswoman for his record label said on Friday night. He was 70. Mr. Womack, nicknamed the Preacher for his authoritative, church-trained voice and the way he introduced songs with long discourses on life, never had the million-record success of contemporaries like Pickett, Marvin Gaye, Al […]

  ROLLING STONE: “As singers, we all deal in pain,” said Ray Charles. “We’re all trying to push the pain through the music and make it sound pretty. Jimmy Scott has more pain and prettiness in his voice than any singer anywhere.” When Scott died on June 12th, he left an extraordinary legacy of both broken dreams and artistic fulfillment. He triumphed, he fell and ultimately he triumphed again. At 25 he was singing with the wildly popular Lionel Hampton band billed as Little Jimmy Scott. His hit, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” became a favorite of beboppers like Dexter Gordon, his Hampton […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: Alexander Shulgin, a chemist who specialized in the creation of and experimentation with mind-altering substances, and who introduced the controversial drug popularly known as Ecstasy for potential therapeutic use, died on Monday at his home in Lafayette, Calif., east of Oakland. He was 88. Dr. Shulgin, whose interest, as he put it once, was “in the machinery of the mental process,” was both a rogue and a wizard, a legitimate scientist and a counterculture hero. Over more than four decades, working generally within the law (if occasionally on the edge), trying out his concoctions on himself, […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: Maya Angelou, the memoirist and poet whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — which describes in lyrical, unsparing prose her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday in her home. She was 86 and lived in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her death was confirmed by her longtime literary agent, Helen Brann. No immediate cause had been determined, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been in frail health for some time and had […]

  NEW  YORK TIMES: Bunny Yeager, a model-turned-photographer whose images of a scarcely clad Bettie Page, embodying feral sexuality and winsome naïveté all at once, helped propel Ms. Page to international stardom as a midcentury pinup queen, died on Sunday in North Miami, Fla. She was 85. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin. Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: A thread running through Mr. Giger’s work was the uneasy meshing of machines and biology, in a highly idiosyncratic blend of science fiction and surrealism. From books to movies to record albums to magazine illustrations to a back-scratcher inspired by “Alien,” his designs challenged norms. He kept a notepad next to his bed so he could sketch the terrors that rocked his uneasy sleep — nightmarish forms that could as easily have lumbered from prehistory as arrived from Mars.“Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span,” Timothy Leary, the psychedelic drug […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: He hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of …” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling). […] In his second issue, […]

David Brenner’s Tonight Show debut, Jan. 8, 1971. He would go on to become Carson’s most frequent guest, with more than 150 appearances. NEW YORK TIMES: David Brenner was born on Feb. 4, 1936, in Philadelphia, the son of Lou and Estelle Brenner. His father was a former vaudevillian who he said had several jobs — not all of them legal — and was one of the funniest people he knew. Mr. Brenner served in the Army and graduated from Temple University with a degree in communications before beginning his career as a documentarian. Tall and skinny, with a toothy […]