Endless Sleep - The Obituary Thread

Al Caiola (September 7, 1920 – November 9, 2016), was a guitarist, composer and arranger who spanned a variety of music genres including jazz, country, rock, western, and pop. He recorded over fifty albums and worked with some of the biggest names in music during the 20th century, including Elvis Presley, Ferrante & Teicher, Frank Sinatra, Percy Faith, Buddy Holly, Mitch Miller, and Tony Bennett. During World War II Caiola played with the United States Marine Corps 5th Marine Division (United States) Band that also included Bob Crosby. Caiola served in the Battle of Iwo Jima as a stretcher bearer.



Partial studio recordings list:

Paul Anka — "Diana", "Lonely Boy", "My Way", "Puppy Love", "Put Your Head on My Shoulder", "Times of Your Life"
Louis Armstrong — "Back O'Town Blues", "Mop! Mop!", "Blueberry Hill" (All three tracks recorded live in 1947)
Frankie Avalon — "DeDe Dinah", "Venus"
Burt Bacharach — "Bridget Bardo"
LaVern Baker — "I Cried a Tear", "I'm Leaving You", banjo on "Humpty Dumpty Heart"
Tony Bennett — "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", "Stranger in Paradise"
Ruth Brown — "Miss Rhythm", "Late Date with Ruth Brown"
Solomon Burke — "Cry to Me"
Glen Campbell — "Galveston"
Petula Clark — "Don't Sleep in the Subway", "This Is My Song"
Rosemary Clooney — "Come on a My House", "Half as Much", "Hey There", "This Ole House"
The Coasters — "Dance!", "Gee, Golly", "Hungry", "I'm Fallin'", "Run Red Run"
Perry Como — "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes", "Patricia", "Temptation"
The Crickets — "Rave On!", "That's My Desire"
King Curtis & Al Caiola — "Guitar Boogie Shuffle"
Bobby Darin — "Artificial Flowers", "Bill Bailey", "Dream Lover", "Mack the Knife", "Queen of the Hop", "Splish Splash", "That's All"
Dion — "Abraham, Martin and John", "Drip Drop", "Runaround Sue", "The Wanderer"
Fabian — "Tiger", "Turn Me Loose", "Hound Dog Man"
Percy Faith — "The Theme from A Summer Place"
Ferrante & Teicher — "Airport Love Theme", "Theme from Exodus"
Jackie Gleason — "From Russia with Love", "Melancholy Serenade"
The Bobby Hackett Quartet — entire "You Stepped Out of a Dream" album
Herbie Hancock — "Deck the Halls"
Woody Herman — "Body and Soul", "Caldonia", "Early Autumn", "Mood Indigo"
Al Hirt — "Big Honey", "Puppet on a String"
Buddy Holly — "I'm Gonna Love You Too", "It Doesn't Matter Anymore", "Moondreams", "True Love Ways"
Ivory Joe Hunter — "Empty Arms", "Love's a Hurting Game"
Mahalia Jackson — "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", "I See God", "You're Not Living In Vain"
Ben E. King — "Spanish Harlem", "Stand by Me"
Brenda Lee — "Fairyland", "One Step at a Time"
Jerry Lee Lewis — "Let's Talk About Us", "To Make Love Sweeter For You"
Julie London — "Lonely Girl", "Remember"
Al Martino — "Spanish Eyes"
Johnny Mathis — "Chances Are", "It's Not for Me to Say", "Misty", "Smile", "The Twelfth of Never"
Mitch Miller — "The Yellow Rose of Texas", most "Sing Along with Mitch" albums
Elvis Presley — "Santa Lucia"
Johnnie Ray — "Just Walkin' in the Rain", "Soliloquy of a Fool"
Marty Robbins — "A White Sport Coat", "She Was Only Seventeen", "The Story of My Life"
Neil Sedaka — "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do", "Calendar Girl", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen", "Next Door to an Angel"
Del Shannon — "Hats Off to Larry", "Little Town Flirt", "Runaway"
Simon & Garfunkel — "Mrs. Robinson", "Old Friends", "Bridge over Troubled Water" (also see Tom & Jerry)
Frank Sinatra — "Bye Bye Baby", "Don't Cry Joe", "Drinking Again", "It All Depends on You"
Barbra Streisand — "Bye Bye Blackbird"
Tom & Jerry (Simon & Garfunkel) — "Baby Talk"
Sarah Vaughan — "Autumn in New York", "Lullaby of Birdland", "Moonlight in Vermont", "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever"
The Village Stompers - "Washington Square"
Dinah Washington — entire "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes!" album
Andy Williams — "Butterfly", "Canadian Sunset"
Joe Williams — "I Should Have Kissed Her More", "On the Sunny Side of the Street"
Chuck Willis — "C. C. Rider" (also known as "See See Rider"), "Hang Up My Rock 'N' Roll Shoes", "What Am I Living For?"
Hugo Winterhalter — "Blue Tango", "Count Every Star"

Billy Miller, Curator and Historian of Fringe Music, Dies at 62 (NY Times)

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Billy Miller, a rock ’n’ roll archivist and collector whose record label, Norton, gave new life to forgotten rockabilly artists and garage bands of yesteryear, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 62.

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Billy Miller of Norton Records, photographed at his home in Brooklyn in 2013.

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The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, kidney failure and diabetes, his wife and business partner, Miriam Linna, said.

Mr. Miller and Ms. Linna met in 1977 at a record fair in New York. She was an original member of the punk-rockabilly group the Cramps and the editor of a fanzine for the rock band the Flamin’ Groovies. He was a fanatic collector.

“He was selling, I was buying,” Ms. Linna said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I was looking for ‘You Must Be a Witch’ by the Lollipop Shoppe,” a 1960s Las Vegas garage band. Mr. Miller had the record and invited Ms. Linna to drop by his apartment to pick it up. A marriage of true minds quickly followed.

The couple began publishing Kicks, a magazine devoted to overlooked rock ’n’ rollers, in 1979. They founded Norton, in 1986, as a way to broadcast their shared passion for artists like Hasil Adkins, a rockabilly singer who played multiple instruments simultaneously; the guitarist Link Wray, known for his raw reverb sound; and Esquerita, a blues screamer and pianist who decisively influenced Little Richard.

The label, named after Ed Norton, the character played by Art Carney on the television series “The Honeymooners,” soon became what The Village Voice, earlier this year, called “the definitive provider of rockabilly reissues from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.”

The label earned a following for its rediscoveries and for imaginative anthologies like “The Raging Teens,” a series devoted to New England rockabilly artists. It attracted not only fans in search of the unusual but professional musicians with a keen interest in rock history, among them Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and Elton John.

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Billy Miller and Miriam Linna in their apartment in 2002.

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Before founding Norton, Mr. Miller and Ms. Linna performed with the rockabilly group the Zantees and later with the garage band the A-Bones. He sang; she played drums. But they channeled most of their energy into ferreting out forgotten acts and labels and amassing the detailed historical information that informed Norton’s scholarly liner notes.

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Norton breathed new life into the dormant careers of artists like James Timothy Shaw, who, under the name the Mighty Hannibal, recorded the R&B song “Jerkin’ the Dog” in 1959 [Actually it came out in 1965 -- K]. After the label released the anthology “Hannibalism!” in 2001, Mr. Shaw began performing again.

The Alarm Clocks, a teenage garage band from Parma, Ohio, reunited after Norton issued “Yeah!” in 2000, featuring both sides of their 1966 single, “Yeah” and “No Reason to Complain,” along with unreleased recordings.

Norton’s compilation discs shed light on lively recording scenes outside New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Its series of releases focusing on the Pacific Northwest, for example, sparked renewed interest in the Wailers, one of the earliest garage bands, and the Sonics, often credited as the first grunge band.

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Although the label feasted on arcane artists, Mr. Miller saw nothing peculiar about his tastes.

“Some people accuse us of being into nostalgia and being narrow-minded because we don’t listen to the ‘latest’ music,” he told the authors of the guidebook “Incredibly Strange Music” (1993). “But it’s not nostalgia — I wish I’d heard all these obscure records when I was a little kid.”

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'Drift Away' songwriter Mentor Williams RIP

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Mentor Williams, a longtime Taos resident and nationally known singer-songwriter, died at 6:15 a.m. Wednesday (Nov. 16), according to a family source.

Williams was best known for writing "Drift Away", a middle-of-the-road playlist classic performed by Dobie Gray in 1973. He is the brother of songwriter-actor Paul Williams, according to an online biography.

He has received an award from ASCAP for his 30 years of songwriting, and has earned 17 writing awards.

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He worked at The Record Plant with Paul McCartney and Kenney Jones and at Apple Studios in London with Stealers Wheel and Gerry Rafferty. He produced Kim Carnes, John Stewart, Paul Williams (Mentor's brother), and Dobie Gray, among others. Mentor was a post-production, re-mix engineer for The Muppet Movie, which won a Grammy Award and an Academy Award. He also worked on the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid soundtrack.

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John Henry Kurtz - "Drift Away" (original version, 1972)

Dobie Gray (1973)

Rolling Stones (Unreleased, 1974)

Was about to make a Sharon Jones RIP thread...

LINK

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Sixty years ago, Jim Lowe’s gold record "Green Door" knocked Elvis Presley out of the top spot on the Billboard charts. After the release of his hit record, Jim Lowe was heard on New York City's flagship radio stations for decades.

James Ellsworth (Jim) Lowe died on Monday morning at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, New York, after a long illness. The native of Springfield was 93.

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Always liked that song. RIP.

Jim Lowe - "Green Door"

Guitarist Tommy Allsup, 85

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Allsup, who was touring with Holly after the two met during a recording session in 1958, was initially supposed to be on the ill-fated, Holly-charted flight from Mason City, Iowa to Fargo, North Dakota. However, Valens, who suffered from a fear of flying, asked Allsup if he could take his spot on the plane.

"[Valens] asked me four or five times could he fly in my place. For some reason, I pulled a half dollar out of my pocket and flipped it. He said 'heads' and it came up heads," Allsup recalled of the February 2nd, 1959 flight. "So I went out to the station wagon and told Buddy. I said, 'I'm not going. Me and Ritchie flipped a coin. He's going in my place.' Buddy said, 'Cool.'"

Waylon Jennings also avoided the plane crash after giving his seat to J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson.

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Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Buddy Holly, January 1959



Tommy talks about the coin toss

Holy shite, totally didn't realize that Mose Allison died this year too. Wow.

LINK

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Maggie Roche, one-third of family band the Roches, has died. Roche’s sister and bandmate Suzzy confirmed the news in the below Facebook note, saying she died after a long battle with cancer. She was 65. “She was a private person, too sensitive and shy for this world, but brimming with life, love, and talent,” the note reads. “I want to let you know how grateful she was to everyone who listened and understood her through her music and her songs. ... It’ll be hard for me to carry on without her.”

The Roches grew up in Park Ridge, New Jersey. In 1973, Maggie and sister Terre sang back-up on Paul Simon’s album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. They were signed to Columbia Records as a duo and released their album Seductive Reasoning in 1975. Their younger sister Suzzy joined them to form the Roches. Their first self-titled album as a trio, produced by Robert Fripp, was released in 1979. The trio continued recording and performing until their final album Moonswept was released in 2007.

“Hammond Song” was listed on Pitchfork’s “200 Best Songs of the 1970s.”

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The Roches - "Hammond Song"

Lyle Ritz, Wrecking Crew Bassist, Dies at 87

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He started out as a virtuoso ukulelist—yes, that is an actual word, meaning one who plays the ukulele—but it was in his capacity as bassist for The Wrecking Crew that Lyle Ritz contributed to best-selling recordings by the likes of the Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Righteous Brothers and Linda Ronstadt, among others. Ritz died Friday (March 3) at the age of 87.

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By the mid-’60s, as a member of the collective of studio musicians loosely named the Wrecking Crew, Ritz found himself constantly busy, contributing to hits by the Beach Boys (“Good Vibrations”), the Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”), Ronstadt, the Monkees, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (“A Taste of Honey”), Sonny and Cher, Dean Martin and others. In all, Ritz estimated that he played on more than 5,000 recording sessions during his long career. He also contributed to the soundtracks of numerous television programs.

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Lyle Ritz with Brian Wilson