R.I.P. Wayne Cochran, blue-eyed soul trailblazer and author of “Last Kiss” has died at 7811/26/2017 Wayne Cochran, the blue-eyed soul singer known as much for his flashy platinum white pompadour as he is for writing songs like “Last Kiss” and “Goin' Back to Miami”, died on November 21st in Miramar, Florida. He was 78 years old. Dubbed by many as “The White Knight of Soul”, Cochran was more of a cult figure than a chart-topper, with many of his songs with the C.C. Riders finding fame when covered by other artists. His tragic teenage love song “Last Kiss”, for example, went on to be famously covered by Pearl Jam, who found in their 1999 rendition one of the biggest chart hits of their career. Another well-regarded cover of the song came years earlier in 1964, when J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers offered up their take to much success. Cochran also got a nod from the Blues Brothers in their eponymous film, and the duo even covered Cochran's “Goin' Back to Miami” on their live album, Made In America. News of his passing came from his son, Christopher, who informed the Miami Herald that the singer succumbed after a battle with cancer. At the time of his death, he was three decades deep into serving as an evangelical minister in the Miami area. “He was all about family,” his son Christopher told the Herald. “Over the course of his 25-year career in the music industry he employed over 300 people with different members of the band and the people at his church. He always looked after people. He ran his building like a big family.” Cochran's legacy goes back a long way. Early in his career he played bass for soul legend Otis Redding, who Cochran always cited as a major influence. “I never heard race in the music,” he told the Herald in 2011. “It was just music that spoke to me. It moved me.” He also helped introduce influential jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius to the world when he recruited the young musician for his band, the C.C. Riders. Pastorius would go on to play with the Weather Report, as well as Joni Mitchell and Pat Metheny. Below, hear Cochran's “Last Kiss” and “Goin' to Miami”, and see an interview with David Letterman he did in 1982. ![]()
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R.I.P. Wayne Cochran, blue-eyed soul trailblazer and author of “Last Kiss” has died at 7811/26/2017 Wayne Cochran, the blue-eyed soul singer known as much for his flashy platinum white pompadour as he is for writing songs like “Last Kiss” and “Goin' Back to Miami”, died on November 21st in Miramar, Florida. He was 78 years old. Dubbed by many as “The White Knight of Soul”, Cochran was more of a cult figure than a chart-topper, with many of his songs with the C.C. Riders finding fame when covered by other artists. His tragic teenage love song “Last Kiss”, for example, went on to be famously covered by Pearl Jam, who found in their 1999 rendition one of the biggest chart hits of their career. Another well-regarded cover of the song came years earlier in 1964, when J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers offered up their take to much success. Cochran also got a nod from the Blues Brothers in their eponymous film, and the duo even covered Cochran's “Goin' Back to Miami” on their live album, Made In America. News of his passing came from his son, Christopher, who informed the Miami Herald that the singer succumbed after a battle with cancer. At the time of his death, he was three decades deep into serving as an evangelical minister in the Miami area. “He was all about family,” his son Christopher told the Herald. “Over the course of his 25-year career in the music industry he employed over 300 people with different members of the band and the people at his church. He always looked after people. He ran his building like a big family.” Cochran's legacy goes back a long way. Early in his career he played bass for soul legend Otis Redding, who Cochran always cited as a major influence. “I never heard race in the music,” he told the Herald in 2011. “It was just music that spoke to me. It moved me.” He also helped introduce influential jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius to the world when he recruited the young musician for his band, the C.C. Riders. Pastorius would go on to play with the Weather Report, as well as Joni Mitchell and Pat Metheny. Below, hear Cochran's “Last Kiss” and “Goin' to Miami”, and see an interview with David Letterman he did in 1982. ![]() In February, rapper John Walt, a.k.a. dinnerwithjohn of Chicago hip-hop collective Pivot Gang, was murdered while riding a CTA train. Saturday would have marked Walt's 25th birthday and the surviving members of Pivot Gang celebrated his legacy with the first annual John Walt Day benefit concert. Taking place at Chicago's House of Blues, the sold-out concert featured performances from Saba, Joseph Chilliams, MFNMELO, and FRSH Waters. They were joined by a number of surprise guests, including Noname, Jamila Woods, Smino, and Jean Deaux. Check out fan-captured footage from the performance below. Prior to the performance, an unreleased John Walt track called “The Time” and featuring Smack was released by Saba. Take a listen below. All proceeds benefits from John Walt Day benefited the newly established John Walt Foundation supporting youth arts. ![]() In February, rapper John Walt, a.k.a. dinnerwithjohn of Chicago hip-hop collective Pivot Gang, was murdered while riding a CTA train. Saturday would have marked Walt's 25th birthday and the surviving members of Pivot Gang celebrated his legacy with the first annual John Walt Day benefit concert. Taking place at Chicago's House of Blues, the sold-out concert featured performances from Saba, Joseph Chilliams, MFNMELO, and FRSH Waters. They were joined by a number of surprise guests, including Noname, Jamila Woods, Smino, and Jean Deaux. Check out fan-captured footage from the performance below. Prior to the performance, an unreleased John Walt track called “The Time” and featuring Smack was released by Saba. Take a listen below. All proceeds benefits from John Walt Day benefited the newly established John Walt Foundation supporting youth arts. ![]() Late last week, Sony announced its acquisition of the new Quentin Tarantino film. Now, as the script begins to circulate around the studio, Vanity Fair has posted a preliminary plot synopsis. “Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino's upcoming movie focuses on a male TV actor who's had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick - who's also his stunt double - is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson's cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.” Tarantino is said to be courting Margot Robbie to play the role of Tate. Tarantino alumni Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are also being circled for roles, as is Tom Cruise. Sony hopes to begin production on the film by the middle of next year, working off of a budget of around $100 million. The film will be Tarantino's penultimate project, as he previously announced plans to retire following the completion of his 10th film. It's also his first production not involving Miramax or The Weinstein Company. Deadline reports that Tarantino originally intended to make the film with his longtime collaborator Harvey Weinstein, but was forced to scrap those plans after allegations of Weinstein's sexual misconduct surfaced. ![]() British acts Stormzy, Massive Attack and Kaiser Chiefs joined this year's lineup, but Clockenflap is championing the best of the Hong Kong underground, too Hong Kong enjoyed its musical heyday in the 1970s and 80s when clubs such as DiscoDisco, the former British colony's answer to Studio 54, saw Andy Warhol and Madonna grace the dance floor – followed by decades of inertia. A leading light in reviving it has been Clockenflap, which sets out to create a world-class music and arts festival – it has just celebrated its 10th anniversary with Massive Attack, the Prodigy, Kaiser Chiefs and Stormzy. But there's still a way to go, as co-founder and musical director Justin Sweeting explains: “Our festival serves as an annual rallying cry for those who yearn for more creative stimulus. Though we need many more of these pieces across the spectrum to make for a fully functioning, sustainable music scene.” Continue reading...“As long as I live, I'll never talk about that,” Dennis Wilson said of Charles Manson. The statement comes laced with guilt, and with good reason. Despite the brevity of their time with Wilson - a single summer in 1968 - the Manson Family functions as much more than a footnote in The Beach Boys' long and complicated history. For the uninitiated, the story goes something like this: Toward the end of spring, Wilson picked up two young hitchhikers, Patricia Krenwinkel and and Ella Jo Bailey, both of whom turned out to be members of Manson's cult. He dropped them off, but soon encountered them again. The trio headed back to his mansion in the Pacific Palisades. Wilson left to record with the rest of The Beach Boys, and when he returned, he was greeted by a crazed-looking stranger in his driveway. The man was none other than Manson himself, and to assuage Wilson's apprehension, he reportedly knelt down and kissed his feet. The next few months saw Manson and his cadre of women moving in with Wilson, who allowed them to leech from his superstar status in exchange for group sex and servitude. The two even began collaborating together musically, so much so that Wilson introduced Manson to The Byrds' producer Terry Melcher. This is where the story gets especially dark. Melcher granted Manson an audition, but ultimately decided not to give him a record deal. Seeking revenge, Manson targeted the producer at his former residence of 10050 Cielo Drive. Little did he know that Melcher had moved out and that the home's owner, Rudi Altobelli, had leased it to film director Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate. You know the rest: The Manson Family showed up at Cielo Drive looking for Melcher and instead found Tate (then eight months pregnant) and four houseguests. I won't go into the gruesome details here (you can find them over at Wikipedia), but the Family brutally murdered everyone at Cielo Drive. To say that Dennis Wilson is indirectly responsible for the Tate Murders is a bit of a stretch. To be fair, he did sever ties with Manson when he showed his true colors - when he showed that his interests went beyond sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll hedonism and into incomprehensible violence. And I truly believe that if Manson had never been introduced to Melcher, he still would have found some way to infiltrate show business. He still would have found some way to get his one shot at the big time, ruin that shot with his temper and depravity, then mete out violence on those who he thought deserved it. But it's important to note how Wilson's fascination with Manson emboldened the cult to take their next step toward a massacre. The fact that they encountered one of The Beach Boys seemingly by pure chance was proof enough that Manson was telling the truth - that he was as powerful as he promised and that they would be wise to follow him and his crazed ambition. Did Wilson know any of this? History tells us no, and many of his friends believe that his own self-destructive death spiral - his increased drug and alcohol intake - resulted from his guilt over his unknowing role in the Manson Family saga. Also, it's understandable to see why Wilson felt a musical kinship with Manson. Both men were somewhat crude in their musicianship, interested in fraying the edges of traditional forms. Manson's debut album, Lie: The Love and Terror Cult, operates mostly in a blues and folk framework. But on the majority of the demo-quality recordings, Manson often speeds up the pace or strikes an off-kilter chord out of nowhere. It never devolves into full-on chaos, but there's a warped musicality that threatens to overtake each otherwise conventional song. When Wilson began coming to his own as a songwriter on The Beach Boys' minor 1968 masterpiece, Friends, he favored a similar disruption. Even at 24, his voice was more gravelly than the other Beach Boys. This adds unease and melancholia to “Little Bird” and “Be Still”, two songs that, though musically sparse, have a meditative complexity usually reserved for Brian Wilson. As his work evolved, the songwriting became less and less pristine. 1969's 20/20 saw Wilson actually purchasing the rights to Manson's “Cease to Exist” and rejiggering it (this became the source of their initial fallout) and ending another one of his songs, “All I Want to Do”, with audio of him having sex with an unnamed woman. From Friends onward, Dennis Wilson was arguably the most adventurous Beach Boy when his brother Brian wasn't around (which, in the 1970s, was quite a bit). But the adventurous spirit often leads to flirtations with darkness, as indicated by Wilson's relationship with Manson. And he was far from the only bold musician to be fascinated by the madman. In addition to some of the other Beach Boys and Melcher, Neil Young was also drawn to Manson, complimenting him as recently as 2013 in his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace. While Young acknowledged the horror of Manson's crimes, he still writes about him with reverence: “His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along, and they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was hard to glimpse a true message in them, but the songs were fascinating. He was quite good.” While I'm sure Young doesn't mean anything by the above paragraph, it shows that, as artists, we're often far too eager to fetishize the strange, the otherworldly, whatever you want to call it. We're hypnotized by the dark. We're hypnotized by the evil that men do and how it can perhaps inform our own art. And that's fine. That's how great art sometimes gets created. But in the wake of Manson's death, it's important to remember how easily we can be fooled. It's important to remember how he duped so many legendary musicians into thinking he was complicated when, in reality, he was probably just fucked up and evil. Very few of the musicians who interacted with him in the fading dawn of the hippie dream acknowledge this. They either refused to talk about their complicity (like Wilson), or they continue to adorn it with mystique (like Young). Surprisingly, one of the only musicians to full-on denounce Charles Manson is Trent Reznor, an artist who, out of anyone mentioned in this article (including Manson himself), makes the most overtly dark music. He went as far as to rent the Cielo Drive residence in 1992, where he would record much of The Downward Spiral. Upon meeting Sharon Tate's sister, he immediately regretted his decision. It feels appropriate to end with his words - a true statement of repentance. “[She] said: 'Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said: 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time: 'What if it was my sister?' I thought: 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit.” ![]() The new High Flying Birds song features Le Volume Courbe's Charlotte Marionneau
This weekend sees a host of London jazz festival events revisit the work of Alice Coltrane, who broke the rules of jazz to blaze a musical trail that still inspires Fifty years after the death of John Coltrane, another legend will be celebrated at the London jazz festival this weekend: his wife. Alice Coltrane, a harpist and pianist who died in 2007, continues to find new audiences with her hypnotic glissando rolls, chord clusters and unison choral lines. Contemporary musicians Kamasi Washington and James Holden are among her fans. Continue reading... |
Camille Mullens
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