GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

[Thorngrub]

Didn't hear about McCourt passing on. I really liked Alan Parker's treatment of his book Angela's Ashes.

[Ayinger]

[JACkory]

[maarts]

Indeed.

Rest softly, Les.

[Ayinger]

THE Man.

[RocDoc]

a man obsessed and on a mission to satisfy his obsession.

thank god he was smart as a whip too.

'if there's a rock and roll heaven...'

rest in peace, mr Paul.

[RocDoc]

one more...

Memphis musician Jim Dickinson dies at 67


<sub>Career of artist, producer touched four decades, many lives
By Bob Mehr (Contact), Memphis Commercial Appeal

Originally published 11:02 a.m., August 15, 2009
Updated 08:56 p.m., August 15, 2009

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.


“He went peacefully,” said his wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, adding that her husband remained in good spirits until the end. “He had a great life. He loved his family and music. And he loved Memphis music, specifically.”

During the course of his colorful half-century career, Dickinson built a worldwide reputation as a session player for the likes of Dylan and The Rolling Stones, a producer for influential groups including Big Star and The Replacements, a sometime solo artist and the patriarch of a small musical dynasty through his sons, Cody and Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars.

Just last weekend, a tribute concert headlined by singer-songwriter John Hiatt and featuring a host of Memphis musicians was held at The Peabody Skyway to help defray Dickinson’s medical costs.

Dickinson’s earthy musical approach resonated with his peers: Bob Dylan, who was a longtime friend and collaborator, acknowledged him as a “brother” while accepting a Grammy award for 1997’s Time Out of Mind; The Rolling Stones, ever wary of outsiders, brought Dickinson in to add his soulful piano touch to their classic Sticky Fingers ballad “Wild Horses.”

As a producer, Dickinson was a studio alchemist in the tradition of such great Memphians as Sam Phillips and Chips Moman, for whom he worked. Dickinson was willing take on any role, acting as a protector, parent or prankster for his artists — thus helping him forge creatively rewarding relationships with difficult talents including Alex Chilton, Paul Westerberg and Ry Cooder.

Dickinson’s reach and impact on Memphis music over the last four decades is significant; perhaps more than anyone, he was uniquely connected to the city’s historic past and its present.

In addition to being one of the key forces behind the rise of Memphis’ Ardent Studios, Dickinson’s deconstructionist roots-rock band Mud Boy & the Neutrons proved a seminal influence on several generations of local acts.

Dickinson remained busy during his final years, continuing to produce local artists, including the breakthrough CD for Memphis roots chanteuse Amy LaVere, as well as several projects for his sons. He’d also been writing and performing with a crew of musicians half his age in the garage bands Snake Eyes and Trashed Romeos in recent months.

Born in Little Rock on Nov. 15, 1941, and briefly raised in Chicago before settling in Memphis, the young James Luther Dickinson came up in a musical hothouse, influenced by his piano-teacher mother and mesmerized by the sounds permeating from the radio.

“There was something about the voice coming out of the box that got me. That’s where it all started,” Dickinson recalled in his final interview, given to The Commercial Appeal in May.

As a student at Whitehaven High School, Dickinson formed his first band, The Regents; he later had the distinction of singing on The Jesters’ 1966 garage-rock nugget “Cadillac Man,” the final release on Sun Records.

After a stint in college in Texas, Dickinson returned to the Bluff City, where he began a career as a session player, eventually forming The Dixie Flyers, a group that became house band for Atlantic Records, and backing artists such as soul queen Aretha Franklin and R&B belter Little Richard.

In 1972, Dickinson released his first solo record, the cult classic Dixie Fried. The LP would prove the apotheosis of a kaleidoscopic musical vision he dubbed “world boogie.”

Significantly, starting in the mid-’70s, Dickinson made an almost seamless transition from working with mainstream major label acts to punk and indie artists. Beginning with his work on the seminal Big Star album Third/Sister Lovers, Dickinson’s “anything goes” aesthetic made him a favorite choice to produce numerous alternative acts in the ’80s and ’90s.

Despite his connections, Dickinson never sought the trappings of fame, instead preferring to live on a sprawling thatch of land in rural Coldwater, Miss., that he dubbed Zebra Ranch, which housed a pair of trailers that served as his home and studio.

A gifted raconteur, musical philosopher and cultural historian, Dickinson was a veritable treasure trove of pop arcana and profound theory, capable of finding the cosmic and literal connections between deejay Dewey Phillips and former Mayor Willie Herenton, wrestler Sputnik Monroe and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

For Dickinson, there was some sense of artistic closure late in life. His final album, Dinosaurs Run in Circles, released in May, brought him back to his earliest love: the pop and jazz-flecked standards from his childhood radio days. Several of the tracks were recorded from his mother’s original sheet music.

Dickinson’s health woes began following an appearance playing with British rocker Elvis Costello at the Beale Street Music Festival in May. Though he’d long suffered from intestinal problems, a physical exam revealed Dickinson also had serious cardiac issues. A procedure to put two stents in his heart, a triple-bypass surgery and a prolonged stay in an intensive-care unit followed.

Last month, Dickinson was relocated to a rehabilitation facility; family and doctors had been hoping for gradual recovery, “but he just never did really get a break physically,” said his wife.

Luther Dickinson said the family has no plans for a public memorial and that the tribute show at The Peabody will stand as the farewell to their father.

“That was the best sendoff he could have ever wanted,” he said.

Although he achieved a modicum of commercial success in his lifetime, ultimately, Dickinson’s legacy won’t be measured in chart placements or platinum albums but in the profound impact his work had on listeners.

“Some of the records I’ve done, really obscure things, will be the ones that somebody will tell you saved their lives,” he once said.

What Dickinson understood was both the impermanence of his own life and the enduring power of the music he made. It’s a sentiment reflected in the epitaph he chose for himself: I’m just dead, I’m not gone.

Career highlights

1966: Cuts the song “Cadillac Man” for Sun Records, attracting the interest of his idol, Sam Phillips.

1969: Plays piano on “Wild Horses” for The Rolling Stones in Muscle Shoals, Ala.

1975: Produces Big Star’s dark masterpiece Third/Sister Lovers. It eventually is named one of Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”

1986: Rowdy Minneapolis rockers The Replacements come to Memphis to record the critically-acclaimed Pleased to Meet Me with Dickinson producing.

1997: Plays on Bob Dylan’s Grammy-winning “comeback” album Time Out of Mind.

2009: Releases his swan song, Dinosaurs Run in Circles, a collection of old pop standards:

--Bob Mehr, 529-2517

www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/aug/15/memphis-musician-jim-dickinson-dies-67/</sub>

[RocDoc]

and crap!
i knew he had cancer but i didn't know he'd passed already....and this guy was COOL!

Willy DeVille, Mink DeVille Singer and Songwriter, Is Dead at 58


<sub>WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 7, 2009

Willy DeVille, a singer and songwriter and the leader of the group Mink DeVille, whose adventurous forays into rhythm and blues, Cajun music and salsa made him one of the most original figures of the New York punk scene of the 1970s, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his publicist, Carol Kaye.

Mr. DeVille, a regular at CBGB in the mid-1970s, lent his bluesy voice and eclectic musical tastes to Mink DeVille, one of the club’s main draws. A disciplined songwriter with a deep admiration for the Atlantic Records sound of the Drifters and Ben E. King, he drew from many sources, including Latin music, French ballads, New Orleans funk and Cajun accordion music. He was, the critic Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times in 1980, “idiomatic, in the broadest sense, and utterly original.”

Mr. DeVille was born William Borsey in Stamford, Conn. After dropping out of school at 16, he began spending time in Greenwich Village and on the Lower East Side, where he learned to play the guitar and began performing, affecting a blues style like that of John Hammond Jr. He played with several groups before assembling Mink DeVille on a trip to San Francisco. He brought it to New York in 1975.

Mink DeVille, frequently lumped in with its fellow headliners Blondie, Television and Talking Heads, was essentially a soul band with roots in the commercial songwriting traditions of the Brill Building. Onstage Mr. DeVille cut a dapper figure. A pencil mustache and sculptured pompadour complemented his suits and pointy Italian shoes.

Working with Jack Nitzsche, a producer associated with Phil Spector, the group recorded the album “Cabretta” in 1977 for Capitol Records. Two of its tracks, “Spanish Stroll” and Moon Martin’s “Cadillac Walk,” became minor hits. The group recorded two more albums with Mr. Nitzsche for Capitol, “Return to Magenta,” which employed shimmering string arrangements reminiscent of the Drifters on several tracks, and the oddly romantic, highly eclectic “Le Chat Bleu.”

“Le Chat Bleu,” recorded in Paris without most of the original band members, baffled Capitol. It included French cabaret music, Cajun accordion melodies and songs written with Doc Pomus, one of the writers of “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Although the album sold well in Europe, Capitol shelved it, finally releasing it in 1980 to critical acclaim.

In a spiritual homecoming, Mr. DeVille signed with Atlantic Records after returning to the United States and recorded the soul-tinged “Coup de Grace” (1981), with Mr. Nitzsche as producer, and “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1983). “Sportin’ Life” (1985), his last album under the Mink DeVille name, included “Italian Shoes,” a hit in Europe.

After 1985 Mr. Deville performed and recorded as Willy Deville, pursuing a path with unusual twists and turns. His song “Storybook Love,” from the album “Miracle” (1987), was used as the theme for “The Princess Bride” and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Relocating to New Orleans in 1988 reinforced a lifelong attraction to Cajun, zydeco and New Orleans rhythm and blues, a taste Mr. DeVille indulged in “Victory Mixture” (1990), a collaboration with New Orleans greats like Dr. John, Eddie Bo and Allen Toussaint, and in “Loup Garou” (1995).

The unpredictable Mr. DeVille recorded a startling mariachi version of the Jimi Hendrix hit “Hey Joe” on “Backstreets of Desire” (1992) and turned to Southern traditional music and blues on “Horse of a Different Color” (1999). He later toured and recorded live as part of an acoustic trio. After living in New Mexico for several years, he returned to New York in 2003.

Mr. DeVille’s first two wives died. He is survived by his third wife, Nina; a son, Sean; and a sister, Mimi, who lives in Australia.

www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/arts/music/08deville.html</sub>

[RocDoc]

R & B singer John E. Carter dies in Harvey

<sub>August 21, 2009 11:56 PM

Lead tenor John E. Carter, who was twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with two separate Chicago-based vocal groups, has died at age 75.

Susan Fine, a spokeswoman for Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Carter's native Harvey, said Carter died there early Friday.

Associates said Carter died after a long battle with lung cancer.

Carter was the last surviving founding member of the Flamingos, a doo-wop group he left in 1960 to join the Dells, a quintet formed by some of his high school friends from Harvey.

The Dells' 1954 breakout hit, "Oh What A Night," sold more than a million records when it was reissued in 1969 with Carter on falsetto lead.

The Dells were also famous for "Stay in My Corner," one of the first R&B hits to run more than six minutes.

Carter is survived by five daughters and several grandchildren.

-- The Associated Press</sub>


they showed some wonderful footage of the dells on the news here last night...nice coverage given that he (and the band) were local guys.
i'd heard them and had friends who really liked them, but i can't say i was any sort of massive fan. a bit before my era actually.
but after those vids last night, wow, carter was honestly a powerhouse.

he's at lower left in that album cover btw.

[maarts]

Rip Oasis?

[Ayinger]

gawd that was funny! The mentioning of The Verve was priceless.......

[maarts]

Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, Is Dead at 60


By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 13, 2009

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 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 high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.

“Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league,” the diaries began, innocently. “I’m enthused about life due to this exciting event.”

By the end of the book, Mr. Carroll was a heroin addict who supported his habit by hustling in Times Square. “Totally zonked, and all the dope scraped or sniffed clean from the tiny cellophane bags,” the final entry read, continuing, “I can see the Cloisters with its million in medieval art out the bedroom window. I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure.”

“Basketball Diaries,” republished in a revised version in 1980, became enormously popular, especially on college campuses. In the film adaptation, released in 1995, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Mr. Carroll

The writer’s good looks and flair for drama made him ideal raw material for rock stardom. “When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it,” he told the poet Ted Berrigan in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, with the encouragement of Patti Smith, he formed a musical group, the Jim Carroll Band, whose first release, “Catholic Boy” (1980), is sometimes called the last great punk album.

James Dennis Carroll, the son of a bar owner, spent his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he attended Roman Catholic schools. After the family moved to Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan, he won a basketball scholarship to Trinity. There he discovered a love of writing and began spending time at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, falling under the spell of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.

Still in his teens, he published a limited-edition pamphlet of his poems, “Organic Trains” (1967), which, with its successor, “4 Ups and 1 Down” (1970), won him a cult following that was enhanced when The Paris Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. “Living at the Movies” (1973), issued by a mainstream publisher, won him both acclaim and a wider audience.

His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene. After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia University, he found his way to Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he contributed dialogue for Warhol’s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers and lived with Ms. Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in “Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.”

In 1973 Mr. Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where met and married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by a brother, Tom.

Mr. Carroll’s music career started by accident, when Ms. Smith, during a West Coast tour, brought him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background. Encouraged by the response, Mr. Carroll formed his own band, which caught the attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a three-record deal with Atlantic Records.

The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in 1982 as “not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.” Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like “People Who Died,” from “Catholic Boy,” a poetic litany of Mr. Carroll’s dead friends that became a hit on college radio stations and part of the soundtrack for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.”

The group’s next two albums, “Dry Dreams” (1982) and “I Write Your Name” (1984), caused much less stir. After writing lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Skaggs, Mr. Carroll returned to the studio in 1998 to record “Pools of Mercury.”

Mr. Carroll published several more poetry collections: “The Book of Nods” (1986), “Fear of Dreaming” (1993) and “Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997” (1998), as well as several spoken-word albums.

[RocDoc]

<sub>Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died / I miss 'em--they died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others,
And I salute you brother/ This song is for you my brother

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
Hey, Herbie said, Tony, can you fly?
But Tony couldn't fly . . . Tony died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, hey, I know it's dangerous,
but it sure beats Riker's
But the next day he got offed
by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

- Jim Carroll</sub>

[Ayinger]

* no shit * that one escaped me.......I just saw him interviewed on some show,,,,a very short bit, but man he looked like hell warmed over......

[JACkory]

He was a very unsavory fellow.