The group’s original bass player, he was with the band from 1971 to 1977 but was uncomfortable with fame.Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal range on songs like “Take It to the Limit” helped catapult the rock band to international fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the band said on its website.“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the group said.Mr. Meisner, the band’s original bass player, helped form the Eagles in 1971 along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. He was with the band when they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On the Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, became among the band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for record of the year in 1978.But Mr. Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”He left the band in September 1977 but was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, published by the Hall of Fame for the event, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later became “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of excess and seduction that had begun spinning seriously out of control.”The Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s and had four consecutive No. 1 albums and five No. 1 singles, according to the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone sold upward of 26 million copies.Before joining the Eagles, Mr. Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, another Los Angeles country-rock band, formed in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.A list of survivors was not immediately available. His wife, Lana Meisner, was killed in an accidental shooting in 2016.Randall Herman Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Neb., on March 8, 1946, and started practicing music at a young age.He got his first acoustic guitar when he was around 12 or 13 and, shortly after, formed a high school band, according to a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar magazine. “We did pretty good, but we didn’t win anything,” he said.He was still a teenager when he joined another band and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965, he told Rock Cellar.“We couldn’t find any work because there were a million bands out here,” he said.Years later, Mr. Meisner would find plenty of work with the Eagles.“From Day One,” he told Rock Cellar, “I just had a feeling that the band was good and would make it.”A full obituary will appear shortly. More

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The ‘Commander in Chief’ songstress and her Australian singer collaborator get reflective on their struggles to triumph over societal pressures while taking a train ride in the visuals.

Feb 17, 2021
AceShowbiz – Demi Lovato and Sam Fischer’s collaborative song “What Other People Say” has received a visual treatment. Premiered over a week after the song’s release, the music video sees the two singers taking an emotional train ride.
The clip begins with the “Camp Rock” star pondering on her past and where life has brought her to now as she sits by herself on a moving subway. “I used to not take chances with God’s name/ But it’s been so long since I last prayed/ And now I’m all f**ked up and my heart’s changed/ ‘Cause I care more about what other people say,” she sings in the chorus, while having left her seat and walking through the subway.
Sam joins in to deliver the second verse, also getting reflective on their struggles to triumph over societal pressures. “I wish I could shelter the boy I knew/ From the constant hell I’d put him through,” he sings as if talking to his younger self. ” ‘Cause I’m all grown up and I’m black and blue/ I could use some tape, I could use some glue.”

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The two then harmonize in the second chorus, as they are briefly seen singing their hearts out on top of the train. The scene intersperses with footage of other passengers sharing an embrace and kissing, before their train ride comes to an end and both Demi and Sam leave at the same time.
Co-written by Sam, Rykeyz, Geoff Warburton and Demi, “What Other People Say” which was released on February 4 is a pop-beat power ballad that Sam has described as a “confession,” the anxieties of losing one’s individuality for the sake of being well-liked.
The Australian singer/songwriter said he always knew it would be a duet as a statement released of the song described it, “Written about a feeling of being alone and not wanting to let people down, the pairing takes two different lives and perspectives and unites them in one message of human experience, emotion and togetherness, so they are alone with one another in the song.”
“this song is so special to both me and Demi and i’m so SO happy it’s all yours now,” Sam gushed when debuting the song earlier this month. The former Disney Channel darling also felt the same attachment to the song, writing on Instagram prior to the song’s release, “These lyrics are so special to my heart. I can’t wait to share this one with you.”

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Our photographer followed 95 young musicians for six days as they prepared to perform with Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.The student musicians, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, were rehearsing an excerpt from “West Side Story” in a high school auditorium one recent afternoon. Then, as the trumpets blared and the timpani went wild, a voice broke out from the conductor’s podium.“Oy yo yo yo yo yo yo,” said the superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who was leading the rehearsal. “You are not dancing together.”Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, paused for a moment, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound. Then he put his hands in his pockets and swaggered around the stage.Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, guided the youth ensemble, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound.James Estrin/The New York Times“This is cool, really cool music,” he said, eliciting laughter from the students. “We need something that goes with the nature of the body.”The students, part of a 95-member youth ensemble nominated by schools and arts programs and assembled by the New York Philharmonic, were at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan for six days last week. They were preparing for a concert on Friday with Dudamel, who has vowed to expand the Philharmonic’s presence in schools and in the community when he takes over in 2026.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders.Melissa Auf der Maur spent 15 years as a rocker on the road, playing bass in alternative bands like Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, dating Dave Grohl, and at times taking up residence in Janis Joplin’s old room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. But in 2006, when she met and fell in love with the filmmaker Tony Stone, she knew it was time to settle down away from the city, become a mother and raise a child in a “cozy little town with a cool kindergarten and plenty of nature.”She was 34 and in the middle of making her second solo album, she said, when Mr. Stone took her to Hudson, N.Y., to visit friends and family who had moved to the area.“I had a tingling feeling,” she said. “I said to Tony: ‘If we’re going to live anywhere in the U.S., it’s going to be here.’”The couple moved to Hudson in 2008 and started a family soon thereafter. But Ms. Auf der Maur still felt driven by the urge to create. She also wanted to do something community-focused, like starting an arts center similar to the ones she had relied on when she was a struggling young musician growing up in Montreal.Together with Mr. Stone, she started Basilica Hudson in 2010. The arts and performance space, housed in a former railroad wheel foundry, hosts both international music festivals and local events. A reclaimed elementary school, built around 1901 and close to Basilica’s net-zero campus, now serves as a showpiece, design innovation hub and media center for the couple’s interest in green design. Basilica has also become one of the Hudson Valley’s most popular wedding venues, which, as Ms. Auf der Maur puts it, “wasn’t in our original plan, but totally pays for our wild, purist dreams of arts and culture.”A former grunge icon for Courtney Love’s band in the dangerous days of the ’90s, Ms. Auf der Maur is just one of the many musicians who have moved to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills to start over, in one way or another. Some have put their musical careers on hold. Others have continued recording and touring, while devoting themselves to completely new pursuits. But the artists in the area make up a dream festival bill for the Lollapalooza generation, one that remembers vinyl, cassettes, CDs and when MTV still played music videos for most of the day.Melissa Auf der Maur, left, and Courtney Love of Hole, onstage in Los Angeles in 1999.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Inc., via Getty ImagesThere’s longtime area resident Natalie Merchant, the former lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs, who has volunteered for educational nonprofits including Head Start in Troy; the bassist Tony Levin, who played with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, and who now lives in Kingston and pursues photography; the songwriter Amy Rigby, now an author and podcaster in Catskill; Daryl Hall, of Hall & Oates fame, who became a nightclub proprietor with the opening of Daryl’s House in Pawling; and Kate Pierson, the inimitable singer of the B-52’s, who pioneered the funky retro chic motel concept in the Catskills with the opening of Kate’s Lazy Meadow in Mt. Tremper in 2004.And where else but in Woodstock could the dentist who is filling your cavity have had a former life as a “one-hit wonder” in that golden year of pop, 1967?As a couple, Ms. Auf der Maur and Mr. Stone seemed like the perfect combination for making a thriving arts center in Hudson a reality; she had the vision, and he had the know-how. “I wanted to see if I could bring the world to us, to bring all the things I had experienced around the world to this tiny town,” she said.Mr. Stone is the son of two artists who were active in the SoHo and TriBeCa loft scene of the 1970s. “Tony’s dad, Bill, was a contractor in Lower Manhattan, who at one time almost went in on a plumbing pipe threader with Philip Glass,” Ms. Auf der Maur said. “A lot of artists worked renovating many lofts in SoHo, a skill my husband inherited,” she continued. “We’re not afraid of taking on big buildings without plumbing or electricity. Our destiny seems to be taking these buildings and creating a second life for them and ourselves.”Mr. Stone described himself as “an urban-rural hybrid,” who grew up in a loft on Duane Street in Downtown Manhattan but spent every summer “off the grid in a hippie cabin” in Vermont. “By age 12, I was wiring solar panels and digging wells,” he said. “It set the stage for what Melissa and I do today at Basilica.”He came to know the Hudson Valley as a student at Bard College and again when his aunt bought a house in Hudson, followed by his parents, who moved to the area in 1998. Soon after he started dating Ms. Auf der Maur, Mr. Stone introduced her to family haunts in Vermont and upstate New York, where Ms. Auf der Maur “began to understand the power of nature in the raw and the need to preserve it,” she said. “It makes you look at everything differently. And that, too, changed the whole direction of my life.”Ms. Auf der Maur and Mr. Stone seemed like the perfect combination for making a thriving arts center in Hudson a reality; she had the vision, and he had the know-how; Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesNow, the couple are players in the local arts and climate scene. Ms. Auf der Maur is a member of the Regional Economic Development Council for the Capital region, where she reviews grant applications. (Basilica Hudson and The River House Project, their green design initiative, have received grants from the council.) She and Mr. Stone were part of the team that helped secure a $10 million grant from the council to revitalize the Hudson waterfront.Ms. Auf der Maur also joined the writer, musician and producer Jesse Paris Smith (who is the daughter of Patti Smith) and the musician and activist Rebecca Foon to help Hudson become a part of the 1,000 Cities Initiative for Carbon Freedom, a project to get cities of all sizes involved in the renewable energy and zero emissions goals set forth by the Paris Agreement.“Melissa and Tony’s efforts have been a blessing for our community, one that really demonstrates the connection between climate action and social justice,” said Kamal Johnson, the mayor of Hudson. “Basilica has been a great asset,” he continued. “It has brought world-class artists and audiences to our door and served as the stage for many events that bind together our community.”The singer Amanda Palmer, who is half of the punk-cabaret duo the Dresden Dolls and has a place in Woodstock, concurs with the mayor’s take on Ms. Auf der Maur, now 50, who has also found the time to work on a memoir that will include some of the 30,000 photos she snapped during her time as a musician. “She’s an important nexus, a vital connective tissue in the arts, the environment and in swaying a certain kind of creative, like myself, to take up residence in the Hudson Valley,” Ms. Palmer said.About five miles south of Hudson is the town of Catskill. In 2011, the singer-songwriter Amy Rigby (best known for her 1996 album, “Diary of a Mod Housewife”) moved there from France with her rocker husband, Eric Goulden, also known as Wreckless Eric (best remembered for his 1977 record “Whole Wide World”). Her friend Deb Parker, a former owner of the Beauty Bar in the East Village and who had become a real estate broker in the area in the late 2000s, showed the couple around.The singer-songwriter Amy Rigby moved to Catskill with her husband in 2011. These days she’s writing and producing a podcast.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesOnce they were settled, Ms. Rigby started working part time at the Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson and pursuing writing. In 2019, her memoir, “Girl to City,” about being a musician in the East Village from the 1970s through the mid-90s, was published.During the Covid-19 shutdown, Ms. Rigby created a podcast based on “Girl to City” and began work on a follow-up memoir, “Girl to Country.” The Hudson Valley is all about second acts, she said. “Everybody reinvents themselves up here.”Ms. Rigby onstage with her husband, Eric Goulden, at City Winery in New York City.Al Pereira/Getty ImagesTake Tracy Bonham, who had a No. 1 alternative single in 1996 with “Mother, Mother,” but who has since used much of her time to teach music to children. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, she and another musician founded Melodeon Music House, an educational program in Woodstock that was inspired by the popular 1970s Saturday morning TV series “Schoolhouse Rock!”But unlike her peers, Ms. Bonham ultimately decided full-time country life was not for her. This fall, she returned to Brooklyn, where she currently teaches the Melodeon curriculum to preschoolers.“It was really for the energy and vitality of the city, and the diversity of the people,” Ms. Bonham said of her return to the city. “Now that I look back on it, it could be a bit isolating,” she said, referring to Woodstock. “The sun goes down early and the winters are long and hard, so you can feel a bit trapped. Now that I am back in Brooklyn, I feel re-energized and inspired. There’s both more opportunity for work and to socialize.”Ms. Rigby, too, feels the pull of the city. “When I was driving down to Manhattan to play a gig at the City Winery recently, I kept telling myself, ‘I don’t care about the city anymore,’” she said. “But it’s a defense mechanism. I still care about the city that made me, and nothing feels as good as playing to a New York crowd.”Ms. Rigby, at home in Catskill, N.Y.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesHowever, when she hits the New York State Thruway and sees the mountains, Ms. Rigby said, she can breathe again. So for now, she’s staying put. “I probably became a more well-rounded person living up here. New York will always be the paragon of where one goes to pursue a creative life, but that kind of low-rent existence for aspiring artists isn’t possible there anymore.”Tony Levin, who has lived in Kingston since the mid-70s, is also not going anywhere. Best known for his inventive bass playing with King Crimson, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, Mr. Levin still tours and records. But he is also a writer and a photographer, and he recently took advantage of his downtime during the pandemic to organize many of his photographs into a new coffee table book, “Images From a Life on the Road.”Across the river in Beacon, Richard Butler, the charismatic frontman of the Psychedelic Furs, who studied at the Epsom School of Art and Design in London before pursuing music, lived and painted there for decades before relocating to Connecticut last year.Another rocker with long ties to the area is Bruce Jay Milner, whose band, Every Mother’s Son, had a hit with “Come on Down to My Boat” in 1967. The tune also earned him and his bandmates a place in the “One-Hit Wonders” exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.Bruce Jay Milner at his dental office, Transcend Dental, in West Hurley, N.Y.Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times“I had just started dental school at N.Y.U., but this was way, way more exciting,” Dr. Milner said of the instant success as a young musician. “I really thought I would pursue this, stay in the music game forever, if we kept getting hits.”Unfortunately, that was not to be. Dr. Milner ended up finishing dental school and now lives and practices dentistry in West Hurley, about three miles south of Woodstock. Naturally, he claims to have attended the famous festival of peace and music in nearby Bethel, in 1969. The name of his practice? Transcend Dental.“I still play a lot locally, have a digital keyboard in my office and have had my hands in the mouths of some of the biggest names in music,” said Dr. Milner, ticking off famous patients like Brian Eno and Sonny Rollins.The musician Amy Helm, whose father was Levon Helm, the drummer for The Band, is a patient. She said Dr. Milner was “the kind of guy who will play a song and sing harmony with you before he gives you a root canal.”Dr. Milner said: “Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”“He’s the kind of guy who will play a song and sing harmony with you before he gives you a root canal,” a longtime patient said of Dr. Milner.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesSal Cataldi is a writer, musician and former publicist living in Saugerties, N.Y. More