Aurelia Butler

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    Randy Meisner, Founding Member of the Eagles, Dies at 77

    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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    Sinead O’Connor Was Ireland’s Alternative Moral Compass

    In any society, she would have been radical for a pop star. But in Ireland, she was revolutionary.On March 9, Sinead O’Connor stood onstage at the Vicar Street concert venue in Dublin. Her presence was greeted by a prolonged standing ovation. O’Connor was at the RTE Choice Music Prize, an evening celebrating the best Irish albums of the past year. A new award had been invented for the occasion: classic Irish album, and O’Connor was there to accept it for her 1990 record, “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.”It was the day after my 40th birthday. Untethered by this life landmark, I felt strangely grounded by her presence: Sinéad is here, all is well in the world. Soaking in the noise of the audience cheering her on, she smiled, almost bashful, before dedicating the award to refugees in Ireland.O’Connor had a tendency to show up at necessary moments. This time, her reappearance was a relief, because everyone in the crowd was worried about her. Her son, Shane, took his own life in 2022. He was 17. She was no stranger to articulating her personal struggles: the abuse she suffered as a child, the impact of a news media that sometimes hounded her, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and PTSD.And now, here she was, onstage in Dublin, a strange sort of lighthouse, beaming again. “How is she?” I asked one of the stage crew. “Flying form,” came the answer.O’Connor receiving the Classic Irish Album award at the RTE Choice Music Prize, in Dublin, in March.Kieran Frost/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAt the time, there was something of an O’Connor renaissance occurring. Her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” was critically lauded, and she posted the positive reviews excitedly on social media. The 2022 documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, correctly positioned her as an alternative moral compass in Ireland, driven by integrity and authenticity, not shame.When I was a child, Ireland felt like a phony place, yet I had no way to conceptualize its inauthenticity. I was raised Catholic, and made to navigate the weirdness of First Holy Communion, novenas and trips to the shrine at Knock. The idea of defying this was incomprehensible. The dominance of the church was simply a given.I was 9 when television news bulletins framed O’Connor destroying a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” as blasphemous, missing the serious statement behind the act. As far as Irish society was concerned, he was a living saint. The incident rattled the country, and it also rattled me. You could do that?There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.O’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990.DMI/The Life Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAnd Ireland was in her songs. “Dublin in a rainstorm” was the setting for one of her finest, “Troy.” Her voice was pure and strong, and Anita Baker described it as “cavernous.” She traversed alt-rock and pop, reggae and traditional Irish music. She covered Prince, Nirvana and John Grant. On “8 Good Reasons” (a title that referred to the eyes of her four children, she explained), she sang, “You know I love to make music, but my head got wrecked by the business.”When I first interviewed O’Connor, in 2007, backstage at the Oxegen music festival, in Kildare, she seemed a little shaky, but utterly cool, friendly and fun. In 2014, I sat listening to her talk about her latest album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” as she chain-smoked in a Dublin recording studio, her face tattoos faded by laser removal treatment.Although I only knew her from afar, the sense of connection she created, both through the music and what she stood for, was profound. Her loss has instigated a deep collective grief across Ireland. She was a symbol of hope as much as defiance, an artist and thinker who always stood on the horizon, urging others to catch up.When I heard the news, I felt the gut-punch of loss. It was as though something elemental had departed the world, and some essential tributary had run dry within me.My wife stood up from the couch, walked to the fireplace, and lit a candle, the traditional gesture of Irish grief and remembrance. The national broadcaster’s main radio station played song after song. We remembered that night in March, when the roar and applause of the audience in Dublin seemed to say: thank you, we love you, you were right. More

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    ‘The Unknown Country’ Review: A Granddaughter’s Road Trip

    Lily Gladstone’s achingly measured performance braided with the actual stories from nonprofessional actors makes Morrisa Maltz’s film a memorable road trip.Snow-bordered highways, a cat winking its jade eye, the tentative yet always observant expressions of the main character Tana (Lily Gladstone) are among the low-key pleasures of “The Unknown Country,” the director-writer Morrisa Maltz’s luminously photographed, delicately paced road movie.After the death of her grandmother, whom she cared for, Tana accepts an invitation to attend her cousin’s wedding in South Dakota. She hasn’t been with her Oglala Lakota family since she was eight.Tana’s wintry drive from Minneapolis to her cousin Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux’s in Spearfish, S.D., is just the first leg in a journey that will take her to the Pine Ridge Reservation and southward to Texas, as she traces an itinerary taken from her grandmother’s photo album. One picture shows Tana’s grandmother as a young woman, a craggy vista in the distance, and finding where the photo was taken starts to shape Tana’s sojourn.Shangreaux, her husband, Devin, and their daughter, Jasmine, are among the performers here portraying themselves. In the film’s most inventive, gently disruptive gesture, the nonprofessional cast members’ actual stories are recounted in their voice-overs. Think of these mini-documentary profiles — of a waitress (Pam Richter), a gas station attendant (Dale Leander Toller), a motor lodge owner (Scott Stampe), and the nonagenarian Florence R. Perrin, a two-stepping mainstay at the Western Kountry Klub in Midlothian, Texas, as rest stops in Tana’s trip.Gladstone, who stars in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon,” delivers a performance that is hushed and anchoring. But the film’s gentle detours into the real-life stories remind us that it is the people met on the road that so often make the trip memorable.The Unknown CountryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Kokomo City’ Review: Dispatches From the Down Low

    The director D. Smith’s new documentary follows four Black transgender women, who talk about how they got into sex work.The documentary “Kokomo City” features interviews with people who aren’t often given the chance to publicly share their life stories. The film follows four Black transgender women, who speak directly to the camera about how they got into sex work and what they learned about human nature once they got there.The film’s vivacious interviews take place in personal, bare settings, as the film’s subjects put on makeup and get dressed. One by one, the interviewees — Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver — share candid stories of how they sustain themselves in a profession whose clients can quickly turn toward violence.In a tragic reminder of the film’s life-or-death stakes, one of the documentary subjects, Koko Da Doll, was fatally shot in April, just months after the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. But here, Koko brims with vitality, ambition and insight. This is not a maudlin film; instead it is a movie with heroines who fight tooth and nail for their lives and their self-worth.The director D. Smith, who is also transgender, shoots her subjects in black and white. She uses music to emphasize episodes of their stories, with comic record scratches and jaunty melodies underlying their madcap recollections. Smith also utilizes actors for re-enactments — unnamed performers roll down car windows and peel off waistbands as the film’s subjects describe their work in voice-over.Smith’s style doesn’t break new ground in documentary filmmaking. At times, her movie feels diminished by comparison to landmarks from queer documentary history, films like “Portrait of Jason” (1967) and “Paris is Burning” (1990), both of which used surreal images, experimental editing and offscreen sound to complicate the relationship between performance and reality. By comparison, Smith’s style is more slickly commercial, at the cost of artistic power, with a run time that feels too short for the amount of insight its subjects offer. What feels fresh, though, is the palpable trust between the person asking the questions and the people answering them. Smith’s approach grants respect to women who are often dehumanized, even in their most intimate settings.Each woman proves herself to be a marvelous investigator, a theoretician of human sexuality with a lifetime of evidence to report. Their stories range from reflections on clients who prefer to remain unseen to memories of near murder to the economic benefits of gender-affirming surgery. But most important, Daniella, Koko, Liyah and Dominique provide a record of their own extraordinary lives, one that resonates with clarity and compassion.Kokomo CityRated R for nudity, sexual content, language and references to violence. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Sinead O’Connor’s Death Is Not Suspicious, Police Say

    The London police force said that the Irish singer was found dead at a home in the city.Sinead O’Connor was found dead in a private home in London, the city’s police said on Thursday, a day after the provocative Irish singer’s death was announced. While few details have been released about the death, the police said that it was not being treated as suspicious.Ms. O’Connor, best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was 56.Her family confirmed Ms. O’Connor’s death in a short statement. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”Ms. O’Connor recently moved to London, according to local news media outlets. On Thursday afternoon, the city’s police force said in a statement that officers pronounced Ms. O’Connor dead at the scene at a residential address in southeast London. “A file will be prepared for the coroner,” the statement added.The local coroner’s court said in a news release that an autopsy would be undertaken, the results of which “may not available for several weeks.” Then a coroner would decide whether to hold an inquest into the cause of death, the news release added.Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, including her 1990 breakthrough, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” Although her music cut through on both sides of the Atlantic, she was also known for stirring public controversy. In 1992, she ended an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” by ripping a photo of Paul John Paul II into pieces to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. More

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    A Trumpeter Stretches Past the Bounds of Jazz

    Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah’s new album, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he extends the legacy of Black masking Indians in New Orleans.Growing up in New Orleans, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah was raised at the corner of two traditions. He learned to play the trumpet at the elbow of his uncle and mentor, the saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., whose career took off after a stint in Art Blakey’s band. Harrison was a true-blue jazz musician, and Adjuah — who was born, and first introduced to the listening public as, Christian Scott — seemed destined to become one, too.But their family was also prominent in New Orleans’s tradition of Black masking Indians, rooted in the city’s history of Black and Indigenous resistance in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Africans fleeing slavery often joined with Native Americans in maroon communities. While professional musicians laid down the roots of American jazz in the late 1800s — mixing African styles with European repertoire at parades and society functions — groups of so-called Mardi Gras Indians dressed in bright regalia performed songs with a more unbroken connection to West and Central Africa, and little relationship to a commercial audience. To this day, Black masking Indians sing those old songs on Mardi Gras Day.Adjuah now carries that history. He has become a big chief of a Black Indian group, the Xodokan Nation, just as his uncle and grandfather were before him. On July 1, in a ceremony at historic Congo Square, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center named Adjuah the Grand Griot of New Orleans.Adjuah has worked for years to convince the world that he’s not a “jazz” musician at all: The word’s racist history is now widely acknowledged; he says “stretch music” is a more appropriate catchall for the alloy of African influences, Black American improvisation, hip-hop, indie rock and more that he has been polishing for the past two decades. But it has always been tough to hear the music he makes with his bands, and not think immediately about where it fits in the cosmology of (what most of us know as) contemporary jazz.Until now.Adjuah’s new LP, “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning,” is his 14th studio album, and the first on which he doesn’t touch the trumpet. Instead, he sings and plays a handful of self-made instruments: Chief Adjuah’s Bow, which blends the West African n’goni and kora with the European harp; a custom n’goni; and a Pan-African drum kit. Adjuah mixes in the odd SPD-SX drum machine or other synthesized percussion, but the album features almost nothing but acoustic percussion, vocals and the occasional sound of trees rustling or birds cawing.Instrument-building, he said in a recent conversation with the Africana studies scholar Joshua Myers, is part of his effort to “find instruments that could work as 21st-century bridges to the older styles, so that we could go back and grab those things.”“Bark Out Thunder” connects to a lineage of Black Indian recordings made over the past 50 years: by Bo Dollis’s Wild Magnolias; the Wild Tchoupitoulas; and Donald Harrison Jr., whose 1992 album “Indian Blues” (featuring Dr. John) did its best to marry straight-ahead jazz aesthetics with the Black Indian repertoire.Adjuah’s LP amounts to a paean to this legacy, and an announcement of how he plans to carry the torch forward. Joined by about a dozen longtime collaborators and close family members, he leads the ensemble in a few traditional songs and a handful of originals built on gnostic, historically grounded lyrics and drifting, driving rhythms. He doesn’t condescend to the folklore. It is his source of strength: a book of oral histories and battle rhythms, to be used in a contemporary way.This is Adjuah’s first album that simply cannot be construed as contemporary jazz — and it’s the most compelling, undiluted LP he has made yet.From the Black Indian canon, he covers the rousing call-and-response of “Shallow Water,” offered here in tribute to his uncle; an up-tempo version of the traditional song “Iko,” here titled “Xodokan Iko — Hu Na Ney,” with a refrain in Black Indian Creole set against Adjuah’s original verses full of references to the Orishas and American Indian iconography; and “Golden Crown,” on which the chorus’s voices salute the chief: “Adjuah got the golden crown.”As “Golden Crown” nears its end, Adjuah’s voice fades down to sing a hopeful verse:Meet the hunter that mornin’ gold shining brightSay a riot this mornin’ I might incite, nowA riot of love, a riot of lightOn the digital LP, an up-tempo bonus track reprises the hazy title tune. Adjuah plucks his bow in a slightly distorted pattern while the percussionist Elé Salif Howell joins him in a charging, six-beat rhythm redolent of Wassoulou music: an ancient-but-alive West African style, played mostly by women, not far from what’s known as “desert blues.” True to form, as Adjuah sings he name-checks his sources — shouting out the Wassoulous’ history of resistance to French colonization while placing them alongside a dozen other groups (“Haitian, Cheyenne and Mande, too”) that fought the same fight. “There was a man who took a stand,” he sings, “did what he can to build the world anew.”Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah“Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning”(Ropeadope) More

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    ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’ Review: A Pop Star Turns Politician

    Uganda has been under authoritarian rule for decades. Wine has doggedly challenged its leader, and this documentary shows the price he’s paid.The pop-culture personage turned politician is not so novel a figure as it used to be. But the Ugandan pop singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, who goes by the stage name Bobi Wine, has earned, by way of his courage and resilience, the special consideration this documentary affords him.“Bobi Wine: The People’s President” opens by laying out the situation in Wine’s East African country: its leader, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, having seized power in 1986 (several years after the military strongman sank the country into civil war), has shown no inclination to give it up. Wine was vocal in his opposition to the regime, but after the 2015 election, when Museveni engineered an amendment to the Constitution rescinding the presidential age limit, the pop singer-turned-politician decided to run for office.Wine the campaigner is cheerful and stylish. He and his cadre dress all in red. He cuts songs whose lyrics function as policy planks: “To free ghetto people we must educate/but education is expensive.”By 2017, Wine is an elected member of Parliament and votes against Museveni’s scheme. The autocrat’s vindictive response is relentless, and lasts years. Wine is jailed, emerging sick and limping. He flies to the States in 2018 to seek treatment — he claims his jailers poisoned him — and gain publicity. When he runs for president against Museveni, in 2021, things really ramp up.The directors Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp seem to have had intimate access to Wine and his family, and this, along with their clear admiration for the crusader, doesn’t always work in the movie’s favor. The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.Bobi Wine: The People’s PresidentRated PG-13 for violence. In English and Swahili with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘El Agua’ Review: After the Flood, the Legends

    This film from Elena López Riera follows what happens when floods drench a village in southeastern Spain.In the southeastern Spanish village where the director Elena López Riera grew up — and where her debut feature, “El Agua,” is set — water is both a boon and a curse. This dry region doesn’t get enough rain for its lemon and orange crops, but when it does pour, there are frequently devastating floods. And as is often the case with forces we cannot control or understand, it’s the village’s women who are blamed for nature’s caprices.In “El Agua,” aquatic myths ensnare the teenage dreams of 17-year-old Ana (Luna Pamies). In a series of documentary interviews interspersed throughout the film, locals relate the myth of the women who have water “inside them,” who disappear whenever a flood arrives. Then there is the curse that supposedly afflicts Ana, her mother (Nieve de Medina) and her grandmother (Bárbara Lennie), three fiercely independent women who live together. Ana yearns to leave the stifling village and finds hope in the mysterious José (Alberto Olmo), who claims to have returned to the village after a trip abroad.The movie weaves together several threads, of which Ana’s coming-of-age is the weakest: Her adolescent rebellions and her fling with José play out rather predictably, never quite evoking the lust or portent that the film’s folklore suggests. But “El Agua” succeeds as a portrait of the village’s traditions, both manual and cultural, brought to life by a largely nonprofessional cast (including Pamies, a striking discovery). Scenes involving pigeon races, farmers working the land with their hands, and women caring for and grooming each other all glow with a tactile sense of naturalism, which makes the documentary footage of floods that closes the film all the more gutting.El AguaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More