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      Remembering Sly Stone and Brian Wilson

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week, pop music lost a pair of world builders: Sly Stone, who created visionary psychedelic rock, soul and pop that helped integrate popular music and captured harsh social realities under the guise of big-tent cheer; and Brian Wilson, the macher of the Beach Boys, whose ear for elevated harmony helped create some of the defining sounds of the 1960s. Both men were 82.Wilson and Stone excelled in a moment in which the country was shaking off the staidness of the 1950s. Wilson’s work with the Beach Boys initially took on themes of American freedom before evolving into a more complex outfit on “Pet Sounds.” After that album, Wilson descended into mental instability, and remained largely out of view for decades. Stone had his commercial peak in the early 1970s with up-tempo funk numbers riven deep with social meaning. But he, too, lost his grip on his career, and was heard from only intermittently in subsequent years.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Stone’s improvisational genius, how he channeled his social moment through music, and what it took to turn the life stories of Stone and Wilson into books and film.Guests:Ben Greenman, a longtime journalist who collaborated with Stone on “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir” and Wilson on “I Am Brian Wilson”Joseph Patel, a producer of the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)”Vernon Reid, a rock musician who was the founder of Living Colour and a co-founder of the Black Rock CoalitionConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      Brian Wilson and Beach Boys’ Style Showed What California Living Looked Like

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      In Pendleton shirts and khakis, Mr. Wilson and the Beach Boys showed the world what easy Southern California living looked like.The band name was a fluke. Looking to cash in on the burgeoning surf culture in the United States, the record executive who first brought Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine together on the obscure Candix Records label in Southern California wanted to call the assembled musicians “The Surfers.’’But another group, as it happened, had already claimed the name. And then there was an additional problem: only one of the band members, Dennis Wilson, actively surfed.And so, as Brian Wilson — the architect of the band’s sound and image, whose death, at 82, was announced by his family on Wednesday — tweeted back in 2018, the promoter Russ Regan “changed our name to the Beach Boys.” He added that the group members themselves found out only after they saw their first records pressed.Originally, the band had another name. It was one that speaks not only to the aural backdrop the Beach Boys provided for generations but also to their enduring influence on global style. As teenagers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the band had styled itself the Pendletones. It was a homage to what was then, and in some ways still is, an unofficial uniform of Southern California surfers: swim trunks or notch pocket khakis or white jeans, and a blazing white, ringspun cotton T-shirt worn under a sturdy woolen overshirt.The shirts the Pendletones wore were produced by the family-owned company, Pendleton Woolen Mills of Portland, Ore., and had been in production since 1924. The shirts were embraced by surfers for their over-the-top durability and the easy way they bridged the intersection between work and leisure wear. The blue and gray block plaid, which Pendleton would later rename as the “Original Surf Plaid,’’ was worn by every member of the Beach Boys on the cover of their debut album, “Surfin’ Safari.” It was a look that, novel then, has since been quoted in some form by men’s wear designers from Hedi Slimane to Eli Russell Linnetz and Ralph Lauren.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

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      Rigmor Newman, Behind-the-Scenes Fixture of the Jazz World, Dies at 86

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      She was a concert promoter, a nightclub impresario and the producer of an award-winning 1992 film about the Nicholas Brothers dance duo.Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.Ms. Newman appeared with the trumpeter Joe Newman, whom she married, on the cover of his 1960 album “Counting Five in Sweden.” Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph.World Pacific RecordsWe 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

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      James Lowe, Rock Outsider With the Electric Prunes, Dies at 82

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      His band’s output ranged from the 1966 psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” to what he called a “Catholic Mass done in rock veneer.”James Lowe, the frontman of the 1960s rock band the Electric Prunes, whose “free-form garage-rock” approach, as he called it, yielded the swirling psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died on May 22 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Lisa Lowe said he died in a hospital of cardiac arrest.The Electric Prunes arrived on the rock scene with a jolt: a menacing electric buzz that sounded like an oncoming swarm of deadly hornets.The sound, which opened “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” was the result of a playback error on a tape of the guitarist Ken Williams noodling with a fuzz box and a guitar tremolo bar. It was so raw and powerful that Mr. Lowe argued to keep it. The track would come to be hailed as a cornerstone of garage psychedelia.With its trippy title and astral sound, “Too Much to Dream” was widely interpreted as a drug song, but its lyrics actually detailed the woe of an abandoned lover. Then again, the Electric Prunes, who swung from paisley pop to proto-punk to, yes, religious hymns sung in Latin, were always difficult to pin down.“We were always outsiders,” Mr. Lowe recalled in a 2007 interview with Mojo, the British rock magazine. “We weren’t hip enough to be crazy, drugged-out characters.” In addition, he said: “The music was too eclectic. It sounds like 10 different bands on those records.”Despite its maximalist sensibility, the band, which emerged from the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, scored two early hits.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

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      Brian Wilson Wrote the California Dream, but He Didn’t Live It

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      An artist nearly synonymous with Los Angeles made his name crafting songs playing up his home state’s beachy vibes. His inner life, however, was anything but sunny.Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.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

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      Paul McCartney, Carole King and Others Pay Tribute to Brian Wilson

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      Wilson, whose death was announced on Wednesday, leaves behind an immense musical legacy that spans several decades. King and others share how his music shaped them.Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys who death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, provided a joyous soundtrack for beach vacations and summer road trips for generations of people.Among pop and rock musicians he will also be remembered as a talented songwriter and studio pioneer whose music has had an immense influence for decades on those who followed him.The Beach Boys had 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10, with three of them reaching No. 1. Their influence on the surf rock genre and on popular music generally was recognized by the variety of people who paid respects on social media to Wilson on Wednesday.Here’s what some of Wilson’s friends had to say about his death and legacy.Paul McCartney, a Wilson contemporary, noted that there was a chorus of tributes from other musicians, saying Wilson had a “mysterious sense of musical genius” that made his songs special. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time,” McCartney said. “I loved him, and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows.’”Carole King, also a contemporary, wrote on Facebook that Wilson was her friend and brother in songwriting. “We shared a similar sensibility, as evidenced by his 4 over 5 chord under ‘Aaaah!’ in ‘Good Vibrations’ and mine under ‘I’m Into Something Good,’” she said. “We once discussed who used it first, and in the end we decided it didn’t matter.”Elton John, whose artistry is equally revered in the industry, said on Instagram that he grew to love Wilson and that he was “the biggest influence on my songwriting ever.” John added that Wilson was a “musical genius” who moved the goal posts when it came to writing songs and shaping music. “A true giant,” he added.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

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      Met Opera’s ‘Diva Whisperer’ Retires After 18 Years

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      Suzi Gomez-Pizzo, wearing a tangerine sweatshirt and sneakers, barreled down the backstage corridors of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon, a trolley full of clothes behind her.It was the first act of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” and Gomez-Pizzo, who supervises costumes for female leads at the Met, was lining up a series of quick changes for the soprano Julia Bullock, the opera’s Cleopatra. In the span of minutes, Gomez-Pizzo had to help Bullock change from a sleek burgundy gown to a slinky watercolor dress to a bejeweled pharaoh’s outfit.“You got this,” Gomez-Pizzo told Bullock, handing her a water bottle. “You look stunning.”After 18 years, Gomez-Pizzo, 64, a fast-talking native New Yorker, is retiring this month from the Met. She has garnered a reputation as a calm troubleshooter with a knack for defusing last-minute sartorial snafus: broken shoes, missing earrings, ripped gowns.“Before I even think of it, she anticipates the needs,” said the soprano Jullia Bullock, here with Gomez-Pizzo. “I know that no matter where my mind is, or feelings are, I’ve got this totally secure, reliable person.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesBut perhaps her most important role has been as confidante and cheerleader to the stars. She meets opera singers at their most vulnerable, casually asking them to strip down and sit for fittings. She is often the last person they see before heading onto the Met’s stage, one of the grandest in opera. It is a critical moment when doubts, fears and yearnings — for water, chocolate or moral support — are particularly urgent.At the Met, Gomez-Pizzo is known simply as the diva whisperer. Over the years, she has befriended some of opera’s biggest stars, including Anna Netrebko, Lise Davidsen, Angel Blue, Elza van den Heever, Deborah Voigt and Natalie Dessay.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

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      How “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

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      Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the Top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.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