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      Hall v. Oates, No Longer a Mystery, Arrives at Court in Nashville

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      Hall has accused Oates of committing the “ultimate partnership betrayal” when he moved to sell off his portion of a joint venture. Oates denies wrongdoing.The nature of the dispute between Daryl Hall and John Oates, which had been obscured in sealed court documents, became clearer on Thursday as one of pop music’s most recognizable and long-running duos put their fight in front of a judge in Nashville.Details of the collapse of the 50-year artistic collaboration and business partnership between the two had been trickling out for days in court papers submitted before Thursday’s hearing in Chancery Court, where Hall and Oates were represented by lawyers but did not appear.Hall, the lead singer and songwriter for many of the band’s hits, is arguing that Oates violated their contract by moving to sell his portion of one of their business partnerships without Hall’s approval.Hall’s lawyers went to court to block any sale while their business disagreement goes through a separate arbitration process. On Thursday, Chancellor Russell T. Perkins granted their request, preventing Oates from going further in the agreement until the arbitrator resolves the impasse, or until Feb. 17.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?  More

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      Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor’s Enduring Friendship

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      The two Irish singers interacted like siblings, speaking of each other warmly, but needling each other, too.When I heard the news on Thursday that Shane MacGowan had died, I thought of Sinead O’Connor, his longtime friend and collaborator. I played their duet from 1995, “Haunted,” which MacGowan had originally written for the “Sid and Nancy” soundtrack. Then I watched their joint interview promoting the song for the Irish talk show “Kenny Live.”MacGowan appeared standoffish behind black sunglasses, a lit cigarette resting between his fingers. O’Connor was perched at his side in a big sweater, fiddling with her short hair and smiling slyly at her friend. The host, Pat Kenny, called the collaboration “strange and unlikely,” but they did not see it that way. “We’re different sexes, yeah,” MacGowan said, to which O’Connor replied: “Are we?”O’Connor died this summer, a few months before MacGowan did. When I profiled her in 2021, I interviewed them both. They spoke of each other warmly, but they needled each other, too. They seemed different in the way siblings are different — two musicians riffing on a shared context, picking up different threads of the same conversation.Both made music out of their troubled childhoods, mental illness and addiction. Both helped popularize Irish music around the world, even as they maintained a critical distance from their own stardom. In interviews, they were funny and blunt. Their public reception, however, was different. In our interview, O’Connor identified a double standard. “When men are drunk and on drugs — for example, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues — people idolize them,” she said. “A man could be like that, but a woman couldn’t.”Their relationship was complex. In a 2021 biography of MacGowan, O’Connor recalled performing a version of “Haunted” with him while he was using heroin. “The producers were freaking out because Shane was nodding out on smack in between the verses,” she told MacGowan’s biographer, Richard Balls. “I was singing my verse and they didn’t believe he was going to wake up and neither did I.” In 1999, a few years after that collaboration, O’Connor called the police on MacGowan when she found him using heroin at his home.They fell out over it, then grew back together. Later, when asked if O’Connor’s police call ended his relationship with her, he replied, “No, but it ended my relationship with heroin.” In 2004, when O’Connor gave birth to a baby boy, she named him Shane. And at MacGowan’s 60th birthday party, in 2018, she performed the song “You’re The One,” which MacGowan originally sang with Moya Brennan.O’Connor and MacGowan first encountered each other in the 1980s in London, MacGowan told me over email in 2021, though he did not remember the exact circumstances. What he recalled was their dynamic. “She was very shy and I was speeding, so I talked a lot,” he said. Hanging around with him and Joey Cashman, his Pogues bandmate, “must have been a nightmare for her,” he said. “I talk a lot, but Joey makes me look like an introvert.”In her 2021 memoir “Rememberings,” O’Connor did not write much about MacGowan, but she did make a little joke about him and speed. She experimented with the drug, she said, during a stay at St. Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. “In the locked ward where they put you if you’re suicidal, there’s more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan’s dressing room,” she wrote.Their collaborations highlighted the distinctiveness of their voices — his gruff, hers incandescent. But when I interviewed the singer-songwriter Bob Geldof about O’Connor, he found an aesthetic similarity between them. He appreciated that they were among the few singers who did not sound blandly American. “She has an Irishness to her voice,” Geldof said of O’Connor. “Bono doesn’t sound Irish. Shane MacGowan sounds Irish.” In our interview, MacGowan called O’Connor “a brilliant singer and a brilliant Irish singer, one of the best.”MacGowan described O’Connor as fragile, sensitive and genuinely spiritual. Mostly, he spoke of her care for him as a friend. “She is a generous soul, always looking after people,” he told me. “She looked after me when I really needed it.”You could see it in the “Kenny Live” interview: When Kenny asked MacGowan pointed questions about his drug use, O’Connor lightly intercepted them. “Do you worry at all about your own mortality?” Kenny asked MacGowan, but O’Connor slid in to answer the question herself. “I do,” she said.She took a dig at her friend and turned it into an insight into being a person. “Just the whole thing: What are we all doing here? How does the Earth hang in space?” More

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      Doja Cat Makes the Leap From the Internet to the Arena Stage

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      The extremely online 28-year-old singer and rapper’s Scarlet Tour accentuates her flair for big statements.More than most artists on pop’s current A-list, the 28-year-old rapper and singer Doja Cat is a child of the internet. Born Amala Ratna Zandile Diamini, she spent much of her youth making beats and rabble-rousing social media posts. She first experienced viral fame in 2018 when her goofy but surprisingly well-executed novelty song “Mooo!” blew up, and still — even after racking up bona fide hits, including two that ranked No. 1 on Billboard — retains the glint-eyed, anarchic spirit of an internet troll.Just as screen charisma doesn’t always translate IRL, not every terminally online musician can convincingly make the leap from, say, Instagram Live to the 19,000-capacity Barclays Center, where Doja headlined her first New York City arena show as part of her Scarlet Tour on Wednesday night.She has been a near constant presence on the charts for almost four years, but as a live performer she is still largely unproven. Her dreamy, disco-inflected breakout hit, “Say So,” was released in January 2020 and, during the pandemic, became a TikTok sensation.Doja Cat’s dreamy, disco-inflected breakout hit, “Say So,” became a TikTok sensation during the pandemic. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere have been hints, though, that she can handle a large stage with flair. Many of her awards show numbers have been showstoppers, announcing her as an electric performer willing to take unexpected risks. During a pretaped appearance at the 2020 MTV Europe Music Awards, she reimagined the bubbly “Say So” as a brooding nü-metal anthem — and actually pulled it off. At this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, she vamped her way through a transfixing medley from her latest album, “Scarlet,” including the brash, rough-edged diss track “Demons.”“Demons” was the second song Doja Cat played during her commanding, confident and occasionally repetitious hour-and-a-half set at Barclays Center, which featured an opening set from the rising star (and Bronx-born hometown hero) Ice Spice. For that track, Doja Cat was joined by an animatronic spider nearly twice her size, a reference to the dark, occasionally nightmarish aesthetics of the uncompromising “Scarlet.”Prowling around a triangular stage that sometimes spurted fire, and flanked by a nimble troupe of dancers dressed as if Kanye West had designed the costumes for “The Warriors,” Doja was at her best when she was free to rap with dexterity and chest-thumping bravado. “Attention,” the sharp, self-assured first single from “Scarlet,” was a highlight, along with a few deeper cuts from the album, including the buoyant, lusty “Gun” and the imperturbably laid-back “Balut,” which has a vintage boom-bap vibe.In an age of fan service and stan armies, Doja Cat’s relationship to her listeners has been unique, even antagonistic. In July, she generated headlines when, on the social media platform Threads, she refused some fans’ requests to tell them she loved them (“i don’t though cuz i don’t even know y’all,” she replied) and criticized those who had chosen to call themselves “Kittenz.” Rude? Honest? You be the judge. But at a time when most pop stars are expected to cater to their most vocal fans to the point of infantilization, a dissenting voice can be refreshing.Doja’s online barbs didn’t seem to diminish the enthusiasm of the adoring fans at Barclays, some sporting Halloween-store devil horns (a reference to her recent hit “Paint the Town Red”), a few wearing cat ear headbands, and several having already changed into the most sardonic offering from the merch table, a white T-shirt that proclaimed its wearer’s “hate” for Doja Cat, emphasized with an expletive.Doja wore a form-fitting, full-body muscle shirt, imprinted with chiseled abs, bare breasts and exposed buttocks.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThroughout her set, Doja wore an outfit that was provocatively unprovocative: a form-fitting, full-body muscle shirt, imprinted with chiseled abs, bare breasts and exposed buttocks, which she paired with tall suede boots that extended up to her hips like chaps. In her own absurdist way, it was a Doja Cat power suit, lending her an exaggerated physicality and a playful androgyny that she controlled depending on how she moved her body. She could pantomime sexualized femininity one minute — while, say, twerking with her back to the audience — and conjure masculine swagger the next, strutting around the stage in a wide stance. At times, it felt like Doja (ever a student of ’90s hip-hop) was playing both characters in the video for Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s 1998 collaboration, “What’s It Gonna Be?!”The softer side of Doja Cat, though, is something she hasn’t yet learned how to communicate on an arena stage; a brief interlude when she sat on a stool and indulged in some R&B crooning was less than captivating. The performance of the pop hits from her previous era, “Say So” and “Kiss Me More,” felt rote, even if “Kiss Me More” featured a crowd-pleasing kiss cam.Doja often suggests on “Scarlet” that she is more at home making razor-edged rap songs than surefire pop hits, and her stage presence backed that up. Still, at an arena show, a musician must find a balance between challenging audiences and keeping them in their seats. The show could have used more visual variety, and its structure — superfluously divided into Acts I through V, though devoid of a narrative arc — was puzzling. When Doja finished the last of her biggest hits, her recent No. 1 “Paint the Town Red,” she still had seven more songs to go.Before a sultry, downbeat cover of “Red Room,” by the Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote, Doja, from her stool, briefly addressed the audience. New York, she said, “is where my mother’s side of the family is from, so I know this place a little bit.” The crowd cheered; modern concert rhythms had primed us to expect that this was the scripted part where the pop star would drop the armor and let us in on something personal, vulnerable, maybe even tear inducing. But she didn’t.Instead, ever the trickster, Doja Cat just thanked the opener and — enrobed in that costume that gave the cheeky illusion of nakedness — introduced the next song.Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour, which comes to the Prudential Center in Newark on Thursday, runs through Dec. 13 in Chicago; dojacat.com/tour. More

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      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

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      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

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      Shane MacGowan, Pogues Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Dies at 65

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      As frontman for the Pogues, he delivered lyrics romanticizing whiskey-soaked ramblers and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora worldwide.Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic former songwriter and frontman for the Pogues, who reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock has died. He was 65.Mr. MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, announced his death on Instagram. She did not provide additional details.Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene of the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s addictions and mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish emigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament-turned-unlikely Christmas classic titled “Fairytale of New York.”It was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tankAn old man said to me, won’t see another one“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography “A Furious Devotion,” which was published in 2021. “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”A full obituary will be published shortly. More

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      Why Does Spotify Wrapped Think My ‘Sound Town’ Is Burlington, Vermont?

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      The music streaming service released a new feature — Sound Towns — with its yearly summary of listener preferences and linked many people to an unexpected city.Do you listen to a lot of Noah Kahan? How about boygenius? Taylor Swift? Odie Leigh? Car Seat Headrest? Indigo Girls? Brandi Carlile?Well, it might be time for you to visit Burlington, Vt.! Spotify thinks you’ll be in good company there. Pack layers and bring a hat!On Wednesday, the music platform released Spotify Wrapped, its annual summation of users’ streaming habits. This year, the campaign included a new feature called Sound Town, showing users a city in the world where others’ listening habits reportedly correspond to their own.Users have been both baffled and entertained by the results, with many posting on social media that Burlington, a town in northwest Vermont, was their designated Sound Town.Dr. Orlando Garner, an I.C.U. doctor in Midland, Texas, was surprised at that result, given that his top artist of the year was Bad Bunny. (Spotify informed Dr. Garner, 36, that the city was chosen because he also listened to boygenius, Courtney Barnett and Car Seat Headrest.)“This is the second year in a row where he’s my top artist,” he said. “Are people listening to Bad Bunny in Burlington, Vt.? That’s what really struck me. Is this accurate?”A spokesperson for Spotify said there were 1,300 Sound Town locations for the platform’s 574 million users. Of them, 0.6 percent were assigned to Burlington — a number disproportionately higher than if listeners had been distributed evenly.Online, some users have joked that Spotify designated certain cities — specifically Burlington, Cambridge, Mass. and Berkeley, Calif. — for L.G.B.T.Q. users. (“Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You In Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay,” read a headline from the online publication Them.)Tiffany Hammer, a tarot card reader from Puyallup, Wash., felt the city was a sonic fit for her. “I do listen to a lot of Noah Kahan. I said throughout this year, ‘If I’m not listening to Taylor Swift, I’m listening to Noah Kahan,” said Hammer, 38, adding that she thought her penchant for indie and folk music might have placed her in the Pacific Northwest.Hammer, who is queer, said Burlington felt aligned with her identity. “I really think it’s coming down to having safe places to be recognized, to listen, to just exist peacefully,” she said.The sudden burst of cultural linkage to Burlington caught city officials by surprise.“It was not on my Wednesday surprise bingo card,” John Flanagan, a spokesperson for Burlington City Arts, a city-affiliated cultural space.But Flanagan, 37, did not pass up a chance to promote his city.“I know a lot of the artists that we’ve been identified with are artists who identify as queer,” Flanagan said. “So a lot of people who listen to those artists are aligning with Burlingtonian values. And I think that’s spot on. And we really do pride ourselves on inclusivity and exquisite taste.”Burlington has a population of roughly 45,000 people, about 85.6 percent are white, above the national average, according to the census. Notable artists and bands have emerged from the Burlington area, including the jam band Phish, as well as singer-songwriters like Grace Potter and Kahan, who has recently broken through to stardom. With events like the summer’s Festival of Fools, a celebration of busking; and an underground music scene, Burlington does have a certain cultural cache, Flanagan noted.“Many people are drawn to Burlington because it’s just got a reputation as a vibrant arts community,” Flanagan said. “And I get the sense that might be what Spotify is kind of going for here.”Howard Dean, who was the governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003, said that he had “absolutely no idea” why Spotify had linked so many to Burlington. He guessed it has something to do with the fact that the city is home to the University of Vermont — which has about 14,000 enrollees.“Vermont has, I think, the second- or third-highest education rate in the country, and with interest in education comes interest in culture and it’s skewed young because of the university. It is pretty much a cultural haven,” Dean said.The Burlington designation struck Kelly Gray, a University of Vermont alumna, as “hilarious.”“I had gone to a lot of like D.I.Y. shows in Burlington in my time there,” said Gray, 26. (D.I.Y. shows loosely refer to music shows that are out of the mainstream and built at the local level.) “So I kind of felt like I had earned it, whereas others were maybe more, stolen valor for Burlington music scene clout.”Meghan Sweeney, a 29-year-old in Brooklyn, has no connection to Vermont, having grown up in Long Island. Nonetheless, Spotify recommended the city to her — to her confusion — with Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and LCD Soundsystem reportedly making her very Burlington-ish.“I went to Vermont, I think, once as a child and then fairly recently as an adult,” Ms. Sweeney said, “and I don’t think my music taste really screams in Vermont based off the experience that I’ve had.”Ms. Sweeney suggested that it could be an aesthetic choice by Spotify.“I feel like every year Spotify comes up with new creative ways to diagnose clinical depression,” Ms. Sweeney said. “So my guess is that it’s because it gets like really cold there, and it’s like mostly dark for half of the year. So it’s very moody.” More

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      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

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      Scott Kempner, Del Lords Guitarist and Punk Rock Pioneer, Dies at 69

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      The Bronx-born musician played guitar for and co-founded the Dictators, an early punk band. He later founded the Del Lords.Scott Kempner, a guitarist and songwriter and a co-founder of the Dictators, one of the first punk rock bands, died on Wednesday. He was 69.His death, at a nursing home in Connecticut, was confirmed by Rich Nesin, who managed his solo career. Mr. Kempner died from complications related to early onset dementia, Mr. Nesin said.Born and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Kempner started his music career not long after he had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He was born Feb. 6, 1954, to Manny and Lynn Kempner.In 1972, while visiting a friend who was in college in New Paltz, N.Y., Mr. Kempner started playing music with Andy Shernoff and Ross Friedman, who was known as the Boss, and together they created the Dictators.That was when he earned the nickname, Top Ten. The band’s first album, “The Dictators Go Girl Crazy,” was released in 1975, a year before the Ramones made their debut. The All Music Guide called the band “one of the finest and most influential proto-punk bands to walk the earth” but said that on its debut album, the group’s satire and “ahead-of-their-time enthusiasm for wrestling, White Castle hamburgers, and television confused more kids than it converted.”The band was dropped by its label, Epic, after its first album. It recorded two more albums, on the Elektra label, that failed to find a big audience, and the band split up, though the members occasionally reunited over the ensuing years.After the breakup, Mr. Kempner founded the roots rock band the Del Lords and took the lead as chief singer and songwriter. “In the Dictators, he was a team player, the heart of the band,” Eric Ambel, a member of the Del Lords, said of his former bandmate.Frank Funaro, the drummer for the Del Lords, said Mr. Kempner had been someone he looked up to.“Scott Kempner was like the older brother that I never had,” Mr. Funaro said in an interview. “The older, cool brother, that turns you on to an encyclopedia worth of rock ’n’ roll, country music, soul music.”The Del Lords released seven albums, including “Elvis Club” in 2013, which featured the doo-wop star Dion DiMucci one on track. Mr. Kempner also played and toured as a side man in several bands, including Little Kings, with Mr. DiMucci, and the Paradise Brothers.Starting in 1992, Mr. Kempner also released three solo albums: “Tenement Angels,” “Saving Grace” and “Live on Blueberry Hill.”The Dictators re-formed in 2019 with Mr. Kempner on board, until he was diagnosed with dementia and had to leave the band in 2021.Mr. Kempner is survived by his wife, Sharon Ludtke, and by his sister, Robin Kempner, and her wife, Mary Noa-Kempner. More