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      Charlie Watts, de los Rolling Stones, murió a los 80 años

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      Watts no quería ser ídolo pop y nunca fue tan extravagante como la mayoría de sus colegas estrellas, pero con su poderosa y sutil batería marcó el ritmo de una de las grandes bandas de rock.Charlie Watts, cuya batería poderosa pero poco ostentosa marcó el ritmo a los Rolling Stones durante más de 50 años, murió el martes en Londres. Tenía 80 años.Su muerte, en un hospital, fue anunciada por su publicista, Bernard Doherty. No se facilitaron inmediatamente más detalles.Los Rolling Stones anunciaron a principios de este mes que Watts no formaría parte de la próxima gira “No Filter” de la banda por Estados Unidos después de que se sometió a un procedimiento médico de emergencia no especificado, que los representantes de la banda dijeron que había sido exitoso.Reservado, digno y elegante, Watts nunca fue tan extravagante, ni en el escenario ni fuera de él, como la mayoría de sus colegas estrellas del rock, y mucho menos como el cantante principal de los Stones, Mick Jagger; se contentaba con ser uno de los mejores bateristas de rock de su generación, tocando con un swing influenciado por el jazz que hizo posible el éxito titánico de la banda. Como dijo el guitarrista de los Stones, Keith Richards, en su autobiografía de 2010, Vida, “Charlie Watts siempre ha sido la cama en la que me acuesto musicalmente”.Mientras algunos bateristas de rock perseguían el volumen y la ampulosidad, Watts definió su forma de tocar con sutileza, swing y un sólido groove.“Tanto como la voz de Mick y la guitarra de Keith, el sonido de la caja de Charlie Watts es el de los Rolling Stones”, escribió Bruce Springsteen en una introducción a la edición de 1991 del libro del baterista Max Weinberg, The Big Beat. “Cuando Mick canta: ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it’ [Es solo rock ‘n’ roll pero me gusta], ¡Charlie está detrás mostrándote por qué!”.Charles Robert Watts nació en Londres el 2 de junio de 1941. Su madre, Lillian Charlotte Eaves, era ama de casa; su padre, Charles Richard Watts, estuvo en la Real Fuerza Aérea y, tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se convirtió en conductor de camiones para los Ferrocarriles Británicos.El primer instrumento de Charlie fue un banjo, pero, perplejo por los movimientos de los dedos necesarios para tocarlo, le quitó el cuello y convirtió su cuerpo en una caja clara. Descubrió el jazz a los 12 años y pronto se hizo fan de Miles Davis, Duke Ellington y Charles Mingus.Para 1960, Watts se había graduado en la Harrow School of Art y encontró trabajo como artista gráfico en una agencia de publicidad de Londres. Escribió e ilustró Ode to a Highflying Bird, un libro infantil sobre el saxofonista de jazz Charlie Parker (aunque no fue publicado hasta 1965). Por las noches, tocaba la batería con diversos grupos.La mayoría eran combos de jazz, pero también fue invitado a unirse al estridente colectivo de rhythm-and-blues de Alexis Korner, Blues Incorporated. Watts declinó la invitación porque iba a dejar Inglaterra para trabajar como diseñador gráfico en Escandinavia, pero se unió al grupo cuando regresó unos meses después.Los recién formados Rolling Stones (entonces llamados Rollin’ Stones) sabían que necesitaban un buen baterista, pero no podían darse el lujo de pagarle a Watts, quien ya cobraba un sueldo regular de sus varios conciertos. “¡Nos morimos de hambre para pagarle!”, escribió Richards. “Literalmente. Anduvimos robando en tiendas para conseguir a Charlie Watts”.A principios de 1963, cuando por fin pudieron garantizar cinco libras a la semana, Watts se unió a la banda, completando la alineación canónica de Richards, Jagger, el guitarrista Brian Jones, el bajista Bill Wyman y el pianista Ian Stewart. Se instaló con sus compañeros de banda y se sumergió en los discos de blues de Chicago.Los Rolling Stones en 1967. De izquierda a derecha: Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards y Brian Jones.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis vía Getty ImagesTras el éxito de los Beatles, los Rolling Stones pasaron rápidamente de ser un grupo especializado en blues eléctrico a ser una de las bandas más importantes de la Invasión británica de la década de 1960. Aunque el riff de guitarra de Richards definió el sencillo más famoso de la banda, el éxito de las listas de 1965 “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, el patrón de batería de Watts fue igual de esencial. Fue implacable en “Paint It, Black” (Número uno en 1966), flexible en “Ruby Tuesday” (Número uno en 1967) y el maestro del groove de cencerro con algo de funk en “Honky Tonk Women” (Número uno en 1969).Los Rolling Stones se presentaron en el escenario del Madison Square Garden de Nueva York en noviembre de 1969.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWatts era ambivalente respecto a la fama que alcanzó como miembro del grupo que a menudo ha sido llamado “la mejor banda de rock’ n’ roll del mundo”. Como dijo en el libro de 2003 According to the Rolling Stones: “Me encantaba tocar con Keith y la banda —todavía lo hago— pero no me interesaba ser un ídolo del pop sentado allí, con chicas gritando. No es el mundo del que vengo. No es lo que quería ser, y sigo pensando que es tonto”.A lo largo de los años, Watts aprovechó su formación en artes gráficas para contribuir al diseño de las escenografías, la mercadería y las portadas de los álbumes de la banda; incluso aportó una tira cómica a la contraportada de Between the Buttons, álbum de 1967. Mientras los Stones cultivaban su imagen de chicos malos y se entregaban a un apetito colectivo de libertinaje, Watts evitaba el sexo y las drogas. Se casó clandestinamente con Shirley Anne Shepherd, una estudiante de arte y escultora, en 1964.Watts es el segundo desde la derecha en la portada del álbum de los Rolling Stones “Between the Buttons”, lanzado en 1967.Tuvo la portada para él solo cuando los Stones lanzaron este álbum de conciertos en 1970.Durante las giras, volvía solo a su habitación de hotel; cada noche, dibujaba su cuarto. “He dibujado todas las camas en las que he dormido durante las giras desde 1967”, dijo a la revista Rolling Stone en 1996. “Es un no-libro fantástico”.Del mismo modo, mientras otros miembros de los Stones luchaban por el control de la banda, Watts se mantuvo en gran medida al margen de la política interna. Como dijo a The Weekend Australian en 2014, “por lo general estoy murmurando en el fondo”.Jones, quien se consideraba el líder, fue despedido de los Stones en 1969 (y encontrado muerto en su piscina poco después). Jagger y Richards pasaron décadas en malos términos, a veces haciendo álbumes sin estar en el estudio al mismo tiempo. Watts estaba contento de trabajar con cualquiera de los dos, o con ambos.Sin embargo, hubo una ocasión en la que Watts se quejó de que lo trataran como un empleado en lugar de como un miembro del grupo en igualdad de condiciones. En 1984, Jagger y Richards salieron a beber una noche en Ámsterdam. Cuando regresaron a su hotel a eso de las 5 a. m., Jagger llamó a Watts, despertándolo, y le preguntó: “¿Dónde está mi baterista?”. Veinte minutos después, Watts apareció en la habitación de Jagger, fríamente furioso, pero afeitado y elegantemente vestido con un traje de Savile Row y corbata.Los Rolling Stones de gira por Atlantic City en 1989. De izquierda a derecha: Ron Wood, Jagger, Watts, Richards y Wyman.Paul Natkin/Getty Images“Nunca vuelvas a llamarme tu baterista”, le dijo a Jagger, antes de agarrarlo por la solapa y darle un gancho de derecha. Richards dijo que salvó por poco a Jagger de caer por una ventana a un canal de Ámsterdam.“No es algo de lo que esté orgulloso de haber hecho, y si no hubiera estado bebiendo nunca lo habría hecho”, dijo Watts en 2003. “La conclusión es: no me molestes”.En ese momento, Watts estaba en las primeras etapas de una crisis de mediana edad que se manifestó como una juerga de dos años. Justo cuando los otros Stones se estaban asentando en la moderación a sus 40 años, él se hizo adicto a las anfetaminas y la heroína, casi destruyendo su matrimonio. Tras desmayarse en un estudio de grabación y romperse el tobillo al caer por una escalera, lo dejó de golpe.Watts y su mujer tuvieron una hija, Seraphina, en 1968 y, tras pasar un tiempo en Francia como exiliados fiscales, se trasladaron a una granja en el suroeste de Inglaterra. Allí criaron caballos árabes ganadores de premios, ampliando gradualmente su criadero a más de 250 caballos en 280 hectáreas de tierra. No se dispuso inmediatamente de información sobre quienes le sobreviven. Su publicista, Doherty, dijo que Watts había “fallecido en paz” en el hospital, “rodeado de su familia”.Los Rolling Stones grabaron 30 álbumes de estudio, nueve de los cuales ocuparon los primeros puestos en las listas estadounidenses y diez en las británicas. La banda fue incluida en el Salón de la Fama del Rock & Roll en 1989, ceremonia a la que Watts no asistió.Charlie Watts con los Rolling Stones en Berlín en 2018Hayoung Jeon/EPA vía ShutterstockCon el tiempo, los Stones se establecieron en un ciclo de publicar un álbum cada cuatro años, seguido de una gira mundial extremadamente lucrativa. (Recaudaron más de 500 millones de dólares entre 2005 y 2007 con su gira “Bigger Bang”).Pero el verdadero amor de Watts seguía siendo el jazz, y llenaba el tiempo entre esas giras con grupos de jazz de diversos tamaños: el Charlie Watts Quintet, el Charlie Watts Tentet, la Charlie Watts Orchestra. Sin embargo, pronto volvería a la carretera con los Stones, tocando en estadios con las entradas agotadas y dibujando camas en habitaciones de hotel vacías.No lo frenó la vejez, ni un ataque de cáncer de garganta en 2004. En 2016, el baterista Lars Ulrich, de Metallica, le dijo a Billboard que, como quería seguir tocando hasta los 70 años, miraba a Watts como su modelo a seguir. “La única hoja de ruta es Charlie Watts”, dijo.A pesar de todo, Watts siguió manteniendo el tempo en una sencilla batería de cuatro piezas, anclando el espectáculo de los Rolling Stones.“Siempre quise ser baterista”, dijo a Rolling Stone en 1996, y añadió que durante los espectáculos de rock en estadios, imaginaba un ambiente más íntimo. “Siempre he tenido la ilusión de estar en el Blue Note o en Birdland con Charlie Parker delante. No sonaba así, pero esa era la ilusión que tenía”. More

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      Met Opera Reaches Deal With Orchestra, Paving Way for Reopening

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      The labor deal means that the company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, is on track to reopen next month after the pandemic kept it closed for more than a year.The Metropolitan Opera has struck a labor deal with its orchestra, officials announced Tuesday, paving the way for its musicians to return to work and for the company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, to resume performances next month after being shut down for more than a year by the pandemic.After months of uncertainty, and talks that grew contentious at times, the Met said that the players had ratified a labor deal reached with the union representing the orchestra, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The musicians were scheduled to return to work on Monday for their first official rehearsal since the pandemic closed the opera house in March 2020.The agreement concludes several months of tension over how significant future pay cuts would be for musicians, who went for nearly a year without pay during the pandemic.“The members of the Met’s great orchestra have been through Herculean challenges during the 16 months of the shutdown, as we struggled to keep the company intact,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement. “Now, we look forward to rebuilding and returning to action.”The group was the last of the three major Met unions to come to an agreement; without a deal on a new contract for the orchestra, the Met would have likely had to postpone its reopening. Several smaller unions have yet to reach deals.In a joint statement, Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802, and the members of the Met’s orchestra committee said that they were “thrilled to be returning to regular performances very soon, and look forward to reconnecting with our audiences.”The four-year deal with the musicians institutes pay cuts of 3.7 percent, with provisions to begin restoring some of that pay after the Met’s box office revenues return to 90 percent of their prepandemic levels, according to a copy of the memorandum of understanding that was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by participants.A significant amount of the savings in the deal appears to come from reducing the minimum size of the Met’s full-time orchestra to 83 players through attrition, according to the memorandum, down from its current minimum of 90. Many players retired during the pandemic; by not filling all those positions, the Met will save money and rely more on extra players.In recent years, symphony orchestras around the country have sought to save money by cutting back the number of regular full-time players.The Met had been seeking deep cuts. Citing the staggering revenue losses resulting from the pandemic, and the uncertainty over when its box office and donations would rebound, the Met had been seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, saying that the change in take-home pay would be more like 20 percent. It had offered to restore half of the cuts when ticket revenues and core donations returned to their prepandemic levels.The first of the unions to reach an agreement, the American Guild of Musical Artists — which represents chorus members, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others — secured salary cuts that fell far short of the management proposal; under the agreement, most types of employees in the union will initially see 3.7 percent cuts to their pay. But that deal saved the Met money, moving the members from the Met’s health insurance plan to the union’s, and by reducing the size of the full-time regular chorus.That contract had been expected to set the pattern for the level of savings expected in deals with the other two major unions, which represent the Met’s stagehands and its orchestra. A provision in the guild’s deal stated that if the other unions struck more favorable deals, the guild’s contract would be adjusted to be brought in line with them.Along with the news of the deal with the orchestra, the Met announced that the orchestra and chorus would give two free performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center on Sept. 4 and 5, conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and featuring the soprano Ying Fang and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as soloists. (It also announced a new annual chamber music series of six concerts at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.)The Met will give its first performance back at the opera house on Sept. 11 with a special concert of Verdi’s Requiem to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. The concert will be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland.The Met’s season is scheduled to open on Sept. 27 with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time the Met is mounting an opera by a Black composer. More

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      R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

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      He delved into the relationship between sound and the environment. Many of his compositions incorporated the music of the natural world.R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and writer who brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology — the relationship between sound, people and the environment — died on Aug. 14 at his home near Peterborough, Ontario. He was 88. The cause was dementia, his wife and collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, said.Mr. Schafer was already an inventive avant-garde composer when he began researching the relationship between sound and the environment in the late 1960s. He had joined a noise abatement society but disagreed with its treatment of noise as a negative phenomenon.“The sounds of the environment were changing rapidly, and it seemed that no one was documenting the changes,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “My Life on Earth and Elsewhere.” “Where were the museums for disappearing sounds? What was the effect of new sounds on human behavior and health?”With funding from UNESCO and the Donner Canadian Foundation, Mr. Schafer formed the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His team of researchers compiled information about noise bylaws, conducted interviews about sounds of the past and tallied car horns honking at street intersections around the world.“It’s quite the task for people to understand that listening can be a very active and inspiring activity,” the composer Hildegard Westerkamp, who was a researcher for the project, said in an interview. “A socially conscious ear, and a culturally conscious ear, and a politically conscious ear — that’s all the legacy that he has given to us.”In 1977, Mr. Schafer published “The Tuning of the World,” a treatise on acoustic ecology, which has influenced generations of scholars and musicians. Drawing on poetry, biology and myth, the book provides a history of the world through its soundscapes while offering instructions in “ear cleaning” and sound walks to reconnect readers with their sonic environments.His immersion in environmental listening changed his compositional interests. In 1979, he composed “Music for Wilderness Lake,” in which 12 trombonists played around the shore of a small lake at dusk and dawn; floating on a raft, Mr. Schafer conducted them with colored flags.Such experiments formed the basis for “Patria,” a cycle of 12 theatrical works composed over 40 years that mingles world mythologies. In one installment, audience “initiates” chant in ancient Egyptian as part of an overnight performance; another of the works unfolds as a carnival.For the cycle’s epilogue, a “co-opera,” several dozen participants have for more than 30 years made a weeklong pilgrimage each August to Ontario’s Haliburton Forest and divided into clans to create collaborative theatrical rituals.Mr. Schafer at the Haliburton Wilderness Reserve in Canada, the site of a performance in 2005. “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time,” he said, “without a beginning and presumably without an ending.” Steve Payne for The New York TimesRaymond Murray Schafer was born July 18, 1933, in the Lake Huron city of Sarnia, Ontario, to Harold Schafer, an accountant for an oil company, and Belle Anderson Rose. He was born blind in one eye and, following a pair of operations at age 8, was given a glass eye, for which he was bullied in school in Toronto. He took piano lessons starting at 6 but was intent on being a painter.Discouraged by others from pursuing a career in art because of his eye condition and failing out of high school, Mr. Schafer ended up at the University of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the composer John Weinzweig and attended classes taught by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.Already a keen intellectual, he preferred reading Rousseau to practicing piano; he angered one choir director by perusing art books during rehearsal. After several such incidents, he was thrown out of the school (though it later awarded him an honorary doctorate).Intent on studying composition in Vienna, Mr. Schafer worked as a deckhand on an oil tanker to raise travel funds. He roamed Europe — interviewing British composers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, learning medieval German, attending a folk music conference in Romania — without a clear plan for his musical future.In Italy, Mr. Schafer convinced Ezra Pound to allow him to revive the poet’s little-known opera, “Le Testament de Villon,” which became a major BBC broadcast in 1962. (Pound gave him an envelope containing his final series of “Cantos” and asked him to deliver it to T.S. Eliot in London.)On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.“The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending,” he said.“We are the composers of this huge, miraculous composition that’s going on around us. We can improve it, or we can destroy it. We can add more noises, or we can add more beautiful sounds. It’s all up to us.” More

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      Billie Eilish Earns a Third Week at No. 1, Narrowly

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      “Happier Than Ever” beat out Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” on the Billboard album chart by a margin of 1,000 equivalent album sales.After a tight weekly race, Billie Eilish holds at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a third time, just ahead of releases from earlier this year by Doja Cat and Olivia Rodrigo.Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” a moderate streaming success that has been a huge hit on vinyl, had 50 million streams and sold 23,000 copies as a complete package in its most recent week, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Altogether, “Happier Than Ever” was credited with the equivalent of 60,000 sales in the United States, the lowest weekly total for a No. 1 album since Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” notched 56,000 in the winter doldrums at the start of the year.Right behind Eilish, at 59,000 equivalent units — Billboard’s publicly reported numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand — is Doja Cat’s “Planet Her,” a steady seller for the last two months, which jumps three spots to No. 2. It had 78 million streams, the best of any album this week, but was overtaken by Eilish’s album sales, which are weighted more heavily in the formula that determines chart positions. (It takes 1,250 song streams on paid accounts or 3,750 on free, ad-supported ones to count the same as a single album sale.)Rodrigo’s “Sour,” which came out in May and has had a total of four weeks at No. 1, fell one spot to No. 3 in its 13th week out. The Kid Laroi’s “____ Love” held at No. 4, while Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is in fifth place. Also this week, the country-pop duo Dan + Shay opened at No. 6 with their latest, “Good Things.” More

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      How Kanye West Is Using Fashion in the 'Donda' Era

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      Kanye West may or may not be imminently releasing “Donda,” his 10th solo album, but over the course of the past few weeks, this era in his career has already established its own signature aesthetic: all black, military, asceticism on an epic scale.It’s a now familiar part of West’s album rollout strategy: clothes to match, or make, the mood. Given that nowadays he spends as much time focused on his fashion enterprises as his music (likely more), it’s unsurprising that shifts in those two creative areas move in parallel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about West’s use of fashion as a signifier for musical evolution, the ways he has been alternately embraced and rejected by the fashion industry, and how musicians like Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator are walking in the path he carved.Guests:Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at GQSteff Yotka, senior fashion news editor at Vogue More

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      Even Billy Joel Mocked ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ I Loved It.

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      As a 4-year-old, our critic couldn’t get enough of this manic 1989 hit, a crash course in U.S. history. Now the song lives on in parodies and memes.Mark PerniceAs a music critic, I’ve long been fascinated by people’s first favorite songs. Not songs made for children, or the kinds of songs we self-consciously broadcast our allegiance to after we’ve developed the filters of taste, personal identity and critical perspective. I’m talking about those early formative encounters with the vast world of popular culture — the initial, primeval jolt that this song is somehow more special than the rest.Where does that feeling come from? Does something about our first favorite song’s chord progression or production style predict what sort of music we grow up to like best? Are we all eternally doomed to be haunted by our original favorite song, forever chasing the unrepeatable rush of hearing it for the first time?I have perhaps felt a need to intellectualize all of this to avoid coming to terms with an embarrassing truth, which is that my first favorite song — yes, me, a person who grew up to be a professional music critic — is a song hated so vehemently by some people that its own Apple Music catalog description admits that it regularly shows up on “worst song” lists. It certainly seems to be one of the most parodied songs in pop music history. Even its own composer has an ambivalent-at-best relationship to its existence and has repeatedly compared its monotonous melody to a “dentist’s drill” and “a droning mosquito.”I am talking about Billy Joel and his notorious, wildly mystifying 1989 U.S.-history-lesson-on-Adderall “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which as a 4-year-old I believed to be the greatest song ever recorded.Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in 1989 and the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Over the decades, it has spawned many parodies and memes.Mike Slaughter/Toronto Star, via Getty ImagesWhat kind of 4-year-old loves this song? My vocabulary was still a work in progress, so I couldn’t have understood most, if any, of its hundred-plus cultural references: Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev/Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc. And yet I lived for the thrill of the song’s rousing introduction coming on the car radio — as it did often; “Fire” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 around the time I turned 3. I loved its weird intensity: I didn’t know what Joel was saying but it all sounded so important! So deep was my love of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that there is a camcorder video of me singing it into a Playskool karaoke machine, ad-libbing lyrics about my own personal cultural luminaries of the time, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.But that was then. How long has it been since you’ve sat down and really listened to that song? (I had to do it to write this article, so you have to do it to read it — I’m sorry, but those are the rules.) More than three decades later, it provokes several different variations on the philosophical question, “How did this get made?” Also: Is Billy Joel … rapping? Did he just rhyme “Malcolm X” with “British politician sex”? Does he always pronounce “Berlin” with an accent on the first syllable, or is he just stretching it to fit the syntax of the song? What’s up with the urgent, unbridled passion he summons to growl “Trouble in the Sueezzzz”?I can at least offer an answer for the “how did this get made?” part. Joel wrote it during a transitional moment in his life: It was around the time of his 40th birthday and he was feeling a little ruminative. One day, when he was working on what would become his 1989 album “Storm Front,” a young Sean Lennon stopped by the studio with another friend his age. They were bemoaning what a strange and overwhelming time they were growing up in: foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz. Joel suggested that he’d also come of age during an exhausting moment in history: birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again. But, in Joel’s telling, Lennon’s friend countered, “You were a kid in the ’50s. And everybody knows that nothing happened in the ’50s.”“Didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel protested. (Again with the Suez.) As soon as these youngsters left, he began writing down bite-sized headlines from his youth, if only to prove his point. Eventually he realized he was writing a song.“The chain of news events and personalities came easily — mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down,” Joel told his biographer Fred Schruers. (He also told Billboard magazine in 2009 that he was pretty sure it was the first and last time in his career that he wrote a song’s lyrics before its melody: “I think it shows, because it’s terrible musically.”)And yet, for a song so indelibly time-stamped and frozen in the year of its completion, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” has had a remarkably long afterlife. In the almost 32 years since its release, it has spawned countless parodies, from the niche (a friend recently told me that her former colleagues once performed a company-specific rendition they’d written for an office party) to the mainstream (a 2019 “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” bit in which the stars of “Avengers: Endgame” attempted to summarize the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe). “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” both featured “Fire” riffs. And this year, a history-based podcast named after the song debuted; hosts Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce devote an entire episode to each of the topics Joel mentions in the song. (Suffice to say, they’re going to be at it for a while.)There have also been the pandemic-era memes. “Today was like if ‘we didn’t start the fire’ was a day,” the TV writer Matt Warburton tweeted on March 12, 2020, and shortly after a therapist named Brittany Barkholtz went viral when she took him up on this challenge: “Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks, no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen.” Plenty of sequels followed, tailored to the most surreal headlines of the day.When I listen to the song now, I can’t say I believe it to be objectively good — but there is something enjoyable about the over-the-top absurdity of it. (It is certainly one of my go-to karaoke standards.) More than anything, though, I am amazed that all the way back in 1989 Joel somehow managed to predict the precise, decontextualized mania that I feel when I’ve spent too long on the internet. At any given moment, I can log onto Twitter and experience a sequence of flat, oddly juxtaposed phrases being shouted at me with the intensity of a man growling “Trouble in the Sueezzzz.”But I also find the prescience of this three-decades-old song a little comforting. It can be easy to feel that we are currently living through the nadir of human history — and hey, maybe we are! But Joel also wrote this song to capture a certain kind of generational déjà vu that has existed since the dawn of civilization. As he reflected to his biographer: “Oh man, we all thought that too, when we were young: My God, what kind of world have we inherited?”Maybe “Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, mafia” is not the most poetic line that the Piano Man has ever penned. But it’s often hard for songwriters to predict just which of their creations will strike an enduring chord, let alone understand why. In a similar sense, you don’t necessarily get to choose which songs you fall in love with, especially when you’re young and impressionable, which is why pop music is one of the great cultural equalizers. I now spend most of my days trying to put into words exactly why I like certain songs, so “We Didn’t Start the Fire” makes me nostalgic for a simpler time when I enjoyed things in a way that defied further explanation. I heard the song and was blown away. What else do I have to say? More

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      Don Everly, Older Brother in Groundbreaking Rock Duo, Dies at 84

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      The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, were the most successful rock act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, rivaling Elvis Presley for radio airplay. NASHVILLE — Don Everly, the elder of the two Everly Brothers, the groundbreaking duo whose fusion of Appalachian harmonies and a tighter, cleaner version of big-beat rock ’n’ roll made them harbingers of both folk-rock and country-rock, died on Saturday at his home here. He was 84. His death was confirmed by his family, which did not provide the cause. The most successful rock ’n’ roll act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, Mr. Everly and his brother, Phil, who died in 2014, once rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961.On the strength of ardent two-minute teenage dramas like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Cathy’s Clown,” the duo all but single-handedly redefined what, stylistically and thematically, qualified as commercially viable music for the Nashville of their day. In the process they influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles.In 1975 Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 pop single with a declamatory version of the Everlys’ 1960 hit “When Will I Be Loved.” Alternative-country forebears like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were likewise among the scores of popular musicians inspired by the duo’s enthralling mix of country and rhythm and blues.Paul Simon, in an email interview with The Times the morning after Phil Everly’s death, wrote: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”“Bye Bye Love,” with its tight harmonies, bluesy overtones and twanging rockabilly guitar, epitomized the brothers’ crossover approach, spending four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1957. It also reached the top spot on the country chart and the fifth spot on the R&B chart.Art Garfunkel and Don Everly performed in Hyde Park, London, in 2004. Mr. Everly recorded several solo albums.Jo Hale/Getty ImagesAs with many of their early recordings, including the No. 1 pop hits “Bird Dog” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and featured backing from Nashville’s finest session musicians.Both brothers played acoustic guitar, with Don being regarded as a rhythmic innovator, but it was their intimate vocal blend that gave their records a distinctive and enduring quality. Don, who had the lower of the two voices, typically sang lead, with Phil singing a slightly higher but uncommonly close harmony part.“It’s almost like we could read each other’s minds when we sang,” Mr. Everly told The Los Angeles Times shortly after his brother’s death.The warmth of their vocals notwithstanding, the brothers’ relationship grew increasingly fraught as their career progressed. Their radio hits became scarcer as the ’60s wore on, and both men struggled with addiction. Don was hospitalized after taking an overdose of sleeping pills while the pair were on tour in Europe in 1962.A decade later, after nearly 20 years on the road together, their longstanding tensions came to a head. Phil smashed his guitar and stormed offstage during a performance at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, Calif., in 1973, leaving Don to finish the set and announce the duo’s breakup.“The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago,” he told the audience, marking the end of an era.Isaac Donald Everly was born on Feb. 1, 1937, in Brownie, Ky., not quite two years before his brother. Their mother, Margaret, and their father, Ike, a former coal miner, performed country music throughout the South and the Midwest before moving the family to Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1944. Shortly after their arrival there, “Little Donnie” and “Baby Boy Phil,” then ages 8 and 6, made their professional debut on a local radio station, KMA.The family went on to perform on radio in Indiana and Tennessee before settling in Nashville in 1955, when the Everly brothers, now in their teens, were hired as songwriters by the publishing company Acuff-Rose. Two years later Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose would help them secure a recording contract with Cadence Records, an independent label in New York, with which they had their initial success as artists.Phil and Don Everly at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Ky., in 1997. The brothers had a fraught relationship and the act broke up in 1973, but they later reunited.Suzanne Feliciano/Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressDon’s first break as a writer came with “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” a Top 20 country hit for Kitty Wells in 1954, as well as with songs recorded by Anita Carter and Justin Tubb. He also wrote, among other Everly Brothers hits, “(’Til) I Kissed You,” which reached the pop Top 10 in 1959, and “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad),” which did the same the next year. “Cathy’s Clown,” which he wrote with Phil, spent five weeks at the top of the pop chart in 1960.That record was the pair’s first hit for Warner Bros., which signed them after they left Cadence over a dispute about royalty payments in 1960. They moved from Nashville to Southern California the next year.Their subsequent lack of success in the United States — they continued to do well in England — could be attributed to any of a number of factors: the brothers’ simultaneous enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1961; their lack of access to material from the Bryants after their split with Cadence and Acuff-Rose; the meteoric rise of the Beatles, even though their harmonies on breakthrough hits like “Please Please Me” were modeled directly on those of the Everlys.They nevertheless continued to tour and record, releasing a series of influential albums for Warner Bros., notably “Roots,” a concept album that reckoned with the duo’s legacy and caught them up with the country-rock movement to which they gave shape.Don also released a self-titled album on the Ode label in 1970 and made two more solo albums, “Sunset Towers” on Ode and “Brother Juke Box” on Hickory, after the Everlys split up.In 1983 he and his brother reunited for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, a show that was filmed for a documentary. The next year they recorded “EB84,” a studio album produced by the Welsh singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds. That project included the minor hit “On the Wings of a Nightingale,” written for the Everlys by Paul McCartney.The duo released two more studio albums before the end of the decade. They were inducted as members of the inaugural class of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.They also received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997 and were enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.In 2003 they toured with Simon and Garfunkel, and in 2010 they appeared on an album by Don’s son, Edan Everly.In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, Adela Garza; three daughters, Venetia, Stacy and Erin; his mother, Margaret Everly, and six grandchildren.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2014, Mr. Everly acknowledged his decades of conflict with his brother but recalled their intimate musical communion with pride.“When Phil and I hit that one spot where I call it ‘The Everly Brothers,’” he said, “I don’t know where it is, ’cause it’s not me and it’s not him; it’s the two of us together.” More

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      A Starry Central Park Comeback Concert Is Silenced by Lightning

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      An all-star show to celebrate the city’s emergence after the hardships of the pandemic, even as the spread of the Delta variant has driven up cases again, was stopped halfway through.It was supposed to be a glorious celebration of the re-emergence of New York City after more than a year of pandemic hardship — a concert bringing thousands of vaccinated fans on Saturday evening to the Great Lawn of Central Park to hear an all-star lineup.And for the first couple of hours it was, with messages of New York’s resilience sandwiched between performances by the New York Philharmonic, Jennifer Hudson, Carlos Santana, LL Cool J, and Earth, Wind and Fire, among others.But shortly after 7:30 p.m., as Barry Manilow was performing “Can’t Smile Without You,” lightning brought the concert to a halt. “Please seek shelter for your safety,” an announcer intoned, stopping the music, as people began filing out of the park.The concert had begun with a ray of sunshine, breaking through the clouds just before it got underway at 5 p.m. Gayle King, a co-host of “CBS This Morning,” began the evening by thanking the essential workers who had pulled the city through the darkest days of the pandemic.“We were once the epicenter of this virus, and now we’ve moved to being the epicenter of the recovery,” she said. “We gather for a common purpose: to say, ‘Welcome back, New York City!’”She then introduced the New York Philharmonic, which kicked off the concert with the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” conducted by Marin Alsop, a Bernstein protégée. The orchestra then played a medley of New York-themed music, including bits of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and “Theme from ‘New York, New York,’” the anthem made famous by Frank Sinatra, among others.The concert, “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert,” which was broadcast live on CNN, was part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to celebrate the city’s comeback after the pain and suffering of the pandemic.When the concert was announced by Mr. de Blasio in June, plunging coronavirus case numbers and rising vaccination figures had filled the city with hope.But circumstances have shifted considerably over the past two months. The spread of the highly contagious Delta variant has led some city businesses to postpone the return to their offices, prompted the city to institute vaccine mandates for indoor dining and entertainment and threatened to destabilize the wider concert business.On June 7, the day the concert was announced, the city was averaging 242 cases a day; the daily average is now more than 2,000 cases a day.With the Philharmonic still onstage, the concert continued with Andrea Bocelli, the star Italian tenor, singing “O Sole Mio,” and Jennifer Hudson, the star of the new Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect,” singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” — a beloved aria that became associated with Franklin after she sang it at the Grammy Awards in 1998.As the crowd streamed in, the idea of New York’s return — whether a two-fisted vanquishing of a viral enemy or a premature declaration of victory — was on seemingly everyone’s mind.“This is our reopening — this is our invitation to get back to real life,” said Dean Dunagan, 52, of the Lower East Side, who had come to see Mr. Springsteen and had been waiting outside the park for four and a half hours before the gates were opened.“New York has been punched in the face every other decade, or whatever,” Mr. Dunagan said, “and we get right back up.”Just a few feet from him was Alexandra Gudaitis, a 24-year-old Paul Simon fan from the Upper West Side. “I’m scared this is going to be a mass spreader event, with the Delta,” she said.Still, she was one of the first fans through the door and rushed to the very front of the general-admission section with a few friends. They wore masks, and Ms. Gudaitis said they had chosen their spot because it seemed to have better access to fresh air.Some of the acts had only tenuous connections to New York. But the rap pioneer LL Cool J led a New York-centric ode to old-school hip-hop with Busta Rhymes, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, French Montana, Melle Mel and Rev. Run of Run-DMC.Amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant, the show required everyone 12 years old and older to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe homecoming show required everyone 12 years old and up to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine; children younger than that, who are still ineligible for the vaccines, were required to wear masks.“When it comes to the concerts, they are outdoors — they are for vaccinated folks only,” the mayor had said on Wednesday. “We are definitely encouraging mask use. But I really want to emphasize the whole key here is vaccination.”The Central Park show came after the city had hosted a week of free hip-hop shows, with local heroes including Raekwon and Ghostface Killah in Staten Island, and KRS-One, Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick in the Bronx. Tickets were required to attend the concert on the Great Lawn — most were free, but V.I.P. packages cost up to $5,000 — and the show was broadcast on television by CNN and on satellite radio by SiriusXM.The concert was programmed by Clive Davis, the 89-year-old music eminence, who, in an interview this week, stressed the role that music could play in shaping society.“It’s vital and important that New York be back,” he said.From the stage on Saturday night, Mr. Davis, a Brooklyn native, made a plea to the audience: “Tonight, I only ask one thing: When you’re having a great time, cheer loud — loud enough so they can hear you all the way in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.”The concert ended before many of the headliners, including Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, got to perform. Mr. Davis said in the interview that after Mr. de Blasio asked him in May to put together the show, his first call had been to Mr. Springsteen.“I picked up the phone and told him we were going to celebrate New York City,” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said he would show up and wanted to do a duet.” That duet was to have been with Patti Smith, on “Because the Night,” a 1978 song they wrote together.The abbreviated concert came at an uncertain moment for the music industry. While some high-profile artists, including Garth Brooks, BTS and Nine Inch Nails, have canceled tour dates recently, the show is largely going on in the live-music business — but it hasn’t been easy. Concert protocols, in New York and elsewhere, have been in flux for months, as the federal authorities, local governments and businesses have adjusted to the changing realities of the virus.Broadway is requiring masks and proof of vaccinations as its theaters reopen, and Los Angeles County recently announced that it would require masks at large outdoor events such as baseball games at Dodger Stadium and concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.Mr. de Blasio has defended going ahead with the concert, noting that it was being held outdoors and for vaccinated people, even as some other events have been canceled. This year’s West Indian American Day parade in Brooklyn, for example, planned for Labor Day Weekend, has been canceled.The eyes of the concert industry have been on Chicago, where the Lollapalooza festival drew 400,000 over four days in late July and early August, amid concerns that it could turn into a “superspreader” event. The festival, which was held outdoors, required that attendees show proof of vaccination or a negative test. Last week, the city said that 203 people attending the show had tested positive afterward and that no hospitalizations or deaths had been reported. More