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      Kangol Kid, Early Rapper Who Sought ‘Roxanne,’ Dies at 55

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      As a member of the group UTFO, he was heard on one of the most influential and widely imitated songs of commercial hip-hop’s early years.Kangol Kid, who as a rapper in the group UTFO was a key contributor to the 1984 single “Roxanne, Roxanne,” one of the most influential and widely imitated songs of commercial hip-hop’s early years, died on Saturday morning at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 55.The cause was complications of colon cancer, said Lion Lindwedel, his publicist.“Roxanne, Roxanne,” released on Select Records, was the 1984 equivalent of a viral hit. It sold a few hundred thousand copies and went to No. 10 on the Billboard R&B singles chart and No. 77 on the Hot 100, but its influence was far vaster than statistics could capture.The song was written from the perspective of three men getting shut down by the same woman, the elusive (and imaginary) Roxanne. Kangol Kid opened the song memorably:She wouldn’t give a guy like me no rapShe was walking down the street so I said “HelloI’m Kangol from UTFO.” And she said “So?”And I said “So? Baby don’t you know?I can sing, rap and dance in just one show’Cause I’m Kangol, Mr. SophisticatorAs far as I’m concerned, ain’t nobody greater.”“Roxanne, Roxanne” was produced by the group Full Force and based on a sample of “The Big Beat” by the rocker Billy Squier, which the producer Howie Tee had brought to the group. It spawned more than two dozen answer tracks and retorts, many by female rappers, most notably “The Real Roxanne” by the Real Roxanne (also produced by Full Force) and Roxanne Shante’s “Roxanne’s Revenge.”. At the height of the Roxanne song wars, UTFO and the Real Roxanne would share concert bills.It was a cultural zeitgeist song that reached across the country. When Dr. Dre began working with Ice Cube, he urged him to perform a version of the song at clubs to help generate crowd excitement. Ice Cube’s take was called “Diane, Diane.”Kangol Kid — sometimes called the Kangol Kid — was born Shaun Shiller Fequiere in Brooklyn on Aug. 10, 1966, and grew up in the East Flatbush neighborhood. His father, Andre, was a taxi driver; his mother, Jean, was a housekeeper at a hospital.Kangol Kid started off as a B-boy, or breakdancer; he and a neighborhood friend, Doctor Ice, were known as the Keystone Dancers, and they toured with the early-1980s rap group Whodini, including on the New York City Fresh Fest tour, and with Full Force. They appeared on Phil Donahue’s talk show and were invited to dance at a birthday party for Dustin Hoffman’s daughter.He received his nickname before he achieved fame because he was known for wearing Kangol hats, and he ended up being sponsored by the company — one of hip-hop’s earliest brand partnerships. (The arrangement spanned his entire life; long after his initial success, the company provided him gratis product.)Formed in Brooklyn, UTFO (sometimes rendered as U.T.F.O., it stands for Untouchable Force Organization) was a foursome: Kangol Kid, Doctor Ice, the Educated Rapper and the D.J. Mix Master Ice. The group occasionally referred to itself as the “Village People of rap” because of its members’ distinct visual identities.UTFO onstage in Chicago in 1988 (from left, the Educated Rapper, Kangol Kid, Mix Master Ice and Doctor Ice). The group’s “Roxanne, Roxanne” spawned more than two dozen answer tracks and retorts. Raymond Boyd/Getty ImagesIn David Toop’s essential early-rap history book, “The Rap Attack” (1985), Kangol Kid explained one of his lyrical innovations: “Another new thing is Z-rap. It’d be like a code language. I would talk to him and his name’s Doctor Ice. I would say, ‘Dizoctor Izice. Yizo hizo bizoy wizon’t youza kizoy mesover herezere?’ — that’s just saying, ‘Yo, homeboy, why don’t you come over here?’ and what I did is make a rap out of that language.” It was a style he deployed on “Roxanne, Roxanne,” and it anticipated the later linguistic zigzagging of E-40, Snoop Dogg and others.In 1985 UTFO released its debut album, called simply “UTFO,” which continued the Roxanne saga with “Calling Her a Crab.” In a 1985 concert review, Jon Pareles of The New York Times praised the group for its “syncopated, overlapping patter” and “spitfire delivery.”UTFO would go on to release four more albums, and became popular enough for their own slot on the Fresh Fest tour, a road show that was then an index of hip-hop’s growing popularity. In 1985, UTFO performed at the Apollo Theater, believed to be a first for a rap group. In 1987, they collaborated with the heavy metal band Anthrax.After UTFO’s run in the spotlight, Kangol Kid wrote and produced for other artists, including the group Whistle and the baseball star Darryl Strawberry, who recorded a novelty rap song, “Chocolate Strawberry.” He did voice-over work and wrote a music-industry advice column, first for Black Beat magazine and then for AllHiphop.com.In the last decade, Kangol Kid was actively involved with cancer charities. In 2012 he was honored by the American Cancer Society for his fund-raising efforts as co-founder of the Mama Luke Foundation. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in February.He is survived by his parents; three brothers, Joel, Andy and Alix (all memorably name-checked on UTFO’s “Lisa Lips”); three sons, T.Shaun, Andre and Giovanni; a daughter, Amancia; and seven grandchildren. More

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      Rosalie Trombley, Who Picked Hits and Made Stars, Dies at 82

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      As music director for CKLW, a major radio station in the Detroit market, she furthered the careers of Alice Cooper, Bob Seger, the Temptations and many others.Whatever story you have about the high point of your junior high school years, Tim Trombley has a better one. The rocker Alice Cooper once picked him up at his school in a limousine to take him to lunch.That was one of the perks of having Rosalie Trombley for a mother.From 1967 into the early 1980s, Ms. Trombley was the music director for CKLW-AM, a radio station based in Windsor, Ontario, with a signal so powerful that it was heard in dozens of states in the U.S., dominating the markets of Detroit and other Midwestern cities in the days before the emergence of FM. A 1971 headline in The Detroit Free Press called her “The Most Powerful Lady in Pop Music,” because her tastes went a long way toward determining what was played on the station, which in turn went a long way toward determining what was played in the rest of North America.Sometimes, Mr. Trombley related in a phone interview, his mother would bring demo records home, and he would be allowed to play them. She noticed that he was playing one quite a lot: Mr. Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.”“She made it known to the label, to Warner Bros., ‘Tim has been playing this song over and over,’” Mr. Trombley said, and she slipped it into CKLW’s rotation. In late 1970 it became Mr. Cooper’s breakout hit. And so Mr. Cooper, a Detroit native, took young Tim to lunch one day as a thank-you.“I knew that mom had a really cool job,” Mr. Trombley said.Ms. Trombley died on Nov. 23 at a long-term care center in Leamington, Ontario, where she had been living for some time. She was 82. Mr. Trombley said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Trombley seemed an unlikely starmaker. She was a single mother of three when she started at CKLW as a part-time switchboard operator. The Free Press once wrote that she “looks like Doris Day’s next-door neighbor.” But she was, as newspapers often described her, “the lady with the golden ear” who, with her no-nonsense demeanor, could hold her own in the male-dominated music business of the day.The list of stars who owed her a debt of gratitude was long.“You’d come in in the morning,” Keith Radford, a former newsman at the station, said in an interview for a video series produced by Radio Trailblazers, an organization promoting women in Canadian radio, “and there’d be big bouquets of flowers at the front desk, from Elton John or the Rolling Stones.”Ms. Trombley would hold court on Thursdays for record promoters who hoped to get their new songs onto CKLW’s “Big 30” playlist.“If they wanted the record really bad, they would bring the act with them,” Johnny Williams, a former D.J., said in the video. “So it wasn’t unusual every Thursday to see the Four Tops, the Temptations, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis Jr.”One artist who made such a pilgrimage was Tony Orlando, who in the video recalled that Ms. Trombley had heard him out that day and offered him an invitation.“Rosalie said, ‘I’ll tell you what: If your next record comes within the ballpark of a commercial record, a playable Top 40 record, because you took the time to come here — but only if it has the goods — I’ll give it consideration big time,’” he said. “And that next record was ‘Yellow Ribbon’” — that is, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree,” the top-selling record of 1973. “And she was the first to put it on the air.”Ms. Trombley with the singer-songwriter Bob Seger holding gold record plaques for his 1978 album, “Stranger in Town.” “Seger never had any problem getting on CKLW,” she said. Detroit Free PressRosalie Helen Gillan was born on Sept. 18, 1939, in Leamington. Her father, Shell, was a general foreman at the Ford Motor Company of Canada, and her mother, Katherine Piper, was a switchboard operator.After graduating from high school, she worked at Bell Canada for a time. She married Clayton Trombley in 1958. She took the switchboard job at CKLW in late 1962, working in that capacity for several years and, as The Vancouver Sun put it in a 1973 article about her, “inadvertently picking up the politics of the music business simply by learning to handle sometimes troublesome record-promotion people who arrived at the station to ply their wares.”Around 1968, Ms. Trombley and her husband separated (they later divorced), and at about the same time she was offered the chance to take over for the station’s record librarian, who was going on maternity leave. The station’s program director soon took note of her ear for hits and made her music director, a job she held, Tim Trombley said, until she was laid off in the early 1980s in a downsizing effort.Ms. Trombley didn’t rely only on her own tastes; she would call R&B stations in the area to see what they were playing, which led her to give CKLW’s 50,000 watts of exposure to Black artists. She similarly boosted the careers of Canadian artists like Gordon Lightfoot and the Guess Who, as well as a number of Detroit-area stars, including Bob Seger.“Seger never had any problem getting on CKLW,” she told The Detroit Free Press in 2004 when Mr. Seger was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Look at the songs. Listen to the lyrics. I’m a lyric freak. When someone is saying something in a song, I can’t be the only person interested in it.”Well, Mr. Seger almost never had any problem getting on the station. Some of his new material came her way in the early 1970s, and she panned it. He sat down and wrote a song about her, called “Rosalie,” that had a winking snide streak.“He was pissed off when he wrote that song about me,” she said. “He told me!”Payola — offering payoffs to get a song played — was part of the radio business during Ms. Trombley’s reign, and her son said it was common knowledge in the industry that she was a single mother, so some promoters would make it subtly known to her that there was money available.“She made it less subtly known,” he said, “that if they wanted to continue to meet with her every week, that was not something that was going to get their record on the radio.”She had her musical favorites, especially Neil Diamond. But that didn’t necessarily win him radio time.“I’m not playing his current release,” she told The Sun in 1973, tactfully not naming it, “because it looks like a midchart record, and I won’t go with it when I know out front that it’s only midchart.”In addition to her son Tim, she is survived by another son, Todd; a daughter, Diane Lauzon; and a grandson.In 2016 Ms. Trombley received a special Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy. Radio Trailblazers has an annual award recognizing women who have “blazed new trails in radio.” She received the first, in 2005, and it is now called simply the Rosalie Award. More

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      Ken Kragen, a Force Behind ‘We Are the World,’ Dies at 85

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      Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones were among the public faces of that 1985 fund-raising record. But behind the scenes, Mr. Kragen made it all happen.The entertainer and humanitarian Harry Belafonte was so inspired by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the record released by an all-star lineup of British and Irish musicians in late 1984 to raise money for famine relief in Africa, that he wanted to do something similar with American musicians. But Mr. Belafonte, in his late 50s at the time, knew he had to recruit current stars to pull off the idea.“I needed a younger generation of artists,” he wrote in his memoir, “My Song” (2011), “the ones at the top of the charts right now: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers and Cyndi Lauper. When I looked at the management of most of these artists, I kept seeing the same name: Ken Kragen.”Mr. Kragen, after some persuading, latched onto Mr. Belafonte’s vision and became a pivotal behind-the-scenes force in creating “We Are the World,” the collaborative song recorded by a dizzying array of stars (including Mr. Belafonte) and released in March 1985. The song became a worldwide hit and, along with an album of the same name, raised millions of dollars for hunger relief in Africa and elsewhere.Among the participants in the recording of “We Are the World” were, clockwise from left, Mr. Richie, Daryl Hall, Mr. Jones, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder.Associated Press“When Belafonte called me, the first call I made was to Kenny Rogers,” who was one of his clients, Mr. Kragen recalled in a 1994 interview with Larry King on CNN. “Then I called Lionel Richie. Then I called Quincy Jones. Lionel called Stevie Wonder. Within 24 hours, we had six or seven of the biggest names in the industry.”Soon “six or seven” had snowballed into dozens, with Paul Simon, Bette Midler, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Willie Nelson and Diana Ross among them. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Richie wrote the song; Mr. Jones conducted the recording session in January 1985, a gathering that became the stuff of music legend.Mr. Kragen, who went on to organize or help organize other formidable fund-raising projects, including Hands Across America in 1986, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85. His daughter, Emma Kragen, confirmed the death. No cause was specified.As Mr. Kragen often told the story later, his goal at first on the “We Are the World” project was to recruit two new stars a day. But soon recruiting wasn’t his problem.“Lionel Richie had this line — he says, ‘You are who you hug,’” he told Mr. King, “and the thing is that everybody wanted to hug somebody who was hipper or somebody who was more successful. So the day that I got Bruce Springsteen, the floodgates opened, because he was the hottest artist in America.”At that point, Mr. Kragen went from dialing the phone to answering it — a lot.“I started to get calls from everybody,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1985, just after the recording session. “I tried hard to cut it off at 28 — to this day I don’t know how it got to be 46. Still, we turned down almost 50 artists.”Mr. Kragen was the founding president of USA for Africa, the foundation set up to administer the aid money raised by “We Are the World,” which continues today. According to its website, it has raised more than $100 million to alleviate poverty.Kenneth Allan Kragen was born on Nov. 24, 1936, in Berkeley, Calif. His father, Adrian, was a lawyer who later taught law at the University of California, Berkeley; his mother, Billie, was a violinist.While studying engineering at Berkeley, Mr. Kragen began frequenting local nightclubs and soon became friendly with the Kingston Trio, a fledgling group at the time that often played at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. He began booking the trio at colleges, and when he graduated in 1958, he was asked to manage them; instead he went to Harvard’s graduate school of business. Before starting there, he took a trip to Europe with his parents; when he came home, a new group was getting a lot of buzz nationally: the Kingston Trio.“I just wanted to die,” Mr. Kragen told The New York Times in 1986. “I thought I’d blown the chance of a lifetime.”But once he earned his graduate degree in 1960, he found new opportunities as a talent manager and promoter. He managed the folk group the Limeliters and then picked up the Smothers Brothers in 1964. He and his business partner at the time, Kenneth Fritz, were executive producers of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which during its three-season run, from 1967 to 1969, was one of the most talked-about shows on television because of its battles with censors.In 1975, he went to work for Jerry Weintraub, a talent manager with a formidable roster that included John Denver, Led Zeppelin and the Moody Blues. (Mr. Weintraub soon became a noted film and television producer.) Mr. Kragen started his own company in 1979, attracting clients like the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John and Trisha Yearwood.Mr. Kragen helped organize the fund-raising event Hands Across America and participated in it at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan in May 1986, along with Jean Sherwood and her daughter, Amy.David Bookstaver/Associated PressMr. Kragen produced television movies featuring Mr. Rogers, as well as TV specials for the singer Linda Eder and others. One of his fund-raising efforts was Hands Across America, whose goal was to create a chain of people holding hands that stretched from coast to coast. The event took place in May 1986. The coast-to-coast chain didn’t quite materialize — there were gaps in various places — and though the event raised millions of dollars for hunger and homelessness, it fell short of its $50 million goal. But some five million people participated, including President Ronald Reagan.Mr. Kragen married the actress Cathy Worthington in 1978. In addition to her and his daughter, he is survived by a sister, Robin Merritt.In 2019, Buzzfeed asked Mr. Kragen if he could envision a reprise of Hands Across America. He couldn’t. People, he said, would be too busy documenting their participation with selfies to actually hold hands. More

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      in Television

      Michael Gargiulo Dies at 95; Documented the Moscow ‘Kitchen Debate’

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      Sent to the Soviet Union in 1959 to promote color television, he ended up taping what he later called a “turning point” in U.S.-Soviet relations.Michael Gargiulo, an Emmy Award-winning television director and producer who immortalized the impromptu 1959 “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, in Moscow, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.His son, Michael, an anchor for “Today in New York” on NBC, said the cause was congestive heart failure.The made-for-television moment took place during a brief thaw in the Cold War, with the finger-wagging performances by Nixon, on the eve of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and the pugnacious Khrushchev starting in the kitchen of a model home at an American trade fair in Sokolniki Park.The two world leaders had been steered to the $14,000 “typical American house” by William Safire, who would later become a speechwriter for Nixon and an opinion columnist for The New York Times, but who at the time was handling public relations for a Long Island homebuilder. (It was Mr. Safire who gave the house the name “Splitnik,” because it was bisected by a walkway for spectators.)The largely good-natured tit-for-tat escalated as Nixon and Khrushchev wended their way through the exhibition hall. They were headed for the studio and control room that Mr. Gargiulo (pronounced gar-JOOL-oh) and his team had assembled for RCA at the invitation of the State Department to promote American technological superiority in color television.“As they were walking in, we were already recording,” Mr. Gargiulo recalled in an interview with his son in 2019. “They didn’t even know we were rolling.”Through interpreters, the U.S. vice president and the Soviet leader conducted a guns-and-butter debate on the merits of capitalism versus Communism, which Mr. Gargiulo and his team shot, ostensibly so they could immediately replay it to demonstrate the wonders of color TV.But while Nixon had been warned to be on his best behavior (so Khrushchev would accept an invitation to a subsequent summit meeting), neither official could resist a microphone and a camera.Nixon acknowledged Soviet advances in outer space; Khrushchev, sporting an incompatible Panama hat and oversize suit, conceded nothing.“In another seven years we will be on the same level as America,” he said. “In passing you by, we will wave to you.”Mr. Gargiulo said the two men had promised that the debate would be broadcast in both Russia and the United States. But a few hours after it ended, he said, Kremlin aides demanded that he turn the original tape over to them.By then, it had already been spirited out of the Soviet Union by NBC (which was part of RCA at the time) to be shared with CBS and ABC, but Mr. Gargiulo offered to share a copy with the Soviets. As a result, the debate was seen on both sides of the Iron Curtain that evening.“It was what we call a virtual draw,” Mr. Gargiulo said of the confrontation.The Moscow trip — on which he was accompanied by his wife, who was pregnant with their son — left him with warm memories as well as accolades.“I never felt more patriotic,” he said. “This was world leaders taping on the sly and slipping it out of the country.”“I can’t imagine anybody thinking that was not a turning point in both of our relationships,” he added.Things ended up better for Mr. Gargiulo than they did for the debaters, at least in the short term. Nixon lost the 1960 presidential race, and Khrushchev was deposed in 1964.Mr. Gargiulo accepted a Daytime Emmy Award from the actor John Gabriel and the model Cheryl Tiegs in 1978. He won 10 Emmys in his career, including a lifetime achievement award in 2015.Disney via Getty ImagesHe began his career by directing stage shows in the Catskills, then joined NBC in New York, where he became staff director of local programming. He directed the game shows “To Tell the Truth,” “The Price Is Right,” “Match Game,” “Password” and “The $10,000 Pyramid.” He also directed special events for CBS, including “All-American Thanksgiving Day Parade,” a pastiche of parade coverage from New York and other cities.His final directing credit was the Tournament of Roses Parade on CBS in 2003.He won 10 Daytime Emmys in his career, including a lifetime achievement award in 2015.Michael Ralph Gargiulo was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Brooklyn to Louis and Josephine (Talamo) Gargiulo. He grew up above his father’s restaurant, a Coney Island landmark.He attended St. Augustine’s High School in Brooklyn and completed high school while serving in the Caribbean Defense Command of the Army Air Forces at the end of World War II. He graduated from the University of Missouri on the G.I. Bill.In 1958, he married Dorothy Rosato. In addition to their son, she survives him, as do their daughter, Susan, who works for Nickelodeon, and three grandchildren. More

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      in Movies

      Suzette Winter, Who Documented Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dies at 90

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      She and her husband produced more than 30 rosy biographical films for television about the era’s biggest stars.Suzette Winter Feldman, who wrote and produced a series of more than 30 documentaries chronicling the life of Hollywood’s biggest stars, often rendering them in the golden light of Hollywood’s heyday, died on Dec. 1 at her home in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. She was 90.Her daughter Zara Janson said the cause was aspiration pneumonia.Ms. Winter, who used her birth name professionally, worked with her husband, Gene Feldman, to create rosy film portraits of Grace Kelly, Gregory Peck, Shirley Temple and many others under the rubric the “Hollywood Collection.”As a team — she as a co-writer and co-producer while he also directed — they earned an Emmy nomination in 1994 for “Audrey Hepburn Remembered” (1993). “She’s projected as a three-dimensional personality — a person, in fact — under the cover girl face,” The Boston Globe wrote of the film’s portrayal of Ms. Hepburn.The documentaries used archival footage, interviews with co-stars and, if possible, conversations with the subjects themselves. Hollywood actors and actresses often narrated them — Jessica Lange, for instance, in “Vivien Leigh: Scarlett and Beyond” (1990).Films from the Hollywood Collection aired on PBS and major cable networks, including Lifetime, TNT and HBO’s Cinemax.The couple made no bones about the laudatory nature of their work. “Our main interest is not to do a biography but rather to look at the achievement of that person and give insight into the magic of that person,” Mr. Feldman told The Journal-News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1987. The couple befriended some of their subjects, Liza Minnelli and Gregory Peck among them.Their documentary treatment extended even to canine stars. “The Story of Lassie” (1994) explored the legacy of television and film’s favorite — and most consistently profitable — collie.The New York Times critic John J. O’Connor called the Lassie film “a fond tribute to the movie and television character that, arguably, projected most consistently the mistily hallowed virtues of purity and innocence, the triumph of good and courage rewarded.”Ms. Winter and her husband with Audrey Hepburn, the subject of one of their documentaries. “She’s projected as a three-dimensional personality — a person, in fact — under the cover girl face,” The Boston Globe wrote of the film’s portrayal of Ms. Hepburn.via Steve JansonSuzette St. John Winter was born on Jan. 19, 1931, in London to Ralph and Marguerite (St. John) Winter. Her father was an electrician, her mother a postal worker.As a child during the Blitz of London in World War II, she and her three siblings were evacuated under Operation Pied Piper, which removed millions of children from the city to the English countryside. She went to live with a great-aunt on a farm in Surrey and was separated from her parents for the better part of six years.After returning to London, she attended art school for a year, worked in Paris as an au pair and worked odd jobs after returning to London.She married Leo Grimpel, an architecture student whom she had met in London, in 1952. They had two daughters, Zara and Stephanie. With Mr. Grimpel, she moved to Australia, then Hong Kong. They divorced in 1966.Returning to Australia with her daughters after the divorce, Ms. Winter met Mr. Feldman there; he had been making educational documentaries and was filming one about the Maori people of New Zealand at the time. They married in 1967 and moved to the United States.In 1977, they released “Danny,” a feature film about a girl and her horse. Ms. Winter wrote the script and later a novelization of the film. They began the Hollywood series in 1982 with “Hollywood’s Children,” a history of child actors, and ended it in 1999.The couple lived in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and later moved to Manhattan. After Mr. Feldman’s death in 2006, Ms. Winter moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow.She attended Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1973. In 1976, she earned a master’s degree from Manhattanville College, in Westchester County, studying humanities.The Hollywood Collection documentaries are still in circulation, with commercial distribution rights owned by Janson Media, an entertainment company run by Ms. Winter’s daughter Zara and her husband, Stephen Janson. In addition to Ms. Janson, she is survived by her other daughter, Stephanie Edelstein; a stepdaughter, Lynne Feldman; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. More

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      in Music

      Vicente Fernández, ‘El Rey’ of Mexican Ranchera Music, Is Dead at 81

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      A beloved Mexican singer, Mr. Fernández was known for his powerful operatic range and marathon performances, delivered in a signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero.Vicente Fernández, the powerful tenor whose songs of love, loss and patriotism inspired by life in rural Mexico endeared him to generations of fans as “El Rey,” the king of traditional ranchera music, died on Sunday morning. He was 81.His death was announced in a post on his official Instagram account, which did not give a cause or say where he died. He had been hospitalized for months after a spinal injury he sustained in August, according to previous posts from the account.Accompanied by his mariachi band, Mr. Fernández brought ranchera music, which emerged from the ranches of Mexico in the 19th century, to the rest of Latin America and beyond. In his signature charro outfit and intricately embroidered sombrero, a celebration of the genre’s countryside origins, he performed at some of the largest venues in the world.He recorded dozens of albums and hundreds of songs over a career that spanned six decades. His enduring popularity was reflected in a series of industry accolades, including a place in the Billboard Latin Music Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Grammy Awards and eight Latin Grammy Awards. He sold tens of millions of copies of his albums and starred in dozens of movies.He was known for giving epic, hourslong concerts, communing directly with his fans and taking swigs from bottles of alcohol that were offered to him. Known fondly as “Chente,” he would tell his audiences that “as long as you keep applauding, your ‘Chente’ won’t stop singing.”Reviewing a 1995 performance at Radio City Music Hall for The New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote that Mr. Fernández “sang with operatic power and melodrama,” flexing his “ardent tenor” to “prodigious crescendos and a vibrato that could register on the Richter scale.”He continued to give marathon performances well into his 70s. At a 2008 concert at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Fernández held court for three hours. A lingering note, delivered in his “lively, if slightly weathered tenor,” could render the audience silent, Jon Caramanica wrote in his review in The Times.Vicente Fernández was born on Feb. 17, 1940, in Huentitán El Alto, in the state of Jalisco in western central Mexico. His father, Ramón Fernández, was a rancher and his mother, Paula Gómez de Fernández, stayed at home to raise their son.He grew up watching matinee movies featuring the Mexican ranchera singer Pedro Infante, an early influence. When he was 8, he received his first guitar and began studying folk music. He left school in the fifth grade and later moved with his family to Tijuana after their cattle business collapsed. He told The Los Angeles Times in 1999 that he took whatever work he could, laying bricks and shining shoes, and even washing dishes.“I’ve always said I got to where I am not by being a great singer, but by being stubborn, by being tenacious, by being pigheaded,” Mr. Fernández said. He gravitated to a public square in Guadalajara called Mariachi Plaza, where he performed for tips, he told The Los Angeles Times. His career took off after he won a competition called La Calandria Musical when he was 19, he said in a 2010 interview with KENS 5 of San Antonio. He moved to Mexico City where he sang at a restaurant and at weddings, and unsuccessfully pitched himself to local record labels.The labels came calling soon after the death in 1966 of Javier Solís, one of the most popular Mexican singers who specialized in bolero and ranchera music. Mr. Fernández then recorded his first albums, including hits like “Volver, Volver,” which elevated him to a level of fame that he had never envisioned, he told KENS 5. Other hits, including “El Rey” and “Lástima que seas ajena,” would follow.“When I started my career, I always had the confidence that I would one day make it, but I never imagined that I would reach the heights at which the public has placed me,” Mr. Fernández said.His public statements occasionally got him into trouble in his later years, such as when he said in a 2019 interview that he had refused a liver transplant because he feared that the donated organ might have come from a gay person or a drug addict. Earlier this year, he apologized after he was seen in a video touching a female fan’s breast without her consent while they posed for a photo.Mr. Fernández married María del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor in 1963. She survives him, as do the couple’s children, Vicente, Gerardo, Alejandra and Alejandro, a Grammy-nominated ranchera performer.Asked if a routine or exercise was a key to his longevity as a performer, Mr. Fernández told KENS that he walked every day for an hour and rode horses when he was home on his ranch. But when he was on tour, he said, “I don’t leave the hotels.”“Still, that keeps me healthy,” he said. “My voice is well rested. When I hear the public’s applause, I don’t know where the voice comes from, but it does for three hours. You’ll have to ask God to find out how he blesses me every time.” More

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      Michael Nesmith, the ‘Quiet Monkee,’ Is Dead at 78

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      He shot to fame as a member of a made-for-TV rock group, but he denied that he was the group’s only “real” musician. He went on to create some of the first music videos.Michael Nesmith, who rocketed to fame as the contemplative, wool-cap-wearing member of the Monkees in 1966, then went on to a diverse career that included making one of the rock era’s earliest music videos and winning the first Grammy Award for video, died on Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.Jason Elzy, the head of public relations for Rhino Records, the label that represents the Monkees, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Nesmith was a struggling 23-year-old singer and songwriter when he saw an advertisement in Variety seeking “4 insane boys” for “acting roles in new TV series.” Two aspiring television producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspired by the Beatles’ movies, were hoping to make a TV series about the zany antics of a rock band — not a real rock band (although the Lovin’ Spoonful was briefly considered for the job), but actors with musical backgrounds who could create the illusion of a band.The four members were picked to fit types. Davy Jones, a British vocalist, was the cute scamp; Micky Dolenz, the drummer and primary lead singer, was the wild jokester; and Peter Tork, the bass player, was the lovable dim bulb. Mr. Nesmith, a guitarist and occasional singer, was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.“He has that dry Will Rogers sense of humor,” Mr. Dolenz told Rolling Stone in 2012, characterizing Mr. Nesmith’s real persona. “That’s probably one of the reasons they cast him.”The show made its debut in September 1966, and though it lasted only two seasons, the Monkees became a cultural reference point, thanks largely to their best-selling albums (which featured a lot of studio musicians and backup singers, especially early on). Mr. Nesmith, who wrote and produced some of the Monkees songs, had the reputation of being the only “real” musician in the group, but in his 2017 memoir, “Infinite Tuesday,” he disputed that.The four members of the Monkees were picked to fit types. Mr. Nesmith was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.  NBC/via Getty Images“It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the ‘only musician’ in the Monkees,” he wrote. “Nothing was further from the truth.”The Monkees in action (or at least acting), from left: Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Mr. Nesmith.Getty ImagesBut he was musician enough to have a modest solo career after Monkee mania faded at the end of the 1960s, and that led him into a role in music-television history.In 1977 he recorded a song called “Rio” for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it.“They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing,” Mr. Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. But he did something different.“I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me,” he said. “As we edited these images,” he added, “an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.”Almost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. It got some play in Europe, but Mr. Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier).The Monkees (from left, Mr. Tork, Mr. Nesmith, Mr. Jones and Mr. Dolenz) in 1967, at the height of their fame.Ray Howard/Associated PressIn 1979 he and the director William Dear developed a TV show, “Popclips,” for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. “Popclips” showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a V.J. The show is often said to have helped inspire the creation of MTV in 1981, although accounts of the various people who claim to have had a role in MTV’s emergence differ widely. Mr. Nesmith, in his interview for “I Want My MTV,” took a nuanced view of his role.“It’s a gradual coalescence of different things,” he said of the concept of a full-time music video channel, “a confluence of energies. It’s one of those ideas that nobody really thinks up. It’s like justice. Or kindness. Nobody thinks that up.”Robert Michael Nesmith was born on Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston. His father, Warren, and his mother, Bette (McMurray) Nesmith, divorced in 1946, soon after Warren returned from fighting in World War II. His mother later remarried, took the last name Graham and became wealthy from inventing Liquid Paper and running the company that produced it. That money would give Michael the financial security to follow his varied interests.His mother moved to Dallas, where he grew up. In his book, he described himself as an indifferent student in high school.In 1960 he enlisted in the Air Force (earning a high school equivalency diploma while in the military). The Air Force, though, was not a good fit, and he requested and received an early discharge in 1962.He enrolled at San Antonio College, where he began performing on a guitar he had received as a Christmas gift from his mother and stepfather in 1961. He also met a fellow student, Phyllis Barbour. In 1964 the newly married couple resettled in Los Angeles, where Mr. Nesmith sought to further his fledgling performing and songwriting career.Mr. Nesmith in the recording studio in an undated photo. When his days as a Monkee were over, he formed a country-rock band and became a pioneer of music video.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAmong the songs he wrote in 1965 was “Different Drum,” though its best-known incarnation, a hit version by Linda Ronstadt and her group the Stone Poneys, would not come out until 1967, after the Monkees were famous. Mr. Nesmith was playing in local clubs and sometimes serving as M.C. at one of them, the Troubadour, when someone showed him the Variety ad.The Monkees’ early songs — provided mostly by outside writers and recorded largely by studio musicians, with the Monkees (primarily Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones) providing the vocals — were such hits that fans began clamoring to see the fake group live in concert.“We started wailing away in rehearsal, trying to get a decent rendition of the songs on the records,” Mr. Nesmith wrote. “It never sounded great, but it didn’t sound all that bad.”The Monkees gave their first live performance in December 1966 in Hawaii, the start of a tour that took them all over the United States.“The Monkees have been practicing more, and are learning to pull off live concerts,” The Boston Globe wrote in March 1967. “On their first tour, the continuous screaming drowned all imperfections in the music.”The mania, though, soon played itself out. “The Monkees” ended after two seasons, in March 1968, and both Mr. Tork and Mr. Nesmith left the band shortly afterward. Mr. Nesmith formed his own group, the First National Band, and released an album in early 1970, “Magnetic South,” which included a minor hit, “Joanne.”Two more First National Band albums quickly followed, showcasing a country-rock sound that was just slightly ahead of its time — as the First National Band was petering out in 1972, groups like the Eagles were pushing a similar sound into the mainstream, leaving Mr. Nesmith feeling as if he had missed the boat.Mr. Nesmith in concert with the Monkees in 2013, during one of the band’s periodic reunions.Jeff Daly/Invision, via Associated Press“I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018, when he organized a modest “First National Band Redux” tour. “The Eagles now have the biggest-selling album of all time and mine is sitting in the closet of a closed record company?”Several other musical ventures followed, but Mr. Nesmith was growing increasingly interested in video. He thought that videodiscs, which had come on the market in the late 1970s, were the future of music, and after “Rio” and “Popclips” he made “Elephant Parts,” an hourlong disc of music videos and comedy sketches (including a parody of his own song “Joanne” that featured the Japanese movie monster Rodan instead of a woman).In 1982, “Elephant Parts” received the first Grammy Award for video, a category called video of the year at the time (soon to be split into short- and long-form awards, the first of several title changes as the art form and technology evolved).“Elephant Parts” led in 1985 to “Michael Nesmith in Television Parts,” a short-lived TV sketch show. Mr. Nesmith had also begun producing movies, most notably “Repo Man” in 1984.And he continued to be a Monkee — when it suited him. In varying combinations, Mr. Tork, Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones (until his death in 2012) toured and recorded periodically as the Monkees. Mr. Nesmith only occasionally joined them onstage, but all four played and sang on, and wrote songs for, the group’s 1996 album, “Justus.” In 2016 the group released the album “Good Times,” which included some archival material recorded by Mr. Jones.Mr. Nesmith also wrote and directed “Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees,” a television special made to promote “Justus,” which was broadcast in early 1997.Mr. Nesmith became more willing, or perhaps more available, to embrace his Monkee past in recent years. He joined Mr. Tork and Mr. Dolenz for a tour after Mr. Jones’s death.Peter Tork died in 2019. Mr. Dolenz is now the last surviving Monkee.In 2018 Mr. Nesmith teamed with Mr. Dolenz for a tour, but that June he had to cancel the final four shows when shortness of breath left him unable to perform. He told Rolling Stone that he had quadruple bypass surgery shortly after that.“I was using the words ‘heart attack’ for a while,” he said. “But I’m told now that I didn’t have one. It was congestive heart failure.”Yet by that September he was back touring with his own group, playing his First National Band material. And he and Mr. Dolenz went back on the road this year, for what was billed as the Monkees’ farewell tour. They gave their last performance on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles.Mr. Nesmith’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1975. His marriages to Kathryn Bild, in 1976, and Victoria Kennedy, in 2000, also ended in divorce. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Christian, Jonathan and Jessica Nesmith, and a son from a relationship with Nurit Wilde, Jason Nesmith, as well as two grandchildren.Mr. Nesmith’s varied career included a legal battle with PBS. Early in the video era, his company, Pacific Arts, had bought the home video rights to some of PBS’s most popular programs, including “Nature.” PBS sued him over royalties, but in 1999 a federal jury in Los Angeles found in Mr. Nesmith’s favor and awarded him $47 million. His reaction to his legal victory was typically wry.“It’s like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo,” he said after the verdict was issued. “You’re glad to get your stereo back, but you’re sad to find out that Grandma’s a thief.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      Lina Wertmüller, Italian Director of Provocative Films, Dies at 93

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      She established an idiosyncratic reputation for blending tragedy, farce, politics and sex. She was the first woman nominated for a best director Oscar.Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.The culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement that Ms. Wertmüller’s “class and unmistakable style” had left its mark on Italian and world cinema. “Grazie, Lina,” he said.She was the first woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for best director, for “Seven Beauties” (1975).Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name, burst onto the cinematic scene with a series of idiosyncratic films that propelled her to the front rank of European directors. All the movies had screenplays written by her, and most relied on the talents of her two favorite actors: Giancarlo Giannini, usually cast as a hapless male chauvinist victimized by the injustices of Italian society and baffled by women, and Mariangela Melato as the always difficult and complicated love interest.In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were. A lively sense of human limitations tempered her natural bent toward anarchy. Struggle was noble and the social structure rotten, but the outcome was always in doubt.Lina Wertmüller on the set of “Summer Night” on the island of Sardinia.New Line CinemaAntiquated codes of honor undo the title character in “The Seduction of Mimi,” a dimwitted Sicilian laborer, played by Mr. Giannini, whose neglected wife stages a sexual revolt. In “Swept Away” (1974), Ms. Wertmüller upended the Italian power structure by giving the humble deckhand Gennarino (Mr. Giannini again) absolute power over the rich and arrogant Raffaella (Ms. Mercato) after a shipwreck.After being dominated and abused, Gennarino turns the tables, and Raffaella becomes his adoring slave — until the two are rescued, and the old order reasserts itself. Feminists objected. With a characteristic bit of obfuscation, Ms. Wertmüller explained that since Raffaella embodies bourgeois society, “therefore she represents the man.”Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino and Mariangela Melato as Raffaella in “Swept Away.”Kino LorberIn “Seven Beauties” (1975), Ms. Wertmüller again courted outrage by using a German concentration camp as the setting for a grim comedy, with farcical overtones. This time, Mr. Giannini played Pasqualino Farfuso, a craven Neapolitan deserter and two-bit charmer who, determined to survive at all costs, seduces the camp’s sadistic female commandant and, directed by her, murders other prisoners. Critics were divided over the merits of the film, but it earned Ms. Wertmüller the Oscar nomination. Not until 1994, when Jane Campion was nominated for “The Piano,” would another woman be nominated for directing.Ms. Wertmüller’s reputation, always more elevated in the United States than in Europe, remained uncertain. With “Seven Beauties,” the critic John Simon wrote, she ascended “into the highest regions of cinematic art, into the company of the major directors.” The critic David Thomson, on the other hand, ascribed her American popularity in the 1970s as “probably inevitable in a country ravenous for a female purveyor of smart cultural artifacts.”And her brand of sexual politics encountered hostility from critics like Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell and Ellen Willis, who called Ms. Wertmüller “a woman-hater who pretends to be a feminist.”Shirley Stoler as the Nazi commandant in “Seven Beauties.”Tiny and voluble, with a fierce smile and instantly recognizable white-framed eyeglasses, Ms. Wertmüller disarmed criticism by unleashing verbal torrents of explanation in a gravelly alto. Vincent Canby, after listening to her hold forth during a publicity tour for her first English-language film, “The End of the World in Our Usual Bed on a Night Full of Rain” (1978), wrote in The New York Times that she spoke “with enthusiasm and at such length and so articulately that (to vary an old Hollywood joke) it seems Warner Brothers might do better to scrap the film and distribute the director.”Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich was born in Rome on Aug. 14, 1928, to a family of noble Swiss ancestry. Her mother was the former Maria Santamaria-Maurizio; her father, Federico, was a successful lawyer and a domestic tyrant with whom she quarreled constantly. After obtaining a teaching certificate, Ms. Wertmüller hedged her bets by enrolling simultaneously in law school and a Stanislavskian drama academy in Rome. Theater won out.During the 1950s, she toured with a puppet theater, wrote musical comedies for television and worked as an actress and stage manager. Her best friend, married to Marcello Mastroianni, introduced her to Federico Fellini, who hired her as an assistant director on “8½,” a life-changing experience that opened the world of film to her.Ms. Wertmüller with Mr. Giannini, who starred in many of her films, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in 1975.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesIn 1963 she directed her own film, “The Lizards,” a study of provincial life in the vein of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni.” It was followed by the quirky “Let’s Talk About Men” (1965), a study of sexual politics that foreshadowed her later explorations of the subject.Ms. Wertmüller’s long collaboration with Mr. Giannini began in television, when she directed him in the musical “Rita the Mosquito” (1966) and its sequel “Don’t Sting the Mosquito” (1967), whose art director, Enrico Job, she married in 1968.Mr. Job died in 2008. Ms. Wertmüller adopted Maria Zulima Job, her husband’s child with another woman, shortly after Ms. Job’s birth in 1991. Her daughter survives her.The 1970s presented Ms. Wertmüller with two of her richest subjects: the changing sexual politics brought about by feminism, and increasing political turbulence in Italy, as old social structures and attitudes buckled under the pressures of modernity. “The Seduction of Mimi,” chosen as an official entry at the Cannes festival in 1972, immediately established her as an important new filmmaker. “Love and Anarchy” (1973), with Mr. Giannini playing a bumbling country boy who tries to assassinate Mussolini, and the social satire “All Screwed Up” (1974) solidified her reputation for idiosyncratic political films blending tragedy and farce.Somewhat paradoxically, her career went into steep decline after the Academy nomination, although in 2019 she received an honorary Oscar for her work, and in 2016 she was the subject of a documentary, “Behind the White Glasses.”“The bubble seemed to burst,” the British critic Derek Malcolm told The Guardian, adding that “she could do nothing right.”The titles of the films grew even longer, and the critical response more uniformly hostile. “The End of the World,” with Candice Bergen as an American photographer and feminist engaged in marital struggle with an Italian communist played by Mr. Giannini, was roundly dismissed as raucous and incoherent. Each succeeding film seemed to bear out Michael Wood’s observation, in The New York Review of Books, that Ms. Wertmüller’s work displayed “a stunning visual intelligence accompanied by a great confusion of mind.”Ms. Wertmüller during filming of the documentary “Behind the White Glasses.” Emanuele Ruiz/Kino LorberBy the early 1990s she had qualified for inclusion in Variety’s “Missing Persons” column. “Ciao, Professore” (1994), about a schoolteacher from northern Italy mistakenly transferred to a poor school near Naples, suggested a return to form, but on a small scale, and with an unexpected sweetness. For perhaps the first time in her career, Ms. Wertmüller faced the charge of sentimentality.To this, as to all criticism, she responded by invoking the ultimate authority: herself. Her films, she liked to say, were made to please an audience of one, and her methods were intuitive.“I am sure of things only because I love them,” she said. “I am born first. Only then do I discover.” More