Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Andrea Fay Friedman, Who Built a Breakthrough Acting Career, Dies at 53

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      Ms. Friedman, who called Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” forged an unlikely path in acting by playing characters with developmental disabilities.Andrea Fay Friedman, an actress who starred in the groundbreaking television series “Life Goes On,” died on Sunday in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 53.She died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, according to her father, Hal Friedman. He said that she had not been able to speak for the past year because of the disease, which is common in people with Down syndrome who are over 50.Ms. Friedman was known for her portrayals of people with developmental disabilities. She called her Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” Mr. Friedman said in a phone interview.Ms. Friedman was born on June 1, 1970, in Santa Monica. After graduating from West Los Angeles Baptist High School, she studied acting and philosophy at Santa Monica College for two years.Her breakthrough in acting came in 1992 on the TV drama “Life Goes On,” in which she played Amanda Swanson, the girlfriend and later wife of the main character Charles “Corky” Thatcher, who also had Down syndrome. She played the character for two seasons.Mr. Friedman said that she got involved in the show while working at a child-care center during her college years. A parent there was writing the music for “Life Goes On,” he said, and suggested she pitch her ideas to the writers.She eventually convinced the producers to include another character who had Down syndrome, Mr. Friedman said. She was originally going to appear in just one episode, but “she did such a great job that they made her a regular on the show,” he said.She would later occasionally appear in other hit shows, like “Baywatch,” “ER” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”In 2010, she had a “dispute” with Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska and 2018 vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Friedman said.In an episode of “Family Guy,” Ms. Friedman voiced a girl with Down syndrome named Ellen, who dates the teenaged character Chris. Ellen tells him over dinner that her mother is “the former governor of Alaska.”Ms. Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, said that the show “really isn’t funny” and was the work of “cruel, cold-hearted people.”Ms. Friedman wrote in an email to The New York Times at the time that Ms. Palin “does not have a sense of humor,” adding, “I think the word is ‘sarcasm.’”“In my family we think laughing is good,” she said. “My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.”Her final appearance on screen was in the 2019 holiday drama “Carol of the Bells,” in which a man searches for his biological mother, played by Ms. Friedman, and learns she is developmentally disabled.Ms. Friedman also worked with students with intellectual disabilities through a program at U.C.L.A.She is survived by her sister, Katherine Holland, her brother-in-law, Grant Holland, her two nephews, Lawson and Andrew Holland, and Mr. Friedman, an entertainment industry lawyer. Her mother, Marjorie Jean Lawson, died about 10 years ago, Mr. Friedman said. More

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      Denny Laine, Founding Member of the Moody Blues and Wings, Dies at 79

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      He wrote “Mull of Kintyre” with Paul McCartney and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Moody Blues.Denny Laine, a singer, songwriter and guitarist who co-founded two of the biggest British rock bands of the 1960s and ’70s, the Moody Blues and Wings, before embarking on a long solo career, died in Naples, Fla., on Tuesday — 50 years to the day after Wings released its most successful album, “Band on the Run,” in the U.S. He was 79.His wife, Elizabeth Mele-Hines, said the cause of death, at a hospital, was interstitial lung disease.Mr. Laine was part of the efflorescence of British rock music in the early 1960s, when many young musicians were still soaking up the influence of American blues. Performers like Eric Clapton, Spencer Davis and the Beatles became not just friends with Mr. Laine but also frequent collaborators with him.A native of Birmingham, England, he moved to London after his first band, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, broke up. In 1964, he joined four other Birmingham-area transplants, Graeme Edge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Clint Warwick, to form the M&B 5, a rhythm-and-blues band named after a Birmingham brewery. They soon changed their name to the Moody Blues.Mr. Laine was with the band for only two albums, but in 1964 he sang lead on its first No. 1 hit, “Go Now!” The success of that song, a cover of an R&B song recorded that same year by Bessie Banks, won the Moody Blues slots on a series of high-profile tours, opening for acts like Chuck Berry and the Beatles.Mr. Laine, right, with his fellow members of the Moody Blues in an undated photo. From left were Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick, Graeme Edge and Mike Pinder.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMr. Laine left the Moody Blues in 1966 over artistic differences and spent the next five years working on solo projects and with, among other bands, the short-lived jazz-rock ensemble Ginger Baker’s Air Force. It was while singing and playing guitar with that band that he caught the attention of Paul McCartney.By 1971, Mr. McCartney was more than a year out of the Beatles and looking to form a new band. One day, from his rural home west of Glasgow, he cold-called Mr. Laine.“He said, ‘Do you want to do something? Get on a plane, we’re in Scotland,’” Mr. Laine recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2019. The two added Mr. McCartney’s wife, Linda McCartney, and the three — with a rotating cast of other bandmates — became Wings.Though Wings is often remembered as a McCartney vehicle — at times it went by the name Paul McCartney and Wings — Mr. Laine was an equal member.He appeared on all seven of the group’s studio albums, sang lead and played lead guitar on several prominent tracks and wrote or co-wrote a number of the band’s songs, including “Mull of Kintyre,” which reached No. 1 on the British charts and sold more than two million copies. (He also claimed to have had a hand in writing another No. 1 Wings hit, “Band on the Run,” although Paul and Linda McCartney are the only credited writers.)Mr. Laine received four Grammy nominations with Wings and won two: best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus in 1975, for “Band on the Run,” and best rock instrumental performance in 1980, for “Rockestra Theme.”“Me and him had this kind of feel together musically,” Mr. Laine said about working with Mr. McCartney in an interview with Guitar World this year. “We slotted in well together. We could read each other, and that came from growing up on the same musical influences. Paul’s got a good sense of rhythm, and he doesn’t overplay, which I like.”Mr. Laine was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 as a founding member of the Moody Blues. In what many critics and fans consider one of the bigger snubs in the Hall of Fame’s history, Wings has yet to follow.Mr. Laine in 1972, a year after Paul McCartney cold-called him asking him to join a new band, Wings.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesBrian Frederick Hines was born on Oct. 29, 1944, in Birmingham. His parents, Herbert and Eva (Basset) Hines, worked in factories.Denny was a childhood nickname, and he later added the surname Laine as a nod to one of his sister’s favorite singers, Frankie Laine.He grew up listening to the so-called Gypsy jazz of musicians like Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, as well as to Spanish guitar — a love he explored in between his time with the Moody Blues and Wings, when he lived in Spain and studied flamenco.After returning to Britain, he formed two bands, the Electric String Band and Balls, both of which fizzled — though the first, which featured a string section and lush orchestration, would greatly influence a similarly named band, the Electric Light Orchestra.He counted the McCartneys among his closest friends, but he left Wings in 1981 after Mr. McCartney was arrested in Japan for marijuana possession. Mr. Laine’s departure ended the band and put a strain on their relationship, though he later played on several of Mr. McCartney’s solo projects.Mr. Laine performing this March at the City Winery in Manhattan. He continued to record and tour regularly in the four decades after Wings split up.Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Laine married Joanne Patrie in 1978; they divorced in 1981. He married Rosha Kasravi in 2003; they later separated and divorced in 2021. He married Elizabeth Mele this year. Along with her, his survivors include two children from his first marriage, Heidi and Laine Hines; three other children, Damian James, Ainsley Adams and Lucy Grant; his sister, Doreen; and several grandchildren.Even while he was with Wings, Mr. Laine kept up a spirited solo career, releasing two albums in the 1970s: “Ahh … Laine” (1973) and “Holly Days” (1977), a tribute to Buddy Holly.He continued to work and tour regularly in the four decades after the band split up, playing a mix of his own compositions and material from the Moody Blues and Wings. Often he would perform what he called “Songs and Stories,” a combination of music and tales from his rock life.“I can’t live without live work,” he told Guitar World. “There’s no substitute for playing live and getting the feeling of connecting with an audience.” More

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      Sandra Elkin, Creator of a Pioneering Feminist Talk Show, Dies at 85

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      “Woman,” which she hosted, brought frank talk about issues like birth control, pay inequality and homosexuality into millions of homes in the 1970s.Sandra Elkin, who as the creator and host of the weekly PBS talk show “Woman” in the mid-1970s brought frank discussions about birth control, job discrimination, health care and other issues confronting American women into millions of living rooms across the country, died on Nov. 8 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.The cause was a heart attack, said her son Todd.Ms. Elkin was a stay-at-home mother in suburban Buffalo in 1972 when she approached the management of WNED, the local PBS member station, with an idea: a half-hour public affairs show focused on women and their concerns as the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism reshaped the gender landscape.Although she had no experience working in television, the station was sufficiently impressed with her pitch to give it the green light after just two weeks of negotiation.“Woman” was an immediate local hit, and after its initial season PBS picked it up for nationwide distribution. By 1974 it was reaching about 185 stations as far-flung as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Corpus Christi, Texas, distant from the liberal cities where the women’s movement had first emerged.Guests included a Who’s Who of contemporary feminism. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Susan Brownmiller all trooped to Buffalo to speak with Ms. Elkin. She also led an all-female crew to Paris to film an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.But most of her guests — housewives (and househusbands), prisoners, blue-collar workers — were far from famous, by intention. Ms. Elkin insisted that the show was about information, not entertainment, and that she was there merely as a “conduit.”“We don’t play the usual talk-show games,” she told The Buffalo News in 1975. “There’s no baiting guests or embarrassing them.”That’s not to say Ms. Elkin and “Woman” shied from controversy. Ms. Brownmiller sat for a two-episode interview about rape. An episode about birth control featured diaphragms and intrauterine devices, intimate items that many viewers probably considered exotic or even frightening, especially in conservative corners of the country.Still, the show won broad viewership among both men and women, in part thanks to Ms. Elkin and her unguarded warmth as a host. She had never wanted to be on camera, and she agreed to do so only after the first season ended and the original moderator, Samantha Dean, moved to another station.Sitting on a couch facing her guest, often with one leg tucked under her and casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, Ms. Elkin made viewers feel they were simply listening in on two friends talking.“Women love to teach each other things, to tell each other what they think,” she said in 1975. “I love being a part of this.”Sandra Ann Marotti was born in Rutland, Vt., on Oct. 16, 1938. Her father, John, was a tailor, and her mother, Lisle (Thornton) Marotti, was a secretary for an investment firm.She studied theater at Green Mountain College. While working in summer theater in Vermont she met Saul Elkin, a theater student at Columbia University. They married in 1958.The couple settled first in Vermont and in 1969 moved to Buffalo, where Mr. Elkin taught at the State University of New York.Ms. Elkin and a friend, who were growing bored as homemakers, pitched a conventional women’s show to WNED, focused on things like cooking and decorating. But they shelved the proposal when the friend moved to Florida.In 1972, the station asked if she was still interested. Yes, she replied. But she had a different idea.“A few years ago I started writing questions that were bothering me and my friends,” she said in an interview with The Kane Republican, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, in 1977. “I found that they broke down into categories that turned into the list of topics I first presented” to the station.She started with 30 show ideas, enough for a full season and then some. She didn’t need to search for more — within weeks of the first episode, Ms. Elkin found herself inundated with suggestions, via letters, phone calls and casual cocktail party conversations.After some 200 episodes, “Woman” went off the air in 1977. It ended for a variety of reasons, among them Ms. Elkin’s move to New York City and PBS’s decision to withdraw support from the show in favor of a more slickly produced women’s interest series with a magazine-style format.Ms. Elkin and Mr. Elkin divorced in the early 1980s. She married her longtime partner, Anke A. Ehrhardt, in 2013. Along with her son Todd, Dr. Ehrhardt survives her, as do another son, Evan, and two grandchildren.In New York, Ms. Elkin pursued a second career as a literary agent. She also produced videos on H.I.V. education at the height of the AIDS crisis and later traveled to South Africa to produce similar videos for local viewers.For the last two decades, she had pursued a series of long-term photography projects. One involved portraits of women around the world. Another focused on women town clerks in Vermont, the sort of people she considered the “first firewall of our democracy” — people she said were needed now more than over.“We’re at the precipice with democracy,” she said in a 2020 interview with the website Think Design. “We’re certainly at the precipice with climate change and with institutionalized racism and sexism. We’ve just got to step up and do what we need to do.” More

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      Cobi Narita, Tireless Jazz Promoter and Benefactor, Dies at 97

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      She produced concerts, helped musicians find work and started a women’s jazz festival. “Jazz in New York would not have been the same without Cobi,” one musician said.Cobi Narita, an indefatigable jazz impresario who for more than 40 years in New York City produced concerts, celebrated female artists in an annual festival and ran performance spaces, died on Nov. 8 in Los Angeles. She was 97.Her death, at the home of a granddaughter, was confirmed by her son Robert Narita.Ms. Narita — who grew up in California, spent most of World War II with her family in an Arizona internment camp for Japanese Americans, and moved to New York in her early 40s — was a unifying force in local jazz circles.“Jazz in New York would not have been the same without Cobi,” the saxophonist Jimmy Heath told the website All About Jazz in 2006.Loren Schoenberg, the founding director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, called Ms. Narita a respected benefactor who provided much-needed opportunities for performers in New York — a role that was later more formally adopted, at least in part, by Jazz at Lincoln Center.“She started at a time when there was no organized world of jazz institutions to give financial aid to musicians,” Mr. Schoenberg said by phone. “Everybody was out in the ocean doing their own little projects. But Cobi had all these things going, and she handed out money to support people.”He added, “Her affect was low-key, but she had charisma and a gravitational field around her.”In 1976, Ms. Narita started the nonprofit Universal Jazz Coalition, an umbrella organization that for about 10 years helped musicians manage their careers, promoted and produced concerts, and distributed a newsletter about local jazz events.Seven years later, she opened the Jazz Center of New York in a rented loft in Lower Manhattan, on Lafayette Street, where famous musicians like Dizzy Gillespie as well as up-and-comers performed. In 2002, she opened Cobi’s Place, on West 48th Street near Seventh Avenue, as a venue for singers, instrumentalists and dancers.Cobi’s Place stayed in business for about a decade. The Jazz Center of New York closed recently but she had retired during the pandemic.Over the years, Ms. Narita produced concerts and performances by, among others, the singers Abbey Lincoln and Dakota Staton, the saxophonist Henry Threadgill and the trumpeter Clark Terry.“Without producers like Cobi,” Ms. Lincoln told The Daily News of New York in 1993, “musicians like me would have a hard time having careers.”In 1978, Ms. Narita organized the four-day Salute to Women in Jazz, which was renamed the New York Women’s Jazz Festival the next year and ran for more than 10 years. The event was held at the disco Casablanca 2, on the original site of the jazz club Birdland, on Broadway between 52nd and 53rd Streets. The event made news when Robert Tirado, the disco’s owner, abruptly increased the rent after two successful nights. Ms. Narita could not meet his demand, and he locked the festival out.Ms. Narita quickly regrouped. The musicians played outdoors near the club for the third and fourth nights, using electricity from a nearby parking lot, instruments and a public address system from the Sam Ash Musical Instruments store a few blocks away, and chairs from the Roseland Ballroom. The pianist Mary Lou Williams and the singer Helen Merrill were among those who performed.“A thousand people had to have lined up on the street,” Ms. Narita told All About Jazz. “It was amazing.”George Wein, the producer of the Newport Jazz Festival, happened to be walking by and was stunned when he came upon the unscheduled street concert. He paid for Ms. Narita to use Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) for a bonus fifth night.Ms. Narita’s financial backer in most of her ventures was Paul Ash, whose family owns the Sam Ash chain of musical instrument stores; Cobi’s Place was located above Manny’s Music, which was owned by Sam Ash. Ms. Narita and Mr. Ash met in 1973 and married in 1989. He died in 2014.“They were like magnets, man, from the start,” her son Robert said. “Soul mates.”Nobuko Emoto was born on March 3, 1926, in San Pedro, Calif. Her father, Kazumasa Emoto, was a farmer who brought fresh vegetables to Los Angeles markets. Her mother, Kimiko (Hamamoto) Emoto, was a homemaker.Nobuko, her parents, her two sisters and her two brothers were among the estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly relocated during World War II to internment camps, mostly in Western states. Mr. Emoto lost his trucks, his equipment and his land.During her incarceration at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, Nobuko wrote a newsletter about goings-on at the camp.She and her family were released in 1945, and she finished high school. She soon married Masao Narita, with whom she would have seven children. She entered Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania in 1948 and studied theater there, but left after one year.After Ms. Narita and her husband divorced in the mid-1950s, she worked in various jobs in the Long Beach, Calif., area. Looking for a better career opportunity, she left for New York City in 1969, taking a job with the International Council of Shopping Centers.Soon after her move, she was walking in Central Park when she heard jazz being played. One of the musicians, the bassist Gene Taylor, urged her to volunteer for the renowned jazz ministry at St. Peter’s Church, on Lexington Avenue near East 54th Street. (In later years the church would be the site of her annual birthday party, which featured live jazz.)In 1972, Ms. Narita was hired as the executive director of Collective Black Artists, a repertory orchestra and support group for needy musicians. But after two and a half years, after raising more than $100,000 for the organization’s projects, she was fired — because, she said, she was not Black.“They really thought a male Black person should be in that job; it just looked better than an Asian woman,” she was quoted as saying in a profile of her on the Library of Congress website.She recovered from that setback by studying corporate organization on a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That program built her skills in time to start the Universal Jazz Coalition.In addition to her son Robert, Ms. Narita is survived by her daughters, Susan Narita-Law and Judith, Charlene, Jude, Lisa and Patricia Narita; another son, Richard; 13 grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and a sister, Therese Nakagawa.Ms. Narita said that one of her lasting goals was to help lesser-known women and budding young artists build jazz careers.“There were a thousand struggling musicians who never got concerts or promotional help so they could build their own names,” she told The Daily News in 1982. “All these young people who seem to have come to a stopping point after going to school: Where do they play?” More

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      Robert H. Precht, Producer of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ Dies at 93

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      Among the highlights of his long tenure were supervising the Beatles’ appearances and telling the comedian Jackie Mason he was fired.Robert H. Precht, who for more than a decade produced “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Sunday night variety extravaganza that for 23 years brought singers, comedians, rock bands, jugglers, animal acts and the Italian mouse puppet Topo Gigio into the living rooms of millions of viewers, died on Nov. 26 at his home in Missoula, Mont. He was 93.His death was confirmed by his daughter Margo Precht Speciale, the producer of a forthcoming documentary about Mr. Sullivan.Mr. Precht joined the Sullivan show as its associate producer in 1958, 10 years after the program made its debut as “The Toast of the Town.” He became producer two years later, replacing Marlo Lewis, and was eventually named executive producer.Mr. Precht arrived too late for Elvis Presley’s electrifying appearances in 1956 and 1957. But he was in charge when the Beatles performed on the show in 1964, first in New York and then in Florida. And when the Beatles performed at Shea Stadium in Queens in August 1965, Mr. Precht filmed the concert for a documentary for Mr. Sullivan’s production company.“This is probably the most fantastic television operation I’ve gotten into,” he told The Daily News of New York a day before the concert. “We’ll have 11 cameras in the ballpark, but there’ll be no chance for rehearsal or for checking our sound system. And with 55,000 people liable to do anything, we don’t know what will happen.”Mr. Precht and Ed Sullivan at Shea Stadium in Queens in August 1965, when the Beatles performed there for 55,000 fans. Mr. Precht filmed the concert for a documentary for Mr. Sullivan’s production company.George E. Joseph/MPTV imagesThe Beatles were the most important act on the Sullivan show during Mr. Precht’s tenure. But as the producer, he knew that he could not rely on the rare megastar to fill an hour every week, and that he had to cast widely for talent, famous and obscure, to keep the masses watching.“It would be easy to book the show without ever leaving the office,” he wrote in an article for The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, N.Y., in 1961. But, he said, members of his staff saw every Broadway show and went to nightclubs, concerts and films in search of acts to book.“Because there’s no type of act we won’t use,” Mr. Precht added, “there’s no place we won’t scout for talent.”In 1964, Mr. Sullivan accused the comedian Jackie Mason of making an obscene gesture on camera during his monologue. Mr. Mason said he was reacting to Mr. Sullivan, who was standing out of camera range holding up two fingers and then one to indicate how many minutes were left for his routine. Upset, Mr. Mason held up his own fingers and told the audience, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”Mr. Sulivan was convinced that one of those gestures was obscene. He canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show, $45,000 contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Precht confronted Mr. Mason as he left the stage to tell him that he was fired.Mr. Mason sued Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Precht for $3 million in damages in New York State Supreme Court; an appellate judge ruled that Mr. Mason’s gestures had not been obscene. In 1966, Mr. Mason returned as a guest.Mr. Precht recognized that “The Ed Sullivan Show” stood out among all the other variety shows on television.“I don’t know if another variety show will ever have the appeal and impact of the Sullivan show,” he told The Missoulian, a newspaper in Missoula, in 1990, almost two decades after the show had left the air. “It’s hard for me to think of someone dying to get home on a Sunday night to watch a variety show.”Robert Henry Precht Jr. was born on May 12, 1930, in Douglas, Ariz., and moved with his parents to San Diego when he was about 12. His father was an ironworker. His mother, Agnes (Branagh) Precht, was a homemaker and a Red Cross volunteer.Mr. Precht made news in 1949 when, as a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles, he was voted a “great lover” by his fellow students, which earned him the right to escort Elizabeth Taylor to the school’s junior prom. It was part of the promotion for the Bob Hope film “The Great Lover.”When he was a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Precht won a contest whose prize was the chance to escort Elizabeth Taylor to the junior prom.Harold P. Matosian/Associated PressAfter transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Precht received a bachelor’s degree in international relations in 1952. That same year, he married Elizabeth Sullivan, known as Betty. She died in 2014.He spent four years in the Navy after graduating and then began working in television — first as an assistant producer of the children’s show “Winky Dink and You” and then as an associate producer of “The Verdict Is Yours,” which presented dramatized versions of real trials.In 1959, shortly after he began working for his father-in-law, Mr. Precht produced “Ed Sullivan’s Invitation to Moscow,” a special that brought the Sunday night vaudeville formula to the Soviet Union. That program, which coincided with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, won a Peabody Award.Andrew Solt, whose company, Sofa Entertainment, acquired the Sullivan archive, containing more than 1,000 hours of programming, from the family in 1990, said that Mr. Precht had modernized the show.“He brought the perspective of a new generation; he focused on the music, and the bookings were top notch,” Mr. Solt said in a phone interview. “One of the reasons it was so easy to watch was that they never had the same set twice. He made it state of the art.”A Sullivan family portrait from 1954. From left: Sylvia and Ed Sullivan and Betty and Robert Precht, with their son Robert.CBS, via Getty Images“The Ed Sullivan Show” was canceled in 1971. Mr. Precht spent the next 20 years largely producing music and awards shows, including the 50th- and 60th-anniversary celebrations of the Grand Ole Opry and the annual Country Music Association Awards.He had begun buying cable television systems with Mr. Sullivan in 1967. After Mr. Sullivan’s death in 1974, he also began to acquire TV stations.In addition to his daughter Ms. Speciale, Mr. Precht is survived by another daughter, Carla Precht; two sons, Robert and Vincent; and six grandchildren. His son Andrew died in 1995.The success of the Beatles and other rock groups on the Sullivan show created a problem for Mr. Precht, The New York Times reported in late 1964: too many screaming teenagers in the audience, who created “an hourlong din that distracts other performers and mars the audio portion of the show.”In one instance, the comedian Alan King appeared to be annoyed during his routine by the screeching that carried over from a performance by the Dave Clark Five.Mr. Precht told The Times that the “whole show is being colored by the kids’ reaction,” and that he was trying to find out how so many teenagers got tickets to the theater. One measure to change the audio mix, he said, was to “turn down the microphones that pick up audience reaction in order to reduce the din going out on the air.” More

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      Myles Goodwyn, Singer-Songwriter of April Wine, Dies at 75

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      Mr. Goodwyn sang and played guitar for April Wine, an arena rock band in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.Myles Goodwyn, a singer, songwriter and guitarist for the Canadian classic rock group April Wine, died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Sunday. He was 75.His death was announced on social media by Eric Alper, his publicist, who did not provide a cause.Mr. Goodwyn was “suffering from a lot of health issues,” said Mr. Alder, who did not provide further details. Mr. Goodwyn had been public about his struggle with diabetes. In 2008, he was hospitalized after he collapsed en route to a Quebec airport on his way to play a sold-out show.Mr. Goodwyn announced in December 2022 that he was retiring from touring with April Wine. He performed his last show in Truro, Nova Scotia, in March.April Wine, arena rockers known for their power ballads, sold over 10 million records worldwide and in 2010 were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. In September, the band was given a spot on the Canadian Walk of Fame, and Mr. Goodwyn was named to the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.April Wine formed in late 1969 in Waverley, Nova Scotia, with Mr. Goodwyn, the brothers David Henman on guitar and Ritchie Henman on drums, and Jimmy Henman, their cousin, on bass. Not long after forming they moved to Montreal.“Fast Train” was the band’s first hit, from its self-titled debut album in 1971. Success in the United States took longer: In 1978, it scored its first American Top 40 hit, “Roller.” In 1981, the album “The Nature of the Beast” went platinum and gave the band its biggest U.S. hit, “Just Between You and Me.”The band attracted attention in 1977 when it was performing at the El Mocambo Club in Toronto. Before the show, April Wine was asked to pose as the headliner for a charity event with a group called the Cockroaches as the opening act, but the Cockroaches turned out to be the Rolling Stones.In 2016, Mr. Goodwyn released a memoir, “Just Between You and Me,” which became a best seller in Canada. “Elvis and Tiger,” his novel, was published in 2018.Mr. Goodwyn was born in Woodstock, New Brunswick, on June 23, 1948. He is survived by his wife, Kim Goodwyn, and their two children, as well as another child from a previous marriage. More

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      Geordie Walker, Guitarist for Killing Joke, Dies at 64

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      He helped define the look as well as the sound of the enduring British post-punk band, which influenced Nirvana, Metallica and others.Geordie Walker, the founding guitarist of the British post-punk band Killing Joke, whose haunting, muscular riffs proved an inspiration to platinum-selling bands including Nirvana and Metallica, died on Sunday in Prague. He was 64.The cause was a stroke, according to a statement the band posted on social media.With his icy good looks, rockabilly-esque pompadour and vintage gold-top Gibson guitar, Mr. Walker helped define the look as well as the sound of Killing Joke during its peak in the 1980s and ’90s.“No man was cooler than Geordie, one of the very best and most influential guitarists ever,” Youth, the band’s original bassist, wrote in a recent Instagram post. “He was like Lee Van Cleef meets Terry-Thomas via Noël Coward.”Mr. Walker’s driving, multilayered fretwork helped propel the dark though often danceable sound of a band that helped pioneer industrial music by blending heavy metal intensity, new wave hooks and a punk taste for provocation. The cover of the band’s 1992 compilation album, “Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!,” for example featured a clergyman exchanging salutes with Nazi brownshirts.Despite its uncompromising approach, the band released five singles that reached the Top 40 in Britain — “Love Like Blood” was their highest charting, reaching No. 16 in 1985 — as well as six Top 40 albums.Killing Joke never found comparable commercial success in the United States, although its 1984 single “Eighties” got plenty of play on alternative rock stations in that era. But the band — and Mr. Walker’s searing guitar work — earned the respect of many artists, including, according to Rolling Stone, Trent Reznor, My Bloody Valentine, Faith No More and LCD Soundsystem.Metallica put its own spin on Mr. Walker’s ferocious guitar work on its 1987 cover of Killing Joke’s 1980 song “The Wait.” More famously, or infamously, Nirvana — big fans of Killing Joke — relied on an ominous riff so eerily similar to Mr. Walker’s on “Eighties” for its landmark song “Come as You Are” that Killing Joke considered legal action.While the tension between the bands eventually subsided — Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman who had been Nirvana’s drummer, played drums on the band’s 2003 album, called simply “Killing Joke” — Mr. Walker was noticeably tart on the subject when interviewed by Guitarist magazine in 1994. “Kurt Cobain is a bloody good songwriter,” he said, “but a complete plagiarist.”“We are very pissed off about that, but it’s obvious to everyone,” Mr. Walker said. “It’s obvious to everyone. We had two separate musicologists’ reports saying it was; our publisher sent their publisher a letter saying it was, and they went, ‘Boo, never heard of ya!’ But the hysterical thing about Nirvana saying they had never heard of us was that they had already sent us a Christmas card!”Mr. Walker performing with Killing Joke in 2015. Despite shifting lineups and multiple hiatuses, the band, formed in 1979, continued to record for nearly four decades.Lorne Thomson/Redferns, via Getty ImagesKevin Walker was born on Dec. 18, 1958, in County Durham, in the northeast of England, the only child of Ronald Walker, a woodworker, and Mary (Glen) Walker, a bookkeeper. He spent his early years in Chester-le-Street, a town near Newcastle, and acquired his nickname — a term referring to the people and accent of the Newcastle area — while attending Sir Herbert Leon Academy in Bletchley after the family moved to southeast England.Mr. Walker was an avid guitarist as a youth, but he had never played in a band until he moved to London in 1979 after graduation to study architecture. He answered an advertisement in Melody Maker, the influential British magazine, posted by the singer Jaz Coleman, who was looking to start a band with the drummer Paul Ferguson.“It looked rather serious, fanatical,” Mr. Walker said in a 1984 interview. “It clicked with me.” Killing Joke released its first EP, “Almost Red,” in December 1979.Despite shifting lineups and multiple hiatuses, Killing Joke continued to record for nearly four decades. During those breaks from the band in the 1990s, Mr. Walker formed the band Murder Inc. with Chris Connelly, the lead singer of Revolting Cocks, along with other members of Killing Joke but without Mr. Coleman, and the Damage Manual, featuring Mr. Connelly along with Martin Atkins and Jah Wobble from Public Image Ltd.At a party after a Killing Joke concert at Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit in 1989, Mr. Walker met Ginny Kiraly, a college student and model. The two married six months later. After the birth of their son, Atticus, in 1992, the family settled in suburban Detroit, where they stayed until the mid-2000s, when Mr. Walker returned to England to care for his ailing father and the couple split. They divorced in 2012.Mr. Walker is survived by his mother; his son; his partner, Alexandra Kocourkova; and their daughter, Isabella.Despite its British chart success, Killing Joke never reached the commercial pinnacle. But as Mr. Walker once put it in an interview with the music writer Andrew Perry, he was not sorry to have missed the perils of rock stardom.“If it had all gone according to plan,” he said, “we’d have all been dead by 1986.” More

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      John Nichols, Author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War,’ Dies at 83

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      After decamping from New York to New Mexico, he wrote what was, for a time, among the most widely read novels about Latinos.John Nichols, a New York City transplant to New Mexico whose exuberant novels, notably “The Milagro Beanfield War,” transformed him from an urban gringo into a local idol, died on Monday at his home in Taos. He was 83.The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Tania Harris.Imbued with a heady pedigree and a peripatetic upbringing, Mr. Nichols evolved instinctively from a cosmopolitan New Yorker and world traveler to a Western writer of the purple sage.He was best known for “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1974), a 445-page political allegory that tells the story of farmers in the fictional town of Milagro Valley who are denied the right to irrigate their farms because water is being diverted to a huge development.“The Milagro Beanfield War” became a crowd pleaser on college campuses, was venerated in his adopted state, and for a while was considered among the most widely read novels about Latinos. In 1988 it was adapted into a film, directed by Robert Redford and starring Rubén Blades, Christopher Walken and Melanie Griffith.“A lot of his work might be characterized as a long slow-motion valentine to the mountains, mesas, high desert, sky and especially people of New Mexico,” said Stephen Hull, director of University of New Mexico Press, which published Mr. Nichols’s memoir “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer” last year.“He was a comic writer who used tropes of absurdism and excess to depict essential injustices,” Mr. Hull said in an email. “He was deeply affected by a period of time he spent in Guatemala in ‘64-’65, and by the poverty, authenticity, even nobility of his neighbors in northern New Mexico.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More