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    Brian McConnachie, Humor Writer ‘From Another Planet,’ Dies at 81

    A contributor to National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV,” he had a patrician presence that belied a whimsical and sometimes anarchic wit.Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”In addition to writing for National Lampoon, Mr. McConnachie appeared in its “1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” among other places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

    A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.Ben Levi Ross, left, as Ethan Dobson and Hannah Cruz as Robin Martinez in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Reggie Wells, Makeup Artist for Oprah Winfrey and Other Black Stars, Dies at 76

    At a time when cosmetic brands did not cater to Black women, Mr. Wells found a niche working with Black stars and models who had struggled to find makeup options for their skin tones.Reggie Wells, who parlayed a background in fine art into a trailblazing career as a makeup artist for Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and other Black celebrities, died on Monday in Baltimore. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his niece Kristina Conner, who did not specify a cause or say where he died.For Mr. Wells, every face was a canvas to explore. One of his most famous clients was Ms. Winfrey, for whom he worked as a personal makeup artist for more than 20 years at the height of her television career.“Reggie Wells was an artist who used his palette of talent to create beauty no matter the canvas,” Ms. Winfrey said in a statement. “He always made me feel beautiful. Ooo my, how we’d laugh and laugh during the process. He was an astute observer of human behavior and could see humor in the most unlikely experiences.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Jann Wenner Removed From Rock Hall Board After Times Interview

    The Rolling Stone co-founder’s exit comes a day after The New York Times published an interview in which he made widely criticized comments.Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.But the dismissal of Mr. Wenner comes after an interview with The Times, published Friday and timed to the publication of his new book, called “The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”Mr. Wenner’s comments drew an immediate reaction, with his quotes mocked on social media and past criticisms unearthed of Rolling Stone’s coverage of female artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagan, who in 2017 wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner, “Sticky Fingers,” cited a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in 1970 called the magazine “viciously anti-woman.”Mr. Wenner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.Mr. Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 with the music critic Ralph J. Gleason and made it the pre-eminent music magazine of its time, with deep coverage of rock music as well as politics and current events. Much of it was written by stars of the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Gleason died in 1975.Mr. Wenner sold the magazine over a series of transactions completed in 2020, and he officially left it in 2019. Last year, he published a memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.”Mr. Wenner was also part of a group of music and media executives that founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983, and inducted its first class in 1986; its affiliated museum, in Cleveland, opened in 1995. Mr. Wenner himself was inducted in 2004 as a nonperformer.The Rock Hall has been criticized for the relative few women and minority artists who have been inducted over the years. According to one scholar, by 2019 just 7.7 percent of the individuals in the hall were women. But some critics have applauded recent changes, and the newest class of inductees includes Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott, along with George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners. More

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    The Metropolitan Opera Guild Will Wind Down Amid Financial Woes

    The organization, founded in 1935 to support the opera house, will lay off 20 employees and stop publishing Opera News as a stand-alone monthly magazine.The Metropolitan Opera Guild, a nonprofit that supports the storied opera house and publishes the magazine Opera News, will wind down its operations and lay off its staff this fall in the face of financial troubles, the organization announced on Tuesday.The guild, which was founded by Eleanor Robson Belmont in 1935 to help the Met survive a funding shortfall caused by the Great Depression, has supported the company and its education programs ever since, bringing thousands of schoolchildren to dress rehearsals each year and working to promote interest in opera through the publication of Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music publications in the United States.Opera News will end its run as a stand-alone monthly magazine. The Met and the guild said it would continue in a different format, under new editorial direction, as part of a new section in Opera magazine, a British publication, focused on the United States that will bear the Opera News logo. The magazine will be sent to guild members and Opera News subscribers in the United States.Opera News, which became one of the leading classical music magazines in the United States, will cease publication as a stand-alone magazine. The British publication Opera magazine will increase its coverage of the Met and opera in the United States, and will be sent to Guild members and Opera News subscribers.Opera News“We greatly appreciate the valuable efforts of our employees over the years, but it is no longer economically viable for us to continue in our current form,” Winthrop Rutherfurd Jr., the Guild’s chairman, and Richard J. Miller Jr., its president, said in a statement.The guild will be reclassified as a supporting organization under the Met; it will no longer operate as an independent nonprofit. The guild said that it would provide severance to its 20 employees, and that it expects the Met to hire some of them. Its board members will be offered positions on the Met’s board.Under the guild’s membership program, patrons pay $85 or more per year for benefits including subscriptions to Opera News, access to dress rehearsals and advance ticket sales.The guild, like the broader opera industry, has faced serious financial pressures in recent years. It draws much of its revenue from its roughly 28,000 members. But contributions and grants have fallen in recent years: they totaled $8.1 million in 2021, compared with $9.1 million a decade earlier. And to some extent the Met and the guild found themselves competing for support from the same opera lovers.The Met, grappling with its own financial woes as it works to recover from the pandemic, said it would continue some of the guild’s offerings, including the program that brings schoolchildren into the opera house to watch dress rehearsals.Guild events including the annual Opera News awards and luncheons at the Waldorf Astoria, such as this one in 2006, will be discontinued. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesUnder Peter Gelb, who became the Met’s general manager in 2006, the company has expanded its oversight of the guild. Gelb said in an interview that the changes came after several months of discussions. He said the problems facing the guild reflected the “difficulties for nonprofit performing arts companies,” including the Met.“It’s the same pressure that, on a large scale, the Met feels,” he said. “We tried to find a way forward that would enable some of the programs of the guild to continue, even if the guild in its current structure would not continue.”The partnership with Opera magazine that will replace Opera News — which began publication in 1936 and has a circulation of about 43,000 — will start in December. The Met will not have editorial input but will provide a share of fees paid by guild members to help offset the magazine’s production costs, as it did with Opera News. Opera magazine named Rebecca Paller its U.S. editor; since 2003, Opera News has been led by F. Paul Driscoll.John Allison, the editor and publisher of Opera, vowed in a statement to preserve the “rich editorial history” of Opera News. He said in an interview that he hoped to engage former Opera News writers when possible.“Coverage of opera at the Met and throughout the United States will continue to be just as comprehensive as guild members and Opera News subscribers have grown accustomed to over the years,” he said.Opera fans reacted with concern to news of the guild’s demise on Tuesday, saying that it was another sign that the art form was struggling.Posy Ryan, a guild member, said that she was “very surprised and deeply saddened” by the changes, including the end of the stand-alone Opera News.“It’s an institution that will be missed,” she said. “For me, it was an introduction to so many young American singers. I’d see a feature, a review and then research them on YouTube. I’ll miss that.” More

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    Bill Zehme, Author With a Knack for Humanizing the Famous, Dies at 64

    A prolific biographer, he charmed his way into access to, and insights about, Frank Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, Johnny Carson and many others.Bill Zehme, whose biographies and magazine profiles humanized the celebrities he described as “intimate strangers” — the “shy, succinct” Johnny Carson; the “blank” Warren Beatty; Frank Sinatra, whose “battle cry” was “fun with everything, and I mean fun!” — died on Sunday in Chicago. He was 64.His partner, Jennifer Engstrom, said the cause was colorectal cancer.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.Mr. Zehme’s biography of Frank Sinatra, published in 1997, was a best seller, and he and Mr. Sinatra remained close.Mr. Zehme (pronounced ZAY-mee) conducted what is widely believed to have been the last major interview with Johnny Carson, whom he called “the great American Sphinx” and whom the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite called “the most durable performer in the whole history of television” when Mr. Carson retired in 1992 after some 4,500 episodes of “The Tonight Show.”Mr. Zehme’s “Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait” was published in 2007, but he never completed the full-fledged biography he had planned.The Chicago-born Mr. Zehme was often said to have cultivated recalcitrant sources with his Midwestern charm. His portraits were not hagiography, but neither were they tell-alls, and he remained close to some of the subjects he interviewed, including Mr. Sinatra and Mr. Hefner.“Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” David Hirshey, a former deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said by email. “What interested him was more subtle than that. Zehme looked for the quirks in behavior and speech that revealed a person’s character, and he had an uncanny ability to put his subjects at ease with a mixture of gentle playfulness and genuine empathy.”That’s why,” Mr. Hirshey continued, “Sharon Stone covered by nothing but a sheet allowed Bill to interview her while lying side by side as they enjoyed a couples massage.”Mr. Carson, Mr. Zehme wrote in an essay for PBS in conjunction with an “American Masters” documentary on him, “rose to reign iconic as the smooth midnight sentinel king whose political japes and cultural enthusiasms mightily swayed popular taste at whim or wink.” That wink, Mr. Zehme noted, transmitted “surefire stardom to aspiring personalities, especially comedians, and privileged co-conspiracy to regular viewers who became his spontaneous partners in sly mockery.”Andy Kaufman, Mr. Zehme wrote, was “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”Delacorte PressOf Mr. Beatty, Mr. Zehme wrote: “He speaks slowly, fearfully, cautiously, editing every syllable, slicing off personal color and spontaneous wit, steering away from opinion, introspection, humanness. He is mostly evasive. His pauses are elephantine. Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses. He works at this. Ultimately, he renders himself blank.“In ‘Dick Tracy,’ he battles a mysterious foe called the Blank. In life, he is the Blank doing battle with himself. It is a fascinating showdown, exhilarating to behold. To interview Warren Beatty is to want to kill him.”Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”He described the unorthodox and at times controversial comedian Andy Kaufman as “the pre-eminent put-on artist of his generation” and “a pioneering practitioner of various cultural trends long before they ever became trends.”William Christian Zehme was born on Oct. 28, 1958, the grandson of a Danish immigrant. His parents, Robert and Suzanne (Clemensen) Zehme, owned a flower shop in Flossmoor, a village south of Chicago and not far from South Holland, where Bill was raised.Mr. Zehme in 2017. “Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” a colleague said. “What interested him was more subtle than that.”Loyola University Chicago School of CommunicationHe graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1980 with a degree in journalism.One of his first books was “The Rolling Stone Book of Comedy” (1991). In 2004, he won a National Magazine Award for his profile of the newspaper columnist Bob Greene.In addition to Ms. Engstrom, Mr. Zehme is survived by Lucy Reeves, a daughter from his marriage to Tina Zimmel, which ended in divorce; and a sister, Betsy Archer.Mr. Zehme bridled at being identified as a celebrity biographer, although most of the people he profiled had been famous long before he wrote about them. They had not, however, seemed as familiar as next-door neighbors until Mr. Zehme wrote about them.“The celebrity profile is the bastard stepchild of journalism, and I’m embarrassed sometimes to be associated with it,” he told Chicago magazine in 1996.“The truth is, I have never written about a celebrity,” Mr. Zehme wrote in “Intimate Strangers.” “I have always written about humans, replete with human traits and foibles and issues, who also happen to be famous.” More

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    New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

    The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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    David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

    An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More