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    Jim Ladd, Free-Form Radio Trailblazer, Is Dead at 75

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    An institution of the airwaves in Los Angeles and beyond, he capitalized on the freedom the FM band offered in the 1970s to blaze his own path.Jim Ladd, a maverick Los Angeles disc jockey who helped pioneer free-form FM radio in the 1970s, and who went on to become a rock institution and an inspiration for Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ,” died on Dec. 17 at his home near Sacramento, Calif. He was 75.The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Helene Hodge Ladd, said.With his laid-back manner and his considerable equestrian skills, Mr. Ladd was known to longtime listeners as the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy, after a 1973 song by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. His expansive musical knowledge, saucy humor and outspoken political views made him a celebrity in rock circles — not only in Los Angeles, where he had storied runs at KLOS and KMET, but also nationally, thanks to his long-running hourlong syndicated series, “Innerview.”“Innerview,” which made its debut in 1974, featured interviews with countless rock luminaries, including the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Elton John. It was heard on some 160 stations around the country.The same class of rock deity could often be found lounging around Mr. Ladd’s treehouse-like home perched on the wooded hillsides of Laurel Canyon. His house drew friends like Stevie Nicks, George Harrison and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who featured Mr. Ladd on his second solo album, “Radio K.A.O.S.” (1987).More interested in challenging listeners with new sounds than spinning the same old chart-toppers, Mr. Ladd was well suited to the early days of free-form radio, which was made possible by a 1964 Federal Communications Commission rule preventing AM stations from repeating more than 50 percent of their formats on commonly owned FM stations in a single market.Mr. Ladd was said to be an inspiration for the Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio.This allowed countless D.J.s like Mr. Ladd, on stations around the country, to shatter the Top 40 format on FM and take control of their own programming in an era when experimentation in rock was ascendant and rock itself was hailed as a force for social change.“Free-form radio was an approach to the music, and the show itself, which resulted in a highly personal and completely spontaneous new art form,” he wrote in his 1991 memoir, “Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial.”“Most of us never thought of it as a job,” he wrote. “A job was something ‘straight people’ did to earn ulcers. For us, it was more of a calling. We were guerrilla fighters for a generation of creative explorers, inmates who took over the asylum for just one purpose — to play with the public address system.”Mr. Ladd got his first access to this public address system in the late 1960s at KNAC in Long Beach, Calif., where he challenged listeners’ ears by playing the latest underground tunes and challenged authorities with his political passions, for example by stacking songs like “Universal Soldier” by Donovan, “The Unknown Soldier” by the Doors and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die” by John Lennon as a musical protest against the Vietnam War.“The music at that time was filled with radical new ideas and a unique generational perspective,” Mr. Ladd wrote. “Alternative points of view not heard on the six o’clock news came through the music loud and clear. Songs about the peace movement, civil rights, Vietnam, drugs and the generation gap — and massive quantities of sex.”James William Ladd was born on Jan. 17, 1948, in Lynwood, Calif., the oldest of three children of Obie and Betty Ladd. His father was a bank loan manager who won three bronze stars as a medic in World War II; his mother was a banker.Mr. Ladd was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis family moved to Vacaville, Calif., near Sacramento, when he was a child. After graduating from Vacaville High School, he returned to Southern California to study at Long Beach City College before joining KNAC.Mr. Ladd spent the early 1970s at the powerhouse Los Angeles rock station KLOS before moving to a rival station, KMET, where he remained until 1987, when the station changed its format and began showcasing smooth jazz. In his book, he derided the new sound as “a computer-programmed Valium tablet, dentist-office music for yuppies.”Even as FM rock stations moved toward more rigid playlists in the 1980s, Mr. Ladd fought to maintain his independence, in both music and message, often running afoul of station management. With his outspoken ways, he was said to be an inspiration for the 2002 Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio that featured lyrics like “Well, the top brass don’t like him talking so much/And he won’t play what they say to play.”In the liner notes for the album of the same name, Mr. Petty thanked Mr. Ladd for “his inspiration and courage.” “Let’s say it may have been partially inspired by me,” Mr. Ladd said in a 2015 video interview.“I don’t want to say it’s about me,” he added, “but I am very, very honored, obviously.”Mr. Ladd made stops at multiple stations over the years. In 2011 he joined SiriusXM satellite radio, where he was a host on the Deep Tracks channel. He remained there until his death.In addition to his wife, Mr. Ladd is survived by a brother, Jon, and a sister, Veronna Ladd.In a 2000 interview with The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Ladd was back at KLOS, he broke out a handful of papers: the station’s playlist schedule, which mapped out the songs to be played over the course of the day — until his slot at 10 p.m., which remained blank. As in the old days, he could play what he chose. The only thing listeners could count on was Mr. Ladd serving up his trademark catchphrase, “Lord have mercy.”When asked why he was allowed to follow his own muse when other D.J.s at the station were not, Mr. Ladd responded, “Stubbornness, stupidity, doggedness.”The station’s program director, Rita Wilde, quoted in the article, offered a different take: “Not that many people, if you gave them the freedom, would know what to do with it.” More

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      ‘Immediate Family’ Review: Unpacking a Musical Kinship

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      The session musicians who helped create the soundtrack of 1970s pop step into the spotlight in the director Denny Tedesco’s documentary.“Immediate Family,” Denny Tedesco’s amiable documentary, could use a subtitle, as it’s not an intimate domestic portrait. It focuses on the currently touring rock band that comprises session players who defined the sound of American pop and rock in the 1970s, while for decades playing with the likes of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and more.Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members — the guitarists Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Postell; the bassist Leland Sklar; and the drummer Russ Kunkel — all relate their individual bios in relaxed, candid fashion. “Immediate Family” takes its time limning their skills and showing how they survived the 1980s, when session gigs became scarce. (Kortchmar’s remedy was to embrace new music technology and use it to boost Don Henley’s solo career after the Eagles disbanded.)Kortchmar’s playing is always in the service of the song and whatever depths that song is trying to plumb. Kunkel’s drumming is metronomically perfect, with powerful fills. Sklar’s sinuous bass playing reminds one of the influential jazz legend Steve Swallow, with a more pop sensibility. And Wachtel is a rhythm master with a bottomless bag of licks and leads. The chord structure of Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is elemental, but Wachtel’s practically nonstop nasty embellishments make lines like “He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim” really sing. Postell, a decade younger than Sklar, the most-senior bandmate, has a varied background that includes time with David Crosby, who appears here singing the praises of all of these musicians.Their stories are often funny, like one in which Wachtel recounts hammering out “Werewolves” all night with guest rhythm players Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, only to conclude that they had nailed the song on Take 2.Immediate FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The War on Disco’ Explores the Racial Backlash Against the Music

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      “The War on Disco,” a new PBS documentary, explores the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it.The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact the new “American Experience” documentary “The War on Disco” makes clearer than a twirling mirror ball.Premiering Monday on PBS, “The War on Disco” traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the ’70s, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression. Originating in gay dance clubs in the early ’70s and converted into a mainstream sensation largely through the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” disco engendered simmering resentment from white, blue-collar kids who weren’t cool enough to make it past the rope at Studio 54 and other clubs. The film details disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.“Saturday Night Fever” helped turn disco from a club phenomenon into a mainstream sensation.Alamy, via PBS“These liberation movements that started in the ’60s and early ’70s are really gaining momentum in the late ’70s,” Lisa Q. Wolfinger, who produced the film with Rushmore DeNooyer, said in a video call from her home in Maine. “So the backlash against disco feels like a backlash against the gay liberation movement and feminism, because that’s all wrapped up in disco.”When the Gay Activist Alliance began hosting feverish disco dances at an abandoned SoHo firehouse in 1971, routinely packing 1,500 people onto the dance floor, the atmosphere was sweaty and cathartic. As Alice Echols writes in her disco history book “Hot Stuff,” gay bars, most of them run by the mob, traditionally hadn’t allowed dancing of any kind. But change was in the air largely because of the ripple effect of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, when regulars at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the latest in a series of police raids. Soon discos were popping up throughout American cities, drawing throngs of revelers integrated across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.Some of disco’s hottest artists were Black women, including Gloria Gaynor and Linda Clifford (who is a commentator in the film). Many of the in-demand DJs, including Barry Lederer and Richie Rivera, were gay. In its heyday disco was the ultimate pop melting pot, open to anyone who wanted to move through the night to a pulsating, seemingly endless groove, and a source of liberation.“The club became this source of public intimacy, of sexual freedom, and disco was a genre that was deeply tied to the next set of freedom struggles that were concatenate with civil rights,” said Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University who is featured in the film, in a video interview. “It was both a sound and a sight that enabled those who were not recognized in the dominant culture to be able to see themselves and to derive pleasure, which is a huge trope in disco.”Studio 54 in 1978, as seen in “The War on Disco.” The club was famous for its glamorous clientele and restrictive door policy.Alamy, via PBSAll subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.The Disco Demolition Night promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park quickly spun out of control, with thousands of people storming the field.Chicago History Museum, via PBSThere were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it.”The culture, and its devotees, outlived the clichés. Disco is dead. Long live disco. More

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      Documentary on New York City’s 1970s Fiscal Crisis Wins Film Prize

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      A documentary about the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, co-directed by the son of one of its saviors, wins the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.On Oct. 29, 1975, Mike O’Neill, the editor of The Daily News, and Bill Brink, the managing editor, returned from lunch and asked whether President Gerald R. Ford, while addressing the National Press Club in Washington, had agreed to help New York City avoid bankruptcy.The editors were read the definitive sentence from Ford’s address: “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”As I recall — I was a reporter and editor at The Daily News at the time — Brink initially summed up the president’s rejection with what was sometimes quaintly described back then as a two-word barnyard epithet. Then they refined the hulking front page tabloid headline, a cri de coeur that encapsulated Washington’s response to the city’s plight and that would help cost Ford the presidential election the following year, ultimately becoming a metaphor for New York’s resilience: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”Those days of urban desolation, despair and painful recovery a half century ago are captured in the forthcoming documentary “Drop Dead City — New York on the Brink in 1975,” which on Monday was awarded the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.“Drop Dead City” was directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, a filmmaker and musician who had a unique perspective: It was Michael’s father, Felix G. Rohatyn, an investment banker, who was recruited in 1975 by the heroic Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York to help stave off the state’s municipal bankruptcy.Michael Rohatyn was only 12 when his father helped save the city. Perusing the old footage from that time and filming 200 additional hours, he said in an interview, “I was very moved to see his charm and his intellect right there on the surface. I think he would be really proud of the film. He might think there’s not enough of him in it, and he might be right.”Felix G. Rohatyn, who helped rescue New York City from insolvency in the 1970s, was the father of one of the filmmakers.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe prize, awarded by The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation, and funded by Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, includes a $200,000 grant for final production and distribution of the film, a sum that, the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns recalled, was more than the entire budget for his first film, on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.“Drop Dead City” serves as a vivid reminder for today’s negativists of how bad the bad old days were. The contrasting scenes are poignant: a theater poster for “Man of La Mancha” — the Impossible Dream — and streets clogged with cabs juxtaposed with the carcasses of burned-out buildings, abandoned skeletal public works, graffiti-shrouded subway cars, and mobs of justifiably choleric municipal workers whose promise of lifetime civil service job security was suddenly jeopardized. Its protagonists were mostly men with long sideburns in smoke-filled rooms, palpably fearful over the uncharted consequences if the city could no longer fool some of the people all of the time to pay its bills.Who would have first claim? The bondholders from whom the city had borrowed? Or the police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers and teachers on whom New Yorkers depended every day? Or the beneficiaries of public assistance who depended on the city?And who would bear the blame? Former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose worthies conceived of “moral obligation” bonds to enable more borrowing for good causes? Former Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who was re-elected in 1961 after granting the unions collective bargaining rights? His successor, John V. Lindsay, undone by the cost of good intentions? Or his successor, Abraham D. Beame, who had warned against fiscal gimmickry when he was the city’s comptroller but sanctioned it anyway by voting for the unbalanced budgets, only to find that the buck stopped with him when he was elected mayor?And who should bear the brunt of the sacrifice? Public officials had long maintained low mass transit fares, free tuition at City University and other services, and had granted organized labor generous benefits not only to get re-elected, but to preserve the city’s legacy as a global beacon of opportunity. Bankers should have known that the city was selling tax anticipation notes without having the slightest notion of how much tax revenue was anticipated, even as they reaped hefty commissions on each borrowing that sent the city deeper into debt.“They made the accounting sexy,” Burns said of the filmmakers. “They made the people who get dismissed human and dimensional. The headline became the haiku of the fiscal crisis.”Hundreds of films were submitted to the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to educate Americans about their history through documentaries. It winnowed the submissions to six and presented two to Burns and to Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The runner-up was “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” directed by Nicole London, which recounts the story of the jazz pianist and civil rights pioneer Hazel Scott, who went into exile during the Red Scare of the 1950s.The mid-1970s evoked by “Drop Dead City” are even more distant from today’s audiences than the ancient history of the 1929 stock market crash was from New Yorkers who lived through the city’s fiscal crisis. But, as Hayden explained, what gives the film vitality and relevance is that “it puts history at the forefront.”“Drop Dead City” deftly melds archival footage of frustrated and gravely conflicted negotiators, ordinary New Yorkers and aggrieved rank-and-file union members with candid reflections by the surviving protagonists. Unfortunately some, like former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, didn’t survive long enough to be interviewed on video. (Zuccotti died a day after the filmmakers spoke with him off-camera.)Viewers might also have welcomed more of Felix Rohatyn’s pithy observations. (He once likened default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen.”)The city came so close to default that a declaration was signed by Mayor Beame’s shaky hand, but never invoked; it later hung in the home office of the New York corporate lawyer Ira Millstein.Asked at the time, though, whether an agreement with the municipal unions and the State Legislature to fend off bankruptcy would survive, Felix Rohatyn replied: “I don’t give odds any more. I think it has to work.”But Rohatyn was aware of the costs, predicting that the sacrifices inflicted to satisfy the banks and the Ford administration would mean that even if New York survived, “this city will be a much lesser place.”Yost, the film’s co-director, explained why, even though New York remains very much alive, “Drop Dead City” is still very relevant.“Intellectually, it’s resonant at a time when we’re all at each other’s throats,” he said. “That was a moment when it could have gotten ugly and rude like New York, but seemingly irreconcilable things came together to keep the city from going over a cliff. To me that holds a lot of lessons for us today.” More

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      Gary Wright, Who Had a ’70s Hit With ‘Dream Weaver,’ Dies at 80

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      He was a pioneer in using synthesizers, and his friendship with George Harrison led to a spiritual awakening that also influenced another hit, “Love Is Alive.”Gary Wright, a spiritually minded singer-songwriter who helped modernize the sound of pop music with his pioneering use of synthesizers while crafting infectious and seemingly inescapable hits of the 1970s like “Dream Weaver” and “Love Is Alive,” died on Monday at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. He was 80.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, his son Justin said.The New Jersey-bred Mr. Wright rose to prominence in the late 1960s after relocating to London and helping to form the bluesy British progressive rock band Spooky Tooth.He soon befriended George Harrison, with whom he would collaborate frequently over the years, including playing keyboards on that former Beatle’s magnum opus triple album, “All Things Must Pass,” released in 1970.Their long friendship would have a lasting impact on both Mr. Wright’s life and his music. Mr. Harrison introduced him to Eastern mysticism, giving him a copy of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Paramahansa Yogananda, who helped popularize yoga and meditation in the United States, and Mr. Harrison traveled with him to India.Mr. Wright with George Harrison performing on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971. The two collaborated frequently over the years.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty Images“That was his life path after that,” Justin Wright said in a phone interview. “Deep down inside of him, he was searching for something, and this was the answer for him.”His spiritual awakening helped spawn “Dream Weaver,” a track from his 1975 album, “The Dream Weaver,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard album chart and rocketed him to fame. The song was inspired by the yogi’s poem “God, God, God,” which includes the line “My mind weaves dreams.”Mr. Wright begins the song with the lyrics “I’ve just closed my eyes again/Climbed aboard the dream weaver train/Driver take away my worries of today/And leave tomorrow behind.”The “Dream Weaver” single, swept along by a wave of lush electronica that bordered on the interstellar, soared to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1976. The song became a soft-rock touchstone, appearing in such movies as “Wayne’s World” (1992) and “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996), as well as on a 2010 episode (called “Dream On”) of the musical comedy-drama television series “Glee.”It was not the only smash hit from that album. That July “Love Is Alive,” like “Dream Weaver,” rose to No. 2 conjuring the languid sexuality of the waterbed era. Mr. Wright performed at stadium shows on the same bill as heavyweights like Peter Frampton and Yes, standing out among the guitar gods with his strap-on keyboard, known as a keytar.While his biggest hits became emblematic sounds of the 1970s, Mr. Wright had taken an unconventional musical approach on the album “The Dream Weaver”: He relied almost entirely on keyboard instruments, including a Minimoog synthesizer, as opposed to guitars, foreshadowing the synth-pop boom of the early ’80s.Mr. Wright playing his strap-on keyboard known as a keytar during a performance in 2001. Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty Images“The theme of having only keyboards, drums, voices — and no guitars — came accidentally,” Mr. Wright said in a 2010 interview with Musoscribe, a music website. When he went back and listened to the demos he had recorded, he said, “I thought, ‘Wow. This sounds good. It doesn’t really need guitars.’”Gary Malcolm Wright was born on April 26, 1943, in Cresskill, in northeast New Jersey. He was the middle of three children of Lou Wright, a structural engineer, and Anne (Belvedere) Wright.His mother helped instill in him an interest in music and acting, driving him to piano lessons and eventually to auditions. Their efforts paid off when he made an appearance on the seminal science fiction TV series “Captain Video and His Video Rangers” and later won a role in the 1954 Broadway musical “Fanny,” starring Florence Henderson.“I originally came into the play as an understudy to the main role, and then I picked up the main child role,” Mr. Wright said in a 2014 interview with Smashing Interviews magazine. “I was only 11 and 12 during those years. It was an amazing experience to act and sing every night before sold-out audiences and sing with a full orchestral band.”Within a few years, he abandoned the stage and screen “to be a normal kind of person in school, playing sports and Little League baseball and that kind of thing,” he told Smashing Interviews. While attending Tenafly High School, he played in various rock groups, including a duo called Gary and Billy with his school friend Bill Markle. Their single “Working After School” was played on the TV show “American Bandstand.”After high school, Mr. Wright attended William & Mary in Virginia for a year before transferring to New York University, where he switched his focus to medicine. After graduating in 1965, he briefly enrolled in medical school before moving to Berlin to study psychology.Losing interest in a life in clinical practice, he went back to music, helping to form a band that built a following in Europe; at one point it opened for the rock group Traffic in Oslo. There he caught the attention of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Mr. Blackwell summoned him to England to join a band called Art, which evolved into Spooky Tooth.Mr. Wright, center, played the organ and sang with the progressive rock group Spooky Tooth in the 1960s. He was flanked by the lead guitarist Luther James Grosvener, left, and the singer and pianist Mike Harrison. Seated were the bassist Greg Ridley, left, and the drummer Mike Kellie. Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix, via Getty ImagesSpooky Tooth temporarily disbanded in 1970, and a year later Mr. Wright released his first solo album, “Footprint.” That album featured Mr. Harrison on guitar on the track “Two Faced Man,” which the two performed with Mr. Wright’s band Wonderwheel on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971.In addition to his son Justin, Mr. Wright is survived by his wife, Rose (Anthony) Wright; another son, Dorian; a sister, Lorna Lee; and two grandchildren. His marriages to Christina Uppstrom, the mother of his sons, and Dori Accordino ended in divorce.Along with his work with Mr. Harrison, Mr. Wright was a session keyboardist for Harry Nilsson, B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis, and he continued to record solo albums.In the Musoscribe interview, he discussed his 2010 release, “Connected,” and the album’s hook-laden opening track, “Satisfied,” in terms that could have applied to “Dream Weaver.”“The word ‘hook’ means drawing people into something,” he said. “When I write songs, I always try to make them that way — catchy — so that people will remember them. They’ll be more embedded in people’s consciousness.” More

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      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More

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      How Do You Tell the Story of 50 Years of Hip-Hop?

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      Hip-hop is a fount of constant innovation woven into nearly every corner of American life. So don’t look for cohesion: Lean into the cacophony.Sean “Puffy” Combs in a celebratory mood. In the mid-1990s, labels like Bad Boy helped bring rap to the center of American culture.Johnny Nunez/GettyHip-hop is a wondrous and centerless tangle, ubiquitous even if not always totally visible.It is a fount of constant innovation, and a historical text ripe for pilfering. It is a continuation of rock, soul and jazz traditions, while also explicitly loosening their cultural grip. It is evolving more rapidly than ever — new styles emerge yearly, or faster, multiplying the genre’s potential. And it has impact far beyond music: Hip-hop is woven into television and film, fashion, advertising, literature, politics and countless other corners of American life. It is lingua franca, impossible to avoid.It is far too vast to be contained under one tent, or limited to one narrative. The genre is gargantuan, nonlinear and unruly. It has its own internal quarrels and misunderstandings, and its stakeholders are sometimes friends and collaborators, and sometimes view each other warily.So when trying to catalog hip-hop in full, it’s only reasonable to lean into the cacophony. The package that accompanies this essay does just that, collecting oral histories from 50 genre titans of the past five-plus decades. The number matters. It’s an acknowledgment that at 50 years old — a mild fiction, but more on that later — hip-hop is broad and fruitful, enthralling and polyglot, the source of an endless fount of narratives. Its fullness cannot be captured without sprawl and ambition. Many voices need to be heard, and they won’t always agree.Side by side, there are stylistic innovators, crossover superstars, regional heroes, micromarket celebrities. There are those who insist on their primacy and see themselves as a center of gravity, and those who are proud students of the game and understand their place in hip-hop’s broader artistic arc. There are those who are universally recognized, and those known mainly by connoisseurs. There are agitators and accommodationists. The revered and the maligned. Some even play with the boundaries of what rapping is ordinarily considered to be.All taken together, these artists form a family tree of the genre, one that highlights bridges between groups that are typically discussed separately, and that underscores the ways in which rappers — no matter the city they hail from, or the era in which they found their success — have been grappling with similar circumstances, creative questions and obstacles.The Cold Crush Brothers in the Bronx, 1979. Joe Conzo, via Easy A.D.These 50 histories detail hip-hop from countless vantage points: the past forward, and vice versa; the underground upward; the less populated regions outward; the big cities out into the suburbs. They tell the story of a makeshift musical movement that laid the foundation for the defining cultural shift of the past few decades.Fifty years ago, though, that outcome seemed fanciful at best. In the 1970s, Bronx block parties gave way to nightclubs, and talking D.J.s laid the foundation for dedicated M.C.s to begin taking over. Soon, the intrusion of capitalism removed and packaged the part of these live events that was the easiest to transmit: rapping.Then it was off to the races. By the mid-1980s, the hip-hop industry was a small club but big business, as audiences around the country were primed by the commercial release of recordings from countless New York artists. A wave of soon-to-be-global stars arrived: Run-DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys. Hip-hop became worldwide counterculture.Run-DMC in 1985, onstage in Providence, R.I.John Nordell/Getty ImagesBy the dawn of the 1990s, it flowered everywhere in this country — the South, the West, the Midwest — and seeped into the global mainstream. In the mid-90s, thanks to the work of Biggie Smalls and Puffy, Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre, Bad Boy and Death Row, it became the center of American pop music, despite resistance from those convinced rock was destined to forever reign supreme.Into the 2000s, the genre’s power center shifted from the coasts to the South, where the genre was flourishing (largely away from the scrutiny of the major labels) in Miami, Houston, Virginia, Atlanta and Memphis. 2 Live Crew, the Geto Boys, Missy Elliott, Outkast, Three 6 Mafia — each had absorbed what was being imported from the rest of the country and created new lingo and sonic frameworks around it. Hip-hop was becoming a widely shared language with numerous dialects.T.I. onstage in his hometown, Atlanta, in 2005.Ray Tamarra/Getty ImagesAll the while, the genre was expanding, becoming more commercially successful and inescapable with each year. It became centrist pop, which in turn spun off its own dissidents: the New York and Los Angeles undergrounds of the 1990s; the progressive indie scenes of the 2000s; and the SoundCloud rap of the 2010s. In the past 20 years, hip-hop has been responsible not only for some of the biggest pop music of the era — Drake, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Cardi B — but its templates have become open source for performers in other genres to borrow from, which they did, and do, widely. Hip-hop became a crucial touch point for country music, for reggaeton, for hard rock, for K-pop and much more.What’s striking in the histories collected in this package is how no part of that ascent has been taken for granted. In every era, there were stumbling blocks. For each artist, there was a promise of a scene just out of reach. And for all of these rappers, that meant leaning in to a new idea of what their version of hip-hop could be, and hoping ears would meet them in this untested place.Missy Elliott performing in New York in 2012.Jerritt Clark/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesThere is also the matter of untold history — to read these recollections is to be continually reminded of those who are no longer here to share their tales. There is a punishing catalog of before-their-time deaths just below these stories, a reminder that canons can’t include songs that never got to be made.As for the 50th anniversary, well, it is a framing of convenience. The date refers to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc — in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx — reportedly first mixed two copies of the same album into one seamless breakbeat. That is, of course, one way to think about hip-hop’s big-bang moment, but by no means the only one. If you think of rapping as toasting, or talking over prerecorded music, or speaking in rhythmic form, then hip-hop has been around longer than 50 years. Just ask the Last Poets, or DJ Hollywood, who would improvise rhymes on the microphone as he was spinning disco records. There are also, depending upon whom you ask, others who had previously mixed two of the same record.Kanye West’s Saint Pablo tour opener in Indianapolis in 2016.AJ Mast for The New York TimesBut the canniness and the cynicism of attempting to enshrine a date that everyone can stand behind reflects a darker and more worrisome truth, which is that, for decades, hip-hop was perceived as disposable, a nuisance, an aberration. Commemoration and enshrinement seemed far-fetched. For a long time, hip-hop had to argue for its rightful place in pop music, and pop culture, facing hostilities that were racial, legal, musical and beyond.Insisting that the genre has an origin point, therefore, is really just another way of insisting on its importance, its stability and its future. You can quarrel with the specific details — and many do — but not with the intent, which is to ensure that no one again overlooks the genre’s power and influence.That said, hip-hop was never going anywhere, because no style of pop music has been as adaptive and as sly. Hip-hop directly answers its critics, and it voraciously consumes and reframes its antecedents. It is restless and immediate, sometimes changing so quickly that it doesn’t stop to document itself. So here is a landing place to reflect, and a jumping off point for the next 50 or so years. More

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      Fuzzy Haskins, Who Helped Turn Doo-Wop Into P-Funk, Dies at 81

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      As a teenager, he joined forces with George Clinton. Their vocal group, the Parliaments, morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, one of the wildest acts of the 1970s.Fuzzy Haskins, a foundational member of the vocal group that morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, the genre-blurring collective led by George Clinton that shook up the pop music world in the 1970s, died on March 16 in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. He was 81.His son Nowell Scott said the cause was health problems complicated by diabetes.Mr. Haskins, one of Parliament-Funkadelic’s vocalists and songwriters, was a distinctive presence onstage during the group’s propulsive performances, often wearing tight long johns and sometimes suggestively straddling the microphone.“Fuzzy was always able to capture your attention,” Mr. Scott said by email, “rhythmically gyrating the audience into a deeper consciousness where night after night they were forced to consider if they were really getting it on.”Mr. Haskins was living in Edison, N.J., and was in his last year of high school and singing in a vocal group when he met Mr. Clinton, who had a barbershop in nearby Plainfield and his own fledgling vocal group. Someone from Mr. Clinton’s group had left.“So they chose me out of my group to come and sing with them,” Mr. Haskins recalled in 2011 in a short biographical video. He joined up with Mr. Clinton, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas and Ray Davis, and, Mr. Haskins said, “the rest is history.”Parliament-Funkadelic in 1971. Mr. Haskins is at the far left; George Clinton is fifth from left, uncharacteristically in the background.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe group was called the Parliaments, named after a cigarette brand, Mr. Clinton said in his book “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” (2014).Mr. Clinton didn’t smoke, but, he wrote, “I thought cigarettes were cool as a symbol, a little dangerous, a little adult, and Parliament was a big brand, so we became the Parliaments.”The group worked a doo-wop sound at first.“Each of us had a distinctive style,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “sometimes in imitation of people who were famous then, sometimes in anticipation of people who would be famous later.”“Fuzzy,” he added, “who was second lead, was a soulful tenor with all the bluesy inflections, like Wilson Pickett, real rough.”The Parliaments had a Top 20 pop hit in 1967 with “(I Wanna) Testify.” Soon the group became simply Parliament and developed an alter ego, Funkadelic. Two different groups, they recorded for two different labels but drew on the same ever-growing collection of musicians. Parliament remained vocally oriented; Funkadelic borrowed from psychedelic rock and the funk sound of groups like Sly and the Family Stone.“White rock groups had done the blues, and we wanted to head back in the other direction,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “be a Black rock group playing the loudest, funkiest combination of psychedelic rock and thunderous R&B.”Mr. Haskins wrote the song “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing” for Funkadelic’s debut album, called simply “Funkadelic” and released in 1970. He joined Mr. Clinton in writing “My Automobile” for Parliament’s first album, “Osmium,” released the same year. He was one of four writers (including Mr. Clinton) of “Up for the Down Stroke,” the title song on Parliament’s second album, released in 1974. And he had a hand in other songs for both groups as they released records throughout the ’70s.The stage shows accompanying the album releases grew increasingly elaborate, culminating in the P-Funk Earth Tour, which began in 1976, continued for several years and featured an outer-space theme, including an onstage spaceship.But the original Parliaments were clashing with Mr. Clinton. Mr. Haskins, who had recorded a solo album in 1976, “A Whole Nother Thang,” left the group in 1977 along with Mr. Simon and Mr. Thomas. Under the name Funkadelic, the three released an album that same year, “Connections & Disconnections,” which included tracks openly criticizing Mr. Clinton.Mr. Haskins recorded a solo album in 1976, shortly before leaving Parliament-Funkadelic.Mr. Haskins released another solo album, “Radio Active,” in 1978.In the early 1990s, he, Mr. Simon, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Davis formed a group called Original P, whose repertoire was heavy on songs from the Parliament-Funkadelic catalog.“This act gives us the chance to perform these songs the way they were meant to be heard,” Mr. Haskins told Mountain Xpress, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, in 2000, “with solid arrangements and clear vocal harmonies. We were involved in the creation of these songs, and they are our children.”Whatever the disagreements were with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Haskins was among the 16 members who were honored in 1997 when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Parliament-Funkadelic, who were introduced at the ceremony by Prince.“Parliament and Funkadelic were the mind-blowing, soul-expanding musical equivalent of an acid trip,” the hall’s website says. “They grabbed the funk movement from James Brown and took off running.”Clarence Eugene Haskins was born on June 8, 1941, in Elkhorn, W.Va. His father, McKinley, was a coal miner, and his mother, Grace Bertha (Hairston) Haskins, was a homemaker.“I listened to country when I grew up,” Mr. Haskins said in the biographical video, since there was not much R&B or other Black music on West Virginia radio at the time.“We used to sing church music — hymns, gospel — at home,” he added. “We’d harmonize.”The family relocated to New Jersey when he was still a child. Before long he had met Mr. Clinton, and he was on his way.“The P-Funk sound is perhaps one of the most significant and impactful crossed-over ideas to ever manifest into a sound,” his son said by email, “and Fuzzy was always excited to be a part of that.”Mr. Haskins lived in Southfield, Mich. His marriages to Estelle James and Lorraine Dabney ended in divorce. In addition to his son, his survivors include two other children, Crystal White and Michelle Fields; a sister, Julia Drew; and 10 grandchildren. Two other children, Michael and Stephanie, died before him.Mr. Haskins was to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in May. More

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      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

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      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More