Nineteen Hundred Sixties

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    He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is.

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    In the summer of 1985, Ringo Starr’s friend and fellow drummer Max Weinberg flew to England for the former Beatle’s 45th birthday.Though the pair had become chummy since meeting five years earlier in Los Angeles, backstage at a concert Weinberg was playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Weinberg remained somewhat intimidated by his boyhood hero in the early stages of their friendship. (The ever-amicable Starr offered advice: “Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.”)While celebrating at Tittenhurst Park — the sprawling estate outside London that had previously belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Starr turned to his younger friend, then 34, and said something that remains an inside joke between them: “Well, Max, I’m going to be 45. Doesn’t that make you feel old?”That line is classic Ringo — a dryly clever, double-take koan from rock ’n’ roll’s Yogi Berra, the man whose tossed off “Ringo-isms” became immortalized in Beatles song titles like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”Each year, Starr would update the line for Weinberg, until its recitation became something of an annual tradition. “I imagine if I was speaking to him on July 7,” Weinberg said in a phone interview, “him saying to me, ‘I’m 85.’ And it doesn’t sound so old anymore.”Ringo Starr will be the first Beatle to turn 85, and like his surviving bandmate Paul McCartney, he never retired. 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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      Lou Christie, ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’ Pop Crooner, Is Dead at 82

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      A late-1960s throwback to the days of clean-cut teen idols — he called himself “the missing link” — he rode his gymnastic vocal range to a string of hits.Lou Christie, who with his heartthrob persona and piercing falsetto rode high on the mid-1960s pop charts with hits like “Lightnin’ Strikes” and “Two Faces Have I,” while transcending teen-idol status by helping to write his own material, died on Wednesday at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 82.His family announced the death on social media, saying only that he died “after a brief illness.”With his perky doo-wop-inflected melodies and his gymnastic vocal range, Mr. Christie was at times compared to Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons. Like Mr. Valli, Mr. Christie hit his stride as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the other guitar groups of the British Invasion were starting to shatter the handsome-teen-crooner archetype personified by the likes of Fabian and Frankie Avalon.“They started disappearing,” Mr. Christie once said of such singers in an interview with the site Classic Bands. “It was so interesting that I kept going. I hit the end of that whole era.“I’ve always been between the cracks of rock ‘n’ roll, I felt. The missing link.”Mr. Christie in performance in 2013 in Collingswood, N.J. He continued to tour as an oldies act and release music on small labels long after his hitmaking days were over.via Getty ImagesEven in changing times, he held his own, thanks in part to the songs he wrote with his songwriting partner, Twyla Herbert, who was two decades his senior. The songs they created together had more emotional complexity than the standard odes to puppy love.While his debut album, released in 1963, failed to make a splash, two of the singles featured on that album climbed the charts. “The Gypsy Cried” reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. “Two Faces Have I,” a showcase for Mr. Christie’s signature falsetto, climbed to No. 6 a few months later.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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      James Lowe, Rock Outsider With the Electric Prunes, Dies at 82

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      His band’s output ranged from the 1966 psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” to what he called a “Catholic Mass done in rock veneer.”James Lowe, the frontman of the 1960s rock band the Electric Prunes, whose “free-form garage-rock” approach, as he called it, yielded the swirling psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died on May 22 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Lisa Lowe said he died in a hospital of cardiac arrest.The Electric Prunes arrived on the rock scene with a jolt: a menacing electric buzz that sounded like an oncoming swarm of deadly hornets.The sound, which opened “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” was the result of a playback error on a tape of the guitarist Ken Williams noodling with a fuzz box and a guitar tremolo bar. It was so raw and powerful that Mr. Lowe argued to keep it. The track would come to be hailed as a cornerstone of garage psychedelia.With its trippy title and astral sound, “Too Much to Dream” was widely interpreted as a drug song, but its lyrics actually detailed the woe of an abandoned lover. Then again, the Electric Prunes, who swung from paisley pop to proto-punk to, yes, religious hymns sung in Latin, were always difficult to pin down.“We were always outsiders,” Mr. Lowe recalled in a 2007 interview with Mojo, the British rock magazine. “We weren’t hip enough to be crazy, drugged-out characters.” In addition, he said: “The music was too eclectic. It sounds like 10 different bands on those records.”Despite its maximalist sensibility, the band, which emerged from the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, scored two early hits.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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      Brian Wilson Wrote the California Dream, but He Didn’t Live It

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      An artist nearly synonymous with Los Angeles made his name crafting songs playing up his home state’s beachy vibes. His inner life, however, was anything but sunny.Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.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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      Brian Wilson and Sly Stone: Pop World Builders Dogged by Darkness

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      Two of music’s powerful visionaries died this week. The songs they meticulously constructed offered an escape their makers struggled to realize in their own lives.In a cruel coincidence, this week has brought the deaths of two pop world builders at 82: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. Both were exemplars of 1960s California, with Sly & the Family Stone representing psychedelic San Francisco as a diverse, utopian commune and Wilson’s Beach Boys (with members of his own family) bringing the world a Southern California teen mythos of sun, surf, girls, cars, dancing and romance.As producers and songwriters, both were architects of joy. They devised irresistible pop hits that were ingenious, eclectic and full of vital details. Those studio masterpieces were beautiful, indelible artifacts. But the humans behind them led troubled lives.Wilson had barely reached his 20s when he emerged as the Beach Boys’ songwriter and producer, commandeering not only his band members but seasoned studio musicians to execute his pop innovations; the pros took him seriously. At first Wilson latched onto a sport he didn’t participate in — surfing — as a peg for his increasingly sophisticated musical constructions. But he quickly outgrew the connection — and bade it a cosmic farewell in “Surf’s Up,” with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, in 1966.Wilson’s early songs lifted guitar licks from Chuck Berry, but they also reveled in vocal harmonies derived from both doo-wop, with its basic chords and its rhythmic nonsense syllables, and from the Four Freshmen, who sang intricate arrangements with chromatic jazz chords. With “I Get Around,” in 1964, Wilson cut loose with multiple key changes, a cappella sections, sudden instrumental interjections and exultant falsetto wails; it was a No. 1 hit. His innovative side had paid off.In 1965, Wilson decided to stop touring with the Beach Boys in order to concentrate on songwriting and studio recording — an unconventional but brilliant choice, one he had foreshadowed with a song from 1963, “In My Room.” It’s an introvert’s confession, closely harmonized by Wilson with the Beach Boys, savoring the sanctuary where he can “lock out all my worries and my fears.”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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      Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82

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      Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82. The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his representatives.“Sly was a monumental figure, a groundbreaking innovator, and a true pioneer who redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” the statement said.As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.The band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”Mr. Stone, second from left, with the other members of Sly and the Family Stone in 1970.GAB Archive/RedfernsWe 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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      Masahiro Shinoda, Leading Light of Japan’s New Wave Cinema, Dies at 94

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      His films tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics. But unlike his peers, he did not shun tradition.Masahiro Shinoda, a leading director of the postwar Japanese New Wave whose films, notably “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide,” fused pictorial beauty and fetishistic violence, died on March 25. He was 94.His production company, Hyogensha, said in a statement that the cause was pneumonia. It did not say where he died.In the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese New Wave cinema, like its French predecessor, tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics, with a tinge of nihilism. But unlike his peers, Mr. Shinoda refused to shun tradition. Instead, he used feudal-era theatrical forms like Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki to recount how cycles of violence have persisted since imperial Japan. His films were wrought with poetic imagery — hooded puppeteers, striking femmes fatales (including his wife, the actress Shima Iwashita) — but for all their sensuality, they espoused the idea that nothing really matters.“Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Mr. Shinoda said in an interview with Joan Mellen for her book “Voices From the Japanese Cinema” (1975), adding that “human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”From left, Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga and Takashi Fujiki in “Pale Flower” (1964), Mr. Shinoda’s best-known film.ShochikuWe 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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      Trumpeters. Friends. Rivals. 60 Years Ago, the Pair Made Jazz History.

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      “There was a bar right there,” a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, resident named James said in early March, pointing to the deli at 835 Nostrand Avenue, at the intersection with President Street. “Long time ago, though.”Sixty years ago, the Black social club that once occupied that corner hosted a jazz concert that is so storied, it has a title: the Night of the Cookers. Of the dozens of performances that the trumpet star Freddie Hubbard led in the mid-1960s, his two nights at La Marchal on April 9 and 10 featuring his friend and chief rival, Lee Morgan, are heralded as arguably the most celebrated jazz gig in the borough’s history.“That was one of the records that made me say, ‘You gotta go find your own thing,’” the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard said in a phone interview, referring to the recordings from the gig that were first released on LP in 1966. “They both had great sounds on their instruments, but they were very different.”The Night of the Cookers was a night of tension. Hubbard and Morgan, both born in 1938, were the hottest trumpet players in the business as they turned 27, though each was at his own crossroads. Hubbard, always ambitious, was securing his future as a bandleader; Morgan was struggling with addiction while watching the improbable rise of his hit record, “The Sidewinder,” on the pop charts.An engineer named Orville O’Brien was rolling tape as the bandstand filled with heavyweights including James Spaulding on alto saxophone and flute, the pianist Harold Mabern Jr., the bassist Larry Ridley, the drummer Pete LaRoca and another special guest, Big Black, on congas. Well-dressed Brooklynites, including musicians like the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, filled the spot to capacity. A crowd of standees hovered near the bar.“When anybody mentions Night of the Cookers, I can see it as if I was there again,” said the trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who sat in the front row both nights. “I was at their feet, looking up at Freddie and Lee, and I was screaming and yelling. When I hear that record, I can hear my voice.”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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      Herb Greene, Who Photographed the Grateful Dead and Other 1960s Rock Acts, Dies at 82

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      Herb Greene, whose evocative portraits of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and others helped define the rock scene that emerged in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, died on March 3 at his home in Maynard, Mass. He was 82.His wife, Ilze Greene, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Greene pursued music portraiture in his spare time while working for about a dozen years in the 1960s and ’70s, as a fashion photographer for the Joseph Magnin department store and the men’s wear retailer Cable Car Clothiers.Instead of photographing concerts, which did not interest him, he invited bands and musicians to various studios in San Francisco, including one he had on Front Street, and to his apartment, where some of them stood in front of a dining room wall filled with hieroglyphics drawn by a roommate with knowledge of Egyptology.His pictures of the Dead, a favorite subject, include Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader, in a vest and tie, playing a banjo while seated on a stool, with a wall-sized American flag behind him; Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen, striking a threatening pose in front of Mr. Garcia; and the band on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the hippie counterculture.Mr. Greene’s many pictures of the Grateful Dead, a favorite subject, include a well-known one of Jerry Garcia against a wall-sized American flag.Herb Greene, via Greene familyHe also photographed Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen.Herb Greene, via Greene familyMr. Greene photographed the Grateful Dead (from left, Mr. Garcia, Mr. McKernan, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann) on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the counterculture.Herb Greene, via Greene familyWe 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