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      How Cold War Politics Destroyed the Band Blood, Sweat & Tears

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      A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.“This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.”It is largely forgotten just how big Blood, Sweat & Tears was in its day. “Child Is Father to the Man,” the band’s 1968 debut, drew critical notice for its blend of big-band horns with rock and soul structure and style, but struggled commercially. After the group recruited the stentorian Toronto vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, its self-titled second album exploded, generating three Top 5 singles: “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.”The band performed at Woodstock (though, like many of the bigger groups on the bill, its management refused participation in the movie that made the festival a legend), and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” won the album of the year Grammy over the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Johnny Cash at San Quentin.”But in 1969, Blood, Sweat & Tears had to cancel a concert in Maryland when Clayton-Thomas was detained by Canadian immigration authorities; the United States had blocked his re-entry. No explanation was given, but the band assumed it was politically motivated.“I thought that because he’s Canadian, and we were — not collectively, but individually — speaking against the war,” the drummer Bobby Colomby said by phone, “some ultra-white congressmen probably said, ‘Who the hell does this Canadian guy think he is?’”The band’s manager, Larry Goldblatt, met with officials to resolve his singer’s visa status, and what happened next remains unclear — whether he or the State Department came up with the idea of having Blood, Sweat & Tears tour Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia as a way to promote democracy in Soviet-aligned countries that were potentially exploring closer ties to the West.“To use the language we use today, a quid pro quo was agreed upon,” Scheinfeld said. “If the band does this tour, the State Department will make David’s immigration problems go away. The band gets to keep their lead singer, and the State Department has the hottest band going working to advance their interests in Eastern Europe, so it’s kind of a win-win.”A planned movie of the tour fell apart as did a proposed TV special. The footage, smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, was found in a vault.AbramoramaClayton-Thomas noted that such cultural exchange tours had been happening for decades, so the band didn’t think it was a big deal. “Most of the guys were jazz musicians, and they were used to the idea that Louis Armstrong would go to Moscow, and they’d send the Bolshoi Ballet to Lincoln Center,” he said by phone. Only the guitarist Steve Katz voted against the trip.It was agreed that the tour would be filmed for a possible documentary, organized by the executive producer Mal Klein. Blood, Sweat & Tears played seven concerts between June 17 and July 7, 1970, and when they first arrived in Yugoslavia, they were surprised by what they saw.“The kids were wearing ripped jeans and they had cafes and rock ’n’ roll and street fairs,” Clayton-Thomas said. “We thought, ‘Wow, they’ve been lying to us — this ain’t so bad.’ Then we went to Romania, and you could hear the Iron Curtain slam shut behind you.”Dan Klein, Mal Klein’s then 14-year-old son, tagged along and described the whole thing as feeling “like a James Bond movie.” He said the officials in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania made no effort to disguise the bugs they placed in hotel rooms, and he recounted being observed during meals.“There was a man sitting at the table reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee,” Klein said by phone, “and after a while, he got up and left, and another person sat down at the same table and picked up the same newspaper and continued drinking the same cup of coffee.”But things turned from comedy to tragedy at the Bucharest concerts, where audience members got too rowdy and were beaten by security guards. The second night, the band members were instructed to dial things down, and when they didn’t, the guards set dogs loose on the crowd.“My father, in his naïveté, thought that if he got the camera people to film the policemen and the dogs attacking the spectators that it would make them stop,” Klein said. “But that was just stupid; that just made them angrier.” The crew had to smuggle its footage out of Romania, using blank reels of film as a decoy for officials to confiscate.Back in the United States, the musicians came under fire for aiding the government, accused of being a “fascist rock band” by both the underground press and mainstream journalists. The trouble immediately became evident at a hastily arranged, hostile Los Angeles news conference.“We came back saying, ‘Yeah, Nixon is awful, Vietnam is the worst thing in the world, but communism? You don’t want that here,’” Colomby said. “But back then, for the extreme left, that wasn’t acceptable to say.”Henry Kissinger even sent Richard M. Nixon a memo about the tour, and the president scrawled a note at the bottom inquiring how “youth leaders might get the message.” On July 25, the band played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies staged a protest, throwing horse manure onstage.The damage was simply too great. “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” which was actually released during the Eastern European tour, went to No. 1, but the group never had another hit single, and album sales plummeted. The strains of the tour and the backlash exacerbated tensions between band members, and by the end of 1971, four of the nine musicians — including Clayton-Thomas — had left the group.In its heyday, the band was among the biggest in the country, beating out the Beatles and Johnny Cash for the Grammy for album of the year.AbramoramaAs for the planned documentary, there was no formal directive, but Scheinfeld suspects that the footage, especially of the Romanian riots, was deemed too negative to help American efforts to thaw the Cold War. The feature film morphed into a proposed TV special, but that also seemed to go nowhere. What started as a win-win wound up being a disaster for all sides.And that was the end of the story, until Scheinfeld — whose film subjects have included John Lennon and Harry Nilsson — was introduced to Colomby, who had seen “Chasing Trane,” the director’s 2017 John Coltrane documentary. They got to talking, Scheinfeld learned about the 1970 tour debacle, and he set out on a coast-to-coast mission, combing through storage vaults and government facilities to locate the lost material.Scheinfeld determined that while 65 hours of film had been shot, both the production company and the postproduction house had gone out of business in 1971. After months of fruitless searching, an email showed up from a vault that Scheinfeld had already checked: Someone had found a reference to Blood, Sweat & Tears in a file, which turned out to be a pristine, 53-minute print of the abandoned television edit. That footage became the spine of “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”For Colomby, revisiting this pivotal chapter revealed much that he didn’t know, but he offered no apologies and no regrets for making the deal and taking the trip.“We were the most innocent musicians you ever met in your life,” he said. “We just wanted to play well and do something that would affect music in a positive way. So if you ask, ‘Would you do this again?’ In a heartbeat. It was fascinating. It was eye-opening in every sense of the word.” More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant” and was a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.”Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace.“Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed.The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats.He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.”In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Reveals Himself: As a Composer

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      After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music (while in a robot-style helmet), the French artist is releasing “Mythologies,” a score for traditional symphony orchestra.The most shocking part of “Mythologies,” a ballet that premiered last summer in Bordeaux, France, came after the dance was over. It was a seemingly normal moment: The composer of the music came out and took a bow.What was surprising was that his face and his wild halo of dark curls were showing. After spending more than 20 years in public behind shiny, opaque robot-style helmets as half of the pathbreaking dance-music duo Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter was ready to be seen without barriers.“There’s nothing sensational about it,” Bangalter, 48, said on a recent video call. “It’s down to earth, my relationship to physical appearance that I feel now.”“Mythologies,” Bangalter’s first major solo project since Daft Punk announced its dissolution in February 2021, is arriving on Friday as an album on Erato, the distinguished French classical label. Conceived in 2019, long before Daft Punk’s breakup, it is a 90-minute instrumental score for traditional symphony orchestra, with nary an electronic sound in the mix.“With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines,” the soft-spoken and thoughtful Bangalter said from his home in Paris. “So to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”“Mythologies” revels in the palpably human effects of an acoustic ensemble: the trembling friction of bows on strings; the exhalations of breath into brasses; the grumble of bassoon, with audible clicks of fingers on keys. The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesEven without the buffed, gleamingly artificial sheen and pumping tempos of Daft Punk’s trademark sound, much of the sprawling, 23-track new album does have the clean, poised formality and propulsive rhythmic regularity of Vivaldi and Bach — and of techno.“It was definitely a journey of learning and experimenting,” Bangalter said. “How to orchestrate, as well as the value of trial and error, and also exploring the ’70s or the ’80s. But not the 1970s or 1980s — the 1880s, or the 1780s.”The 1970s and ’80s are very much in the score, though, in the form of brooding, endlessly cycling small cells of material, like that in the work of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, both favorites of choreographers. Relentlessly repeating small cells of material is also the way many electronica songs, including Daft Punk’s, are built.No one will mistake “Mythologies” for Bangalter’s work with his longtime musical partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But this new project is as much a continuum with Daft Punk as it is a break or rejection. The duo’s “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack, from 2010, blended electronic sounds with a symphony orchestra (though, unlike “Mythologies,” Bangalter didn’t arrange those orchestrations himself).A sense of ambivalence about technology permeates the slouchy, melancholy mood of “Random Access Memories” (2013), the group’s last album, which was lauded for “restoring a human touch to dance music” and celebrating liveness over computerized composition. “Mythologies” is, in a sense, another step in that direction.“It’s a break of medium, but he’s the same person,” said Romain Dumas, who has conducted the work in its live performances and on the new album.A large-scale dance score is also a return of sorts to Bangalter’s youth in Paris, where he was surrounded by choreography, both classical and modern. His mother was a ballet dancer, and his father was a songwriter and producer; as a child, Bangalter took piano lessons from a member of the music staff of the Paris Opera.But from his late teens, he and Homem-Christo began to explore a style they thought of as retrofuturist, borrowing elements from the past — disco, ’80s electropop, R&B — to build an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism, touring with an enormous pyramid-shape stage set and taking on their robot personas in a spectacle simultaneously ironic and sincere. Thanks in large part to Daft Punk, dance music went fully mainstream.Daft Punk, Bangalter’s duo with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced its breakup in February 2021.Michael Falco for The New York TimesIt had been six years since the release of “Random Access Memories” when Bangalter was approached, in mid-2019, by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, who had used Daft Punk’s music in his work in the past.“At first, I was interested to mix electronic music and symphonic, like they did in ‘Tron,’” Preljocaj said. “But I think Thomas wanted to have a completely new experience. He proposed to me to write a completely orchestral score, and obviously I respected his desire.”Marc Minkowski, the renowned Baroque maestro who until last year directed the Opéra National de Bordeaux, where the ballet premiered, recalled: “Angelin said, ‘I have a friend who’s one of the Daft Punks.’ And they were so popular in France, it was like Abba. He told me that his friend was about to start composing, and wanted to do something completely different. And I said, ‘Wonderful.’ I love crossover; I’m a conductor, and my dream is to accompany Lady Gaga in musicals.”The ballet’s mythology theme and its music arose in tandem: Bangalter sought a kind of story scaffolding from Preljocaj to begin to structure his writing, and Bangalter’s initial sketches inspired in Preljocaj the idea of exploring a range of myths, rather than a single narrative.Bangalter read classic treatises on orchestration — the art of how to properly use the different instruments and balance them — by Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. To write the score, he not only abandoned the computer, but also the keyboard, at which he would compose during the Daft Punk years.“Right away, I said I’m going to write everything at the desk,” he recalled. “I don’t want to be limited, both harmonically and rhythmically, by my own limitations at the piano.”After so many years working with machines, “to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating,” Bangalter said.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesBut old habits died hard. “He was coming from an electronic world,” said Dumas, the conductor, “so some ideas were very odd and very difficult to do for humans. For example, in ‘Zeus,’ that’s one cell that’s repeating for like three or four minutes; that was very hard to do for an orchestra.”It’s a paradox: Bangalter clearly relished the human touch and immediacy of classical music, the sound of dozens of musicians playing together, unamplified, in Bordeaux’s 18th-century opera house. (Alain Lanceron, the head of Erato, said that Bangalter insisted on going back to the label’s original logo — “very, very classical and old-fashioned and traditional” — for the album cover.)But he also, just as clearly, missed the minute control he was used to — and the effects that only technology makes possible. When it came time for making tweaks, Dumas said, they weren’t big ones.“It was tiny elements that were changing: ‘We’re going to add a dot at this point, or change it to another dynamic and mix it with this little thing,’” he said. “As human interpreters, this kind of subtlety was kind of hard to do sometimes; it’s the kind of precision you can only have with machines.”Deep in the collaboration on “Mythologies” when Daft Punk’s split was announced, Preljocaj was surprised by the news. “I think these two guys are very, very demanding with themselves,” he said. “They are perfectionist, precise. I think they are not sure they will do something higher than the point where they were. I’m not sure of that, but it’s an intuition. And that shows the honesty of their work. They don’t want to produce something which is less than what they did.”Bangalter still shares a studio and equipment with Homem-Christo, who saw “Mythologies” in Bordeaux. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “So it’s behind me now, but I’m really happy about it. I’ve always liked the idea of adding facets and possibilities more than shutting down ideas. The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Those things might involve more film scores — he has collaborated several times with the director Gaspar Noé — as well as work that is released with greater frequency than the sometimes glacial expanses between Daft Punk albums.And “Mythologies” does not represent goodbye to electronics. “I feel I’ve learned some things in this process that I would be happy to integrate in my future creative projects,” he said. “But what has always driven me is to go in one direction and then to do the opposite.”There is one thing, though, that he has abandoned, irretrievably and happily.“My priorities in the world in 2023 are on the side of the humans, not the machines,” he said. “I have absolutely no desire or intentions to be a robot in 2023. There is absolutely not one reason I would want to be one.” More

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      Morgan Wallen Makes It Four Weeks at No. 1 With ‘One Thing at a Time’

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      The country superstar’s latest album easily held off new releases by Lana Del Rey and Jimin of the K-pop group BTS.Another week, another No. 1 for Morgan Wallen, the mullet-maned country superstar whose latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” notches a fourth time at the top despite competition from new releases by Lana Del Rey and Jimin of the K-pop giants BTS.In its latest week out, “One Thing at a Time” had the equivalent of 197,000 sales in the United States, including 236 million streams and 17,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release a month ago, the 36-song album has been streamed about 1.3 billion times in the United States.New releases take up the next three spots on the chart, though none was popular enough to present much of a challenge to Wallen.“Face,” a six-track, 20-minute release by Jimin, opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 164,000 sales, including 124,000 copies sold as a complete unit — it came out in a variety of collectible CD packages, which included one bonus song — and just shy of 20 million streams. Jimin is the third of BTS’s seven members — after RM and J-Hope — to put out a solo album since BTS announced a pause in full-group activities last year.Jimin’s song “Like Crazy” tops the latest Hot 100 singles chart, replacing Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers.” Its success was largely driven by sales, with five versions of Jimin’s single selling 254,000 copies as downloads and CD singles. (Billboard determines chart positions on the Hot 100 by looking at streams, sales and radio airplay.)Del Rey’s “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” starts at No. 3 on the album chart with the equivalent of 115,000 units, including 36 million streams and 58,500 copies sold as vinyl LPs. Another young country hitmaker, Luke Combs, opens at No. 4 with “Gettin’ Old,” which had the equivalent of 101,000 sales, including 85 million streams.SZA’s “SOS” falls two spots to No. 5 in its 16th week out, and “So Much (for) Stardust,” the eighth studio album by the rock band Fall Out Boy, opens at No. 6. More

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      Seymour Stein, Record Biz Giant Who Signed Madonna, Dies at 80

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      Steeped in music, he championed Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders and more on his Sire label, and helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.It was early 1957, and a nervous teenager named Seymour Steinbigle sat in a midtown office with his father and a hard-bitten record producer who was offering to mentor the young man in the ways of the music business.“Listen,” the producer, Syd Nathan, told the skeptical parent. “Your son has shellac in his veins,” referring to the brittle material used in 78 r.p.m. records.“If he can’t be in the music business, it’s going to ruin his life,” Mr. Nathan added. “He’ll wind up doing nothing and will have to deliver newspapers.”The pitch worked. Mr. Steinbigle agreed to let his son spend the next two summers in Cincinnati at Mr. Nathan’s company, King Records, home to R&B stars like James Brown and Little Willie John.The experience at King proved formative, and the young Steinbigle — better known as Seymour Stein, a name he took at Mr. Nathan’s suggestion — would become one of the music industry’s most successful and most colorful executives, signing Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Pretenders to his label Sire, and helping to found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.He also worked with the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T, Lou Reed, Seal, K.D. Lang and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in a career that stretched well over 50 years. Mr. Stein died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at age 80. The cause was cancer, his daughter Mandy said.Mr. Stein, left, with Hilly Kristal, owner of the club CBGB in Lower Manhattan, in the 1970s. Mr. Stein signed the punk rock group the Ramones after it made an appearance at the club in 1975. Joe StevensIn a business fixated on hits, Mr. Stein was a walking encyclopedia of 20th-century pop and more. He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.“He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.Even in the brusque world of old-school record executives, Mr. Stein could be startlingly impolitic. He sometimes told journalists — in jest, they hoped — that he would kill them if their work made him look bad. And while his memoir, “Siren Song: My Life in Music” (2018), written with Gareth Murphy, was filled with lighthearted anecdotes like the “shellac” scene with Syd Nathan, he also used the book to settle old scores with rivals like Mo Ostin (who died last year), the longtime, widely admired head of Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire.“Being liked was not my goal in life,” Mr. Stein wrote. “My business was turning great music into hit records.”Seymour Steinbigle was born on April 18, 1942, into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, David, worked in the garment business in Manhattan; his mother, Dora (Weisberg) Steinbigle, had worked in a family market in Coney Island from a young age.As a child, Seymour took comfort and pleasure in pop music — listening to it as well as learning every detail he could about it. At age 8, while tuning in his favorite radio show, “Make Believe Ballroom,” he noticed that Martin Block, the announcer, saluted Patti Page on her 13-week run at No. 1 with her song “Tennessee Waltz” — an early sign of Mr. Stein’s lifelong obsession with music charts.In his early teens, he showed up in the Manhattan offices of Billboard, the music industry trade publication, with a request. He wanted to copy, by hand, the magazine’s pop, country and Black music singles charts for every week going back to his birth. The editors agreed, and were amazed to see him follow through.“He would come in every day after class and work on this project,” Tom Noonan, the magazine’s former chart editor, later told Rolling Stone. “It took him two years.”After graduating from high school, Mr. Stein took a junior position at Billboard, where in 1958 he was part of the team that introduced the Hot 100, which remains the magazine’s flagship singles chart. In the early 1960s, he worked at King and Red Bird, a short-lived label founded with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; its first release, the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (1964), went to No. 1.Richard Gottehrer and Mr. Stein in 2010. The two went into business together in 1966 and named their company Sire, a blend of their first names.Chad Batka for The New York TimesIn 1966, Mr. Stein went into business with Richard Gottehrer, a young producer and songwriter who had established himself with hits like the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” (1963). Mixing up the first two letters of each man’s given name — S, E, R and I — they called their new company Sire.Mr. Stein developed a specialty of licensing British and European songs for American release. At first, New York cheesecakes helped open the necessary doors. According to Mr. Stein, he would board trans-Atlantic flights carrying a stack of cakes packed in dry ice and serve them to salivating record executives in London. “The more we delivered, the easier it was to walk out with bargains,” he wrote.Sire had its first hit in 1973 with “Hocus Pocus,” a yodeling rock novelty track by the Dutch band Focus. It went to No. 9 in the United States and, according to Mr. Stein, sold a million copies.Mr. Gottehrer left the label in 1975. One night that year, Mr. Stein’s wife, Linda Stein, came home from a downtown Manhattan dive raving about a new band. The bar was called CBGB and the group was the Ramones. Auditioning the band the next day, Mr. Stein was amazed if bemused by the band’s blistering take on 1960s bubble-gum rock; he later described the Ramones’ sound as the Beach Boys put through a meat grinder.“Ramones,” the band’s debut album, was released in 1976 and established punk rock’s blueprint of songs that were brutish and short, though with a tunefulness and winking humor that few could match. Still, Mr. Stein wrote in his memoir, “radio stations wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush.” It took 38 years for their first album to go gold.After the Ramones, Mr. Stein signed Talking Heads to Sire and soon also brought to the label Echo and the Bunnymen, the Pretenders and Soft Cell (“Tainted Love”). Sire had its first No. 1 hit in 1979 with “Pop Muzik” by M, a new wave touchstone.Mr. Stein in 2010. After taking an early interest in the music business, he went on to become one of its most successful and most colorful executives.Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Stein made his most successful signing while hospitalized for a heart condition in 1982. Madonna Ciccone, a young singer and dancer, was beginning to attract industry attention for a demo tape of a song she had written called “Everybody.” Fearing competition from other labels, Mr. Stein summoned her to his bedside at Lenox Hill Hospital.“Just tell me what I have to do to get a record deal in this town,” she said (using saltier language), according to Mr. Stein’s book.“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ve got a deal.”Mr. Stein signed Madonna to a $45,000 contract for three singles, with an option for an album, and Sire released “Everybody” that fall. Madonna went on to sell more than 64 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.“Words cannot describe how I felt at this moment after years of grinding and being broke and getting every door slammed in my face,” Madonna said of her signing in a post on Instagram after Mr. Stein’s death. (“I am weeping as I write this down,” she said.) “Not only did Seymour hear me,” she wrote, “but he Saw me and my Potential! For this I will be eternally grateful!”In 1983, Mr. Stein was part of a group of music and media executives who created the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, and in 2005 he was inducted into the hall as a nonperformer.In the 1980s, he coaxed new albums from aging rock legends. He signed Brian Wilson for his first solo album, and Lou Reed for “New York,” the 1989 album that reestablished Reed’s credentials as a cold-eyed commentator on urban life. In later years, Mr. Stein remained at Warner Music while the Sire imprint shuffled between divisions and was inactive for a time. He retired in 2018.In addition to his daughter Mandy, a filmmaker whose projects have included a documentary about CBGB, Mr. Stein is survived by a sister, Ann Wiederkehr, and three grandchildren. His marriage ended in divorce. Ms. Stein, his former wife, was a co-manager of the Ramones who became a successful real estate agent in New York. In 2007, she was killed by her assistant, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for second-degree murder. His daughter Samantha Jacobs died of brain cancer in 2013.In his memoir, Mr. Stein discussed his sexuality, including his attraction to men and the gay subculture that permeated the entertainment world, particularly in London. “I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo,” he wrote of his marriage to Linda, “even if the roles were a little confused.”Mr. Stein became a noted collector of art and antiques, which he often acquired while on scouting trips for new music. “The Siren,” a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse that Mr. Stein had owned for more than 30 years, was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2018 for about $5 million.But Mr. Stein always maintained that the business of music was his true calling.“When I first got hired at Billboard, I went home and told my mother. I said, ‘Ma, they actually pay me!’” Mr. Stein told Rolling Stone in 1986, the year that Madonna’s album “True Blue” went to No. 1.“I just love music and love this business,” he added. “And you know what? I still don’t believe I get paid for it.” More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Japanese Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers and a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band who scored films including “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant,” died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in January 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.” Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace. “Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed. The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats. He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.” In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      Chloë Tangles With Future, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bettye LaVette, Abra, Tyler, the Creator and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Chlöe and Future, ‘Cheatback’Chloe Bailey contemplates getting even for infidelity — “pulling a you on you” — in “Cheatback,” an almost-country ballad like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from her debut album, “In Pieces.” Backed at first by basic acoustic guitar chords, she thinks through the details. “Say I’m with my girls while he spendin’ the night,” she sings, and “I might make a video.” Future semi-apologizes — “Should’ve never let you down, feelin’ embarrassed/Temptation haunting me” — and asks her to “Make love, not revenge,” knowing he hasn’t lost her yet. JON PARELESGeorgia, ‘It’s Euphoric’“You don’t have to say nothing when you start to feel something,” the British pop musician Georgia sings on this dreamy, upbeat reverie, co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, which captures the buzz of new love. She settles for a simple, repeated refrain of “it’s euphoric,” giving that last word a prismatic luminosity. LINDSAY ZOLADZAbra, ‘FKA Mess’Save for recent, one-off collaborations with Bad Bunny and Playboi Carti, the self-proclaimed “darkwave duchess” Abra has been quiet since her head-turning 2016 EP “Princess.” The throbbing, six-minute “FKA Mess,” though, is a promising return to form: The bass-heavy track is murky and echoing but cut through with infectious melody and a kinetic beat. It sounds, in the best way possible, like a strobe-lit, after-dark dance party in an abandoned mall. ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Plan B’Bettye LaVette taps into deep blues and the anxiety of age in “Plan B,” a Randall Bramblett song from her coming album, “LaVette,” produced by the drummer and roots-rock expert Steve Jordan. “Plan B” is wrapped around a minor-key guitar riff and a production that harks back to both Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and, yes, Pink Floyd’s “Money.” LaVette, as always, is raspy and indomitable. Even as she sings “My mojo’s busted and I ain’t got a spare,” it’s clear she’s tough enough to keep going. PARELESKassa Overall featuring Nick Hakim and Theo Croker, ‘Make My Way Back Home’The drummer, singer and rapper Kassa Overall wishes for the “family that I never knew” and a place “where the love is real” in “Make My Way Back Home,” a dizzying jazz-hip-hop production that never finds a resting place. Multitracked trumpets, flutes, keyboards and voices cascade across the drummer’s light, ever-shifting beat, building chromatic harmonies that continually elude resolution — a structure of endless longing. PARELESTyler, the Creator, ‘Sorry Not Sorry’Repentance turns to belligerence in “Sorry Not Sorry,” a new song from “Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale,” the expanded version of Tyler, the Creator’s 2021 album. At first, over a sumptuous 1970s soul vamp (from “He Made You Mine” by Brighter Shade of Darkness), Tyler admits to mistakes: “Sorry to my old friends/the stories we could’ve wrote if our egos didn’t take the pen.” But he’s definitely not abandoning that ego; as the track builds, remorse turns to pride and sarcasm: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” PARELESMadison McFerrin, ‘God Herself’In “God Herself,” Madison McFerrin — like her father, Bobby McFerrin — revels in all the music that can be made without instruments: vocals, breaths, percussive syllables, finger snaps. “God Herself” is a multitracked, close-harmony construction that draws on gospel to equate carnality and spirituality: “Make you want to come inside and pray to stay for life,” McFerrin vows. “You gonna see me and believe in God herself.” It’s meticulously calculated to promise delight. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)’Kelsea Ballerini promises to give a friend an alibi — paying attention to both the physical and the digital — in “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” It’s a foot-stomping country tune about friendship and perjury. “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband/Hand on the Bible, I’d be lyin’ through my teeth,” Ballerini sings, with bluegrassy fiddle and slide guitar backing her up. It’s a successor to songs like the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” but it’s no direct threat, just a contingency plan. PARELESJess Williamson, ‘Hunter’The Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — who released a collaborative album last year with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, under the name Plains — yearns for connection on the bracing, country-tinged “Hunter,” the first single from her upcoming album, “Time Ain’t Accidental.” The song oscillates between muted disappointment and, on a surging chorus, defiant hope: “I’ve been known to move a little fast,” Williamson sings. “I’m a hunter for the real thing.” ZOLADZ More

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      Keith Reid, Who Brought Poetry to Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      He did not perform with the group, but his impressionistic words made it one of the leading acts of the progressive-rock era.Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to fuel emblematic songs of the 1960s, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.His death was announced in a Facebook post from the band. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause, but according to news media reports he died in a hospital in London after having been treated for cancer for two years.During its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically ambitious, even by prog-rock standards — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The band’s music, which at times bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared along with it. Mr. Reid was happy to oblige. “I always write them as poems,” he said of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, the British music magazine. Indeed, with Procol Harum, the words tended to come first.As the lyricist Bernie Taupin has long done for Elton John, Mr. Reid generally submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and primary songwriter, Gary Brooker, or sometimes the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who also wrote songs.While Mr. Reid was a founding member of the group, he was more a rock star by association, since he did not sing or play an instrument and thus did not record or perform with Procol Harum. Still, he rarely missed a gig.“If I didn’t go to every gig, I would not be part of the group,” he told Melody Maker. Touring, he said, helped him write: “I find it much easier to shut myself away in a hotel room for two hours than to work at home, where there are far too many distractions.”Procol Harum showcased its musical ambitions on the 1972 album “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The results of such focus were apparent with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first single off the band’s debut album, released in 1967. The song, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, sold around 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured long after the ’60s drew to a close.By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical status. It was often used to underscore the wistful memories of veterans of the flower-power era in films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife crisis tale, “The Big Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s May-December romance installment in the 1989 film “New York Stories,” which also included short films by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.The song’s famous opening lines (“We skipped the light fandango/Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor”) conjure bawdy images of drunken debauchery at a party, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They are set to a haunting chord progression with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical fashion by Mr. Fisher’s organ, and sung by Mr. Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and regret.She said “There is no reasonAnd the truth is plain to see.”But I wandered through my playing cardsWould not let her beOne of sixteen vestal virginsWho were leaving for the coastAnd although my eyes were openThey might have just as well’ve been closed.“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” Mr. Reid said in a 2008 interview with the British music magazine Uncut.“I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born on Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mother who had been born in England to Polish parents. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his release.His father’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Mr. Reid said influenced his worldview, and his writing.“The tone of my work is very dark, and I think it’s probably from my background in some subconscious way,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories” (2003).In 1966, Mr. Reid was introduced by a mutual friend to Mr. Brooker, who was with a band called the Paramounts, whose members also included Mr. Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson. Mr. Reid and Mr. Brooker became friends and started writing together; they, Mr. Trower, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Fisher would all eventually form Procol Harum.Mr. Reid, fourth from left, made a rare on-camera appearance when the 1970 version of Procol Harum posed for a group photo. With him were, from left, Gary Brooker, B.J. Wilson, Robin Trower and Chris Copping.Mike Randolph/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesProcol Harum never again scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, but it continued to be a major act through the mid-1970s, regularly releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a live orchestral version of “Conquistador,” a song from the band’s first album, reached the Top 20 in 1972.Mr. Reid said he felt lost after the band broke up in 1977 (it would reform, in various incarnations, over the years). In 1986 he moved to New York, where he started a management company and composed songs (music as well as lyrics) for other artists.That year, he collaborated with the songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in several countries, although it made little impact in the United States.During the 1990s, Mr. Reid wrote songs for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others. He would eventually turn the focus on his own talents, releasing two albums by what he called The Keith Reid Project, “The Common Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Mr. Thompson.Mr. Reid’s survivors include his wife, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.Unlike the rock luminaries he came of age alongside, Mr. Reid did not bask in the lights of the stage. Even so, he experienced his own form of glory, gazing on as the members of Procol Harum brought life to his words at shows he refused to miss.“You wouldn’t expect a playwright not to attend the rehearsals of his play,” he told Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are just as personal to me. They’re a part of my life. They are not gone from me.” More