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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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      The Rolling Stones Unveil a New Album, ‘Hackney Diamonds’

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      Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood provided details about their first record of new material in 18 years, which will be released on Oct. 20.When the Rolling Stones released “Beggars Banquet” in 1968, the band had an unusual way of grabbing attention: a surprise food fight.At the end of a feast with journalists in a posh London hotel, Mick Jagger celebrated the record, which includes “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man,” by smashing a cream pie into the face of the guitarist Brian Jones. The event quickly descended from there, with band members and guests throwing food at one another, leaving faces drenched in cream.On Wednesday, Jagger, 80, Keith Richards, 79, and Ronnie Wood, 76 — the band’s three current members — promoted their new album, “Hackney Diamonds,” in somewhat more sedate fashion: with a livestream on YouTube hosted by Jimmy Fallon.Named after old British slang for the shards of glass that are left after a break-in, “Hackney Diamonds” will be released on Oct. 20.Richards, wearing a hat and shades, said that playing live is a “holy grail,” but that recording albums is “where the guys can get together and pass around ideas without any interference.”“When it works, it’s great,” he said.Jagger, wearing a patterned jacket, said he didn’t “want to be bigheaded, but we wouldn’t have put this album out if we hadn’t really liked it.” He then added that he hoped the group’s fans would love it too. “I’ll drink to that,” Wood said, raising a glass.After the 20-minute event ended, the band premiered the video for the album’s first single, “Angry,” featuring Sydney Sweeney. Jagger earlier said that the album had many tracks themed around anger and disgust.The lunchtime event was held at the Hackney Empire, an old theater in the trendy Hackney district of London. Fallon, sitting in front of a broken-up version of the band’s lips logo and near three smashed chandeliers, interviewed the group before an audience of journalists and invited guests, although questions were not allowed from the floor.The anticipated 12-track “Hackney Diamonds” is the group’s first album of original material since the release of “A Bigger Bang” in 2005, and its first since the drummer Charlie Watts died in 2021. Two of the tracks were recorded in 2019 with Watts, Jagger said, including “Live by the Sword,” which he described as “retro.”Richards said the band was obviously different without Watts. “He’s No. 4, he’s missing, he’s up there. Of course he’s missed incredibly.” He said that Watts had recommended the band’s new drummer, Steve Jordan, and that moving on “would have been a lot harder without Charlie’s blessing.”Jagger joked about the long delay before this album, saying that the band — known for its extensive tours — had been a bit “lazy,” and that the group needed a deadline. They forced themselves to hit the studio in December, he said. “We cut 23 tracks very quickly and finished them off in January, and mixed them in February.”Fans of the Stones, which formed in 1962 and went on to become one of rock’s most enduring acts, have been awaiting a new album since “Blue & Lonesome” in 2016, which featured a dozen blues covers. Jagger told The Los Angeles Times in October 2021 that “Hackney Diamonds” would have been finished long ago if not for the coronavirus pandemic.Last month, the Stones teased the album via an advertisement for a fake glass repair company, called Hackney Diamonds, that appeared in a London newspaper. The ad’s text referred to several of the band’s well-known songs: “Our friendly team promises you satisfaction. When you say gimme shelter we’ll fix your shattered windows.”In the interview with Fallon, the band said other album titles it considered were “Hit and Run” and “Smash and Grab.”Philip Norman, who wrote “The Stones,” a major biography of the group, said in an interview that the release event was far from the band’s raucous 1960s and ’70s image but still managed to give its members an air of being “tearaways” by being held in London’s trendiest district. That was “typical Stones’s fakery,” Norman said, because the band had no previous association with Hackney.Although the Stones have said “Hackney Diamonds” marks a “new era,” Norman said he was anticipating a classic Stones sound. “This is the Stones we know and some of us have loved for the past six decades,” he said.The livestream generated interest online (at points 53,000 people watched live), but there was less hype on Hackney’s streets on Wednesday. Before the unannounced event, a few dozen fans waited outside the theater to catch a glimpse of the band walking the red carpet.Sam Poullain, 42, a marketing director, said that two months after he watched a school play on the Empire’s stage, he was back to see “the original rock ’n’ roll band.”The enthusiasm was not unanimous. As the huddle to see the band grew, three schoolgirls walking past asked what was happening. Told it was the Rolling Stones, Anya Morrison, 16, said, “I’ve heard of them, I think.” Then she got on a bus home. 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      How Pop Stars Turned NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk’ Into Authenticity Theater

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      The concerts have become an incongruous draw for pop stars with something to prove.What does anyone stand to gain from a string quartet accompanying Post Malone? At one of the megastar’s typical performances, you might find Austin Post standing alone on a vast stage, shirtless, mimicking the postures you might see at a rapper’s show, warbling his melodic pop with its intermittent hip-hop gestures. Recently, though, the singer sat down on the set of NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series — in an unassuming, tchotchke-filled corner of a Washington office — to perform a handful of his songs with a larger ensemble: 12 musicians, including four backup vocalists and four string players, rearranging his hits to highlight multipart harmonies and the twinkle of acoustic instruments. Why?Gradually, over its 15 years of existence, the Tiny Desk series has come to host some of the biggest names in music — artists like Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys and Harry Styles. That’s something of a coup, given its roots. In its early days, Tiny Desk programming was geared toward exactly the kinds of performers you might expect to find playing an intimate set in a mundane corner of an office, with no stage or lights or flashy videography: folk acts, singer-songwriters, crooning indie-rockers. The series has always introduced listeners to new musicians, and it still hosts performances in an impressive array of genres. But its biggest gets, back in the late aughts, were acts like The Swell Season or Tallest Man on Earth — musicians practiced at addressing small, hushed rooms with acoustic instruments. The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. Then T-Pain changed everything. By the time the Tallahassee star performed a Tiny Desk concert, in 2014, his use of Autotune as a musical signature had led plenty of casual listeners to assume the pitch-correcting tool was hiding a weak voice. Even fellow artists complained that he was polluting the industry. (He was depressed for years, he has said, after Usher told him that he had “killed music.”) T-Pain used his Tiny Desk performance to demolish the idea that he lacked talent, sitting beside a single electric-piano player and singing, beautifully, with no digital adornment. The video of his set went viral, not least among those only just learning that his use of Autotune was artistic flair, not a crutch; it remains one of the most watched of the hundreds of sessions Tiny Desk has produced.The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. The series built its audience organically, getting bigger bookings and finding frequent viral successes. If you’re looking to discover young folk, rock or jazz acts, or to rediscover sidelined innovators, its nonpop shows remain a valuable and thoughtfully programmed resource. But for pop artists, it has become a tool with a very specific utility: demonstrating in-the-room chops. It inherits this role from a long line of similar series — chief among them MTV’s “Unplugged,” a pioneer in the field of forcing musicians to spend a set signaling their allegiance to the values of ensemble performance. You don’t have to perform with acoustic instruments on Tiny Desk, but musicians often choose to. (Post Malone, for instance, used the string quartet to replace all the charming synth bleeps and bloops of his recordings; it’s a common Tiny Desk move to render digital production flourishes acoustically.) The audio and video are engineered in-house at NPR, an act of submission that’s rare in a world where stars seek to control every part of their image. And the old air of coffeehouse intimacy has, for big acts, been oddly abandoned, replaced by a new kind of excess geared to the constraints of the format. Post Malone’s Tiny Desk ensemble rivaled the number of musicians on his nationwide arena tour.A Tiny Desk appearance doesn’t just underline musical skill: There’s also star quality. Listeners already knew that Usher, for instance, could sing. But he could still capitalize on T-Pain’s precedent. Last year he used a Tiny Desk set to remind people that he is a charismatic performer even without the benefit of lavish stage production — an effective advertisement for the second leg of his Las Vegas residency shows. The purpose of a Tiny Desk appearance in a pop marketing campaign is now to assert the artist’s performing prowess, an opportunity that has been seized on by artists like Lizzo and Anderson .Paak, whose chops are key parts of their stardom.Often the goal of presenting songs in this format doesn’t feel financial or artistic or even purely a matter of marketing; sometimes it feels almost ideological. Post Malone doesn’t exactly need the exposure Tiny Desk offers. He surely has the resources to stage his own acoustic performance videos. But Tiny Desk offers the perfect venue to present himself as a genre-transcending renegade. The performance that results feels less like a musical idea and more like a statement about his persona — an argument that he’s not “just” a hip-hop artist, that his hit song “I Fall Apart” can be both a stadium banger and cello-adorned chamber music.There are perils in this hybridity. Stripped of the artificial charm he can summon in a recording studio or the collective exhilaration he can rely on in an arena, the Tiny Desk version of Post Malone reveals his songs a little too clearly for what they are. The packaging insists that he’s able to transcend genre, but his blithe transit through rap, pop and ballads shows no commitment to any of these forms beyond ensuring their availability to him. Their meanings are hollowed out; their signifiers are piled up into a thing without a center. The whole set sounds like no one thought much about making it good — only about making the point that Post Malone could do it. Post isn’t the only artist whose Tiny Desk performance revealed a certain shallowness. Take the British producer and electronic musician Fred Again. It’s hard to imagine many of his forebears in dance music capitulating to the notion that “authentic” live performance is the way to justify their work. But Fred Gibson aimed his music at a Tiny Desk funnel, performing alone at a piano amid a nest of samplers and synthesizers. His anthems for crying on the dance floor felt, without the dance floor, like a saccharine, exhausting solicitation of approval — more interested in asserting that Gibson is a composer and a performer than in doing justice to the genre he’s currently dominating. With every year, more and more of pop music moves over into the disembodied world of digital sound production, pushing further into the synthetic, the abstract — sounds that are neither rooted in nor trying to imitate anything in the real world. At the same time, audiences seem to hunger for a certain type of authenticity theater, and artists hunger to perform it. It grows steadily more tempting for musicians to hedge their eccentricities and creative excursions into studio sounds with lavish office-corner performances — sets that are growing steadily more incongruous and strange. The Tiny Desk is where pop stars can go to reconcile all the exquisite contradictions of being a performing musician in 2023. For some, a better option is to leave them be.Opening illustration: Source photographs from NPRAdlan Jackson is a writer from Kingston, Jamaica, who covers music in New York. He runs the Critical Party Studies blog. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Speed Round, Part 2

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe first leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has come to a close, with the pop superstar having performed in stadiums across North America for several million people.A few of those people are friends of Popcast. This week and next, we’ll speak with a few of them about their experiences at the show.On this week’s Popcast, conversations about Swift’s relationship to the broader hierarchy of celebrity, the tour date as destination event, how fans dressed up for the show, and ways in which Swift is extremely deliberate in the manner that she deploys sexuality.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorVrinda Jagota, a freelance writer for Pitchfork and othersJosh Duboff, a freelance writer for Vanity Fair and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Zach Bryan’s First No. 1 Is His Self-Titled Album

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      The singer-songwriter, whose music crosses genre borders, also has the first rock release to top the Billboard 200 in over a year.Zach Bryan, the Oklahoma-raised singer-songwriter whose work fits somewhere on a continuum of country, rock and Americana folk, has logged his first No. 1 album and single with big streaming numbers.His album, “Zach Bryan,” opens at the top of the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 200,000 sales in the United States. That includes 233 million streams and 17,000 copies sold as a digital download, according to the tracking service Luminate.Critics and playlist curators may quibble over exactly which genre tags to attach to Bryan’s work. But for chart purposes, Billboard has applied a straightforward test, ruling that “Zach Bryan” counts as both country and rock since Bryan’s work has appeared on both its country and rock charts. As such, “Zach Bryan” is the first rock album to top the chart in over a year, since the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Unlimited Love” early last year, and it has the biggest streaming week ever for a rock album. (Among country releases, Billboard reported, Bryan’s album has the fifth-largest debut streaming week.)In addition, Bryan notches his first No. 1 single on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart. “I Remember Everything,” Bryan’s duet with Kacey Musgraves, takes over from Oliver Anthony Music’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which falls to No. 6 after two weeks at the top.Also on the latest album chart, Travis Scott’s “Utopia” falls to second place after four weeks at No. 1, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 3 and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 4. SZA’s “SOS” returns to the Top 10 for the first time in a month, jumping six spots to No. 5, after the release of a new music video for her song “Snooze.” More

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      Steve Harwell: How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

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      The track, sung by Steve Harwell, took a winding path to evergreen status that illustrates how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music business.Long before it became a soundtrack nugget and an internet meme, it was just a rock band’s attempt to land a radio hit.But the long path to evergreen status for “All Star,” the 1999 track by the California alternative band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music industry.The song took shape while the group was working on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first taste of success with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its record company and was told: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s manager, told Rolling Stone in 2019. Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and primary songwriter, said the song’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth fans, he told the website Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”“All Star” was quickly placed on film soundtracks, including “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The original music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, among others.) But the song’s immortality began with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favorite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, where the song plays in the opening credits. The film grossed a total of $484 million around the world, according to the site Box Office Mojo.A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off another level of success for “All Star,” when the children who grew up on “Shrek” began meme-ing on it relentlessly. There was the version made up entirely of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his name. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched together from “Star Wars” clips. There were the ones sung by Jon Sudano, a YouTuber, showing him melding the song — sometimes painfully — to hits like Adele’s “Hello” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or with the vocal line maddeningly shifted one beat from the original. And don’t forget the guy who recreated Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” using samples of Harwell’s voice.Perhaps the most popular take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with actual effort taken to write new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.Those were all iterations of what has become a key avenue for artists to find wide success in a fragmented media environment, with user-generated content ricocheting through social media to propel a new song (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or point younger listeners to an old one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).In the case of “All Star,” this process kept an old track alive for years and led to gigs like the band performing a snippet of the song on a Progressive insurance ad in 2020. All of that activity tends to drive listeners back to streaming services, and “All Star” has garnered just under a billion streams on Spotify alone.In an interview with the music site Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists sometimes have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s valuable exposure, and that can lead to money in their pocket. On the other … it’s not always fun to have one’s work flattened into a joke.“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell said. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.” More

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      Have You Seen Paul McCartney’s Lost Bass Guitar? Tips Welcome.

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      For decades, mystery has surrounded the fate of the missing bass that accompanied the Beatles as they rocketed to fame. A new campaign is trying to find it. Before Beatlemania, there was the distinctive Höfner violin bass — the first guitar that Paul McCartney bought after becoming the bassist for the Beatles.That bass can be heard on some of the band’s most famous hits, including “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout.”Mr. McCartney picked up the instrument in a Hamburg music store in 1961, and it accompanied the Fab Four as they rocketed to stunning success, becoming the most famous band in the world. But the guitar vanished eight years later.A new campaign is seeking to find the missing instrument, and hundreds of people have responded, hoping to help solve the decades-old mystery: Where is Paul McCartney’s missing bass guitar?“It’s a hugely significant instrument in its own right,” said Nick Wass, a semiretired consultant for Höfner, the guitar’s manufacturer, who has joined forces with two journalists to try and track the guitar down. “It’s the bass that made the Beatles.”“The bass was absolutely at the heart of the origins of the Beatles sound,” said one of the journalists, Scott Jones, who worked for the BBC. “The smallest pieces of information can often lead to the biggest breakthroughs,” he said of their appeal for tips on its fate.Mr. Jones’s wife, Naomi, is the other journalist behind what they are calling The Lost Bass Project.The three Beatles fans have urged members of the public to come forward with any information that might help. No tip is too small, they say, and they are promising to keep sources confidential. They say they have already received several credible leads since the project was launched on Saturday.The instrument’s treasured place in Beatles mythology is intertwined with the band’s story. After the departure of their original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mr. McCartney, who had been playing guitar, switched instruments to replace him during a residency in Hamburg in 1961. For that, he needed a new bass guitar.“I got my Violin Bass at the Steinway shop in the town center. I remember going along and there was this bass which was quite cheap,” he said in a 1993 interview with Guitar Magazine, adding that he had not wanted to go into debt and could only afford the Höfner, 500/1 guitar at the time. It cost about £30 pounds, or $38, he recalled. “And once I bought it, I fell in love with it.”Paul McCartney performing in 2017.Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. McCartney took the guitar back to Britain, where it accompanied the Beatles through hundreds of gigs — from the band’s early concerts at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they were spotted by Brian Epstein, who would become their manager, to the recording of their first two albums. It was repaired in 1964, according to the team behind the new search, and then used along with other bass guitars.But the last confirmed sighting of the instrument was in London in 1969, in video footage of the band members writing their final album, “Let It Be.” Rumors have percolated ever since about what happened to the instrument: The Lost Bass Project suggests that it could have been stolen or lost either from the basement of Abbey Road Studios, or from the Apple Corps recording studio on Savile Row.A representative for Paul McCartney declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Wass said he understood, from previous communications with Mr. McCartney, that he was keen to be reunited with the instrument. “He calls it the ancient one,” Mr. Wass said.Among the leads they had received, Mr. Jones said, were suggestions that the instrument could have traveled to the United States or Japan. But he added that all the leads need to be vetted. “Somewhere among that information there is going to be the answer,” he said.Other iconic instruments have been lost and found over the years — one close example being a Gibson acoustic guitar belonging to John Lennon, which was bought in 1962 and then lost the following year. Half a century later, it re-emerged and was sold at auction in 2015 to an anonymous buyer for $2.4 million.It is unclear what the market value of Mr. McCartney’s missing guitar would be, but the team behind the search insists that the effort is not for monetary gain, calling the guitar “priceless.”“We just want to know where it is,” said Mr. Wass. More

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      Jimmy Buffett Died of Rare Form of Skin Cancer

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      The singer’s website said he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years and died at his home on Long Island.Jimmy Buffett died of skin cancer at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island, according to a statement on the singer-songwriter’s website.After Mr. Buffett died on Friday at age 76, his site announced the death but did not give a cause or specify where he died. In an update over the weekend, the website said that he had Merkel cell carcinoma for four years. A rare and aggressive form of skin cancer, Merkel cell is diagnosed only about 2,500 times a year in the United States, and until recent years it had carried a life expectancy of five months.Mr. Buffett’s 1970s hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which mingled country-rock with bits of calypso melodies and had wry lyrics about the carefree life of boating and loafing at beachside bars, made him a cult hero on a huge scale.He sold at least 23 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, on par with Jimi Hendrix and the Beastie Boys. And Mr. Buffett’s annual tours — in which he usually appeared barefoot, in a comfy T-shirt or Hawaiian button-down — were hugely successful, drawing millions of fans who sang along, drank prodigiously and called themselves Parrot Heads.Mr. Buffett was one of pop music’s most successful and ambitious businessmen, building a huge empire on the brand of good times and island escapism that he sang about in his songs. That included Margaritaville restaurants and resorts, footwear, drink mixes and a 2018 Broadway jukebox musical, “Escape to Margaritaville.”This year, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion, with $570 million attributed to his tours and recording and $140 million in planes, homes and his shares in Berkshire Hathaway — the holding company whose chairman and CEO is multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett, who had been a longtime friend. More