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      David Lindley, ‘Musician’s Musician’ to the Rock Elite, Dies at 78

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      He worked with a wide range of luminaries, most notably Jackson Browne, and there was seemingly no stringed instrument he couldn’t play.David Lindley, the rare Los Angeles session guitarist to find fame in his own right, both as an eclectic solo artist and as a marquee collaborator on landmark recordings by Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart and many others, died on Friday. He was 78.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause, although he was said to have been battling kidney trouble, pneumonia, influenza and other ailments.With his head-turning mastery of seemingly any instrument with strings, Mr. Lindley became one of the most sought-after sidemen in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Mixing searing slide guitar work with global stylings on instruments from around the world, he brought depth and richness to recordings by luminaries like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder and Iggy Pop.But he was far more than a supporting player. “One of the most talented musicians there has ever been,” Graham Nash wrote on Instagram after Mr. Lindley’s death. (Mr. Lindley toured with Mr. Nash and David Crosby in the 1970s.) “He was truly a musician’s musician.”On Twitter, Peter Frampton wrote that Mr. Lindley’s “unique sound and style gave him away in one note.”Mr. Lindley, who was known for his blizzard of curly brown hair and an ironic smirk, first made his mark in the late 1960s with the band Kaleidoscope, whose Middle East-inflected acid-pop albums, like “Side Trips” (1967) and “A Beacon From Mars” (1968), have become collector’s items among the cognoscenti.He embarked on a solo career in 1981 with “El Rayo-X,” a party album that mixed rock, blues, reggae, Zydeco and Middle Eastern music and included a memorably snarling cover of K.C. Douglas’s “Mercury Blues.”Mr. Lindley in performance with Jackson Brown in Fremont, Calif., in 1978. Mr. Lindley was heard on every one of Mr. Browne’s albums from “For Everyman” (1973) to “Hold Out” (1980).Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesBy that point in his career, Mr. Lindley was already treasured among the rock elite for providing an earthiness and globe-trotting flair to the breezy California soft-rock wafting from the canyons of Los Angeles in the 1970s.He is best known for his work with Mr. Browne, with whom he toured and served as a featured performer on every Browne album from “For Everyman” (1973) to “Hold Out” (1980). His inventive fretwork was a cornerstone of many of Mr. Browne’s biggest hits, including the smash single “Running on Empty,” on which Mr. Lindley’s plaintive yet soaring lap steel guitar work helped capture both the exhaustion and the exhilaration of life on the road, as expressed in Mr. Browne’s lyrics.Mr. Lindley’s guitar and fiddle could also be heard on landmark pop albums like Ms. Ronstadt’s “Heart Like a Wheel” (1974), which included the No. 1 single “You’re No Good,” and Rod Stewart’s “A Night on the Town” (1976), highlighted by the chart-topping single “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”Ever on the hunt for new sounds and textures, Mr. Lindley had “no idea” how many instruments he could play, as he told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2000. But throughout his career he showed a knack for wringing emotion not only from the violin, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer and autoharp, but also from the Indian tanpura, the Middle Eastern oud and the Turkish saz.Despite his position at the center of the Los Angeles rock firmament, he kept a low-key presence both onstage and in life, steering clear of the epic hedonism of the era.“I’m kind of a social misfit when it comes to after-show parties, so I usually went back to the hotel,” Mr. Lindley said in a 2013 interview. “There’s danger at those after-show parties, you know what I mean? I couldn’t do that. And I had no real idea how to schmooze and do any of this stuff.”Mr. Browne in concert in Byron Bay, Australia, in 2006.James Green/Getty ImagesDavid Perry Lindley was born on March 21, 1944, in Los Angeles, the only child of John Lindley, a lawyer, and Margaret (Wells) Lindley. He grew up in San Marino, Calif., an upscale city near Pasadena, where his father, a musical connoisseur, filled the house with sounds from around the world, including masters of the Indian sitar and the Greek bouzouki.Drawing on those influences, by age 6 David had become obsessed with all manner of stringed instruments. “I even opened up the upright piano in the playhouse out in back of my parents’ house to get at the strings,” he recalled in a 2008 interview with the musician Ben Harper for the magazine Fretboard Journal.His parents were less than enthusiastic when he channeled his energies into bluegrass. “I played the five-string banjo in the closet,” he said in a recent video interview, “because it was very, very loud, and my mom and dad were a little disturbed by their son, the hillbilly musician.”Regardless, he found success with the instrument in the Los Angeles area, winning the annual Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest five times. After graduating from La Salle High School in Pasadena, he played in a series of folk groups; in one of them, the Dry City Scat Band, he played alongside his fellow multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow, later a member of Kaleidoscope.Although Kaleidoscope failed to hit the commercial jackpot, it turned heads within the music industry. Tom Donahue, the influential San Francisco disc jockey, called it “one of the best groups in the country.” Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin once called Kaleidoscope “my favorite band of all time, my ideal band; absolutely brilliant.”But Mr. Lindley and his bandmates had little interest in doing what seemed necessary to pursue fame. Once, he recalled in the Acoustic Guitar interview, “we were sitting in the dressing room of the Whiskey a Go Go, and a manager guy comes in and says, ‘We can make you guys stars — huge. But you’ll have to do this, this and this, and you’ll have to dress like this, too.’ And we said, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ and sent the guy packing.”He is survived by his wife, Joan Darrow, the sister of his former bandmate Chris Darrow, and their daughter, Rosanne.Mr. Lindley would eventually find a degree of stardom, with a big boost from Mr. Browne, whom he met in the late 1960s at a Los Angeles rock club called Magic Mushroom. Once they started working together, though, it was the boost that Mr. Lindley gave Mr. Browne that became obvious.In a Rolling Stone interview in 2010, Mr. Browne recalled an early tour, when the audience was clamoring to hear his hit “Doctor My Eyes.” The band, however, lacked the full array of instruments to capture the sound of the recording.“We’re playing at this concert at a college and they were calling for this song,” he said. “And we said, ‘What the hell, let’s just play it.’ And it was a revelation. The piano part is sturdy enough — it’s just playing fours — and it was enough to support Lindley doing this insane grooving, swinging playing. He wasn’t even the guitar player on the record. But he just ripped it up.“And I realized then I didn’t need a band to play with David. It just comes out of him.” More

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      Punk Producer Glen ‘Spot’ Lockett’s 10 Essential Recordings

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      As the house producer for SST Records, Lockett shaped the sound of hardcore from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. He died last week at 72.Between 1979 and 1985, Glen Lockett, the producer and engineer credited as Spot, captured the first generation of American hardcore punk bands — Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents, Saccharine Trust and more — as they came screaming and flailing from South Bay beach cities outside Los Angeles. The house producer for the standard-bearing independent punk label SST Records, Lockett sculpted hardcore’s hyper-fast and caustic sound with a documentarian’s ear. He died on March 4 at age 72.A Spot recording was brittle, intimate and — crucially — affordable. Lockett preferred that a band play in the studio all at once instead of overdubbing, giving SST Records a feeling of immediacy. It was a visceral alternative in an era when major labels were investing in ostentatious filigrees like gated reverb and prohibitively expensive synthesizers. Spot’s no-frills production not only gave shape to these bands’ spittle and blurs, but served as an abrasive metaphor for an entire movement that was rethinking, and self-managing, everything from album art to record distribution to touring.By the mid-80s, the SST founder Greg Ginn and his roster of uncompromising artists had grown creatively restless, putting Lockett at the bleeding edge of emerging subgenres and microscenes like sludge metal, stoner metal and cowpunk, as well as at the controls for Hüsker Dü’s double-LP masterpiece “Zen Arcade.” He decamped for Austin in 1986, leaving a legacy of recordings that would serve as a crucial inspiration to the alternative and DIY rock booms of the 1990s and beyond.Here are 10 essential tracks from Lockett’s scene-defining tenure at both SST and New Alliance, the label helmed by the Minutemen.Minutemen, ‘Fanatics’ (1981)The bassist Mike Watt called recording the first Minutemen album, “The Punch Line” from 1981, “a gig in front of microphones,” most likely a nod to Lockett’s light touch on the controls. Lockett told Red Bull Music Academy that when recording the Minutemen, he “just set them up the way I thought that they should be set up, turned on the tape and let them go.” On the raucous, 31-second “Fanatics,” you can hear the drummer George Hurley’s sticks accidentally collide. “The songs were so short, that finding them on the tape was really hard,” Lockett told the makers of the Minutemen documentary “We Jam Econo,” adding an expletive. “I had to make so many cuts to put 18 songs on this damn thing.”Saccharine Trust, ‘A Human Certainty’ (1981)Emboldened by the energy of Los Angeles hardcore but artistically powered by Captain Beefheart, the Fall and Charlie Parker, Saccharine Trust made poetic, jagged art-punk that never garnered the attention of its peers. The band’s debut album, recorded in one session and titled “Paganicons,” was a favorite of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. On the album closer, “A Human Certainty,” Spot captures an expressive mix of pleas and groans from the vocalist Jack Brewer, somewhere between punk venting and goth agony.Black Flag, ‘Damaged I’ (1981)After four EPs with three different singers, Black Flag settled into its classic lineup on its 1981 full-length tantrum, “Damaged,” on which the 20-year-old former ice-cream-scooper Henry Rollins launched a series of emotional Molotovs. His most feral moment was the closer, “Damaged I”: Rollins improvised the lyrics and Spot had him do only two takes — the first one was the keeper, Spot said. The band’s drummer “Robo always wore these bracelets on his left wrist and the drum mics would pick them up,” Rollins wrote about the sessions. “It became part of the sound. You can hear it on the record.”Descendents, ‘Suburban Home’ (1982)Remembered by Spot as the first time he got to properly record vocals, the debut Descendents album, “Milo Goes to College,” showcases the singer Milo Aukerman’s adenoidal whine and sugary harmonies, essentially writing the blueprint for decades of American pop-punk bands like Green Day and Blink-182.The Dicks, ‘Rich Daddy’ (1983)Spot told the site Punktastic that, of his productions, the debut LP from the riotous Austin, Texas, band the Dicks, “Kill From the Heart,” was his absolute favorite: “Absolutely nothing phony or [expletive] about either the band or the recording.” The group’s openly gay frontman, Gary Floyd, snarled and crooned lyrics about anti-capitalism, the police state and homophobia, making righteous protest music feel like a party. Spot flew to Austin and recorded the band’s debut in 48 hours. On songs like the Creedence Clearwater Revival-tinged “Rich Daddy,” the band made the move from hard-edge barkers to uniquely grooving blues-punk dynamo. “Everything got recorded way, way, way too hot and it was distorted as hell,” Spot told Jim Ruland, the author of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.” “Somehow I figured out a way to make it sound good.”Minutemen, ‘I Felt Like a Gringo’ (1983)The Minutemen were expanding their vision to include longer songs and heavier grooves, soon to reach apotheosis on the 1984 college radio juggernaut “Double Nickels on the Dime.” But for six songs on the “Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat” EP, Spot had one more “econo” trick up his sleeve. “I said, Hey, let’s forget about this multitrack stuff,” he recalled in the Minutemen documentary. “Let’s just set it up and do it live to two-track. One take. Bam, it’s done. You mix it while you’re playing it and be done with it. And that’s what we did.”Saint Vitus, ‘Saint Vitus’ (1984)Spot produced the 1984 debut from the doom-metal pioneers Saint Vitus, who recorded every song on it in one take. “Nobody wanted to do something on a record that you couldn’t reproduce live,” Saint Vitus’ guitarist, Dave Chandler, told Red Bull Music Academy. “All of us had seen too many bands, like Led Zeppelin for instance, where there are all these fancy nine guitars on one song, and then you go to the live show, and the song sucks because they can’t play it like that.” The resulting album — Black Sabbath metallurgy rendered as something much darker and heavier — helped popularize “doom metal,” a substrain eventually taken up by bands like Sleep and Electric Wizard.Black Flag, ‘My War’ (1984)On the title track from the second Black Flag album, Henry Rollins vomits out arguably the greatest vocal performance in the history of hardcore — nearly four minutes of accusations, screams, diatribes, squeals and assorted throat shreds. On the album, produced by Spot with Ginn and the drummer Bill Stevenson, you can hear Rollins moving through the space like he’s scratching to escape a prison of his own making. The second side of the “My War” album would feature the band moving into long, molasses-slow dirges that would absolutely enrage audiences in 1984 but ultimately prove a formative precursor to the sludge metal of bands like Melvins, Boris and Mastodon.Meat Puppets, ‘Oh, Me’ (1984)From their 1982 debut to their 1984 follow-up, Meat Puppets evolved from an acid-fried hardcore mush into shambolic, vulnerable and Grateful Dead-tweaked country-punkers. Spot recorded both. “He made it really easy to get exactly what I wanted,” Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood told The Austin Chronicle. “He had no opinion. He really liked the live stuff and he was so into the punk rock thing from recording all those other bands. He had such a great ear.”Hüsker Dü, ‘Something I Learned Today’ (1984)Hüsker Dü’s second LP, “Zen Arcade,” stretched the very concept of hardcore in sound, ambition and duration. A 70-minute concept album on four sides of vinyl, “Zen Arcade” teamed one of the fastest bands in the land with paisley-printed hooks, acoustic strumming and the shimmering sounds of psychedelia. Though its heady concept and catchy songs might sound like AOR excess, it was still undoubtedly a hardcore album: Twenty-three of its 25 tracks were first takes, recorded in the span of about 45 hours. “With Spot, he was a real purist,” the guitarist and vocalist Bob Mould told Tape Op. “His background was jazz, so his theory was, get the right mic on the finely tuned instrument and go with it.” More

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      Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd Guitarist, Dies at 71

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      The last surviving original member of the classic Southern rock group, he played the soaring slide guitar solo on “Free Bird” and co-wrote “Sweet Home Alabama.”Gary Rossington, an original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the quintessential Southern rock band, whose guitar helped define its sound and who was a key figure in the group’s eventual rebirth after a plane crash in 1977 killed three of its members, died on Sunday. He was 71.The band posted news of his death on its Facebook page but did not say where he died. No cause was given, although Mr. Rossington had had heart problems for years. He was the last surviving member of the original band.Growing up in the Jacksonville, Fla., area, Mr. Rossington got the rock-star bug when a friend, Bob Burns, was given a drum kit in the summer of 1964. The two teenagers decided they would become rock drummers.“The practical limitations of forming a band with only two drummers soon became apparent,” Mr. Rossington’s biography on the band’s website notes, “and Gary gravitated toward playing the guitar.”That same summer, according to a portrait of the band written for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the group in 2006, another teenager, Ronnie Van Zant, was playing in a baseball game when he hit a foul ball that struck a spectator, Mr. Burns. Mr. Van Zant, too, had rock-star aspirations, and the three began playing together, adding other members and trying out group names — the Wildcats and Sons of Satan were among those considered.Eventually they settled on Lynyrd Skynyrd, a bastardization of Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher who had hassled them in high school because of their long hair.The band, playing countless bar dates around Florida and eventually beyond, evolved into a seven-piece with three guitars — Mr. Rossington, Allen Collins and Ed King (later replaced by Steve Gaines) — backing Mr. Van Zant’s vocals. The guitarists would alternate as lead, sometimes in the same song. Mr. Rossington was adept as a lead and also had a knack for adjusting his style to support the other guitarists when one of them was front and center.“Back in the day, we had three guitars and a keyboard, so that’s all strings,” he told the website Premier Guitar in 2017. “It’s hard to get all those strings together, and the hardest part is not playing. Growing up, we learned where not to play. Even though you could play, you leave the space and room.”The band’s breakthrough came in 1973, when the musician and producer Al Kooper caught a show in Atlanta, liked what he heard and signed the group to his Sounds of the South label. Mr. Kooper produced the band’s first album, “Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced ‘lĕh-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd),” which was released in 1973 and included “Gimme Three Steps,” “Simple Man” and what became one of rock’s most famous songs, “Free Bird,” with Mr. Rossington’s evocative slide guitar solos.By the fall of 1977, the group had released four more albums, had hits with “Sweet Home Alabama” (which Mr. Rossington wrote with Mr. Van Zant and Mr. King) and other songs, and was one of the best-known bands of the day. Then, on Oct. 20, the band’s chartered plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a thicket in Mississippi, killing Mr. Van Zant; Mr. Gaines; Cassie Gaines, Mr. Gaines’s sister and a backup vocalist; the band’s road manager; the pilot; and the co-pilot. The 20 other passengers were injured, including Mr. Rossington, who sustained numerous broken bones.The crash was the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for a time. After a few years to recover physically and psychologically, Mr. Rossington and Mr. Collins formed the Rossington Collins Band, which strove to distinguish itself from Lynyrd Skynyrd, in part by hiring a female vocalist, Dale Krantz, whom Mr. Rossington would later marry.But the new band did play “Free Bird” at its shows.“We do it now as an instrumental,” Mr. Rossington told The Orlando Sentinel in 1980. “We don’t do the vocal on it because that was Ronnie’s. It still gets heavy when we play it. I can hear him singing.”In 1987, the 10th anniversary of the crash, Mr. Rossington helped bring about a tribute tour, reuniting surviving members, with Mr. Van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny, taking over as vocalist.Mr. Rossington, right, duets with Rickey Medlocke in the reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd in Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004.Steve Traynor/The Killeen Daily Herald, via Associated Press“We were just going to do a one-show thing,” he told The Los Angeles Times that year, “but it turned into a tribute tour because, 10 years later, the music’s still being played on the radio, and it’s still requested, and it’s still selling real good.”The reconstituted group stuck, and it has been touring as Lynyrd Skynyrd, with various lineups, ever since, as well as releasing albums. Later this year the band is scheduled to tour with ZZ Top. Mr. Rossington, though, had cut back his participation to only occasional appearances, for health reasons.Mr. Rossington was born on Dec. 4, 1951, in Jacksonville. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother was an important force in his life, so much so, he said, that he named his first serious guitar, a Les Paul, “Berniece” after her.In a 1993 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Rossington recalled some early validation for the fledgling group: winning a battle of the bands in Jacksonville in 1968.“There were 10 bands playing soul music,” he said. “We came in and did Yardbirds and Stones. We were a little over the audience’s heads. Except that the judges went, ‘These cats are cool.’”Mr. Rossington, right, with Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2019. He cut back his participation in the band in recent years because of health problems.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Rossington and other band members were known for a wild lifestyle. In 1976 Mr. Rossington smashed his car, with alcohol and drugs contributing to the accident. The crash inspired the band’s song “That Smell,” a track on its 1977 album, “Street Survivors.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Rossington’s survivors include two daughters.When Mr. Rossington and the others in the tribute group of 1987 gave their first concert, in Nashville, they played “Free Bird” as an instrumental, as Mr. Rossington had in his earlier group. The audience filled in for the absent Ronnie Van Zant.“You could hear 16,000 people singing,” Mr. Rossington said, “and it sounded like a million.” More

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      Steve Mackey, a Mainstay of the Britpop Band Pulp, Dies at 56

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      Shortly after he joined that long-running group in 1987, it rose from obscurity to chart-topping success in what came to be called the Cool Britannia era.Steve Mackey, the lauded bassist, songwriter and producer who made his name laying down dance-floor-friendly grooves for the British band Pulp during its 1990s pinnacle, as it transformed itself from a little-known art-rock collective to a festival-headlining Britpop powerhouse, died on Thursday. He was 56.His death was announced on social media by his wife, Katie Grand. She did not say where he died or cite a cause, although she noted that he had died “after three months in hospital, fighting with all his strength and determination.”With Hollywood-worthy looks and an image of tailored cool, Mr. Mackey provided the pulsing bass lines that helped whip audiences into a frenzy as Pulp cycled through glam-rock, acid-house, disco and indie-pop influences on 1990s anthems like “Common People” and “Disco 2000,” two of the five Top 10 singles the band notched in Britain.Pulp also had five Top 10 albums, including the celebrated “Different Class” in 1995.Mr. Mackey recorded five studio albums with Pulp over the course of a decade, starting with “Separations” in 1992. His tenure coincided with the most commercial and critically acclaimed era for this long-running, ever-evolving band, as it emerged from obscurity in Sheffield, England, and, after a series of false starts, took its place in the English pop firmament along with Oasis, Blur and other supernovas of the so-called Cool Britannia era.In 1995, the influential British music magazine Melody Maker anointed Pulp the band of the year — a notable accomplishment in a year that also saw the release of Oasis’s era-defining album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” That same year, the band headlined the star-studded Glastonbury rock festival after the scheduled headliners, the Stone Roses, dropped out.It was a meteoric rise for a garage-band bassist who had started his association with the band as a mere fan.Stephen Patrick Mackey was born on Nov. 10, 1966, in Sheffield, a historically industrial city in South Yorkshire, England. He was in his late teens when he started catching gigs by Pulp, which was already a respected band on the local scene.Jarvis Cocker, the band’s lead singer, made an immediate impression with his haunted air and chiseled looks. “I was amazed by Jarvis,” Mr. Mackey said in a 2021 video interview. “He was really a striking frontman, and the songs were really powerful; they’re quite dark as well.”It was while he was playing in band called Trolley Dog Shag that Mr. Mackey befriended Mr. Cocker, although he did not entertain thoughts of lobbying to play with Pulp. “They seemed self-contained, quite aloof,” he said in a 1996 interview for the band’s website. “I was into really noisy bands, garage bands, and Pulp were like an art band.”Besides, the band, formed in 1978, hardly seemed on a fast track to stardom. By the time Mr. Mackey joined in 1987, Pulp had cycled through multiple lineups and had failed to generate much of a stir with its first two albums, “It” (1983) and “Freaks” (1986).The band began developing a more pop-friendly sound, and the first single from “Separations,” the ice-cool dance track “My Legendary Girlfriend,” finally gave Pulp a taste of mainstream success. The British music newspaper NME named it a “single of the week.”Pulp would continue to chart for the rest of the decade, but disbanded after its 2001 album, “We Love Life.” In the ensuing years, Mr. Mackey, who had contributed to the writing of the band’s songs along with Mr. Cocker and the other members, kept busy as a producer and songwriter, working with bands like Arcade Fire and Florence + the Machine.He had a cameo role in the 2005 film “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” as the bassist for a wizard supergroup called Weird Sisters, alongside Mr. Cocker, as well as Jonny Greenwood and Philip Selway of Radiohead.Mr. Mackey was an avid photographer, and he spun out a side career in the 2010s shooting fashion campaigns for brands like Armani Exchange and Marc Jacobs while collaborating with his wife, a stylist and fashion journalist, on her fashion magazine, Love.He joined Pulp on a reunion tour in 2011 and 2012, but declined to join one scheduled for this year, explaining on social media last October that he desired “to continue the work I’m engaged in — music, filmmaking and photography projects.”In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Marley; his parents, Kath and Paul; and his sister, Michelle.After Mr. Mackey’s death, Mr. Cocker posted on Instagram a photo of Mr. Mackey trekking up a rocky trail in the Andes in 2012.“We had a day off & Steve suggested we go climbing in the Andes,” Mr. Cocker wrote. Calling it a “magical experience,” he continued: “Steve made things happen. In his life & in the band. & we’d very much like to think that he’s back in those mountains now, on the next stage of his adventure.” More

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      Nicki Minaj Returns Ready to Rumble, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis and Summer Walker, Arlo Parks, 6lack and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’Calm arrogance is Nicki Minaj’s gift. There’s no need to decipher all her allusions because her delivery and production say it all. The track of “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” based on Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” juggles near-flamenco handclaps, trap drums and choral vocals going “Uh-oh.” Her percussive rhymes are competitive in every realm — linguistic, sexual, financial, culinary (“guacamole with the taco”) — and their utter confidence is still convincing. JON PARELESKali Uchis and Summer Walker, ‘Deserve Me’“Red Moon in Venus,” the third studio album by the cheerfully bilingual Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis, moves between sensual romance and fierce recriminations. “Deserve Me” is blunt: “I like it better when you’re gone/I feel a little less alone.” Uchis and Summer Walker take turns bad-mouthing the thoughtless lover who’s getting dumped, and harmonize sweetly to remind him, “You don’t deserve me.” The track starts out light and tinkly but keeps adding bassy layers, literally showing the depth of their contempt. PARELESboygenius, ‘Not Strong Enough’The indie-rock trio boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — formed in 2018, under a cheeky moniker that, Dacus said in an interview, was meant to harness some macho overconfidence: “We were just talking about boys and men we know who’ve been told that they are geniuses since they could hear, basically, and what type of creative work comes out of that upbringing.” The group’s stirring, acoustic-guitar-driven new single “Not Strong Enough” once again finds the women in provocative but poetic drag, as they harmonize on a chorus that answers Sheryl Crow: “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man.” On a steadily galloping bridge, Dacus leads the trio in a chant that expresses frustration at being “always an angel, never a god.” But by the end of the candid “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius has generated its own kind of strength in vulnerability — and in numbers. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Impurities’The English songwriter Arlo Parks has absorbed Joni Mitchell, hip-hop and much more; it’s no wonder she is willing to enjoy her “Impurities.” Her new track revolves around echoey loops and samples, but she has a paradoxical lesson to impart: “When you embrace all my impurities, then I feel clean again.” PARELESMandy, Indiana, ‘Pinking Shears’On the echoey, percussion-forward “Pinking Shears,” the Manchester art-rockers Mandy, Indiana forcefully and exhaustedly reject an increasingly mechanized world: “J’suis fatiguée” (“I’m tired”) becomes a kind of mantra when chanted by the band’s vocalist Valentine Caulfield. But there’s catharsis and resistance in the industrial abrasion of the sound they create, like a rogue machine created from cobbled-together parts suddenly learning how to talk back. ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Barley’The hypnotic “Barley,” from the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, sounds a bit like a playground chant reimagined by Sonic Youth: “One, two, three, counter, you’re a cool thing, count mountains,” Rachel Brown drones in a charismatic deadpan. The song — and first single from the forthcoming album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26 — is full of loopy left-turns and unexpected riffs that jut out at odd angles, but Brown and bandmate Nate Amos are, at all times, utterly in command of their strange and alluring sonic universe. ZOLADZ6lack, ‘Since I Have a Lover’6lack positions himself between singer and rapper on “Since I Have a Lover,” which has a looped feeling. He barely projects his voice, but he rides the rhythm of a loping, two-chord guitar track as he promises more than a passing attraction. Will it last? The song suggests a woozy maybe. PARELESPrincess Nokia, ‘Lo Siento’Steady, wistful piano chords carry Princess Nokia through “Lo Siento” (“I’m Sorry”) from her EP due March 14, “I Love You But This Is Goodbye.” It’s not really an apology; as the production blooms into lush, pillowy harmonies, she switches from singing in English to calmly rapping in Spanish, cursing her lover for betrayal and noting, “Thanks for the pain, the pain in my song.” PARELESyMusic, ‘Zebras’A seven-beat rhythm percolates through “Zebras,” a minimalistic but eventful romp by the chamber sextet yMusic. The rhythm hops from key clicks on a bass clarinet to pizzicato strings; it’s juxtaposed with sighing melody lines and hints of a circus band, making the most of its three-and-a-half minutes. PARELES More

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      Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ Still Reverberates

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      Pink Floyd’s enduring blockbuster merged grandeur and malaise. Very much a product of its era, it became one of the best-selling albums of all time.Glum, ponderous songs about madness, mortality and greed, punctuated with tense instrumentals. Was that a blueprint for a blockbuster? It hardly sounds like the makings of one of the best-selling albums of all time.But there’s no denying the popularity and tenacity of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the indelible album that Pink Floyd released 50 years ago, on March 1, 1973. Looming like an inscrutable monolith, “Dark Side” spent nearly all of the next 14 years — through punk, disco, early hip-hop and the pop heyday of MTV — lodged in Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. It arrived during the analog, material days of record stores and vinyl LPs, when an album purchase was a commitment. And no matter how familiar “Dark Side” went on to become as an FM radio staple, people still wanted their own copy, or perhaps a new copy to replace a scratched-up one. In the digital era, “The Dark Side of the Moon” album returned to the charts on CD, selling and then streaming more millions.The success of “Dark Side” stoked the ambitions of Pink Floyd and its leader, Roger Waters, who has toured arenas and stadiums ever since; Waters, 79, is playing his “first ever farewell” dates this year. He conceived the “The Wall,” a narrative rock opera released in 1979, that would foreground his anti-authority reflexes, from schoolmasters to heads of state; he has performed it against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall. Decades later, Waters would go on to spout cranky, conspiracy-theory-minded, pro-Russia political statements that many former fans abhorred. When “Dark Side” appeared, all that was far in the future.There will, of course, be another deluxe edition for the latest “Dark Side” anniversary. Arriving March 24, the new boxed set has high-resolution and surround-sound remixes and other extras, though it’s largely redundant after the exhaustive “Immersion Edition” reissue in 2011. Both “Immersion” and the new set include a worthy 1974 concert performance of “Dark Side,” with brawny live sound and extended onstage jams.Waters has also announced his own full-length remake of “Dark Side,” that will have his own lead vocals — not the husky, doleful voice of Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour — with Waters’s spoken words over the album’s instrumentals, along with “no rock ’n’ roll guitar solos.”Uh-oh.In 1973, “Dark Side” was an album that worked equally well to show off a new stereo — or, for a few early adopters, a quadraphonic system — or to be contemplated in private communion with headphones and a joint. The ticking clocks, alarms and chimes that open “Time” are startlingly realistic even when they’re no longer a surprise, and the perpetual-motion synthesizers and desperate footfalls of “On the Run” are eternally dizzying.Stately tempos, cavernous tones and solemn framing announce the high seriousness of “Dark Side,” which begins and ends with the sound of a heartbeat. The album juxtaposes overarching sonics and grand pronouncements with human-scale experience. Its tracks are punctuated with voices from Pink Floyd’s road crew and friends, dispensing loop-ready tidbits like “I’ve always been mad” in working-class accents.Like other overwhelming best sellers of the 1970s and 1980s — Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” — “Dark Side” deals with disillusionment, fear and resentment despite the polish of its production. It’s troubled and obsessive at heart, not tidy. Countless bands and producers would learn from Pink Floyd how to fuse grandeur and malaise, how a few well-placed sounds can say far more than a showy display of virtuosity.“Dark Side” was very much a product of its era. The early 1970s were prog-rock’s heyday, particularly in Britain, where bands like Genesis, King Crimson and Yes were constructing suite-length songs and unveiling elaborate conceits. But the early 1970s were also a time when the utopian promises of the hippie era were fading, pushed back by entrenched interests and corporate co-optation. “Dark Side” captures naïve hopes falling away.It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album, the continuation of a cult career that had been synonymous with psychedelia and progressive rock: with extended structures and open-ended jams, with verbal conundrums and with an oh-wow appreciation of reverberant textures and spatial effects.Pink Floyd’s founding songwriter, Syd Barrett, left the band in 1968 with mental health problems, taking its sense of whimsy with him. Waters emerged as its new, more saturnine leader. But it took a string of uneven albums, full of amorphous studio jams, before the relative concision and clarity of “Dark Side” came into focus. While the album unfolds as a 42-minute prog-rock suite — despite the necessity, in 1973, of flipping over an LP — it also features clearly delineated verse-chorus-verse songs that radio stations could play. Waters deliberately made his lyrics blunter and more down-to-earth than he had before: “Money, it’s a gas/Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”Waters tackled big topics: “Time,” “Money,” war, the inevitability of death, the triviality of daily life, the importance of seizing the moment. His perspective is dour. In “Breathe (in the Air),” he describes life as a “race towards an early grave”; in “Time, he observes that every sunrise brings you “One day closer to death.” But the reason “Dark Side” became a blockbuster is that Pink Floyd’s music — the full band, with Richard Wright’s self-effacing but fundamental keyboards, Waters on bass, Nick Mason’s steadfast drumming and Gilmour’s probing, slashing, keening guitar — defies all that miserabilism.The album builds dramatically and inexorably toward the songs that close each side of the LP. “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which ends Side 1, is a progression of tolling, processional keyboard chords from Wright, topped by spoken words denying fear of death — “You’ve got to go sometime” — followed by Clare Torry’s leaping, soaring, riveting vocal improvisation. She’s a pure life force, with pain and freedom and determination in her voice, refusing to accept oblivion. (Torry only received composer credit for her top line in 2005, along with an undisclosed settlement, after suing the band.)The album’s conclusion — “Brain Damage” seguing into “Eclipse,” both written by Waters — reads as bleak but feels like transcendence. In “Brain Damage,” the singer feels himself succumbing to mental illness. “The lunatic is in my head,” he warns, answered by a snippet of maniacal laughter; in the chorus, he sings, “If your head explodes with dark forebodings too/I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”Then, in “Eclipse,” he makes his way toward a revelatory oneness — “All that is now and all that is gone/And all that’s to come and everything under the sun is in tune” — only to see it swallowed by darkness as “the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” But in both songs, the music swells behind him, with churchy organ and robust major chords, pealing guitar and gospelly choir harmonies. As the album ends, tidings of catastrophe sound like triumph; it’s a fist-pumping arena-rock finale.In recent interviews, Waters has described the message of the album more positively. “What is really important is the connection between us as human beings, the whole human community,” he told Berliner Zeitung in February. That’s revisionist; “Dark Side” luxuriates in alienation, futility and desperation. Its persistence reveals just how many listeners feel the same. More

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      100 gecs Shook the Underground. Can the Duo Explode … With Rock Music?

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      Laura Les and Dylan Brady’s debut spurred a subgenre called hyperpop and earned them a major-label deal. Swerving again, they’re returning with a different sound on “10,000 gecs.”LOS ANGELES — Laura Les and Dylan Brady, the experimental pop duo known as 100 gecs, wanted to set off fireworks indoors.And if this were a few years ago, back when the pair were quickly becoming the internet underground’s favorite musical pranksters, they probably would have just done it, pooling cash to hoard semi-legal explosives and gleefully wrecking the basement of whichever friend of theirs cared the least. In its anarchic “Jackass” ethos, few things could be so gecs-y.But at the end of last year, with an upcoming major-label album to market — and all the corporate guardrails that entails — 100 gecs were being forced to blow stuff up a bit more by the book. Fortunately for Les, 28, and Brady, 29, the other thing that comes with a fat recording contract — besides a boatload of commercial expectations, various handlers and more rules — is resources.The fireworks, after all, were not just for mayhem but a music video — the one expected to help propel the band’s new single, “Hollywood Baby,” into a mainstream crossover success.So one evening last December, in the parking lot of a Van Nuys soundstage, a small crew and an old-school pyrotechnics expert made 100 gecs’ absurd vision into an insurable reality, erecting a perfectly dumpy two-room house with no roof, which at least made it look like the fireworks were being ignited inside.When a tiny fireball hit Les, clad in a thrifted Limp Bizkit T-shirt, directly in the eye, the crucial thing was that it had been captured on camera.“There’s our short-form content,” Brady cracked, his chronic deadpan delivery only ever disrupted by boyish enthusiasm.That night’s elaborately D.I.Y. setup — like the souped-up pop-punk of “Hollywood Baby” — was 100 gecs with a budget and plenty of good will to burn.Since the group’s debut, “1000 gecs,” blew minds, made memes and topped critics’ year-end lists in 2019 with its playfully futuristic genre-mashing, Les and Brady have been on the steepest of career trajectories, their sold-out shows growing exponentially as Atlantic Records positioned itself behind whatever the duo wanted to do next.“It was definitely a ‘stop you dead in your tracks, you have to pay attention’ moment,” Craig Kallman, the industry veteran who signed the band to Atlantic, said of 100 gecs’ viral rise.Saddled almost immediately with the weight of its own Spotify-branded subgenre (and accompanying playlist) called hyperpop — for its synthetic, sugary mix of Top 40 bombast, emo sincerity-in-snottiness and rap swagger — 100 gecs were stamped as disruptive innovators, the instant cult favorites who weren’t expected to remain anyone’s secret for very long.Bridging the blown-out bass of the SoundCloud era and the looming everything-at-once cacophony of TikTok, 100 gecs had the kind of auspicious, stars-aligning arrival that led those in the group’s expanding universe to invoke the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs of Nine Inch Nails, for whom 100 gecs opened on tour last year, and Nirvana.Kallman, anticipating what is supposed to happen now, called back to “that transition from ‘Bleach’ to ‘Nevermind,’” anointing “Hollywood Baby,” with its arena-ready chorus, a “real linchpin song to kick the door open.”“There’s definitely growing pains, but neither of us are trying to make every dollar we can,” Les said. “Making music is such a fun thing. If it wasn’t fun, we’d just stop doing it.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesYet in a rare balancing act, rapturous hype for 100 gecs is still just as likely to come from below as from the ambitious benefactors above.Jesse Taconelli, 25, a manager for acts like quinn and Jane Remover who have been grouped into the broader hyperpop sphere, said: “The influence that gecs has is incredible and supernaturally powerful in this scene,” which encompasses a loose, mutating network of SoundCloud pages, Discord chats, message boards and other unwieldy corners of social media.“They’re the Nirvana of that, the Stones of that,” he said. “But in the internet age, with an internet-y sound, and when you get credited with creating a wave like that, it becomes difficult to follow up.”After various delays and some stopgap releases, 100 gecs took about four years. But where the band landed for its sophomore LP, “10,000 gecs,” out March 17, is amusing in a way only Les and Brady could muster: They made an alt-rock album.Instead of leaping deeper into the digital glitchiness that defined its name, 100 gecs found a fresher palette in the analog, including rawer vocals, raging guitar riffs and pummeling live percussion, courtesy of the journeyman rock session drummer Josh Freese (Guns N’ Roses, Weezer, A Perfect Circle). Though still wobbly enough to be recognizably gecs, the bones are sturdier.“It’s funny to think, are people going to call ‘Hollywood Baby’ hyperpop?” Les wondered, noting that many of the duo’s earlier conventions — “goofier snares,” pitched-up nightcore vocals, supersaw synths — are minimized or absent.“It could’ve been easier,” she shrugged, a pile of discarded ideas, a global pandemic and two headlining tours later. “We could’ve made an album in the style of the last one quickly. The songs would’ve been pretty OK. It was just boring.”While the band had previously nodded at maligned sounds like ska and nu-metal, cutting them with Auto-Tune, trap drums and E.D.M., “10,000 gecs” largely lingers in the crevices where the Warped Tour met the Family Values Tour, on the alternative edges of MTV’s turn-of-the-century “TRL” empire. In just 10 songs across less than 30 minutes, the album recalls Korn and Sum 41, Primus and Cypress Hill, even incorporating the ignominious rap-rock calling card of D.J. scratches over distortion.And although it is a truism of the pop-music present that a generation raised on the all-you-can-absorb buffet of piracy and streaming playlists has defeated the dogma of genre walls, 100 gecs are more pro-genre than post-genre, drawing from musical tropes with a superfan’s precision and depth of reference, à la the filmmaker Jordan Peele.None of it, Brady and Les insist, is ironic. “It would be so condescending to be like, we are going to pull from terrible genres,” Les said.“Genres that have no worth,” Brady mocked, recalling the tortured metaphors for collision that followed the release of “1000 gecs.” “Meme music made in a computer blender — that’s not how I think about it,” he said. “It’s just music that we like.”Les acknowledged a debt to viral detritus — “Crazy Frog” and “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” are frequent gecs touchstones — and called the musician and comedian Neil Cicierega an “Internet Jesus” for his YouTube mash-ups.“But there’s a lot of good craft built in there,” Les said. “We like playing with the different connotations that people do have with things — whether good or bad or silly or meme-y. But we’re pulling from them because we think they’re cool.”Pointing to the skank-ready new songs “Frog on the Floor” and “I Got My Tooth Removed,” Brady added, “People have been telling me that ska is bad my whole life.”Making music with Les, Brady said, “feels even more natural and easy than working by myself.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesIn multiple interviews that spanned a year of writing, recording, tweaking, backtracking, touring, writing and recording some more and ultimately letting go, Les and Brady could be gloomy (or just hung over), vaguely optimistic (or just hung over) and often cagey, but were always adamant that they were almost where they needed to be.“It’s getting better, but I wish it was getting more done,” Les said last spring, after a night of studio trial and error that lasted until 7 a.m. “This is a very spaghetti-at-the-wall process,” she said. “Then we whittle.”Like comedians who would rather die than explain their jokes, the two gecs — both of whom produce and sing — could sound more like platitudinal politicians while discussing their process than the mischievous jesters of their public personas. But their dedication to the project and solace in one another shone through.“There’s differences in making music when there’s that much more pressure,” Les said. “But we figure out how we can make every day be fun.”The pair first met as teenagers in suburban St. Louis, where Brady was honing a sample-based production style and Les was struggling as a fuzzed-out singer-songwriter. At first, Brady hoped to recruit Les as a vocalist for a group he envisioned as “Nine Inch Nails meets Death Grips meets Beastie Boys,” but it never happened. (“This is the album that we made instead of doing that band,” Les said of “10,000 gecs.”)When Brady moved to Los Angeles and Les to Chicago, the pair stayed in touch, bonding over their shared passions for the composer John Zorn’s Naked City and the experimental production of Oneohtrix Point Never and Sophie, but also the rap of Sicko Mobb and Lil Durk.In 2016, after a week together in Les’s apartment, the pair quietly released a five-song EP as 100 gecs, and continued to work remotely afterward, sending one another tracks and building an increasingly adventurous sound. Some of the group’s first shows, in early 2019 and 2020, took the form of virtual D.J. sets at mock music festivals — Fire Festival and Coalchella — in the world of Minecraft.Across the physical distance, the pair’s creative connection proved to be pure, uncomplicated and near-psychic. “It feels even more natural and easy than working by myself,” Brady said.Early on, Brady had also dabbled in the SoundCloud rap world, channeling the Auto-Tune wails of Travis Scott, and was managed by Cody Verdecias, a young A&R executive and former musician. Verdecias, who took on 100 gecs, hoped to elevate alternative music on a mass scale, and he found success in recent years with the hardcore band Turnstile, one of 21st-century rock’s greatest grass roots success stories.“I strive with our A&R team to be pioneering and championing things that are fresh and new,” Kallman said, crediting Verdecias with helping him see 100 gecs’ potential. “They just felt like a band that was going to have great cultural significance, build a scene and a loyal, dedicated following.”In Brady’s tiny, windowless studio last year, Verdecias said he had successfully been keeping Atlantic at bay as Les and Brady toiled. “I told the label today, big tracks coming!” Verdecias said. “That’s like my main job.” Even he hadn’t heard most of what was to come.“I like to think that after this album, they can become the 10-year album band,” Verdecias teased.Brady, noncommittal, noted that Led Zeppelin once “did like four albums in two years.”“Yeah, but they only wrote half the songs,” Les countered.“Who else wrote them?”“They’re like, old blues songs.”“They got it done either way,” Brady said.“10,000 gecs” includes sounds from the alternative edges of MTV’s turn-of-the-century “TRL” empire.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesFour months later, when the time finally came to play the album for Atlantic, 100 gecs went all out, renting the venue Irving Plaza in Manhattan for the afternoon and rolling out a literal red carpet for the expectant suits. At an earsplitting volume befitting the album’s mosh-ready roar, “10,000 gecs” blared from an empty stage toward rows of seats, strobe lights flashing offbeat. Controlling the proceedings from above, Les and Brady headbanged in the balcony.Ultimately pleased with the finished product, the label targeted a release date still another eight months away — enough time to press vinyl LPs and prepare a proper marketing rollout.“We’re not scared of squandering anything,” Les said in December, as “10,000 gecs” became a palpable reality. “‘Oh, you had momentum’ — whatever.”“The album wasn’t done, so,” Brady added, “what were we supposed to do?”Time, it turned out, had been the ultimate luxury. Making harebrained music on their computers was one thing, befitting the lives of long-distance friends with day jobs and managed expectations. But working through the right guitar tones, the perfect live drum sound and the best of 200 vocal takes was a new privilege.“It’s not like I’m getting off work and having to do it in the evening,” Les, who moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to pursue 100 gecs full-time, said. “It’s much easier to make something when you’re not worried about paying rent.”Still, the duo insisted that their own expectations were more modest than those of their biggest boosters: release the album, start another, “do the tour, maybe sell some T-shirts,” Brady said.“Nirvana? That was a complex situation,” Les had offered earlier. “There’s a reason Kurt Cobain’s suicide note is pretty crazy.”“There’s definitely growing pains, but neither of us are trying to make every dollar we can,” she said. “Making music is such a fun thing. If it wasn’t fun, we’d just stop doing it.”For now, though, Les added, “If I had the choice of doing this and doing anything else, I would be doing this.” More

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      Tom Whitlock, Co-Writer of ‘Top Gun’ Anthem ‘Danger Zone,’ Dies at 68

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      Mr. Whitlock wrote the words for that song and the chart-topping “Take My Breath Away,” central elements in the success of the hit 1986 movie.Tom Whitlock, who co-wrote two songs that helped elevate the 1986 movie “Top Gun” into a pop-culture phenomenon, died on Saturday in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 68.His death was confirmed by Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Home, which did not cite a cause.The “Top Gun” songs “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away,” with words by Mr. Whitlock and music by Giorgio Moroder, were just two of the more than 100 songwriting credits he accrued over his career. Songs he helped write were performed and recorded by Bonnie Tyler, Ray Charles, Graham Nash and others. But the work he did with Mr. Moroder for “Top Gun,” the hit Tom Cruise movie about fighter jets and machismo, has especially endured.Mr. Whitlock worked frequently with Mr. Moroder. Together they wrote five songs for the movie, but two in particular achieved widespread acclaim.“Danger Zone,” performed by Kenny Loggins, served as the guitar-heavy, energetic scene setter for the movie’s opening moments, as fighter jets roared off into the sky. The lyrics spoke for an unapologetic thrill seeker, culminating in the oft-repeated line “Highway to the danger zone.” The song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It was also featured on the soundtrack of the hit 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”Even more successful was “Take My Breath Away,” the soulful ballad performed by the group Berlin that was heard in a love scene. It topped the Billboard charts on Sept. 13, 1986, and won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best original song.Thomas Ross Whitlock was born on Feb. 20, 1954, in Springfield, Mo., to Ross and Peg Whitlock. He started playing the drums when he was 11 years old, he said in a 2014 interview archived on the website rediscoverthe80s.com, and was soon working professionally.After attending Drury University in Springfield and playing in a short-lived band, he moved to Los Angeles. He was helping a friend at a sound studio there when Mr. Moroder, an already accomplished musician who had just bought the studio, said he was having issues with the brakes on his Ferrari, Mr. Whitlock said in the interview. Mr. Whitlock bought some brake fluid, used his own tools and fixed the issue. A few weeks later, he was hired to do odd jobs in the studio.After other people had left the studio for the day, he would stay and work on his own songs. And when other songwriters weren’t around, he recalled, Mr. Moroder turned to Mr. Whitlock for help on the “Top Gun” lyrics.He also wrote lyrics for the theme songs for the 1988 Summer Olympics and the 1990 FIFA World Cup.His marriage to Hollie Whitlock ended in divorce. Survivors include his sister, Mary Whitlock Schweitzer. More