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Maggie & Terre Roche’s 1975 LP Is a Revelation. Why Is It Forgotten?
“Seductive Reasoning,” a flop that preceded the Roches’ debut, has a fluctuating sonic palette, contributions from Paul Simon and the sisters’ most brilliant songwriting.“It’s funny how one always wants to play their favorite records for friends, and they never listen properly, never understand them,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1943. Many of us have albums like that, orphaned ones we shyly push on others to little or no avail. We blink back tears while playing the tracks; they wish to flee the room.Primary among these, for me, is Maggie & Terre Roche’s little-known 1975 album “Seductive Reasoning.” It appeared 50 years ago this month, which seems like an occasion to speak up about it. It’s a misfit of a record, and it fizzled commercially: People lined up not to buy copies.“Seductive Reasoning” was such a non-hit that it drove Maggie and Terre, sisters from Park Ridge, N.J., out of the music business — at least until 1979, when they emerged with their younger sister, Suzzy, as the Roches and released their eponymously titled first LP to ecstatic reviews. That album, “The Roches,” deserves its reputation. If you don’t know “Hammond Song,” well, your homework, and a portable slice of bliss, awaits you.From left: Maggie, Suzzy and Terre Roche in 1980.Rob Verhorst/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNothing the three Roche sisters did together, for me, tops the sparer and earthier and wilier (it’s a little stupid on purpose) pleasures of “Seductive Reasoning.” It’s been in the shadows for too long.“Seductive Reasoning” is a young person’s record, a product of overlapping propinquities, made by a college dropout (Maggie) and a high school dropout (Terre) who possessed swooping blood harmonies, a novelistic deftness with language and a whole raft of intense perceptions and inchoate longings to draw upon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Roy Thomas Baker, Who Helped Produce ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Dies at 78
Among the most successful music producers in the 1970s and ’80s, he helped churn out hits for acts like Queen, the Cars, Journey and Foreigner.Roy Thomas Baker, who was among the most successful music producers of the 1970s and 1980s and who helped produce Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most unconventional pop hits, died at his home in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on April 12. He was 78.His death was announced by Bob Merlis, a spokesman, who said in a statement that the cause was unclear.Besides Queen, Mr. Baker collaborated with other well-known bands like the Cars, Journey, Mötley Crüe and Foreigner while working as a producer and sound engineer at several recording studios over the course of his career.He is perhaps best known for helping to produce the nearly six-minute-long “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Mr. Baker said that the song was “ageless” because “it didn’t confine to any given genre of music.”“I thought it was going to be a hit,” said Mr. Baker, who produced the song with Queen. “We didn’t know it was going to be quite that big. I didn’t realize it was still going to be talked about 30 years later.”Roy Thomas Baker was born on Nov. 10, 1946, in Hampstead, England. He began his career at Decca Studios in London in 1963, working as a second engineer to Angus Boyd (Gus) Dudgeon, an English record producer who would later become known for his collaborations with Elton John; and Tony Visconti, an American producer who went on to work with artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Tina Knowles Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis in New Memoir, ‘Matriarch’
A little over a decade ago, during quiet moments traveling between New York and Houston, Tina Knowles started freestyling, recording memories and childhood stories in voice notes on her cellphone.Then 59, Knowles was still busy styling and mothering her world-conquering daughters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles (she counts Kelly Rowland and a niece, Angie Beyincé, as her own, too) and had just divorced her husband of 31 years. There had been several deaths in her family.“I just started thinking about mortality, and ‘I’m not gonna be here forever,’” she said. “I felt old, I felt sad.” She wanted to leave a legacy for her kids and grandchildren.As Knowles, now 71, sat earlier this month in the great room of her home atop a Hollywood Hill, a sunny space filled with gallery-sized artwork at every turn, she described that personal nadir while infrequently waving a hand adorned with a few knuckle-sized gold rings and manicured in a bright red that matched her lipstick. Having changed into a tan Alo sweatsuit after a photo shoot — the right sleeve eventually slipped, leaving her shoulder bare — she radiated an offhand sultriness, a nonchalant glamour that couldn’t have been more removed from the dark era that launched the project.Her resulting memoir, “Matriarch,” available Tuesday, brings Knowles’s life to center stage. It has the drama of her upbringing in the segregated South and the personal improvement journey of a working mom compelled to stand up for her kids but not herself, as well as cautionary optimism: Knowles reveals for the first time that she was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in 2024. (After surgery and treatment, she is cancer free — and daring to dress in “sheer mesh” after undergoing a reduction. “That was my silver lining.”)When she was first approached to write a memoir, Tina Knowles said she thought, “They’re going to want to hear about my kids; they’re not going to want to hear about me.”Kobe Wagstaff for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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How Japanese Engineering Transformed Pop Music
On the morning of Monday, Aug. 18, 1969, during the last set of the Woodstock festival, Jimi Hendrix wielded a white Stratocaster to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His guitar solo was one psychedelic peak in a long heritage of experimentation. Almost as soon as guitars were first amplified in the 1930s, musicians began messing with their equipment to create brash tones — from poking holes in speaker cones to increase distortion to plugging into a Leslie speaker, which had horns rotating in a hefty refrigerator-size wooden enclosure, the resulting Doppler effect making the guitar sound rich and otherworldly. More
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How Japanese Superfans Redefined What It Means to Be Obsessed
Otaku, people for whom hero worship is a way of life, have changed everyone’s relationship to the culture.ON ANY GIVEN night, the neon-lit streets of Akihabara, an entertainment district in central Tokyo, are packed with visitors. Inside windowless shopping malls, they flock to stalls selling used Hello Kitty or Astro Boy figurines, Pokémon trading cards and vintage video game consoles. At the idol bars and theaters — venues dedicated to musical acts like AKB48, which was named after the area — they wave glow sticks in colors that correspond to their favorite performers. And at the maid cafes, they pay to take pictures with young waitresses in petticoats and pinafores, many of whom hope to become stars themselves one day. Since the Japanese anime boom of the past few decades, Akihabara has been a refuge for the otaku — someone who would “go beyond the lengths of any normal person to pursue their interests,” according to the 2004 documentary film “Otaku Unite!” Kaede, 29, a member of F5ve, a girl group based on the 1990s manga series “Sailor Moon,” calls the neighborhood their “holy land.” More
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Goose Rules the Jam-Band Roost (Sorry, Haters)
A monkey, a giraffe, a pair of goth nuns, a bee holding flowers and an old-timey circus strongman made their way through the crowd last month at Luna Luna, the lost art carnival, in Manhattan.Fans of the 11-year-old jam band Goose were wise to what they were witnessing. “They’re from the band’s lore,” one explained spying the performers, who had assembled to help announce a new Goose album, “Everything Must Go.” Soon the four members of Goose and a guest saxophonist situated themselves in the center of the crowd of hundreds that fanned out to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel and Keith Haring’s carousel, and began an hourlong jam.Creative, intentional, extremely eager to please: The whole thing was very Goose.A jam band “is like a sitcom,” said Cotter Ellis, Goose’s drummer. “When you watch a show like ‘The Office,’ after a while you feel like you know the characters. That’s how people view us — they feel they’re such a part of the scene that they actually get to know us.”Ellis, 33, who earlier had strolled anonymously around Luna Luna dressed as a lion, added, “I like that. I don’t want to be seen as better than the crowd. I want it to be seen as, ‘We’re all in this together.’”“Everything Must Go,” a 14-song set that features major-key tunes with lyrics alternately goofy and uplifting, a prog-y instrumental number and a new single, the Don Henley-inflected “Your Direction,” comes as the group solidifies its status as rock’s biggest “new” jam band. On Thursday, Goose will make its debut at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, followed by its first destination festival — Viva el Gonzo, next month in San José del Cabo, Mexico — and a sold-out headlining concert in June at Madison Square Garden, long the site of heralded residencies by the jam great Phish. Together, it all inescapably feels like an anointment.“Within the community, there’s all this talk of, ‘Who’s coming next?’” said Peter Anspach, Goose’s keyboardist. “You see the lineage of the Grateful Dead, Phish. ‘Well, what’s going to happen after this?’ Is it going to be a pool of bands? Is it going to be, like, one pinnacle band?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Mac Gayden, Stellar Nashville Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 83
Heard on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” among other albums, he also sang and was a writer of the perennial “Everlasting Love.”Mac Gayden, the co-writer of the pop evergreen “Everlasting Love” and an innovative guitarist who recorded with Bob Dylan and helped establish Nashville as a recording hub for artists working outside the bounds of country music, died on Wednesday at his home in Nashville. He was 83.His cousin Tommye Maddox Working said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Strangely enough, Mr. Gayden’s most illustrious achievement — his percussive electric guitar work on “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a track on Mr. Dylan’s 1966 opus, “Blonde on Blonde,” most of which was recorded in Nashville — went uncredited for decades. It was only recently, when a new generation of researchers discovered the omission, that he received his due.Mr. Gayden, who was self-taught, had a knack for inventing just the right rhythm or mood for an arrangement. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Nashville was just beginning to break out of its conventional country bubble, he had a particular affinity for collaborating with cultural outsiders, among them Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters.“Mac Gayden was a genius, genius, genius — the best guitar player I ever heard,” Bob Johnston, the producer of “Blonde on Blonde,” was quoted as saying in “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City,” a 2015 exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Mr. Gayden in 2015 at the opening of the exhibition “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Jason Davis/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumOn J.J. Cale’s 1971 Top 40 single “Crazy Mama,” Mr. Gayden played bluesy slide guitar with a wah-wah pedal, creating an uncanny sound later employed to droll effect on the Steve Miller Band’s chart-topping 1973 pop hit “The Joker.” Decades later, the steel guitarist Robert Randolph, a Pentecostal-bred star in jam-band circles, adopted the technique as well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
