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

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

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      Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott and Sheryl Crow Nominated

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      Cyndi Lauper, Joy Division, George Michael and the White Stripes are also among the first-time nominees up for induction this year.Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott, Sheryl Crow, the White Stripes and Cyndi Lauper are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, the organization behind the museum and annual ceremony announced on Wednesday.Artists become qualified for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording; both Elliott, the trailblazing rapper, and the White Stripes, the defunct garage-rock duo, made the ballot in their first year of eligibility. (Because of changes in when the nominating committee meets, the Rock Hall said releases from 1997 and 1998 were eligible this year for the first time.)Nelson, who turns 90 in April, became eligible in 1987, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. Last year, Dolly Parton at first protested her nomination, saying that she didn’t “feel that I have earned that right” as a country musician. (Voters disagreed, and she joined the Hall in November.) Crow, whose career began in the 1990s, has been eligible for several years, while Lauper, the singer behind hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” could have been nominated more than a decade ago.Among the 14 nominees this year, other first-time picks include: George Michael, the English singer-songwriter who died in 2016; Joy Division, the English rock band that became New Order in 1980 after the death of the group’s frontman, Ian Curtis; and Warren Zevon, the singer-songwriter whose work was beloved by performers like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and who died in 2003.More than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals will now vote on the nominees to choose the final class of inductees, which typically include between five and seven musicians or groups that have increasingly over recent years spanned a wider mix of genres: rap, country, folk, pop and more.Will 2023 be the year for musicians who have been nominated repeatedly, to no avail? The politically minded group Rage Against the Machine is on the ballot for the fifth time. Kate Bush, whose song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was resurgent on the charts last year after an appearance in the TV show “Stranger Things,” has been nominated three times before, as have the Spinners, one of the leading soul groups of the 1970s.The hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, the heavy metal band Iron Maiden and Soundgarden, a rock band that was ascendant in the ’90s and lost its singer Chris Cornell in 2017, have all been nominated once before.While an unnamed nominating committee within the Hall of Fame is in charge of choosing the slate of possible inductees, power now flips to the voters, and fans are also asked to weigh in online. (A single “fan ballot” is submitted as a result of those votes.)The inductees will be announced in May, and the ceremony is slated to take place in the fall. More

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      Dino Danelli, Whose Drums Drove the Rascals, Is Dead at 78

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      His percussion virtuosity was a key to the band’s many hits of the late 1960s, including the chart-topping “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free.”Dino Danelli, whose hard-charging, high-energy drumming powered the Rascals to a string of hits in the late 1960s, including the No. 1 records “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free,” died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 78.Joe Russo, a close friend and the band’s historian, confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation center. He said Mr. Danelli had been in declining health for several years.The Rascals (billed on their first three albums as the Young Rascals) were among the first American bands to emerge in response to the so-called British Invasion of 1964.Formed in New Jersey in 1965, the quartet — featuring Felix Cavaliere on organ and vocals, Eddie Brigati on vocals, Gene Cornish on guitar and Mr. Danelli on drums — drew on a range of influences, including doo-wop, jazz and soul.Mr. Danelli, a protégé of the great jazz drummers Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, merged percussive virtuosity with a rock sensibility. Like Ringo Starr of the Beatles, he set the template for the rock drummer archetype: disciplined and precise, but with a flair that drew the crowd’s eye. He would twirl his sticks — a trick he learned from his sister, a cheerleader — and throw them in the air, before catching them without dropping the beat.Mr. Danelli was responsible for the band’s first big hit. He was a fan of obscure soul records, and one day at a record shop in Harlem, he found a single by the Olympics, “Good Lovin’,” written by Rudy Clark and Arthur Resnick, which reached No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965.“We said, ‘Let’s try it, let’s put a new version to it,’” he said in a 2008 interview with the drummer Liberty DeVitto. “It was just a lucky find.”The Rascals played the song during a 1966 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It soon topped the charts and — with its opening shout of “One, two, three!” — became one of the best-known songs of the decade.Onstage, the band dressed in the sort of foppish outfits favored by several other white acts of the mid-1960s: knee-high socks, short ties, floppy collars. But it was the first white band signed by Atlantic Records, home of Ray Charles, and it was among the few American rock bands to be accepted by Black crowds.The members included a clause in their contracts stating that they would perform only if a Black act was on the bill with them — a fact that meant large swaths of the South remained off limits.As the Rascals evolved, their sound mellowed and they turned out summer-vibe classics like “Groovin’,” which hit No. 1 in 1967, and “A Beautiful Morning,” which reached No. 3 in 1968. That same year, shocked by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, they released “People Got to Be Free,” a paean to racial harmony — written, like the earlier two songs, by Mr. Cavaliere and Mr. Brigati. It also reached No. 1.The Rascals dissolved in the early 1970s; Mr. Brigati left in 1970 and Mr. Cornish a year later. Mr. Cavaliere and Mr. Danelli stayed for two more albums before the band broke up.Mr. Danelli played in a series of bands through the 1970s, and in 1980 he joined Steven Van Zandt, the lead guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in a side project called the Disciples of Soul.Mr. Van Zandt had grown up as a die-hard Rascals fan. In 1997 he delivered the speech inducting the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, calling Mr. Danelli “the greatest rock drummer of all time.”The Rascals, then known as the Young Rascals, appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in March 1966. From left: Mr. Danelli, Eddie Brigati, Ed Sullivan, Gene Cornish and Felix Cavaliere.CBS, via Getty ImagesDino Danelli was born on July 23, 1944, in Jersey City, N.J., the son of Robert Danelli and Teresa Bottinelli.He is survived by his sister, Diane Severino.He began playing drums at an early age and, after dropping out of high school, moved to Manhattan, intent on pursuing a music career. He picked up gigs in the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, finagled a room at the Metropole Hotel in Times Square and met Mr. Rich and Mr. Krupa, who both took him under their wing.He traveled to California, Las Vegas and New Orleans for work, including a stint with the jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, before returning to New York. He met his future bandmates at a venue in Garfield, N.J., called the Choo Choo Club, and after playing together in another band, they formed the Young Rascals.The band got back together for a few reunion shows in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, minus Mr. Brigati, performed under the name the New Rascals. At Mr. Van Zandt’s urging, the four original members played a 2010 charity show together, and in 2012 Mr. Van Zandt wrote and produced a “bioconcert” called “The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream” — a multimedia show featuring performances by the band and clips from its 1960s heyday.It ran for 15 shows on Broadway, then toured the country for several months. More

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      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      The Fall of Kidd Creole: Inside a Rap Pioneer’s Tragic Descent

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      The video is grainy, the sound raw, but it’s hard to look away. A small, nervous man is describing the previous night’s commute to a police detective. In his telling, he has exited Grand Central Terminal onto East 43rd Street, heading to a midnight shift at a copy shop.“I cross the street on Lexington Avenue — I notice him standing on the side right there,” he says.The detective interrupts. “When you say him, who are you referring to?”“The guy that I stabbed,” the man says.The interview continues, and the nervous man explains why he stopped to talk to the man he stabbed: He did not want to alienate a potential fan. “I have a social status,” he says. “I’m part of this rap group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.”The fatal encounter came on the first day of August 2017. The following day, Nathaniel Glover, better known as Kidd Creole, who helped create the blueprint for rap music, was under arrest for the murder of John Jolly, 55. He spent the next four and a half years in jail awaiting trial, was convicted of manslaughter in April and, last month, at the age of 62, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he told the detective the night after the stabbing. “I wish that I would just have stayed home. I didn’t even want to hurt him. He just made me so afraid, that’s all. And I just didn’t want him to hurt me.”South Bronx RisingKidd Creole, right, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1984.Anthony Barboza/Getty ImagesThe saga of Kidd Creole, from the pinnacle of hip-hop stardom to a Bronx rooming house and a series of menial temp jobs, is a parable of rap’s first generation. It is a story of extravagant creativity, an industry that took advantage of its very young creators and a man who never stopped dreaming of a way back into stardom.“This entire music genre was founded by us,” said Grandmaster Caz, a contemporary of Kidd Creole. “And how much is it worth? How much do we own?”The answer, for most of the genre’s pioneers, is not much.Nathaniel Glover Jr. was born Feb. 19, 1960, the third of five children in a working-class Bronx family. His father, Nathaniel Sr., was a handyman who would repair floors; his mother, Sarah, took care of the home.“We basically were sheltered,” said his sister, Glander, one year older. “We weren’t allowed to hang out late at night, be outside, be late.”Nathaniel was a shy, undersized adolescent who favored soft rock and Motown. He and his younger brother Melvin would sneak away with their sister’s poetry notebooks, enchanted by the rhymes. In the Bronx, at that time, it was a useful interest to cultivate.By the mid-1970s, neighborhood D.J.s started holding parties in parks and community centers. In July 1977 — the month of a blackout that left New York City dark — the brothers met a D.J. named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Grandmaster Flash.Flash worked with a bowlegged teenager named Keef Cowboy, who energized the crowds with simple rhymes and exhortations. When a friend enlisted in the military, Cowboy teased him on the microphone: “Hip, hop, hip, hop!”The new culture would soon have a name.Nathaniel and Melvin were the next to join. Nathaniel became Kidd Creole, from the Elvis Presley movie “King Creole”; Melvin became Melle Mel.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.Using the Vatican’s own archives, a soft-spoken scholar has become arguably the most effective excavator of the church’s hidden sins.TikTok choreography, dancing umpires, a ballet-trained first-base coach: The Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league baseball team, has amassed a following by leaning into entertainment.There is growing evidence that MDMA — the illegal drug known as Ecstasy or Molly — can significantly lessen or even eliminate symptoms of PTSD when the treatment is paired with talk therapy.They were the Three M.C.s — later the Furious Four, and finally, Five — giving shape to what hip-hop would become. Their parties were epic, and they were stars — untrained, disrespected by mainstream artists and creating the music that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.“We didn’t have any idea that it would be an original form of American music,” Mr. Glover said last month, speaking from the floating jail barge where he spent years waiting for his trial. “We was just trying to have fun, make a couple of dollars, meet some women. It wasn’t that we had in our head, ‘Oh, this is going to be the start of something big.’”Creole was not as lyrically deft as the other group members, but he had a way of connecting with audiences, said MC Sha-Rock, a member of the Funky Four Plus 1, the Furious Five’s chief rivals in the early days. “Every rhyme, every word made you feel like he was talking to you,” she said. “It was strange: being a teenager, how did you just know that this is what you had to do to engage a crowd?”From another D.J.’s party, Creole picked up a phrase and made it a hip-hop fundamental: “Yes, yes, y’all.”Major record companies saw the music as a fad, leaving it to independents: Enjoy, Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy, Tuff City. When Sugar Hill offered the group a contract in 1980, the rappers signed the papers on the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car at the Englewood, N.J., home of the label’s owners, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, according to Guy Todd Williams, better known as Rahiem, another member of the Furious Five. He was under 18, the others just over. Like the other performers on the label, they knew nothing about the music business.The gloss of the studio and the authority of the engineers made Mr. Glover feel like he was a member of the Motown groups he looked up to, one of the Temptations, maybe.“We kind of felt like we were walking in their footsteps,” he said.What followed was music history and decades of litigation.Sugar Hill became the group’s managers, publishers, producers and recording company. Tension grew when the record label selected Melle Mel as a de facto frontman, alienating the others. Mel was the only member who participated in the Furious Five’s highest charting hit, “The Message” — it is his voice reciting the song’s familiar refrain: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head.”The invention, the crowds, the concerts, made the six members of the group into celebrities. But it wouldn’t last. Even as the group recorded songs that defined the new genre, they never received any royalty payments, Rahiem said. (Flash, Melle Mel and Scorpio all declined to be interviewed for this article; Cowboy died in 1989.) Eventually, Grandmaster Flash had to sue just for the right to use his own stage name.It was a familiar story, said Rocky Bucano, executive director of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, which is scheduled to open in the Bronx in 2024.“This goes not just for the guys in hip-hop, but the guys in R&B, soul and every other music genre,” Mr. Bucano said. “The early guys who started as teenagers got taken advantage of and ended up with the short end of the stick.”The band ultimately made some money when the label paid the performers to settle two lawsuits in 2002 and 2007; another is still ongoing.Leland Robinson, son of the label founders, said that Sugar Hill paid the performers all royalties due them, and that any lingering litigation would soon be resolved. “We are one,” he said, claiming close relationships with Scorpio and Melle Mel. “I’m just tired of bad press.”Styles ChangeKidd Creole, right, and his group became stars, helping to create the genre that would define much of Black culture for the next 50 years.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesOnstage, the group was dynamic and seamless. They toured the world. But offstage there were problems: egos, drugs, friction over loyalty to the Robinsons, which helped seed a rift between the Glover brothers that persists to this day.Styles were also changing. In 1983, the group Run-DMC. from Queens, came out with a stripped-down sound and look that made the Furious Five, with their flashy hair and designer leathers, seem dated. They still performed, but the hits stopped coming and the audiences were smaller. Mr. Glover was just 23, and his star turn was ending. The first generation of hip-hop pioneers — the oldest of the old school — were disappearing from view.“There was never a Plan B for them,” said Sha-Rock. As her career waned, she went on to become a corrections officer in Texas. (She couldn’t do it in New York, she said, “because I would know all the people coming through.”)Mr. Glover spoke candidly about the pain of losing his star status. “It was disappointing to stand on the sideline and watch people achieve,” he said.After a last brief turn in New York’s spotlight in 1994, hosting a call-in radio show on Hot 97 that was canceled the next year, Mr. Glover began to take on temporary jobs — security guard, maintenance, office work — which gave him flexibility for occasional gigs or short tours. In 1997, he moved into a modest rooming house in the West Bronx, still believing the group had the talent to get back on top.He bought himself a beat-making machine and an eight-track recorder so he could produce his own songs, but he could never get anyone to take much of an interest. In 2012, he posted a series of videos of himself rapping, hoping to drum up a following on YouTube. Five years earlier, the group had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but now his videos rarely got more than a few hundred views.“You went from having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”And in the rooming house, he was essentially anonymous.“Hardly anybody knew I was part of the recording industry,” he said. “I kept that to myself.”It was a life he never quite got used to.“Ain’t like nobody was walking up to him, ‘Ain’t you so-and-so from Grandmaster Flash?’” said Van Silk, a promoter who worked with the group. “Because the time has passed.”A Fatal ConfrontationInduction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Glover, center right, went from “having everything to having almost nothing,” his sister said. “That’s a deep dive.”Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesIn the summer of 2017, Mr. Glover thought he had finally caught a break. Capitalizing on growing nostalgia for old school hip-hop, the surviving Furious Five MCs were booked to perform at the 6,000-seat Dell Music Center in Philadelphia, on a bill with other veteran hip-hop acts. It would be Mr. Glover’s first time in front of an audience in more than five years, and he hoped it might lead to a full tour.“I always enjoyed being out on the road performing,” he said in a call from jail. “It’s in my blood. I can’t get away from it.”On Aug. 1, three weeks before the Philadelphia gig, Mr. Glover rode the subway to Grand Central Terminal for his midnight shift in Manhattan. Since being robbed after a trip to the store for milk and beer a dozen years prior, he had begun carrying a steak knife attached to his forearm with a rubber band.“I went across Lexington Avenue, that’s when I noticed the guy,” he would tell Mark Dahl, a prosecutor from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the next night. He said that seeing a man standing alone was “a red flag for me.”But Cheryl Horry, John Jolly’s cousin, doubted there was anything unusual going on: “Most likely my cousin was standing there drinking a beer,” she said. “When he’s drinking his beer, he’ll lean against the wall, and he’ll speak to everybody.”According to Ms. Horry, Mr. Jolly was born in Charleston, S.C., but moved to New York with an uncle after his parents died. As an adolescent, he left school for a series of jobs, Ms. Horry said, including a stint at White Castle. He had a habit of distancing himself from his family, and this became more pronounced as an adult, particularly after he’d been drinking heavily. Ms. Horry and others lost touch with Mr. Jolly, seeing him only occasionally, often during the holidays.“We never knew why,” she said. “When he’d come around, we always used to tell him: ‘We’re family. Even if you don’t want to be around family, call us, let us know you’re all right.’”According to Mr. Glover and surveillance video of the confrontation, Mr. Jolly said something to Mr. Glover as he passed by that August night. But Mr. Glover had earbuds in, listening to a song by the Eagles. Take it easy, take it easy / Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.Mr. Glover said that he took out his earbuds, not wanting to be rude, in case the man was a fan — in which case, he would have apologized for initially ignoring Mr. Jolly and thanked him for the recognition. But when he realized that Mr. Jolly had only said, ‘What’s up?’ he responded in kind. “Nothing, bruh, nothing,” he said and put the buds back in.Surveillance video from a neighboring office building shows Mr. Glover then strolling out of the frame. After several seconds, Mr. Jolly is seen gesticulating in the direction that Mr. Glover has gone. He then walks purposefully toward him, still gesturing, until he is right in the face of Mr. Glover, who has walked back into the frame. Mr. Glover makes to leave, and Mr. Jolly follows him. Both men drift out of sight. What happened next was not caught on camera.Throughout his four and a half years in jail, Mr. Glover has never denied that he stabbed Mr. Jolly, even pantomiming for the prosecutor during the interview the following night the motion he used, two sharp jabs to Mr. Jolly’s chest. On the phone recently from the Vernon C. Bain jail barge, he was just as blunt.“I’m backing up, and he’s moving toward me,” he said. “He was sweating and his eyes was bulging.” Mr. Glover backed off, he said, and Mr. Jolly moved forward. “And then that’s when I stabbed him.”Rahiem, who stayed in touch with Mr. Glover as he awaited trial, said that the rapper never appeared broken. “He seemed determined, resilient, innocent, but disappointed in the way the justice system was working against him,” Rahiem said.But while he expressed deep remorse in his initial interviews with law enforcement, Mr. Glover became increasingly fixated on the surveillance video during his years in jail, telling family members, friends and reporters that it had been manipulated to make Mr. Jolly seem less aggressive. (The New York Times asked a video expert, Catalin Grigoras, the director of the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, Denver, to analyze the video in question, and he said it bore no signs of manipulation.)Finally, this March, a trial commenced. Mr. Glover’s trademark long hair was shorn, his face creased by time. He looked small and uncomfortable in an oversize suit, and he did not testify, leaving it to Scottie Celestin, the fifth in a string of lawyers representing him over the years, to argue that Mr. Jolly died from mismanaged care at the hospital, not from his two stab wounds.Mr. Glover’s supporters were irate when the judge, Michele S. Rodney, told the jurors not to consider whether Mr. Glover acted in self-defense. New York law says that deadly physical force is permissible only in response to an aggressor who is also using deadly physical force; Mr. Jolly was unarmed.On April 6, the jury returned a verdict acquitting Mr. Glover of murder — which requires intent — but convicting him of manslaughter. On May 4, Mr. Glover was sentenced to 16 years. If he serves the full term, he will be 73 when he leaves prison. Asked to speak before the sentencing, he made no apology to anybody, as Cheryl Horry noted bitterly afterward.Mr. Glover said to the judge, “I’m very disappointed in the way that the whole situation has played out,” adding that he had been portrayed as a person with no remorse or humanity. “I also feel that at a certain point the truth of all this will be revealed and I will be exonerated,” he said. Mr. Celestin said he planned to appeal.The day of the sentencing, Sylvia Robinson, who had been the chief executive of Sugar Hill Records, was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The music that she, Mr. Glover and a small handful of others brought into the world is now almost 50 years old, and it is the dominant form of popular music today. Hip-hop’s legacy includes revolutions in fashion and language, lasting fame and enormous fortunes — but it left Mr. Glover working a midnight shift over a photocopier.The tragedy of Kidd Creole, the rapper, is that the culture he helped create had so little need for him. The tragedy of Nathaniel Glover and John Jolly was a random encounter of no more than seven minutes. Mr. Glover believed to the end that he was one break away from relaunching his music career.Sha-Rock, now 60, sees in Mr. Glover’s fall a legacy of neglect: first by the city, and then by the industry.“Sugar Hill Records created the space for people to hear us outside of New York City,” she said. “But we were supposed to be protected as young teenagers. He shouldn’t have had to be working at a copy shop, I shouldn’t have to be working as a corrections officer. We were supposed to have been protected. We gave you everything that was dear to our heart and dear to the culture of hip-hop. That’s real.“We gave you our blood, sweat and tears, and transformed rap records,” she continued. “You were supposed to protect us.”Mr. Glover agrees. “If I was doing anything that had any relation to the industry, I wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “I would have been home.”He protests the case against him, talking to anyone who will listen about his issues with the surveillance video. Though he has never stopped admitting to the stabbing, the contrition he displayed on the night after the killing has disappeared. “My conscience is clear,” he said.“He initiated this whole thing,” he said of Mr. Jolly. “I didn’t want anything to do with him.” He mentioned the show scheduled for later in the month. “The group was ready to get back together,” he said. “I was getting ready to go back to my life the way it was.”The concert in Philadelphia went on without him. More

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      Dolly Parton Voted Into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

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      The country singer had objected to being included, but will join a class that includes Carly Simon, Duran Duran and others from across genres.Despite a last-minute plea to “respectfully bow out” of consideration for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country singer Dolly Parton made it in anyway, joining a musically diverse array of inductees for 2022 that also includes Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar.The honorees — voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals — “each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock ’n’ roll,” said John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock Hall, in a statement.Parton, 76, had said in March that she was “extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated” but didn’t feel that she had “earned that right” to be recognized as a rock artist at the expense of others. Ballots, however, had already been sent to voters, and the hall said they would remain unchanged, noting that the organization was “not defined by any one genre” and had deep roots in country and rhythm and blues.In an interview with NPR last week, Parton said she would accept her induction after all, should it come to pass. “It was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for the people in rock music, and I have found out lately that it’s not necessarily that,” she said.But she added, “if they can’t go there to be recognized, where do they go? So I just felt like I would be taking away from someone that maybe deserved it, certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist.”Following years of criticism regarding diversity — less than 8 percent of inductees were women as of 2019 — the Rock Hall has made a point in recent years to expand its purview. Artists like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson have been welcomed in from the worlds of rap, R&B and pop, alongside prominent women across genres like the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Tina Turner.This year, Eminem becomes just the 10th hip-hop act to be inducted, making the cut on his first ballot. (Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording.)Parton, Richie, Simon and Duran Duran were also selected on their first go-round, while fresh nominees like Beck and A Tribe Called Quest, who had been eligible for more than a decade, were passed over. Simon, known for her folk-inflected pop hits like “You’re So Vain,” was a first-time nominee more than 25 years after she qualified. Benatar and Eurythmics, long eligible, had each been considered once before.Those passed over this year also included Kate Bush, Devo, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick.Judas Priest was on the ballot, but will instead be inducted in the non-performer category for musical excellence, alongside the songwriting and production duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will be recognized with the Early Influence Award, while the executives Allen Grubman, Jimmy Iovine and Sylvia Robinson are set to receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award, named for the longtime Atlantic Records honcho and one of the founders of the Rock Hall.The 37th annual induction ceremony will be held on Nov. 5, at Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, and will air at a later date on HBO and SiriusXM. More

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      Dolly Parton Bows Out of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nomination

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      The country singer, who was among 17 genre-spanning nominees this year, said, “I don’t feel that I have earned that right” and asked to be removed. Voting has already begun.Dolly Parton does not feel rock ’n’ roll enough for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.The country singer, known for crossover hits like “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5,” said on Monday that she wished to be removed from consideration for the annual honor after earning her first nomination in February.“Even though I am extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I don’t feel that I have earned that right,” Parton, 76, wrote in a statement posted to social media. “I really do not want votes to be split because of me, so I must respectfully bow out.”❤️ pic.twitter.com/Z6LKfWtlxg— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) March 14, 2022
      The Rock Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Selection was underway as of last month, and it was unclear what would happen to any potential votes already cast for Parton.Among the 17 nominees eligible for inclusion alongside Parton were others who stretch the traditional definition of rock music: Eminem, A Tribe Called Quest, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Dionne Warwick and Kate Bush were selected for the ballot along with bands like Judas Priest, MC5, Rage Against the Machine and New York Dolls.Ballots were sent in February to the more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals who choose their top five inductees each year, with the winners — typically between five and seven in total — scheduled to be announced in May. This year’s induction ceremony was slated for the fall.The Rock Hall asks its voters to consider an act’s music influence and the “length and depth” of its career, in addition to “innovation and superiority in style and technique.” Following complaints about its treatment of female and Black musicians over the years, the Rock Hall has recently expanded its tent to include artists from rap, pop, R&B and beyond, including Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. Artists in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock Hall include Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Brenda Lee, among others. Parton was inducted into the Country Hall of Fame in 1999.On its website, the Rock Hall praised Parton as a “living legend and a paragon of female empowerment,” adding that her “unapologetic femininity belied her shrewd business acumen, an asset in the male-dominated music industry.”A 2019 look at the organization’s nearly 900 inductees found that only 7.7 percent were women.Other artists have balked at inclusion in the club before: John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, thumbed his nose at the band’s induction in 2006, with the band opting not to show. In 2012, when Guns ’n Roses made it, Axl Rose said he would decline to participate and asked that he not be inducted in absentia. Both acts were inducted anyway.In her statement, however, Parton left the door open. She wrote that she hoped the Rock Hall would “be willing to consider me again — if I’m ever worthy,” noting that she had been inspired by the recognition to “put out a hopefully great rock ’n’ roll album at some point in the future.” More

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      Sam Lay, Drummer Who Backed Blues Greats and Bob Dylan, Dies at 86

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      His distinctive double-shuffle groove, which he likened to “three different drummers playing the same beat,” enlivened records by Howlin’ Wolf and many others.Sam Lay, a powerful and virtuosic drummer who played and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, was a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and backed Bob Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died on Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.His daughter, Debbie Lay, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Lay’s exuberant, idiosyncratic drumming was known for its double-shuffle groove, which he adapted from the rhythms of the hand claps and tambourine beats he heard in the Pentecostal church he attended while growing up in Birmingham, Ala.“The only way I can describe it is, you’ve got three different drummers playing the same beat but they’re not hitting it at the same time,” Mr. Lay said in “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” a 2015 documentary directed by John Anderson that took its name from an album Mr. Lay released in 1968.The harmonica player Corky Siegel, a longtime collaborator, said the double-shuffle groove was part of Mr. Lay’s broader ability to do more than keep the beat.“He just made you fly,” Mr. Siegel said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t held back by the concept of groove and time.” He added: “People think he played loud. No, he played delicate, but he used the full dynamic range, and when you do that, and you get to a crescendo, it’s powerful, like a locomotive coming toward you. But with Sam, it was like five locomotives.”After arriving in Chicago in early 1960, Mr. Lay played in bands led by the harmonica player and singer Little Walter and the singer Howlin’ Wolf, with whom he recorded songs that became blues standards like “Killing Floor,” “The Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”Once, after being fined by Howlin’ Wolf for wearing pants without a black stripe on them, Mr. Lay argued that no one could see his pants behind his drum kit. When their dispute persisted, Mr. Lay pulled a Smith & Wesson gun and held it to Howlin’ Wolf’s face.Mr. Lay left Howlin’ Wolf to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963, lured by the prospect of making $20 a gig, nearly three times what he had been earning. Led by Mr. Butterfield on harmonica and vocals, the band — which also included the guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, the bassist Jerome Arnold and the keyboardist Mark Naftalin — was racially integrated, a rarity at the time, and bought the blues to a white audience during an intense period in the civil rights movement.Bob Dylan rehearsing for his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with, from left, Mike Bloomfield, Mr. Lay, Jerome Arnold and Al Kooper.David Gahr/Getty ImagesThe band played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. Hours after their set, Mr. Lay, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bloomfield were part of Mr. Dylan’s backup band when he stunned the audience by performing an electric set, which began with a bracing version of his song “Maggie’s Farm.”Soon after that, Mr. Dylan asked Mr. Lay to back him on the title track of his album “Highway 61 Revisited.” In addition to playing drums, Mr. Lay played a toy whistle on the song’s memorable opening. (The organist Al Kooper has said he was the one who brought the whistle to the studio).“I blew it and it sounded like a siren,” Mr. Lay told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Bob said, ‘Do that again.’ So I did it again.”Later in 1965, the Butterfield band’s first album, called simply “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” was released. One track, “I Got My Mojo Working,” featured Mr. Lay on lead vocal.An illness caused Mr. Lay to leave the band in late 1965.Samuel Julian Lay was born on March 20, 1935, in Birmingham. His father, Foster, a Pullman train porter who played banjo in a country band, died when Sam was 17 months old. His mother, Elsie (Favors) Lay, cleaned Pullman cars.Growing up, he listened to country music; as a teenager, he took drumming lessons from W.C. Handy Jr., the son of the composer. He dropped out of high school (which ended his dream of trying to run faster than the Olympic champion Jesse Owens) and in 1954 moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a steel mill and started to discover his musical path.One day, he stopped into a wine bar after hearing the sound of a harmonica being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in when he learned that he played drums. In the late 1950s Mr. Lay joined the Thunderbirds, a blues and R&B group.When Little Walter was shot, Mr. Lay helped nurse him back to health. Once in Chicago, he joined Little Walter’s band. But he didn’t stay long; he was soon hired by Howlin’ Wolf.Mr. Lay was a slick dresser who wore elaborate capes and hats and carried a walking stick. He styled his hair for a while after Little Richard’s. And he brought his windup eight-millimeter camera to clubs in the 1960s. It didn’t have sound, but he captured images of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Buddy Guy and others onstage.“As soon as Howlin’ Wolf knew that a camera was watching him, you’d think he was possessed in some kind of way,” Mr. Lay said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.Footage he shot was used in Mr. Anderson’s film and in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 public television series, “The Blues.”In 1966, after he had begun to play with the harmonica player and singer James Cotton, Mr. Lay heard from Muddy Waters that an enemy of Mr. Cotton’s, who had shot him years before, had just been released from jail and was going after him. Mr. Lay rushed to his house, got his Colt .45, drove to the club and prepared to defend Mr. Cotton.But while Mr. Lay waited for the gunman (who never came), his gun went off, he told Phoenix New Times in 1999. He shot himself in the groin.“I’m still recuperating,” he said in the interview.Mr. Lay recording at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kan., a former church, in 2000.Cliff Schiappa/Associated PressIn 1969, Mr. Lay was part of the all-star band, which also included Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield, that recorded the album “Fathers and Sons.” It reached No. 70 on the Billboard chart.Over the next 50 years, he performed with Mr. Siegel’s ensembles the Siegel-Schwall Band, Chamber Blues and Chicago Blues Reunion, as well as leading his own blues band.But the blues did not pay all of Mr. Lay’s bills. For many years, he moonlighted as a security guard.Mr. Lay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, as part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and into the Blues Hall of Fame three years later.In addition to his daughter, he is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Buirts) Lay, died in 2017. His son Bobby died inn 2019, and his son Michael died last month.Mr. Lay did not lack self-confidence.“I don’t know nobody in the world who can follow a band as good as I can, specifically if it comes to blues and that old-time rock ‘n’ roll,” he said in Mr. Anderson’s documentary.“The secret,” he added, “is paying attention to what everyone else is playing and keeping your eyes open, and your mind.” More