Bring Out Your Dead! The celebrity death thread....
Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Pat Robertson.
Thank you, Jesus.
It is almost impossible for me to gin up any kind of Christian compassion relative to this passing. This is a man who saw the Bible as a cudgel and inflicted horrible harm on people, purportedly in the name of Jesus.
I sometimes ponder an afterlife, in which one’s eyes and heart are opened to the meaning of true compassion, love and acceptance of all fellow humans. And where the full effect of all of one’s sins are revealed to that person, all of the emotional and physical pain that others may have endured as a result of your deeds and words.
The thought of some thing like that, waiting for me beyond this life makes me squirm. I’m not sure I want to be faced with all of my failings, and be given a true insight into how those failings affected other people. But it is a thought which gives me a sense of justice, that maybe someone like Pat Robertson shows up at the pearly gates, expecting to be escorted inside to a giant palace. But instead before he can do so, is required to review his life and understand the hurt he inflicted.
I’m not claiming to understand what awaits all of us once we depart this mortal realm. It’s just something I think about.
WFUV’s Mixed Bag (Don McGee) just reminded me that Cynthia Weil co-wrote this standout song for Solomon Burke’s 2002 comeback album.
mrincredible said:
Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Pat Robertson.
Thank you, Jesus.
It is almost impossible for me to gin up any kind of Christian compassion relative to this passing. This is a man who saw the Bible as a cudgel and inflicted horrible harm on people, purportedly in the name of Jesus.
I sometimes ponder an afterlife, in which one’s eyes and heart are opened to the meaning of true compassion, love and acceptance of all fellow humans. And where the full effect of all of one’s sins are revealed to that person, all of the emotional and physical pain that others may have endured as a result of your deeds and words.
The thought of some thing like that, waiting for me beyond this life makes me squirm. I’m not sure I want to be faced with all of my failings, and be given a true insight into how those failings affected other people. But it is a thought which gives me a sense of justice, that maybe someone like Pat Robertson shows up at the pearly gates, expecting to be escorted inside to a giant palace. But instead before he can do so, is required to review his life and understand the hurt he inflicted.
I’m not claiming to understand what awaits all of us once we depart this mortal realm. It’s just something I think about.
I hope things are very uncomfortable for Pat right now.
RIP Treat Williams, star of Hair, The Phantom, and Everwood... I never figured out why he wasn't a massive star. He was insanely good-looking and could act and sing, but just didn't get the roles for some reason. Most of the obits from people he worked with on the Tweets say he was one of the nicest guys in Hollywood and maybe that's why. I don't know. I think the first thing I saw him in was Flashpoint, alongside Kris Kristofferson. Great movie, terrible music choice at the end.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/entertainment/treat-williams-death/index.html
Treat Williams had leading-man looks but took character-actor type roles. Maybe he if had played Danny in the film version of “Grease” like he did on Broadway (while Travolta was Doody), he would have had a more conventional leading man arc. Instead, he got Berger in the film version of “Hair,” which was successful, but not necessarily a career launching-pad type role.
Fortunately, his position in Hollywood allowed him to do excellent work in parts that superstars wouldn’t take, like the charming, predatory Arnold Friend in “Smooth Talk.”
galileo said:
Cormac McCarthy,89, a great writer. The Road was terrific.
His books were so different and unique. His writing style and lack of punctuation was challenging and demanded your attention. I read All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian back in the 90s. No Country for Old Men was brilliant, and was a pretty good movie as well.
Maybe I will try The Road.
Donald Triplett, the first person to be diagnosed as autistic. He was 89 years.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-17/donald-triplett-autism-diagnosis-in-a-different-key-obituary/102492418
Don was much loved in his family, and his community and will be missed by many.
May his memory be a blessing.
Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof and numerous other Broadway shows, and was a featured guest a few years back at the Maplewood Ideas Festival, dies at 99.
While not recently deceased, the Aretha Franklin storyline is a bit bizarre. She had only two handwritten wills, and only one was notarized. The other was found stuffed under a couch cushion. The jury ruled in favor of the second will (under the couch cushion), which essentially reversed what the first will said: brothers 2 and 3 will now get all and brother 1 is shut out (4th brother lives under guardianship in assisted living). Weirdest thing I read about it was that she mostly insisted on being paid in cash, up front, and would put that money in her purse and carry it on stage. That's serious old-school.
The 1960s wild child, British actor and singer, Jane Birkin, who became a beloved figure in France, has died at the age of 76.
Birkin was best known outside France for her 1969 hit in which she and her then-lover, the late French singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, sang the sexually explicit Je t'aime…moi non plus
https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/2023/07/16/british-actor-singer-jane-birkin-dies/
And another voice known to most every 60s teenager in the midwest and south:
Dick Biondi, Fast-Talking Star of Top 40 Radio, Dies at 90
“Wild, outrageous, goofy and uplifting,” as one fan put it, he was based in Chicago for most of his career but had fans all over the country.
July 20, 2023
Dick Biondi, an exuberant, fast-talking Top 40 radio personality, nicknamed “the Screamer,” who in the early 1960s became one of Chicago’s most popular disc jockeys and, thanks to the strength of his station’s signal, was heard well beyond the city, died on June 26 in Chicago. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Pamela Enzweiler-Pulice, the director of a forthcoming documentary, “The Voice That Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story.”
Mr. Biondi was a yeller, though not a shock jock, at WLS-AM, which had just changed its format to rock ‘n’ roll when he was hired for the late evening shift in 1960 for $378 a week (about $3,900 in today’s dollars). The station’s reach into 38 states and Canada provided Mr. Biondi with a platform that made him a major media personality as rock music’s popularity surged.
Mr. Biondi, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1998, quickly established himself as a Chicago star. He called himself “the Wild I-tralian”; hosted record hops and charity events; and recorded a novelty song, “On Top of a Pizza,” a parody of “On Top of Old Smoky” that in 1961 became a local hit.
“Nobody came close to his personality,” Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice said in a phone interview. “He was wild, outrageous, goofy and uplifting. He was like a big kid — he was one of us. He spoke our language.”
In 1961, The Gavin Report, an industry publication, named him the Top 40 disc jockey of the year. His evening ratings eventually rose to the highest in Chicago radio.
Despite “operating in the shadowland of the night-time disk jockey, where the glare of national publicity and the adulation of the fan magazines seldom penetrates,” Roger Ebert, the future film critic, wrote in late 1961 in The Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Biondi has managed in the past two years to become one of the most famous men in the Midwest.”
The Chicago Tribune has reported over the years that Biondi’s show attracted as much as a 60 percent share of all listeners in the Chicago market. In 1962, The Tribune said that most of his local audience consisted of teenagers.
Ms. Enzweiler-Pulice was one of Mr. Biondi’s young fans. She started a Biondi fan club and wrote a newsletter. She was 13 when she met him for the first time at a shopping center, where hundreds of people watched him arrive in a helicopter.
“Wherever he went,” she said, “fans mobbed him.”
WLS became a critical part of the hit-making machine for record companies, and Mr. Biondi was a significant player in that equation. He was especially important to the Four Seasons, whose label, Vee-Jay, was based in Chicago.
Another group that was on Vee-Jay, at least for a while, was the Beatles. And it is possible that when Mr. Biondi played their Vee-Jay single “Please Please Me” in early 1963, it was the first time a Beatles song had been heard on a station in the United States, said Mark Lewisohn, whose book “Tune In” (2013) is the first of a projected trilogy called “The Beatles: All These Years.”
But Mr. Biondi’s time at WLS ended in 1963 after only three years. He was fired when he complained about the amount of commercials on his show compared with that of a competitor, Dick Kemp, known as “the Wild Child,” on a rival station. Mr. Biondi said that his carping angered the sales manager; in one confrontation at the studio, Mr. Biondi, armed with a letter opener, had to be restrained by two engineers.
This was, Mr. Biondi said, one of 25 times he was dismissed from various jobs over the course of his career.
Soon after his dismissal, Herb Lyon, a gossip columnist in The Tribune, reported: “Ex WLS Dee Jay Dick Biondi, still the youngster’s hero, trotting ’round town, pushing his own new album, ‘Biondi Talks to Teenagers,’ a real twist.”
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Richard Orlando Biondi was born on Sept. 13, 1932, in Endicott, N.Y., near Binghamton, to Michael and Rose Biondi. He first performed on radio when he was 8, and, as he stood outside a studio in Auburn, N.Y., the announcer he was watching asked him to come inside and read a commercial for a women’s clothing store.
That started his love affair with radio. As a teenager he worked as a gofer at a station in Binghamton, where one of the announcers tutored him on his diction. In 1950, after graduating from high school, he got a job in Corning, N.Y., as a sportscaster.
For the next decade he worked at stations in Alexandria, La. (where he played R&B and called high school football games); York, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; and Buffalo.
He hosted a record hop in 1957 starring Jerry Lee Lewis, who was at the apex of his fiery fame but was upstaged at the event by the actor Michael Landon, who talked his way through his single “Gimme a Little Kiss (Will Ya, Huh?).”
“The girls went nuts,” Mr. Biondi said in an interview on the television show “Chicago Tonight” in 2003. “You know how good-looking he was.”
Mr. Biondi grew a beard, which he dyed from week to week to match the official colors of the high schools where he regularly hosted record hops. He sat on a flagpole for three days and nights on a listener’s dare.
And he said he met Elvis Presley backstage in Cleveland and persuaded him to autograph the white shirt he was wearing; Mr. Biondi then wore it to a hop, where fans shredded it so badly that he had to go to a hospital emergency room to treat his badly scratched back.
After leaving Chicago in 1963, Mr. Biondi spent the next half-century bouncing around. He moved to KRLA in Los Angeles in 1963; hosted a nationally syndicated show on Mutual Radio from 1964 until it was canceled in 1965; and then returned to KRLA, where in 1965 he and his fellow D.J.s, including Bob Eubanks and Casey Kasem, introduced the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. He came back to Chicago in 1967, at WCFL.
“You know, the day I left Chicago, I started wanting to come back to it,” he told The Tribune in 1967. “It’s the only place I’ve ever been that’s made an impression on me.”
But in 1972 he left for a station in Cincinnati. He later moved on to Boston and North Myrtle Beach, S.C., before coming back to Chicago for good in 1983, most significantly as the host of a show at a new oldies station, WJMK-FM, for 21 years. He returned to WLS (this time on the FM dial) from 2006 until the station ended its association with him in 2018.
His survivors include his wife, Maribeth Biondi, and his sister, Geraldine Wallace.
Many of Mr. Biondi’s encounters with rock luminaries remained vivid decades later.
For example, he recalled that after Michael Landon, who was then starring in the film “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” wowed the crowd of several hundred fans in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis went onstage for his second set and performed 14 songs.
“He goes crazy in the second show,” Mr. Biondi said. “He walks off and here’s Michael Landon. He says, ‘OK, pretty boy, top me this time.’”
Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” More about Richard Sandomir
Gosh. Tony Bennett made it to 96 years, incredible. A life to celebrate and remember…
May his family and friends find comfort in happier memories of his better years (before dementia), knowing the world mourns with them.
RIP Sinead O'Connor
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66318626
Irish singer and activist Sinéad O'Connor has died at the aged of 56.
In a statement, the singer's family said: "It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad.
"Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time."
She was best known for her single Nothing Compares 2 U, released in 1990, which went on to hit number one around the world.
The singer, who was outspoken in her social and political views, brought out 10 studio albums in all.
ridski said:
RIP Sinead O'Connor
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66318626
Irish singer and activist Sinéad O'Connor has died at the aged of 56.
In a statement, the singer's family said: "It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad.
"Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time."
She was best known for her single Nothing Compares 2 U, released in 1990, which went on to hit number one around the world.
The singer, who was outspoken in her social and political views, brought out 10 studio albums in all.
A sad ending to her life, much too soon.
They just played Nothing Compares 2 U on FUV. Seems like she fell into a bad place in her later years.
That is really sad - she had many mental issues over the years. The death of her son was unrecoverable. She was super talented - she will be missed.
Road trip from Chapel Hill to Ann Arbor with a friend in January 1988. Three new CDs that we played over and over in the car: 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe, the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me — and O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra.
Showtime did a special last year about her called Nothing Compares. It's available on demand for subscribers and definitely worth seeing.
This was a shocker to me. Just heard about it now and thought I might beat you all here. But, you guys are really fast.
If it was an end to a troubled life, I hope she has found peace. We'll always have her music, but I'm sure it will be hard on her family. 56. So young.
Anyone remember whose picture it was that she became so infamous for ripping in half when she hosted SNL? Was it the then-current pope?
Now its the 699 Club