The RIP Famous Person Thread

[Happy As Larry]

Martin Mull, Arrested Development and Roseanne actor, dies aged 80

Martin Mull, whose droll, esoteric comedy and acting made him a hip sensation in the 1970s and later a beloved guest star on sitcoms including Roseanne and Arrested Development, has died, his daughter said Friday. He was 80 years old.
Mull’s daughter, TV writer and comic artist Maggie Mull, said her father died at home on Thursday after “a valiant fight against a long illness”.

Mull, who was also a guitarist and painter, came to national fame with a recurring role on the Norman Lear-created satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and the starring role in its spinoff Fernwood Tonight, on which he played Barth Gimble, the host of a satirical talk show.

“He was known for excelling at every creative discipline imaginable and also for doing Red Roof Inn commercials,” Maggie Mull said in an Instagram post. “He would find that joke funny. He was never not funny. My dad will be deeply missed by his wife and daughter, by his friends and coworkers, by fellow artists and comedians and musicians, and – the sign of a truly exceptional person – by many, many dogs.”

Known for his blonde hair and well-trimmed mustache, Mull was born in Chicago, raised in Ohio and Connecticut and studied art in Rhode Island and Rome. He combined his music and comedy in hip Hollywood clubs in the 1970s.
“In 1976 I was a guitar player and sit-down comic appearing at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip when Norman Lear walked in and heard me,” Mull told the Associated Press in 1980. “He cast me as the wife beater on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Four months later I was spun off on my own show.”

In the 1980s he appeared in films including Mr Mom and Clue, and in the 1990s had a recurring role on Roseanne.

He would later play private eye Gene Parmesan on “Arrested Development,” and would be nominated for an Emmy in 2016 for a guest turn on “Veep.”
“What I did on ‘Veep’ I’m very proud of, but I’d like to think it’s probably more collective, at my age it’s more collective,” Mull told the AP after his nomination. “It might go all the way back to ‘Fernwood.’”

Other comedians and actors were often his biggest fans.
“Martin was the greatest,” “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig said in an X post. “So funny, so talented, such a nice guy. Was lucky enough to act with him on The Jackie Thomas Show and treasured every moment being with a legend. Fernwood Tonight was so influential in my life.”

Martin Mull, Arrested Development and Roseanne actor, dies aged 80 | Television | The Guardian

[harrybarracuda]

Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Chinatown who was also one of Hollywood’s most renowned script doctors, has died. He was 89.
Born in Los Angeles, Towne started his film career acting and writing for producer Roger Corman. In the early 1970s he emerged as a key figure in the New Hollywood movement, collaborating with filmmakers including Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.
Towne’s credited scripts from the period included Roman Polanski’s classic Chinatown as well as The Last Detail and Shampoo. But he was also known as one of the industry’s leading script doctors, doing uncredited work on films such as Bonnie And Clyde, The Parallax View, McCabe And Mrs Miller and The Godfather.
Later, Towne wrote scripts for several of Tom Cruise’s early box office hits, among them Days Of Thunder, The Firm and Mission: Impossible and its first sequel.
He also began to direct, working from his own scripts on Personal Best, Tequila Sunrise, Ask The Dust and other projects.
Besides his 1975 Academy Award for Chinatown, Towne earned Oscar nominations for The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes. He won Writers Guild of America awards for Chinatown, Shampoo and TV series Mad Men (on which he was a consulting producer) and, in 1997, the Guild’s Laurel Award for screenwriting achievement. He also won a Bafta for Chinatown and The Last Detail.

Oscar-winning ‘Chinatown’ screenwriter Robert Towne dies at 89 | Features | Screen

[S Landreth]

James Inhofe, former Republican senator who called climate change a ‘hoax’, dies aged 89

The Republican former senator James Inhofe, a climate denier who once brought a snowball to the chamber floor in a stunt attempting to disprove global warming, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.

[Happy As Larry]

Legendary sex therapist Dr Ruth dead at age 96

The legendarily frank sex therapist and cultural icon Dr Ruth Westheimer, known simply as Dr Ruth, has died at the age of 96, according to her publicist.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family.

Westheimer never advocated risky sexual behavior. Instead, she encouraged an open dialogue on previously closeted issues that affected her audience of millions. Her one recurring theme was there was nothing to be ashamed of.

“I still hold old-fashioned values and I’m a bit of a square,” she told students at Michigan City high school in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.”

Westheimer’s giggly, German-accented voice, coupled with her 4ft 7in frame, made her an unlikely looking – and sounding – outlet for “sexual literacy”. The contradiction was one of the keys to her success.

But it was her extensive knowledge and training, coupled with her humorous, accepting manner, that catapulted her local radio program, Sexually Speaking, into the national spotlight in the early 1980s. She had a nonjudgmental approach to what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their home.
Legendary sex therapist Dr Ruth dead at age 96 | Sex | The Guardian

[Happy As Larry]

Richard Simmons, celebrated fitness instructor, dies aged 76

The fitness instructor Richard Simmons, who rocketed to fame in the 1980s with up-tempo neon-colored exercise videos such as Sweatin’ to the Oldies, has died.

Simmons had just thanked fans on social media for birthday wishes after he turned 76 on Friday. “I never got so many messages about my birthday in my life!” Simmons wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I am sitting here writing emails. Have a most beautiful rest of your Friday.”

ABC News said Simmons’ death was confirmed by his representative on Saturday, following a 911 call made by his housekeeper. It added that Simmons appeared to have died of natural causes, citing police sources.
Born in New Orleans as Milton Teagle Simmons, Simmons rose to fame in the 1970s and captured the zeitgeist in the 1980s through a series of exercise videos, conducted in often lurid outfits. He also opened a number of gyms, promoted a range of products and became an established media presence on TV and radio over the decades.

Having long been the most recognizable face of fitness and healthy living in the US, promoting various weight-loss programs in his often flamboyant style, Simmons also became involved in aspects of political activism, such as his support for non-competitive physical education in public schools.

In the past decade, Simmons had largely retreated from public life. In March, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with skin cancer, underneath his eye. In the same month, he posted on social media that “I am … dying. The truth is we all are dying. Every day we live we are getting closer to our death.”

He later clarified that he was not actually about to die and that he intended to pass on a message for people to embrace life.

[Happy As Larry]

Shannen Doherty, Heathers and Beverly Hills 90210 star, dies at 53

Shannen Doherty, star of Beverly Hills 90210 and Heathers, has died at the age of 53.

A statement from her publicist Leslie Sloane, cited by People magazine, said: “It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease.”
The actor had been first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and underwent a mastectomy. In 2020, she said that her diagnosis was then terminal, calling it “a bitter pill to swallow” in a Good Morning America interview.
In June 2023, Doherty shared an Instagram post that revealed news that cancer had spread to her brain alongside a video of her receiving treatment. “My fear is obvious,” she wrote.
Doherty started working at a young age with small-screen roles in Father Murphy and Little House on the Prairie and big-screen roles in The Secret of NIMH and Girls Just Want to Have Fun all before the age of 15.

In 1988, Doherty starred in the dark comedy Heathers alongside Winona Ryder. While it wasn’t a financial success at the time, it since became a cult favourite, widely seen as one of the best high school films ever. She later made a cameo appearance in the pilot of a TV adaptation.

Two years later, Doherty found success as Brenda Walsh in hit teen drama Beverly Hills 90210, which averaged over 21 million viewers by its fourth season. “We get accosted in malls,” said Doherty of the show’s success in 1992. “Basically, it takes over your life.”

Doherty left before season five but later returned for the 2008 reboot and 2019’s meta BH90210, where she played herself.
She also found major success in witchcraft drama Charmed, which she starred in for three seasons. She also directed a number of episodes. Her film roles included Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for the film-maker Kevin Smith.
When Doherty shared her latest update in June 2023, Smith wrote: “You have been such a fearless fighter your whole life, so it’s understandable to be a little scared from time to time. But when those moments pass, let that indomitable Doherty spirit take over anew. I love you so much, my Mallrat.”

Doherty was often positioned as a troublemaker in the press, with People magazine once referring to her the “iconic Hollywood bad girl of the 90s”. Addressing her reputation in 1992, Doherty pushed back on being difficult.
“If you consider ‘difficult’ being a strong woman who sticks up for herself, yeah, I admit to it,” she says. “I’m open to different ideas, but if you get on my bad side and don’t listen to me and you don’t treat me with as much respect as you treat a man, you’ve got a problem.”
In 2010, Doherty addressed it again: “I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did. But, after a while you sort of try to shed that rep because you’re kind of a different person. You’ve evolved and all of the bad things you’ve done in your life have brought you to a much better place.”
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...90210-heathers

[Happy As Larry]

Bob Newhart, famed comedian and sitcom actor, dies at 94

Bob Newhart, the revered US comedian and star of two classic sitcoms known for his deadpan delivery, died on Thursday at the age of 94.

The Chicago native and titular star of game-changing sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart in the 1970s and 80s, died at his home in Los Angeles after a period of short illnesses, his publicist Jerry Digney confirmed in a statement.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

The follow-up, Newhart, starred Newhart and Mary Frann as an author and his wife who open a rural inn in Vermont. It ran from 1982 until 1990 and featured one of the more admired finales in TV history, in which Newhart’s character wakes up next to his wife from the Bob Newhart Show, played by Suzanne Pleshette, suggesting the entire second series was a dream.

Newhart was nominated for several Emmys for his TV work, though he didn’t win one until 2013, for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. He is also famous to younger audiences as Papa Elf, the adoptive father to Will Ferrell’s Buddy, in the 2003 holiday comedy Elf.

Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely; his debut was the first comedy album to top the Billboard charts, and his first two albums held the top two spots simultaneously, a feat not accomplished again until Guns N’ Roses in 1991.

In his later years, Newhart took on a number of feature film roles, including In & Out and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. He also continued performing standup into his 70s, giving about 30 shows a year as of 2006.
“Comedy has given me a wonderful life,” he said. “When I first started out in standup, I just remember the sound of laughter. It’s one of the great sounds of the world.”

Among those paying tribute to Newhart were Judd Apatow, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Prady. Apatow, who co-directed Bob and Don: A Love Story about the lifelong friendship of Newhart and Don Rickles, posted on social media: “I was so lucky to get to spend that time with my hero. His brilliant comedy and gentle spirit made everyone he encountered so happy.”

Prady reflected on his importance to comedy: “Hard to explain how important Bob Newhart was to every comedian and comedy writer who came after him.”

Curtis wrote in a tribute on her Instagram, “They will be laughing wherever people go when they leave us. God, he was funny! Bob Newhart. You will be missed!”

Bob Newhart, famed comedian and sitcom actor, dies at 94 | TV comedy | The Guardian

[misskit]

Bob Newhart, Emmy-Winning Comedy Icon, Dies at 94

Bob Newhart, the iconic comedian known for his deadpan delivery, two eponymous sitcoms and his role as Papa Elf in the holiday classic “Elf,” has died at age 94, his longtime publicist Jerry Digney announced on Thursday.


The Emmy winner died after “a series of short illnesses,” Digney said in a press release. He called Newhart’s passing the “end of an era in comedy.”


The press release highlighted a Newhart quote that reflected his typically modest approach to his long career: “In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out.”

Clearly, comedy was the right calling for the former accountant. He was known for his one-side telephone conversations in his routines, something he even managed to work into the 1962 Steve McQueen war drama “Hell Is for Heroes.”


In 1972, he landed his first sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he played a Chicago psychologist with kooky clients, a not-too-bright pilot neighbor (Bill Daily) and his lovely and smart wife, Emily (Suzanne Pleshette).

MORE Bob Newhart, Emmy-Winning Comedy Icon, Dies at 94

[misskit]

Funny man, he was. Hate to see him go.

[Happy As Larry]

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78

Lou Dobbs, a longtime cable news anchor known in recent years for supporting Donald Trump and for spreading misinformation, has died at age 78, according to statements posted on his social media accounts.
Trump paid tribute to Dobbs as “a friend, and truly incredible Journalist, Reporter, and Talent” in a post on his social media site, writing: “He understood the World, and what was ‘happening,’ better than others.”

Dobbs, a nightly presence on Fox Business Network for more than a decade, was also praised by Fox News Media in a statement as “an incredible business mind with a gift for broadcasting” and someone who “helped pioneer cable news into a successful and influential industry”.

Fox News cancelled Dobbs’ popular show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, in 2021, after Dobbs became a major contributor to the false narrative that the 2024 election had been stolen, and continued airing those ideas on his program even after admitting that they lacked actual proof.

Dobbs was named in a lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems over lies told on the network about the 2020 presidential election. A mediator in 2023 pushed the two sides toward a $787m settlement, averting a trial. A mountain of evidence – some damning, some merely embarrassing – showed many Fox executives and on-air talent didn’t believe allegations aired mostly on shows hosted by Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. At the time, they feared angering Trump fans in the audience with the truth.

Dobbs had previously made headlines as a CNN host in 2009 for repeatedly raising questions about whether Barack Obama was a US citizen, and continuing with those questions despite the documented evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Trump would also become a major figure in the “birther” conspiracy, which was widely condemned as racist.

Dobbs’s death was announced on Thursday in a post on his official Twitter/X account, which called him a “fighter till the very end – fighting for what mattered to him the most, God, his family and the country”.
“Lou’s legacy will forever live on as a patriot and a great American. We ask for your prayers for Lou’s wonderful wife Debi, children and grandchildren,” the post said.

Dobbs had joined CNN at its inception in 1980 and worked at the network for more than two decades, CNN reported, eventually anchoring the program Moneyline.
“Lou was one of the CNN originals, who helped launch and shape the network,” a CNN spokesperson said.

Once the most visible television business journalist with his Moneyline show in the 1990s, Dobbs made CNN management uneasy as he grew more opinionated and drew angry protests from Latinos for his emphasis on curbing illegal immigration. He left CNN in 2009.

When he joined Fox Business, Dobbs said he considered himself the underdog. A few years later his show was highly rated and he was a key figure on the right-leaning network.
Dobbs said he always wanted to be straight with his viewers about his own views on issues.

“My audience has always expected me to tell them where I’m coming from, and I don’t see any reason to disappoint them,” he said in 2011.

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78 | Fox News | The Guardian

[Seekingasylum]

Funny man, he was. Hate to see him go.

Indeed, a fine humorist and human being. When Americans were not so fucked up.

[DrWilly]

You could have just left it as a compliment.

[harrybarracuda]

American comedian and actor Bob Newhart dies at 94




LOS ANGELES – Bob Newhart, who burst onto the comedy scene in 1960 working a stammering everyman character not unlike himself, then rode essentially that same character through a long, busy career that included two of television’s most memorable sitcoms, died on July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.


His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death.


Newhart was not merely unknown a few months before his emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had aspirations.




In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart.


The record shot to No. 1 on the charts and at the 1961 Grammy Awards, it improbably captured the top prize – album of the year.


He won two other Grammys that year, for best new artist and best spoken-word comedy performance, an honour that was given not to his first album but to his second, a hastily made follow-up titled The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! (1960). For a while, his first two albums occupied the top two spots on the Billboard album chart.




“Playboy magazine hailed me ‘the best new comedian of the decade,’” Newhart wrote in his autobiography, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me As Funny (2006), describing this period. “Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade.”


He transitioned quickly and easily into television, landing a short-lived variety show, numerous guest appearances on the shows of Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan, regular work guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and, ultimately, The Bob Newhart Show, a celebrated sitcom in which he played a somewhat befuddled psychologist.


That series ran from 1972 to 1978, and he followed it up with Newhart (1982 to 1990), another successful sitcom, in which he played a Vermont innkeeper. Newhart ran for eight seasons and ended with what is still viewed as one of the greatest finales in television history.


He remained busy in television and films into his 80s. He won an Emmy in 2013 for a guest appearance as the beloved former host of a TV science show on The Big Bang Theory (2007 to 2019).


That Emmy was, surprisingly, his first.


American comedian and actor Bob Newhart dies at 94 | The Straits Times

[harrybarracuda]

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78

In recent years, renowned for being a barking trumpanzee with a terrible syrup.

[harrybarracuda]

A reminder of just how bad some disco was.

Yet somehow seven million people were convinced to buy this dross

"Whooo-aaa Hooo!"

Evelyn Thomas, influential disco singer, has died aged 70

[misskit]

^ Wow. That was pretty bad. Somehow I missed Evelyn back in the day.

[Happy As Larry]

Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last surviving member of Four Tops, dies aged 88

Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving original member of the Four Tops, the beloved Motown group, died Monday at his home in Detroit. He was 88 years old.

According to a family spokesperson, Fakir died of heart failure with his family and friends by his side. The family announced his death Monday afternoon, saying, “our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of a trailblazer, icon and music legend who, through his 70-year music career, touched the lives of so many”.

Fakir, who co-founded Four Tops in 1953, had been struggling with bladder cancer and had retired from touring late last year. An associate told Billboard that on Sunday he was “happy, talking and interacting, and when they turned to do something and turned back around, he had slipped away”.

The Four Tops were among Motown’s most popular and enduring acts, peaking in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they had 11 Top 20 hits and two No 1s: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and the operatic classic Reach Out I’ll Be There. Other songs, often sagas of romantic pain and bereavement, included Baby I Need Your Loving, Standing in the Shadows of Love, Bernadette and Ask the Lonely.

Many of Motown’s greatest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, came of age at the Detroit-based company founded by Berry Gordy in the late 1950s. But Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963 and already had a polished stage act and versatile vocal style that enabled them to perform anything from country songs to pop standards like Paper Doll.

They called themselves the Four Aims when they started out, but soon renamed themselves Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.
The Four Tops had recorded for several labels, including the famed Chess Records in Chicago, with little commercial success. But Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting-production team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland and they quickly caught on, blending tight, haunting harmonies (with Fakir as lead tenor) behind Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Four Tops had more sporadic success, with hits over the next few years including Still Water (Love), and a pair of top 10 songs in the early 1970s for ABC/Dunhill Records, Keeper of the Castle and Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got). They reached the Top 20 for the last time in the early 1980s, with the sentimental ballad When She Was My Girl.


Throughout, they remained a busy concert act and at times toured with latter day members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry launched when the groups performed together at the all-star 1983 television concert marking Motown’s 25th anniversary. While the Temptations and other peers suffered from drug problems, internal dissension and personnel changes, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton died in 1997. Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008.

“The things I love about them the most – they are very professional, they have fun with what they do, they are very loving, they have always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
Fakir later toured as the Four Tops with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr, the son of Lawrence Payton.

“As each one of them (the original members) passed a little bit of me left with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a quandary as to what I was going to do from that moment on, but after a while I realized that the name together with the legacy that they had left us simply had to carry on, and judging by the audience reaction it soon became pretty evident that I did the right thing and I really do feel good about that.”

Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honors included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving the Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2009. More recently, Fakir was working on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and completed the memoir I’ll Be There, published in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, for the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children. Six survive him. In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.
A lifelong Detroit resident who stayed home even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in early 1970s, Fakir was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a rough neighborhood where rival Black and white gangs fought often. He had early dreams of being a professional athlete, but was also a talented singer whose tenor brought him attention as a performer in his church choir. He was in his teens when he befriended Stubbs, and the two first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday party thrown by a local “girl” group whom Fakir remembered as “high-class, very fine young ladies”.

“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing the lead. We’d just back him up. Well, when he started, we all fell in like we’d been rehearsing the song for months! Our blend was incredible. We were just looking at each other as we were singing, and right after we said, ‘Man, this is a group! This is a group!’”
Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last surviving member of Four Tops, dies aged 88 | US news | The Guardian

[david44]

One of the great Motown sounds, RIP

[david44]

[harrybarracuda]

^^^ Last surviving member of the ORIGINAL Four Tops as they're still going. You can even see them in Cardiff in September. It's like Trigger's broom.




However today is a bad day.

British blues pioneer John Mayall dies aged 90


John Mayall: Pioneer of British blues dies aged 90

[david44]

A great and so influential RIP

[Happy As Larry]

Jerry Miller, Moby Grape Lead Guitarist and Co-Founder, Dies at 81

Jerry Miller, greatly admired lead guitarist of the 1960s group Moby Grape and one of the architects of that era’s San Francisco sound, died Sunday at 81 in his hometown of Tacoma, Wash. News of the death was shared by friends and family on social media. No cause was given.

A text from Miller’s wife, Jo, was shared to the Moby Group fan page on Facebook Sunday: “Everybody flood the ether with Jerry Miller’s music. Play it all day long for me and him. And thank you all so much.”
Miller’s guitar skills were such that Rolling Stone included him at No. 68 on a ranking of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

Moby Grape’s tenure as a quintessential part of the west coast counterculture rock scene was a relatively short but influential one. Formed in 1966, the band broke up three years later, managing to release four albums for Columbia during that window, including a self-titled debut in 1967 (reaching a chart peak of No. 24) and 1968’s “Wow/Grape Jam” (No. 20). A fifth album was recorded for Reprise during a fleeting reunion in 1971. Further reunion albums appeared in the 1980s, but the group’s impact was never best measured on the charts, or in the number of years it endured.

Miller’s admirers included Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, David Crosby and Taj Mahal. Both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant extolled him, as Led Zeppelin was said to have covered Moby Grape songs at their first rehearsal.

In 1999, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote a five-star reassessment of Moby Grape’s debut album, three decades on from the group’s heyday. “They had the looks, the songs, the guitars (three of ’em) and the singing (five drop-dead, blues-angel voices) — everything they needed to be America’s Beatles and Rolling Stones combined,” Fricke wrote. “Everything except the luck.” Possibly commercially cursed or not, the group merited a place in the pantheon, per Fricke, especially with such a remarkable entry. “Cut in three weeks for $11,000, ‘Moby Grape’ is one of rock’s truly perfect debut albums and a pivotal document of ’60s rock in radiant mid-mutation. Funky country, folk rock, acid punk, frat-band R&B: They’re all here, whipped into a 13-song fireball of wide-screen vocals and meticulous guitar sizzle. … Moby Grape never became stars, but… their legend is secure.”

The Washington-bred musician was born in 1943 and participated in local Tacoma bands like the Elegants, the Incredible Kingsmen and the Frantics, the last of which located to San Jose. Several members of that band regrouped as Moby Grape in 1966.

Miller loved the band’s three-guitar approach. “When we first started rehearsing, we just sounded so good,” he said in a video interview with Saint Bryan in 2016, calling the multiply-pronged approacy “more different than anything i’d ever experienced. Three guitars — i’d barely ever layed with more than me! it was great, and right then, we knew we had something. We laughed al the way home. We said, ‘This is gonna be good.’ And it was, until some things went haywire. … We all sang, we all wrote, and we thought, ‘Hell, there’s no end to the possibilities here.’ We were all young and handsome.”

Despite the run of albums on a major label, Moby Grape ran into unusual obstacles. Skip Spence, who was the most visible of the group members — even though it unusually had several lead singer-songwriters — developed serious drug issues and ended up being institutionalized. Its lineup reduced to four, the band was offered a booking at Woodstock, but bassist Bob Mosley shocked the others by joining the Marines before they could play the festival. Even then, Moby Grape soldiered on as a trio for a time.

Miller was profiled by a local newspaper, the Inlander, in 2014, in a story that reported on his constant gigs in the area. “He never rehearses, and says most of his practice comes from teaching guitar two to three times a week for $50 a lesson,” the paper wrote. “The local gigs and lessons — combined with Social Security, a few royalties and occasional tours with aging members from ’60s supergroups like Quicksilver Messenger Service or Jefferson Airplane — all enable Miller to ‘get by,’ as he puts it.” At a local diner bar where Miller’s band played, the owner said, “A lot of people, when they find out … they come back and they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? What’s he doing here?'”

Photos were posted on social media of Miller cheerfully being joined by friends and family in an 81st birthday party less than two weeks before his death.

After Miller’s passing, his daughter, Sarah Kabbani, also posted a message on Facebook, describing what it was like “to live with a legend…..and be the first-born kid in a wild time of some epic partying and revolutionary music.

“Late night jam sessions, getting to sneak into a gig here and there,” she continued. “Jerry (Garcia) letting me stay up after Michan (her mother) went to sleep, hiding me under pillows on the couch if she woke up, so I could stay up late with him and listen to him play. Afternoons of mowing and fluffing the lawn together. Building a giant train set in the barn. And buffing our bicycles to ride to the store for snacks. At one point I thought he was making me do too many chores. At another point I finally realized he just wanted me to do everything with him. We just saw him in SF and I’m so thankful now. He gave me a big smooch and told me I was da mos buutiful girl.”
Jerry Miller Dead: Moby Grape Guitarist Was 81

[Happy As Larry]

Martin Phillipps, founder of New Zealand rock band the Chills, dies at 61

Martin Phillipps, the founder of the New Zealand rock band the Chills, has died at the age of 61.

Phillipps’ death was announced on Sunday on the band’s’ social media channels.
“It is with broken hearts the family and friends of Martin Phillipps wish to advise Martin has died unexpectedly,” the post read. “The family ask for privacy at this time. Funeral arrangements will be advised in due course.”

The guitarist and lead singer founded the Chills in 1980 with his sister Rachel Phillipps on keyboards, Jane Dodd on bass, guitarist Peter Gutteridge and drummer Alan Haig.
The band soon built a devoted fanbase in New Zealand before garnering a cult following in Europe and the US. They released a number of hits, including Pink Frost, Heavenly Pop Hit, I Love My Leather Jacket and Kaleidoscope World.

Their 1990 album Submarine Bells was a commercial success, with the British music weekly Melody Maker calling it “a magical experience”. The band’s success stalled later in the decade and their US label folded.
Speaking to RNZ in 2019, Phillipps said: “No one foresaw the impact of the digital revolution, of massive changes in music, with Nirvana, with hip-hop, and all sorts of things, that we could so quickly become redundant and old-fashioned.”

During this period, Phillipps battled with drug addiction, alcoholism and hepatitis C. “It was after that, retreating to Dunedin, tail between my legs, everyone saying, ‘Oh you gave it a good go, time to get a real job,’ all sorts of things conspired, but there was some sort of breakdown, mental breakdown involved there,” he added.

The musician told the Guardian in 2014 that having hepatitis C meant he had to have a closer relationship to mortality. “I’m on the list for some of the new trial drugs, but in the meantime I’m up to stage four of the disease. Stage five is cancer. So it’s already cirrhosis of the liver, and that means I really don’t know long I’ve got,” he said.

The Chills released Silver Bullets, their first studio album in 19 years, in 2015. It was followed by their sixth studio album, Snow Bound, in 2018, and Scatterbrain, the last studio album, in 2021.

A documentary about the band, The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, in 2019 shone a light on Philipps’ life, including being told he may only have months to live due to the hepatitis C he contracted in the 1990s. He had said the film forced him to look at himself closely, and open up old wounds.

The Chills’ remaining members are Callum Hampton, Todd Knudson, Erica Scally and Oli Wilson.
The band’s official website referred to Philllips as having a “single-minded determination to take quality, original NZ-sounding, melodic rock music global”.
Martin Phillipps, founder of New Zealand rock band the Chills, dies at 61 | Music | The Guardian

[david44]

[Happy As Larry]

Irish author Edna O’Brien dies aged 93

The Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who explored the complications and contradictions of women’s lives in a literary career lasting more than half a century, has died aged 93 after a long illness, her agent has announced.

In a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls that were at first banned in Ireland but feted abroad, O’Brien gave voice to women struggling with the oppressive and hypocritical expectations of rural life. Her focus widened in later works such as House of Splendid Isolation and The Little Red Chairs, but always maintained the keen intelligence and daring that made Philip Roth once hail her as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.

Paying tribute to the author, her publisher, Faber, said she was “one of the greatest writers of our age”. “She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.
“Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on.”
Born in a village in County Clare in 1930, O’Brien was the youngest of a large family with a father who was a drinker and a gambler – a childhood she recalled as full of “money troubles, drink troubles, all sorts of troubles”. After qualifying as a pharmacist in 1950, she married the writer Ernest Gébler against her family’s wishes – a hurried decision she described in 2011 as going “from them, to him; from one house of control, to another”.

When the couple moved to London with their two sons in 1959, O’Brien started working as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson, which soon commissioned her to produce a novel.
Written in three weeks, The Country Girls crackles with wit and feeling as it follows Caithleen and Baba from dreaming of romance at their convent boarding school to abandonment in Dublin. When it was published in 1960, Kingsley Amis saluted its “unphony charm and unlaborious originality”, while it was greeted with consternation across the Irish Sea.

Writing in 2008, O’Brien said she had received anonymous letters, “all malicious”, and the “few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest”.
The novel was swiftly banned in Ireland, as were O’Brien’s next six novels, beginning with two sequels that completed The Country Girls’ inevitable trajectory: 1962’s The Lonely Girl, and 1964’s mordantly-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss.

O’Brien’s own marriage came to an end in 1967, but the fiction continued. A young girl is seduced by a priest in 1970’s A Pagan Place, a novel whose narrator addresses herself in the second person, while Time and Tide, published in 1992, offers a bleak portrait of a woman going through an awkward divorce and battling for custody of her two sons. Life as a single mother was hard, she remembered in 2011, “but I was able to do it. I seemed to have endless energy at the time: I could cook and clean, and write.”

House of Splendid Isolation, published months before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, marked a broadening of
O’Brien’s concerns, with its story of an unlikely friendship between a terrorist and an elderly widow. Down By the River tackled controversies over abortion, while Wild Decembers examined the confrontation between modernity and tradition.

A series of prizes including the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award and the 2006 Ulysses medal revealed shifting attitudes in her homeland. The transformation was complete when the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, gave her the country’s highest literary accolade, the Saoi of Aosdána, in 2015, and called her a “fearless teller of truth” who had continued to write “undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, authoritarian hostility and sometimes downright
”.
Higgins said on Sunday: “Edna O’Brien has been one of the outstanding writers of modern times, her work has been sought as model all around the world.
“Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.
“Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.”

Her masterpiece, according to Roth, was published later that year. The Little Red Chairs opens when a wanted Balkan war criminal turns up in “a freezing backwater that passes for a town” on the west coast of Ireland and ends among exploited migrant workers in London. Writing in the Guardian, Julie Myerson called it “utterly original, urgent, beautiful”, declaring it “hard – no, almost impossible – to believe that O’Brien is in her ninth decade, for this is absolutely the work of a writer in her prime and at the very height of her phenomenal powers”.

Speaking in 1999, O’Brien confessed she found writing very hard. “In some ways I suppose a lot of the material of my life has been ripe for literature, but a bit of a handicap for what is laughingly called everyday life,” she said. “But that’s the bargain. Mephistopheles didn’t come, you know. He was already there.”

Irish author Edna O’Brien dies aged 93 | Edna O'Brien | The Guardian