BREAKING: Sometimes Famous People Die

[viscousmemories]

Last week my sister's child asked me to create a Spotify playlist of old school hip hop, which I did last night, and I added The Magic Number.

[Ensign Steve]

Wrong thrad, but what else is on the list? Public Enemy? Heavy D and the Boyz? Inquiring minds want to know!

[The Man]

Kinda surprised to see that no one mentioned that Thomas Miller, better known by his stage name Tom Verlaine, passed away a couple of weeks ago at the age of 73.

He wasn’t a household name, but for my money he was the greatest guitarist and songwriter to come out of punk rock. Then again, it’s debatable how punk Television still was by the time they finally recorded their first album, the all-time classic Marquee Moon.

Marquee Moon is frequently categorised as a post-punk album, which it is in a sense, but that classification doesn’t feel quite right to me either. For one thing, it was released on February 8, 1977. Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols was released on October 28, 1977. I get that “post-punk” is a style descriptor more than anything, but how is it post-punk if it’s released before one of the defining albums of punk? If Marquee Moon had been released four years earlier, or if it had had a keyboardist, it probably would’ve been recognised for what it actually is: a slightly edgy progressive rock album.

I need to preface the following declaration by noting that I have 7,695 plays of Godspeed You! Black Emperor on last.fm. This means that I am the user with the highest all-time number of plays of them that .fmbot on Discord has ever recorded. So here goes: “Marquee Moon”, the title track, features one of the single greatest crescendi in the history of rock music. Just listen to this beautiful motherfucker.

Television - "Marquee Moon"

Two of the greatest solos I’ve ever heard, too. Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played off each other’s strengths in a way few other guitarists in rock history have ever managed. Maybe Keith Richards and Mick Taylor. Maybe Duane Allman and (as big a douche as he is) Eric Clapton. Maybe Prince Rogers Nelson and Wendy Melvoin. I could probably name a couple other examples if I spent long enough thinking about it, but there aren’t many.

The greatness of "Marquee Moon" raises the inevitable question of whether the rest of the album is this good. The answer is unfortunately no, but how could it be? It's still a 10/10 album, and the entire thing is mandatory listening. Make sure you get a version that includes the absolutely banging single "Little Johnny Jewel", which is probably the closest they came to replicating the greatness of "Marquee Moon".

Television - "Little Johnny Jewel"

The follow-up Adventure is nearly as great, and has been sorely underrated by people due to its comparatively understated approach. But it has some gorgeous tracks, like the closer "The Dream's Dream".

Television - "The Dream's Dream"

I admit to very little familiarity with Verlaine's solo career or Television's reunion work, both of which I intend to rectify in due course. The equally lamented David Bowie did cover "Kingdom Come", from Verlaine's self-titled debut album, on his classic Scary Monsters.

David Bowie - "Kingdom Come"

Television was a fantastic live band, too. Just listen to this scorching version of "Marquee Moon" from 1978.

Television - "Marquee Moon", 1978-06-29

Considering that he took his stage name from a French poet, language is clearly a thing Verlaine cared a lot about, and his lyrics were also fantastic. "I remember how the darkness doubled / I recall lightning struck itself" is one of the greatest opening couplets in a rock song. It feels like an obvious precursor to the sort of lyrics Chris Cornell and Cedric Bixler Zavala write.

And that voice. Verlaine was never going to win American Idol, because he was from that Neil Young school of "emotionally piercing, unique, virtually inimitable voices that fit the music perfectly". But that made his singing all the more special to me.

(OK, Dewey Bunnell from America did a pretty good Neil Young impersonation, and Fallon does a fantastic one. I've never heard anyone convincingly imitate Verlaine, though.)

They say celebrity deaths come in threes. For me, last month's three were Beck, Crosby, and Verlaine. All three hit me like a Mack truck. R.I.P., you legends.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

Wrong thrad, but what else is on the list? Public Enemy? Heavy D and the Boyz? Inquiring minds want to know!

[Stephen Maturin]

RIP Raquel Welch, age 82.

[Miss Shelby]

The queen of beautiful. I loved her when I was a kid.

[LarsMac]

Originally Posted by Miss Shelby

The queen of beautiful. I loved her when I was a kid.

I did, too.
I still remember playing hooky from school to go watch 'Fathom'

Those were the days.

[Basset Hound]

Stella Stevens, 60's star has died.

Stella Stevens Dead: Poseidon Adventure, Nutty Professor Star Was 84 - Variety

[Miss Shelby]

This thread makes me wonder. How many famous celebrities/ well known people are still alive and kicking? I mean if you make it til your 80a 90s you must be doing something right.

[Miss Shelby]

Bruce Dern comes to mind.

[viscousmemories]

I didn't realize he was still alive. I thought the first time I saw him was in After Dark, My Sweet, but having just scanned his catalogue I see he was also in Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which wrecked my psyche as a young child.

[LarsMac]

Just saw news blurb claiming that Jimmy Carter is going into Hospice care.

I met him back when he was running for Governor of Georgia.

He will be missed.

[The Man]

Even if he is 98 years old, this is still going to hurt. Carter has had by far the best post-presidency of anyone since John Quincy Adams, and a case could be made that Carter’s has been the best of all time. He’s one of the few people to ever occupy the office that I actually sort of look up to. I can’t even imagine how this will affect my father, who worked on the camera crew for the CBS news detail that covered Carter during his campaign and throughout his presidency.

(Also, maybe this merits its own thread?)

[Stephen Maturin]

RIP Richard Belzer, who was a damn fine stand-up comic long before creating the Detective John Munch character.

[Miss Shelby]

Oh I loved him too

[lisarea]

I read a while back that Detective Munch was probably the most crossed-over character in television history.

This might be the article I read.

[beyelzu]

I have always taken pride the Jimmy was from Georgia. It saddens me that he is not more generally more well loved (by white people/conservatives)in Georgia. He is proof that being a white man from Georgia ain’t got to mean you’re racist.

I remember reading an article about Carter appointing RBG (probably when she passed), in it Carter was quoted that he looked at the judiciary and saw only people who looked like him and not people that looked like Anerica and he thought that was wrong.

As the country's 39th president, Carter appointed 57 minority judges and 41 female judges to the federal judiciary, more than all previous presidents combined.

Jimmy Carter honored for appointing minority judges

Jimmy Carter lost the Religious Born again vote to Reagan which just goes to show that Christians don’t particularly care for Christlike people.

Carter gets lots of credit as an ex-President, but I think not enough as a President. In spite of losing re-election, he saw our problems clearly in lots of ways. While not always successful, he was very often right.

When a shitty person dies, I sometimes quote Thompson’s Nixon column, paraphrasing as the record will show I hated the person long ago.

I loved and respected Carter for a very long time. He wasn’t ennobled by death, he was noble in life.

[Stephen Maturin]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

Jimmy Carter lost the Religious Born again vote to Reagan which just goes to show that Christians don’t particularly care for Christlike people.

Amen to that.

show spoiler

[beyelzu]

If I once believed that Mr. Carter was the only president to use the White House as a steppingstone to greater things, I see now that the past 43 years have really been an extension of what he thought of as his unfinished presidency. In or out of the White House, Mr. Carter devoted his life to solving problems, like an engineer, by paying attention to the minutiae of a complicated world. He once told me that he hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm. Last year there were only 13 cases of Guinea worm disease in humans. He may have succeeded.

nytimes.com

[JoeP]

Betty Boothroyd dies aged 93 | Betty Boothroyd | The Guardian

A historic figure. The first and only female Speaker of the House of Commons.

Betty Boothroyd - Wikipedia

[vremya]

I really enjoyed watching her preside over prime minister's questions.

[The Man]

RIP to saxophone god Wayne Shorter, aged 89. It’s probably easier to list the people he didn’t play with. Art Blakey? Got his start with him. Miles Davis? Of course. Steely Dan? Check. Weather Report? Cofounded it. Herbie Hancock? A ton. Joni Mitchell? Also a ton. I’ll stop this list before it becomes boring, but he remained active into this decade, showing up on Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021). His final album, the three-disc Emanon was recorded in 2016 and released in 2018.

Here’s Steely Dan’s “Aja”, which contains, for my money, one of the greatest sax solos ever recorded. I’m not sure what I’ll put on after that yet.

Steely Dan - Aja - YouTube

[Stephen Maturin]

Between Shorter's tenor sax and Steve Gadd's drumming, that's one of my all time favorite. I also forget sometimes that Wayne, Jaco Patorious and Joe Zawinul were in the same band at the same time. RIP indeed.

Weather Report - Birdland - YouTube

[LarsMac]

Actor Tom Sizemore died yesterday.

He was a very busy guy. His credit list is amazing.
He played a lot of those "Tough Guy" roles.

I think my favorite of his, though, was Snake Dupree, a two-bit hood, in "Big Trouble", a 2002 flick based on a book by Miani Herald columnist David Barry

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246464.../rm3036846080/

[Miss Shelby]

He wasn’t the best known but I liked him.