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Jack Russell, the former frontman of 1980s and ’90s glam rockers Great White, has died at age 63.
The news comes from the Instagram page for Jack Russell’s Great White, which is the band name the frontman toured under after the group disbanded in 2001.
“With tremendous sadness, we announce the loss of our beloved Jack Patrick Russell — father, husband, cousin, uncle, and friend,” the statement begins, adding that the singer “passed peacefully” surrounded by his wife Heather Ann, son Matthew Hucko and other family and friends. “Jack is loved and remembered for his sense of humor, exceptional zest for life, and unshakeable contribution to rock and roll where his legacy will forever live and thrive.”
The family is asking for privacy and shared that details of a public memorial would be announced at a later date.
On the Instagram page for Great White, Russell’s original bandmates shared their “deepest condolences to the family of Jack Russell. We hope they take comfort in knowing Jack’s incredible voice will live on forever.” The ended the statement: “Rest In Peace, to one of rock’s biggest champions.”
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Great White landed six songs on the Billboard Hot 100 in the late ’80s and early ’90s, including the top five smash “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1989 and whose music video was in heavy rotation on MTV. The song’s album, 1989’s …Twice Shy, was a top 10 hit on the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at No. 9.
Following the group’s end in 2001, the lead singer hit the road as Jack Russell’s Great White — most infamously headlining Rhode Island’s The Station nightclub in 2003, when pyrotechnics started a fire that killed 100 people, including bandmate Ty Longley, and injuring 230. Russell’s tour manager, Daniel Biechele, pleaded guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter in 2006 and served two years in prison of a 15-year sentence. The owners of The Station, Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, pleaded no contest, with Michael serving almost three years in prison and Jeffrey being sentenced to community service. The band also reached settlements with victims in several lawsuits.
Last month, Russell’s Instagram page had announced his retirement from touring after diagnoses of Lewy Body Dementia and Multiple System Atrophy. “Words cannot express my gratitude for the many years of memories, love, and support,” the retirement announcement read. “Thank you for letting me live my dreams.”
Find the family and band statements below.
John Mayall, the British blues musician whose influential band the Bluesbreakers was a training ground for Eric Clapton, Mick Fleetwood and many other superstars, has died. He was 90.
A statement on Mayall’s Instagram page announced his death Tuesday (July 23), saying the musician died Monday at his home in California. “Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world’s greatest road warriors,” the post said.
He is credited with helping develop the English take on urban, Chicago-style rhythm and blues that played an important role in the blues revival of the late 1960s. At various times, the Bluesbreakers included Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce, later of Cream; Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac; Mick Taylor, who played five years with the Rolling Stones; Harvey Mandel and Larry Taylor of Canned Heat; and Jon Mark and John Almond, who went on to form the Mark-Almond Band.
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Mayall protested in interviews that he was not a talent scout, but played for the love of the music he had first heard on his father’s 78-rpm records.
“I’m a band leader and I know what I want to play in my band — who can be good friends of mine,” Mayall said in an interview with the Southern Vermont Review. “It’s definitely a family. It’s a small kind of thing really.”
A small but enduring thing. Though Mayall never approached the fame of some of his illustrious alumni, he was still performing in his late 80s, pounding out his version of Chicago blues. The lack of recognition rankled a bit, and he wasn’t shy about saying so.
“I’ve never had a hit record, I never won a Grammy Award, and Rolling Stone has never done a piece about me,” he said in an interview with the Santa Barbara Independent in 2013. “I’m still an underground performer.”
Known for his blues harmonica and keyboard playing, Mayall had a Grammy nomination, for “Wake Up Call” which featured guest artists Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Mick Taylor and Albert Collins. He received a second nomination in 2022 for his album The Sun Is Shining Down. He also won official recognition in Britain with the award of an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2005.
He was selected for the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class and his 1966 album Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton is considered one of the best British blues albums.
Mayall once was asked if he kept playing to meet a demand, or simply to show he could still do it.
“Well, the demand is there, fortunately. But it’s really for neither of those two things, it’s just for the love of the music,” he said in an interview with Hawaii Public Radio. “I just get together with these guys and we have a workout.”
Mayall was born on Nov. 29, 1933 in Macclesfield, near Manchester in central England.
Sounding a note of the hard-luck bluesman, Mayall once said, “The only reason I was born in Macclesfield was because my father was a drinker, and that’s where his favorite pub was.”
His father also played guitar and banjo, and his records of boogie-woogie piano captivated his teenage son.
Mayall said he learned to play the piano one hand at a time — a year on the left hand, a year on the right, “so I wouldn’t get all tangled up.”
The piano was his main instrument, though he also performed on guitar and harmonica, as well as singing in a distinctive, strained-sounding voice. Aided only by drummer Keef Hartley, Mayall played all the other instruments for his 1967 album Blues Alone.
Mayall was often called the “father of British blues,” but when he moved to London in 1962 his aim was to soak up the nascent blues scene led by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Eric Burdon were among others drawn to the sound.
The Bluesbreakers drew on a fluid community of musicians who drifted in and out of various bands. Mayall’s biggest catch was Clapton, who had quit the Yardbirds and joined he Bluesbreakers in 1965 because he was unhappy with the Yardbirds’ commercial direction.
Mayall and Clapton shared a passion for Chicago blues, and the guitarist later remembered that Mayall had “the most incredible collection of records I had ever seen.”
Mayall tolerated Clapton’s waywardness: He disappeared a few months after joining the band, then reappeared later the same year, sidelining the newly arrived Peter Green, then left for good in 1966 with Bruce to form Cream, which rocketed to commercial success, leaving Mayall far behind.
Clapton, interviewed for a BBC documentary on Mayall in 2003, confessed that “to a certain extent I have used his hospitality, used his band and his reputation to launch my own career,”
“I think he is a great musician. I just admire and respect his steadfastness,” Clapton added.
Mayall encouraged Clapton to sing and urged Green to develop his song-writing abilities.
Mick Taylor, who succeeded Green as a Bluesbreaker in the late 1960s, valued the wide latitude which Mayall allowed his soloists.
“You’d have complete freedom to do whatever you wanted,” Taylor said in a 1979 interview with writer Jas Obrecht. “You could make as many mistakes as you wanted, too.”
Mayall’s 1968 album Blues From Laurel Canyon signaled a permanent move to the United States and a change in direction. He disbanded the Bluesbreakers and worked with two guitars and drums.
The following year he released The Turning Point, arguably his most successful release, with an atypical four-man acoustic lineup including Mark and Almond. “Room to Move,” a song from that album, was a frequent audience favorite in Mayall’s later career.
The 1970s found Mayall at low ebb personally, but still touring and doing more than 100 shows a year.
“Throughout the ’70s, I performed most of my shows drunk,” Mayall said in an interview with Dan Ouellette for Down Beat magazine in 1990. One consequence was an attempt to jump from a balcony into a swimming pool that missed — shattering one of Mayall’s heels and leaving him with a limp.
“That was one incident that got me to stop drinking,” Mayall said.
In 1982, he reformed the Bluesbreakers, recruiting Taylor and McVie, but after two years the personnel changed again. In 2008, Mayall announced that he was permanently retiring the Bluesbreaker name, and in 2013 he was leading the John Mayall Band.
Mayall and his second wife, Maggie, divorced in 2011 after 30 years of marriage. They had two sons.
Abdul Kareem “Duke” Fakir, the last of the original Four Tops and a stalwart of Motown’s golden age, has died at age 88.
Fakir’s family announced the singer’s death on Monday afternoon (July 22), noting that “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 The Four Tops in 1953, had been in poor health, most recently fighting bladder cancer, and had retired from touring late last year. He was, according to the family, “surrounded by his loved ones” at his home in the Detroit area. 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.”
With his glasses and angular frame, Fakir was arguably the most recognizable of The Tops and maintained his leadership in the group following the deaths of Levi Stubbs in 2008, Renaldo “Obie” Benson in 2005 and Lawrence Payton in 1997 (his son Lawrence Payton Jr. is part of the current lineup).
“I am probably as surprised as you are at the longevity,” Fakir said during 2022 while promoting his memoir I’ll Be There: My Life With The Four Tops. “It’s unbelievable. I never would’ve thought that while I was in my 80s I’d even be thinking about doing this, let alone still doing it. I feel nothing but blessed, man. Just blessed.”
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Fakir was born in Detroit on Dec. 26, 1935; his father was a factory worker who’d come over from what is now Bangladesh. He played football, basketball and ran track in high school, meeting Stubbs through neighborhood football games; the two began singing after separately attending a variety show, eventually recruiting Payton and Benson to form the group, first called The Aims but later changed to avoid confusion with the Ames Brothers.
The Four Tops recorded without success for several labels — including Chess, Red Top, Riverside and Columbia — and supported Billy Eckstine before signing with Motown in 1963. The group started out recording standards for the label’s Workshop Jazz Records imprint, but when the songwriting/production team of Holland-Dozier Holland gave The Tops “Baby I Need Your Loving” in mid-1964, it hit No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, which opened the floodgates for a string of hits that included “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love” and “It’s the Same Old Song.”
“We were so fortunate in a lot of things we did,” explained Fakir, who was engaged to The Supremes’ Mary Wilson during the mid-’60s but called it off due to their individual career demands. “The love we shared between the four of us was kind of rare for four really kind of street guys from the north of Detroit, to come together with that kind of love. But music does a lot of things to you. It created a lot of love that we had, especially between ourselves.
“I didn’t know how much I would love the audience and the people. Just being on stage changed my whole life and my perspective. I look at the world a whole different way than I did when I was a young guy. It’s a beautiful world, and it just needs a little push towards love and togetherness.”
The Tops had several stints with Motown, and away from that company it also had hits with “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” “Are You Man Enough” and “When She Was My Girl.” The Tops were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1999. Fakir accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of the band in 2009. “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2022.
“They’re just a tremendous group, one of the best,” Otis Williams of friendly “rivals” The Temptations said when the groups performed together a few years ago. “You look how long the original four stayed together like they did, and it’s so rare and special. I always marveled at it.” Like Fakir, Williams is the only remaining founding member of The Temptations, a role he said the two would speak about.
“These groups are our lives, you know?” Williams said. “I know Duke will be a Four Top until he can’t do it anymore. We both feel a responsibility to keep our [groups] going and keep the music out there for people to hear.”
In addition to the memoir, Fakir was also working on a stage musical based on The Four Tops’ story.
Fakir is survived by his wife, Piper; daughter Farrah Fakir Cook; sons Nazim Bashir Fakir, Abdul Kareem Fakir Jr., Myke Fakir, Anthony Fakir and Malik Robinson; 13 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements for Fakir are currently pending.
Chris King, the rapper who was close friends with Trippie Redd and Justin Bieber and started the label Snotty Nose Records, was fatally shot in Nashville early Saturday morning. He was 32 years old.
According to Nashville homicide detectives, King (real name: Christopher Cheeks) was with friends at 2:30 a.m. CT when three suspects attempted to rob the group. Both King and his 29-year-old friend were struck by gunfire. After running in separate directions, the 29-year-old victim was located and treated, while King was pronounced dead at Vanderbilt hospital.
On social media, there was an outpouring of love for the late rapper, who was born in Fontana, Calif. King briefly lived with Bieber, who took to his Instagram Story on Saturday to write, “Love you bro,” with a broken-heart emoji over a photo of the pair hugging. “This one hurts. Please keep his family in your prayers. See you in paradise, brother.”
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On Saturday, Redd — described as King’s best friend — posted a carousel of photos of the late rapper along with the caption “I am so hurt rn I can’t even think I love you bro come back!!!!!” He posted a longer tribute to Instagram on Sunday, writing, “Original 1400 I love you until we meet again twin! I would not be where I am today without @whoischrisking.” In the caption, Redd credited King with introducing him to 10K Projects CEO Elliot Grainge as well as Create Music Group founding partner Milo Stokes. “He had the best energy always. He had so many friends and it shows. I love you guys for supporting one of my best friends ever my brother.”
Machine Gun Kelly responded in Redd’s comments, writing, “chris was rare.”
Keke Palmer also shared a tribute to King on Instagram, posting a photo of the two talking on Facetime. “Chris King! I wish I had more photos but it’s actually perfect because this is exactly how it began,” she wrote. “iChat sessions with you and Marcel back in the 2Much days. Wow. I can’t believe I’m saying rest in peace. This is terrible. I really don’t know what to say. I just want to share that I loved you and I remember all the city walk, grove moments. That was my high school. When we were babies before everyone knew you was a real rockstar. We were kids! And you always knew how to make everyone laugh. Your kindness was present no matter what room you were in, everybody was and wanted to be your friend. We will miss you until we meet again, rest heavenly brother.”
On April 8, King released his final music, a song called “Seeing Double Seeing Double.” The rapper was in Tennessee to perform Friday night at the Nashville Cannafest.
See some of the tributes to King below:
Michael Cuscuna, the three-time Grammy winner, Mosaic Records co-founder, historian and archivist who produced hundreds of jazz reissues and studio sessions during his career, has died. He was 75.
Cuscuna died Saturday of cancer at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, Grammy-winning recording artist Billy Vera, a longtime friend, announced.
Cuscuna produced the 1970 album Buddy & the Juniors, featuring Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and Junior Mance, for Vanguard Records, and 1972’s Give It Up, Bonnie Raitt’s lone gold album during her time at Warner Bros.
He produced reissues and studio sessions for Impulse, Atlantic, Arista, Muse, Elektra, Freedom, Novus and virtually the entire Blue Note catalog.
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“Plainly stated, Blue Note Records would not exist as it does today without the passion & dedication of Michael Cuscuna,” execs from the label wrote on Instagram.
Readers of Blues & Rhythm magazine know his work in the blues field, which included box sets on T-Bone Walker, Amos Milburn, Charles Brown and the Otis Spann/Lightnin’ Hopkins Candid sessions.
Nominated nine times in all, Cuscuna received his Grammys in 1993, 1999 and 2002, respectively, for producing box sets of music from Nat King Cole, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
Born on Sept. 20, 1948, in Stamford, Connecticut, Cuscuna played drums, saxophone and flute while working in a local record shop. He was drawn to R&B before jazz became his greatest love.
As a radio DJ, his theme song was the novelty tune “Rubber Biscuit” by The Chips, later covered by the Blues Brothers. When asked what was his favorite kind of music, he always answered, “Atlantic singles and Blue Note albums.”
He culled the Blue Note vaults for unissued treasures by such label masters as Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver, Art Blakey and Jimmy Smith as well as lesser-known performers including Quebec, Hank Mobley and Tina Brooks.
Also for Blue Note, he uncovered gems by Lester Young, Sonny Criss and Art Pepper, and his work on Michael Ruppli label discographies from company files was invaluable.
In later years, he gained ownership of Blue Note’s vast photographic library, licensing shots to books and films.
Without Mosaic — which he founded in 1982 with Charlie Lourie — the complete Roulette recordings of Count Basie, the complete Capitol Duke Ellington sessions and countless other gems might still be hidden away or lost forever, Vera noted.
Survivors include his wife, Lisa, children Max and Lauren and grandchildren Nicolas and Penelope.
“Michael and I were close friends for nearly 60 years,” Vera, who had a No. 1 song with “At This Moment” in 1987, said in a statement. “When back east, I stayed at his home, annoying Lisa, who put up with our often-sarcastic sense of humor. Our many lunches with [producer-discographer] Bob Porter were legendary for our obscurest dives into musical esoterica. The three of us adamantly refused to accept any dividing line between blues and jazz.
“In 1989, Blue Note chief Bruce Lundvall asked us to produce Lou Rawls. We gathered legends like Richard Tee, Cornell Dupree, Hank Crawford, David Newman, Benny Golson, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, Ray Charles and Lionel Hampton, reviving Lou’s career with the No. 1 jazz album At Last, followed by two more that landed in the top five. It was the greatest fun we ever had.”
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Jean-Paul Vignon, the romantic French vocalist and actor who impressed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic during an eight-decade career, died March 22 of liver cancer in Beverly Hills, his family announced. He was 89.
Performing a repertoire of contemporary pop and American standards, Vignon debuted in the U.S. in 1963 at the famed New York supper club The Blue Angel, where he opened for stand-up comic Woody Allen.
Ed Sullivan would soon showcase him on his Sunday night CBS variety show in eight appearances — including one in which he sang a duet with young Liza Minnelli — and he became a regular guest on Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin’s programs.
Signed to Columbia Records, Vignon released his first U.S. album, Because I Love You, in 1964. Three years later, he had a supporting role opposite William Holden and Cliff Robertson in the World War II film The Devil’s Brigade.
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In a 1994 profile in the Los Angeles Times, reporter Robert Koehler noted, “Vignon fulfilled the American image of the romantic, singing Frenchman. Ironically, rather than compare his voice to such renowned Gallic crooners as Maurice Chevalier and Gilbert Bécaud, Vignon says that he has a Bobby Darin kind of voice, able to sing fast and passionate or gentle and slow.”
He continued to play some of the top rooms in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other major cities into the early 1970s, and in ’74 he recorded a single, “You,” with Farrah Fawcett, then a relatively unknown young actress and model.
Changing audience tastes stalled his career, but he did host a Canadian TV show produced by Dick Clark called The Sensuous Man, which ended each week with him reclining in a bathtub. And for a Playgirl centerfold in 1973, he sported a sweater once worn in a famous photo shoot by Marilyn Monroe and little else.
Born on Jan. 30, 1935, in the port city of Dire-Daou in the colonial territory of French Somaliland (later known as Djibouti), Vignon was schooled in Avignon, France. He briefly studied medicine in Marseille and law at the Sorbonne in Paris but decided to pursue music full time.
He was in his early 20s when, on the recommendation of Belgian singer-actor Jacques Brel, he secured a prestigious cabaret job in Paris that would launch his career.
The baritone debuted in front of the cameras as the star of the 1956 feature Les Promesses Dangereuses, then followed with a performance opposite Francoise Arnoul in the romantic drama Asphalte (1959).
Meanwhile, he had signed as a vocalist with France’s Disques Vogue, which aimed to develop him as an artist along the lines of such balladeers as Charles Trenet (his idol), Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. His first album was 1957’s autobiographical Djibouti.
His career in France began to lag after he served 17 months of compulsory military service, but after opening for Edith Piaf and performing on board the French liner Liberté before such ocean-going celebrities as Ernie Kovacs, Edie Adams and Carol Burnett, he decided to try his luck in the States.
As he wrote in his 2018 memoir, From Ethiopia to Utopia, “My adventurous spirit was telling me, ‘Marco Polo did not hesitate to go to China, Henry Morton Stanley did not hesitate to presume exploring Central Africa and find Dr. Livingston, Christopher Columbus did not hesitate to sail west to discover America … so it is your turn to discover the United States.’”
After years of career ebbs and flows, he returned to the L.A. cabaret scene in 1993, encouraged by such pop vocalists as Harry Connick Jr., Michael Feinstein and Tony Bennett and the smash success of “Unforgettable,” which paired the late Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie. He would remain active into his 80s with appearances at Feinstein’s at Vitello’s and the Catalina Jazz Club.
Along the way, he would also appear on such shows as The Rockford Files, Hotel, Falcon Crest, L.A. Law, Columbo, Days of Our Lives and Gilmore Girls; voice one of the Merry Men in Shrek (2001); and narrate the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer (2009).
Meanwhile, his company, Côte d’Azur Productions, provided French audiences with translations and overdubs of Scarface and other American films.
Survivors include his longtime partner, Suzie Summers; daughters Marguerite Vignon Gaul (from his marriage to late American actress Brigid Bazlen) and Lucy Brank; and granddaughters Leah and Hannah.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Eric Carmen, the hitmaker behind ’70s and ’80s smashes like “All By Myself” and “Hungry Eyes,” has died at age 74, his wife Amy confirms.
“It is with tremendous sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the passing of Eric Carmen,” a message posted to his website, Facebook and X account reads. “It brought him great joy to know, that for decades, his music touched so many and will be his lasting legacy. ‘Love Is All That Matters…Faithful and Forever,’” the message concludes, signed by Amy Carmen, his wife of eight years.
Over his decades-long career — starting in earnest during his college years at John Carroll University in his home state of Ohio, when he joined a band called Cyrus Erie — Carmen scored three top five hits on the Billboard Hot 100: the No. 2-peaking “All By Myself” in 1976, followed by the Dirty Dancing soundtrack standout “Hungry Eyes,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1988, and “Make Me Lose Control,” a No. 3 hit, also in 1988. His highest-charting album was his self-titled solo debut, which peaked at No. 21 in 1976.
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In addition to scoring a hit on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, Carmen also co-wrote “Almost Paradise… Love Theme from Footloose” (performed by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson) for the Footloose soundtrack, earning him his lone Grammy nomination for best album of original score written for a motion picture or a television special.
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Before his blockbuster solo career, he recorded four albums with The Raspberries from 1972 to 1974. They scored a No. 5 hit from their debut album called “Go All the Way” in 1972 and a top 20 hit with the ironically titled “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),” which peaked at No. 18 in 1974.
Many of Carmen’s songs have endured thanks to new placements in pop culture, including Celine Dion’s Hot 100 No. 4-peaking cover of “All By Myself” in 1997; “Go All the Way” being featured on the Guardians of Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack in 2014; and his co-written “Almost Paradise” serving as the theme song to The Bachelor spin-off Bachelor in Paradise in 2014.
Steve Lawrence, the charismatic Grammy- and Emmy-winning crooner who delighted audiences for decades in nightclubs, on concert stages and in film and television appearances, died Thursday (March 7). He was 88.
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Lawrence died in Los Angeles of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, publicist Susan DuBow announced. He partnered with the late Eydie Gormé, his wife of 55 years, in the very popular act Steve & Eydie.
With his boyish good looks, silky voice and breezy personality, Lawrence broke into show business when he won a talent competition on Arthur Godfrey’s CBS show and signed with King Records as a teenager. The singer chose to stay old school and resist the allure of rock ‘n’ roll.
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“It didn’t attract me as much,” Lawrence once said. “I grew up in a time period when music was written by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and Sammy Cahn and Julie Stein. Those people, I related to — what they were writing — because it was much more melodic.”
Lawrence’s smooth stylings were heard on dozens of solo albums, starting in 1953 with an eponymous LP. In 1963, he topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks with the Gerry Goffin-Carole King pop ballad “Go Away Little Girl.” The single became the first in history to reach No. 1 by two different artists, after Donny Osmond recorded his chart-topping version in 1971.
Lawrence also made the top 10 with 1959’s “Pretty Blue Eyes” (No. 9), 1960’s “Footsteps” (No. 7) and 1961’s “Portrait of My Love” (No. 9).
On Broadway, Lawrence starred as Sammy Glick in the long-running What Makes Sammy Run?, a musical adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s novel, and received a best actor Tony nomination in 1964. A year later, he hosted a short-lived CBS variety program, and in the 1970s, he was a semi-regular on The Carol Burnett Show, appearing on more than 2 dozen episodes.
Many will remember Lawrence for his portrayal of manager Maury Sline in The Blues Brothers (1980). When Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) need to quickly raise money to save their childhood orphanage, they turn to Maury to book a gig. Lawrence utters one of the film’s most memorable lines when he hears how much they’re looking for. “Five-thousand dollars?” he sputters. “Who do you think you are, The Beatles?”
He reprised the character in the 1998 sequel Blues Brothers 2000.
Lawrence also played a pal of Steve Martin‘s greeting card writer in The Lonely Guy (1984); was Morty Fine, the father of Fran Drescher‘s character on CBS’ The Nanny; and guest-starred on other series including Night Gallery, Sanford and Son, Murder, She Wrote, Frasier, Hot in Cleveland and Two and a Half Men.
At the height of their popularity in the 1960s and ’70s, Lawrence and Gormé were one of show business’ hottest couples. If a variety show was on TV, it was only a matter of time before Steve & Eydie would be booked for it.
They won an Emmy in 1979 for their NBC special Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin and had fun on game shows, appearing on What’s My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret and Password All-Stars, to name a few.
When they weren’t shining on the small screen, they were wowing fans in concert and at top nightclubs throughout the country. They were a staple in Las Vegas, headlining Caesars Palace, the Sands, the Sahara and the Desert Inn, and the Las Vegas Entertainment Awards honored them four times as Musical Variety Act of the Year.
In 1981, Lawrence realized a lifelong dream when he and his wife performed a series of sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall.
“They are both confident, full-throated singers who show the kind of assured stage presence that can come from years of playing to Las Vegas audiences,” John S. Wilson wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Lawrence, like so many singers who work in that milieu, uses singing mannerisms that owe a great deal to Frank Sinatra; Miss Gormé has a smoky voice with a powerful projection that enables her to belt out torch songs with a figure that brings such legendary singers as Sophie Tucker up to date.”
Steve Lawrence was born Sidney Liebowitz in Brooklyn on July 8, 1935. The son of a cantor, he grew up singing in synagogue choirs. Music was always a part of his life, but he didn’t know what direction it would take him until the day he listened to his first Frank Sinatra record.
“I must’ve been 15 years old when I heard him. I think I knew [then] what I wanted to do with the rest of my musical life,” he said. “His influence — not only on me, but everyone who came after him — was so indelible, so powerful.”
(Lawrence would hang around with Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, and later, Steve & Eydie opened for Ol’ Blue Eyes on his Diamond Jubilee World Tour. For almost a year starting in 1990, they visited 13 countries for 41 sold-out performances that culminated with a concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden.)
Lawrence attended Thomas Jefferson High School, but books weren’t a priority. He would skip classes to spend his days in Manhattan at the Brill Building, hustling to make connections and pick up some cash singing demos. It was at the songwriting mecca that he first met Gormé; he was entering the building as singer Bob Manning, an acquaintance, was leaving with her.
“Bob said, ‘I want you to meet Eydie Gormé,’” Lawrence recalled in a 2014 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “She had her hair in a ponytail, and her ponytail hit me in my face.”
In 1953, they met again when they were each booked to sing on the Steve Allen-hosted Tonight!, a forerunner of The Tonight Show. They started doing duets and two years later collaborated on their first single together: “(Close Your Eyes) Take a Deep Breath”/ “Besame Mucho.”
Lawrence and Gormé were wed at the El Rancho Vegas hotel in December 1957. A few months later, they filled in for Allen with a summer replacement variety series that ran for eight weeks on NBC.
After he spent two years in the U.S. Army, they released three albums in 1960, including Steve & Eydie We Got Us, which won them a Grammy for best performance by a vocal group.
In 1968, they headed to Broadway to star in the original musical Golden Rainbow, and that played for more than 380 performances. (Lawrence closed the first act by singing “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” later made popular by Sammy Davis Jr.)
Though they each enjoyed success as a solo act, audiences seemed to prefer Steve & Eydie together. And they did so until Gormé died of an undisclosed illness in August 2013. “Eydie has been my partner on stage and in life for more than 55 years,” Lawrence said then. “I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time.”
A year after Gormé’s death, Lawrence released the solo album When You Come Back to Me Again. He had recorded it when she was ill and put it on hold when she died. When it came time to turn his attention back to music, Lawrence thought it only appropriate to dedicate the album to his wife and release it on Valentine’s Day.
“Eydie heard that album, and she thought it was terrific,” Lawrence said. “We were attached at the hip — Steve-and-Eydie. It was like we were one person, to be married that long.”
It was more than two years before Lawrence would return to the stage. On Valentine’s Day in 2016, he performed a selection of Sinatra tunes at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert.
Survivors include his son, David, a film and television composer whose credits include the High School Musical films; daughter-in-law Faye; granddaughter Mabel; and brother Bernie. Another son, Michael, died of heart failure in 1986 at age 23.
Donations in his memory can be made to Alzheimer’s Los Angeles here.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Wayne Kramer, the co-founder of the protopunk Detroit band the MC5 that thrashed out such hardcore anthems as “Kick Out the Jams” and influenced everyone from The Clash to Rage Against the Machine, has died at age 75.
Kramer died Friday (Feb. 2) at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, according to Jason Heath, a close friend and executive director of Kramer’s nonprofit Jail Guitar Doors. Heath said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
From the late 1960s to early 1970s, no band was closer to the revolutionary spirit of the time than the MC5, which featured Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith on guitars, Rob Tyner on vocals, Michael Davis on bass and Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson on drums. Managed for a time by White Panther co-founder John Sinclair, they were known for their raw, uncompromising music, which they envisioned as the soundtrack for the uprising to come.
“Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I’ve ever known,” Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote via Instagram on Friday. “He possessed a one of a kind mixture of deep wisdom & profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction. His band the MC5 basically invented punk rock music.”
The band had little commercial success and its core lineup did not last beyond the early 1970s, but its legacy endured, both for its sound and for its fusing of music to political action. Kramer, who had a long history of legal battles and substance abuse, would tell his story in the 2018 memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities.
Thompson is now the band’s only surviving member.
Kramer and Smith had known each other since their teens and played with various other musicians around Detroit before the core lineup was in place, in the mid-1960s. At Tyner’s suggestions, they called themselves the MC5, short for Motor City Five, and emulated The Rolling Stones, the Who, and other hard rock bands of the era.
By 1968, they had built a substantial local following and were influenced by Marxism, the White Panthers, the Beats and other social-political movements. The MC5 was more radical politically than most of its peers, and otherwise louder and more daring. They were virtually the only band to perform during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where police were beating up anti-war protesters.
“Kick Out the Jams” was their most famous song, peaking at No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 and marking their only appearance on the chart, and opened with an unprintable call to arms: “Kick out the jams mother—-er!” A live album of the same name peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 in 1969, their highest-charting release. They also released the studio albums Back in the USA and High Time before breaking up at the end of 1972.
Kramer would lead various incarnations of the MC5 over the following decades, and perform with Was (Not Was) among other groups. But for a time he sank into the life of what he called “a small-time Detroit criminal.” He was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and sentenced to four years in prison. Jail Guitar Doors is named for a Clash song that refers to his struggles: “Let me tell you ’bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”
Survivors include his wife, Margaret Saadi, and son, Francis.
Groundbreaking Los Angeles-based disc jockey Jim Ladd, whom Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers immortalized in their 2002 song “The Last DJ,” died suddenly Sunday of a heart attack. He was 75.
A Los Angeles fixture, Ladd worked up and down the Los Angeles radio dial, including stints at KNAC, KMET and KLOS. He was considered the last freeform DJ in the country, allowed to pick his own song selections.
After leaving KLOS in 2011, he was quickly picked up by SiriusXM’s Deep Tracks channel, where he appeared until his death. Over the decades, he was well known for his interviews with such artists as John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Stevie Nicks and Led Zeppelin.
The Doors drummer John Densmore paid tribute to Ladd on social media, posting on X, “’The Last DJ’ has crossed the tracks. There wasn’t a more soulful spinner of music. The songs he played were running through his blood, he cared so much for rock n’ roll. Irreplaceable… a very sad day, which can only be handled by carrying his spirit forward.”
Densmore’s Doors bandmate Robby Krieger also posted, “Rest in peace, Jim Ladd. He was the best friend in radio The Doors ever had. Even when people forgot about us in the late ‘70s, he kept playing our music.“
Ladd started his career at Long Beach, Calif.’s KNAC in 1969 as FM radio was burgeoning and quickly established himself as one of Southern California’s leading rock voices. In an undated interview with Michael Simone, he said of his mentors and being at the forefront of FM radio, “We were inventing this thing as we were going along, so what I would say in radio [for role models], it is pretty much everybody that I’ve worked with that I’ve learned from or borrowed from. … As far as role models in my life, Martin Luther King would be one, and certainly when I was growing up, John Lennon and Jim Morrison were two others who had a great influence on me, as well as [Roger] Waters.”
Waters and Ladd had a long friendship, with Ladd playing a rebel DJ on Waters’ 1987 Radio K.A.O.S. album and touring with Waters on the Radio K.A.O.S. On the Road outing.
From KNAC, Ladd moved to KLOS in 1971 and then had stops at Los Angeles stations KMET, KMPC and KLSX before returning to KLOS in 1997, where he stayed for 14 years. As Billboard reported in 2011, when he was let go from KLOS after Cumulus bought the station, he signed off with Pink Floyd’s “Shine On Your Crazy Diamond.”
Ladd inspired “The Last DJ” song, which Petty told journalist Jim DeRogatis was “about a DJ who becomes so frustrated with his inability to play what he wants that he moves to Mexico and gets his freedom back.”
Flowers will be placed on Ladd’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. He received his star in 2005. “His legendary voice and unparalleled contribution to the world of radio have left an indelible mark on the industry,” Ana Martinez, producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremonies, stated in a statement. “Jim’s passion for music and his unique ability to connect with his listeners will always be remembered fondly.”
SiriusXM is airing tributes to Ladd, who is survived by wife Helene, on Deep Tracks as well as other classic rock channels.