Otherwise known as Ann Margret….
I can’t believe she’s 70 today…
Here she is in “Viva Las Vegas” with some guy….
Tag Archives: Music
Goodbye, Phoebe Snow– ‘Poetry Man’ singer, Dies at 60
The amazingly gifted singer Phoebe Snow passed away today. She was very special.
My partner, Steve, and I were privileged to see her perform at “Birdland” in New York just a couple of years ago. We sat at a ringside table not more than a few feet from her. That will always be a great memory for us….
She was an amazing singer and an amazing person….
Here is an excerpt from her obituary and a CBS Profile.
I’ll also post a couple of video clips of her performing…
NEW YORK – It wasn’t long after the release of “Poetry Man,” the breezy, jazzy love song that would make Phoebe Snow a star, that the singer experienced another event that would dramatically alter her life.
In 1975, she gave birth to a daughter, Valerie Rose, who was found to be severely brain-damaged. Her husband split from her soon after the baby was born. And, at a time when many disabled children were sent to institutions, Snow decided to keep her daughter at home and care for the child herself.
The decision to be Valerie’s primary caretaker would lead her to abandon music for a while and enter into ill-fated business decisions in the quest to stay solvent enough to take care of Valerie.
Snow, who worked her way back into the music performing world in the 1980s and continued to perform in recent years, died on Tuesday from complications of a brain hemorrhage she suffered in January 2010, said Rick Miramontez, her longtime friend and public relations representative. She was 60.
Snow never regretted her decision to put aside music so she could focus on Valerie’s care. She was devastated when her daughter, who was not expected to live beyond her toddler years, died in 2007 at 31.
“She was my universe,” she told the website PopEntertainment.com that year. “She was the nucleus of everything. I used to wonder, am I missing something? No. I had such a sublime, transcendent experience with my child. She had fulfilled every profound love and intimacy and desire I could have ever dreamed of.”
After her stroke last year, Snow endured bouts of blood clots, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, said her manager, Sue Cameron.
“The loss of this unique and untouchable voice is incalculable,” Cameron said. “Phoebe was one of the brightest, funniest and most talented singer-songwriters of all time and, more importantly, a magnificent mother to her late brain-damaged daughter, Valerie, for 31 years. Phoebe felt that was her greatest accomplishment.”
Known as a folk guitarist who made forays into jazz and blues, Snow put her stamp on soul classics such as “Shakey Ground,” “Love Makes a Woman” and “Mercy, Mercy Mercy” on over a half dozen albums.
via Phoebe Snow, ‘Poetry Man’ singer, dies at 60 – Yahoo! News.
Here is a clip of a profile from CBS a couple of years ago:
Filed under Music, Uncategorized
Happy Birthday, Ella Fitzgerald
What is it with so many great singers/performers having their birthdays so close together??
There must be something to astrology after all….
The late, great Ella Fitzgerald would have been 93 today.
Filed under Broadway, Entertainment, Movies, Music
Happy Birthday, Barbra Streisand and Shirley MacLaine
Two icons were born today: Barbra Streisand is 69 and Virginia’s own Shirley MacLaine is 77….
Of course, I have to put up a couple of clips:
A little prime Streisand:
And a little MacLaine:
Filed under Broadway, Entertainment, Gay, Movies
Judy Garland: Over the Rainbow, and Then Some!
In recognition of her Carnegie Hall Concert 50 years ago tonight, there’s a lot of new interest in Judy Garland.
Here is a great article from this month’s Vanity Fair:
In December 1959, Judy Garland, only 37 but with a quarter-century of hard living behind her, lay near death in New York’s Doctors Hospital. Alcohol and pills were the culprits. When in reasonably good health, Garland, who stood an inch under five feet, weighed 100 pounds. Now she weighed 180. Her tiny frame was grotesquely swollen with fluid and her liver severely compromised. Her eyes were glazed; her memory was failing; her body was shutting down. Walking by Garland’s hospital room, a close friend overheard a clutch of doctors discussing her condition. One of them turned to the friend. “I have to tell you the truth,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it.”
She made it. “She had the constitution of an army,” Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft says. “She just knew she had to keep going.” But three weeks later, after 20 quarts of fluid had been drained from her body, her lead physician told Garland, “For the rest of your life, all your physical activity must be curtailed. You are a permanent semi-invalid.… It goes without saying that under no circumstances can you ever work again.”
Garland fell back onto her pillows. “Whoopee!” she cried, weakly.
Happy Birthday, Patti Lupone
Broadway’s original Evita is 62 today….
Here are a couple of clips of her at her best….
Here she is in her first Tony Award winning performance in “Evita 32 years ago…
I won’t post her second Tony Award winning performance as Moma Rose in “Gypsy” because I just hated her performance….
She was on a total ego trip in that show….It was over the top and out of control.
But I have also seen her in concert and found her quite charming…
But here is a taste of her in better form today…
Say what you will, the woman sure knows how to own the stage….
Filed under Broadway, Uncategorized
100 Best Albums of the Eighties | Rolling Stone
A trip down memory lane for a few of us…
I kept thinking of missing albums, like Boz Scaggs “Silk Degrees” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” when I realized they were from the late 1970’s…
I am getting senile…
This has been the first rock roll decade without revolution, or true revolutionaries, to call its own. The Fifties witnessed nothing less than the birth of the music. The Sixties were rocked by Beatlemania, Motown, Phil Spector, psychedelia and Bob Dylan. The Seventies gave rise to David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, heavy metal, punk and New Wave.
In comparison, the Eighties have been the decade of, among other things, synth pop, Michael Jackson, the compact disc, Sixties reunion tours, the Beastie Boys and a lot more heavy metal. But if the past ten years haven’t exactly been the stuff of revolution, they have been a critical time of re-assessment and reconstruction. Musicians and audiences alike have struggled to come to terms with rock’s parameters and possibilities, its emotional resonance and often dormant social consciousness.
The following survey of the 100 best albums of the Eighties, as selected by the editors of Rolling Stone, shows that the music and the values it stands for have been richer for the struggle. Punks got older and more articulate in their frustration and rage, while many veteran artists responded to that movement’s challenge with their most vital work in years. And rap transformed the face — and voice — of popular music.
via 100 Best Albums of the Eighties | Rolling Stone Music | Lists.
Filed under Music
David Cassidy is 61
I almost missed it, but I’m on the West Coast this week where it is still April 12th…
That should make some of us feel rather old…
Keith Partridge is almost old enough for Social Security!
For the record, I never got him or The Partridge Family, but my sister lived for it…
What the hell, it was a cultural milestone of the ’70’s.
Happy Birthday, David!
Filed under Entertainment, Television
To sir, with love: How ‘Glee’ turned Matthew Morrison from Broadway stalwart to international star -The Independent
One of the many things I love about “Glee” is that it’s given so many Broadway people a wider audience and bigger paychecks.
We saw several younger members of the cast on and off Broadway in “Spring Awakening”.
We also knew Matthew Morrison from Broadway. We had seen him in “Light in the Piazza” and maybe a couple of other things. I hated that he had left “South Pacific” by the time we got to see it as we had been looking forward to seeing his Lt. Cable.
So I’m quite pleased to see him making it big now. We already have our tickets to see him live, again, when he comes to Greensboro this summer.
Here is an interesting article about him I thought I would share…
Morrison is Glee’s break-out male star, and not just because he gets to share screen time and vicious dialogue with the best female character, comedy nasty cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch). On the set he’s known as “Triple Threat”: he can sing, he can dance, he can act. So, after rigorous training, can most of the other cast members. But not with the natural-born – and professionally honed – savvy of Morrison.
Prior to Glee, he was a Broadway stalwart with a decade of well-regarded, award-winning performances behind him, in shows including Hairspray, The Light in the Piazza and South Pacific – he was the male lead in the latter when Glee creator Ryan Murphy cast him in the show. He went from earning “something like 10 grand a week” to a figure he can describe only with a cat-that-got-the-cream smile.
With seven to 10 years’ age on most of his castmates, he is also a little more sanguine about the hoopla surrounding what has become one of the biggest TV shows in the world. “I’m so happy I got to live out my twenties in New York and be free to do whatever I wanted to do, not under that public eye and that scrutiny,” he says. “I feel bad for the rest of the guys that they’ll never experience that.”
Filed under Broadway, Entertainment, Music, Television, Uncategorized
Lost in the 21st Century 