The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[-Jrabbit]

We've lost another one of the greats.

RIP, Levon Helm, 71, drummer and lead vocalist for The Band.

Watch Quick Hits: Levon Helm Performs "The Weight" on PBS. See more from Sound Tracks.

[-Jrabbit]

The hits just keep on coming...

RIP Jonathan Frid, 87. The original star of Dark Shadows died on Friday the 13th.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-rt-us-darkshadows-obitbre83i1bo-20120419,0,3157189.story

[SlowwHand]

[Uncle Sparky]

[rah]

Yeah, pretty funny.

[molly bloom]

A broken string:

The manual Play in a Day was the bible for generations of budding guitarists in the 1950s and 1960s. Its author was Bert Weedon, an unassuming dance-band musician whose unpatronising approach made him Britain's earliest expert on the instrumental niceties of rock'n'roll. Weedon, who has died aged 91, was among the first British musicians to incorporate into his style the innovations of American country and western, boogie and rock'n'roll guitarists.

Hank Marvin, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Brian May and Eric Clapton were among those whose introduction to the guitar was strumming through the exercises in Weedon's tutor books. McCartney's testimony was typical: "George and I went through the Bert Weedon books and learned D and A together."

In the 1950s, Weedon played on hundreds of recording sessions for most of the leading singers and bands of the era, including Alma Cogan, Dickie Valentine and Frankie Vaughan. When such American stars as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Tony Bennett recorded in London, Weedon was called in to accompany them. He recalled that "you had to be so adaptable and flexible. For example, Winifred Atwell would want a honky-tonk approach, Russ Conway something light, while Frankie Vaughan would want something quite beaty and Ronnie Hilton something else again." As a featured soloist with the BBC Show Band directed by Cyril Stapleton, Weedon could be heard almost daily on the Light Programme throughout the 1950s.

He broadcast frequently on the variety show Workers' Playtime, appeared with the Big Ben Banjo Band and the Palm Court violinist Max Jaffa and later led the resident band on Easy Beat. He took part in more than 5,000 broadcasts during his career. However, it was rock'n'roll that brought Weedon to prominence.

It is difficult now to imagine the vehemence with which the musical establishment, from Sir Malcolm Sargent to Steve Race, excoriated the records of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley and their effect on British youth. Weedon was one of the few experienced studio session players who wholeheartedly embraced rock, which he first heard when Stapleton procured a copy of Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock months before it was issued in Britain. Stapleton planned to broadcast the song and wanted to be sure that Weedon could reproduce the guitar sound.

He could, of course, and as the music industry sought to create British rock stars, Weedon was soon in great demand to play on their records. Beginning with Tommy Steele's 1956 debut Rock With the Caveman, he contributed guitar solos to numerous tracks by Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, Laurie London and others.

Weedon also recorded prolifically for the Top Rank label under his own name. Guitar Boogie Shuffle (1959, by the American guitarist Arthur Smith) and Apache (1960, by Jerry Lordan) were minor hits, although the latter was a much greater success in the version by Weedon's disciples the Shadows. His own compositions included Sorry Robbie (1960), China Doll (1961) and the much-recorded Ginchy (1961).

Play in a Day was first published in 1957. Its cover promised to teach the purchaser to play skiffle, jazz, Latin American rhythms and "special effects", as well as rock'n'roll, and eventually more than 2 million novices were enticed to buy a copy by its promise of instant proficiency. In 1987 Weedon issued a video version of Play in a Day which promised that "a beginner can play in a group in only 25 minutes".

Weedon was born in East Ham, London, the son of a train driver who had a collection of hillbilly records and was an amateur singer. Weedon bought his first guitar aged 12 from Petticoat Lane market. (In 2003 he received an apology and damages from the BBC after the publicity for a radio programme had inexplicably claimed that he learned to play the guitar while in jail.)

As a teenager, he was the leader of such groups as the Blue Cumberland Rhythm Boys and Bert Weedon and His Harlem Hotshots. In the 1930s and 1940s the guitar was not the ubiquitous instrument it would later become and, Weedon said: "The only time you saw a guitar was in the hands of a cowboy in a western film singing Home on the Range."

He soon graduated to the semi-professional Dixieland jazz group Harry Gold's Pieces of Eight and performed with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli and pianist George Shearing in the early 1940s. Weedon and the classical guitarist Julian Bream provided the music for a postwar London production of Lorca's Blood Wedding.

The first amplified guitars were beginning to appear and Weedon became an enthusiastic exponent, playing in the orchestras of Ted Heath, Mantovani and Ronnie Aldrich. His career was interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis. After he was discharged from hospital, doctors advised him to avoid smoky dancehalls and night-clubs and he switched the focus of his career to records, radio and television.

Although he first appeared on TV in 1946, it was not until the arrival of the independent network in 1955 that Weedon began to appear frequently on the small screen. He was seen in Slater's Bazaar, the first TV advertising magazine, and from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s he was a regular in a series of children's shows: Small Time, Tuesday Rendezvous and Five O'Clock Club, with Muriel Young, Wally Whyton and the glove puppet Ollie Beak. When Weedon invited anyone needing help to play the guitar to drop him a line, sackfuls of mail arrived at Associated Rediffusion, who had to print and mail out thousands of instructional leaflets.

Among those who were inspired by the televised guitar lessons was Mike Oldfield, who told me: "I saw him on television when I was seven and immediately persuaded my father to buy me my first guitar. If it wasn't for Bert I might never have taken it up in the first place."

With the various "rock revivals" of the 70s, Weedon was once again in demand, making the hit albums Rocking at the Roundhouse (1970) and 22 Golden Guitar Greats (1976), a No 1 hit that sold over a million copies.

For much of his career Weedon was involved in work with the entertainment industry charity the Grand Order of Water Rats, becoming King Rat in 1992. He was appointed OBE in 2001 for services to music and was honoured by the Variety Club of Great Britain, the British Music Hall Society and the British Association of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

He is survived by his second wife, Maggie, two sons, Geoff and Lionel, eight grandchildren and a great-grandson.

• Herbert Maurice William Weedon, guitarist, born 10 May 1920; died 20 April 2012

Bert Weedon.

[-Jrabbit]

Wow. I'm pretty immersed in rock history, but barely knew his name.
Excellent post, Molly.

Oh and RIP, Mr. Weedon.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

He was a British icon. Every Brit guitar hero of the late 50s to early 70s started out learning from Bert.

[molly bloom]

I'm sorry, put this down to chronic insomnia and advancing age: the blues turn a deeper hue of indigo.

Despite its connotations of misery and bad luck, the blues is no less flexible a medium for humour, satire and topical commentary. Few artists in recent times have demonstrated this more vivaciously than the singer and harmonica-player Jerry McCain, who has died aged 81. The dozens of songs he wrote in a career spanning six decades embraced the wry social observation of That's What They Want, My Next Door Neighbour and Viagra Man, message songs such as Burn the Crackhouse Down and more playful pieces such as Homogenized Love.

A lifelong resident of Gadsden, Alabama, McCain began playing music semi-professionally in his teens. During the 1950s he gained celebrity status in the southern jukebox market with singles such as Wine-O-Wine, Stay Out of Automobiles, Courtin' in a Cadillac and other jaunty pieces for the Trumpet and Excello labels. Record collectors discovering southern downhome blues in the 1960s were especially excited by his coupling of the harmonica instrumental Steady and She's Tough (1960), a sly, sinuous blues in the manner of Jimmy Reed. And not only record collectors: She's Tough was covered, almost 20 years later, on the first album by the Texas band the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and recalled in the title of the group's later album Tuff Enuff.

In the 1960s McCain gigged around Alabama and Georgia and made further recordings for Okeh and Jewel, but music could not support him and he worked as a bounty hunter. Welfare Cadillac Blues (1970), a response to an implicitly racist country song, put his name back on the jukeboxes, but soon afterwards his recording career faded, not to be fully revived until the late 1980s, when he signed with the soul label Ichiban and made albums such as Love Desperado and Struttin' My Stuff. He had to wait longer than many of his contemporaries to be invited to Europe, but after his first trip in 1990 he was often booked for festivals and club engagements.

McCain never lacked self-belief. In his youth he drove round Gadsden in an old Ford truck with the titles from his first record painted on the side, and in later years his voicemail message ran: "You've reached the blues man Jerry 'Boogie' McCain, the baddest harmonica player in the world." He bore a striking resemblance to Sammy Davis Jr, and dressed for the stage in black and bling, sometimes wearing a holstered gun.

He could play two harmonicas at once, one with his mouth, the other with his nose. So could the better-known Sonny Boy Williamson II, who said he invented the technique, but McCain always contested that. Less of a harmonica virtuoso than Williamson, he was happiest when playing medium-tempo instrumentals, such as Steady and Red Top, with a fat sound like that of a saxophone or, as on 728 Texas (the title was the address of Jewel Records), an accordion.

His last album, This Stuff Just Kills Me (2000), was his most elaborate. McCain produced more of his topical numbers, such as Ain't No Use for Drug Abuse, and his producer Mike Vernon drew in collaborators such as the Fabulous Thunderbirds' Jimmie Vaughan, the rhythm section of Stevie Ray Vaughan's Double Trouble, and Chuck Berry's former pianist Johnnie Johnson. Unfortunately, soon afterwards the Jericho label went out of business and the album became, almost overnight, a collector's item. It was a turn of events that McCain viewed philosophically, as he had learned to do after many years' experience of double-dealing record companies and unreliable managers.

He continued to work on his home ground, and in 2007 he received an Alabama folk heritage award. Since 2008 he had appeared several times at First Friday, a monthly Gadsden street festival. His wife and daughter predeceased him.

• Jerry McCain, blues musician, born 19 June 1930; died 28 March 2012

[SlowwHand]

I need to check him out. I have some Sonny Williams.

"I've Got The Blues All Over Me" and "The Jig's Up" coming to me now.

[-Jrabbit]

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Saturday, April 21, 2012 -- 4:40 PM EDT
-----

Charles W. Colson, Watergate Felon Reborn as Evangelical Leader, Dies at 80

Charles W. Colson, who served as a political saboteur for President Richard M. Nixon and masterminded some of the dirty tricks that led to the president’s downfall, then emerged from prison to become an important evangelical leader, saying he had been “born again,” died Saturday. He was 80. The cause was complications from a brain hemorrhage, according to a statement on his organization’s Web site.

Mr. Colson was sent to prison after pleading guilty to obstructing justice in the Watergate affair. After having what he called his religious awakening behind bars, he spent much of the rest of his new life ministering to prisoners, preaching the Gospel and helping to forge a powerful coalition among Republican politicians, evangelical church leaders and Roman Catholic conservatives, changing the very dynamics of American politics.

I doubt he's on anyone's list.

[Wezil]

Nope, of all the criminals and assorted villains, he was missed.

[Uncle Sparky]

Billy Bryans (Parachute Club) has just been moved to palliative care. Lung cancer, in remission in 2006, returned earlier this year. But when will he 'Rise Up'?

[molly bloom]

Not a politician known to many outside the British Isles, but to many (whatever their political affiliation) a campaigning hero, for older people, for people with disabilities and for women who have been abused:

The Labour politician Jack Ashley, who has died aged 89 after suffering from pneumonia, was a many-layered hero. Deaf for most of his Westminster career, he was an inspiration to people with disabilities, a battler on their behalf and a relentless pursuer of justice for other underdog causes.

The authority that his support gave to the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act of 1999, after campaigning against cuts in incapacity benefits – "Enough is enough ... this is a fine bill" – was very welcome to the realists of Tony Blair's government. Being appointed Companion of Honour (1975) and privy counsellor (1979), marks of distinction usually reserved for the most senior politicians, reflected the breadth of support for his work. Being created Lord Ashley of Stoke in 1992 gave him a platform for continuing it after representing Stoke-on-Trent South for 26 years.

His personal courage faced its severest test after he hit rock bottom in December 1967, the year following his entry into the Commons. In the wake of a minor operation to restore full hearing on a punctured eardrum, an infection destroyed his hearing, leaving only the noises of tinnitus.

Despite efforts to repair the damage and a crash course in lip-reading, by Easter 1968 he had decided to quit: "I was an MP with a safe seat and fair prospects. Now I have no future ... One lives in a glass cage. You see lips move, but there's no sound. You see babies cry, but hear no crying." He brought out the searing impact of isolation in deafness in his first autobiography, Journey Into Silence (1973); the second was Acts of Defiance (1992).

He was dissuaded from stepping down by friends – among them the social policy expert Peter Townsend – and his constituents. "On reflection," he said, putting a brave public face on the situation, "I think there's nothing I can't do as an MP. I can put down questions, sit on committees, take part in debates. There's still the problem of machine-gun speakers, of course, but I can catch up with Hansard." Among other problems, he faced colleagues who could not cope with talking to a deaf man.

But the Commons as a whole willed his comeback. In July 1968, he made his first speech since going deaf – typically to introduce a bill to increase pensions for disabled people. Both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Tory leader Edward Heath had stayed on in the chamber to listen to him.

From then on, it was a tremendous haul to reach near-full effectiveness. He tried hard to lip-read better. In those days his devoted wife, Pauline, was always on hand to supplement his lip-reading with sign language. She helped him overcome his depression, as did his three daughters, Jackie – now a Guardian columnist – Jane and Caroline. By 1977, the government arranged for a Palantype reporter in the press gallery to provide a verbatim account of Commons speeches to a screen at Ashley's side.

Ashley's perseverance helped change the public perception of deafness. At the beginning, he could get into difficulties because he did not know how loud he was speaking. In the Commons, he was helped by discreet signals from the Tory MP Neil Marten, sitting opposite.

There were political consequences, too, as the loyal union-sponsored rightwinger became the leading voice of disabled people. He did not mind whose toes he trampled on, so long as it was likely to help those he championed. "The one thing is never to accept the brush-off from any minister, Tory or Labour, if you are convinced you are right," he said. He saw disabled people as a "vast pool of untapped labour" for whom employment was much preferable to subsidy.

Ashley's fierce determination came from his origins in the slums of Widnes. His father, a labourer, died of pneumonia when Jack was five, leaving his Catholic widow to struggle along on £1 a week. Jack's mother went out office-cleaning to support him and his three sisters.

He left St Patrick's elementary school at 14 to fill large bottles of sulphuric acid at 12s 6d a week. His flair for campaigning was revealed by a leaking roof. The landlord roughly brushed off Mrs Ashley when she tackled him on the subject. Jack went to the Widnes town clerk to obtain a form allowing tenants to claim rebates when landlords let their property fall into disrepair, knocking 40% off their rent. The landlord became ruder. So Jack got another form, made 200 copies and visited all the other tenants to inform them of their rights.

One tenant was so impressed that he persuaded Ashley to stand for Widnes council. He became Britain's youngest borough councillor, at 22, in 1945. His wartime service as a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps had lasted only briefly, since he was discharged because of his eardrum injury.

By 1946, he had had a decade of labouring and crane-driving jobs, and became the youngest member of a trade union national executive. He had fallen ill with appendicitis while shovelling scrap into a furnace at a local copper-smelting works. On leaving hospital, he asked for lighter work for a few weeks. The management refused, so he distributed application forms to join the Chemical Workers' Union. He became a shop steward and led two unofficial strikes.

After evening classes, Ashley won a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford (1946-48). From there he went on to read economics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1948-51), beating Geoffrey Howe and Norman St John Stevas to become the president of the Cambridge Union – the first working-class holder of the post. He refused to wear the prescribed dinner jacket for debates: "I just wasn't going to be bullied into expense I couldn't afford." But he became a fluent speaker, representing Cambridge on a tour of US universities, without losing his Widnes accent.

On his return, he was interviewed for the student newspaper Varsity by a maths student from Girton College, Pauline Crispin. Six months later they were engaged. When Girton rules blocked their marriage, Ashley pursued the college's head, the Mistress, with his typical relentlessness. The couple married in 1951.

That year he contested the north London constituency of Finchley, long before Margaret Thatcher captured it. Unsuccessful there, he became a BBC radio producer (1951-57) before moving on to television, involved in producing Panorama for current affairs and Monitor for the arts. Later, one of his big campaigns would be for subtitling for TV programmes.

After reaching the Commons when Wilson sought re-election in 1966, Ashley became parliamentary private secretary to the foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, another rightwing loyalist. He was the only Labour MP backed by a union – the General and Municipal Workers – fully to support Barbara Castle's union-reforming In Place of Strife white paper, published in January 1969. But the following month, he was willing to rebel when the Wilson government refused to provide pensions to disabled housewives, even voting for a Tory bill on the subject.

He demanded of education secretary Ted Short that more research be done into teaching deaf children, including finger-spelling. In 1970, he called for special research into dyslexia and strongly supported Alf Morris's Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act.

Labour's defeat that year did not slow Ashley's increasing concern with disadvantaged people. He crusaded against phoney cancer cures, in support of old age pensioners, and for funds to be made available to realise the provision of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act.

In 1972, in tandem with the Sunday Times and its editor, Harold Evans, Ashley's relentless attacks on the Distillers Company for its inadequate compensation for thalidomide victims gave rise to his reputation as a reformer. Together they ignored legal attempts to gag them. As chairman of the all-party Disablement Group, he used every parliamentary device to keep up the pressure, supported by the Speaker, Selwyn Lloyd. The following year Distillers agreed to part with more than £20m.


When Labour came back into office after the February 1974 election, Castle, now health secretary, made Ashley her PPS. Two years later, the Guardian could point to reforms that owed much to what Ashley called his "bloody-mindedness" in five areas: non-disclosure of victims' names in rape cases; the rights of battered wives; the ending of fuel disconnections for elderly people; a royal commission on the legal profession; and civil liability for damages such as those due to thalidomide victims.

He was always looking out for the interests of underdogs, such as soldier victims of bullying or negligence. Another target was forcing giant companies to pay for the damaging side-effects of drugs like Opren, Halcion or Debendox. A third abiding concern was how negligent big institutions, notably hospitals and prisons, could hide behind crown immunity, making them impervious to reform.

Ashley had still other objectives. He was a long-time enthusiast for televising the Commons. He was a Eurosceptic, backing the team of Peter Shore and Gwyneth Dunwoody for leader and deputy leader in 1983. He was strongly anti-apartheid, slating Thatcher in 1985 for appeasing its South African advocates. He was elected to Labour's national executive committee for two years (1976-78), missing election by only 9,000 votes in 1979 as the party moved to the left.

Before he stood down as an MP, he fought one big battle against the Tories' minister for the disabled, Nicholas Scott. In October 1988, Ashley claimed that Scott had ignored an official report which doubled the number of disabled people in the country and emphasised the way poverty compounded the effects of disability. His last major Commons battle, in 1990, was over the service victims of nuclear tests.

In John Major's 1992 dissolution honours list he became Lord Ashley of Stoke. Soon after his arrival in the Lords, he announced his opposition to "life sentences on brutalised women like Kiranjit Ahluwall and Sara Thornton. Driven to extremes by sustained violence, they received the same sentence as calculating, cold-blooded murderers."

In 1993 he campaigned on behalf of babies born without eyes, often in rural areas where the fungicide benomyl was used. That was also the year when Ashley began to hear again, thanks to a cochlear implant.

In 2007, he introduced for the second time the Disabled Persons (Independent Living) bill to provide a comprehensive scheme to enable disabled people to live independent lives on the basis of guaranteed all-around support from local authorities, the NHS and others. He knew the government would not accept the expensive project: in refusing, Lady Royal hailed his "unceasing efforts over many years in furthering the interests of disabled people", adding that although she was an opponent of human cloning, she would make an exception if it were possible to clone Jack Ashley.

Undaunted, he put the bill to the Lords for a third fruitless time in 2009, proposing it as: "a 'New Deal' for Britain's disabled people. They have suffered neglect and even ostracism for too long. It is time that they came in from the cold." At the same time, he was seeking state aid to address the later-life effects of thalidomide, writing in the Guardian: "Justice is not time limited. It is an absolute. When a grievous wrong is done, those who have suffered need respect and help throughout their lives, not just while the rest of us can be bothered to pay attention."

Pauline died in 2003. Ashley is survived by his daughters.

• Jack Ashley, Lord of Ashley of Stoke, politician and campaigner, born 6 December 1922; died 20 April 2012


• Andrew Roth died in 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/21/lord-ashley-of-stoke?newsfeed=true

[-Jrabbit]

An impressive man. RIP...