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☆ With ‘Tommy’ Revival, Pete Townshend Is Talking to a New Generation
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-23 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As he entered a suite at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, Pete Townshend mentioned that an afternoon meeting had been canceled. “So,” he added, “we have lots of time to talk.”Townshend is one of rock’s great singers, songwriters and guitarists, and he’s also among music’s pre-eminent talkers. In 1969, the Who released “Tommy,” a rock opera written mostly by Townshend, although the bassist John Entwistle contributed the songs “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” and the drummer Keith Moon suggested the premise of “Tommy’s Holiday Camp.” Townshend expected the double album to fade quickly, in the way of most records. Instead, it took root in pop culture, and in short succession was adapted by a ballet group in Montreal, the Seattle Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra. Then, most memorably, it was a delirious 1975 film directed by Ken Russell.

Persons: Pete Townshend, ” Townshend, he’s, music’s, Tommy, Townshend, John Entwistle, Cousin Kevin ”, Keith Moon, Ken Russell Organizations: Carlyle, Seattle Opera, London Symphony Orchestra Locations: Manhattan, Montreal

☆ To Make ‘The Notebook’ a Musical, She Wove in Memories of Her Parents
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-08 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It’s crowded and overlit, thanks to a high-wattage vanity mirror situated near a 1970s-era mini sink. “Quirky” is a word that turns up in articles about her, and quirky is rarely a mass-market trait. In 2004, it was adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and its feverishly passionate dialogue (“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!” Gosling shouts, in the middle of a rainstorm.) Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”

Persons: Gerald Schoenfeld, Ingrid Michaelson, “, ”, “ There’s, Michaelson, Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, Sara Bareilles — Michaelson, Nicholas Sparks’s, Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, ” Gosling, Stephen Holden, Sparks’s Organizations: The New York Times

☆ Kiss Loves to Say Goodbye. Is Its Rock ’n’ Roll Really Over?
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-01 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

But Sinatra returned two years later, to much ballyhoo and chart success, with the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.” Bowie was paying attention. “David was a big Sinatra fan,” his former manager, Tony DeFries, recently told Mojo magazine. Bowie’s retirement was a ruse, DeFries added, to generate publicity and whip up demand for a headlining tour of big venues in the United States. It worked; in 1974, Bowie played arenas across the country, including two shows at Madison Square Garden. After Bowie retired in 1973, then unretired in 1974, he retired a second time in 1975.

Persons: Bowie, It’s, Frank Sinatra, “, Plato, Gene Simmons, Sinatra, ” Bowie, “ David, Tony DeFries, DeFries, Elton John, ”, “ Elton, hasn’t, Lazarus, “ I’ve, ” Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Cher, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, “ I’d, ” Trent Reznor, Cameron Crowe Organizations: Mojo, Madison, Wembley, Billboard, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Playboy Locations: United States, London

☆ Vince Clarke, a Synth-Pop Mastermind, on His Unexpected Solo Album
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-14 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

So they moved to Basildon, one of many “new towns” Britain built quickly to create new housing — in some cases, too quickly. “Cracks would start appearing in walls, and they’d have to flatten the houses and start again,” he said. It was naff.”Musically, his first love was Simon & Garfunkel, after he discovered he could play their songs on a guitar. “The early electronic musicians weren’t. They played weekly at a Basildon disco, “but we only had eight songs, so the set was pretty short,” he recalled.

Persons: Clarke’s, ”, Vince, Simon, Garfunkel, “ Locations: London, Germany, Basildon, Britain

☆ Tony Bennett’s 10 Essential Songs
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-21 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When Anthony Dominick Benedetto was growing up in Astoria, Queens, during the Depression, his parents couldn’t afford to pay for the singing lessons he wanted. Anthony Benedetto later took the advice of the comedian Bob Hope and adopted the more Americanized stage name Tony Bennett. Voice lessons, however long delayed, were important to his development. After he served in World War II, Bennett studied, thanks to the G.I. In 1965, Frank Sinatra told Life magazine, “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.” He held on to that distinction for decades to follow.

Persons: Anthony Dominick Benedetto, John Benedetto, Anthony Benedetto, Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, Bennett, Bill, Cole Porter, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra Organizations: Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, American Theater Wing Locations: Astoria , Queens, Italy, Manhattan, Italian

☆ John Mellencamp Just Might Punch You
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-06 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I’m not a nostalgic person, but I can tell when I play it for the audience that they are. I could do a whole show of hits if I wanted to, but I don’t. I don’t know if that girl made it home, so I wrote a song about her. Bob and I were painting together one day, and I asked him how he wrote so many great songs. In all seriousness, he said, “John, I’ve written the same four [expletive] songs a million times.” I’m going to get in line with Bob on that.

Persons: “, ”, ” Jack, Diane, you’re, Bob Dylan, “ John, I’ve, ” I’m, Bob, It’s Organizations: America Locations: America, Portland

☆ Lauren Daigle, a Christian Music Superstar, Is Ready for a Bigger Tent
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Christian rock began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when it was known as “Jesus Music,” a grass-roots movement led by longhaired hippie outsiders. Major labels took notice, and began to buy up Christian labels or start imprints of their own. “She left no ambiguity in her music and spoke transparently about her personal relationship to God.”As a child, Daigle dismissed Christian music as cheesy. She was raised in a religious home that welcomed secular music, as long as there “weren’t F-bombs every five seconds,” she said. As her interest in music grew, she cleaned her church choir director’s bathroom in exchange for singing lessons.

☆ Gordon Lightfoot’s 10 Essential Songs
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Rob Tannenbaum | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Bob Dylan once named Gordon Lightfoot one of his favorite songwriters, and called the musician “somebody of rare talent” while inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986. On Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” he even recorded Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” and the respect was mutual — Lightfoot listened carefully to Dylan’s songs, which instilled in him “a more direct approach, getting away from the love songs,” he once said. In an expansive career that drew from Greenwich Village folk and Laurel Canyon pop, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr., who died on Monday at 84, was embraced by a diverse group of musicians: Elvis Presley and Duran Duran, Lou Rawls and the Replacements. “Lightfoot’s is the voice of the romantic,” Geoffrey Stokes of The Village Voice wrote in 1974. “We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry.” In the process, Lightfoot became one of the most successful recording artists of the 1970s.

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