Tributes

All good things must end some day

Posted on by brucehhackett

What’s that pop culture superstition about celebrities dying in threes? It’s pretty much nonsense, is what it is. How close together must their death dates be for it to qualify as a hat trick of celebrity deaths, anyway?

Three notable people in the rock music world died within a few days of each other at the end of May, but then this week, there was a fourth… Or was it the first of the next group of three? I think you see my point. Regardless, four very different but similarly influential musicians have just passed away, and Hack’s Back Pages has decided to pay a modest tribute to each of them. Their individual careers, backgrounds and preferred musical genres had little to do with each other, but they all operated under the broad umbrella of classic rock music, and are consequently deserving of our attention here.

The Spotify playlist at the end includes a batch of songs from each honoree’s catalog. These are songs that typically wouldn’t ever be on the same playlist, but they do show the diversity to be found in the music of the classic rock era…

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Ronnie Hawkins

Referred to in a New York Times obituary as a “rockabilly road warrior,” Ronnie Hawkins was actually much more than that. Though he was born and raised in Arkansas, he relocated to Ontario, Canada, and is credited with kickstarting the Canadian rock music scene in the mid-’60s, bringing his infectious blend of gregarious rock ‘n’ roll and R&B.

Hawkins died May 29th of cancer at age 87.

Born in 1932, Hawkins came from a musical family that included his father, two uncles and a few cousins who played the honky-tonk circuit in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the ’30s and ’40s. In the ’50s, cousin Dale Hawkins wrote and recorded “Suzie-Q” (later made famous by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s rendition in 1968). While serving in the Army, Hawkins was astounded when he heard a black group perform “a cross between the blues and rockabilly,” and ended up joining them for a while as the Blackhawks. “Instead of doing a kind of rockabilly that was closer to country music, I was doing rockabilly that was closer to soul music, which was exactly what I liked,” he recalled.

Hawkins (second from left) with The Hawks (Helm at far left)

In 1958, he formed a band of Arkansas-based players called The Hawks that included a young drummer named Levon Helm, still in high school. Country singer Conway Twitty urged Hawkins and his band to tour in Ontario, Canada, where rockabilly music was becoming popular at the time, so Hawkins and The Hawks split their time between Arkansas and Ontario, eventually releasing their first album there on Roulette Records. The album failed to chart, but the first single from it, “Forty Days” (a version of Chuck Berry’s 1955 hit “Thirty Days”), peaked at #4 on the Canadian charts and made it as far as #45 on the US pop charts. The follow-up, “Mary Lou,” was a Hawkins original that reached #26 in the US and was later covered by ’70s stars Steve Miller and Bob Seger, among others.

Once Hawkins moved permanently to Ontario and became a Canadian citizen, the rest of The Hawks dropped out, and their ranks were filled by guitarist Robbie Robertson, organist Garth Hudson, pianist Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko, who would go on to international fame as The Band, one of the most influential groups of the ’70s.

Ronnie Hawkins with Robbie Robertson circa 1964

Hawkins nurtured a reputation as a startling showman on stage, doing backflips and handstands, and something he called the “camel walk,” which some say was the progenitor of Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” move in the ’80s. The raw energy of his musical output made him a big draw in the Toronto club scene, playing a repertoire that included scorching renditions of classics like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t,” Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” Dion’s “Ruby Baby” and Billy Lee Riley’s “Red Hot.”

You may recall seeing Hawkins as a featured performer in The Band’s celebrated concert film, “The Last Waltz,” or playing the role of Bob Dylan in Dylan’s 1976 experimental film “Renaldo and Clara,” or in Michael Cimino’s 1980 box-office bomb “Heaven’s Gate.”

Danko with Hawkins in “The Last Waltz”

In his later years, he became something of a respected “elder statesman” of Canadian rock music and, having made shrewd investments, lived handsomely and owned several prosperous businesses.

But he remained a devilish rascal at heart, chuckling as he summed up his life: “Ninety percent of what I made went to women, whiskey, drugs and cars,” he said. “I guess I just wasted the other 10 percent.”

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Jimmy Seals

With their precise high harmonies and deft use of guitars, mandolin and fiddle, Jimmy Seals and Dash Crofts crafted some really gorgeous melodies that earned them mainstream success in 1972-73 and made them the darlings of the New Age crowd, thanks to lyrics that often emphasized a spiritual approach.

Seals, who died Monday at age 80, was a gentle soul from small-town Texas who learned fiddle and sax at a young age and began collaborating with the like-minded Crofts while they were still teenagers. By the early ’60s, they had moved to California and met session guitarist Glen Campbell, with whom they performed as part of The Champs and in other configurations. Seals and Crofts eventually became part of a band called The Dawnbreakers, named after a book chronicling the evolution of the Persian religion known as Baha’i, and soon became strong devotees of that faith.

“I think our music is a combination of the Eastern part of the world and the Western,” Seals said in 1971. “We’ve had people from Greece, Israel, England, France, China, everywhere, listen to our music and say, ‘Oh, it’s music from the old country.’ It really seemed strange to us because we didn’t realize it ourselves until we started comparing our work with, for example, Persian music, which, when you listen to it, is really very close to ours. We had no knowledge of this at all beforehand. So it’s just something that happened.”

Their first two LPs received little notice, but beginning with 1972’s “Summer Breeze,” they enjoyed a run of four Top 20 hits and two Top Ten albums that put them right up there with James Taylor and Cat Stevens in the singer-songwriter sweepstakes that dominated the early ’70s. “Hummingbird,” “Diamond Girl” and “We May Never Pass This Way Again,” each offering sunny, positive messages, received heavy airplay. These albums included an impressive diversity of styles and instrumentation on deeper tracks like “It’s Gonna Come Down on You,” “The Euphrates, “Wisdom” and “Say.”

Then Seals and Crofts let their fiercely held beliefs get the better of them. They took a calculated risk in 1974 when they released “Unborn Child,” which took a strong anti-abortion stance in the wake of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision a few months earlier. “Warner Brothers warned us against it,” said Seals. “They said, ‘This is a highly controversial subject, we advise that you don’t do this.’ But we said, ‘You’re in the business to make money; we’re doing it to save lives. We don’t care about the money.” The duo insisted the song’s message was simply “don’t take life too lightly,” and to reconsider abortion as an option. Conservative fans applauded their brave stance, but critics were merciless, and the controversy severely impeded their commercial momentum. The song stalled at #66, although the album of the same name did reasonably well at #14, thanks to other fine tunes like “Desert People” and “The Story of Her Love.”

“I figured either it (‘Unborn Child’) would be very much accepted on the strength of the song itself, or that it would be the biggest bomb that we ever had. But it was incidental by that point, because the music was gone. I was out of gas already,” Seals revealed years later.

Actually, Seals and Crofts continued making music throughout the ’70s, changing their style to match changing tastes. Singles like “I’ll Play For You” (1975), “Get Closer” (1976), “My Fair Share” (1977) and the disco-flavored “You’re the Love” (1978) kept them in the public eye, but the bloom seemed to be off the rose by 1980 when Warners dropped them and they called it quits.

Seals and his family subsequently split their time between their Tennessee home and their coffee farm in Costa Rica, only occasionally reuniting with Crofts for one-off shows, and one album in 2004 (“Traces”). A stroke in 2017 ended Seals’s public appearances.

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Alan White

In 1972, Yes was the biggest progressive rock band in the world. Riding high on the strength of “The Yes Album,” “Fragile” and the then-new opus “Close to the Edge,” the group was about to embark on a major U.S. tour when they found themselves in a serious quandary.

Bill Bruford, Yes’s brilliant drummer from the very beginning, had grown frustrated and impatient with the group’s internal squabbles and drawn-out songwriting/recording process. He decided to take a leap of faith and accept an invitation to become the drummer for prog rock pioneers King Crimson.

Yes needed a capable drummer, and fast. They turned to the most logical choice: Alan White, a prolific London session musician who had just completed a European tour in support of Joe Cocker. White had, in fact, been present during a Yes recording session a few months earlier for the track “Siberian Khatru,” filling in when Bruford had to leave early. White eagerly accepted, spent five intensive days learning the band’s concert setlist, including the dense, 20-minute “Close to the Edge,” and off he went.

Yes in 1973, with Alan White at lower right

White never looked back, holding on to the slot as Yes’s drummer for more than 40 years, through numerous personnel changes and reunions, more than 15 albums and nearly 30 tours.

White died May 26th at age 72 after a brief illness. He had already begged off participating in the upcoming Close to the Edge 50th Anniversary Tour.

As early as age 17, White was getting gigs with London area bands like Griffin and the Alan Price Set, and was called on to be the drummer in numerous studio sessions as well. Seemingly out of nowhere, in September 1969, White was approached by John Lennon to join him, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman for a quickly arranged trip to Toronto to perform as the Plastic Ono Band at a festival there. The appearance was captured and released as a live LP called “Live Peace in Toronto 1969.” Recalled White, “I thought for sure it was one of my mates pranking me, pretending to be Lennon, but it was the real deal. It was all very exciting for me.”

That experience brought about further collaborations between White and Lennon, including the early 1970 session for Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” single, and also some of the tracks for his #1 LP “Imagine” in 1971.

White in 2014

Following the death of bassist Chris Squire, one of Yes’s founders, in 2015, White became the band’s longest reigning member.

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Andy Fletcher

Despite being a founding member of Depeche Mode, one of the most successful and influential electronic music bands of the ’80s, ’90s and beyond, Andy Fletcher is not a widely recognized name, even among fans of rock music. He was not the lead singer or the main songwriter, and even he would have admitted that his instrumental and vocal contributions were relatively inconsequential.

Indeed, in a scene from a 1989 documentary about the band, Fletcher had this to say: “Martin (Gore) is the songwriter, Alan (Wilder) is the good musician, Dave (Gahan) is the vocalist, and I bum around.”

Depeche Mode, L-R: Andy Fletcher, Gahan, Gore, Wilder, circa 1988

Upon the band’s founding in the early ’80s, Fletcher played bass, synth bass and synthesizer, and supervised the use of sampling. By his own design, he took a supportive role in Depeche Mode, sometimes serving as a tiebreaker in group discussions. Fletcher was typically described as the group’s figurehead, playing a mostly managerial role, taking care of the business affairs of this entity that has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. “I’m the tall guy in the background, without whom this international corporation called Depeche Mode would never work.”

Fletcher died on May 26 at age 60. Cause of death has yet to be officially announced.

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It never felt so good, it never felt so right

Posted on by brucehhackett

As the story goes, a Texas woman named Wilma Oday gave birth in 1947 to “nine pounds of ground chuck,” as Wilma’s husband Orvis described the infant’s reddish appearance.

Marvin Lee Aday soon came to be known by his initials “M.L.,” which also stood for Meat Loaf among those who would bully and tease the boy for his large, chubby frame.

That this kid would grow up to become one of the most unlikely rock stars of his generation speaks volumes about how serendipity, perseverance and a phenomenal voice can combine to create one of the best-selling albums in the history of rock and roll.

Meat Loaf died last week at age 74. There’s no official word on the cause of death but it appears to be due to complications from the coronavirus. What a sad ending to a dramatic life.

But I don’t want to dwell on that, because this is a rock music blog, not a medical science forum or political soapbox. Let us focus, if you please, on Meat Loaf’s talents, his accomplishments and his unique story that thrilled many millions of record buyers and concert goers between his dizzying debut LP in 1977 and his passing in 2022.

The man’s name may have been Marvin Aday (which he later changed to Michael), but the entire world knew him as Meat Loaf, which means that, on second reference, I’m supposed to refer to him as Loaf, which seems either awkward or amusing. (The staid New York Times, following its formal newswriting style, would always refer to him as “Mr. Loaf,” which I found hilarious.)

Getting the facts about this guy’s story is a challenge, largely because he relished the opportunity to continually embellish it with fantastic tall tales that contributed to his larger-than-life persona. In most articles published since his death, the authors have conceded that they don’t know for sure which anecdotes are fact and which are fiction.

For example, Meat Loaf himself claimed that when he was 16, he was hit in the head with a 12-pound shot put thrown from 50 feet away, and woke up the next morning with a three-octave voice of great power and nuance. True? It’s never been verified, but it makes great copy. In a 2013 interview, he stated he had survived 18 concussions, eight car crashes and a three-story fall. Any proof of this? Nope.

Here’s another: When his mother passed away in 1966 when Loaf was 19, he insisted that his violent, alcoholic father tried to kill him following her funeral, kicking open Loaf’s bedroom door and coming at him with a butcher knife. “I rolled off the bed just as he put that knife right in my mattress,” he had said. “I fought for my life. Apparently I broke three of his ribs and his nose, and left the house barefoot in gym shorts and a T-shirt.” (Note the use of the word “apparently.” Even Loaf isn’t sure what happened.)

What we do know for certain is that Loaf played tackle on his high school football team but also sang in his high school chorus and appeared in drama productions of “The Music Man” and “Where’s Charley?” His passion for and abilities in the arts led him to Los Angeles in the late ’60s, where he shone in rock and soul bands while also appearing in stage productions. His band Floating Circus warmed up for bands like The Who, The Stooges and the Grateful Dead, and concurrently, he appeared in the L.A. cast of “Hair.” Improbably, this led to a contract with Motown, where he was teamed with Shaun “Stoney” Murphy and, as Stoney and Meatloaf, released one album in 1971 that included a single “What You See is What You Get,” which managed to reach #36 on R&B charts (and #74 on the pop charts).

Meat Loaf in 1971

Overall, though, Loaf found his initial experience in the music business to be unsatisfying. He once said his biggest struggle in life was “not being taken seriously in the music industry. They treated me like a circus clown.”

Consequently, he pursued theater arts again by moving to New York and rejoining the cast of “Hair,” this time on Broadway, and also appeared in several other productions alongside future acting stars like Raul Julia, Mary Beth Hurt and Ron Silver. In 1973, Loaf appeared in an L.A.-based production of Richard O’Brien’s notoriously campy “The Rocky Horror Show,” a chaotic but hugely successful mix of science fiction, B horror movies, transvestism and ’50s rock and roll. When the play was made into the film “Rocky Horror Picture Show” in 1975, Loaf was again cast as the deranged Eddie, a small but important role that led to bit parts in more than 50 movies over several decades. Most were forgettable, but his appearances in “Wayne’s World,” “Black Dog,” “Spice World” and “Fight Club” drew good reviews.

Meat Loaf as Eddie in “Rocky Horror Picture Show” in 1975

In 1973, during his time with “Rocky Horror,” Loaf met eccentric songwriter-producer Jim Steinman, who had been working on developing “Neverland,” a futuristic rock version of the Peter Pan story, for which he had written several lengthy, grandiose songs. Steinman worked with Loaf on the set of the stage show “National Lampoon: Lemmings,” where Loaf served as understudy to John Belushi. Hearing and seeing Loaf sing and perform convinced Steinman that the two should collaborate, and with singer Ellen Foley also involved, they set out to create demos of four of his songs: “Bat Out of Hell,” “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”

Each of these extravagant, theatrical tracks were presented to, and rejected by, dozens of record companies over the next couple of years. They were told the material didn’t fit any “recognized music industry styles,” a typically myopic view that record executives have adopted in almost every decade of the rock era.

Enter Todd Rundgren, songwriter/singer/producer and still one of the true innovators in rock. “They set up in a rehearsal studio, Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf and (singer) Ellen Foley, just the three of them, and they essentially performed most of what turned out to be the first record for me. I saw the whole presentation as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen, a guy who I thought needed to be spoofed. That’s why I decided to get involved. There was a lot of interesting stuff in there.  Steinman kind of wove this sense of humor into the material in a way that Springsteen didn’t.  I was rolling on the floor laughing at how over-the-top and pretentious it was.  I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this album.’”

Rundgren added guitar parts and brought in his bandmates from Utopia, plus Edgar Winter on sax, and even Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, pianist and drummer with The E Street Band. Rundgren brought an intensity and “Wall of Sound” richness to the production, befitting the bombastic nature of the material.

“Bat Out of Hell” wasn’t well received in the US upon its release. Critics found it overly operatic and ostentatious, and radio program directors didn’t quite know what to make of it. Some DJs embraced it from the beginning, like the great Kid Leo on Cleveland’s dominant WMMS-FM, but it was slow to get any sort of national attention. Intense, persistent marketing efforts by Steve Popovich of Epic Record’s Cleveland International label eventually paid off, and once Meat Loaf and company performed on “Saturday Night Live” in March 1978, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, there was praise. As critic Stephen Erlewine put it, “It’s epic, gothic, and silly, and it’s appealing because of all of this. Steinman is a composer without peer, simply because nobody else wants to make mini-epics like this. It may elevate adolescent passion to operatic dimensions, but it’s hard not to marvel at the skill behind this grandly pompous yet irresistible album.”

“Bat Out of Hell” now ranks third on the list of all-time most successful albums, with more than 45 million albums sold. It still sells something like 200,000 units a year.

Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf in 1978

Meat Loaf and his ensemble toured relentlessly as momentum continued to build, which took its toll on the star, who was diagnosed with a chronic heart condition made worse by his frenetic delivery on stage. He was advised to step away from performing for a while, but he eventually resumed recording, with and without Steinman on hand to write songs for him.

Four Meat Loaf LPs in the 1980s — “Dead Ringer” (1981), “Midnight at the Lost and Found” (1983), “Bad Attitude” (1984) and especially “Blind Before I Stop” (1986) — stiffed pretty badly in the US, although they always seemed to find an appreciative audience in Britain. It wasn’t until Loaf and Steinman reunited fully in 1993 and had the audacity to release “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell” that they were able to pull off one of rock’s greatest comebacks. The album matched the first one’s grandiosity, reaching #1 in a dozen countries, and its lead single, “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” also topped the charts around the world.

Loaf’s 1995 follow-up, “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” did respectably, as did the single, “I’d Lie For You (And That’s the Truth).” But by 2006, it was clear he’d gone to the well one time too many. He and Steinman had had a series of legal disputes that delayed production of “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose,” and it showed. Critics pounced, calling it “overblown and frequently ridiculous.” The fact that it’s the only Meat Loaf LP unavailable on Spotify says all you need to know.

Throughout the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, Loaf seesawed between suffering poor-health episodes (heart attack, shattered leg, exhaustion/collapse) and following a physical therapy regimen that permitted periodic returns to touring. You’ve got to give him credit for staying in the game for as long as he did.

Many people, including my wife, regard the original “Bat Out of Hell” album as life-changing, an absolute classic of teenage angst and bravado, and I’m inclined to agree. I’m crazy about the title song, and the funny sex romp of “Paradise” never fails to liven up a party. Without question, it has earned its place in the pantheon of pivotal rock and roll music. Not bad for a guy who Foley once described this way: “Growing up in a bumfuck Texas town, he might have become a serial killer or the guy who shot up the local 7-Eleven. But the first time I saw him, he walked in with this incredible bravado and confidence, like in his mind he was already fully formed. He had this will that allowed him to do what he had to do to survive and exorcise a lot of his demons through music. But there’s a lot of sadness and anger, which is pretty much at the core of what he does.”

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I’ve assembled a Meat Loaf playlist on Spotify that features songs from throughout his career, many of which, admittedly, I didn’t know until I took a deep dive into his catalog over the past seven days. Naturally, my list emphasizes the “Bat Out of Hell” material, but also includes early tracks like his “Rocky Horror” moment, “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul,” and other worthy tracks from his later years.