Vic Mizzy, a songwriter who was probably best known for penning the themes to ’60s sitcoms The Addams Family and Green Acres, passed away Saturday at his home in Bel Air, Calif. Mizzy, a Brooklyn native, rose up through the vaudeville circuit, eventually writing standards for the likes of Doris Day and Dean Martin. He provided lead vocals for the theme to The Addams Family, and gave the show’s principals direction on just how to snap their fingers while feigning boredom. In the ’60s, he composed music for a slew of movies starring Don Knotts; ater in his career, Sam Raimi asked him to contribute music for the DVD release of Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. A few of Mizzy’s compositions (as performed by Day and They Might Be Giants, among others) after the jump. MORE »
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Obituaries
Vic Mizzy, R.I.P.
Obituaries
Captain Lou Albano, R.I.P.
Captain Lou Albano, the wrestling star who brought the World Wrestling Federation and the music industry together with his creation of the Rock N’ Wrestling Connection in the 1980s, passed away today after a long illness. Albano’s connection to the music industry began in 1983, when he appeared as Cyndi Lauper’s father in her breakthrough video for “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”; that partnership led to her appearance at a slew of WWF-related events, including the inaugural installment of WrestleMania, not to mention the first of what would go on to be quite a few entanglements between the WWF and the then-fledgling MTV. Albano also recorded an album with and “managed” the crit-cult favorites NRBQ. A few of his musical cameos, after the jump. MORE »
Obituaries
Stephen Gately, R.I.P.
Stephen Gately, one of the two lead singers of the Irish pop group Boyzone and the first member of a “boy band” to come out of the closet when he did so in 1999, passed away over the weekend while on holiday in Spain. Boyzone had six No. 1 singles in the UK since its inception in 1993; the group broke up in 2000, and reunited in 2007 for a tour and a greatest-hits album that included a few new tracks. MORE »
Obituaries
Patrick Swayze, R.I.P.
His fame stretched way beyond the pop-star realm, but let’s not forget that the late Patrick Swayze’s star turn in the 1987 Catskills romance Dirty Dancing also spawned the No. 3 hit “She’s Like The Wind,” a velvety, saxophone-enhanced ballad that, thanks to its superglossy ’80s sound, was something of an outlier on the movie’s oldies-heavy soundtrack. (It later inspired covers by the likes of Lumidee and Girls Aloud.) Swayze’s filmic links to pop music both on and off the charts didn’t end with Dirty Dancing—the use of the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” in his 1990 film Ghost resulted in two versions of the track being on the Hot 100 at the same time, while the 1989 flick Road House inspired its own musical adaptation. Swayze was 57. [NYDN / YouTube] MORE »
Obituaries
Ellie Greenwich, R.I.P.
Ellie Greenwich, a prolific songwriter who co-wrote some of the most iconic pop songs of the ’60s (if you just look at the “A to E” portion of her writing credits, you’ll hit on “Be My Baby” (above), “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” and “(And) Then He Kissed Me”), has passed away. MORE »
Obituaries
Michael Viner, R.I.P.
Michael Viner, the record producer and audiobooks impresario who produced the Incredible Bongo Band’s seminal 1973 track “Apache,” passed away on Saturday in Los Angeles. “Apache” scholar (and friend of Idolator) Michaelangelo Matos wrote a pretty comprehensive obituary of Viner over at Rolling Stone, so do click over and read that while you listen to the track, embedded above. Viner was 65. [RS / YouTube] MORE »
Obituaries
Les Paul, R.I.P.
Guitarist and inventor Les Paul passed away today at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y., after a bout of severe pneumonia. Paul’s name is synonymous with one of the most well-known and beloved models of electric guitar in the world, and he was a pioneer in the art of multi-track recording; the official site of Gibson Guitars has an exhaustive look at the Wisconsin native and his legacy—from his earliest experiments with studio wizardry to his collaborations with his eventual wife Mary Ford to his residency at the New York jazz club Iridium—and it’s well worth reading, if only to realize just how much of current popular music would look very different without Paul’s input and innovation. A few clips from his career after the jump. MORE »
Obituaries
Alexis Cohen, R.I.P.
Alexis Cohen, the tart-tongued American Idol contestant whose colorful language and confrontational nature gave her some early-episode cult-figure status during the show’s last two seasons, passed away after being struck by a car in New Jersey early Saturday morning. MORE »
Obituaries
Steven Wells, R.I.P.
Steven Wells, the frequently profane, always opinionated writer who contributed to the likes of the NME, the Philadelphia Weekly, the Guardian (among many others), passed away earlier this week after a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. NME scribe James McMahon penned an obit worthy of the man known as “Swells” and the mag that includes a few selections from his archives; Wells himself filed an obituary of sorts to the Weekly shortly before his passing. Wells was 49. [NME] MORE »
Obituaries
Michael Jackson, R.I.P.
Michael Jackson’s death at age 50 this afternoon came as a shock, despite his obviously frail condition and the constant rumors that his health was even worse than it seemed. “I’ve never known a world without Michael Jackson,” a socially networked friend of mine managed to get out through those sites’ seeming paralysis over the news, and I could say the same thing. It’s very tempting to say that Jackson was something of a mirror of the past 40-ish years of popular culture, from his family’s band’s beloved singles in the ’60s and ’70s to his boundary-breaking solo career that followed to the celebrity-spectre existence, which started off as funny stories about chimps and hyperbaric chambers before snowballing into scurrilous details about lawsuits and breathless tabloid reports, that threatened to define his final days. Jackson’s voice was a technical marvel that caused the admittedly stellar material he often had to work with to soar, to become indelible in the minds of pop fans all around the world, to inspire them to sing along.
MTV is actually breaking from its all-self-degradation-all-the-time playlist to show videos from Jackson’s body of work, and what with him being an artist who helped define the earliest parts of the music-video era–he did, remember, represent the breaking down of the color barrier on the formerly AOR-heavy channel thanks to the power of the sinuous “Billie Jean”–I think it’s more than fitting for us to do the same. This is hardly all of his body of work–every time I think I’m about to hit “publish,” I think of another video to add. Feel free to fill in any gaps in the comment section. MORE »
