Comedy world mourns sitcom star Sugden
By Paula Fentiman, Press Association
Thursday, 2 July 2009
2009 07 02 14:19:52
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Bo Diddley: Pioneer of rock'n'roll
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
When The Beatles first arrived in the United States in 1964, John Lennon was asked by a reporter what he was most looking forward to seeing in America. "Bo Diddley," he replied.
Indeed, when the legendary American disc jockey Alan Freed coined the phrase "rocknroll", Bo Diddley was the first musician he considered to be an exponent of the style. In 1955, playing the musicians first single for Chess Records in Chicago, the eponymous "Bo Diddley", Freed declared, "Heres a man with an original sound, an original beat thats gonna rocknroll you right out of your seat."
In years to come, Diddley would feel his position as "The Originator", a sobriquet he wore proudly, had been usurped by Elvis Presley. "Im sick of everybody talking about Elvis," he would complain. "It was me and Chuck Berry that started rocknroll." He claimed that he had also suffered financially, insisting he had never received royalties for his early hit recordings; broke in the early 1970s, he sold off his music publishing rights, when he even supplemented his income by taking a job as a deputy sheriff in New Mexico.
Yet his characteristic bomp, bomp, bomp, bomp-bomp "Bo Diddley beat" has been one of the defining mainstays of contemporary music: there are some 1,800 recordings of songs originally played by Diddley, including covers as well as lifts by such illustrious figures as The Rolling Stones (their cover of Buddy Hollys "Not Fade Away"), The Who ("Magic Bus") and U2 ("Desire").
The "Bo Diddley beat", essentially a bump-and-grind shuffle, has its origins in a West African drum rhythm, filtered through the experiences of slaves transported to the American South. Forbidden to possess traditional drums, slaves would pat out rhythms on their bodies. When children built their own single-string guitars, on which they would play such beats, the instruments were known as "diddley bows". Although there are many variants on the origin of the performing name of Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel, this is probably the most accurate.
Born in McComb, Mississippi at the end of 1928, he never knew his father, Eugene Bates, and was raised by Gussie McDaniel, a cousin of his 15-year-old mother, who legally gave him her surname. Like many southern black families, they fled the harshness of the Depression-era rural South, relocating to Chicago in 1934. When, at the age of eight, the boy was inspired to ask for violin lessons, his local church bought him an instrument and paid for his tuition. But he switched to the guitar after breaking a finger. A spell as an amateur boxer thickened his hands and fingers, until they became "meat hooks", he said.
This was reflected in his unique playing style; he approached the guitar as if it were a drum-kit, pushing the sound onwards, rapidly flicking his pick across the guitar strings. "I play drum licks on the guitar," he said; indeed his hand-built, square-shaped guitars looked like percussive instruments, and he would supplement the sound through his skill with electronic trickery. Adding a Latino feel to his music, which sounded partially like black rockabilly, with the addition of maracas constructed from lavatory ballcocks, added a further rhythm, which was supplemented by his sometimes staccato vocals; John Lee Hooker was his original vocal inspiration, although the singing cowboy Gene Autry was another. While still at high school, Ellas McDaniel started his first group, The Hipsters, a trio, renamed later the Langley Avenue Jive Cats.
But his groups line-up was finalised when he brought in his neighbour Jerome Green to play the maracas and a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold. Playing regularly at rough, down-at-heel venues on Chicagos South Side, the trio built a strong audience.
Cutting a demo recording of two of his own songs, "Uncle John" and "Im a Man", in 1955, McDaniel was turned down by two local companies. But when he approached Chess Records, the label that already was releasing tunes by the likes of Chuck Berry, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters and Etta James, Leonard and Phil Chess immediately realised this was a new sound. At their request the "Uncle John" tune was re-written and recorded on 2 March as "Bo Diddley"; Ellas McDaniel simultaneously became that character. (Such self-referencing became a theme of his career; he recorded more than 40 songs in which his name formed part of the title: "Bos a Lumberjack", "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger", "Bo Diddley is a Lover" and "Bo Meets the Monster", for example.)
Almost immediately, "Bo Diddley/Im a Man" started to sell, both sides getting airplay. By the beginning of May 1955, the two separate songs were numbers one and two on the Billboard RnB and jukebox charts, assisted by the championing of Alan Freed, the beginning of a long run of hits such as "Diddley Daddy", "Mona", "Who Do You Love?", "You Cant Judge a Book by the Cover", "You Dont Love Me" and "Road Runner". However, only "You Pretty Thing" (1958) and "Say Man" (1959) crossed over into the US pop charts.
Meanwhile, Muddy Waters had a hit with "Mannish Boy", an adaptation of "Im a Man". Diddley also co-wrote "Love Is Strange", a hit in 1957 for Mickey & Sylvia, and for the Everly Brothers in 1965. Bo Diddley, one of the quintessential rocknroll albums, was released in 1957.
Diddleys success, however, meant that he frequently fell foul of Americas bitter racial divisions. When he appeared in 1955 on Ed Sullivans celebrated television show, he was asked to sing a cover of Tennessee Ernie Fords "Sixteen Tons" in preference to "Bo Diddley". Performing live, he instead plunged straight into his own song. Afterwards Sullivan snarled, "Youre the first black boy that ever double-crossed me," and Diddley had to be pulled back from punching him. Sullivan declared he would see to it that Diddley never again worked in television: it was another 10 years before he was seen on networked American TV. Had Sullivan sensed something subversive within Diddleys work? If he had, he would have been correct. "They are often explicitly signifying records which involve putting over a joke on someone who doesnt understand the nuances of African-American thought and speech," said the US music critic Joe Levy. "It makes fun of white people without them realising it."
Four years after that Ed Sullivan Show, Diddley and his black group encountered an even more egregious example of racism. After they swam in the pool at Las Vegass Showboat Casino, an attendant closed it to replace the water.
Overseas, however, especially in Britain, Bo Diddley was lionised. He became an icon of the burgeoning blues scene, notably influencing the Rolling Stones, who covered both "Mona" and "Im Alright"; the Crawdaddy, the club in Richmond, Surrey, at which both the Stones and the Yardbirds had residencies, took its name from the Diddley song "Doing the Craw-Daddy", whilst the Pretty Things also were named after a Diddley song. The Animals paid tribute with their tune "The Story of Bo Diddley"; and the comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore even had a skit about "Bo Dudley", a tale of a Harlem blues singer.
Continuing to work within his own style, Diddleys popularity dwindled in the second half of the 1960s, as album rock took over the market. In 1967, attempting to catch this boat, he recorded the Super Blues and Super Super Blues Band LPs with Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf and Little Walter. Even though in 1972 John Lennon and Yoko Ono had produced the Elephants Memory track "Chuck & Bo", a tribute song to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, the previous year Diddley had been obliged to take that deputy sheriff post in Los Lunas, New Mexico.
The 1970s were difficult years for him, yet Bo Diddley continued to tour. Whilst gigging in Australia in 1978 he was asked to support the Clash on their first American tour. Although the English punk group were surprised he at first refused to play his classic songs ? his explanation was that he no longer owned the copyright on them ? they were even more startled when, on the tour bus, he would place Lucille, his guitar, in his bunk and sleep sitting upright.
By 1985, however, Diddley was performing with George Thorogood at the Philadelphia Live Aid concert. Two years after that, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the same year toured with the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood.
In 1997 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, being given a similar accolade at the 1999 Grammy Awards ceremony. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fames 20th induction ceremony in 2005, Bo Diddley performed his own signature tune with Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson.
Although suffering from diabetes, Bo Diddley continued for many years to perform regularly, rising every day at 4am to write new material.
Chris Salewicz
Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel (Bo Diddley), musician and songwriter: born McComb, Mississippi 30 December 1928; four times married (five children, one stepson); died Archer, Florida 2 June 2008.
2008 06 03 10:10:39
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POSTED IN: OBITUARY
Robert Rauschenberg, champion of junk art, dies aged 82
Robert Rauschenberg, the most versatile, inventive and iconoclastic American artist of the past 50 years, who would use anything from canvas to a stuffed goat or household junk for his creations, has died in Florida after a long illness, his gallery representative said. He was 82.
Rauschenberg first embraced painting when he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1940s and later in Paris. But to call him a painter was an understatement. In his own words, he sought to operate "in the gap between art and life".
He painted, true ? but he was also a sculptor, set designer and choreographer, working in whatever medium and on almost whatever object that came to hand.
Born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg originally wanted to become a minister ? but gave it up because his church banned dancing. "I was considered slow," he once said. "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins."
But he soon discovered a talent for drawing and composition. By the mid-1950s he had created the "Combines" style that became the template for his career. It blended painting, sculpture and almost anything else that captured Rauschenbergs imagination. He would use car tyres, shirts, light bulbs ? whatever came to hand ? in the process, blurring the line between everyday life and art as few other artists of his era did.
Among his best-known works are Bed in 1955, that used his own pillow and bedspread wrapped around a wooden support, and Monogram in 1959, consisting of a stuffed Angora goat with a tyre around its mid-section and paint blobbed on its nose.
Early on, he made little public headway ? mainly because few had the slightest idea what he was up to. But over the years, he became one of the countrys best known and most influential artists, who never shrank from a challenge to arts established order.
In the 1960s, he began silk-screen paintings and then embarked on a period of more collaborative projects. In terms of art history, Rauschenberg was a leader of the reaction to abstract expressionism, according to an official biography at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In 1997, the museum put on a retrospective of his work (including a collage painting a quarter-of-a-mile long).
Recognition extended further afield in 1964, when he became the first American artist to win top prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Two decades later, Rauschenberg underlined his versatility by winning a Grammy Award for best album package, for Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads.
In his book American Visions, the art critic Robert Hughes said Rauschenberg was a "protean genius" with a "richness of temperament" who showed Americans that every aspect of life was open to art. He "didnt give a fig for consistency", nor was he concerned about his reputation. "His taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss," wrote Mr Hughes.
2008 05 14 18:56:14
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Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102
PARIS ? Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann?s 1979 book ?LSD: My Problem Child.?
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.
He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug?s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity?s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.
Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.
He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. ?It was a real paradise up there,? he said in an interview in 2006. ?We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.?
It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.
?It happened on a May morning ? I have forgotten the year ? but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,? he wrote in ?LSD: My Problem Child.? ?As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.
?It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.?
Though Dr. Hofmann?s father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. ?I said that I didn?t believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world,? he said. ?I had this very deep connection with nature.?
Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.
It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.
On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as ?bicycle day.?
Dr. Hofmann?s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.
?Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom,? Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. ?I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.?
Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind?s place in nature and help curb society?s ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.
But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.
After his discovery of LSD?s properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.
During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.
Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books
He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD ?medicine for the soul,? by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
?I know LSD; I don?t need to take it anymore,? he said, adding. ?Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.?
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, ?I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that?s all.?
2008 05 02 21:01:57
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