I grew up with Harry Belafonte and his music – my mom absolutely loved him and loved his music.
Great man, truth teller, trailblazer. I love him in this song with the Muppets.
If you only watch one video, watch this one:
by WaterGirl| 66 Comments
This post is in: Absent Friends, Open Threads
I grew up with Harry Belafonte and his music – my mom absolutely loved him and loved his music.
Great man, truth teller, trailblazer. I love him in this song with the Muppets.
If you only watch one video, watch this one:
I hope you can take a few minutes and read this article, if you haven’t seen it already.
Non Muppet Version of Day-O
Classics – Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
The Midnight Special
Harry Belafonte & Falumi Prince – Turn the World Around (Live)
Turn the World Around with the Muppets (I can’t find the full version, if you find it, add the link in the comments.)
11 Turn the World Around – Harry Belafonte (Jim Henson’s Memorial Service)
Jamaica Farewell
Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye sing Hava Nagila in 1965.
I hope we can all share our memories of Harry Belafonte, going him a proper send-off.
Rest in Peace, Harry.
This post is in: Absent Friends, Excellent Links, Popular Culture
RIP Al Jaffee, MAD Magazine's longest serving contributor, who from 1955 to 2020 contributed many things to the magazine, most notably the iconic Fold-In. https://t.co/ric0AuvnoL
— CN News/Schedules (@CNschedules) April 10, 2023
Last month, in honor of Al Jaffee’s 102nd birthday, New York Magazine shared an unpublished interview from 2009 in which he discussed his life and career at length. I’m sharing it in his memory. https://t.co/9neCAAFppj
— Ryan W. Mead (@rwmead) April 10, 2023
And now I’m regretting that I couldn’t find a space to share this sooner… Very much worth reading the whole thing, especially for the wealth of illos!
… Originally intended as a onetime parody of Playboy’s foldouts, Jaffee’s recurring feature, which appeared in MAD from 1964 until its demise in 2019, became almost as recognized and imitated as Alfred E. Neuman’s gap-toothed grin. Located on the magazine’s inside back cover, it featured a drawing that, when folded vertically and inward, revealed a hidden picture and a surprise joke. But what made the “Fold-in” so brilliant wasn’t merely the concept. Deceptively simple and seemingly innocuous, it was a cache of subversive satire. Judging from some of the references over the years, Jaffee had always trusted the intelligence of his audience, even when they were no more than pre- or just-pubescent kids looking for a quick laugh before bedtime or during math class. How else to explain the very adult punch lines like “Soaring Profits in Medical Prescriptions” or “Hiding the Homeless Problem”? Or the gag in which an American bald eagle transforms into another, perhaps even more popular cultural icon: the Big Mac?
One can easily imagine generations of young humor writers, including notorious MAD fans Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, reading one of Jaffee’s “Fold-in”s for the first time and realizing what could be done with the written word and slight tweaking of an image. After all, Colbert celebrated Jaffee’s 85th birthday on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, in 2006 by creating a “Fold-in” vanilla birthday cake. It included the message: “AL, YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY SHOWN ARTISTRY & CARE OF GREAT CREDIT TO YOUR FIELD. LOVE, STEPHEN COLBERT.” But when the cake’s center was removed, it read, “AL, YOU ARE OLD.”…
For someone who’s spent more than 50 years contributing to such an American comedic institution, you spent a fair amount of your childhood in a country not necessarily known for its humor.
That’s right. I spent six years in Lithuania, from the age of 6 to 12. At that time, most of the Lithuanian Jews lived in ghettos. I lived in one, too, in a town called Zarasai.But you weren’t born in Lithuania?
No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921. But both of my parents were from Lithuania. My mother was very religious, and she wanted to go back to a place where she felt comfortable. She moved back, and brought me and my three brothers with her. This was in 1927.
How did those six years in Lithuania affect your comic sensibility?
My father remained in America through those six years, and I made him promise to send me American comic strips. Every few months or so, my brothers and I would receive a package of rolled-up Sunday color comics and daily comics. We would just sit there and read them for days and days. My brother Harry, who was also artistic, would take these Sunday comic pages, and we’d cut them up and turn them into little books. We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.Most of the comics we received were humorous. Some were adventurous, in the “Little Orphan Annie” mold. There was no TV or radio, so that was pretty much it for us. But I would see humor in everything, even in the religious practices, which didn’t quite register with me…
How prevalent was antisemitism in Lithuania when you lived there?
There was a great deal of antisemitism, which was a source of humor for me — dark humor. I’d sit around with my friends in their houses and listen to the grown-ups talk about the latest prohibition against Jewish commerce, or whatever. They would take it seriously, but they would also ridicule and make fun of it.A lot of the children’s jokes that went around at that time had to do with restrictions against the Jews that were set by the government. Between the restrictions coming from our own religious community and those coming from the antisemitic government, you were caught in such a ridiculous situation. The only thing you could do was laugh at it, make fun of it…
Why did you eventually return to the States?
My father brought us back when Hitler came to power. This was in 1933. My mother chose to remain behind. She said that she would join us later, but she never did. She died around 1939, although I’ve never found out how. There are no records. The Red Cross thought it might have been caused by the local partisans eager to help the Nazis after they invaded Lithuania…What was your first comic-book sale? How old were you?
I was 20. I went to see Will Eisner, who was the creator of a comic strip called “The Spirit,” which was beautifully drawn and very creative. The opening splash pages were all so brilliantly conceived. In the comics field, we all admired this strip tremendously. Will was a genius. He just did beautiful work.I had created a parody of Superman called “Inferior Man,” and I wanted to show it to Will. It seems so naïve now, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time…
To have made a major sale at the age of 20 must have been very exciting. Not to mention a real boost to your career.
It was, certainly. But whenever I read news reports or stories about that time, or I hear people talking about it, one element that’s usually left out is the realistic atmosphere. Our families had either just come out of the Depression or were still in the Depression. No one opened the gate and said, “Depression over!” You had a lot of baggage, and some of that was trying to figure out how to become self-sustaining and not have to rely on your parents. So with the comic-book field, the buzz was, “There’s work.” You can get so much money per page. All you have to do is write and draw cartoons. I was making three times as much as my father was making as a postal worker…In rereading your MAD articles, I found that you predicted, or perhaps even invented, quite a few modern-day products.
I did?I’ll give you a few examples. In a piece you did in March 1967, you drew an illustration of a machine, and wrote, “The Idiot-Proof Typewriter will include memory tapes and store millions of words, phrases, and correct grammatical expressions.” Sounds very similar to the spell-checker on a word processor.
Wow! I don’t remember that…You don’t remember these?
I don’t remember, no. I’ll have to read your book…Have you ever looked at a “Fold-in” you created years ago and actually tricked yourself?
Actually, I have, yes. I’ve looked at some old issues of MAD where I don’t remember what the “Fold-in”’s answer is. I can’t figure it out — which either means I’m a numskull or I’m doing a pretty good job on this thing…
Is Al Jaffee dead?
No, he took up planking at 102.
No, just fold him in.
At his age, who can tell?RIP.
— J. Elvis Weinstein (@JElvisWeinstein) April 10, 2023
Farewell Al Jaffee… pic.twitter.com/2xC5K5Zq6A
— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) April 10, 2023
American cartoonist Al Jaffee has passed away at the age of 102, retired from creating comics at 99 to “take a short break”.
“With a career running from 1942 until 2020, Jaffee holds the Guinness World Record for having the longest-ever career as a comic artist.”
RIP
— Bob M. Guthrie (Laissez-faire account)🇺🇦 (@bobguthrie) April 10, 2023
Al Jaffee: 1921-2023 https://t.co/1QI68gMgOs via @art4mad
— Tom Richmond (@art4mad) April 10, 2023
… Al Jaffee was the greatest cartoonist who ever worked with MAD Magazine, and for me the greatest who ever put pen to paper, period. Sergio is right there for me as well, but Al still takes the prize. No one ever did what he did as brilliantly as he did it for as long as he did it. No one. He was one of a kind.
Al was not the greatest artist that ever worked for MAD. That would probably have to go to Drucker or Davis or Wood. That’s a different animal. He was not the greatest writer that ever worked for MAD either… that title might have to go to Frank Jacobs or Dick DeBartolo or Arnie Kogen or Desmond Devlin or Tom Koch or… again too long a list. He was the greatest “cartoonist” who ever worked for MAD. He combined both writing and art and the highest of levels, and sustained that greatness over the course of MAD’s long run. IMO Al was the undisputed heavyweight champ of MAD. He wrote covers, features, parodies, one page gags, multiple page gags… there was nothing he could not do and do as well or better than anyone else. Many of his “gag” inventions ended up become ACTUAL products or technology. His “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” is a long running and beloved staple of MAD. His “Fold In” is just flat out iconic, and a masterpiece of humor genius that lasted for well over 50 years in print, and he did them for ever single issue from 1964 until 2019.
But MAD was not Al’s whole story. He worked with Stan Lee and Timely Comics before Timely was Marvel doing humor comics featuring his creations Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. He did a syndicated comic strip called “Tall Tales” which was a vertical format strip he designed to fit into vertical spaces and was pantomime so it would appeal to any paper in any language. Al once told me the a story about how his syndication editor insisted he add words to the strip, and when he did they lost two dozen foreign papers that carried it. I think the word Al used to describe that gentleman was “idiot”…
What made this title seem so funny was that overrating Al Jaffee was impossible to do. RIP, and thanks. /jt pic.twitter.com/EfF1gdUSfr
— Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (@CBLDF) April 10, 2023
Farewell, Al Jaffee, Man of A Million MAD CartoonsPost + Comments (55)
This post is in: Absent Friends, Gamer Dork
It is with profound sadness that we at CATAN Studio acknowledge the passing of Klaus Teuber, legendary game designer and creator of the beloved board game CATAN. Our hearts go out to Klaus' family during this incredibly difficult time. pic.twitter.com/gPPIVtleHJ
— CATAN – Official (@settlersofcatan) April 4, 2023
Dan Zak, at the Washington Post — “In a world of Monopoly and Risk, the maker of Catan settled for more” (unpaywalled gift link):
At some point early in the pandemic, I began to dream in hexagons. The hexagons were talismans of order and plenty. One depicted golden sheaves of wheat, another quarried gray ore, another the tufted wool of sheep. The outside world was chaos, collapse and deprivation, but the hexagonal pieces of a board game called Catan imposed a geometric peace on a doomy evening, if only for an hour at a time, with a glass of cab sauv and three covid-bubbled friends.
“I developed games to escape,” Catan’s creator, Klaus Teuber, told the New Yorker in 2014. “This was my own world I created.”…
I grew up in the 1990s, in a house without Nintendo, playing antique products of the Great Depression and the Cold War: Monopoly and Risk, with their 20th-century mandates of greed and confrontation. The exorbitance of Park Place, the alien sound of Kamchatka and Irkutsk — these were backward-feeling games that urged ravenous competition. The board game of my eventual adulthood, my pandemic, was being born around that time, but it would not become globally popular for several years.
In the ’90s, as I was fiendishly fortifying the Americas on a 1959 board of Risk, Teuber, a dental technician from a small village in central Germany, was descending into his basement to escape the doldrums of dentures and to craft a sort of utopia in the form of a board game. It would be a game of graceful simplicity, requiring both competition and cooperation, that would invalidate the zero-sum, total-war ethos of prior parlor pursuits. His invention was born of a childhood rapt by the beauty of an atlas.
“I loved the old, musty-smelling, ragged maps that were rolled out as lessons,” Teuber wrote in his 2021 memoir. “I loved travelling in them in my imagination. Over mountain ranges in brown hues, the green valleys, blue rivers and lakes.” In elementary school, he began making maps of his own. He was fascinated by the Vikings, pictured their arrival in Iceland, envisioned the materials they would’ve needed to build a settlement. Teuber loved geography, then history, then chemistry. You need the essence of all three things, he would say later, to create a good board game.
In his basement he made hexagons of wool, ore, wood, brick and wheat that would make up an otherwise characterless, mystical island (“Catan” had no special meaning, he said). Players would stake out initial territory and use those natural resources to build roads, then settlements, then cities. Catan’s genius is its intrinsic leveling dynamics. On a board of finite resources, it was impossible to succeed without working with your opponents; academics made it a metaphor for nuclear proliferation and then climate change. Dice added luck and chance to a game of strategy and bartering, which kept all players involved even when it wasn’t their turn to roll…
The Settlers of Catan, as it was first called, debuted in Germany in 1995 and the United States in 1996. In Europe it won prizes and filled convention halls. Its success allowed Teuber to quit the dental field in 1998, though he never lost the qualities of a man whose initial tradecraft was small, precise implements for delicate parts of the body. Among hobbyists and gamers he was revered like a rock star, but he looked and acted and sounded like a man who tinkered with stuff in his basement. He didn’t have the swagger (or the command of English) to fully engage with American praise or interrogation. He was, at heart, a hobbyist.
Teuber credited a 2009 story in Wired magazine — headlined “Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre” — for helping to mainstream Catan in the United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a fan. At one point the Green Bay Packers had a Catan obsession. During the first five months of 2020, as covid colonized Earth, sales of Catan climbed 144 percent, according to NPR.
I was one of the buyers. This sounds insane, but it was true in the darker months of 2020 and 2021: A game of Catan was a Brigadoon of cheer in an America gone rotten. Even now, a game of Catan at the end of a workweek — with all its slights, disappointments, imperfections and imbalances — settles a bit of the chaos. Or at least brings a gathering of friends together for more than repetitive gossip. It doesn’t require a cosplay fetish or a familiarity with specific lore. It takes skill, but not mastery; rookie players can win. It urges exuberant competition, not destruction. Players are in a race to accumulate points, and territorial disputes occur, but they are not truly at war…
Neil Genzlinger, for the NYTimes (also a gift link):
… “In the beginning, these games were just for me,” he told Forbes in 2016. “I always have stories in my head — I would read a book, and if I liked it, I wanted to experience it as a game.”
That was the origin of his first big success, a game called Barbarossa, which grew out of his admiration for the “Riddle-Master” trilogy, fantasy books written in the 1970s by Patricia A. McKillip.
“I was sorry to see it come to an end,” he told The New Yorker in 2014, “so I tried to experience this novel in a game.”
In 1988 that game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany, considered the most prestigious award in the board game world, Germany being particularly enthusiastic about board games. He won that award twice more, in 1990 (for Hoity Toity) and in 1991 (for Wacky Wacky West), before scoring his biggest success with what was known in German as Die Siedler von Catan…
Mr. Teuber told Wired in 2009 that creating Catan felt different than his other efforts.
“I felt like I was discovering something rather than inventing it,” he said.
The initial run of 5,000 sold out so quickly, according to Wired, that Mr. Teuber didn’t even have a first-edition version. Within a few years he was able to give up that stressful day job and devote himself to games full time.
Catan has been widely hailed as being challenging yet intuitive — children play it — and has been credited with jump-starting a new era of board games, which moved beyond the staid confines of Scrabble and Monopoly. Instead of sitting idly while other players take their turns, as in Monopoly, Catan invites constant wheeling and dealing.
“The secret of Catan,” Mr. Teuber told Wired, “is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine.”
For Mr. Freeman, that is what elevates it above older games.
“I truly believe Klaus created the greatest board game of all time,” he said. “Both complicated and approachable, it combines skill, luck, strategy and my favorite aspect: the power of persuasion. You can’t talk your way into winning a game of chess, but you certainly can in Catan.”…
Last year, in an interview with Nikkei Asia, Mr. Teuber was asked why he thought Catan was so popular.
“There may have been a good balance between strategy and luck,” he said. “For example, roulette is only about luck, and chess is all about strategies. However, if you win in Catan, you think, ‘My strategy was good,’ and when you lose, you might think, ‘I was just out of luck.’ This is the same as life.”
Ian Bogost, at the Atlantic, grudgingly admits that it wasn’t bad when “We Settled for Catan”:
Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.
And yet, board games are terrible. Candy Land is stupid, Scrabble takes too long, Risk is how you learn your dad is an asshole, and Monopoly—let us not speak of Monopoly. Better, nerdier options have long existed (Diplomacy, Vector, Gettysburg—not to mention chess, go, backgammon), but the same few products dominated American rugs and tabletops for much of the 20th century, and thus defined board-gaming as a mainstream activity…
Why did Catan become so popular? Not because the game is good. Look, Catan is fine, but both connoisseurs and amateurs tend to tolerate it more than love it. That’s the game’s secret: Teuber fell upon a design that every kind of player—geeks, kids, your mother—could stomach playing.
Reading about how a game plays is almost as awful as listening to someone explain how to play it, but here we go: Catan’s board is made up of hex tiles representing different land types (forest, field, pasture, etc.). Each bears a number, and the tiles are laid out differently for each game. On every turn, a player rolls two six-sided dice, and the corresponding land tile gives resources to the players with settlements surrounding it. (Unless a robber token has been placed there; rolling a seven allows the player to move the robber.) The player can then trade resources and build roads, settlements, or cities to expand.
That wasn’t too bad, actually! And it’s one reason Catan took off: It is not horrifyingly oppressive to teach or learn. A round can be played in an hour or two, which helps Catan avoid the common board-game fate of interruption and abandonment. If board games are prisons, then the best ones offer mild sentences.
Board-game aficionados—the kind who would insist I call their passion “tabletop gaming”—tend to find Catan insufficiently strategic. The use of dice gives luck a strong role in victory, and purists prefer to win by reason. But luck also prevents an experienced player from dominating novices, and the dice provide a familiar board-game ritual of rolling to start your turn. Their six-sidedness also distanced Catan from subcultural artifacts, such as Dungeons & Dragons: These are normal dice, the sort used for respectable activities such as Yahtzee and craps.
Catan is a social game, too. Trading resources with other players can mean the difference between winning and losing. It gives players something to do when they’re waiting for their turn, and encourages them to pay attention to what’s happening rather than zone out because, ugh, board game. But unlike, say, Cards Against Humanity or Pictionary, the game’s social dimension is constrained: You’re not expected to be creative or performative, merely to persuade others to swap bricks or wool. That makes Catan less embarrassing for misanthropes like me, and also saves it from the isolation of a game like Scrabble, which is played mostly in your head…
This is Klaus Teuber’s great accomplishment, and I mean that earnestly. One needs a deep supply of both skill and luck to make a game that lots of people love. But creating a game that will be universally indulged is much harder still. Producing something that brings so much modest pleasure is a worthy goal. Too many people want to change the world; too few yearn to roam its pastures.
Rest In Peace, Klaus Teuber, the Original Settler of CatanPost + Comments (25)
This post is in: Open Threads, RIP, Science & Technology
Some lives span an entire transformation, the complete journey from before to after.
Gordon Moore proposed Moore’s law in 1965: that the number of transistors that could be included on a chip would double roughly every two years. That prediction held up for at least half a century, and may have a bit more road to run.
Mr. Moore cofounded Intel, one of the companies that turned his “law” into reality — but now, after a long, lucrative, and ultimately philanthropic life, has himself run out of road.
Moore was one of “the traitorous eight” who abandoned William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor and, later, a leading scientific racism advocate, to form a rival firm to Shockley’s, Fairchild Semiconductor. Then with one other of the eight, Robert Noyce, schismed again to start Intel; the new company soon focused on the creation of what would be called integrated circuits–systems of transistors–on wafers of silicon…a concept that launched, among much else, just about every device that does computation today, including the one on which I write this.
He had a long life–when he died yesterday, he was 94–and a creative one. I never met him, but I know some folks who did, and he seems to have been a good guy at the level of ordinary human interaction. Along the way, he helped transform how humans live in the world. Crucially, in this age of tech-bro political assholery, he doesn’t seem to have seen his wealth as conferring on him the right to tell the rest of how to live in our new circumstances. And he chose fairly early on to dispose of much of his wealth in the service of ends other than a new superyacht.
Moore came into this world in 1929, months before the start of the Great Depression. He was a kid during World War II–the first war that pitted one side’s scientists against the other’s in a a war fought across intellectual and geographic front lines. By the time he died there was almost no corner of the world in which he could not have found traces of his work. Not bad.
RIP Gordon Moore.
The thread is open.
Image: James Seymour, Jumping the gate, before 1752.
This post is in: Popular Culture, RIP
Raquel Welch in the Muppet show still lives rent free in my brain. pic.twitter.com/t18yIOJLJz
— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) February 15, 2023
There’s worse reasons to be remembered. Per the NYTimes, many memorable photos [unpaywalled ‘gift’ link]:
… She was invariably described as a sex symbol, though she never posed nude for the camera in any film or photo shoot, despite the efforts of Playboy magazine and various producers. She had a key role in “Bandolero!” alongside Jimmy Stewart and Dean Martin and went on to play a woman seeking revenge in another western, “Hannie Caulder,” an inspiration for the Quentin Tarantino films “Kill Bill” and “Django Unchained.” After portraying a struggling single mother in the roller derby drama “Kansas City Bomber,” she found a home in the comedic action of a pair of Richard Lester movies, “The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers.”
She moved beyond film sets, developing a nightclub act that played to sold-out crowds in Las Vegas and became the basis for a CBS special, “Really, Raquel.” Through the 1970s, she was a regular on variety shows, singing the same song, “I’m a Woman,” with both Cher on “The Cher Show” and Miss Piggy on “The Muppet Show.”
In 1981, she had a breakthrough when she replaced Lauren Bacall as the star of “Woman of the Year” on Broadway. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow called her a “show stopper,” adding that her performance was “in all respects marked by show-business know-how.” She stayed in the role for two years, her cave woman past a distant memory.
The Hollywood Reporter, fittingly, has a longer and more descriptive obituary.
So sad to hear about Raquel Welch's passing. I loved working with her on Legally Blonde. She was elegant , professional and glamorous beyond belief. Simply stunning. May all her angels carry her home. 🕊️ Sending love to her family and her many fans ❤️ pic.twitter.com/FBtXhpvS25
— Reese Witherspoon (@ReeseW) February 15, 2023
We are saddened to hear about the passing of legendary actress Raquel Welch, who starred as Loana in Ray Harryhausen's 1966 classic 'One Million Years B.C'. An iconic role which spawned one of the most famous movie posters ever. Our thoughts are with her family at this sad time. pic.twitter.com/vQW5tj52mk
— Ray Harryhausen (@Ray_Harryhausen) February 15, 2023
RIP RAQUEL WELCH (1940-2023) 💔
Here she is at her dazzling best in 1975 singing I’M A WOMAN with CHER. pic.twitter.com/v0Nr69EPF8
— James Leighton (@JamesL1927) February 15, 2023
And she got to startle people one last time… news of her death circulated on Twitter as the same time as the Super Bowl victory parade, which meant that #KansasCityBomber (one of her most beloved pictures) appeared in conjunction with #KansasCityChiefs.
This post is in: Absent Friends, Music
At #Sundance, the Indigo Girls remembered mentor David Crosby. "He always had a twinkle in his eye," Emily Saliers said. pic.twitter.com/pXIWmMEXiK
— AP Entertainment (@APEntertainment) January 20, 2023
From a much longer thread:
1. My 1st thought abt David Crosby is to exploit the moment & tell you to check out his last 5 solo albums, starting with "Croz" in 2014; then "Lighthouse" in '16, "Sky Trails" in '17, "Here If You Listen" in '18 and "For Free" in '21.
I think he'd want those hyped. pic.twitter.com/iwCbVRPB2f
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) January 20, 2023
2. Also, everybody needs to see @ajeaton's excellent documentary “Remember My Name” produced by @CameronCrowe.
It’s all of the beauty & chaos of David with blunt honesty & bravura filmmaking. It's be worth watching for the animated sequence where he’s fired from The Byrds. pic.twitter.com/jWZGdju72q
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) January 20, 2023
8. He didn’t sing, but he was so brilliant and hilarious the crowd was enthralled. I begged him to do a spoken word tour.
He was wonderful and went home w/my wife’s vape pen, which she considered a tremendous honor. pic.twitter.com/adIU9RySBA
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) January 20, 2023
My Washington Post subscription allows me to share access to great journalism. Check out this gift article, at no cost to you.
Read here: https://t.co/hwKUronLzN
— mrs.LHS 🇺🇦🍀🌻☮️ (@ABPC84) January 21, 2023
Live long enough, become an artifact of history…
Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane and David Crosby Discuss Woodstock Festival | The Dick Cavett Show
Absent Friends: Last Thoughts on David CrosbyPost + Comments (25)
This post is in: Absent Friends, Music
RIP David Crosby.
You gave me my favourite song of all time. pic.twitter.com/OVUJdl7VYx— Ron Baumann (@DocB__) January 19, 2023
Thing about David Crosby: He always gave the impression that he actually liked women. A rare quality, among ‘rock stars’…
Singer, songwriter and guitarist co-founded The Byrds and supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash https://t.co/06LBm2vaYB
— The Guardian (@guardian) January 19, 2023
… The singer, guitarist and songwriter was part of the original lineup of the Byrds and appeared on their first five albums, including the 1965 hit cover of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man.
He also co-founded the folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash along with fellow musicians Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. They later added Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young to the lineup.
In a statement to Variety, his widow Jan Dance said: “It is with great sadness after a long illness, that our beloved David (Croz) Crosby has passed away. He was lovingly surrounded by his wife and soulmate Jan and son Django…
The son of Oscar-winning cinematography Floyd Crosby, David Crosby pursued a career in music after flunking school in Los Angeles.
Crosby joined the Byrds in 1964, but was dismissed from the band three years later. In 2019 documentary Remember My Name, Byrds member Roger McGuinn described Crosby and his on-stage political rants as “insufferable”, with fellow band member Chris Hillman saying he had a superiority complex.
In 1968, Crosby met Stephen Stills and the pair started jamming together. They were soon joined by Graham Nash to form Crosby, Stills & Nash, selling millions of copies of their first two albums: their self-titled debut in 1969, and – joined by Neil Young – Déjà Vu the following year…
Crosby discovered Joni Mitchell playing in a Florida club in 1967, helping her get a record deal and producing her first album, Song to a Seagull. The pair were romantically involved. He recently described Mitchell as “the best singer-songwriter … I don’t think anybody comes close”.
Crosby’s first solo album came out in 1971, If I Could Only Remember My Name. He released a few more solo records through the 80s and 90s, before a 20-year break and a prolific late-life period, with five coming out since 2014.
His most recent, For Free, was produced and co-written with James Raymond, a son Crosby didn’t know he had until Raymond was 30, after he was given up for adoption by his mother after birth. Raymond had been a musician for 20 years before he discovered who his father was, and tracked him down. The pair also released albums with the Lighthouse Band…
Eight months ago Crosby agreed to be interview by a journalist class at a high school in Colorado. He made headlines after answering a student’s question about whether he would tour again, replying: “No. I’m not, because I’m 80.” He also pointed to his age to explain his recent spate of solo albums: “I’m 80 years old so I’m gonna die fairly soon. That’s how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it’s really good.”
Crosby was famously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice and five albums to which he contributed were included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
RIP DAVID CROSBY ??
Here he is performing one of the most iconic songs of the 60s – TURN! TURN! TURN! – with THE BYRDS in 1965. pic.twitter.com/9VzWDmKbdt
— James Leighton (@JamesL1927) January 20, 2023
Melissa Etheridge remembers David Crosby: "I am grieving the loss of my friend and Bailey’s biological father, David. He gave me the gift of family … His music and legacy will inspire many generations to come. A true treasure." https://t.co/D3geUD5zqD
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) January 19, 2023
Chaos muppets, represent!
RIP David Crosby. This clip reminds us why we love him so much. His experimental techniques have inspired so many musicians, and we honor his life and lasting legacy. pic.twitter.com/NEqnmdxZ7M
— AXS TV (@AXSTV) January 20, 2023
My favorite Crosby, Stills and Nash song is “Southern Cross.” Thanks David Crosby for the beautiful music??. @Uperpeninsula pic.twitter.com/GE4hB7eXPv
— Wynn Westmoreland (@WynnWs) January 19, 2023
Throwback to when David Crosby called Ted Nugent a hack because Nugent complained about not being in the RRHOF: pic.twitter.com/zbvMoAzAOW
— April is not an incubator (@April_Sassy) January 20, 2023
Crosby, Stills & Nash at Woodstock, their very first public performance. David Crosby once said: “Everyone in the world who we thought was cool- Hendrix, Dead, Airplane, Who- was standing at the back of the stage watching us.”
— Michael Ivan Burke (@MikeIvanBurke) January 20, 2023
Fantastic David Crosby cameo on Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" for the Song Around the World video to honor the Dead’s 50th anniversary
RIP Cros 🙏 pic.twitter.com/ySL4Wtrddv
— Wu-Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) January 20, 2023
"I don't like greed, I don't like ignorance. I really don't like anger. But I love love." – @thedavidcrosby
Rest in peace to the brilliant David Crosby. He will be greatly missed. 🕊
📸 Henry Diltz pic.twitter.com/6AXXTT8wcP
— Marianne Faithfull (@Faithfull_M) January 20, 2023
R.I.P. David Crosby, At All the Musical IntersectionsPost + Comments (62)