Tag: Pioneer

Categories
Entertainment

Rusty Younger, Nation-Rock Pioneer, Is Lifeless at 75

Rusty Young, Country-Rock Pioneer, Is Dead at 75

Rusty Young, a founding member of popular country rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock of the late 1960s and 1970s, died Wednesday at his Davisville home. Mo. He was 75 years old.

His publicist Mike Farley said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than half a century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands such as the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was one of the architects of the country rock movement of the late 1960s, which incorporated traditional country instruments into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and dozens of other bands would follow suit.

Formed in 1968, Poco originally included singers and guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay – both formerly Buffalo Springfield, another groundbreaking Los Angeles country rock band – plus Mr. Young, drummer George Grantham and bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)

Poco first got together for a high profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the final track of Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album. “The last time.” The music that Poco made generally used a Twangier production and was more populist-oriented than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated towards experimentalism and obfuscation.

Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin ‘Up the Pieces”, the title track of Poco’s 1969 debut album, served as a letter of intent:

Well there is just a little bit of magic
In country music we sing
So let’s start.
We’ll bring you back home where people are happy
Sittin ‘pickin’ and a-grinnin ‘
You and me
We’ll pick up the pieces, um.

Sharp and lyrical at the same time, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work shaped the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.

“I put color in Richie’s country rock songs, and that was the whole idea of ​​using instruments with a country sound,” Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to the compositions of Mr. Furay.

But Mr. Young, who also played the banjo, dobro, and mandolin, was not averse to musical experiments. “I slipped the envelope onto the steel guitar and played it with a fuzz tone because nobody did that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much like a Hammond B3 organist would, leading some listeners to believe that he was actually playing an organ.

Mr. Young was not one of Poco’s original singers or songwriters. After the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973, he appeared alongside newcomer Paul Cotton as one of the group’s front men. Mr. Young wrote and sang the lead vocals for “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached # 1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Charts in 1979 (and # 17 on the Pop Charts).

He also wrote and sang the lead role on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the 1970s, and orchestrated the reunion of the group’s original members in 1989 for the album “Legacy,” which like the 1978 platinum Legend “, resulted in a pair of top 40 singles.

Norman Russell Young was born on February 23, 1946 in Long Beach, California, the eldest of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country bars where he was fascinated by the steel guitarists as a child.

He grew up in Denver where he started playing lap steel guitar at the age of 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.

After moving to Los Angeles but before joining Poco, he declined an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time included Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly Byrds.

After Mr. Cotton left Poco in 2010 because of a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s only front man. The band made their last album, All Fired Up, in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. In 2017 he released his first solo album “Waitin ‘for the Sun” and performed sporadically with the latest version of Poco until the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020.

Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine Pietrovich; and three grandchildren. His brother Ron died in 2002.

Mr. Young’s rise as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late 1970s after nearly a decade as a supporting instrumentalist was as propitious as it was accidental.

“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained in his 2014 Goldmine interview, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina. “My job was to play the steel guitar and bring the music to it. When my job changed, a lot of opportunities opened up for me. So I liked the way things went. “

Categories
Health

Yehuda Ben-Yishay, Pioneer in Treating Mind Accidents, Dies at 88

Yehuda Ben-Yishay, Pioneer in Treating Brain Injuries, Dies at 88

Yehuda Ben-Yishay was born on February 11, 1933 in Cluj, a city in the Transylvania region in western Romania. His father, Chaim Ben-Yishay, was a businessman; his mother Leah (Finkelstein) Ben-Yishay was a seamstress.

His family survived the Second World War largely unscathed. Although hundreds of thousands of fellow Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands survived, especially in the southern part of Transylvania, where the family had moved just before the war.

The Ben-Yishays were zealous Zionists and in 1946 boarded a converted cattle ship with about 2,000 other Jews heading for Palestine. The British authorities had banned such mass migration and when Yehuda arrived he and his two brothers and sisters were separated from their parents when they were taken to refugee camps.

After Israel gained independence in 1948, Dr. Ben-Yishay in Nahal, part of the Israel Defense Forces that established agricultural settlements. He later attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the hope of studying psychology, but there was no one to teach it: Arab guerrillas had murdered the department head and several colleagues in 1948.

Dr. Ben-Yishay studied sociology instead, graduating in 1957. He received a scholarship to the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and arrived at the end of the year.

To cover his living expenses, he taught Hebrew and worked with retirees, including at a summer camp in Brewster, NY. There he met Myrna Pitterman know. They married in 1960 and had three sons, Ari, Ron and Seth. All survive him along with his brothers Israel and Meir; his sister Pnina; and eight grandchildren.

At the New School, Dr. Ben-Yishay headed by a German emigrant psychologist named Kurt Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein insisted that patients with traumatic injuries could only recover in a “holistic” setting that would take into account not only their physical well-being but also their emotional and spiritual health.

Categories
Entertainment

Malcolm Cecil, Synthesizer Pioneer, Is Lifeless at 84

Malcolm Cecil, Synthesizer Pioneer, Is Dead at 84

Malcolm Cecil, a UK-born bassist with the soul of an engineer who revolutionized electronic music by helping create a giant analog synthesizer that gave a new sound to Stevie Wonder’s albums, died Sunday in a Valhalla hospital, NY. He was 84 years old.

His son Milton said the cause was not yet clear.

Mr Cecil, a talkative man with a curly head, had played double bass in jazz bands in England and was night maintenance engineer at Mediasound Studios in Manhattan in 1968 when he met Robert Margouleff, a film and record producer he owned and owned and operated a moog there -Synthesizer.

“He said, ‘Robert, if you show me how to play the synthesizer, I’ll teach you how to be a top-notch sound engineer,” Margouleff said in a telephone interview.

They started designing and building what would become the Original New Timbral Orchestra or TONTO. Starting with the Moog and adding other synthesizers and a collection of modules, some of which were designed by Mr. Cecil, they created a massive semicircular device that took up a small space and weighed a ton. It could be programmed to produce a variety of original tones and to modify and process the sounds of traditional musical instruments.

While developing it, Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff recorded an album entitled “Zero Time” (1971) under the name of TONTO’s Expanding Head Band.

Timothy Crouse wrote about Zero Time in Rolling Stone: “How to take acid and discover that your mind has the power to stop your heart, the realization that this instrument can do all sorts of things to you now that you have it it has you is troubling. “

The album caught the attention of Mr. Wonder, who had just turned 21 when he appeared on Mediasound over Memorial Day weekend in 1971. Mr. Cecil lived in an apartment above the studio so he could fix anything that could go wrong, day or night.

“I get a ringtone,” Cecil told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. There’s my friend Ronnie and a guy who turns out to be Stevie Wonder in a green pistachio jumpsuit and what my album looks like under his arm. Ronnie says, ‘Hey Malcolm, has someone here who wants to see TONTO.’ “

What began as a demonstration by TONTO for Mr. Wonder turned out to be a weekend-long recording experiment. Seventeen songs were recorded and a collaboration was born.

Over the next three years, TONTO became an important sound element of Mr. Wonder’s music on the 1972 albums “Music of My Mind” and “Talking Book” and their successors “Innervisions” (1973) and First Finale of Fulfillment (1974).

In an interview with the music website Okayplayer in 2019, Mr. Cecil described part of the creative process behind the recording of “Evil”, the final track of “Music of My Mind”.

“When you hear ‘Evil’ it has a fantastic opening that is all TONTO and the sound was classic,” he said. “There was an oboe sound. There was a horn sound and a foreboding bass. “He added,” When Stevie wanted something, he explained what he was hearing in his head and we tried to get it as specific as possible. “

The experience with Mr. Wonder was, said Mr. Margouleff, “very much in the moment; nothing was planned in advance. It was all intuitive and wonderful. “

Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff won the Grammy Award for their development of “Innervisions”, which included the hits “Living in the City” and “Higher Ground”. Mr. Wonder won Grammys that year for Album of the Year and Best Rhythm and Blues Song for “Superstition,” which mixed Mr. Wonder’s drums and clavinet play with a funky TONTO bass sound.

The partnership of Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff with Mr. Wonder ended after four albums.

“We never brought the business part of our relationship with Stevie together,” said Margouleff. “Business problems have made our relationship untenable.”

A year later, Margouleff and Cecil split after technical difficulties during Billy Preston’s live appearance by TONTO on the NBC music show “Midnight Special”.

Malcolm Ian Cecil was born in London on January 9, 1937. His mother, Edna (Aarons) Cecil, was an accordionist who played in bands, including one that was all women, and maintained troops during World War II. His father David was a concert organizer who also worked as a professional clown under the name Windy Blow. They divorced when Malcolm was very young.

Malcolm started playing the piano at the age of 3 and began playing drums a little later. As a teenager he started playing the double bass and was soon playing in jazz clubs. He studied physics at the London Polytechnic for a year before joining the Royal Air Force in 1958. His three years as a radar operator prepared him for future studio work.

After his release he was the house bass player in the nightclub of saxophonist Ronnie Scott in London, where he played with American musicians such as Stan Getz and JJ Johnson. a member of Alexis Korners Blues Incorporated, a band whose evolving line-up included Charlie Watts and Jack Bruce; and the solo bassist of the BBC Radio Orchestra. He also had a shop that set up sound systems and other equipment for musicians.

Mr. Cecil suffered from collapsed lungs and decided he needed a warmer climate. He moved to South Africa where he continued to play bass. But he didn’t like living in the midst of apartheid.

He sailed for San Francisco in 1967 and then went to Los Angeles, where he spent a year as a chief engineer in Pat Boone’s recording studio. He later moved to New York City, where he worked at the Record Plant for six weeks before joining Mediasound as a maintenance engineer.

He admired the Moog Synthesizer IIIc in Mediasound, but only met Mr. Margouleff on his fifth night there. They quickly began recording experimental psychedelic music together, and six months later jazz flautist Herbie Mann signed them to his Embryo label.

The first track they recorded for their album “Zero Time” was “Aurora” which was originally 23 minutes long. “I said, ‘Malcolm, I’m not even sure it’s music,'” Margouleff recalled. They cut its length by two thirds.

Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff made TONTO the most advanced synthesizer in music. It was mostly used in its heyday in the 1970s for recording Richie Havens, the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Quincy Jones, Joan Baez, Little Feat, and others.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Cecil produced several Gil Scott-Heron albums and produced or constructed albums by the Isley Brothers, Ginger Baker, Dave Mason and other artists. He also played bass on Mr. Scott-Heron’s 1994 album “Spirits”. Mr. Margouleff went on to produce the rock band Devo.

TONTO’s Expanding Head Band released another album in 1974, “It’s About Time”. “Tonto Rides Again,” a digitally remastered compilation of the previous two albums, was released in 1996.

“Margouleff and Cecil were about 30 years ahead of their time when they started this project,” wrote Jim Brenholts in a review of “Tonto Rides Again” on AllMusic.

In addition to his son Milton, Mr. Cecil is survived by his wife Poli (Franks) Cecil.

TONTO had several homes in New York City, including Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios; It also spent time in Los Angeles and in a converted barn owned by Mr. Cecil in the Hudson River town of Saugerties, NY

In 2013, TONTO was acquired by the National Music Center in Calgary, Alberta, where it was restored and its effects celebrated in a five-day event in 2018. A Tribe Called Red, a Canadian electronic music duo that TONTO admires and contemplates an influence performed there, and Mr. Cecil gave a demonstration.

One member of the band, Ehren Thomas, compared TONTO to the combination of spaceship and time machine in a long-running British TV series.

“It’s like the Tardis in Doctor Who,” he told the CBC, “because you can’t program it to do anything. You can set up the parameters and ask TONTO to do what you want , but what comes out of it is beyond your control. “

Categories
Health

Greg Steltenpohl, Pioneer in Plant-Based mostly Drinks, Dies at 67

Greg Steltenpohl, Pioneer in Plant-Based Drinks, Dies at 67

“Steve encouraged him to think outside the box and see the moment as an opportunity for innovation and progressive thinking rather than a failure,” said Eli Steltenpohl. “That certainly gave my father the fire he needed to get through.”

Odwalla never fully recovered. With the company on the verge of bankruptcy, its founders had to sell a majority stake in private equity firms.

The Coca-Cola Company acquired Odwalla in 2001 for $ 181 million and closed it last year. In doing so, Coke cited the need for business efficiency and a consumer preference for less sugary beverages, although Steltenpohl told The Times in 2016 that Coke had never maximized the brand’s potential.

“My father didn’t imagine that for Odwalla,” said his son. “But that made the success of Califia all the sweeter.”

In 2010, Mr. Steltenpohl planned to found another juice company, but changed gear when he saw the coming wave of non-dairy milk alternatives made from nuts, coconut, oats and soy. While he was recovering from his liver transplant, the hospital gave him a protein drink; he found it so uncomfortable, he told the Times, that he was inspired to do better and he was soon producing premium almond milk, ready-to-drink coffee and barista blends.

He named the new company after Queen Califia, a character in a 16th century Spanish novel who became the spirit of colonial California. After learning hard lessons from Odwalla, he insisted on strict quality control, less sugar and more nutrition, and an independent ethos. Until 2017, California’s bottled coffee was number 1 in the United States.

Greg Andrew Steltenpohl was born on October 20, 1954 in Homestead, Florida. His mother, Benita (Desjardins) Steltenpohl, was a culinary entrepreneur and cook. His father Jerome was a civil engineer who moved the family to Southern California in the 1950s, where he worked for defense companies. Greg grew up in the San Bernardino area.

Categories
Business

Nancye Radmin, Pioneer of Plus-Dimension Trend, Is Useless at 82

Nancye Radmin, Pioneer of Plus-Size Fashion, Is Dead at 82

Nancye Radmin, a plus-size fashion pioneer who ran an upscale chain of stores for two decades, the Forgotten Woman who served a group of women otherwise overlooked by high fashion, died at her home on December 8th in Lakeland She was 82 years old.

The death was confirmed by her son, Brett Radmin.

For most of her life, Ms. Radmin hovered around a size 8, preferring to wear fine fabrics like cashmere and jacquard. But by her second pregnancy in 1976, she had gained 80 pounds and was 16 years old. When looking for new clothes in her favorite Manhattan stores, she was shocked to find that there were only polyester pants and boxy sweaters her size.

“Fat,” she told Newsweek in 1991, “was the F-word of fashion.”

“There was absolutely nothing stylish available,” she added. “I just knew I wasn’t the only fat woman in New York.”

With $ 10,000 borrowed from her husband, Ms. Radmin wanted to start her own business – a boutique stocked with the kind of high quality clothing she wanted to wear.

In 1977 she opened Forgotten Woman at 888 Lexington Avenue on the fashionable Upper East Side. The name of the store was indicative of their clientele, women who wore sizes larger than most fashion designers – and perhaps a culture they overlooked.

Prices were high: a Searle Persian lamb faux fur coat was $ 595 and a dazzling pink silk Kip Kirkendall gown was $ 1,850.

By 1991, it had 25 stores across the country with annual sales of $ 40 million.

“People forget that the older and taller women usually lead elegant social lives,” she told the New York Times in 1983. “She is the mother of the bride, she goes to formal dinners with her successful husband, and she can remove pearls.” and bright colors that could flood a little woman. “

Plus sizes generally start at size 14, and today the average size of US women’s clothing is between 14 and 16. The plus size market for women was valued at $ 9.8 billion in 2019, according to market research firm Statista.

In the late 1970s, the concept of plus size fashion was an anomaly. Still, Ms. Radmin’s shop spoke directly to the emerging idea of ​​body acceptance, a product of the women’s liberation movement of that decade.

“If you look at the fashion history of taller women, it was either invisible or ghettoized or incredibly grumpy,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, professor of history at the New School in New York, in a telephone interview. “The Forgotten Women as a business for attractive, high-end plus-size clothing at the time was a radically integrative concept from the perspective of fat women who deserved to see themselves as feminine, fashionable people who deserved a shopping spree to make excursion. “

Ms. Radmin reached out to Seventh Avenue makers, many of whom referred to her as “Crazy Nancye”, to have some of her favorite plus size clothes made.

She also urged designers to create more plus size clothing. Some, like Oscar de la Renta, were a little convincing, but even he created evening dresses for their stores, as did Geoffrey Beene, Bob Mackie and Pauline Trigère.

In the Forgotten Women boutiques there was a “Sugar Daddy Bar” where the male companions of the female buyers could have fun. It was filled with basket champagne, tea sandwiches, and miniature muffins. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Roseanne Barr, Nell Carter and Tyne Daly have shopped there. Stores were strategically opened on shopping streets like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to show customers that they were just as authorized to spend money as their skinny counterparts.

“We wanted the customer to feel important and not embarrassed,” said Dane O’Neal, who worked in merchandising for the chain.

Nancye Jo Bullard was born on August 4, 1938 in Nashville to Joe and Jane (Johnson) Bullard. She grew up on her father’s farm in Cochran, Georgia, where he harvested peanuts and cotton. Her mother was a nurse.

Even as a child, Nancye was an entrepreneur, selling peanuts on the street corner to make extra money.

She attended Middle Georgia College (now Middle Georgia State University) but left to travel before graduating. She then worked as a secretary and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.

In 1967 she met Mack Radmin, a widower 23 years older who worked in the kosher meat business. She converted to Judaism for him (she grew up a Southern Baptist) and they married in 1968.

Ms. Radmin often called the early years of their marriage her “Barbie Doll Days” because she weighed 110 pounds, was a size 4, and spent a lot of time shopping and eating in Manhattan.

Mr. Radmin died in 1996. In addition to her son Brett, she survived another son, William Kyle Radmin; two sisters, Michelle Moody and Cheryle Janelli; and four grandchildren.

In 1989 Ms. Radmin sold part of the Forgotten Woman chain to venture capitalists. In 1998 the Forgotten Woman applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The remaining nine stores were closed by the end of the year.

By then, larger department stores had entered the plus-size market and started selling clothes in more sizes.

Frau Radmin didn’t think much of them. “I have no competition,” she told People magazine in 1988. “I only have copycats.”