Tag: 2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Mick Ralphs 6/2025

Mick Ralphs (81) was born March 31, 1944 in Stoke Lacy, a small village in Herefordshire, England. As a kid he was not really too impressed with the music of the time, as it did not possess the rawness he was looking for.
He began playing guitar after being inspired by a song he heard on Radio Luxembourg.

“It was Green Onions by Booker T and the M.G’s,” he later said in an interview. “Up to that point I wasn’t that into music. The music of the day when I was growing up was syrupy pop like Cliff and the Shadows. It was all very white sounding. I listened to Radio Luxembourg and I heard this song that turned out to be Green Onions.
“I loved the nasty guitar of it and the groove. I had never heard anything like it before and that inspired me to want to play guitar like that. It basically got me into blues and soul music and people like Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry. That was the trigger, I heard it and thought, ‘Yes, I like that.’”

Continue reading Mick Ralphs 6/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Lou Christie 6/2025

Lou Christie (82) was born Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco on February 19, 1943, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He won a scholarship to the Moon Area High School, he studied music and voice, served as student conductor of the choir and sang solos at holiday concerts. His teacher, Frank Cummings, wanted him to pursue a career in classical music, but Sacco wanted to cut a record to get on American Bandstand. At age 15 he met and befriended Twyla Herbert, a classically trained musician 20 years his senior, who became his regular songwriting partner and wrote hundreds of songs with him over the next 40 years until her death in 2009.  In 1962 they penned “The Gypsy Cried,” which he recorded on a two-track recorder in his garage. The single became a local phenomenon, and was eventually licensed for national release by the Roulette label, peaking at number 24 on the pop charts in 1963.

“I never worked with anyone else who was that talented, that original, that exciting,” Christie told Goldmine magazine in 2005. “She was just bizarre, and I was twice as bizarre as her.”

Still as Sacco he performed with several vocal groups and between 1959 and 1962 released several records on small Pittsburgh labels, achieving a local hit with “The Jury” by Lugee & The Lions (a group consisting of Sacco, Twyla Herbert’s daughter Shirley, and two others) released on the Robbee label. After graduating from high school in 1961, Sacco relocated to New York City and worked as a session vocalist.

Continue reading Lou Christie 6/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Brian Wilson 6/2025

Brian Wilson (82) – The Beach Boys – was born June 20, 1942 in Inglewood, California, the first child of pianist Audree Korthof and Murry Wilson, a machinist who later pursued songwriting part-time. Wilson, along with his siblings, suffered psychological and sporadic physical maltreatment from their father. His 2016 memoir characterizes his father as “violent” and “cruel”; however, it also suggests that certain narratives about the mistreatment had been overstated or unfounded.

From an early age, Wilson exhibited an aptitude for learning by ear. His father remembered how, after hearing only a few verses of “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along“, young Wilson was able to reproduce its melody. His father Murry was a driving force in cultivating his children’s musical talents. Wilson undertook six weeks of accordion lessons, and by ages seven and eight, he performed choir solos at church. His choir director declared him to have perfect pitch. One of Wilson’s first forays into songwriting, penned when he was nine, was a reinterpretation of the lyrics to Stephen Foster‘s “Oh! Susannah“.

At age 12, his family acquired an upright piano, and he began teaching himself to play piano by spending hours mastering his favorite songs. He learned how to write manuscript music through a friend of his father. Wilson sang with peers at school functions, as well as with family and friends at home, and guided his two brothers in learning harmony parts, which they would rehearse together. He also played piano obsessively after school, deconstructing the harmonies of the Four Freshmen by listening to short segments of their songs on a phonograph, then working to recreate the blended sounds note by note on the keyboard.

I got so into The Four Freshmen. I could identify with Bob Flanigan‘s high voice. He taught me how to sing high. I worked for a year on The Four Freshmen with my hi-fi set. I eventually learned every song they did.

Continue reading Brian Wilson 6/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Sly Stone 6/2025

Sly Stone (82) – Sly and the Family Stone – was born Sylvester Stewart on March 15, 1943 in Denton, Texas, before the family’s move to Vallejo, California, in the North Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. He was the second of five children born to K.C. and Alpha Stewart, a deeply religious middle class couple, raising their children on music. Sylvester was identified as a musical prodigy. By the time he was seven, he had already become proficient on the keyboards, and by the age of eleven, he had mastered the guitar, bass, and drums as well.

As a teenager he had settled essentially on the guitar and joined a number of high school bands. One of these was the Viscaynes, a doo-wop group in which Sylvester and his friend Frank Arellano—who was Filipino—were the only non-white members. The fact that the group was integrated made the Viscaynes “hip” in the eyes of their audiences, and would later inspire Sylvester’s idea of the multicultural Family Stone. The Viscaynes released a few local singles, including “Yellow Moon” and “Stop What You’re Doing”; during the same period, Sylvester also recorded a few solo singles under the name Danny Stewart. With his brother, Fred, he formed several short-lived groups, like the Stewart Bros. After high school Stone studied music at the Vallejo campus of Solano Community College.

Continue reading Sly Stone 6/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Rick Derringer – 5/2025

Rick Derringer (77) was born Richard Dean Zehringer in Fort Recovery, Ohio on August 5, 1947. Aside from his parents’ extensive record collection, his first major music influence was his uncle, Jim Thornburg, a popular guitarist and singer in Ohio.

Derringer recalled first hearing him play guitar in the kitchen of his parents’ home and knowing immediately that he wanted to learn the instrument. He was eight years old at the time, and his parents gave him his first electric guitar for his ninth birthday. Soon after, he and his brother Randy began playing local gigs with his uncle, a country musician, before he was in high school.

After eighth grade, the family moved to Union City, Indiana, where Derringer formed a band he initially called the McCoys. He later renamed it the Rick Z Combo and then Rick and the Raiders before reverting to the original name.

In the summer of 1965, before Derringer turned 18, the McCoys were hired to back up a New York-based band called the Strangeloves in concert. The Strangeloves, who were also record producers from New York City with a major hit song “I Want Candy”, were looking for a band to record the song “My Girl Sloopy”, originally released by the Vibrations the previous year, and chose the McCoys. Derringer later persuaded the producers to change the title to “Hang On Sloopy”. After the Strangeloves recorded the guitar and instrumental parts, Derringer and the McCoys were brought into the studio to sing on the recording, which was then released under their name. The song reached number one on the Hot 100 when Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” fell from number one to number two and The Beatles’ “Yesterday” shot from number forty-five to number three.

Continue reading Rick Derringer – 5/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Roberta Flack 2/2025

Roberta Flack (88) was born on February 10, 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a jazz pianist and U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene Flack a cook and church organist. According to DNA analysis, Flack was of Cameroonian descent. Her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.

Her first musical experiences were in church. She grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals. She occasionally sings at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington.  From time to time, she caught gospel stars like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke performing there. Her father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother’s lap and Flack took formal lessons in playing the piano when she was nine. She gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata.
Continue reading Roberta Flack 2/2025

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Marianne Faithfull 1/2025

Marianne Faithfull (78) 1/2025 was born 29 December 1946 in Hemstead, London. Just to sketch her aristocracy come down it should be noted that

Faithfull was born at the old Queen Mary’s Maternity House in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London University. Her mother, Eva, was the daughter of Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1875–1953), an Austro-Hungarian nobleman of old Polonized Catholic Ruthenian nobility. Eva was born in Budapest and moved to Vienna in 1918; she chose to style herself as Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso in adulthood. She had been a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Continue reading Marianne Faithfull 1/2025