tagged w/ Drummers
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CNN...
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Levon Helm, co-founder of The Band, dead at 71
By Todd Leopold, CNN
updated 4:07 PM EDT, Thu April 19, 2012
PHOTO:
Drummer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Levon Helm, of The Band, pictured in Woodstock, New York, circa 1968.
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Helm, the drummer, multi-instrumentalist and singer for The Band, is dead at 71
He had been suffering from throat cancer
Helm is best known for providing the vocals to The Band's rock 'n' roll standards
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(CNN) -- Levon Helm, the drummer, multi-instrumentalist and singer for The Band who kept the band's heart for more than three decades, died "peacefully" Thursday afternoon, according to his record label, Vanguard Records. He was 71.
"He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul," the record label's statement said.
Helm had a voice unlike any other in rock music: definitively Southern, soulful and gritty, an oak-barreled whiskey that sometimes went down with a fiery kick.
He could be mournful, calling up ghosts, as he did in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and the half-chanted chorus of "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)."
He could be playful, as he was in "Ophelia" and "The Weight," where in the latter he lunges into the "Take a load off, Annie" chorus with joyful abandon.
And he could belt in sheer pleasure, galloping through "The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show" or simply lending his unique harmonies to "The Shape I'm In" and "This Wheel's on Fire."
It was an American voice.
Helm had been suffering from throat cancer. Despite reducing his voice to a rasp in recent years, it had not robbed him of his spirit.
At his home in Woodstock, New York, he regularly hosted the Midnight Ramble, weekly concerts that attracted sell-out crowds and all-star support from the likes of Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen. In the past decade, he recorded two albums, 2007's "Dirt Farmer" and 2009's "Electric Dirt," that won Grammys. And he occasionally took the show on the road, making appearances at Tennessee's Bonnaroo, the Newport Folk Festival and Los Angeles' Greek Theater.
But Helm is best known for providing the vocals to such rock 'n' roll standards as "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," the latter a tale of a Confederate veteran sizing up his wasted land. That song was credited to The Band's primary songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who has said he was inspired by tales of the South from Helm and others.
Certainly, there was never a doubt who would sing it: the Arkansas-born, Southern-mythologizing Helm. "I aimed it right at him, I wrote it for him, he gets to say it all," Robertson told Rolling Stone in 1969.
Levon Helm was born Mark Lavon Helm in Elaine, Arkansas, on May 26, 1940, the son of a cotton farmer. He told CNN that he was inspired by "the old traveling medicine tent shows" that would travel the South.
"They had comedians and wine and music. Always a lot of music," he said in 2010.
After high school, he joined Ronnie Hawkins' band, the Hawks. When the Hawks moved to Canada in the early '60s, Hawkins and Helm recruited several local musicians, including Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and finally Garth Hudson. Hawkins left the band in 1963, and the group renamed itself Levon and the Hawks.
The next year the group met Bob Dylan, beginning one of rock's great partnerships. The group, already known for its blazing live performances, ended up accompanying him on his famous 1965-66 tours -- though Helm left by the end of 1965, upset at the vicious reaction the newly electric Dylan was getting from audiences.
Helm rejoined the Hawks in 1967, playing on what became known as Dylan's "Basement Tapes." The group also wrote and recorded its own songs in the same place, a house called "Big Pink" in West Saugerties, New York.
Renamed The Band, the group put out its debut album, "Music from Big Pink," in 1968, to rapturous reviews. "Six months are left in this proselytizing year of music ... but I have chosen my album for 1968. 'Music from Big Pink' is an event and should be treated as one," wrote Al Kooper in his Rolling Stone review of the LP.
The music was something new in American rock: both ancient and modern, rooted in the past and eschewing the psychedelic sounds then in vogue. The group, too, looked like something just emerged from a 19th-century daguerreotype.
And Dylan did the cover and wrote or co-wrote three of the songs.
The next album, 1969's "The Band," earned them the January 12, 1970, cover of Time magazine, headlined "The New Sound of Country Rock." The magazine's artwork features a menacing-looking Helm, bearded and hatted, looking every bit the American prophet he sometimes sounded.
The group was, and remains, hugely influential; the whole alt-country movement can trace at least some of its roots to The Band. (Patterson Hood, the leader of the Drive-By Truckers, named one of his earlier groups "Virgil Kane" after the protagonist of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.") Elton John and Bernie Taupin were huge fans, and their song "Levon" drew its character's name from Helm.
The Band put out several more albums, including "Stage Fright," "Cahoots" and "Moondog Matinee," but touring and internal dissension took their toll. In 1976, the group decided to bow out with an all-star concert, "The Last Waltz," filmed by Martin Scorsese and considered one of the great music concert documentaries.
The tensions of the band were obvious on screen, and Helm in particular didn't hide his anger. In his 1993 autobiography, he talked about his disgust, as Greg Kot observed in a 2002 article on the film's anniversary.
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Levon Helm, co-founder of The Band, dead at 71
By Todd Leopold, CNN... more
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Los Angeles Times...
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Tom Ardolino dies at 56; former NRBQ drummer
Tom Ardolino was a teenage amateur drummer when tapped by NRBQ. He spent the next few decades providing nimble, propulsive backbeats for the category-defying band.
PHOTO:
NRBQ is shown in 1990. Clockwise from left are Joey Spampinato, Tom Ardolino, Terry Adams and Al Anderson. (Waring Abbott)
By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
January 11, 2012
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Members of the category-defying band NRBQ knew from the outset that their prospects of mainstream success were slim to none.
With a sound and attitude that embraced the seminal rock of Chuck Berry and no-borders expanse of free-form jazz experimentalist Sun Ra, the invigorating dance rhythms of zydeco kingpin Boozoo Chavis and dreamy multilayered pop of Brian Wilson, the quartet spent the '70s, '80s and '90s recording and touring chiefly for the reward of accolades from fellow musicians including Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Elvis Costello and Bonnie Raitt, as well as from a coterie of devoted fans scattered across the planet.
The group's anything-goes-and-usually-does approach was what first caught the ear of 15-year-old drummer Tom Ardolino, who sent a fan letter to keyboardist Terry Adams after catching one of the group's shows in Springfield, Mass. In 1974, Adams invited him to join the group when drummer Tom Staley quit.
Ardolino spent the next few decades providing nimble, propulsive backbeats for bandmates Adams, guitarist Al Anderson and bassist Joey Spampinato until health issues forced him to quit touring. Those problems contributed to his death Friday at age 56 from alcoholism-related illness.
"Tommy deserves an entire wing in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," Raitt told the Boston Globe last year. "There's [Rolling Stones drummer] Charlie Watts, and there's Tom Ardolino. That's it."
During NRBQ's relentless touring schedule — they often logged 250 shows a year — Ardolino projected the image of the world's happiest bus driver. Under a mass of long, black curly hair and peering out from behind a grizzly beard and mustache, Ardolino bounced atop the stool of his drum kit as he pounded out sultry shuffles, effervescent swing beats, insistent rock and slinky R&B pulses, country two-steps or intricate jazz polyrhythms that anchored his fellow players' flights of musical fancy.
"Between 1974 and whenever I left that band, I can tell you that that was the baddest-ass rhythm section that ever lived," Anderson told the Boston Globe, referring to the Ardolino-Spampinato half of the group that Anderson left in 1994. "NRBQ was kind of destined not to make it big because critics and radio couldn't put a name on it. But we were so great because we were playing 250 nights a year, and we started thinking with one mind."
Ardolino was born Jan. 12, 1955, and was a teenage amateur drummer in Springfield when he got a call from Adams after Staley decided to bow out.
"I was ready," Ardolino told the Baton Rouge (Louisiana) Advocate in 1999, when the band was on a 30th anniversary tour. "My problem was I had to learn to play for like a whole set long, and [to play] harder, because I was used to playing with records, which was soft."
Responding to the moment was NRBQ's calling card in concert, a trait that rarely translates into commercial success, which typically requires steady predictability.
NRBQ could never be easily pigeonholed, and therefore handily marketed, so only three of the group's albums ever charted, in the lower reaches of Billboard's Top 200 Albums rankings. Their 1969 debut "NRBQ," which originally stood for New Rhythm & Blues Quintet, and their 1990 album "Wild Weekend" are among the group's best-known recordings.
"We get disappointed sometimes, and we don't understand," Ardolino told The Times in 1992. "One of our old record labels sent us a statement once claiming the total sales of one of our albums was three cassettes. But it ain't gonna stop us. Besides, I think we have a great life. We get to play whatever we want, and we got to meet a lot of great people. I know all the good record stores in every town."
After the band went on hiatus about a decade ago, Ardolino released a solo album, "Unknown Brain." Adams resurrected NRBQ in recent years and has continued touring and recording, with himself as the only remaining original member.
Elvis Costello once told Rolling Stone, "I'd much rather any day go see NRBQ playing than any of our illustrious punk bands in England."
Ardolino's alcoholism progressed in recent years, according to the Boston Globe, and he was hospitalized in November. He died at Kindred Hospital in Springfield, Mass., the newspaper reported.
He was separated from his wife, Keiko, with whom he had a stepdaughter, Emiko, and a stepson, Liku. He is also survived by his brother, Richard.
.Los Angeles Times...
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Tom Ardolino dies at 56; former NRBQ drummer
Tom... more
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