70′s Soul Singer – Al Wilson

No matter where you go in the US you can turn the radio on and listen to classic rock or classic soul. The “classic” music format features a large but limited playlist of songs ranging from the early-1960s through the early-1980s with more emphasis on the earlier hits by artists associated with the loosely-defined “classic era”.

One song that falls into the genre of music is the soul song from the 1970′s called “Show and Tell.” It is still played on radio today due to the singer and songwriter’s style in a blend of earthiness and sophistication. His name was Al Wilson and his wide range of pop & jazz, gospel, rock, blues and funk shows the sensitivity and strength that mark him as an enduring star even in today’s music scene.

It is Al Wilson who has taken his Final Taxi at the age of 68.

Born on 19 June, 1939, in the city of Meridian,Mississippi, Al Wilson showed little interest in education but performed in school plays, sung in talent shows and won first prize in a local art contest. Wilson began his career at the age of 12 leading his own spiritual quartet and singing in the church choir, even performing covers of country and western hits as circumstances dictated. While he was in high school, Wilson and his family relocated to San Bernardino, California, where he worked odd jobs and taught himself to play drums; after graduation he spent four years touring with Johnny Harris and the Statesmen before joining the U.S. Navy and singing with an enlisted men’s chorus.

After the Navy Wilson join several groups including the Jewels, the Rollers and an instrumental group, the Souls.

In 1966, he was spotted by manager Marc Gordon, who introduced him to singer Johnny Rivers, who signed him to his Soul City label. Wilson’s first single, “The Snake” in 1968, was a hit and was followed by “Do What You Gotta Do” in 1969.

Wilson largely disappeared from sight until 1973, when he issued the platinum-selling Weighing In — the album’s success was spurred by the shimmering “Show and Tell,” a Johnny Mathis castoff that sold well over a million copies.

Wilson charted with several other 1970s singles, including “La La Peace Song,” “I’ve Got a Feeling (We’ll Be Seeing Each Other Again)” and “Count the Days.”

In 1999 Wilson was honored by the California State Assembly in recognition of the state’s Juneteenth Holiday, for being a Freedom Fighter for Musical Arts along with fellow entertainers Joe Vincent and Rickey Ivie.

Dead Mouse Found In Beer Bottle ??

If a dead mouse in a beer bottle sounds like a plot in a 80’s comedy movie its because it is.

The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew is a 1983 film starring the popular SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie. The McKenzie brothers were a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted “The Great White North”, a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show’s third season in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas. It created a fad in the 80’s that sparked two comedy records and film. They also had a hit song called “Take Off” which featured fellow Canadian Geddy Lee of the rock group Rush.

In the movie two unemployed brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, are in a bind when they give away their father’s beer money, then run out of beer. The brothers place a mouse in a beer bottle in an attempt to get free Elsinore beer from the local beer store, but are told by the no-nonsense clerk—under threat of being shoved into a bottle themselves—to take up the matter at the Elsinore brewery instead. After presenting the evidence to management at Elsinore brewery, the brothers are given jobs on the line inspecting the bottles for mice. They take this opportunity to drink lots of free beer off the line; later, they surprise their parents with a van full of Elsinore products.

So it sounds like a good comedy plot right? Tell that to Mihai Stanescu, 32, a Romanian man who ended up in an emergency hospital with food poisoning after finding a dead mouse in his bottle of beer.

He said: “I simply opened the bottle and took a few gulps. The taste was very strange and when I looked closer I noticed the mouse floating in my beer.”

The man alerted local consumer protection officials who have launched an investigation.

Chief trading standards inspector Mihai Miclaus said: “We will check the whole batch of beer to see if there are other such cases. Then we’ll contact the producer and see who is responsible for this.”

I wonder if Stanescu saw the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie? Strange brew indeed.

Even Dead Customers Still Have To Pay Cell Bill

I was a loyal Cingular customer. They treated me right and when I talked to someone over the phone the customer service as good. I never had a problem until AT&T bought them out. WE now have more dropped calls, bad service and if you try to talk to someone in customer service you might as well know you will be getting into an argument with them. After being with the same network for 10 years we have now started shopping around for another cell phone company.

We narrowed it down and Sprint was one of them we have been looking into. Sure I heard about the time they charged someone a $14,062.27 phone bill incorrectly, but accidents happen, right?

Maybe not- now there is news coming out that the ignorance -plagued “organization” has refused to humanely cancel the account of a subscriber who had just passed away.

Story goes back to December 21, when a 66 year-old man in Framingham,  Mass., died of a brief illness. After what had to be a really sad Christmas, the deceased man’s son-in-law, Bill Stewart, called Sprint  to cancel his father-in-law from the family cell phone plan.

“They said his contract wasn’t up and to pay the fee or keep it activated,” Bill Stewart  told WCVB-TV in Boston. “They said my father had upgraded his phone, so we can’t cancel unless we pay the early termination fee or give the phone to somebody else,” Stewart added.

The uncaring Sprint salesperson first suggested to Bill Stewart that they add someone else to the plan. That suggestion didn’t go well with Stewart. Then, the customer “service” rep offered  to reduce the  monthly fee for his deceased father-in-law’s phone from $20 to $10 until the contract ends in September 2008.  That didn’t go over too well with Bill Stewart either.

Finally, a TV news reporter got Sprint spokesperson Mark Elliott on the line. He said that with a death certificate from the Stewart’s, that they would make it right five days or so.  

What Sprint saying to a grieving son-in-law is we hear what you’re saying about your loss, but prove it.  I might expect this from a clueless India customer service rep.( That is another rant.)  Have we been reduced to this for a company to do this to longtime, loyal customer?

The Sun Sets On Another Day – Laraine Day

When growing up in the 70′s we had an afternoon TV program called “Dialing For Dollars”. I was suppose to be doing homework but my afternoon was watching the host as he called a house and asked them the ‘count and the amount” of the money they had to give. To get us to watch this show, besides winning cash, we were asked to watch old movies. Many were bad “B” movie sci-fi but we were graced once a week to a Tarzan movie.

One of these classics was the film “Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) ” with Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan. In the film the plane of a young couple and their baby crashes in the jungle. Everyone on the plane dies, except for the baby who is rescued, by Cheeta, Tarzan’s chimpanzee. Tarzan and Jane adopt the child and name him “Boy”. Jane was played by the legendary Maureen O’Sullivan and the mother of the child was played by a new actress whose name was Laraine Day.

Laraine Day has taken her Final Taxi at age 87. Day appeared in over 80 films and TV shows during her career. She was also voted most promising film star in 1940 by American distributors.Day began her stage career with the Long Beach Players in 1931. A talent scout saw her there and got her a contract with the Goldwyn studios, for whom she made her cinema debut in the celebrated Barbara Stanwyck drama, Stella Dallas (1937). She had four lines. RKO offered her the female lead, billed as Laraine Johnson, opposite George O’Brien in three minor westerns: Border G-Men, Painted Desert and Arizona Legion, before she went to MGM in 1939 and became Laraine Day. Her first role there was as a lively Irish lass, the adopted daughter of cop Wallace Beery in “Sergeant Madden.” That same year she signed with the Dr Kildare series. (These were films that were replaced with TV soap operas.)

“Calling Dr Kildare (1939)”, in which Day played Mary Lamont, a nurse who becomes involved in a murder case with Dr Kildare (Lew Ayres), was the second of the studio’s series featuring the young doctor and his gruff mentor Dr Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore), and Day remained as Kildare’s love interest for six more films until, in “Dr Kildare’s Wedding Day (1941)”, Mary was fatally struck by a truck on the day she was to wed the doctor.

Day’s performance was so affecting that the studio was inundated with letters from grieving fans. In order to console them, MGM cast her again opposite Lew Ayres in “Fingers at the Window (1942)”, hoping to create a husband-and-wife detective duo to rival “The Thin Man.”

Day was lent out to United Artists for Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent (1940). She played the daughter of Herbert Marshall, who heads a peace organization, although she does not know that it is a front for fifth columnists. Joel McCrea, on the run with her from Nazi agents, says: “I’m in love with you and I want to marry you.” She replies: “I’m in love with you and I want to marry you!” “That cuts our love scene down quite a bit, doesn’t it?” he retorts. The film received 6 Oscar nominations.

Day was excellent as a rich socialite whom gambler Cary Grant tries to fleece in Mr Lucky (1943), and, in Cecil B DeMille’s The Story of Dr Wassell (1944), she provided sterling support as a nurse to Gary Cooper’s missionary doctor in Java during the war.

Other credits include “I Take This Woman” with Spencer Tracy, “Unholy Partners” with Edward G. Robinson and John Wayne’s “The High and the Mighty.” She also hosted a TV program called “The Laraine Day Show (1951)”

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Laraine Day has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Final …..’Tractor’???

Down here in the South people tend to depend on their farm tools a lot and will grow attached to them. Many people love their trucks and tractors and it shows with the rise in clothing with the John Deer logo on it. But it is not just a Southern U.S. thing as a man in the UK has asked that his Final Taxi be a ‘final tractor.’

A Yorkshire farmer, Jimmie Haythornthwaite , owned three vintage Massey Fergusons and used an adapted 1960s model to go shopping and pick up his pension.

A tractor fanatic, Haythornthwaite told his son that his last wish was to have his body towed to his funeral on his favorite tractor. That wish was granted when he died and his coffin was pulled to a crematorium on a trailer attached to his beloved red 1956 model driven by pal Colin Moses.

Daughter Vicky, 35, said: “It was his last wish to be towed behind his favorite tractor and that his ashes should be scattered at the farm.”

Her father was a well known character in the area and could often be seen standing outside his home surveying the countryside.

She said he lived an old-fashioned life alone in his house that had hardly changed in decades. It was several hundred years old and still had a butchery area and between 1870 and 1878 was a brewery serving the men who built nearby Ponden reservoir.

Invite an axe-murderer into your home this Christmas

It has been a week since Halloween and my podcasts of ‘ true stories of horror ‘ went over well this year it seems. I couldn’t help but laugh a bit when I read a news story this morning. It would fit in my true horror tales and also the death history stories I tell.

It seems the German city of Hanover is getting slammed for featuring an axe wielding serial killer on a children’s Christmas advent calendar. Tourism officials have defended the move by saying mass murderer Fritz Haarmann was part of the German city of Hanover’s history.

Haarmann killed 24 young men, chopped up their corpses and dumped their remains in the local river Leine. He appears on the Advent calendar hiding behind a tree on the river bank.

Haarmann stalked Hanover more than 80 years ago and his victims were aged between 13 and 20. Rumors had it that he would then peddle meat from the bodies of his victims as black market pork. His accomplice, Hans Grans, sold the clothing of his victims. Haarmann was sentenced to death and beheaded in 1925.

The calendar is already on sale at tourism offices and shows children singing Xmas carols and laughing as Santa hands out Xmas gifts – and the Star of Bethlehem twinkles over the rooftops.

But over the first door of the calendar, a trilby wearing man peeks out from behind a tree with a meat cleaver in his left hand.

Head of the Hanover tourism board, Hans-Christian Nolte, has defended the calendar, saying: “He is part of our city’s history. Even on guided tours the serial killer’s story is told.”

Aquaman Creator – Paul Norris

 

Name just a few super-heroes that you know and one character may pop up in that list.

Aquaman.

He has never got the popularity of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman or Spider-man, but he is a hero that many of us grew up to. Either in comic books or on Saturday morning cartoons, Aquaman was a part of that trivia of our youth.

Aquaman is a superhero in DC Comics that was created by Paul Norris ( and Mort Weisinger,) for More Fun Comics # 73 (Nov. 1941). Initially a backup feature for the main attraction of Superboy, Aquaman was later featured in his own title multiple times. Nearly two decades later, during the superhero-revival period known as the Silver Age of Comic Books, he was a founding member of the Justice League of America. Aquaman is king of Atlantis and has the power to communicate with sea creatures.
Aquaman has also appeared in animated and live-action television programs. Most will remember him from the Super Friends or the long running Aquaman cartoon show in the 60′s.

The man who help create Aquaman, Paul Norris, has taken his Final Taxi at the age of 93.

Born on April 26, 1914 in Greenville, Ohio, Norris studied at Midland Lutheran College and at the Dayton Art Institute before being hired for the Dayton Daily News as an illustrator and cartoonist. In 1939, he headed to New York to seek a better job. By 1940, he was drawing comics for Prize Publications, where he created such “star strips” as Yank and Doodle, Power Nelson and Futureman.

Norris was at DC Comics in 1941. There, he and editor-writer Weisinger created Aquaman.

His first credit with DC is a revamp of the Sandman. Sandman has always been my favorite super hero. The simple green three-piece suit with purple cape and a gas mask was something I could see someone wearing instead of the tights and cape. Norris thought otherwise and followed what was popular for the time giving Sandman yellow and purple tights and a boy sidekick. It worked for the time period but I was glad he turned back to the gas masked hero many years later.

During WW II Norris illustrated propaganda leaflets to be dropped from aircraft over Okinawa, urging Japanese soldiers to surrender. After the war he worked with the King Features Syndicate as a “troubleshooter” with such adventure strips as Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9.

I the 1950s, Norris drew issues of Dell Comics’ Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Jungle Jim, the latter of which he had previously drawn as a newspaper comic strip. The following decade, he drew stories of jungle adventurer Tarzan and science-fiction hero Magnus, Robot Fighter in comic books for Gold Key Comics. He also drew one of my favorite DC speedsters Johnny Quick.

Later he drew comics for Marvel of Hanna-Barbera characters including Yogi Bear, Scooby Doo, and Dyno-mutt.

Noted as one of the last of the great creators of Golden Age DC superheroes, Aquaman stories still get a “Created by Paul Norris” credit on them.

Ramones manager – Linda Stein

Back in the late 70’s I was invited by a friend to a concert at Brother’s Music Hall.  a nightclub in Birmingham. The band playing was The Ramones, who I had not heard of, but it was a night that would change my life. My musical taste would defiantly be influenced by one show.

I had been to several concerts before but this was the first one that I was a participant. There was no sitting down in chairs. This was an event. The music was loud and everyone was pleasant and moved to the music as one. (This was years before slam dancing started at punk shows.) I danced with the entire crowd there.

The Ramones were an American rock band often regarded as the first punk rock group. It was  their appearance in 1976 that  galvanized the beginning UK punk rock scene, inspiring future punk stars, including members of The Clash, The Damned, and the Sex Pistols.

It was a few months after that tour that they played Birmingham. On tour with them was their manger at the time, Linda Stein.  She has taken her Final Taxi at age 62.

Linda Stein, former manager of US punk band the Ramones and realtor to New York’s A-list celebrities has taken her Final Taxi.

Stein, a former teacher, was credited with jumpstarting the careers of the Ramones, The Pretenders ,Talking Heads and Madonna to stardom. She was a fixture in clubs from Studio 54 to the Mudd Club and later a reliable voice in gossip columns, aided by her quick wit and fanciful way with a four-letter word.

In the 1990s, Stein left band management and became a “real estate agent to the stars”. She landed mega-million-dollar apartments for Madonna, Sting, Billy Joel, Christie Brinkley, Bruce Willis, Michael Douglas, Steven Spielberg and Elton John.

According to her friend, author Steven Gaines, Stein inspired two movie characters: the real estate agent (played by Sylvia Miles) who sells a high-rise apartment to Charlie Sheen’s character in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, and a predatory record executive in the 1998 movie.

She was just getting over breast cancer treatments when she was found murdered in her New York apartment.

Long-time friend Elton John said in a statement: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years and will be greatly missed, She did so much for breast cancer and was a huge supporter of my AIDS foundation.”

A Satisfied Mind – Porter Wagoner

While growing up in the late 60′s and 70′s in Birmingham, Alabama there was three programs that were staples in households I would visit: Country Boy Eddie, Hee Haw and The Porter Wagoner Show. My parents were not big Country and Western fans but at 5am, when Dad would be leaving for work, Country Boy Eddie is all that was on. If you liked one of his guests you might catch them later on the Porter Wagoner show. My best friend’s father did like country and I remember watching Wagoner on a huge black and white set while his rhinestones flashed at the camera iris.

Porter Wagoner, who placed over 81 songs on the country-music chart, has taken his Final Taxi.

Porter Wagoner was born Aug. 12, 1927, in West Plains, Mo. He grew up helping out on the family farm, but when he wasn’t busy with farm chores he would spend hours standing on the trunk of a felled oak tree pretending he was host of the Grand Ole Opry, of which he was a huge fan of.

He got his first guitar from his older brother, Glenn, whose death before age 20 from a heart ailment hit Wagoner hard. He became determined to carry on his brother’s love for music. Working at a department store in West Plains, Wagoner was hired by the owner to sing on a radio show he sponsored.

He wrote and recorded “A Satisfied Mind,” a song that discounts the rewards of the material world in favor of the facets of life that lead to peace of mind. It took him to the top of the country chart in 1955 for the first time and remained his biggest hit.

He reached the No. 1 spot two more times, in 1962 with “Misery Loves Company,” and a dozen years later with “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me,” a duet with Parton.

One of the first songs I remember hearing from Porter Wagoner was his song “Green, Green Grass of Home” which I recall him singing on his syndicated TV series, The Porter Wagoner Show, which ran from 1960 to 1979.

Whilst hosting the show, Wagoner introduced newcomer Dolly Parton as his new duetting partner in 1967. Together they were a huge hit, and recorded several records. At it’s peak, his TV show was syndicated in 100 countries and attracted audiences of over 3 million. They won several awards for their duets, including two Country Music Awards in 1970 and ’71.

The pair’s complex relationship deteriorated resulting with Wagoner suing Parton in the late 70s, however they settled out of court and remained friends.

Parton acknowledged writing “I Will Always Love You” as a peace offering to Wagoner, but she said it took him years to understand its message. The song was a hit for her three separate times — when it was released in 1974, as a remake for the 1982 movie “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and in 1995 as a duet with Vince Gill. It became an international pop smash when Whitney Houston recorded it in 1992.

Wagoner’s old-school country style fell out of favor with Nashville, except for his role at the Opry, as country moved on in the ’80s to younger, more pop-music minded stars such as Alabama.

Porter Wagoner career lasted a period of nearly 40 years and in 2002, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

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