Six White Horses

[manho]

"folk punk years before anybody thought of the term"

i don't think anybody has actually thought of the term. you should put a copyright on it immediately.

[owen]

folk punk. i havent heard of that either but i like it.

correct on the subtlety thing. they just belted out out the tunes in between guzzling the black stuff. the way those songs were intended to be played.

my fav dubliners story is that along with brendan behan and a few others, they used to crawl from pub to pub in dublin. in every pub they went to at least one of them was barred.

i heard jimi was blown away by seven drunken nights.

what happened on nights 6 and 7

[manho]

black velvet band:
www.sendspace.com/file/kvmf57

[cripes]

A Message from Ernest Borgnine

Haha! Made you look.

I'm still up and kicking......you assbags. What kind of place is this? You eight-balls should have an Ernest Borgnine thread anyway. A forum with no Borgie thread is a dick forum.

I ain't scared of dying either. Heaven and hell don't mean shit to me. If I go to hell I can look forward to kicking Sinatra's ass again. It'll make that scene with Maggio in From Here To Eternity look like a Shit-zoo massage. Hahaha!

Rest gently you fags!

[dino]

"Mr. Wexler was a controversial figure in black music circles - he once left a black disc jockey convention under guard after threats to his life - but he was colorblind in the studio and often used musicians of various races in sessions in Southern recording studios during the '60s, such as the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama, where he first recorded Franklin.

"Columbia Records had her for five years, and I made the best record of her career the first time I took her into the studio," he said in a late-night hotel room conversation many years ago. "And I will say this to the black apologists: The only black ass in that room was hers."

[zilla]

Damn, wished I would have seen this guy do Amos Moses just once.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7596040.stm

Gotta love that lyric: "well, raised up a son who could eat up his weight in groceries...."

[manho]

well, if you leave syd out of the equation i'd say this guy was the most important member of the group. apart from syd's guitar sound (and voice and songs, of course) it was all keyboards for me. that was the originality of the group. that organ sound.

[owen]

yep great organ sound. especially during the syd days. emily play...has anybody got close to that sound since?

[manho]

yeah, organwise (and soundwise in general) emily was certainly an important moment in pop history. and arnold layne was almost as good. wasn't it one of the beatles engineers who produced all the early stuff? makes sense.

[manho]

the velvelettes, needle in a haystack:
www.sendspace.com/file/qjgp7g


Norman Whitfield

He co-wrote and produced some of Motown's greatest hits

Dave Laing
The Guardian,
Friday September 19 2008

The success of the Motown "hit factory", founded in the 1960s by Berry Gordy, was built on the creative contributions of a large team of songwriters, musicians and producers - of which Norman Whitfield, who has died aged 67 of complications associated with diabetes, was arguably among the half-dozen most vital members. He co-wrote such classics as I Heard It Through the Grapevine, War, and Papa Was a Rollin' Stone, and among those whose records he produced were Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations.

Whitfield was born in Harlem, where his main achievement was to become a skilled pool player. He told later interviewers that his family had settled in Detroit after their car broke down there while returning from an aunt's funeral in California. After high school, he exchanged pool for music and produced records for the small Thelma Records label, including one by Richard Street, a future member of the Temptations. He also hung around the Motown studios, observing the production process until Gordy was persuaded to give him a job.

A former car worker, Gordy borrowed the idea of a quality control department from the automobile industry, and in 1961 Whitfield became its first head. He was paid $15 a week to lend a critical ear to new recordings by Motown staff, a job he said "consisted of being totally honest about what records you were listening to". He graded the tracks for Gordy's monthly staff meeting, where decisions were made on which should be released.

Soon dissatisfied with quality control, Whitfield fought to be allowed to create records himself. This involved competing with such established figures as Smokey Robinson, but he got his first opportunities in 1964 with lesser Motown groups, co-writing and producing Needle in a Haystack by the Velvelettes and Too Many Fish in the Sea by the Marvelettes. These records brought him the chance to work with the Temptations, already one of Motown's elite groups. After one of Robinson's productions flopped, Whitfield took over for Ain't Too Proud to Beg, a No 1 R&B hit in 1966 that was later recorded by the Rolling Stones.

For the next couple of years, he and Robinson shared production duties until Whitfield became the Temptations' sole producer in 1968. This heralded a six-year run of scintillating records with the group, many written with Barrett Strong, whose 1960 hit Money was covered by the Beatles in 1963.

Strong and Whitfield skilfully merged newer soul and psychedelic influences with Motown's traditional instrumental and vocal strengths. Although Whitfield had his overall concept of each song, it would be created as a studio recording through controlled experimentation and improvisation by the musicians under the producer's guidance. "It took a lot of research and I really consider myself somewhat of a perfectionist," he told writer Nelson George. "I don't like to speculate and I don't like to take chances with my guys."

A typical example of Whitfield's Motown-soul approach was I Wish It Would Rain, a 1968 Temptations hit, which found the group's Jimmy Ruffin emoting like a southern soul virtuoso with seagull and thunderstorm sound effects added by Whitfield. But the greatest of Whitfield and Strong's songs was undoubtedly I Heard It Through the Grapevine, first released by Gladys Knight and the Pips in a tambourine-driven version in 1967 and recreated in equally dynamic versions in 1968 with Marvin Gaye and the Temptations.

The psychedelic Cloud Nine in 1968 (Motown's first Grammy-winning record) was in many ways a homage to Sly Stone, who Whitfield said showed him that record production was "the science of sound". This was followed by Psychedelic Shack and Ball of Confusion (both 1970) and Papa Was a Rollin' Stone (1972). The lyrics of these songs concerned social and political issues of the day, though not always so coherently as War, the Whitfield-Strong protest anthem memorably sung with strategic grunts by Edwin Starr in 1970.

By the mid-1970s, Motown had moved its operations to California and many of its leading figures had left. In 1974, Whitfield joined the exodus after Warner Bros offered to finance his own record label. He took with him his last Motown "acid-soul" group, the Undisputed Truth, but the Whitfield label initially yielded few hits. His greatest post-Motown success came when he was asked to create the soundtrack for the 1976 film Car Wash. He wrote the lyrics of the disco-styled title song on a Kentucky Fried Chicken wrapper after watching a basketball game and used Rose Royce, a group of former Motown singers and musicians, to perform it. Both song and film were massive hits, and Whitfield produced several more hits for the group.

In the 1980s, he went into semi-retirement, occasionally appearing at music industry functions. He returned to the spotlight in 2005 when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges. The case revealed that even in the late 1990s he had been earning more than $500,000 a year from royalties as his songs were reissued, re-recorded and used in more than 50 film soundtracks. He was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $25,000, but was spared jail in favour of home detention on account of his failing health.

· Norman Jesse Whitfield, songwriter and record producer, born May 12 1941; died September 16 2008

[bart]

[owen]

bummer. the way he play cool hand fredda was incredibly unique.

strangely enough, i clicked into a link on the youtube thread for "the seeker" (from cant explain) and sure enough they had a big pic of newman behind the who. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFZHWGUz-t8&NR=1

[manho]

his black & white stuff was great but he made a lot of shit films after 1970. three of his performances are as good as anything ever done by anybody ever in the movies: the hustler, cool hand luke, butch cassidy.

[manho]

[david]

Very sad news. He was always a favourite of mine. And what a list of terrific performances:

Somebody Up There Likes Me
Bang the Drum Slowly
The Long Hot Summer
The Left Handed Gun
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof
Esodus
The Hustler
Hud
The Prize
Harper
Hombre
Cool Hand Luke
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Sting
Slap Shot
The Verdict
The Color of Money
The Hudsucker Proxy
Nobody's Fool

If I had to pick one as his best, I'd say Hud. He made his share of duds, as they all do, but he was always fun to watch, no matter how bad everything else in the film was. And boy, did he make one hell of a lot of good movies.

"My mama loved me, but she died."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV9r71ucnX0

[owen]

id put him maybe third, but possibly second in that group of actors

brando
dean
newman

that appearance of craftyness and good looks - he couldnt have gone wrong.

[Cat Stevens]

greg peck?

[david]

Brando was the most gifted, of course. Dean only played three lead roles, but even at the start, I think Newman was a more interesting actor than Dean.

Of the Hollywood stars who started out in the 40s and 50s, like Peck, Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Heston, Poitier, Lemmon, Montgomery Clift, the only one I liked as much as Newman (though not as much as Brando) was Robert Mitchum.

[dino]

hey but we have brad pitt now.. how cool is that

[dino]

German artist Natascha Stellmach claims to have acquired the ashes of late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain and intends to smoke them as the finale of her new five part exhibition called "Set Me Free."

“This final act”, Stellmach told Artworld magazine, “will release Cobain from the media circus and into the ether.”

Asked how she she came by having the ashes, she said "That's confidential and kind of magic. They came to me. And I am setting him free.”

The final act of her 'work' entitled "Gone", will see Stellmach smoke a joint containing what she says are Cobain's ashes, currently being kept in an engraved antique case. According to Artworld, Stellmach will smoke it at a secret Berlin location and "represents both the completion of the conceptual project and the final act in an exhibition bound to provoke wide public debate."

As previously reported in June last year, Cobain's ashes were stolen from his widow, singer Courtney Love's Los Angeles home.