Tag Archives: obit

RIP Dept.: Reggae Great Junior Murvin of “Police and Thieves” Fame Is Dead

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Junior Murvin, the Jamaican singer with the distinctive falsetto, whose hit “Police and Thieves” became well known in the punk community when The Clash covered it on their 1977 debut album, died at Port Antonio Hospital in Jamaica today, according to his son Keith Smith. Various reports have put his age at either 64 or 67.

Murvin had been hospitalized recently for diabetes and high blood pressure but the cause of death has yet to be determined.

According to The Independent, “Police and Thieves” was recorded in 1976 to reflect turf war and police violence in Jamaica but became closely associated with London’s Notting Hill Carnival, which ended in rioting that year.” The song eventually became a British hit For Marvin in 1980.

Murvin never again achieved the success of “Police and Thieves,” which was produced by the legendary Lee “Scratch” Perry at Perry’s Black Ark studio in Washington Gardens, St Andrew.

Reggae-vibes.com has this about “Police and Thieves”: “He [Junior Murvin] had met Perry years before when Scratch auditioned singers who wanted to record at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One. Scratch introduced Junior Murvin to Coxsone Dodd as a singer with potential. Coxsone heard the song and told Junior to learn another verse to his song. Junior never returned and never recorded at Studio One. “I never had the patience to wait at that point”. He had come to Kingston to look for a producer for his song and this is how it happened: “It was a vibes y’know – of the producers at that time, only he could manage that heavy hardcore – cause I just get a vision to go to him and that was it. Lee Perry is the greatest producer I ever work with”. Together he and Scratch developed “Police And Thieves” and by its popularity was to prove the cry of the Jamaican people in the strife torn mid-seventies and early eighties. “He (Perry) always said to me ‘bwoy with the tune that you make you nah go dead’. True I was young I never realise what him a tell me – true he was older than me – but now me start get bigger me understand”. Junior and Scratch developed a relationship where they counteracted each other: “Me give Lee Perry nuff idea too y’know nuff idea. Him like work with me too… we have same idea, some time me have the idea before him – him say ‘When you have it ?’. He is a man who when you have voicing – him can talk through the mic and tell you three bars before the bridge comes – he just phrase in your ears – remind you say ‘Junior phrase away now remember the bar a come, phrase away now the bar a come now-hit it!’. (Laughs) When you’re voicing he’s talking through the mic in your ears – coming down with the music y’know and dancing too – give you a vibes. …..Him a dance and a mix, people who play instrument them always dance, but he’s the only man who I see mix and dance….”

The Clash’s version:

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —

RIP Dept.: An Overview of Electronic Music Pioneer Bernard Parmegiani

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Parmegiani at work.

Bernard Parmegiani passed away yesterday, and today the electronic music expert Simon Reynolds points us to a piece he wrote for The Wire about Parmegiani.

Here’s the opening graphs:

“I don’t think I had any real musical influences,” Bernard Parmegiani has declared. Certainly, it’s true that he started out lacking any academic training in composition. A sound engineer for French television, he caught the musique concrete bug through an experimental music radio show called Club d’Essai. In the late Fifties Parmegiani dabbled in the young form during TV studio down-time he sneaked on the sly. Then, having teamed up with composer Andre Almuro as the latter’s engineer, his promise came to the attention of Pierre Schaeffer. But it took the godfather of concrete two whole years to steal Parmegiani away from TV (and a burgeoning side-career as a mime artist!). Only then did Parmegiani undergo, as a bureaucratic formality, the obligatory two-year composition course required to join the Groupe de Recherche Musicales.

Parmegiani’s sideways trajectory through the French equivalent of the BBC makes for a wonderfully wonky career path: from humble tape operator to venerable composer with a grand oeuvre now neatly tied-up and boxed in this twelve-disc set. The parallel would be if Dick Mills, chief sound effects maker at the Radiophonic Workshop, had been encouraged by the Beeb to lay aside Goons Show gastric-rumbles and Dalek voices and dedicate his energies to hour-long concrete operas inspired by A.J. Ayer. By the mid-Sixties, that was exactly what Parmegiani was up to: composing long-form works sparked by the philosophical pensees of Gaston Bachelard. The imprint of the latter’s classic ruminations on human perception as related to space, time, and the “poetics” of the four elements is detectable in Parmegiani titles like “L’Instant mobile” and “Capture ephemere”; often he would embark on a composition armed with nothing but a title borrowed from or inspired by the philosopher.

For the rest of this piece, head to ReynoldsRetro.

Listen to two of Parmegiani’s recordings:

Patti Smith Writes Lou Reed Tribute For The New Yorker

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Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

In a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed, Patti Smith wrote in the current issue of New Yorker:

I met Lou at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. The Velvet Underground played two sets a night for several weeks that summer. The critic and scholar Donald Lyons was shocked that I had never seen them, and he escorted me upstairs for the second set of their first night. I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground. A dissonant surf doo-wop drone allowing you to move very fast or very slow. It was my late and revelatory introduction to “Sister Ray.”

Within a few years, in that same room upstairs at Max’s, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, and I presented our own land of a thousand dances. Lou would often stop by to see what we were up to. A complicated man, he encouraged our efforts, then turned and provoked me like a Machiavellian schoolboy. I would try to steer clear of him, but, catlike, he would suddenly reappear, and disarm me with some Delmore Schwartz line about love or courage. I didn’t understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances. He had black eyes, black T-shirt, pale skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader, and a sonic explorer. An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem. He was our connection to the infamous air of the Factory. He had made Edie Sedgwick dance. Andy Warhol whispered in his ear. Lou brought the sensibilities of art and literature into his music. He was our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.

For more head to the New Yorker.

Why Lou Reed Matters: “…every bit Bob’s equal”

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Photo via the Village Voice.

This past week the Village Voice published a wonderful essay on Lou Reed. Peter Gerstenzang zeroed in on the import of Lou Reed’s songwriting, calling him “Bob’s equal,” the Bob being, of course, Mr. Dylan.

Gerstenzang wrote:

Even knowing there was a cat around named Bob Dylan, who often gets the credit for marrying poetry and mature ideas to Rock and Roll, Lou Reed, who died from the results of liver disease, is, I believe, every bit Bob’s equal. Unquestionably as important, possibly more influential. Although there’s some similarity in their backgrounds (they’re both real rockers who listened to Little Richard before they ever read Rimbaud), Lou did things differently than Dylan. Where Bob introduced surrealism and symbolism into our music, Lou Reed did the same for realism. Perhaps, more accurately, photorealism.

Sure, Dylan told us about the mystery tramp, Queen Jane, that ghostly Johanna, people who lived in our dreams. Reed, no matter where he grew up or who he studied with, told us about people who lived in New Yawk. In 1964 or so, with Dylan delighting in “majestic bells of bolts” and tambourine men, Lou was writing, in complex, but no uncertain terms, about the kind of people who couldn’t resist the siren’s song, the supremely majestic feeling of shooting smack. Or speed. No code words, no metaphors, no clever substitutions. And, without any obvious moralizing, how when these drugs turned on you, you just wished you were dead.

For the rest of this insightful essay, head over to the Village Voice.

Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed: “Lou was a prince and a fighter…”

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Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

Laurie Anderson published this obit in The East Hampton Star today:

To our neighbors:

What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.

— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend