A couple of people that past away that you might have missed

[BearDown]

Drummer Buddy Miles best know for playing with Jimi Hendrix died 2/26/08. I have a friend that played in a band with him in the late 80's early 90's. He was 60.

Blind guitarist Jeff Healey Passed away from cancer on 3/2/08. I don't know if it's true or not but I once heard that one or both of his parents are famous but he didn't want to make it on their name. The guy was a kick ass guitar player, his new CD is suppose to be out in April. He was 41.

[BearDown]

I didn't hear anything about Harvey Korman passing away Thursday. I just watch Blazing Saddles a week or two ago. I really liked him and Tim Conway on the Carol Burnett show. He was a funny guy imo.

http://www.legacy.com/STNG-BeaconNew...onID=110639774

[BearDown]

Blues great Bo Diddley passes away.

Bo Diddley gets a rocking sendoff at Fla. funeral
By BRENDAN FARRINGTON
Associated Press Writer

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Bo Diddley's funeral rocked and rolled Saturday with as much energy as his music.
For four hours, friends and relatives sang, danced and celebrated the life of the man who helped give birth to rock and roll with a signature beat that influenced Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and many others.

As family members passed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's casket, a gospel band played his namesake song. Within moments, the crowd of several hundred began clapping in time and shouting, "Hey, Bo Diddley!"

Diddley, 79, died of heart failure Monday at his home in nearby Archer.

"In 1955 he used to keep the crowds rocking and rolling way before Elvis Presley," Diddley's grandson, Garry Mitchell, said before kicking his legs sideways, high up in the air, the way Diddley did onstage. Mourners cheered.

"I'm just telling it the way it is," Mitchell said.

Diddley, who was born Ellas Bates and became Ellas McDaniel when he took the last name of a cousin who raised him, was remembered for much more than his songs. Friends recounted his generosity, manifested in concerts for the homeless and work with youth groups and other charities; and the way he loved to talk to just about anybody he met.

Gainesville Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan referred to one of his most famous hits as she told the crowd, "When the question is asked, 'Who do you love?', it's you, Bo."

The funeral was followed by a tribute concert featuring his touring band and other musicians.

Eric Burdon, leader of the rock group The Animals, attended the service, and flowers were sent from musicians including Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Petty, George Thorogood and others.

Burdon, also a member of the Rock Hall, called Diddley a big influence.

"I've been a fan of his since 16, 17 years of age. Probably one of the first records I ever owned," Burdon said, recalling that his attention was immediately grabbed when he saw an album cover with Diddley sitting on a scooter with a square guitar.

Burdon said he saw Diddley play last year at a concert in Australia, and even though he could tell his health wasn't great, Diddley put tremendous energy into the show. He was known for his stage moves, which some presume influenced Presley.

"He's always been jumping around and very aggressive; if he was onstage with the Stones, he was obviously putting Keith Richards in his place," Burdon said. In describing the "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm Diddley made famous, Burdon said, "I call it bone music, because it goes to your bone."

But stories of another side of Diddley were told repeatedly at the funeral. A man who loved God and his family, who would always stop to talk in the grocery store and was always smiling.

His brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes of Biloxi, Miss., said Diddley always asked how he could help and what he could give.

"There was one thing he wouldn't give me. That's his hat," Haynes said, referring to the black hat the musician was also known for.

But Haynes said his brother grew weary of life on the road.

"'But this is what God gave me to feed my family,'" Haynes recalled Diddley saying. "'I have to keep doing it until God says it's enough.'"

Diddley was born in McComb, Miss. He moved to rural Archer in the early 1980s and had a recording studio on his 76 acres. Mitchell joked that Diddley got up so early, he would tap the roosters on the shoulder to wake them up. And he always sang at breakfast.

Diddley's friend Roosevelt Hutchinson described how the musician would wrap meat in several layers of tin foil, bury it and light a fire on top to cook it. Once the fire was lit, he would grab his guitar.

"He just enjoyed playing that thing under the trees," Hutchinson said.

But he enjoyed his family even more, friends said. He had four children, 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.

"Please know this, because I know Diddley," the guitarist's business manager, Faith Fusillo, told his family. "As much as you loved him, he loved you more."

[BearDown]

LOS ANGELES - George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day. When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

When asked about the fallout from the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction," Carlin told the AP, "What are we, surprised?"

"On that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson's there was also a commercial about a 4-hour erection. A lot of people were saying about Janet Jackson, 'How do I explain to my kids? We're a little family, we watched it together ...' And, well, what did you say about the other thing? These are convenient targets."

Carlin was born May 12, 1937 and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Forth Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar.

Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."

Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.

[BearDown]

Concord Music Group’s statement on Isaac Hayes:
The Stax Records and Concord Music Group family lost a great friend on Sunday when soul music giant Isaac Hayes died suddenly at the age of 65.

To the world he was Black Moses, Ike The Ripper and, later, Chef from TV's South Park. To the rest of us who had the extraordinary opportunity to work with him in recent years, he was just Isaac. He was humble, unpretentious and refreshingly down-to-earth. Not bad for a man who delivered a record-setting seven #1 albums to the Billboard R&B chart, scored numerous awards (including multiple Grammys and 2 Academy Awards), appeared in over three dozen films and was named a Royal King of Ghana along the way.

In the ‘60s, the Covington, Tenn. native helped define the Stax Records sound, co-writing with David Porter such hits as “Soul Man,” “Hold On (I’m Coming),” “B-A-B-Y,” and “When Something’s Wrong With My Baby” for Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and Johnnie Taylor, among others.

He took soul music in a new direction with his 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul, which featured expansive re-interpretations of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and Bacharach and David’s “Walk On By.” The music’s impact was matched only by the visual impact of the record’s cover, which featured Hayes’ signature bald head, gold chains and bare chest.

Two years later, his “Theme From Shaft” exploded on the pop and R&B charts, putting him on the map as an artist and icon. The rat-a-tat of that lone high-hat, that cultural-shifting kick of the wah-wah pedal -- no other piece of music signaled the true end of the '60s, ushering in the gritty 1970s than Isaac Hayes' theme from Shaft. The song won him not only a Grammy but two Oscars, for “Best Song” and “Best Score” in 1972. That same year he won a Grammy for his double album Black Moses. The hits continued for Hayes throughout the ‘70s.

In later years, Hayes’ career took some other directions. He became the voice of Nickelodeon’s “Nick at Nite” and later the voice of Chef in the animated series “South Park.” He had a role in the upcoming movie “Soul Men” with stars Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac (who also died this past weekend).

In 2007, Hayes participated in the Stax Records 50th Anniversary celebration shows in Memphis, Austin and Los Angeles. Despite health problems that slowed him down in recent years, he continued to tour the world. He had proudly returned to Stax Records, which was reactivated in 2007 by Concord Music Group. There were plans to record a new album later this year.

To borrow a phrase from the man himself, he was “one bad mutha”. And through the music he so generously left behind, the world will be talking about him and more importantly listening for lifetimes to come.

Concord Music Group president and CEO Glen Barros states, “Isaac Hayes exemplified all that is Stax. We are all very fortunate to have worked with a visionary who changed music in indelible and profound ways. His talent was matched only by his kindness of spirit. On behalf of the entire Concord/Stax family we express our deep sympathies to his family, friends and fans all over the world.”

Gene Rumsey, Concord Music Group general manager added, “The enduring influence of Stax Records could only have been made possible through Isaac’s brilliant song-writing which laid the ground work for the future generations of rap, hip-hop, and soul. Isaac played a pivotal role in the recent re-launch of Stax, once again infusing the label with his creativity, inspiring a whole new breed of Stax artists. Our condolences go out to all the people whose lives Isaac touched throughout his unparalleled career and lifetime.”

John Burk, executive VP and chief creative officer, Concord Music Group states, “Having collaborated closely with Isaac during the past 3 years, I got to know not only his incredible musical ability, but his deep love for humanity. His was a talent that was colorblind and united people from all walks of life. I feel tremendously privileged to have had the opportunity to work along side this giant of a man.”

[BearDown]

LONDON (AP) -- Richard Wright, a founding member of Pink Floyd, died Monday. He was 65.

The rock group's spokesman, Doug Wright, who's unrelated, said Wright died after a battle with cancer at his home in Britain. He said the band member's family did not want to give more details about his death.

Wright met Pink Floyd members Roger Waters and Nick Mason in college and joined their early band, Sigma 6. Along with the late Syd Barrett, the four formed Pink Floyd in 1965.

The group's jazz-infused rock and drug-laced multimedia ''happenings'' made them darlings of the London psychedelic scene, and their 1967 album, ''The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,'' was a hit.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, Wright, along with Barrett, was seen as the group's dominant musical force. The London-born musician and son of a biochemist wrote songs and played the keyboard.

''Rick's keyboards were an integral part of the Pink Floyd sound,'' said Joe Boyd, a prominent record producer who worked with Pink Floyd early in its career.

The band released a series of commercially and critically successful albums including 1973's ''The Dark Side of the Moon,'' which has sold more than 40 million copies. Wright wrote ''The Great Gig in the Sky'' and ''Us and Them'' for that album, and worked on the group's epic compositions such as ''Atom Heart Mother,'' ''Echoes'' and ''Shine on You Crazy Diamond.''

But tensions grew among Waters, Wright and fellow band member David Gilmour. The tensions came to a head during the making of ''The Wall'' when Waters insisted Wright be fired. As a result, Wright was relegated to the status of session musician on the tour of ''The Wall,'' and did not perform on Pink Floyd's 1983 album, ''The Final Cut.''

Wright formed a new band Zee with Dave Harris from the band Fashion, and released one album, ''Identity,'' with Atlantic Records.

Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and Wright began recording with Mason and Gilmour again, releasing the albums ''The Division Bell'' and ''A Momentary Lapse of Reason'' as Pink Floyd. Wright also released the solo albums ''Wet Dream'' (1978) and ''Broken China'' (1996).

In July 2005, Wright, Waters, Mason and Gilmour reunited to perform at the ''Live 8'' charity concert in London -- the first time in 25 years they had been onstage together.

Wright also worked on Gilmour's solo projects, most recently playing on the 2006 album ''On an Island'' and the accompanying world tour.

Gilmour paid tribute to Wright on Monday, saying his input was often forgotten.

''He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognized Pink Floyd sound,'' he said. ''I have never played with anyone quite like him.''

[BearDown]

Levi Stubbs, lead singer of legendary Motown band The Four Tops, has died at his home in Detroit, US, aged 72.

The performer, who had suffered ill-health for several years, passed away in his sleep.

Abdul Fakir is the only surviving original member of the group, which has sold more than 50m records.

The Detroit band became one of Motown Records' biggest successes, scoring hits including Bernadette and Reach Out (I'll Be There).

Founding members Lawrence Payton and Obie Benson died in 1997 and 2005 respectively.

Audley Smith, of the Motown Historical Museum, said that Levi Stubbs had a voice as unique as Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson or Stevie Wonder.

"[He] fits right up there with all the icons of Motown," he said.

Levi Stubbs was born in 1936 in Detroit and met Abdul "Duke" Fakir at High School.


The Four Tops were one of Motown's biggest successes

They met Payton and Benson while singing at a mutual friend's birthday party.

In 1953, they formed a group called The Four Aims and signed a deal with Chess Records.

Later they changed their names to the Four Tops to avoid being confused with the Ames Brothers.

The group signed with Motown Records in 1963 and produced 20 Top-40 hits over the following 10 years, making music history with other acts in Berry Gordy's Motown stable.

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Stubbs is survived by his wife Clineice, five children and 11 grandchildren.