Congratulations on making it to the end of another week! Unfortunately, these people didn’t: Light a candle for Funeral Friday.
Taking over for Maureen O’Sullivan once the actress finally grew weary of playing with vines and chimpanzees, Brenda Joyce put her athletic build and blonde locks—once certified as the longest in Hollywood, back when such things were measured—to good use as “Jane” in five Tarzan films, beginning with 1945’s Tarzan And The Amazons. By the time she took her own trip into the jungle, Joyce had already had a meteoric rise and fall: Once Fox’s favorite pinup girl of 1940, she’d starred in films like The Rains Came opposite Tyrone Power and Little Old New York before she married an Army officer; according to her obituary in the Telegraph, the studio was so upset by this, it punished her by relegating her to doing strictly B-pictures like Pillow Of Death (a precursor to Death Bed, perhaps?) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back. In 1945, a frustrated Joyc was coaxed out of early retirement to take on the role of "Jane" opposite Johnny Weismuller, who reportedly made persistent sexual advances on her. (She once remarked to her friend, actress Mildred Shay: “How Johnny holds all that manhood tamed under his loincloths defies the laws of nature.”) Nevertheless, she put up with Weismuller’s harassment through four films, and even helped provide the transition into the Lex Barker era of the character with 1949’s Tarzan’s Magic Fountain. Joyce then retired from acting (save two cameos as herself on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) to work for the Department of Immigration, where she reportedly kept her past as “Jane” a secret until her death this week at the age of 97.
The New Riders Of The Purple Sage began as a countrified offshoot of the Grateful Dead, founded by John Dawson—who went by the name “Marmaduke,” because it was the ’60s—along with guitarist David Nelson and Jerry Garcia, who was looking to indulge his new fascination with pedal-steel guitar. (This “indulgence” was obviously a rare moment of excess for Garcia.) Dawson turned his friends on to the Bakersfield sound of artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and after becoming involved with the late-’60s Acid Test scene in the Bay Area, Dawson foresaw a future where that electric country sound and the San Francisco psychedelic scene would commingle. He was right: Groups like The Band and Gram Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers began to do just that, and meanwhile Dawson, Nelson, and Garcia started experimenting with their own mescaline-influenced take on country music in the down time between Dead gigs. After taking on the Dead’s Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh, the group chose a name (stolen from the Zane Grey Western) and became the official opening act for the band through 1971, mostly because it was cheap and practical to do so. Albums followed, including 1973’s gold-certified The Adventures Of Panama Red, Members came and went—Garcia, Hart, and Lesh all left eventually; Jefferson Airplane’s Spencer Dryden sat in as drummer for 10 years (and later managed the group); Skip Battin from The Byrds joined in 1974—but Dawson was the band's one constant through the late ’90s. In 1997, he retired to teach English in Mexico, where he soon contracted emphysema; sadly, this left him too ill to participate in the reunion tours organized by Nelson in 2005. More recently, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, from which Dawson died this week at the age of 64.
British Invasion-era duo Peter And Gordon may have had their own pleasant, Everly Brothers-esque charms, but it was their silent partner who had the most impact on the group’s career: Paul McCartney, who used them as an outlet for songs he didn’t record with The Beatles, including the No. 1 hit, “A World Without Love.” McCartney began sharing his scraps (“Here boys, plenty of genius to go ’round, pip pip!”) with Peter Asher and Gordon Waller in 1963, when he was dating Peter’s sister Jane, an actress in films like The Quartermass Experiment. Peter And Gordon rode the success of “A World Without Love” to successful appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere in the States, and followed that chart-topper with “Nobody I Know” and “I Don’t Want To See You Again,” both written by McCartney. In 1966, clearly feeling cocky, McCartney gave them the song “Woman” under the name “Bernard Webb,” reportedly just so he could see if it was possible to score a hit without his name attached. (It was.) After touring with The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and scoring nine hits in all, Peter And Gordon’s career began to dry up—coincidentally!—around the same time McCartney stopped sharing. The two disbanded in ’68, with Asher going on to manage James Taylor and work as a producer, while Waller pursued a solo career (including 1972’s sadly titled and Gordon and last year’s Rebel Rider) and starred as “Pharaoh” in the 1971 production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a role he also played on the official album. Gordon died this week at the age of 64.
Another artist who benefited from his work with McCartney and Co., Heinz Edelmann was a Czechoslovakian-born graphic designer who worked on many book covers (including the first German edition of Lord Of The Rings) and advertising campaigns, developing a distinct, fluid style that incorporated bits of Impressionism and Expressionism with his own cartoonish whimsy. His work eventually caught the eye of Al Brodax, producer of The Beatles cartoon show (which The Beatles reportedly hated, by the by), who tapped him to be the chief designer on the feature-length Yellow Submarine film he was planning. The New York Times details how the look of that movie came to be: Brodax and Beatles manager Brian Epstein were strolling through London’s Tate Gallery when they were inspired by the colors of J.M.W. Turner’s "Peace—Burial At Sea"; they both agreed that Edelmann would be the perfect choice to put those colors in motion for their own work. Edlemann’s Yellow Submarine design near-singlehandedly established the psychedelic art of the era, but he himself reportedly never connected with it, altering his style almost immediately after its release into a slightly darker, more cynical aesthetic to avoid being pegged as a "psychedelic artist." He spent the ’80s creating editorial cartoons for German magazines—and in 1992 he designed the mascot for the 1992 Expo world fair in Seville—and lecturing at the Stuttgart Academy Of Fine Arts, where “his teaching consisted of metaphysical monologues examining links among the arts, literature, Asian mythology, graphic design and the dumbing down of youth,” and he often urged his students not to pursue a career in illustration. Edelmann died this week at the age of 75.
As an album cover designer, Tom Wilkes was also responsible for some of the most iconic images of the ’60s and ’70s, though his work was considerably more down-to-earth—even downright squalid when it came to his infamous, initially rejected cover for the Stones’ Beggars Banquet, which featured a photo of a graffiti-covered toilet stall. Wilkes first caught the eye of the music industry with his posters for the Monterey Pop Festival, which landed him a job as the art director for A&M Records and work designing covers for musicians like Phil Ochs and Herb Alpert And The Tijuana Brass. As a freelancer, he put together the iconic album art for records like Neil Young’s Harvest, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs And Englishmen, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Eric Capton’s self-titled solo debut—in other words, nearly every album you’ll find in the collection of any discerning fan of rock ’n’ roll. Wilkes won a Grammy in 1973 for his cover of The London Symphony Orchestra’s version of The Who’s Tommy, and in his lifetime he worked on hundreds of books, posters, ads, music videos, and television commercials. He died this week at the age of 69.
An author who worked for a decade as an IBM executive before taking up writing and selling his first self-published novel, Invisible Life, from the trunk of his car, E. Lynn Harris was hailed as one of the first openly gay black writers to reveal a secret world of bisexual African-American men “on the down-low,” i.e. posing as heterosexuals to save face in their communities. Harris later found mainstream success as a romance writer—which led some to dub him “the male Terry McMillan”—and published 11 novels in all, 10 of which landed in the New York Times bestseller list, along with the 2004 memoir What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted. His most recent novel was this year's Basketball Jones, which concerned the secret relationship between a New Orleans business professional and an NBA star. This week, Harris fell ill on a train to Los Angeles; he died of as-yet undetermined causes last night at the age of 54.
Canadian comedian Les Lye got his start in 1948 in talk radio, where he soon partnered up with impersonator Rich Little to record the album My Fellow Canadians: Little would do his impressions of prime ministers and politicians, while Lye filled in with supporting roles as journalists and the like. Although he loved the medium more than anything, Lye gave up on radio in 1961 and began a long association with Ottawa TV station CJOH, where he first worked on the evening show Compass—starring a young Peter Jennings—before being called upon to create a children’s show. With his friend Bill Luxton, Lye developed the popular Uncle Willy And Floyd, which ran for 22 years in syndication before finally leaving the air in 1988. But it was Lye’s 1979 creation, You Can’t Do That On Television, which endeared him to an entire generation of American kids: Envisioning it as an adolescent play on Laugh-In (Ruth Buzzi even joined the cast for a while), Lye assembled a cast of young actors (including Alanis Morisette) and—in addition to lending his animated face to the opening credits—cast himself in most of the adult roles, including studio director Ross, drunken Senator Lance Prevert, dungeon master Nasti, firing squad leader El Capitano, and of course, chef Barth Bagge (“I heard that!”), purveyor of the world’s most disgusting hamburgers. Lye died this week at the age of 84.
Have a super weekend!