“The rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, who stood to collect millions of dollars on the star’s life insurance policy, a former roadie has claimed in a new book.
James “Tappy” Wright says that Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, drunkenly confessed to killing him by stuffing pills into his mouth and washing them down with several bottles of red wine because he feared Hendrix intended to dump him for a new manager, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday.
In his book, Rock Roadie, Mr Wright says Jeffrey told him in 1971 that Hendrix had been “worth more to him dead than alive” as he had taken out a life insurance policy on the musician worth $2m (about £1.2m at the time), with himself as the beneficiary. Two years later, Jeffrey was killed in a plane crash.” SADIE GRAY, The Independent
“The music on the record is built around the familiar fiddles, mandolins and harmonies of rural Appalachia, and yet there’s no regionalism to speak of in Ms. Jones’s supple, loamy alto. She sings of the hard times, murderous urges and chilling loneliness that haunt the old Anglo-Celtic ballads but, with one exception, sets her plain-spoken narratives resolutely in the present. She approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.” BILL FRISKICS-WARREN, New York Times
T-Model Ford: Sallie Mae (Live at KEXP 90,3 FM Seattle)
“What tip would you give to people who want to travel the blues trail?
Bring a GPS — so many of the juke joints that we went to were literally off dirt roads in the middle of cotton fields. We’d arrive at hundred year-old buildings made out of tin and sheet metal, without a liquor license. They wouldn’t keep regular hours, either. You might read in a guide book that they were open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but we’d pull in on a Friday and they wouldn’t be open. Call ahead if you can.
Without fail, they usually serve two kinds of beer. They’d either have Budweiser or Miller and then the light beer equivalent. You’d walk in and order from a window cut into a wall, and they wouldn’t hand you a normal-sized beer. Instead, they’d give you 60 oz. bottle, paper cups, and napkins. You’d pay a man in cash, and he’d turn around hand it to another man, who would instantly put the money in a safe — in case there was a robbery. If you brought drinks with you, they’d give you a “set-up” — a Tupperware bowl filled with ice, some glasses and a can of Coke.” Jeff Weiss, LA Times
“He has 999 wives. He hails from an unnamed region of central Africa (“a thin layer of impenetrable rainforest,” he tells interviewers) known only as d’bush. His name is Prince Zimboo Abakunamabooba, and if he sounds fishy to you, he should. Outlandish back stories are common in hip-hop—a genre perched on the fault line between tell-it-like-it-is verité and winking artifice—but Zimboo’s mythology is patently unbelievable, 100 percent wink. Is he a loon? A comedian? A walking 419 scam, claiming African royalty as part of some elaborate performance-art hoax?” Jonah Weiner, Slate
“Let’s Do It Again will likely not turn Leela James into a household name like Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone or even Dap Kings’ lead, Sharon Jones. At best, the recording will earn James a new generation of committed followers. Let’s Do It Again gives us a glimpse of the development of an artist, who at the age of only 25, is clearly destined to be one of the most important voices of her generation.” Mark Anthony Neal, the Root
“Patsi Bale Cox’s new book, The Garth Factor: The Career Behind Country’s Big Boom, provides an in-depth look at the phenomenal success of country superstar Garth Brooks. In this blog, she recalls hearing his music for the first time and how it led to her latest book.” CMT Blog, Patsy Bale Cox
“Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration. Dylan scoffs at the discipline of daily writing.
“Oh, I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together.”
He sometimes writes on a typewriter but usually picks up a pen because he says he can write faster than he can type. “I don’t spend a lot of time going over songs,” Dylan says. “I’ll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts.”
He doesn’t insist that his rhymes be perfect. “What I do that a lot of other writers don’t do is take a concept and line I really want to get into a song and if I can’t figure out for the life of me how to simplify it, I’ll just take it all — lock, stock and barrel — and figure out how to sing it so it fits the rhyming scheme. I would prefer to do that rather than bust it down or lose it because I can’t rhyme it.”
Themes, he says, have never been a problem. When he started out, the Korean War had just ended. “That was a heavy cloud over everyone’s head,” he says. “The communist thing was still big, and the civil rights movement was coming on. So there was lots to write about.
“But I never set out to write politics. I didn’t want to be a political moralist. There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour.”
Dylan found subject matter in newspapers. He points to 1964’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” the story of a wealthy Baltimore man who was given only a six-month sentence for killing a maid with a cane. “I just let the story tell itself in that song,” he says. “Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?”
Other times, he was reacting to his own anxieties.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” helped define his place in pop with an apocalyptic tale of a society being torn apart on many levels.”Robert Hillbum, LA Times
