.............................................................................................................................................. The Killer



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.............................................................................................................................. UNCUT 209 -- October 2014



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Modern Drummer - September 2014



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MOJO 251 - October 2014



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Keith Richards’ granddaughter makes her Fashion Week debut

Ella Richards made her Fashion Week debut at the Richard Chai show at Lincoln Center. Photo: WireImage

Ella Richards, the 18-year-old granddaughter of rocker Keith Richards, has signed a modeling deal with Wilhelmina and is making her debut at New York Fashion Week.

Ella is the daughter of Marlon Richards, son of legendary Rolling Stone Keith, and Lucie de la Falaise, a former model and niece of designer and Yves Saint Laurent muse LouLou de la Falaise.

Ella is in good company, because also signed to Wilhelmina are her relatives Alexandra and Theodora Richards, as well as their mother, Patti Hansen.

Ella walked in the Richard Chai show on Thursday, and is fitting with EDUN to walk in their upcoming show.

Ella also appeared in the Tom Ford fall/winter 2014 campaign.

[nypost.com]

................................................................................................................................ Classic Rock September 2014



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............ Modern Drummer - September 2014



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....................................................................................................................... The Australian - 9 September 2014



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THE AUSTRALIAN ------------- 10 September 2014



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............................................................................................. Watch it ..
...................................................................................................... Jumpin' Jack Flash - Jagger/Richards







Guitar Aficionado Magazine ----- Vol6/no5 -- 2014



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........................ Herald Sun --- 10 September 2014



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Whoooo who'd have ever thought ..
From bein' stranded at the crossroads to featurin' in a Super Quiz....



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....................................................................................... The Rockin Machine with Hank Garland Tupelo MS - 27 September 1957



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Film traces record label founder Chris Strachwitz's sonic search
Free-wheeling documentary explores how label founder helped record unique talents of the South

By Sam Whiting




The motto of the Down Home Music Store is "No Mouse Music," and to find out what that means, you can either see the movie or go to the source, Chris Strachwitz, 83, at his storefront on a raggedy stretch of San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito.

The documentary "This Ain't No Mouse Music!," which opens at Bay Area theaters Sept. 19, runs an hour and 32 minutes. It will take longer than that to get the answer in person because to find Strachwitz at his desk, you have to walk the length of the store, and that is like walking from Houston up through Louisiana and Mississippi to Nashville.

Tex-Mex, hillbilly, Cajun, New Orleans jazz, country blues and R&B are all here, much of it recorded half a century ago by the shopkeeper who sits at the top of a set of stairs in back. "I am, in a way, a diplomat for this music," says Strachwitz, a tall man who lumbers along with a stoop, probably from too many years flipping through record bins.

The best documentary profiles are of charming old cranks, and Strachwitz is a natural. A ready raconteur, there is no short answer to any question. If you ask what first got an immigrant from an aristocratic German family interested in music indigenous to the American South, the story starts at a Santa Barbara boarding school, where he was shipped for polishing, soon after arriving in the United States in the fall of 1947.

His English was still limited when he happened to see the new musical film "New Orleans," with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. That ended his interest in the popular sounds of Doris Day and Frank Sinatra, which the other boys were listening to on the radio. Strachwitz spun the dial until he hit on a station that was playing the western swing of Bob Wills and the bluegrass of the Armstrong Twins. Strachwitz fell for this unpopular sound to the extreme. At first, he was driving to Los Angeles to hear it live, and then he was driving three or four days to Houston and working his way up from there.

He got a job, teaching German at both Los Gatos High and Saratoga High. He might have made tenure if he hadn't tested his German students by playing music bootlegs for them. "I snuck in the stuff I was recording, which was mostly blues," he says.



That helped transition his career to self-described song hunter. "I was not made to be a teacher, but I did teach them about some good music." He loaded his recording gear into an old Plymouth and went south.

"In those early days, you didn't know any of these people, and you had to be a detective to find them," he says.

His best talent-search story, as related in the film, has to do with him driving to Texas in 1960 to find and record country bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins. But at the same time Hopkins was on his way to Berkeley to perform. Strachwitz could have saved himself the trip.

"There was no publicity for those types of things, none," he says, with the same laugh that always accompanies his stories of misadventure. This one ended better than most. A tip from a plantation owner led him to a man named Pegleg who hung around the railroad station. Strachwitz had no trouble indentifying Pegleg when he saw him, and that is how he got his first big break.

"We met Mance Lipscomb that same night and recorded him in his little shotgun house," he says. "That was the first record I ever put out." He named his label Arhoolie Records, derived from a field holler, on Nov. 3, 1960, "Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster" was released. The pressing was 250 copies, and one of them was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2013.

Strachwitz's other big break had nothing to do with the blues. It had to do with Country Joe McDonald, the Berkeley bandleader of the Fish. The Vietnam War was raging, and Strachwitz's Berkeley living room seemed like as good a place as any to record "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-to-Die Rag." For his hospitality, Strachwitz got the publishing rights, which probably would not have amounted to much had McDonald's performance of the Rag at Woodstock not become a central scene in the ensuing "Woodstock" documentary.

Suddenly Strachwitz had the cash to buy a building in El Cerrito for the record company he had been running out of the basement of Jack's Record Cellar, a long-gone store at the corner of Page and Scott streets in San Francisco.

When the upholstery company at the front of the building moved out, he opened Down Home Music. He made the records on one side of the building and sold them on the other side, along with other folk-related labels.

"I don't just collect these things," he says in the film. "I love to liberate the stuff. Make it available to people."

Documentarians Chris Simon and Maureen Gosling have known Strachwitz for 35 years, and it took about that long to get him to agree to a film.

"Things have changed unfortunately for the worse," he says. "The record business pretty much died out." What business there is might be in soundtracks, and Arhoolie is releasing a two-disc set to go with the film.

If the footage were to focus strictly on Strachwitz, the only action would be him washing vinyl records with soap and water in his kitchen sink. That's about as domestic as it gets for Strachwitz, who never married and lives alone.

"It was hard for me to get along with somebody," he says. "I'm just too much of a dictator, I guess."

As such, he dictated that "This Ain't No Mouse Music!" be a road movie. They drove those same long flat highways looking for music, just like Strachwitz did 55 or 60 years ago.

"We retraced my footsteps," he says, "and visited people and places I had known for years, like Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet and the Savoy Family." He also visited the grave of Mance Lipscomb, at rest since 1976 in Navasota, Texas.

When the filmmakers try to get him to define "mouse music," he is vague. "I'm not sure it's a proper term," he says. "I like it when it's really cooking."

"For as much music as Chris loves, there's more music that Chris hates," says radio producer Davia Nelson, "and he loves to hate things. He hates with a passion."

And what music does he hate the most? "Pop crap," he says.

"This Ain't No Mouse Music!": Opens Sept.19 at the Roxie in San Francisco, Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley, Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol. To watch a short video, go to www.sfgate.com/news/item/arhoolie-records-33005.php.

.............. Herald Sun - 12 September 2014



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...................................................................... THE AGE - 13 September 2014



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Bob Crewe, Songwriter for Frankie Valli and Four Seasons, Dies at 83

Bob Crewe, right, listening with the Four Seasons to a playback in a New York studio in 1967. Credit Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

Bob Crewe, who helped create a parade of indelible hits, most notably for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, including “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Rag Doll” and Mr. Valli’s soaring anthem of adoration “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” died on Thursday in Scarborough, Me. He was 83.

His brother, Dan Crewe, confirmed his death. He said his brother had been in declining health after a fall several years ago while visiting him in Maine.

Mr. Crewe was a singer himself in the 1940s and ’50s, but he found his niche writing, co-writing and producing for a wide range of other artists, sometimes on record labels he started, including Dynovoice. His first hit, written with Frank Slay, was the 1957 single “Silhouettes”; a Top 10 hit for the Rays, it became a Top 10 hit again for Herman’s Hermits in 1965.

That same year he produced “Devil With a Blue Dress On & Good Golly Miss Molly,” a hit for Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

Nearly a decade later he wrote, with Kenny Nolan, “Lady Marmalade,” recorded by Labelle. Propelled by its provocative and irresistible chorus in French, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir,” it rose to No. 1 in 1974. Nearly three decades later, a new version of the song featuring Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Pink and Mya, featured in the movie “Moulin Rouge,” was also a No. 1 hit.

But it was in his work with the Four Seasons and the striking falsetto of Mr. Valli that Mr. Crewe established himself as a master purveyor of pop sentimentality. In less than 10 years he helped make the group one of the best known in the history of popular music.

The group had been struggling to find a hit and a record label in the early 1960s when Mr. Crewe, who had worked with Mr. Valli in the past, decided to take a chance on them. In 1962 he produced their first No. 1 hit, “Sherry,” written by the group’s keyboardist, Bob Gaudio, and he soon began helping write songs for them.

With Mr. Gaudio composing most of the music, Mr. Crew wrote most of the words — some syrupy, some shamelessly ogling — that Mr. Valli sang with urgency. Mr. Crewe is portrayed in the hit Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” and credited as the show’s lyricist; in the movie version, directed by Clint Eastwood, he is played by Mike Doyle.

Few of Mr. Crewe’s songs are more enduring than “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which Mr. Valli recorded as a solo artist and which rose to No. 2 in 1967. Mr. Crewe, the producer, wrote the lyrics; Mr. Gaudio, the music. The song begins with a whisper:

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take my eyes off of you.

You’d be like heaven to touch

I want to hold you so much

At long last love has arrived

And I thank God I’m alive.

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take eyes my off of you.

Then it bursts into the chorus:

I love you, baby

And if it’s quite all right

I need you, baby,

To warm the lonely night

I love you, baby

Trust in me when I say

Oh pretty baby ...

With bright bells, ample strings and big, precise percussion, Mr. Crewe’s productions were crisp confections that gave little ground to the rougher rock that was on the rise in the 1960s. He wrote about innocent crushes, direct sexuality and heartache, his metaphors always accessible. Against the big melody of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore),” which was first recorded by the Four Seasons but became a bigger hit for the Walker Brothers, he wrote in sad counterpoint:

Loneliness is the coat you wear,

A deep shade of blue is always there.

The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore.

The moon ain’t gonna rise in the sky

The tears are always clouding your eyes

When you’re without love.

Robert Stanley Crewe was born on Nov. 12, 1930, in Newark and grew up in Belleville, N.J. He took tap dance lessons as a boy and performed on street corners in Newark. After graduating from Belleville High School, he studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan before dropping out to pursue music. He met Mr. Slay in New York and by the early 1950s they were writing songs together.

Mr. Crewe recorded some songs as the Bob Crewe Generation in the 1960s and had a modest hit with the instrumental “Music to Watch Girls By.” He also produced “Good Morning Starshine,” a single by the singer Oliver from the score of the musical “Hair.”

“He had what they used to call ears,” said Ralph M. Newman, who worked in music publishing in the 1960s and ’70s and knew Mr. Crewe. “He could recognize what the popular taste was.”

Mr. Crewe was gay, and his brother, his only survivor, said he was discreet about his sexuality in many of his social circles. He noted that in “Jersey Boys” Mr. Crewe was portrayed as overtly gay, but in real life that was not the case, Mr. Newman said, particularly during the period when he was working with the Four Seasons. Promotional material for Dynovoice Records quoted a female singer fawning over Mr. Crewe’s handsomeness.

“Whenever he met someone, he would go into what I always called his John Wayne mode, this extreme machoism,” Dan Crewe said.

That fact that Mr. Crewe wrote so many songs about women reflected the complicated culture of his era as well as his shrewd professionalism, his brother said. Asked if some of his songs had been inspired by male romantic interests, Dan Crewe said: “It wasn’t motivated by anything, except he had an intense love affair with words. He told stories.”

[www.nytimes.com]

Never heard of the guy but I know all his hits...........handsome chap ;o) thanks for posting Latebloomer

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You're most welcome, NICOS. I had never heard of Crewe either; he sure did write some gorgeous songs.

Always make me happy.........written by Bob Crewe,





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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2014-09-15 00:42 by NICOS.

Some kinda Stones connection...





Produced by Bob Crewe.


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2014-09-15 00:27 by Deltics.

Glad you find the connection my friend......

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Thanks Latebloomer......

......he had an intense love affair with words. He told stories.”



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Anybody catch the movie yet? I've been thinkin' about gettin' the dvd.

I've always loved that song The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, the Walker Brothers version, but did not know who it was written by or that it was first recorded by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. It appears that it was also covered by U.S. group Jay and the Americans as well as Cher. The British group Keane has covered it more recently. But I have to say that nothing beats the Walker Brothers version. Scott Walker just owns that one and the bass and drums are more forceful as is the overall studio recording.

Your right stonehearted..........

Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons...funny
Jay and the Americans....scks
Cher...scks
Keane.....scks
Walker Brothers....unbeatable..as all their songs are

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I never realised this one was Bob Crewe's ...