RIP Posts Here

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Re: RIP Posts Here

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R&B singer Pendergrass dead in Pa. at 59
Jan 14, 6:47 AM (ET) - By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY

NEW YORK (AP) - R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, who had been one of the most electric and successful figures in music until a car crash 28 years ago left him in a wheelchair, has died of colon cancer. He was 59.

Before the crash, Pendergrass established a new era of R&B with an explosive, raw voice that symbolized masculinity, passion and the joys and sorrow of romance in songs such as "Close the Door,""It Don't Hurt Now,""Love T.K.O." and other hits that have since become classics.

He was an international superstar and sex symbol. His career was at its apex - and still climbing.

Friend and longtime collaborator Kenny Gamble, of the renowned production duo Gamble & Huff, teamed with Pendergrass on his biggest hits and recalled how the singer was even working on a movie.

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"He had about 10 platinum albums in a row, so he was a very, very successful recording artist and as a performing artist," Gamble said Thursday. "He had a tremendous career ahead of him, and the accident sort of got in the way of many of those plans."

Pendergrass, who was born in Philadelphia in 1950, suffered a spinal cord injury in a 1982 car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down - still able to sing but without his signature power. The image of the strong, virile lover was replaced with one that drew sympathy.

But instead of becoming bitter or depressed, Pendergrass created a new identity - that as a role model, Gamble said.

"He never showed me that he was angry at all about his accident," Gamble said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "In fact, he was very courageous."

Pendergrass died Wednesday in suburban Philadelphia, where he had been hospitalized for months.

The singer's son, Teddy Pendergrass II, said his father underwent colon cancer surgery eight months ago and had "a difficult recovery."

"To all his fans who loved his music, thank you," his son said. "He will live on through his music."

Pendergrass left a remarkable imprint on the music world as he ushered in a new era in R&B with his fiery, sensual and forceful brand of soul and his ladies' man image, burnished by his strikingly handsome looks.

Gamble said Pendergrass was one of a kind as an artist and boasted a powerful voice and "a great magnetism."

"He was a great baritone singer, and he had a real smooth sound, but he had a real rough sound, too, when he wanted to exert power in his voice," Gamble said.

But it wasn't Pendergrass' voice that got him his break in the music business - it was his drum playing abilities. He met Harold Melvin, who was looking for replacement members for his group, the Blue Notes, and signed on to be the drummer. Later, he became the lead singer of the group, which became known as Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

The band started working with Gamble and Leon Huff and had signature hits in the early 1970s with "Wake Up Everybody" and "If You Don't Know Me by Now."

But Pendergrass had creative differences with Melvin and soon left for a solo career, according to his Web site. It was then he would become a sex symbol for the R&B genre, working women into a frenzy with hits such as "Only You" and concerts dedicated for ladies only.

"The females," Gamble said, "loved Teddy Pendergrass. The females were very attracted to him and his music."

Unlike the songs of many of today's male R&B crooners, Pendergrass' music bordered on eroticism without explicit lyrics or coarse language - just through the raw emotion in his voice. "Turn Off the Lights" was a tune that perhaps best represented the many moods of Pendergrass - tender and coaxing yet strong as the song reaches its climax.

Fans were devastated when, at age 31, Pendergrass was critically injured after his Rolls-Royce hit a tree. He spent six months in a hospital and returned to recording the next year with the album "Love Language."

He continued to sing and recorded several albums, receiving Grammy nominations; perhaps his best-known hit after his crash was the inspirational song "Life is a Song Worth Singing."

It was 19 years before Pendergrass resumed performing at his own concerts. He made his return on Memorial Day weekend in 2001, with two sold-out shows in Atlantic City, N.J.

Gamble noted Pendergrass' charitable work for people with spinal cord injuries, his performances despite pain and his focus on the positive in the face of great challenges.

"He used to say something in his act in the wheelchair, 'Don't let the wheelchair fool you,' because he still proclaimed he was a lover," Gamble said.

But his career was never the same. Gamble said it was difficult for Pendergrass to project vocally like he once did: "The breathing aspect of it, he wasn't really able to deal with it."

And while he had albums, he was no longer seen as the sex symbol but more of a sympathetic, tragic figure, even though he still had a strong following among his core female fans.

After the accident, he dedicated much of his life to helping others with spinal cord injuries and founded the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance to do just that. Gamble said he wanted to help others.

"In his quiet moments, he probably did a lot of reflection. But I never saw him pity himself. He stayed busy," Gamble said. "(But) I feel that he's in a better place now. ... He doesn't have to go through that pain or whatever he was going through anymore."

---

Associated Press writers Patrick Walters and Bob Lentz contributed to this report from Philadelphia.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Well that sucks, I always kind of hoped for a Lost Boys 30 years latter thing where the two Corey's got back together to re-defeat a new bunch of vampires. Than and he was my favorite Corey. :-(
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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'Mission: Impossible' star Peter Graves dies in LA
Mar 14, 9:02 PM (ET)

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Peter Graves, star of the television series "Mission Impossible" and the "Airplane" films, has died.

Graves' publicist, Sandy Brokaw, says the actor died Sunday shortly after returning to his Los Angeles home from brunch with his family. He was 83.

Graves was best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps, leader of a gang of special agents who battled evil conspirators in the long-running television series "Mission: Impossible."

Normally cast as a hero, he turned in an unforgettable performance early in his career as the treacherous Nazi spy in Billy Wilder's 1953 prisoner-of-war drama "Stalag 17."

He also masterfully lampooned his straight-arrow image when he portrayed bumbling airline pilot Clarence Oveur in the 1980 disaster movie spoof "Airplane!"
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Wow...what a bummer! :o
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Ah man, that sucks.

The last I saw him he was doing Gold Line commercials.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Malcolm McLaren, Seminal Punk Figure, Dies at 64
Published: April 8, 2010

Malcolm McLaren, an impresario, recording artist and fashion designer who as manager of the Sex Pistols played a decisive role in creating the British punk movement, died on Thursday in Switzerland. He was 64.

The cause was mesothelioma, a cancer of the linings around organs, said Young Kim, his companion of many years. She said he had been under treatment at a Swiss hospital. The couple had a home in Paris.

Mr. McLaren, a former art student, found an outlet for his ideas about fashion, music and social provocation in the inchoate rock ’n’ roll scene of London in the early 1970s. Operating from the fetish clothing boutique Sex, which he and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood ran, he brought together four obscure musicians, called them the Sex Pistols and provided them with an attitude suited to Britain in decline: nihilistic rage, expressed at top volume in songs like “Anarchy in the U.K.” and the vitriolic anti-anthem “God Save the Queen.”

Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to sign their contract with A&M Records outside Buckingham Palace and organized a performance of “God Save the Queen” on the Thames, outside the Houses of Parliament, on a boat named the Queen Elizabeth. The police quickly intervened, ratifying the group’s incendiary reputation.

Until their breakup in January 1978, the Sex Pistols epitomized the look, the sound and the attitude of British punk. All three came, in large measure, from Mr. McLaren’s restless brain.

Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was born on Jan. 22, 1946, in London and was raised mostly by a wealthy grandmother. He attended more than half a dozen art schools. At none of them did things go smoothly. He was expelled from Chiswick Polytechnic, and the Croydon College of Art tried to have him transferred to a mental institution.

He terminated his education, such as it was, in 1971 at Goldsmiths’ College in London, but not before completing a series of paintings titled “I Will Be So Bad.”

In 1972 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood took over a store on the King’s Road in Chelsea called Let It Rock and began selling hipster Teddy boy fashions. The business was run along unconventional lines.

In a 1997 article for The New Yorker, Mr. McLaren recalled, “We set out to make an environment where we could truthfully run wild.” On most days the shop did not open until the evening and closed within a few hours. The goal, Mr. McLaren wrote, “was to sell nothing at all.”

After the New York Dolls visited the store, renamed Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, Mr. McLaren followed the group to the United States and became its manager. He dressed the band members in red clothing based on the Soviet flag, placed politically provocative slogans onstage and presided over their swift demise.

Back in London, Mr. McLaren, now at Sex, took an interest in a group called the Strand (later the Swankers), three of whose members formed the nucleus of the original Sex Pistols. The group gave its first performance at St. Martin’s College on Nov. 6, 1975 — hostile audience reaction caused them to leave the stage after two songs — and soon emerged as the leaders of the punk scene. Reliably or not, Mr. McLaren explained his strategy for packaging and selling the band in the 1980 film “The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.” “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen” (whose release was timed to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee) rose to the upper rungs of the pop charts in Britain, and the group’s only album, “Never Mind the Bollocks: Here’s the Sex Pistols,” reached No. 1 in 1977. On the band’s first American tour, in January 1978, John Lydon, the lead singer known as Johnny Rotten, walked offstage at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and the Sex Pistols dissolved.

Mr. McLaren briefly managed Adam and the Ants and then, with several ex-Ants, created Bow Wow Wow around a teenage Burmese singer, Annabella Lwin. The group recorded the hits “Go Wild in the Country” and “I Want Candy.” Through his clothing store, now called World’s End, he also sold Ant and Bow Wow Wow fashions.

He went on to record his own music. His album “Duck Rock” (1983), a blend of world music and hip-hop, generated the hit singles “Buffalo Gals” and “Double Dutch.”

“I’m much more of a magician than a musician,” he told The Globe and Mail of Toronto in 1985. “I steal other people’s songs and try to make them better.”

In 1984 Mr. McLaren released the album “Fans,” a mixture of opera and urban music, which included the hit single “Madame Butterfly.” “Waltz Darling” (1989), “Paris” (1994) and other albums followed.

In recent years his name often surfaced in connection with film, television and radio projects, most of them never realized, although he did help produce the film “Fast Food Nation” and presented two series for BBC2 radio, “Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London” and “Malcolm McLaren’s Life and Times in L.A.”

He is survived by his son with Ms. Westwood, Joseph Corré, a founder of the lingerie company Agent Provocateur.

Mr. McLaren spent much of the last 30 years trying to explain punk. “I never thought the Sex Pistols would be any good,” he told The Times of London last year. “But it didn’t matter if they were bad.”
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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They just had John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) on Red Eye tonight and asked him about McLaren's death. To his credit he just said he "would never speak ill of the dead" and then he went on to give his condolences to the family.

I was never a huge Sex Pistols fan, but it's always sad when someone you grew up knowing (well, not personally) dies.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Dixe Carter dead at 70.
Dixie Carter, an accomplished actress who gave strong, opinionated Southern women a good name in the television series “Designing Women” in the 1980s and 1990s, and later enjoyed success as a cabaret singer, died on Saturday in a Houston hospital. She was 70 and lived in Beverly Hills, Calif. Her death was announced by her husband, the actor Hal Holbrook, who said that the cause was complications of endometrial cancer.

In “Designing Women,” which ran for seven seasons on CBS, Ms. Carter’s character, Julia Sugarbaker, was the head of an four-woman interior design business in Atlanta and specialized in sarcasm. “If sex were fast food, there’d be an arch over your bed,” she once snapped at her sister Suzanne (played by Delta Burke). Yet when Julia went into a theatrical tirade, which was often, it usually was in the service of some higher social or political principle.

For some time before that, Ms. Carter had been a familiar face on television. She played the sophisticated colleague of two naïve young women in a 1977 series, “On Our Own”; the snooty wife of a plantation owner in “Filthy Rich” in the early 1980s; and the vibrant new stepmother of Gary Coleman in the penultimate season of “Diff’rent Strokes” in 1984 and 1985. She received her first and only Emmy nomination in 2007 for a recurring role as Marcia Cross’s scary mother-in-law on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.”

Dixie Virginia Carter was born on May 25, 1939, in McLemoresville, Tenn., which is roughly halfway between Memphis and Nashville. She was one of three children of Halbert Leroy Carter, a grocery and department store owner, and his wife, Virginia. She attended the University of Tennessee and Southwestern at Memphis and graduated from Memphis State.

She said that after hearing a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera at age 4 she immediately decided that she would move to New York to become an opera singer. She made her professional acting debut as Julie Jordan in a 1960 production of “Carousel” in Memphis and moved to New York in 1963.

That same year she played Perdita in a Joseph Papp production of “The Winter’s Tale” in Central Park. She then joined the Music Theater of Lincoln Center, which under the leadership of Richard Rodgers specialized in reviving classic musicals. Yet Ms. Carter never rose above understudy and left in 1966 to join the revues at the Upstairs at the Downstairs nightclub. Among the other performers were Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn.

She made her Broadway debut in 1974 in a short-lived musical, “Sextet,” for which she was singled out by critics, and appeared in a 1976 revival of “Pal Joey.” In 1997 she received favorable reviews after replacing Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s “Master Class.” Her final Broadway appearance was in 2004, as Mrs. Meers in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

She said that it was her cabaret career, which began in the 1980s, that brought her the greatest creative satisfaction. “To me, there’s no feeling as gorgeous as the feeling of singing,” she told Stephen Holden of The New York Times in 1984. “It’s like flying.”

Six years later, when Ms. Carter was appearing at Cafe Carlyle, Mr. Holden described her as “one of the most vivid and endearing performers in a field already crowded with idiosyncratic personalities.”

In 1967, Ms. Carter married Arthur L. Carter, a New York investment banker who later became the owner and publisher of The New York Observer. They had two daughters. Ms. Carter left show business for eight years after her marriage. She later said that during that period she gradually lost confidence in her talents — to the point where she was afraid to sing.

“Eventually I lost the idea that I could have a career," she said. "I thought I was too old."

She and Mr. Carter divorced in 1977, and that same year she married the actor George Hearn. That marriage lasted only two years. In 1984 she married Mr. Holbrook, whom she had met doing a 1980 television film, “The Killing of Randy Webster.”

She made relatively few feature films, and her last screen appearance was in “That Evening Sun,” released last year. She played the wife of an elderly Southern farmer (Mr. Holbrook) who was fighting for his property.

In addition to Mr. Holbrook, she is survived by her daughters, Ginna Carter of Los Angeles and Mary Dixie Carter of Brooklyn; a sister Melba Helen Heath of San Anselmo, Calif. and several nieces and nephews.

Although Ms. Carter long ago moved to California for her television career, she and Mr. Holbrook also kept a home in McLemoresville. In 1999, she told The Palm Beach Post that she treasured the courtesy and kindness she found in Tennessee, a welcome contrast to the backstabbing and sniping of Hollywood.

“Of course in the South we talk about people too,” she said. “But if you end your comments with ‘Bless her heart,’ you’re off the hook.”
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Guru gone at 43. I'm 43 :(

http://apnews.excite.com/article/201004 ... 1O400.html
Rapper Guru dies at 43 after battle with cancer
Apr 20, 5:26 PM (ET)

By MESFIN FEKADU
NEW YORK (AP) - Guru, the influential rapper known for his intellectual themes, his monotone delivery and his combination of jazz sounds with hip-hop beats, has died after battling cancer, collaborators said. He was 43.

The world has lost "one of the best MCs and hip-hop icons of all time," according to a statement from Solar, Guru's producer. It was posted on the Web site of DJ Premier, who with Guru made up the rap duo Gang Starr. The site said Guru died Monday.

E-mails from The Associated Press to Solar and his assistant were not immediately returned.

The statement also features a letter Guru wrote before his death. In it, he thanks Solar for his friendship, speaks about his son KC and his nonprofit cancer organization, Each One Counts.

He also dismissed his relationship with Premier, saying, "I do not wish my ex-DJ to have anything to do with my name."
"I write this with tears in my eyes, not of sorrow but of joy for what a wonderful life I have enjoyed and how many great people I have had the pleasure of meeting," it read.

Guru, whose real name was Keith Elam, was born near Boston and later moved to New York. His first album as a member of Gang Starr, "No More Mr. Nice Guy," was released in 1989. They released more albums as a duo, including the gold-selling "Moment of Truth" in 1998.

The group's first hit was "Words I Manifest," which samples Miles Davis and Charlie Parker's "A Night In Tunisia." Other hits include "Dwyck,""Just to Get a Rep" and "Take It Personal."

Guru moved on as a solo artist in 1993, releasing "Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1," which featured a blend of jazz melodies and hip-hop sounds. He released four volumes of the "Jazzmatazz" series. He attended Morehouse College.
Guru worked with top musicians including Herbie Hancock, Isaac Hayes, Chaka Kahn, Erykah Badu, The Roots, Common, Jamiroquai, Macy Gray and Damian Marley.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Dennis Hopper, Actor and Iconoclast, Dies
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Dennis HopperEverett Collection Dennis Hopper, in the film “Easy Rider,” which he directed, edited and starred in.

3:19 p.m. | Updated Dennis Hopper, whose portrayals of drug-addled, often deranged misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” drew on his early out-of-control experiences as part of a new generation of Hollywood rebel, died at his home in Venice, Calif., on Saturday. He was 74.

According to the Times obituary written by Edward Wyatt, Mr. Hopper died from complications of prostate cancer. His death was first reported by Reuters.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include at least six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use. During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said was first diagnosed a decade ago.

Inverting a famous line of dialogue spoken by Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider,” Manohla Dargis wrote of Mr. Hopper in The New York Times:

Dennis Hopper — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he has played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he has made it through the good, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring into a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He has been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next big thing, the last man standing.

It's the end of an era...RIP Dennis. :cry:
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This after Ronnie James Dio and Gary Coleman, as well as the Bass player for Slipknot.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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So, who's next? I hear Morgan Freeman has been having some problems. :(
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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If you wonder if a person (celebrity) is still alive go to Dead People Server.

They list them as Alive, Dead and Not Dead Yet. The lead singer of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood is listed as Not Dead Yet because of lingering illness.
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Re: RIP Posts Here

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Bummer about Dennis Hopper...I missed this.

I watched the Blues Brothers this weekend which got auto-banked on our DVR...I still miss John Candy :-(

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