| Name | Fame |
|---|---|
| Cover | Bowie_Fame.jpg |
| Artist | David Bowie |
| From album | Young Americans |
| B-side | "Right" |
| Released | |
| Format | 7" single |
| Recorded | Electric Lady Studios, New York January 1975 |
| Genre | Funk rock |
| Length | 03:30 Single edit 04:12 Full-length album version |
| Label | RCA RecordsRykodisc/EMI ("Fame '90") |
| Writer | David Bowie, Carlos Alomar, John Lennon |
| Producer | Harry Maslin, David Bowie |
| Last single | "Young Americans"(1975) |
| This single | "Fame"(1975) |
| Next single | "Golden Years"(1975) |
| Last single | "Never Let Me Down"(1987) |
| This single | "Fame '90"(1990) |
| Next single | "Real Cool World"(1992) |
"Fame" is a song recorded by David Bowie, initially released in 1975. It reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the week of September 20th, 1975.
With the Young Americans sessions mostly concluded in late 1974, the material was delayed while Bowie extricated himself from his contract with manager Tony DeFries. During this time he was staying in New York, and met John Lennon. The pair socialised and jammed together, which led to a one-day session at Electric Lady Studios in January 1975. There, Bowie contacted several members of his tour band. First a cover of The Beatles’ "Across the Universe" was recorded. Then a new song called "Fame", inspired by a guitar riff written by Carlos Alomar and with the title from Lennon, was then hurriedly developed by Bowie, and recorded. Both tracks were then added to the Young Americans album. Despite having only a minor contribution, Lennon was given a co-writing credit due to the lyrics (bemoaning the nature of celebrity) being inspired by conversations he had with Bowie on the subject, and because Bowie acknowledged that Lennon singing "Fame!" over Alomar’s guitar riff was the catalyst for the song. The songwriting credit list order is David Bowie, Carlos Alomar, and John Lennon. Lennon's voice is also heard singing the repeated words "FAME, FAME, FAME" with his voice heard at a fast, normal, and slow track, making it sound like a recording on the fast and slow speeds, until Bowie's voice is heard singing the final lyrics of the song before the fade.
"Fame" became Bowie's biggest hit to that point in the U.S. It was his first number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, as well as his first to break the top 10.
"Fame" would only reach number seventeen in the UK
Film director Gus Van Sant directed the promotional video for this version, which featured clips from many of Bowie’s previous videos. In the music video, Bowie also performs a dance with Louise Lecavalier, one of the main dancers of the Québécois contemporary dance troupe La La La Human Steps (whom Bowie would collaborate with on the Sound + Vision tour).
In both the UK and the U.S. this appeared in a variety of formats, including a 7" picture disc, an "Arthur Baker Remixes" 12 inch single and a "Changes pack" with three prints of Bowie at different eras. None of the British releases (on EMI USA) feature the "Absolutely Nothing Premeditated mix". It stayed in the UK chart for four weeks, peaking at number twenty-eight.
| Name | Fame |
|---|---|
| Artist | God Lives Underwater |
| Released | 1998 |
| Format | CD |
| Genre | Industrial rock, Techno, Rock |
| Length | 3:26 |
| Label | A&M; |
| Producer | Gary Richards |
| Reviews | * Allmusic |
| Last single | "From Your Mouth"(1998) |
| This single | "Fame" (1998) |
| Next single | "Tricked (That's the Way I Like It)"(2004) |
"Fame" is a cover version by the band God Lives Underwater of the 1975 David Bowie song "Fame". It was released in 1998, resulting in significant airplay.
Category:1975 singles Category:1990 singles Category:Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles Category:David Bowie songs Category:Funk songs Category:Songs written by John Lennon Category:Songs written by David Bowie Category:God Lives Underwater songs Category:2000 singles Category:1998 singles Category:Songs written by Carlos Alomar
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | David Bowie |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | David Robert Jones |
| Born | January 08, 1947Brixton, London, England |
| Years active | 1964–present |
| Occupation | Musician, actor, record producer, arranger, singer |
| Voice type | Baritone |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, saxophone, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums, percussion |
| Genre | Rock, Pop, glam rock, art rock, blue-eyed soul |
| Associated acts | The Riot Squad, Tin Machine |
| Label | Deram, RCA, Rykodisc, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Parlophone, Pye, Hanso |
| Url | Official Website |
Although he released an album (David Bowie) and several singles earlier, Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when the song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture."
The family moved in 1953 to nearby suburb, Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His singing voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that." By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as He received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would lose the sight of the eye, and he was forced to stay out of school for a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation. The damage could not be fully repaired, leaving him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil (the latter producing Bowie's appearance of having different coloured eyes, though each iris has the same blue colour). Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.
Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul—"I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall.
Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie re-named himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years. Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside." After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.
Bowie contributed backing vocals to Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough Transformer, co-producing the album with Ronson. His own Aladdin Sane (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".
Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with Space Oddity. "Life on Mars?", from Hunky Dory, was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four. Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.
The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. Young Americans yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show Soul Train, Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his October single. Young Americans was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US.
Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of Ziggy Stardust alone), existed essentially on loose change." In 1975, in a move echoing Pitt's acrimonious dismissal 15 years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door."
at the O'Keefe center, Toronto 1976]] Station to Station (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year. Developing the funk and soul of Young Americans, Station to Station also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence." His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke. "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...". According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in The Times, "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."
Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy. During the same period, Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, The Idiot, and its follow-up, Lust for Life, touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977. Low (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described Low as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his Symphony No. 1 "Low"; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 Symphony No. 4 "Heroes". Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".
Echoing Lows minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, "Heroes" (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like Low, "Heroes" evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French. Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show Marc, and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.
After completing Low and "Heroes", Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends." Recordings from the tour made up the live album Stage, released the same year.
The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", Lodger (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop. The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's Sergeant Pepper [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." Lodger reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ". Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.
Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German movie Christiane F., a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as Christiane F. a few months later. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film Cat People came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.
Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially-censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film From Here to Eternity), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. Let's Dance was followed by the Serious Moonlight world tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.
Tonight (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of The Falcon and the Snowman. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.
Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners. The movie was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album". Supporting Never Let Me Down, and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.
Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making. The band's album debut, Tin Machine (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book." EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production". The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.
In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine IIs arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of the four nude band members in statuesque pose, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.
1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say". Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.
Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial Outside (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996. Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, Earthling (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for The Rugrats Movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'". The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.. In 1998, Bowie recorded "A Foggy Day (In London Town)" with Angelo Badalamenti for the Red Hot Organization’s compilation album Red Hot + Rhapsody a tribute to George Gershwin which raised money for various charities devoted to increasing AIDS awareness and fighting the disease.
In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes". 2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low era. Reality (2003) followed, and then a world tour. Covering Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, 'A Reality Tour', with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other tour in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.
at the premiere of Jones' directorial debut Moon]] Recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie reduced his musical output for the first time in several years, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film Shrek 2. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the movie Stealth. He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album Return to Cookie Mountain, made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio, and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace. Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006. In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums." He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive.
Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event, and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. A Reality Tour, a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.
The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise (later made into the 1970 TV movie The Looking Glass Murders). In the black and white short film The Image (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him. The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra. Bowie starred in The Hunger (1983), a revisionist vampire movie, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Another musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto, played the camp commandant who begins to be undermined by Celliers' bizarre behaviour. Bowie had a cameo in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).
Absolute Beginners (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy Labyrinth found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins. Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguini Incident (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's spaghetti western Il Mio West (1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the aging gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of The Hunger. In Mr. Rice's Secret (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in Zoolander.
Bowie portrayed Nikola Tesla, the physicist who pioneered AC electricity, co-starring with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige (2006), Christopher Nolan's film of Christopher Priest's epistolary novel about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the early 20th century. He voice-acted in the animated movie Arthur and the Invisibles as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis TV movie. In the 2008 film August, directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Asked in 2002 by Blender whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied:
}}
Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock", and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'." Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy." Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women." but biographer also reinforces that his public statements on sex had no other purpose but to do marketing and draw attention to his "transgressional" work.
Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive". Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect." Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."
Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums and percussion, and string instruments including viola and cello. , 1974.]]
With these influences Bowie created a new world through his music. "Oh! You Pretty Things" from Hunky Dory (1971) is a fine example of this and has been considered a sci-fi song about 'homo superior' concepts in a "teasing, unquestionably gay tinged manner." The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is another example; an album around a fictional sci-fi story created by Bowie himself. Track "Five Years", for example, desperately says that the world will end to five years, and is one of many examples of his artistic endeavors with the collapse of society. Diamond Dogs also presents a vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Later, in Outside, he returned to the idea of a concept album based on stories he wrote and characters he had created. And Heathen reflected his impressions on the Attacks of September 11, 2001, with lyrics focused on humanity degradation. To conclude, Reality reflects on his career and in the title track he sings: "I've been right and I've been wrong"/ "I look for sense but I get next to nothing" / "Hey boy welcome to reality" on a hard song moved with three guitars, syncopated drums and bass such as the rock songs of his past phases.
Buckley writes that, in an early 1970s pop world that was "Bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, [...] Bowie challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day." As described by John Peel, "The one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change." Buckley says that Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star", with the result that "After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. [...] The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." Buckley concludes that "Bowie is both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced [...] has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. [...] His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
David Bowie's influence remains immense, musically and socially. According to many authors, for example, incorporating androgynous characters like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane in his 1970 glam era that communicate through sexual languages Bowie re-create a independent adolescent class at the time and also helped movements such as the gay liberation. In this era he also helped to create new fashions around the rock and music scenes that still appeals people nowadays.
Musically, his albums were also very influential. The Man Who Sold the World (1970), for example, has been cited as influencing the goth rock, darkwave and science fiction elements of work by artists such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Gary Numan, John Foxx and Nine Inch Nails. In his journal, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana listed this album at number 45 in his top 50 favourite albums. In 1993, the band re-recorded its title-track in their MTV Unplugged in New York. After the glam era Bowie produced works such as Diamond Dogs (1974) which its elements of raw guitar style and visions of urban chaos, scavenging children and nihilistic lovers have been credited with anticipating the punk revolution of bands like The Germs and Sex Pistols, that would take place in the following years. 1976 saw the appraised album Station to Station, that has also been described as "enormously influential on post-punk" and influenced band Magazine. On the following year, "Heroes" (1977) of 'Berlin Trilogy' influenced Double Fantasy (1980) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
His work in the 80's, especially "Ashes to Ashes" song and its video showing a creative Bowie's music and image, provided the basis for a new musical movement of the time, called New Romantic, influencing acts such as Blitz Kids, Keanan Duffty, and Steve Strange. In fact, critics have written that this song was considered the anthem for the New Romantic movement musicians. Pixies also began in 1986 with Joey Santiago introducing Black Francis to the Bowie's music and punk rock, then the pair began to jam together.
David Bowie's influence continues nowadays, even among artists and acts of diverse genres and countries. Examples include Marilyn Manson (in fact, Bowie is their biggest influence), Boy George, Groove Armada (especially album Black Light), Spacehog, Neïmo, Arckid, Stacey Q, Buck-Tick, Lady Gaga, All the Pretty Horses (a Minnesota's transgender rock band), and many others. On November 2010, Bono Vox of U2 compared Bowie to Elvis Presley and said he was very influential on Britain and also in his generation and band. As biographer Thomas Forget adds, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."
Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality. For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he has been honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, two Grammy Awards and two BRIT Awards.
In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year. He declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003, stating: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."
Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time and the 23rd best singer of all time.
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.
Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:1990s singers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:Bisexual actors Category:Bisexual musicians Category:BRIT Award winners Category:British expatriates in Switzerland Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres * Category:Daytime Emmy Award winners Category:Decca Records artists Category:English baritones Category:English film actors Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English record producers Category:English rock musicians Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Glam rock Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:LGBT musicians from the United Kingdom Category:LGBT people from England Category:Musicians from London Category:Parlophone artists Category:People from Brixton Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Rykodisc artists Category:Saturn Award winners Category:Virgin Records artists
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| Name | Adam Lambert |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Adam Mitchel Lambert |
| Born | January 29, 1982Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Origin | San Diego, California, U.S. |
| Genre | Pop rock, pop The Times identified Lambert as one of the few openly gay mainstream pop artists to launch a career on a major label in the United States. |
| Name | Lambert, Adam |
| Alternative names | Glambert |
| Short description | Singer |
| Date of birth | January 29, 1982 |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | John Lennon |
|---|---|
| Img alt | A bearded, bespectacled man in his late twenties, with long black hair and wearing a loose-fitting pajama shirt, sings and plays an acoustic guitar. White flowers are visible behind and to the right of him. |
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | John Winston Lennon |
| Born | October 09, 1940Liverpool, England, UK |
| Died | December 08, 1980New York, New York, US |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, Mellotron, six-string bass, percussion |
| Genre | Rock, pop |
| Occupation | Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, artist, writer |
| Years active | 1957–1975, 1980 |
| Label | Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor |
| Associated acts | The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band |
| Notable instruments | Rickenbacker 325Epiphone CasinoGibson J-160EGibson Les Paul Junior |
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to his family, but re-emerged in 1980 with a new album, Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.
Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, his writing, his drawings, on film, and in interviews, and he became controversial through his political activism. He moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him, while his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement.
As of 2010, Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units, and as writer, co-writer or performer, he is responsible for 27 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all-time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Lennon was born in war-time England, on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, to Julia and Alfred Lennon, a merchant seaman who was away at the time of his son's birth. He was named John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother, but the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia—by then pregnant with another man's child—rejected the idea. After her sister, Mimi Smith, twice complained to Liverpool's Social Services, Julia handed the care of Lennon over to her. In July 1946, Lennon's father visited Smith and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them—with her partner at the time, 'Bobby' Dykins—and after a heated argument his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. It would be 20 years before he had contact with his father again.
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, he lived with his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, who had no children of their own, at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton. His aunt bought him volumes of short stories, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and when he was 11 years old he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, and taught him the banjo, playing "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino.
In September 1980 he talked about his family and his rebellious nature: }}
He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood. Seven years Lennon's senior, Parkes took him on trips, and to local cinemas. During the school holidays, Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, often travelling to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16." He was 14 years old when his uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955 (aged 52).
Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. From September 1952 to 1957, after passing his Eleven-Plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, and was described by Harvey at the time as, "A happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad." He often drew comical cartoons which appeared in his own self-made school magazine called The Daily Howl, but despite his artistic talent, his school reports were damning: "Certainly on the road to failure ... hopeless ... rather a clown in class ... wasting other pupils' time."
His mother bought him his first guitar in 1957, an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she "lent" her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house, and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. As Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, she hoped he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it". On 15 July 1958, when Lennon was 17 years old, his mother, walking home after visiting the Smiths' house, was struck by a car and killed.
Lennon failed all his GCE O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art only after his aunt and headmaster intervened. Once at the college, he started wearing Teddy Boy clothes and acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. As a result, he was excluded from the painting class, then the graphic arts course, and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class. He failed an annual exam, despite help from fellow student and future wife Cynthia Powell, and was "thrown out of the college before his final year."
McCartney says that Aunt Mimi: "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to Paul's brother Mike, McCartney's father was also disapproving, declaring Lennon would get his son "into trouble"; although he later allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the McCartneys' front room at 20 Forthlin Road. During this time, the 18-year-old Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", a UK top 10 hit for The Fourmost nearly five years later.
George Harrison joined the band as lead guitarist, even though Lennon thought Harrison (at 14 years old) was too young to join the band, so McCartney engineered a second audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played Raunchy for Lennon. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year The Beatles, engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, Germany, and desperately in need of a drummer, asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon was now 19, and his aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with him to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. Like the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug, as well as amphetamines, as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager from 1962, had no prior experience of artist management, but nevertheless had a strong influence on their early dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying, "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me". McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and drummer Ringo Starr replaced Best, completing the four-piece line-up that would endure until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached #17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, Twist and Shout. The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With few exceptions—one being the album title itself—Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that–to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised John: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest".
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK around the start of 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at his audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, moviemaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The Beatles received recognition from the British Establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1965.
" with The Beatles in 1967 to 400 million viewers of "Our World".]] Deprived of the routine of live performances after their final commercial concert in 1966, Lennon felt lost and considered leaving the band. Since his involuntary introduction to LSD in January, he had made increasing use of the drug, and was almost constantly under its influence for much of the year." According to biographer Ian MacDonald, Lennon's continuous experience with LSD during the year brought him "close to erasing his identity". 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by Time magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed Lennon's lyrics contrasting strongly with the simple love songs of the Lennon/McCartney's early years.
In August, after having been introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended a weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales, and were informed of Epstein's death during the seminar. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared". They later travelled to Maharishi's ashram in India for further guidance, where they composed most of the songs for The Beatles and Abbey Road.
The anti-war, black comedy How I Won the War, featuring Lennon's only appearance in a non–Beatles full-length film, was shown in cinemas in October 1967. McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's acclaimed, Carroll-inspired "I am the Walrus", was a success. With Epstein gone, the band members became increasingly involved in business activities, and in February 1968 they formed Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation comprising Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve, "artistic freedom within a business structure", but his increased drug experimentation and growing preoccupation with Yoko Ono, and McCartney's own marriage plans, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role, but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon approached Allen Klein, who had managed The Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. Klein was appointed as Apple’s chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr, but McCartney never signed the management contract.
At the end of 1968, Lennon featured in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (not released until 1996) in the role of a Dirty Mac band member. The supergroup, comprising Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell, also backed a vocal performance by Ono in the film. Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969, and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: (known more for its cover than for its music), and Wedding Album. In 1969 they formed The Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. In protest at Britain's involvement in the Nigerian Civil War, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen, though this had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. Between 1969 and 1970 Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance" (widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam-War anthem in 1969), "Cold Turkey" (documenting his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin) and "Instant Karma!".
Lennon left the Beatles in September 1969. He agreed not to inform the media while the band renegotiated their recording contract, and was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that." In later interviews with Rolling Stone, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." He spoke too of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison, and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"
With Lennon's next album, Imagine (1971), critical response was more guarded. Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant". The album's title track would become an anthem for anti-war movements, while another, "How Do You Sleep?", was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics from Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. However, Lennon softened his stance in the mid-70s and said he had written "How Do You Sleep?" about himself. He said in 1980: "I used my resentment against Paul ... to create a song ... not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta ... I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and the Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go 'round with those thoughts in my head all the time".
Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971, and in December released "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". To advertise the single, they paid for billboards in 12 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "WAR IS OVER—IF YOU WANT IT". The new year saw the Nixon Administration take what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war propaganda, embarking on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him: embroiled in a continuing legal battle, he was denied permanent residency in the US until 1976.
Recorded as a collaboration with Ono and with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory, Some Time in New York City was released in 1972. Containing songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland, and Lennon's problems obtaining a green card, the album was poorly received—unlistenable, according to one critic. "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", released as a US single from the album the same year, was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger". Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances.
In 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson soon made the headlines. Two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club in March, the first when Lennon placed a menstruation ‘towel’ on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress, and the second, two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats and Pang rented an L.A. beach house for all the musicians but after a month of further debauchery, with the recording sessions in chaos, Lennon moved to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than thirty years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).
Settled back in New York, Lennon recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it yielded his only number-one single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", featuring Elton John on backing vocals and piano. A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night"—a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted—reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There".
Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording. He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. The same month, Elton John topped the charts with his own cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals. Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. Soon afterwards, "Stand By Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar, and backed by his eight-piece band BOMF (introduced as "Etcetera"), Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand By Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine". The band wore masks on the backs of their heads, making them appear two-faced, a dig at Grade, with whom Lennon and McCartney had been in conflict because of his control of the Beatles' publishing company. (Dick James had sold his majority share to Grade in 1969.) During "Imagine", Lennon interjected the line "and no immigration too", a reference to his battle to remain in the United States.
He emerged from retirement in October 1980 with the single "(Just Like) Starting Over", followed the next month by the album Double Fantasy, which contained songs written during a journey to Bermuda on a 43-foot sailing boat the previous June, that reflected Lennon's fulfillment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey (released posthumously in 1984). Released jointly with Ono, Double Fantasy was not well received, drawing comments such as Melody Maker's "indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn".
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John," ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him." His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life; as of 2010, he remains in prison, having been repeatedly denied parole.
Recalling his reaction in July 1962 on learning that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married." The couple were married on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool. His marriage began just as Beatlemania took hold across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day, and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein, fearing that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his son until three days later.
Cynthia attributes the start of the marriage breakdown to LSD, and as a result, she felt that he slowly lost interest in her. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales, in 1967, for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolize the ending of their marriage. After arriving home at Kenwood, and finding Lennon with Ono, Cynthia left the house to stay with friends. Alexis Mardas later claimed to have slept with her that night, and a few weeks later he informed her that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian on grounds of her adultery with him. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to her divorcing him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court, with Lennon giving her £100,000, and custody of Julian.
Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't." During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".
Lennon's first son, Julian, was born as his commitments with the Beatles intensified at the height of Beatlemania during his marriage to Cynthia. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalls how some four years later, as a small child in Weybridge, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles' song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song." McCartney corroborated Lennon's explanation that Julian innocently came up with the name. Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."
Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono's 1971 move to New York, Julian would not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, it was arranged for him (and his mother) to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."
In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean was a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to re-establish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future." After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.
Two versions exist of how Lennon met Ono. According to the first, on 9 November 1966 Lennon went to the Indica gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of the Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage was working on, Notations, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word".
Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn." When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
During Lennon's last two years in the Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, made famous three months earlier by the Beatles' Let It Be rooftop concert. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' last album, Abbey Road. To escape the acrimony of the band's break-up, Ono suggested they move permanently to New York, which they did on 31 August 1971. They first lived in the St. Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue, East 55th Street, then moved to a street-level flat at 105 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, on 16 October 1971. After a robbery, they relocated to the more secure Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street, in May 1973.
According to author Albert Goldman, Ono was regarded by Lennon as an "almost magical being" who could solve all his problems for him, but this was a "grand illusion", and she openly cheated on him with gigolos. Eventually, writes Goldman, "both he and Yoko were burnt out from years of hard drugs, overwork, emotional breakdowns, quack cures, and bizarre diets, to say nothing of the effects of living constantly in the glare of the mass media." After their separation, "no longer collaborating as a team, they remained in constant communication. ... No longer able to live together, they found that they couldn’t live apart either."
On moving to New York, they "prepared a spare room" in their newly rented apartment for Julian to visit. Lennon, hitherto inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he was refusing to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono—who said she had found a cure for smoking—but after the meeting failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her Lennon was unavailable, being exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment, stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.
Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him through the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974 even played music together again, before growing apart once more. Lennon said that during McCartney's final visit, in April 1976, they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 cash offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. The pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with...only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono....That ain't bad picking."
Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his five-year career break he was content to sit back so long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre "product". When McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, the year Lennon returned to the studio and the last year of his life, he took notice. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he couldn't get the tune out of his head. Asked the same year whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."
Later that year, Lennon and Ono supported efforts by the family of James Hanratty, hanged for murder in 1962, to prove his innocence. Those who had condemned Hanratty were, according to Lennon, "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets. ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene." In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld.
Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another peace activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, Michigan State had drastically reduced the penalties for Sinclair’s crimes and three days after the rally, he was released on bail. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).
Following the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, in which 27 civil rights protesters were shot by the British Army during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting England's actions in the Northern Irish political situation on their Some Time in New York City album: "Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5 suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with a pro-IRA slant.
According to FBI surveillance reports (and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006) Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary since he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".
John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country’s so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country’s got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York chapter of the American Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem", which comprised three seconds of silence. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, Lennon received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail—until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".
In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at the Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together to date. After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986); Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words; and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.
As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes that Lennon was, "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." David Stuart Ryan notes Lennon's vocal delivery to range from, "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too describes contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair" Music historian Ben Urish recalls hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today." Whilst for music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."
Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2010, on what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday, the John Lennon Peace Monument was unveiled in Chavasse Park, Liverpool, by Cynthia and Julian Lennon. The sculpture entitled ‘Peace & Harmony’ exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription “Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980”.
The Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer Lennon has had 27 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. Double Fantasy, released shortly before his death, and his best-selling, post-Beatles studio album at three million shipments in the US, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music went to Lennon. Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons". Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and 38th of "The Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time", and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
, Liverpool]]
Category:1940 births Category:1980 deaths Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:Apple Records artists Category:Alumni of Quarry Bank High School Category:Best Original Music Score Academy Award winners Category:BRIT Award winners Category:British anti-war activists Category:British people murdered abroad Category:Capitol Records artists Category:COINTELPRO targets Category:Critics of religions or philosophies Category:Deaths by firearm in New York Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English experimental musicians Category:English film actors Category:English-language singers Category:English male singers Category:English murder victims Category:English pacifists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English rock guitarists Category:English rock pianists Category:English rock singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Feminist artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Murdered musicians Category:Musicians from Liverpool Category:Nonviolence advocates Category:People convicted of drug offenses Category:People murdered in New York Category:Plastic Ono Band members Category:Religious skeptics Category:Rhythm guitarists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:The Beatles members Category:The Dirty Mac Category:The Quarrymen members Category:Yoko Ono
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| Name | Scott Weiland |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Scott Richard Kline |
| Born | October 27, 1967 |
| Origin | San Jose, California, U.S. |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, keyboards, piano, synthesizer, organ, percussion |
| Genre | Alternative rock, hard rock, grunge, heavy metal |
| Occupation | Musician, singer-songwriter |
| Years active | 1986–present |
| Label | Atlantic |
| Associated acts | Stone Temple PilotsVelvet RevolverCamp FreddyThe Magnificent BastardsThe Wondergirls |
| Url | scottweiland.com |
Weiland wrote the band's lyrics and performed vocals. In 1992, they released their first album, Core, spawning four hits ("Sex Type Thing", "Wicked Garden", "Creep", and "Plush") and leading them to becoming one of the most influential bands of the grunge movement, the music genre that was started in Seattle in the late eighties and became rock and roll's central movement in the early-mid 1990s. The band was widely accused of imitating bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana in an attempt to cash in on the scene's burgeoning popularity. Critics also pointed out that Weiland's vocal style at the time was very similar to that of Layne Staley's and Eddie Vedder's. Weiland has rejected such comparisons, however, citing Jim Morrison and David Bowie as more influential on his vocal techniques and sound. Despite negative reviews from critics, Core was extremely successful, eventually being certified 8x platinum by the RIAA. In 1994, Weiland and STP released their second record, Purple, which saw the development of a more distinctive identity for the band. While still a clear continuation of their previous techniques, the album featured a more "classic rock" sound, and had a mixture of punk, bossa nova, and acoustic songs. Like Core, Purple was a big success for the band, spawning three hit singles ("Big Empty", "Vasoline", and "Interstate Love Song") and selling over 6 million copies. The year prior, STP toured with the Butthole Surfers and Weiland developed a heroin addiction, claiming Butthole Surfers singer Gibby Haynes introduced him to heroin, which Gibby denies.
In 1995, Weiland was caught and convicted of buying crack cocaine. He was sentenced to one year's probation. Issues with drug use did not clear up after his sentence. As his drug problems increased, Weiland moved into a hotel for two months with Courtney Love and claimed to have "shot drugs the whole time" with her. STP was forced to cancel most of their 1996-1997 tour in support of their third release, Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop. Although Tiny Music... was certified 2x platinum, the canceled tour caused the album to fall quickly off the charts. STP went on a hiatus soon after the album was released, with Weiland focusing on a solo career before serving a stint in jail for heroin possession.
, Brazil, December 12, 2010.]]
His period in jail had apparently helped to wean him from his habit, and once released, he rejoined Stone Temple Pilots. In 1999, the band released No. 4. The album contained the hit single "Sour Girl" which featured a strange, surreal music video with Sarah Michelle Gellar. That same year, Weiland also recorded two songs with the short-lived supergroup The Wondergirls.
In November 2000, Weiland was invited to perform on the show VH1 Storytellers with the surviving members of The Doors. Weiland did vocals on two Doors songs, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" and "Five to One". That same month Stone Temple Pilots appeared on The Doors tribute CD, Stoned Immaculate with their own rendition of "Break On Through" as the lead track.
In late 2001, Weiland was arrested on domestic violence charges in Las Vegas, apparently for shoving his wife, Mary Forsberg. However, the charges were eventually deferred upon the couple agreeing to counseling. Soon after, Forsberg filed for divorce but the couple eventually reconciled. Weiland's career also took a hit, with an altercation between Weiland and Dean DeLeo on the final gig of STP's Shangri-La Dee Da tour, leading to the band's official demise with much of the speculation surrounding Weiland's inability to balance personal issues.
In 2008, Stone Temple Pilots announced a 73-date U.S. tour on April 7 and performed together for the first time since 2002. The reunion tour kicked off at the Rock on the Range festival on May 17, 2008. According to Dean DeLeo, steps toward a Stone Temple Pilots reunion started with a simple phone call from Weiland's wife. She invited the DeLeo brothers to play at a private beach party, which led to the reconciliation of Weiland and the DeLeo brothers. However, Weiland stated in a 2010 radio interview to promote the band's self-titled release that the reunion was the result of Dean calling him and asking if he'd be interested in reuniting the band to headline the Coachella Festival.
On April 28, 2008, Weiland was sentenced to 192 hours in county jail for his November 2007 DUI. He was also required to complete an 18-month alcohol program, as well as pay $2000 in fines, and will be on probation for four years. Weiland entered a Los Angeles County jail on May 12, but was released later that same day.
STP's reunion tour was a success, and the band continued to tour throughout 2009 and began recording its sixth studio album. STP's first album since 2001, Stone Temple Pilots, was released on May 25, 2010.
In September 2010, STP announced it was rescheduling several U.S. tour dates so that the band could take a "short break." This announcement comes a few days after Weiland said the following at a show in Houston, Texas: "I started drinking again. My brother died, I got divorced (from) my wife, and my whole world basically spun around. So you know what? I'm going to take care of myself because that's what I need to take care of. Instead of just having a few shows, I want to have a whole hell of a lot of shows."
Weiland would re-record a longer version of "Mockingbird Girl" for his first solo album 12 Bar Blues in 1998,
Weiland rejoined Stone Temple Pilots in the fall of 1995, and The Magnificent Bastards quietly disbanded without releasing a full LP.
On November 25, 2008, Weiland released his second solo album, "Happy" in Galoshes, produced by Weiland and songwriting-producing partner Doug Grean. Weiland went on tour in early 2009 to promote the album.
On November 17, 2009, Weiland released a cover of the classic Christmas song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to iTunes.
Weiland has stated that he has plans for a third solo album.
Around this time, Weiland was asked by former Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan to front a band with Duff and the former GNR members Slash and Matt Sorum, as well as Dave Kushner. The band used the working title "The Project". Slash initially suggested the name "Revolver". Weiland later suggested the name "Black Velvet Revolver", and eventually the name was shortened to "Velvet Revolver", after a suggestion by Slash.
Velvet Revolver's debut album Contraband was released in June 2004 to much success. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and has sold over three million copies worldwide to date. Two of the album's songs, "Slither" and "Fall to Pieces", reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The song "Slither" also won a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal in 2005, an award Weiland had won previously with STP for the song "Plush" in 1994. At the 2005 Grammy Awards, Weiland (along with the rest of Velvet Revolver) performed the Beatles song "Across the Universe" along with Bono, Brian Wilson, Norah Jones, Stevie Wonder, Steven Tyler, Billie Joe Armstrong, Alison Krauss, and Alicia Keys.
That same year, Weiland appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly and performed a new solo song, "The Man I Didn't Know", a country-style ballad that deals with his relationship with his father. "The Man I Didn't Know" would go on to appear on the deluxe edition of Weiland's second solo album in 2008.
Velvet Revolver released their second album, Libertad, on July 3, 2007. Libertad, along with Stone Temple Pilots's Core and Stone Temple Pilots, are the only albums Weiland has recorded sober. In December 2007 Weiland was arrested and charged with DUI, his first arrest in over four years (since October 27, 2003). On February 7, 2008, Blabbermouth.net officially reported that Weiland checked himself into rehab. This resulted in the cancellation of Velvet Revolver's Australian tour (which had initially been postponed for two months already). The article does not mention why Weiland, who has claimed sobriety since 2003, entered the facility. He left rehab in early March, according to his lawyer.
In 2007, Dean DeLeo discussed with Weiland an offer from a concert promoter to headline several summer festivals. Weiland accepted and said he had cleared the brief tour with his Velvet Revolver bandmates. He explained, "everything was cool. Then it wasn't", and stated that the rest of the band stopped talking to him.
On March 20, 2008, Weiland revealed at Velvet Revolver's show in Glasgow that this would be the band's final tour. Matt Sorum posted a message on his website the next day discussing the band's situation and said, "You could tell who was unhappy last night," and "some people in this business don't realize how great of a life they have." Weiland shot back by telling Blabbermouth.net, "Well, first of all, the state of my family affairs is really none of his business, since he is too immature to have a real relationship, let alone children. So don't attempt to stand in a man's shoes when you haven't walked his path." Slash hinted in an interview with Classic Rock magazine that, contrary to Weiland's assertions, Velvet Revolver will continue beyond its current tour. When asked "With Scott singing?", Slash replied "I have no comment on that", and laughed. On Tuesday, April 1, it was announced by a number of media outlets that Weiland would no longer be in Velvet Revolver.
In a Spin magazine interview Weiland revealed that he's also not ruling out a Velvet Revolver reunion. "Slash and I always got on pretty well," he says. "So who knows?"
In March 2010, Weiland revealed in an interview that "the wives and 'petty jealousies'" had led to the downfall of Velvet Revolver.
Weiland and his son Noah were featured on comedian David Spade's The Showbiz Show with David Spade during a comedy sketch about discouraging music file sharing in 2005. Noah has a line during the sketch in which he asks a little girl, "Please buy my daddy's album so I can have food to eat".
Weiland has also confirmed he is writing his autobiography, Not Dead & Not for Sale, with David Ritz. The book, originally expected in February 2010, is now set for release March 8, 2011.
On December 19, 2008 Weiland signed a publishing deal with Bug Music, allowing Weiland to "receive funding to pursue the development of creative projects and writers for Bug Music through his co-founded label, Softdrive Records." The deal includes Weiland's share of the Stone Temple Pilots catalog and future solo projects.
On January 21, 2009 Weiland announced the launch of his clothing line, Weiland for English Laundry, in partnership with designer Christopher Wicks.
It was announced in March 2009 that VH1 will begin airing new episodes of the popular documentary series Behind the Music, which originally ran from 1997 to 2006. Weiland, along with rapper Lil Wayne, have both signed on for their own episodes. However, for unknown reasons, Weiland's episode has since been indefinitely shelved.
On February 25, 2010, Billboard reported that Weiland will appear on Carlos Santana's album , performing a cover of the Rolling Stones song "Can't You Hear Me Knocking." The album was released on September 21st of the same year.
Weiland's younger brother Michael died of a drug overdose in early 2007. The Velvet Revolver songs "For a Brother" and "Pills, Demons, & Etc" from the album Libertad are about Michael. Weiland stated in an interview with MTV News in November 2008 that several songs on "Happy" in Galoshes were inspired by the death of his brother and his separation from Mary. In the same article, MTV News reported that Weiland has not done heroin since December 5, 2002. Weiland also admitted that he went through "a very short binge with coke" in late 2007.
Weiland has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, yet according to an interview with VH1.com, he is not under medication, consequently suffering from mood swings. Weiland had a brief friendship with Courtney Love around 1998 and he admitted they used drugs together.
Weiland is a Notre Dame football fan, as his stepfather is an alumnus. In September 2006, Weiland performed at the University of Notre Dame's Legends Restaurant on the night before a football game. He sang several of his solo songs, as well as "Interstate Love Song" and a cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here".
;Soundtrack
Category:1967 births Category:Living people Category:American adoptees Category:American rock singers Category:American male singers Category:People with bipolar disorder Category:American Roman Catholics Category:People from San Jose, California Category:People from San Diego, California Category:People from Santa Cruz, California Category:Singers from California Category:Grunge musicians Category:Stone Temple Pilots members Category:Velvet Revolver members Category:American fashion designers
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| Name | Happy Rhodes |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Kimberley Tyler Rhodes |
| Born | August 9, 1965Poughkeepsie New York, US |
| Origin | Albany New York, US |
| Instrument | Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards |
| Genre | Alternative rockArt rockAcousticPop rock |
| Occupation | Musician, Vocalist, Songwriter |
| Years active | 1984–present |
| Associated acts | Project Lo, Bartlett/Rhodes |
| Url | http://www.auntiesocialmusic.com/ |
Happy Rhodes (born Kimberley Tyler Rhodes; August 9, 1965) is an American singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and electronic musician with a four-octave vocal range. She has released 11 albums since 1986.
Tessitore introduced Rhodes to Kevin Bartlett, a musician who had his own record label, Aural Gratification, and he urged her to gather up all the songs that she had recorded, to be released on cassette. She had enough songs to release three cassettes at the same time in 1986, Rhodes Vol. I, Rhodes Vol. II, and Rearmament. In 1987, she released the cassette of Ecto. Her first CD release was Warpaint, in 1991. The first four albums were only available on hand-dubbed cassettes until they were re-released on CD in 1992. For the CD releases, Rhodes Vol. I was re-named Rhodes I, and Rhodes Vol. II was re-named Rhodes II. Each of the CD re-releases contained bonus tracks not on the original cassettes. Aural Gratification released nine Happy Rhodes albums between 1986 and 1995, including Equipoise and RhodeSongs in 1993, Building The Colossus in 1994 and The Keep in 1995. Rhodes left Aural Gratification in 1998.
Rhodes' 10th album, Many Worlds Are Born Tonight, was released in August 1998 by Samson Music, a label founded by Norm Waitt Jr., brother of Ted Waitt, co-founder of the Gateway Computer company. Rhodes was dropped from Samson when the label decided to concentrate on other genres of music and Samson transferred rights to the material back to Rhodes, as well as unsold product.
In 2001 Rhodes recorded an 11th album, called Find Me, which was released October 19, 2007.
Rhodes married musician Bob Muller in 2006 and they currently live on a farm in central upstate New York.
Rhodes has cited Bach's Air on a G String as her favorite piece of music.
Many younger artists have cited Rhodes as an influence on their own music and/or outlook, including Noe Venable, Robert German, and Lisse Kathe.
Her high voice can sound very similar to Kate Bush, and her highest recorded sung vocal phrase is D5, one octave above middle C (C4) in a live performance of the Queen song "Lily of the Valley".
She has sung higher notes as background vocals, singing nonsense syllables like "ah" and "la". Her highest example of this type of singing is in her song "Runners" from her album Equipoise, where she hits G-Sharp6, two octaves above middle C (C4).
Her low voice can sound similar to Annie Lennox, and her lowest recorded note is A2, one octave below middle C, in her song "Charlie" on her album Find Me.
Her songs "When the Rain Came Down" on the album Ecto, and "Winter" on Many Worlds Are Born Tonight exhibit this range.
A2 to G-Sharp6 (aka A-Flat6) gives Rhodes a total range of 4 octaves.
In 2001, West Coast fans organized "Ectofest West" in Santa Cruz, California, held on June 9, 2001 at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Rhodes flew to California to perform but on the day of the concert she accidentally cut the ring finger on her fret hand while using a Leatherman tool, and severed the deep flexor tendon, as well as causing nerve damage. She was taken to the hospital where the hand was temporarily treated and bandaged. Rhodes performed 12 songs that evening sans guitar, relying on bandmates Eric Nicholas, Carl Adami and Bob Muller to fill in her parts. Rhodes had surgery on the finger when she returned from California and underwent physical therapy so she could play the guitar again. Ectofest West is the only time Rhodes has performed in front of an audience west of Chicago. Other performers at the festival were Cyoakha Grace, Jill Tracy and Veda Hille. Two Loons for Tea was scheduled to play but the band was stranded in Houston during a hurricane, and was not able to get to Santa Cruz in time. Rhodes was scheduled to play Ectofest 2001 on August 25, 2001 in Danbury, CT but had to bow out because of her injury. Performers at that show were Edie Carey, Mila Drumke, Trina Hamlin, Jargon Society, Rachael Sage and Molly Zenobia. 2001's show was the last Ectofest until the 2007 Ectofest with Happy Rhodes, Noe Venable and Casey Desmond on September 8, 2007, at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. The show sold out 3 weeks in advance, with fans traveling from all over the United States and also Scotland and Germany.
Much of the attention Rhodes has received has been via less traditional routes:
In 2001 Rhodes recorded a new album, Find Me, but it was not released until 2007, although a limited-edition CD sampler consisting of 8 songs - Fall, Charlie, The Chosen One, Can't Let Go, One And Many, Find Me, Here And Hereafter and She Won't Go was sold at her 2005 concert. The album includes three additional songs - Treehouse, Little Brother and Queen. One additional song, Shutdown, was recorded for the album but is not on the official release.
Musicians on Find Me include guitarist Bon Lozaga and bassist Hansford Rowe of Gongzilla, bassist Carl Adami, guitarists Ted Kumpel and Jon Cather and pianist Rob Schwimmer.
Category:1965 births Category:Living people Category:American electronic musicians Category:American female guitarists Category:American keyboardists Category:American female singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:People from Poughkeepsie, New York
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
