I used to live on Staten Island and work out at a YMCA gym there. One day about ten years ago David Johansen walked in. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket that looked like it weighed more than he did. He made a slow circle around the exercise equipment, returned to the parking lot, and drove away. Never saw him again.
David Johansen should have made an exercise video: The Rock Star Workout: Make a slow circle around the exercise equipment then out to the parking lot for a smoke to contemplate upon how "Hope I die before I get old" is a philosophy to live by.
I’ve been meaning to watch the documentary “New York Doll” about band mate Arthur Kane, who later in life converted to Mormonism. This during a time when Mormons were extremely straight-laced, long before the fifth column of Furries gained influence.
When my kids were little, I would sometimes come home from work and we’d blast Hot, Hot, Hot! And do a little conga line around the house. So I owe Mr Johansen a great deal for those happy moments. May perpetual light shine upon him.
I saw him many times at Tramps and Bottom Line as Buster. He always put on a great show. In 2019 I was living near The Carlyle and he was appearing there. I went a little bit into the show. A little more subdued, but he was still funny. He has good comic timing (you can google him appearing in Carson). After the show I went to his table where he’s sitting with his wife and friends. I thanked him and told him years ago, about 1986, he was telling a joke at Tramps, the punch line of which involved the famous old tv commercial with English actor John Williams saying “Polovetsian Dance No. 2” in a posh accent. I was drunk, knew the line and blurted it out, instantly regretting the asshole move. He gave me a pissed look back then but let it go.
He looked at me, probably chagrined he had such ancient dorky fans but said grandly, “You’re absolved, kid.”
You feel it to, that some stars are disappointed to learn how uncool their fans are? I met Jello Biafra who didn't seem pleased. I can't remember if I told him how much guys in my fraternity liked his work or if I just said it in my head.
I asked Peter Wolf for a copy of the Boston Globe sports pages after he finished it. This was Sunday morning at an outdoor cafe. He was alone and I was with a very pretty BU gal. He gave it to me grudgingly. She was mortified.
Don't over interpret marriage and reproduction as indicators of sexual orientation. My personal experience with male and female homosexuals -- per how they self-identify to me in person -- is that most of them have been married and have children and (when they're old enough) grandchildren. The ones who seem to be genuinely strictly homosexual men get crushes on my female friends who are hot chicks.
Morrissey, a probably mostly gay rock star, is a huge New York Dolls fan. On his recent tour there is a a short film prior to the show that is basically a montage of various cultural figures he clearly prizes and Johansen and the NYD get more than passing attention. Personally I cannot recall any of the band’s songs or lyrics but I might need to dive into that as an appreciator of Morrissey.
Morrissey’s slightly obsessive letters to British music magazines praising the Dolls and dissing acts like the Ramones and Sex Pistols that took a sliver of inspiration from them:
Clearly David Johansen struck something very deep in the young Mancunian’s breast… but did he also like them so much because they showed you could gain musical notoriety without much musical talent, and resented others like Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone who drew the same lesson?
This chronological website is also funny because it shows the Dolls’ act consistently failing to live up to their reputations which precede them. Here is a representative review from Holland:
“Musically these five Americans, made up and partly dressed in women's clothing, were nothing. Their show was also no more than that of a starting housewives orchestra, which plunges into pop music. It remains incomprehensible that this group is doing so well with critics and with record companies alike. A singer without any volume. A bass player who apparently cannot tune his instrument. Two guitarists who can only play three chords on their guitar and a drumming lumberjack are presented as if they are the Rolling Stones of the 70s. However, the audience at the Paradiso clearly didn't appreciate them. Witness were the meager applause drowned out by whistling."
Interesting article and so many places you could take the conversation. It’s always fascinated me regarding the link between image and music. Do us normies actually respond to how a singer presents himself or the music? How would the public have responded if David Bowie for example had sung Bruce Springsteen‘s catalog and vice versa? glam rock sounds to me like a crazy idea, then again as a kid I wouldn’t even have noticed.
Springsteen is straight, but he admits he's not as macho as his stage character, who is modeled on his chud dad, while he personally takes after his artsy mom.
Similarly, if you told teens in 1975 that in the later 1980s the biggest rock band in the world, U2, would be comprised of wholesome evangelical Christians, they would have scoffed.
Springsteen was arrested (and charged!) for DUI on his motorcycle a few years ago. The incident was pretty much ignored in the media. He was reported to have been observed swigging from a bottle of tequila offered to him by someone. The incident took place in a notorious gay cruising area in north Jersey, which surprised even me.
I’m pretty sure he’s straight, but when I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not unicorns.
Interestingly to Morrissey in 1975 it seemed there was a clear connection between the New York Dolls and Springsteen, not a genealogy many would draw today:
“It is often forgotten that the Dolls were the beginning of a whole new music scene in America which has produced such rarities as Kiss, Aerosmith, The Tubes, Wayne County, the Dictators, and the current genius, Bruce Springsteen“
When I was a kid every time I saw a good band on TV I would wonder, 'why are they dressed like that'? I found it distracting. Then one day, Nirvana (literally the band Nirvana) great music and they dressed on stage like they couldn't be arsed to change out of their street clothes (which were pretty much the 'outfits' I wore to high school). Then, inevitably, that became a fashion for a while as I shook my head.
My guitar player was in a professional band in the 1970s and often tells the story of their manager wanting to take them to the next level. To do so they would have to wear rock costumes-- platform shoes and whatever else rock stars wore at the time. They declined and went no higher. Was it the lack of cool clothes?
I kind of get it. Live music is a visual experience too. Orchestras wear tuxedoes. R&B guys do synchronized dance moves in glittery jackets. Maybe it doesn't seem like a show to us without costumes?
Recently, saw a Tom Snyder interview of Robert Blake, who recalled sitting around at lunch on a movie set with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. A writer asked Tracy how he liked working at MGM and he said, "Gable and I love it. Everybody else here is queer so we get all the girls."
I can vaguely recall a theory that Spencer Tracy was gay and that his at-the-time covered up affair with Katharine Hepburn was to cover up that she was lesbian.
My theory was that Kate maybe could have been a lesbian but ... Spencer Tracy!
There's theories out there that Barbara Stanwyck was privately lesbian. She had an abortion at 15. She was married to a very controlling man named Frank Fay in the 20s. She had an affair with Frank Capra in the late 20s and he directed her in several films. She married Robert Taylor and probably couldn't have children because of her abortion. She had an affair with the much younger Robert Wagner in the 50s. I don't think Barbara Stanwyck was a lesbian but I can't prove it.
Frank Fay was an interesting historical character. He was one of the first (maybe the first) standup comedians, and also a Nazi loving antisemite, not the best choice for a long career in show biz. He was an alcoholic and an asshole and his marriage to Stanwyck is often cited as the inspiration for "A Star is Born".
Interesting to know. A reason Barbara Stanwyck didn't marry Frank Capra was that she was afraid Capra would be as controlling as Fay. Barbara and Capra never married but had total respect for each other. Capra had Barbara star in "Meet John Doe" long after they were no longer a romantic item.
Katharine Hepburn had an affair with John Ford around 1940 and she helped get him the directorships of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "How Green Was My Valley." Ford was big pals with Spencer Tracy in the 30s and often would he'd go out on Ford's boat. John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Ward Bond were often part of the Ford boating society before the war.
The imbalance in sports participation by sexual orientation is extremely large to anyone who has eyes.
I think these are interesting social science questions and fieldwork is not very hard. Just send out some people with clipboards to amateur games on weekday evenings and ask players a dozen or so questions including sexual orientation.
None of the tens of thousands of PhD social science researchers in US academia ever seems to do this. I assume funding would be unavailable and/or journals won’t publish results.
I read once that as bad at throwing as girls are, they are even worse at dodging things that are thrown at them. This might not survive the reproducibility crisis in the social sciences, but from an evolutionary point of view I find it amusing.
Female soccer players are quite skilled but lack of power and pace makes it a lot more sluggish than the men’s game.
But female goalkeepers are comically slow to react. Elite professional keepers in the women’s game are worse than amateur men playing on a damp Sunday morning.
In the 70s it was not wise to be publicly homosexual. There were hints about Elton John, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. John and Mercury were outed in the 80s and I'm still not sure about Bowie although he died married. I remember how repulsed people were when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shot tongues at each other on Saturday Night Live circa 1978. Both were heterosexual but very, very left-wing. Perhaps their sympathy was a sign of things to come within leftist politics. Closeted Barney Frank was elected to office in 1980.
The group of homosexual rock musicians that our post provides is rather small and most I don't even know. I enjoyed the B-52s but Ricky Wilson was not as famous as the two gal singers, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, and the homosexual male singer, Fred Schneider. Schneider didn't out himself until much later.
I was about to write that the main Violent Femmes album was full of songs that were obviously about a teenage boy obsessing over a girl...then it occurred to me I don't recall if the sex was ever mentioned and he does refer to the object of his desire as "big hands" in 'blister in the sun" but I still always assumed it was a girl with big hands, for a girl.
The drummer was straight. Cindy Wilson was straight. Kate Pierson moved from heterosexuality to homosexuality mid-life. Not sure what that means and I don't really want to know. Apparently, Ricky Wilson never told his sister Cindy that he was dying of AIDS until a few days before his death.
What is the evidence that Jagger or Richards was ever “very, very left-wing”? That they fled to France and the USA to avoid the UK’s very high tax rates of the late 60s/early 70s?
Jagger did go to the London School of Economics, a left-wing university. Many of the topics in their songs were leftist. For instance, "Heartbreaker" is definitely anti-cop and sympathetic to criminals.
There's a semi-separate category of, say, 19 year old proto-stars possibly indulging gay music industry powerbrokers' lusts until the contract is signed and they can get back to chasing girls.
Sure, that but also the rock stars of the era were going for all out transgressive Libertinism, which necessarily included a healthy dose of gender-bending homoeroticism. You get the feeling their hearts weren’t really into the gay stuff, though. Huge exception being Lou Reed who really seemed to enjoy the company of sleazy downtown Factory-adjacent transvestites.
Although “enjoying the company of” also seemed to include some measure of cruelty and sexual violence. And he ended up in a long term relationship with “weird” theater dork Lori Anderson. Imagine their pillow talk!
There’s an early ‘70s interview with Lester Bangs where he says flat out pretending you’re bi just to be glam doesn’t mean shit unless you are willing to suck cock.
"Mas Que Nada" by Sergio Mendes is a toe-tapper. The Black Eyed Peas had a hit with a rap/cover version (English verses, Portuguese refrain). I heard it on KCRW of Santa Monica, trusted radio station of music supervisors everywhere.
Long-time fan, am I, of Legião Urbana, Renato Russo’s band. And yet I wouldn’t try to recommend any one song or album of it or him to anybody. You really have to have followed Brazilian culture for decades. The country is self-sufficient in music, although it has never been hostile to outside material. One of those rare nations that does its own thing and feels inferior to no one. Because it isn’t. In this arena anyway.
Only very recently have I detected oldies on Brazilian radio. I remain unsure why – maybe it has simply taken this long for a certain cohort to age? And having aged, having money that hasn't been decimated by inflation? Could be that simple.
Thanks. That's what I've vaguely felt about Brazilian music: it's its own separate thing that takes a sizable investment of time for American to learn to appreciate. And, yeah, it's good that there is a huge country outside of the path of the American pop culture juggernaut.
Reed was married 3 times, bu once was in a long term relationship with a trans woman. He was married to Laurie Anderson when he died. I think he had shock treament as a teen at his parents' instigation, to cure him of the gayness. Although his sister says not so, it's just what the doctors at the time said he needed to cure him of anxiety, depression and other mental and behavioral issues.
Boys who like to play dress-up tend to be homos and boys who like to play guitar don't. Obviously, however, there are exceptions like Alice Cooper, Kiss, and apparently David Johansen.
Given a different recent death, another interesting question would be, why are there so many former military types (enlisted) who become actors of the seriously heterosexual kind (e.g. Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, more recently, Adam Driver, et al.)?
Similarly, it was not uncommon in the second half of the 20th Century for football players to become movie or TV stars. There's a lot of demand for big tough guys on screen.
I used to live on Staten Island and work out at a YMCA gym there. One day about ten years ago David Johansen walked in. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket that looked like it weighed more than he did. He made a slow circle around the exercise equipment, returned to the parking lot, and drove away. Never saw him again.
David Johansen should have made an exercise video: The Rock Star Workout: Make a slow circle around the exercise equipment then out to the parking lot for a smoke to contemplate upon how "Hope I die before I get old" is a philosophy to live by.
It reminded me of the probably fictional Robert Maynard Hutchins quote: "Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down and wait for it to pass."
Sounds like the kind of witticism that, over enough time, gets attributed to Oscar Wilde.
I’ve been meaning to watch the documentary “New York Doll” about band mate Arthur Kane, who later in life converted to Mormonism. This during a time when Mormons were extremely straight-laced, long before the fifth column of Furries gained influence.
Scorsese has a Johansen doc that came out last year.
When my kids were little, I would sometimes come home from work and we’d blast Hot, Hot, Hot! And do a little conga line around the house. So I owe Mr Johansen a great deal for those happy moments. May perpetual light shine upon him.
I saw him many times at Tramps and Bottom Line as Buster. He always put on a great show. In 2019 I was living near The Carlyle and he was appearing there. I went a little bit into the show. A little more subdued, but he was still funny. He has good comic timing (you can google him appearing in Carson). After the show I went to his table where he’s sitting with his wife and friends. I thanked him and told him years ago, about 1986, he was telling a joke at Tramps, the punch line of which involved the famous old tv commercial with English actor John Williams saying “Polovetsian Dance No. 2” in a posh accent. I was drunk, knew the line and blurted it out, instantly regretting the asshole move. He gave me a pissed look back then but let it go.
He looked at me, probably chagrined he had such ancient dorky fans but said grandly, “You’re absolved, kid.”
You feel it to, that some stars are disappointed to learn how uncool their fans are? I met Jello Biafra who didn't seem pleased. I can't remember if I told him how much guys in my fraternity liked his work or if I just said it in my head.
I asked Peter Wolf for a copy of the Boston Globe sports pages after he finished it. This was Sunday morning at an outdoor cafe. He was alone and I was with a very pretty BU gal. He gave it to me grudgingly. She was mortified.
why and why I wonder. I guess if no one ever asked before it just seems like a stranger begging
Don't over interpret marriage and reproduction as indicators of sexual orientation. My personal experience with male and female homosexuals -- per how they self-identify to me in person -- is that most of them have been married and have children and (when they're old enough) grandchildren. The ones who seem to be genuinely strictly homosexual men get crushes on my female friends who are hot chicks.
Morrissey, a probably mostly gay rock star, is a huge New York Dolls fan. On his recent tour there is a a short film prior to the show that is basically a montage of various cultural figures he clearly prizes and Johansen and the NYD get more than passing attention. Personally I cannot recall any of the band’s songs or lyrics but I might need to dive into that as an appreciator of Morrissey.
The NYT obituary says that as a teenager, Morrissey was the president of the UK branch of the New York Dolls fan club.
Morrissey’s slightly obsessive letters to British music magazines praising the Dolls and dissing acts like the Ramones and Sex Pistols that took a sliver of inspiration from them:
http://www.passionsjustlikemine.com/magazines-presmiths.htm
Clearly David Johansen struck something very deep in the young Mancunian’s breast… but did he also like them so much because they showed you could gain musical notoriety without much musical talent, and resented others like Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone who drew the same lesson?
This chronological website is also funny because it shows the Dolls’ act consistently failing to live up to their reputations which precede them. Here is a representative review from Holland:
“Musically these five Americans, made up and partly dressed in women's clothing, were nothing. Their show was also no more than that of a starting housewives orchestra, which plunges into pop music. It remains incomprehensible that this group is doing so well with critics and with record companies alike. A singer without any volume. A bass player who apparently cannot tune his instrument. Two guitarists who can only play three chords on their guitar and a drumming lumberjack are presented as if they are the Rolling Stones of the 70s. However, the audience at the Paradiso clearly didn't appreciate them. Witness were the meager applause drowned out by whistling."
https://fromthearchives.com/nyd/chronology.html
Now we know what Fred Astaire looks like backwards in high heels.
You slipped right by Neil Sedaka, who's shockingly alive and married since 1962.
I was going to suggest the lead singer of Simply Red, but he runs a hunting and fishing business with his wife, which sounds très gay.
There are no known homosexuals in hunting and fishing.
Interesting article and so many places you could take the conversation. It’s always fascinated me regarding the link between image and music. Do us normies actually respond to how a singer presents himself or the music? How would the public have responded if David Bowie for example had sung Bruce Springsteen‘s catalog and vice versa? glam rock sounds to me like a crazy idea, then again as a kid I wouldn’t even have noticed.
Springsteen is straight, but he admits he's not as macho as his stage character, who is modeled on his chud dad, while he personally takes after his artsy mom.
Similarly, if you told teens in 1975 that in the later 1980s the biggest rock band in the world, U2, would be comprised of wholesome evangelical Christians, they would have scoffed.
Springsteen was arrested (and charged!) for DUI on his motorcycle a few years ago. The incident was pretty much ignored in the media. He was reported to have been observed swigging from a bottle of tequila offered to him by someone. The incident took place in a notorious gay cruising area in north Jersey, which surprised even me.
I’m pretty sure he’s straight, but when I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not unicorns.
It was out on Sandy Hook. Tons of people go there. I doubt he was pulling a George Michael.
Glad to hear it, I remember someone had the arrest report and it sounded pretty suspicious, but I stand happily corrected.
Interestingly to Morrissey in 1975 it seemed there was a clear connection between the New York Dolls and Springsteen, not a genealogy many would draw today:
“It is often forgotten that the Dolls were the beginning of a whole new music scene in America which has produced such rarities as Kiss, Aerosmith, The Tubes, Wayne County, the Dictators, and the current genius, Bruce Springsteen“
Bowie covered 2 Bruce songs, Hard to be a Saint in the City and Growin’ Up.
Weird pic of them together. Bowie says they didn’t really hit it off but he was coked out. Different types:
https://x.com/PointBlankSpain/status/295887632972529664
Will have to listen.
When I was a kid every time I saw a good band on TV I would wonder, 'why are they dressed like that'? I found it distracting. Then one day, Nirvana (literally the band Nirvana) great music and they dressed on stage like they couldn't be arsed to change out of their street clothes (which were pretty much the 'outfits' I wore to high school). Then, inevitably, that became a fashion for a while as I shook my head.
My guitar player was in a professional band in the 1970s and often tells the story of their manager wanting to take them to the next level. To do so they would have to wear rock costumes-- platform shoes and whatever else rock stars wore at the time. They declined and went no higher. Was it the lack of cool clothes?
I kind of get it. Live music is a visual experience too. Orchestras wear tuxedoes. R&B guys do synchronized dance moves in glittery jackets. Maybe it doesn't seem like a show to us without costumes?
I never even heard of the NYD's.
Recently, saw a Tom Snyder interview of Robert Blake, who recalled sitting around at lunch on a movie set with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. A writer asked Tracy how he liked working at MGM and he said, "Gable and I love it. Everybody else here is queer so we get all the girls."
I can vaguely recall a theory that Spencer Tracy was gay and that his at-the-time covered up affair with Katharine Hepburn was to cover up that she was lesbian.
My theory was that Kate maybe could have been a lesbian but ... Spencer Tracy!
There's theories out there that Barbara Stanwyck was privately lesbian. She had an abortion at 15. She was married to a very controlling man named Frank Fay in the 20s. She had an affair with Frank Capra in the late 20s and he directed her in several films. She married Robert Taylor and probably couldn't have children because of her abortion. She had an affair with the much younger Robert Wagner in the 50s. I don't think Barbara Stanwyck was a lesbian but I can't prove it.
Frank Fay was an interesting historical character. He was one of the first (maybe the first) standup comedians, and also a Nazi loving antisemite, not the best choice for a long career in show biz. He was an alcoholic and an asshole and his marriage to Stanwyck is often cited as the inspiration for "A Star is Born".
Interesting to know. A reason Barbara Stanwyck didn't marry Frank Capra was that she was afraid Capra would be as controlling as Fay. Barbara and Capra never married but had total respect for each other. Capra had Barbara star in "Meet John Doe" long after they were no longer a romantic item.
Katharine Hepburn had an affair with John Ford around 1940 and she helped get him the directorships of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "How Green Was My Valley." Ford was big pals with Spencer Tracy in the 30s and often would he'd go out on Ford's boat. John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Ward Bond were often part of the Ford boating society before the war.
If a male likes to throw or kick a ball or play a guitar he is heterosexual.
There are extremely few exceptions to this.
Hitting a ball with a stick is particularly straight male, judging by the high proportion of lesbians who play softball and golf.
The imbalance in sports participation by sexual orientation is extremely large to anyone who has eyes.
I think these are interesting social science questions and fieldwork is not very hard. Just send out some people with clipboards to amateur games on weekday evenings and ask players a dozen or so questions including sexual orientation.
None of the tens of thousands of PhD social science researchers in US academia ever seems to do this. I assume funding would be unavailable and/or journals won’t publish results.
I read once that as bad at throwing as girls are, they are even worse at dodging things that are thrown at them. This might not survive the reproducibility crisis in the social sciences, but from an evolutionary point of view I find it amusing.
Female soccer players are quite skilled but lack of power and pace makes it a lot more sluggish than the men’s game.
But female goalkeepers are comically slow to react. Elite professional keepers in the women’s game are worse than amateur men playing on a damp Sunday morning.
In the 70s it was not wise to be publicly homosexual. There were hints about Elton John, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. John and Mercury were outed in the 80s and I'm still not sure about Bowie although he died married. I remember how repulsed people were when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shot tongues at each other on Saturday Night Live circa 1978. Both were heterosexual but very, very left-wing. Perhaps their sympathy was a sign of things to come within leftist politics. Closeted Barney Frank was elected to office in 1980.
The group of homosexual rock musicians that our post provides is rather small and most I don't even know. I enjoyed the B-52s but Ricky Wilson was not as famous as the two gal singers, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, and the homosexual male singer, Fred Schneider. Schneider didn't out himself until much later.
I had always heard that only one of the B-52s was straight, but I never bothered to figure out which one.
I was mildly astonished to learn that the lead singer for the Violent Femmes is straight.
Odd choices for band names in both cases.
I was about to write that the main Violent Femmes album was full of songs that were obviously about a teenage boy obsessing over a girl...then it occurred to me I don't recall if the sex was ever mentioned and he does refer to the object of his desire as "big hands" in 'blister in the sun" but I still always assumed it was a girl with big hands, for a girl.
That first album was a great one for a bunch of 20 year olds.
The drummer was straight. Cindy Wilson was straight. Kate Pierson moved from heterosexuality to homosexuality mid-life. Not sure what that means and I don't really want to know. Apparently, Ricky Wilson never told his sister Cindy that he was dying of AIDS until a few days before his death.
Thank you
What is the evidence that Jagger or Richards was ever “very, very left-wing”? That they fled to France and the USA to avoid the UK’s very high tax rates of the late 60s/early 70s?
Jagger did go to the London School of Economics, a left-wing university. Many of the topics in their songs were leftist. For instance, "Heartbreaker" is definitely anti-cop and sympathetic to criminals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askAGP/comments/1g41mb1/the_glam_rockers_of_the_70s_probably_werent_agps/
I suspect the list of (likely transitorily) Bisexual 70’s rock stars would be more substantial.
There's a semi-separate category of, say, 19 year old proto-stars possibly indulging gay music industry powerbrokers' lusts until the contract is signed and they can get back to chasing girls.
Sure, that but also the rock stars of the era were going for all out transgressive Libertinism, which necessarily included a healthy dose of gender-bending homoeroticism. You get the feeling their hearts weren’t really into the gay stuff, though. Huge exception being Lou Reed who really seemed to enjoy the company of sleazy downtown Factory-adjacent transvestites.
Although “enjoying the company of” also seemed to include some measure of cruelty and sexual violence. And he ended up in a long term relationship with “weird” theater dork Lori Anderson. Imagine their pillow talk!
There’s an early ‘70s interview with Lester Bangs where he says flat out pretending you’re bi just to be glam doesn’t mean shit unless you are willing to suck cock.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/nov/08/lou-reed-lester-bangs-interview
"Mas Que Nada" by Sergio Mendes is a toe-tapper. The Black Eyed Peas had a hit with a rap/cover version (English verses, Portuguese refrain). I heard it on KCRW of Santa Monica, trusted radio station of music supervisors everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpIUQ5jwJqM
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/22/william-sergio-mendes-on-how-we-made-mas-que-nada-black-eyed-peas
A cover of Mas Que Nada by the fast-rising CT-based jamband Goose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwyBrPQqBkE
Long-time fan, am I, of Legião Urbana, Renato Russo’s band. And yet I wouldn’t try to recommend any one song or album of it or him to anybody. You really have to have followed Brazilian culture for decades. The country is self-sufficient in music, although it has never been hostile to outside material. One of those rare nations that does its own thing and feels inferior to no one. Because it isn’t. In this arena anyway.
Only very recently have I detected oldies on Brazilian radio. I remain unsure why – maybe it has simply taken this long for a certain cohort to age? And having aged, having money that hasn't been decimated by inflation? Could be that simple.
Thanks. That's what I've vaguely felt about Brazilian music: it's its own separate thing that takes a sizable investment of time for American to learn to appreciate. And, yeah, it's good that there is a huge country outside of the path of the American pop culture juggernaut.
Mercury had a girlfriend at one point and Elton John had a wife. Lou Reed?
Reed was married 3 times, bu once was in a long term relationship with a trans woman. He was married to Laurie Anderson when he died. I think he had shock treament as a teen at his parents' instigation, to cure him of the gayness. Although his sister says not so, it's just what the doctors at the time said he needed to cure him of anxiety, depression and other mental and behavioral issues.
Boys who like to play dress-up tend to be homos and boys who like to play guitar don't. Obviously, however, there are exceptions like Alice Cooper, Kiss, and apparently David Johansen.
Given a different recent death, another interesting question would be, why are there so many former military types (enlisted) who become actors of the seriously heterosexual kind (e.g. Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, more recently, Adam Driver, et al.)?
Similarly, it was not uncommon in the second half of the 20th Century for football players to become movie or TV stars. There's a lot of demand for big tough guys on screen.