'So close' Jake Holmes

Peaked at #49, and yet Casey Kasem counted it down for one week on AT40. 

D.A. Pennebaker

Bob Dylan being filmed by D.A. Pennebaker in 1965. 

D.A. Pennebaker, pioneer of cinéma vérité in America, dies at 94.

The filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in 2016. One of his best-known projects, “Dont Look Back,” documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England.CreditCreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

By John Williams for The New York Times

3 August  2019

D. A. Pennebaker, the groundbreaking documentary filmmaker best known for capturing pivotal moments in the history of rock music and politics, including Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England and Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, died on Thursday, 2nd August 2019,  at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by his son Frazer.

Mr. Pennebaker was part of a close-knit group of pioneering filmmakers in the 1960s who helped bring cinéma vérité to the United States. Michael Moore, presenting Mr. Pennebaker with an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2012, said Mr. Pennebaker, along with Robert Drew, Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock, had “invented nothing less than the modern documentary.”

The key development in that invention was the advent of synchronous-sound cameras, which allowed the filmmakers to move more freely with and among their subjects, and to do away with the postproduction voice-over model of narrative.

“You wanted to drive the stories by what people said to each other,” Mr. Pennebaker once said, “not by what you thought up on a yellow pad.”

In 1965, Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, approached Mr. Pennebaker about following Mr. Dylan on a British tour.

“I didn’t really know much about Dylan,” Mr. Pennebaker told The A.V. Club in a 2011 interview. “I had heard one of his songs on the radio.”

“Dont Look Back,” the ensuing movie, is regularly cited as one of the best documentaries ever made. Between brief performance clips, Mr. Pennebaker’s camera follows Mr. Dylan as he antagonizes the press (“I don’t need Time magazine,” he tells a Time reporter), outruns mobs of fans and loudly types over the voice of Joan Baez while she gently sings in a hotel room.

The movie, in black and white, begins with an oft-imitated scene in which Mr. Dylan flips through a series of cardboard placards that display the lyrics of his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” That opening was Mr. Dylan’s idea.

The critic Pauline Kael pointed out in The New Yorker in 1968 that the entire movie was more complicated (and compromised) than some viewers might appreciate.

“Sequences that in a Hollywood movie would have been greeted with snickers — like Bob Dylan in the throes of composition — got by because of the rough look,” she wrote. “Audiences seemed to accept the new cinéma vérité convention that the camera was an intruder in the idol’s life, though it must have been obvious that Dylan had arranged to star in this film.”

Mr. Pennebaker had absorbed these techniques in 1960 while working on the crew of “Primary,” directed by Mr. Drew, which followed Hubert H. Humphrey and John F. Kennedy campaigning in Wisconsin for the Democratic presidential nomination. Decades later, while preparing to make “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Mr. Pennebaker found that politicians had become decidedly less accessible and more wary.

“I could see right away that you couldn’t actually occupy space with a person who intended to become president in a very interesting way,” he told The A.V. Club. “They were constrained to act; as soon as the camera appeared, they had to pretend to be something else.”

Mr. Pennebaker focused instead on George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and other then-little-known (and less camera-shy) operatives. The result, Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, was “a revealing film and an invaluable document.”

His political films are now part of the canon, but the scenes from Mr. Pennebaker’s catalog that still circulate most widely are of pop culture figures in action: Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire in “Monterey Pop”; Elaine Stritch in “Original Cast Album: Company,” exhausted and straining to record “The Ladies Who Lunch” while Stephen Sondheim and others look on in despair; Mr. Dylan showing up the softer-edged singer Donovan in a hotel room crowded with their hangers-on; and the actor Rip Torn (who died last month) attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer at the end of “Maidstone” (1970), one of three eccentric movies directed by Mr. Mailer, for which Mr. Pennebaker served as a cameraman.

Mr. Mailer’s films from that era are mostly notable as oddball vanity projects (in The Times, Vincent Canby called “Maidstone” “a very mixed bag” that “doesn’t make a great deal of sense”), but Mr. Pennebaker’s relationship with the author would pay dividends down the line. In 1971, he accepted Mr. Mailer’s suggestion that he film a panel discussion that Mr. Mailer was holding at Town Hall in Manhattan. The topic would be the state of feminism.

Mr. Mailer was his pugnacious self as he battled with, among others, the author Germaine Greer and the journalist Jill Johnston before a raucous audience. At one point two women from the audience took the stage and kissed and groped Ms. Johnston, an activist for lesbian rights, before all three tumbled to the floor.

The footage of the night remained on a shelf for nearly a decade, but when it was released as “Town Bloody Hall” in 1979, it was called a remarkable time capsule of a colorful moment in New York’s intellectual and cultural history. The filmmaker Chris Hegedus, Mr. Pennebaker’s third wife (they married in 1982) and creative partner, edited the footage, which she once called “incredibly rough.”

“There was so much sexual tension going on between Norman and Germaine in it,” Ms. Hegedus said, adding, “I almost edited it as a love story, in a certain way.”

Mr. Pennebaker liked to maintain the image of a journalist for hire. Discussing the genesis of his 1989 documentary about the rock band Depeche Mode (“Depeche Mode 101”), he said, “Somebody called us up and said, ‘Would you like to film Depeche Mode?’ and I sort of said, ‘What’s that?’ ”

Donn Alan Pennebaker, known as Penny to friends and colleagues, was born on 15 July 1925, in Evanston, Ill., to John Paul Pennebaker, a commercial photographer, and Lucille (Levick) Pennebaker.

He served in the Navy and studied engineering at M.I.T. and Yale. After working as an engineer for about a year, he was shown “N.Y., N.Y.,” a short, impressionistic color film by his friend Francis Thompson chronicling “a day in New York,” as the subtitle says. “In about 15 minutes I saw right away that filmmaking was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” Mr. Pennebaker said in a 2006 interview about that moment.

Thompson’s work motivated Mr. Pennebaker to complete the color documentary short “Daybreak Express,” not quite six minutes of footage of elevated train tracks along Third Avenue in Manhattan. Opening against a blazing orange sunrise, the film is set to music by Duke Ellington.

Mr. Pennebaker would go on to work with Mr. Drew making films for Time-Life before branching out to make his own features.

His many other films include close-up looks at David Bowie (“Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” from 1973), John Lennon (“John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band — Live in Toronto ’69”) and Jane Fonda (“Jane,” from 1962, when she was 25 and enduring a starring role in a flop on Broadway).

In addition to his son Frazer (a producer of many Pennebaker documentaries), Mr. Pennebaker is survived by his wife, Ms. Hegedus; seven other children, Stacy, Linley, Jojo, Chelsea, Zoe, Kit and Jane, all with the surname Pennebaker; 13 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Pennebaker believed that the best documentary films were those in which the filmmaker’s presence is least felt.

“If you’re setting up lights and tripods and you’ve got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can,” Mr. Pennebaker told Time magazine in 2007. “But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it’s different. I’ve left it on the floor. Sometimes I’ll shoot with it on my lap. Other times I’ll put it on a table and turn it on. You don’t make it a big issue.”

Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

Aug. 5, 2019, Section D,  New York edition with the headline: D.A. Pennebaker, Pioneer of Documentary Filmmaking, Is Dead at 94.

Hal Prince, left, director of the original Broadway production of “Company,” and Elaine Stritch, the show’s most indelible star, in Mr. Pennebaker’s documentary about the increasingly tense recording sessions for the original cast album.CreditPennebaker Hegedus Films.

WNEW - FM New York

Dave Herman from 6:00 to 10:00 am
Pete Fornatle from 10:00 am to 14:00
Scott Muni from 14:00 to 18:00
Jonathan Schwartz  from 18:00 to 22:00
Alison Steele  from 22:00 to 2:00 am
Richard Neer from 2:00 to 6:00 am

Dennis Elsas weekends
Vin Scelsa weekends

The day the music died... Alison Steele's obituary at the New York Times on 27 September 1995. 

Billboard, 6 February 1971

40.  Your time to cry - Joe Simon (Spring-Polydor)  debut
39.  Don't let the green grass fool you - Wilson Pickett (Atlantic)
38.  Games - Redeye ((Pentagram)
37.  Pay to the piper - Chairman of the Board (Invictus)
36.  Precious, precious - Jackie Moore (Atlantic)

35.  1900 yesterday - Liz Damon's Orient Express (White Whale)
34.  Get up, get into it, get involved - James Brown (King)
33.  Somebody's watching you - Little Sister (Stone Flower) p.: Sly Stone
32.  Have you ever seen the rain? - Creedence Clearwater Revival (Fantasy) debut
31.  (Do the) Push and pull - Rufus Thomas (Stax)

30.  Theme from 'Love story' - Henry Mancini Orchestra & Chorus (RCA)
29.  Let your love go - Bread (Elektra)
28.  For the good times - Ray Price (Columbia) writer: Kris Kristopherson - 24 wks
27.  Amos Moses - Jerry Reed (RCA)
26.  Stoned love - Supremes (Motown)

25.  Mama's pearl - Jackson Five (Motown)
24.  Black magic woman - Santana (Columbia)
23.  Immigrant song - Led Zeppelin (Atlantic)
22.  I think I love you - Partridge Family (Bell)  15 wks
21.  I reall don't want to know - Elvis Presley (RCA)

20.  We got to get you a woman - Runt (Ampex) p.: Todd Rundgren
19.  Amazing grace - Judy Collins (Elektra)
18.  If you could read my mind - Gordon Lightfoot (Reprise)  up 10 notches
17.  Born to wander - Rare Earth (Motown)
16.  Remember me - Diana Ross (Motown)

15.  Mr Bojangles - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Liberty)
14.  Love the one you're with - Stephen Stills (Atlantic)  8 wks
13.  It's impossible (Somos novios) - Perry Como (RCA)  10 wks
12.  Watching Scotty grow - Bobby Goldsboro (UA)
11.  Stoney End - Barbra Streisand (Columbia)

10. If I were your woman - Gladys Knight & the Pips (Soul-Motown)
9.  One less bell to answer - 5th Dimension (Bell)
8.  Your song - Elton John (Uni)
7.  Groove me - King Floyd (Chimneyville-Atlantic)
6.  I hear you knocking - Dave Edmunds (MAM)

5.  Rose garden - Lynn Anderson (Columbia)
4.  Lonely days - Bee Gees (Atco)
3.  Isn't it a pity? / My sweet Lord - George Harrison (Apple)
2.  One bad apple - The Osmonds (MGM)
1.  Knock three times - Dawn (Bell)

Billboard, 20 March 1971

Billboard, 20 March 1971

#1 album of the week:  'Pearl' - Janis Joplin (Columbia)

40.  Heavy makes you happy (Sha na boom boom) - Staple Singers (Stax)
39.  Burning bridges -  The Mike Curb Congregation (MGM)
38.  Eighteen - Alice Cooper (WB)
37.  Country road - James Taylor (WB) debut
36.  Watching Scotty grow - Bobby Goldsboro (UA)

35.  Theme from 'Love Story' - Francis Lai & His Orchestra (Paramount)
34.  Knock three times - Dawn (Bell)  (16 wks)
33.  Love's lines, angles and rhymes - 5th Dimension (Bell)
32.  Soul power - James Brown (King)
31.  Amazing grace - Judy Collins (Elektra)

30.  Rose garden - Lynn Anderson (Columbia)
29.  Don't let the green grass fool you - Wilson Pickett (Atlantic)
28.  No love at all - B.J.Thomas (Scepter)
27.  You're all I need to get by - Aretha Franklin (Atlantic)
26.  One toke over the line - Brewer & Shipley (Kama Sutra)

25.  Blue money - Van Morrison (WB)
24.  Oye como va - Santana (Columbia)
23.  Free - Chicago (Columbia)
22.  Wild world - Cat Stevens (A&M)
21.  Sweet Mary - Wadsworth Mansion  (Sussex)

20.  Another day - Paul McCartney (Apple)
19.  Theme from 'Love story' - Henry Mancini Orchestra & Chorus (RCA)
18.  Temptation eyes - Grass Roots (Dunhill)
17.  Mr. Bojangles - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Liberty) (dropped 5 notches)
16.  Cried like a baby - Bobby Sherman (Metromedia Records)

15.  What's life? - George Harrison (Apple)
14.  Where do I begin? (Theme from 'Love story') - Andy Williams (Columbia) (down from #3)
13.  Mama's pearl - Jackson Five (Motown)
12.  Have you ever seen the rain? - Creedence Clearwater Revival (Fantasy) (down from #8)
11.  Amos Moses - Jerry Reed (RCA)

10.  If you could read my mind - Gordon Lightfoot (RCA)
9.  Help me make it through the night - Sammi Smith (Mega)
8.  What's going on? - Marvin Gaye (Tamla)
7.  Doesn't somebody want to be wanted? - The Partridge Family (Bell)
6.  Proud Mary - Ike & Tina Turner (Liberty)

5.  For all we know - Carpenters (A&M)
4.  One bad apple - The Osmonds (MGM) (down from 5 wks at #1)
3.  Just my imagination - The Temptations (Motown)
2.  She's a lady - Tom Jones (Parrot)
1.  Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin (Columbia)

David White - Danny & The Juniors' blonde fellow 1939-2019

Danny and the Juniors at the height of their late-1950s fame. From left: Danny Rapp, Joe Terranova, David White and Frank Maffei.

David White, hitmaker with Danny & the Juniors, dies at 79

By Richard Sandomir

31st March 2019

David White, who formed the doo-wop quartet Danny and the Juniors in the mid-1950s, co-wrote their No. 1 hit “At the Hop” and composed their successful follow-up, “Rock and roll is here to stay,” died on 16 March 2019, in Las Vegas. He was 79. His daughter Wendy Adamczyk said the cause was lung and throat cancer.

Like many other teenagers in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. White and his friends Danny Rapp, Frank Maffei and Joe Terranova (also known as Joe Terry), who called themselves the Juvenaires, harmonized in cars and school bathrooms. Their singing on a street corner in Philadelphia in 1957 attracted the attention of John Madara, then a 19-year-old singer, who heard them through his nearby bedroom window.

“The next day I asked some friends, ‘I heard this great group. Do you know who they are?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that was Danny Rapp and the guys,’ ” Mr. Madara recalled in an interview in 2014 with Tom Meros for his online series “Tom TV.” Aware of Mr. Madara’s interest in the group, Mr. White found his way to Mr. Madara’s apartment, where they struck up a friendship and agreed to work together.

Mr. Madara suggested they write a song that would play off teenagers dancing the bop on the television show “American Bandstand” and have an infectious beat like Jerry Lee Lewis’s recent rockabilly hit “Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.” With help from Artie Singer, a vocal coach and producer, they made a demo record, “Do the Bop,” with Mr. Madara singing lead and the Juvenaires singing backup. But when Mr. Singer and Mr. Madara brought the demo to Prep Records, it was rejected.

“Artie took it to Dick Clark” — then a powerful Philadelphia disc jockey as well as the host of “American Bandstand” — “who suggested the title change to ‘At the Hop,’ ” Mr. White said in an interview in 2013 with the blog Milwaukee Opportunities. The group quickly recorded a new version — only the lyrics needed to be changed — with Mr. Rapp singing lead.

Mr. Clark agreed to play the song and gave it a huge boost in late 1957 when he had the group, now renamed Danny and the Juniors, on “Bandstand.” It leapt to No. 1 the Billboard Hot 100, on 9 December 1957, and stayed there for seven weeks.

Hoping to repeat the success of “At the Hop,” Mr. White wrote “Rock and roll is here to stay”, while touring with the group in Davenport, Iowa. It was not the hit “At the Hop” was — it peaked at # 19 on 10 March 1958 — but it acted as an enthusiastic rebuke to adults’ view of rock as a short-lived fad that tore at teenagers’ moral fiber.

“Rock and roll is here to stay,” they sang. “It will never die/It was meant to be that way/Though I don’t know why.”

David Ernest White was born on 26 November 1939, in Philadelphia. When he was 3 he joined his parents, Frank and Marcia Tricker, in their acrobatic touring act, Barry and Brenda and Company. David showed an early interest in music; he began playing piano, clarinet and trombone in elementary school and was writing songs at 14.

The Juvenaires, which Mr. White formed when he was about 15, sang at local parties and other events. Sometimes they practiced in Mr. White’s 1953 Pontiac so they would not disturb the neighbors.

Danny and the Juniors had a few modest hits after “At the Hop” and “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,” but none that kept them atop the charts. Mr. White left the group around 1961 and, in partnership with Mr. Madara, wrote many songs, including the Top 10 hits “The fly” (1961), for Chubby Checker; “You don’t own me” (1963), for Lesley Gore; and “1-2-3” (1965), for Len Barry.

In 1965, Mr. White, Mr. Madara and Ray Gilmore formed a short-lived group, The Spokesmen, and together wrote a single, “The dawn of correction,” an optimistic corrective to Barry McGuire’s foreboding No. 1 hit, “Eve of destruction.” It rose to No. 36 on the Hot 100.

Mr. White found less success afterward. He broke up with Mr. Madara, released a solo album under the name David White Tricker, that did not do well; lived for a time in a trailer park; worked on various musical and film projects, and wrote a memoir that has not yet been published. He also collected royalties from filmmakers and advertisers eager to license songs from his archive, especially “At the Hop” and “Rock and roll is here to stay.”

In the late 1960s, Mr. Rapp formed an all-new version of Danny and the Juniors that toured the country; at one point, he asked Mr. White to join him. While they never reunited, Mr. White sang a few songs with Mr. Rapp’s group at a lounge near Lake Tahoe in 1982.

“He was real up, he was real excited about seeing me,” Mr. White told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I came very close to going back with him because he was working like crazy.”

It was the last time they saw each other Mr. Rapp died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1983.

Mr. Terry and Mr. Maffei continued to perform occasionally as Danny and the Juniors, along with Mr. Maffei’s brother, Bob.

In addition to Ms. Adamczyk, Mr. White is survived by his wife, Sandra (Simone) White; another daughter, Jody Conrad, and three grandchildren. A third daughter, Linda White, died in 2013.

David White.

Dan Ingram, DJ * 7 September 1934 + 24 June 2018

Dan Ingram, irreverent Disc Jockey, is dead at 83

Dan Ingram in 1993, when he was a disc jockey in WCBS-FM in New York. He first achieved fame on WABC-AM when it was a Top 40 powerhouse.CreditJim Estrin/The New York Times

By Richard Sandomir

25 June 2018

Dan Ingram, a popular disc jockey whose wisecracks and double entendres rippled through the air at rock ’n’ roll stations in New York City from the early 1960s to the early 21st century, died on Sunday, 24 June 2018, at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 83.

His son Christopher said he died after choking on a piece of steak. He had received a diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome in 2014.

Mr. Ingram preceded the era of shock jocks, but he was a quick-thinking, somewhat bawdy jester who mocked songs, singers, sponsors and the weather at WABC-AM, a powerful Top 40 station that grew in the ’60s with the popularity of the Beatles, the Motown stable of artists and others.

Later, at WCBS-FM, the groundbreaking oldies-station, he continued his drollery while exhuming the music he had played decades earlier.

“I like to have fun with my listeners,” Mr. Ingram told The New York Times in 1993, when he was at WCBS-FM. “I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, ‘I don’t believe he said that.’ But I don’t like to do sleaze.”

His irreverence was usually heard in short bursts, often during musical introductions before a song was sung.

In those exquisitely-timed moments, called “talk-ups,” he might ridicule a song by Rosie and the Originals (“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the worst record ever recorded, ‘Angel Baby’ ”), tinker with the title of Elton John’s hit “Someone saved my life tonight” (as “Someone shaved my wife tonight”) and refer to Herb Alpert’s group, the Tijuana Brass, as “the Teeny Weeny Brass.”

Once, giving the weather report, he said: “I love brief showers. They’re fun. Watch those briefs coming down!”

Allan Sniffen, who runs MusicRadio77, a website devoted to the Top 40 legacy of WABC-AM, called Mr. Ingram “the greatest of his generation.” In a telephone interview, he added: “He was technically the best. He could make the records fit together, he was funny, and he was the best ad-libber I ever heard.”

Mr. Ingram, Mr. Sniffen said, “inspired a generation of young listeners to become radio people.”

With a deep voice that conveyed mischief, Mr. Ingram addressed his fans as “Kemosabe” (the Native American character Tonto’s term of endearment for the Lone Ranger). He variously called his show the “Ingram mess,” the “Ingram flingram” or the “Ingram travesty.” And each day he named an “honor group” (like trombonists or garbagemen) and announced a word of the day, with a twisted definition.

“Contravene,” he once said, “is something that prevents babies.”

Daniel Trombley Ingram was born into a musical family on 7 September 1934, in Oceanside, N.Y. His father, John, played saxophone and flute for big bands, and his mother, Dorothy (Trombley) Ingram, was a cellist who led a chamber-music group, the Trombley Trio.

Smitten with radio, Mr. Ingram attended live broadcasts in Manhattan and entered a D.J. contest on Fred Robbins’s radio show at age 13. He finished last in a field of six. “The guy who won became a carpenter in New Jersey,” Mr. Ingram said in an interview in 2002 on the New Jersey FM station WFMU.

He attended Hofstra College (now Hofstra University) on Long Island but left before graduation to pursue a radio career, working at stations on Long Island and in Connecticut, Dallas and St. Louis.

He joined WABC-AM in 1961 as it battled WMCA-AM for supremacy among rock listeners in the New York market. The other personalities at WABC included Bruce Morrow, known as Cousin Brucie, Ron Lundy, Chuck Leonard and Herb Oscar Anderson (who died last year). Of them, only Mr. Morrow survives.

Mr. Ingram stayed with WABC until it changed to a talk format in 1982. On his final broadcast, he signed off by saying, “The honor group of the day, my friend, is you, because if you hadn’t listened I would never have been here.”

After leaving WABC, Mr. Ingram held other radio jobs and did commercial voice-overs. But it was not until 1991 that he returned to prominence when he joined WCBS-FM, a powerhouse station built on playing classic rock ’n’ roll.

“I’m lucky as hell that there’s a place in New York where I can peddle my wares,” Mr. Ingram told The Times in 2002, a year before he retired. “Elderly disc jockeys aren’t exactly in great demand around the country.”

In addition to his son Christopher, who wrote a novel, “Hey Kemosabe!” (2014), based in part on his father’s experiences, Mr. Ingram is survived by his wife, Maureen Donnelly; four other sons, Daniel, David, Robert and Phillip; four daughters, Patricia Gavigan, Michelle Rydberg and Christina and Jacqueline Ingram; two stepdaughters, Laura Turetsky and Linda Ingram-Vargas; 26 grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.

His first wife, Kathleen Patricia (Snediker) Ingram, died in a car accident in 1962; his marriages to Anita Strand and Jeannie Weigel ended in divorce.

Mr. Ingram’s freewheeling, smart-alecky approach had its moments of anxiety. In 1993, he told The Times that a disc jockey’s job is filled with “moments of terror interrupted by long periods of utter boredom.”

“You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you’ve got nothing to do.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2018, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Dan Ingram, 83, New York Disc Jockey Who Spun Hits and Cracked Wise, Dies.

Archives 1993

On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia

by Charles Strummay for the NYT

13 May 1993


It is 12:03 P.M., Saturday, on the 17th floor of the CBS building on West 52d Street, and the 'Ingram mess', as Dan Ingram himself calls it, has begun to spread out for 60 miles on the FM band.

The familiar beat of a 1965 Four Tops recording can be heard on the studio speakers. Mr. Ingram clears his throat, opens the microphone and speaks over the music: "This is the song of the midget and the smorgasbord, "I Can't Help Myself."

And so begins the first of three hours on the highest-rated radio program in its time slot in New York, reaching the big-spending, demographically significant 25-to-54 age group. Presiding over it all from a padded swivel chair in a room the size of a small studio apartment is Daniel Trombley Ingram, 58, the smart aleck who owns the afternoon.

Since 1961, when he became one of the Good Guys on WABC-AM, one of the city's legendary top-40 rock stations, Mr. Ingram has been the irreverent jester of choice for afternoon and drive time rock-and-roll aficionados.

At a time when many oldies stations have eliminated their roster of disk jockeys in favor of an all-tape format, WCBS does things the old-fashioned way, and Mr. Ingram remains the voice that stays the hand from turning the dial during humorless commercials or artless recordings.

Mr. Ingram, who returned to this familiar format two years ago (1991) after almost a decade pursuing a variety of other lucrative broadcasting ventures, is selling nostalgia. In fact, he is nostalgia. Like his WCBS-FM colleagues Bruce Morrow, Harry Harrison and Ron Lundy, he is playing the songs he helped popularize 20, 30, almost 40 years ago, a disk jockey with a very long memory for music meant to last about 3 minutes at 45 r.p.m. "It's my theory of minimum involvement for maximum return," he said. "They pay decent money for this sort of thing."

Over the course of the afternoon, he will exhume for his listeners the musical artifacts of rock's golden age, unleashing a stream of doo-wops, dip-dips and sha-na-nas from Ruby and the Romantics, the Mello Kings, the Beach Boys and the Dell Vikings.

To do this, Mr. Ingram makes a leap of faith into scriptless radioland, a void of airtime waiting to be filled with music and advertisements, all tied together by whatever Mr. Ingram can think of to say in 10 seconds or less.

In these narrow synapses he gently mocks anyone who crosses his mind, including himself and the songs he plays -- songs so much a part of popular culture that listeners who can't remember their mother's birthday can still lip-sync the lyrics as they drive to the mall.

"Lindbergh didn't know it, but when he was describing flying across the Atlantic he was actually describing doing a disk-jockey show," Mr. Ingram said during a commercial for Mounds candy. "Moments of stark terror interrupted by long periods of utter boredom. You talk for 10 seconds, the music plays, you've got nothing to do. You talk, read a paper. . . ."

And somehow, in that 10-second opening, Mr. Ingram has found a way to establish a rapport with his listeners, who have come to expect the unexpected. By his quips ye shall know him.

"Steve Allen once said that humor and humorous comedic effect involved what he called a jump shift," Mr. Ingram said. "That's to go from one mode of thinking to another so that the juxtaposition is funny.

"I'm either gifted or cursed with a mind that works in weird ways," he said.

He is the perennial joker at the back of the high school auditorium who has a wisecrack for almost every line of the vice principal's exhortation on school spirit. His larder is stocked with double entendres, some of them sophomoric or lascivious but some so cleverly subtle that it may be 30 seconds into the next tune by the time a listener has figured out what he meant.

He sees life through a prism that is part Jerry Seinfeld and part Lenny Bruce, but all peculiarly Dan Ingram.

But for a man so well known, he accepts what all radio personalities must: invisible fame. At 6 feet 3 inches and more than 200 pounds, with a black beard (which appears and disappears on a whim), he is whatever he sounds like. Mostly, he's a bear of a man in sports clothes who drinks tea, reads from note cards and trades barbs with his producer, Al Vertucci, a man who slings tape cassettes with the practiced hand of a short-order cook.

"I like to have fun with my listeners," Mr. Ingram said. "I like them to use their minds. I like them to say, 'I don't believe he said that.' But I don't like to do sleaze."

And so, with only a few seconds between a Petland Discounts commercial and the start of the 1958 recording "At the Hop," he says: "Danny and the Juniors. They're called Danny and the Postgraduates now."

Or a song by Three Dog Night: " 'Joy to the World,' Chanel No. 5 to Beverly Hills, of course."

Among his favorite introductions is one he has done numerous times for a plaintive tune sung slightly off key by Rosie and the Originals:

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the worst record ever recorded, "Angel Baby."

He is also the man who once added this afterthought to a commercial for discounted chicken parts at Pathmark: "Some assembly required."

All this banter is the adhesive for a carefully timed entertainment whose foundation is rock but whose heart is a computer.

When Mr. Ingram sits down at the microphone, he has before him two lists, both computer generated. One is a roster of advertisers and the hour and minute when their commercials must be broadcast. The other list, three pages long, contains 50 songs, chosen by the computer according to a secret recipe concocted by the station's program director, Joe McCoy.

For example, the third song of the day was "Runaway," by Del Shannon. On the play list, this comes out as 61 (the year); 34 (a file number for storage); the artist's name; 07 (the length in seconds of the musical introduction, if any); the letters F or C, depending on whether the song fades out or ends cold, and the total playing time, in this case 2:12. A digital timer on Mr. Ingram's desk keeps track for him.

"Ah, yes, a runaway," he tells his listeners. "That's where an Italian stripper works. On CBS-FM, 101.1, America's most-listened-to oldies station. Increasing clouds, breezy, chance of showers today."

Then, targeting what he perceives to be unholy nepotism at WCBS-TV, he takes one of his frequent shots at the father-son forecasting team of Frank and Storm Field.

"Showers," he says. "A Dr. Frankenstorm forecast, the Channel 2 weather monster."

None of these shenanigans were learned at the famous broadcasters' school. They were absorbed in suburban New York.

Mr. Ingram was born in Oceanside, L.I., and grew up in Flushing, Queens, and Malverne, L.I. His father was a big-band studio musician - saxophone, clarinet, flute - who also played with Toscanini. His mother was a concert cellist. In high school, he read bulletin-board announcements over the public address system and, when he was 13, finished dead last in a disk jockey contest on the Freddy Robbins show.

After attending Hofstra College on a drama scholarship, he apprenticed with stations on Long Island and Connecticut before heading out to KBOX, "the voice and choice of dynamic Dallas."

It was there, at the station named for its owner, John Box, that he discovered the phrase that would become the closest thing Mr. Ingram has to a trademark: kimosabe. (Tonto's pet name for the wounded man he nursed back to health -- the Lone Ranger.)

It came off a promo for the station, Mr. Ingram recalled, that included the well-known conclusion of the William Tell Overture that most people know as the "Lone Ranger" music. "Just for kicks, I did an Indian voice," he said. "The word kimosabe was on the promo. It worked."

In July 1961, Mr. Ingram became a WABC Good Guy (later, they were WABC All Americans, after WMCA somehow appropriated the Good Guy label). He was 27 and at the top of his form, with a house in Woodbury, L.I., and a family of five children, including infant twins. Four months later his wife was killed in an automobile accident. He was off the air for several weeks.

"Who knows how you cope with things like that," he recalled. "I finally went back on. The station had announced what happened. I thanked everybody and said there was no way to answer all the cards and sympathy messages. I started playing the music again, and that was it."

Today he looks west and south from the 44th floor of the West 57th Street apartment he shares with the fourth Mrs. Ingram, Maureen Donnelly, a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild. He quickly acknowledges that she is more adept than he at remembering how to spell the names of his nine children.

With time and money no object, the Ingrams decided against buying "a little house on the hill somewhere." Instead, they travel -- to Europe, Australia, Russia.

These indulgences seem appropriate for a man who once promised vast powers to his listeners through a device called a "kimosabe card."

For a time, in the 1960's, WABC-AM mailed the cards to anyone who wrote for one. The bearer, it said, was empowered and authorized by Mr. Ingram "to dance in the surf in your bare feet," among other things. Eventually ABC gave up the promotion because it cost too much.

Such were the diversions of old-fashioned top-40 programming, which no longer exists in radio's highly diversified market.

"There's music a little better, there's music pristine, there's music untouched by human hands. When you're tuned to CBS-FM, you know what you're going to get. It's like everything else. Ten percent is spectacular and the rest . . ." He sighed. "This is music for the moment."

And suddenly most of those moments are gone for the day.

With less than four minutes left, four recordings remain on the play list. Mr. Ingram discards the Channels, Roberta Flack and the Happenings, whose recordings are not timed to fit comfortably with the last commercial and a farewell from the host. He chooses, instead, Elvis Presley's "Return to Sender," with a two-second introduction, a fade finish and a running time of 2 minutes, 36 seconds.

In his deepest Frederick's of Hollywood voice, Mr. Ingram intones:

"Elbow. Parsley." The music begins. It is 2:56 P.M.

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 1993, on Page C1 of the National edition with the headline: On the air with Dan Ingram; 'Hi-yo, Kemo Sabe!' A King of Nostalgia.

The Temptations' 'Ain't too proud' on Broadway

Cholly Atkins, left, rehearsed with the Four Tops in the basement of the Apollo Theater in 1964.

Cholly Atkins taught Motown to dance. His moves get an update in ‘Ain’t Too Proud.’


By Brian Seibert
13 March 2019

Five handsome men, dressed sharp. Golden-voiced singers, each distinctly soulful, harmonizing on hit after hit. That they could also move well, smoothly executing snazzy, classy choreography, might have seemed extra. Yet it was essential to what made the Temptations exceptional and enduring. Think about it: Does anyone dance quite the way they did anymore?

Not really. Not even the extremely talented cast of “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which opens at the Imperial Theater on Broadway on 21st March 2019.

Times change. The past can never be wholly recaptured. Those are themes in this jukebox musical, which tells the story of the Temptations from the perspective of Otis Williams, the sole surviving original member (and an executive-producer of the show). And deep in the second act, when consequences and regrets are starting to pile up, the actor playing Mr. Williams (Derrick Baskin) says, “Don’t nothing rewind but a song.”

Change can be lamented or embraced. Sergio Trujillo, the choreographer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” is the embracing type. “It was important to me,” he said before a recent preview performance, “that an audience that knows the Temptations is able to watch the show and think, ‘That’s what I remember.’ But it’s also important to look through the lens of today.” The question he asked himself was: “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”

What he did was create choreography that is more intricate, stylistically varied and narratively sophisticated than anything the Temptations ever approached.

All the characteristic slides and pivots and gestures in relay are in there, but amid a whole lot more. So while “Ain’t Too Proud” honors the past, it also brings out differences between dancing in Motown back then and dancing on Broadway now.

The Temptations were not trained dancers. At first, they didn’t think of themselves as dancers at all. “We would just stand and sing, or sit and sing,” Mr. Williams, 77, recalled over the phone.

The show has fun with this fact in an early scene. Paul Williams (no relation to Otis Williams) tries to get the other guys to dance in their act and they resist, claiming they can’t. He has to convince them that the ladies will like it.

Paul Williams, who died in 1973, did give the Temptations their first moves.

In 1965, though, they started working with a professional choreographer: Cholly Atkins. He is not a character in “Ain’t Too Proud.” But that omission, presumably for narrative economy, has some historical justification. In his 2001 autobiography, “Class Act” (written with Jacqui Malone), Mr. Atkins says that Motown artists were often told to say that they did their own choreography. He was part of the behind-the-scenes operation.

That operation was called Artist Development, and it was a critical component in the vision of Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy. “Berry always wanted Motown artists to be more than recording artists,” said Shelly Berger, who became the Temptations manager in 1966. (He’s a creative consultant for “Ain’t Too Proud,” as well as a character in it.) And so the people hired for Artist Development were show-business veterans, there to teach the kids how to become versatile entertainers.

Mr. Atkins was a tap dancer. Born in 1913, he came of age when tap, a sibling of jazz, was at its cultural peak — ubiquitous in nightclubs, Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals. As a black man, Mr. Atkins found little success in segregated Hollywood; he dubbed tap sounds for white dancers, gave ideas to Eleanor Powell. But in New York, with Honi Coles, a virtuoso once considered to have the fastest feet in the business, he formed a great partnership.

Mr. Coles and Atkins were in the tradition known as the class act: suave, debonair, cultivated. They sang a little, told jokes, and danced in several styles. Their soft-shoe was recklessly slow, a nonchalant tightrope walk of graceful control and rhythmic exactitude.They toured with the big bands of Cab Calloway and Count Basie. They appeared on Broadway in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1949.

But by then, the early 1950s, tap was falling out of fashion. It got a shove from the rise of rhythm 'n'blues and rock'n'roll. At places like the Apollo Theater in Harlem, a home for tap, R&B revues took over. Coles became the theater’s production manager, appalled by the teenagers with hit records and no understanding of theatrical etiquette as basic as how to bow. Mr. Atkins began to teach them.

Before long, word got around, especially when people caught what Mr. Atkins had done with Gladys Knight & the Pips. He was 30 years older than they were, and they called him Pop or Pops, names that stuck when Motown hired him as its official choreographer.

“Pops refined the Temptations,” Otis Williams recalled. “What he did was dramatic but more economic, so we wouldn’t overly exert ourselves but still could get across.”

Mr. Atkins called this technique “vocal choreography,” an art of moving for vocalists. It was dancing that accommodated a singer’s need to breathe and to get back to the microphone on time. In the right spots, it could be complex — feet following the bass line as voices sang a different rhythm. “But Pops would always stress, ‘Remember you guys are singers first,’” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Atkins was a taskmaster (“like a drill sergeant,” Mr. Berger said), but he adjusted to the skills of each group. “Let the punishment fit the crime” was his motto. The Four Tops didn’t get much more than some windshield-wiper bending. The Pips, the Supremes and the Temptations got the works.

They were being groomed for “the smart rooms,” Mr. Williams said: supper clubs like the Copacabana, places where few black acts were invited. Along with their hits, they sang standards, and Mr. Atkins taught them routines with hats & canes. You can see the results in “TCB,” the Temptations’ 1968 television special with the Supremes, and especially on their 1969 special, “G.I.T. On Broadway,” an hour of nothing but show tunes.

Every time one of Mr. Atkins’s groups appeared on television — on Ed Sullivan, “American Bandstand,” “Shindig,” “Soul Train” — they were spreading the tap and jazz steps he had learned when he was young, keeping those moves in cultural circulation as another generation picked them up from TV.

He continued to choreograph for the Temptations until his death in 2003. By then, the group’s roster had turned over many times (there have been more than 20 Temptations). And the way the Temptations danced, once so current, had become a period style.

The choreographer Sergio Trujillo said he asked himself, “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”

The choreographer Sergio Trujillo said he asked himself, “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”CreditSlaven Vlasic/Getty Images

It was around that time that Sergio Trujillo, born in Colombia in 1963, began choreographing “Jersey Boys,” the 2005 juke-box musical about the Four Seasons. For research, he studied videos of the old TV shows, footage of all the old groups. Since the Four Seasons didn’t move much, he had a free hand. “What I created,” he said, “was like the Temptations more than anything.”

“Ain’t Too Proud” came with different pressures: “Can I live up to the legend of these great performers known for their dancing?” he asked himself. “With the confidence of having done other shows of the period” — “All Shook Up,” “Memphis” — “I let myself create with abandonment.”

First, though, he wanted to earn the audience’s trust. And so the opening number of “Ain’t Too Proud” (“The Way You Do the Things You Do”) is very old school. Some of the lyrics are pantomimed baldly (opening the schoolbook), and when the narrator affectionately mocks those lyrics for corniness, he could be speaking of the choreography, too.

Immediately after, the simplicity recedes. For Mr. Trujillo is tasked, as Cholly Atkins never was, with helping to tell a story, the plot of how the Temptations got together and what they went through. And over the course of the show, as the group’s music changes, getting funky or psychedelic, responding to the riots and assassinations of the late 1960s, the dancing also changes, turning harder-edged, angrier, more technically and emotionally complex.

Throughout, the base style — “sprinkled with period authenticity,” in Mr. Trujillo’s words — tilts contemporary: sharper, bolder in attack. The Supremes in this show pop their hips with much more sexual frankness than the demure originals would have been allowed.

Mr. Trujillo is also working with a different kind of performer. Ephraim Sykes, who plays David Ruffin — one of the group’s lead singers — trained at the Alvin Ailey school and danced in the junior Ailey troupe. He has mastered some of Mr. Ruffin’s signature moves: splits; tossing a microphone in the air, spinning, dropping to his knees and catching the mic. But he also does much that Mr. Ruffin never attempted.

“I try to push my body as far as it can go,” Mr. Sykes said. “But also, how cool can I make it? That’s period for me. You didn’t see them try. Even the tricks I do that David never did, I’m trying to keep it so cool that it looks like David could’ve done them.”

Dancing that hard and still having to sing as well as David Ruffin isn’t nearly as easy as Mr. Sykes makes it look. “Singers and dancers are taught to breath in opposite ways,” he said, one relaxing where the other tightens. “I’m trying to use my dance training with a singer’s mind.”

Part of that dance training is in communicating with the body. “How they walked, how they stood, the pride of the city of Detroit, the bop in their step — it says so much about their times,” Mr. Sykes said.

In “Ain’t Too Proud,” even when the Temptations aren’t doing a dance number — in scenes between Otis Williams and his wife, for example — the five men are often present onstage like a cool Greek chorus. Their physical presence shows how they were always in one another’s thoughts.

That’s the kind of metaphor present nowhere in the choreography of Cholly Atkins. But what it looks like is five guys snapping and lightly swaying, as Cholly Atkins taught the Temptations to do.

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2019, on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Way They Move the Way They Move.

Reggie Young, guitarist heard on hundreds of hits, dies at 82

He played guitar on hundreds of hit recordings in a career that spanned more than six decades.

By Bill Friskics-Warren

21st January 2019

NASHVILLE — Reggie Young, a prolific studio guitarist who appeared on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and many others and played a prominent role in shaping the sound of Southern popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday, 17 January 2019, at his home in Leipers Fork, Tenn., just outside Nashville. He was 82.

His wife, Jenny Young, said the cause was heart failure. Mr. Young played guitar on hundreds of hit recordings in a career that spanned more than six decades.

Among his best-known credits are the Box Tops’ “The letter” and Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious minds,” both No. 1 pop singles in the late ’60s, and Neil Diamond’s 1969 Top 10 hit “Sweet Caroline.”

Mr. Young also played the funky chicken-scratch guitar lick on “Skinny Legs and All,” the soul singer Joe Tex’s 1967 Top 10 pop hit. He contributed the reverberating fills and swells that punctuate James Carr’s timeless soul ballad “The Dark End of the Street,” also from 1967. And his bluesy riffing buttressed the sultry, throbbing groove on “Son of a preacher man,” a Top 10 single for the British pop singer Dusty Springfield in 1968.

Mr. Young appeared on all these recordings, including those associated with Presley’s late-’60s return to the limelight, as a member of the Memphis Boys, the renowned house band for the producer Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio.

Living and working in Memphis, where there had long been a fertile cross-pollinization between country music and the blues, was critical to the development of Mr. Young’s down-home style of playing, a muscular yet relaxed mix of rhythmic and melodic instincts.

Mr. Young, second from right in the back, with his fellow members of Bill Black’s Combo and the Beatles in 1964. When Bill Black’s Combo toured with the Beatles that year, Mr. Young gave George Harrison some guitar-playing guidance.

“In Memphis, it’s sort of in between Nashville and the Southern Delta down in Mississippi, so I’m kind of a cross between B. B. King and Chet Atkins,” Mr. Young said in an interview published on the website Soul and Jazz and Funk in 2017. “Most of the soul music back then was in Memphis,” he added. “That’s where I came from.”

In addition to playing guitar, Mr. Young added the psychedelic accents of the electric sitar to a handful of influential recordings, among them the Box Tops’ “Cry like a baby” and B. J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a feeling,” both of which reached the Top 10 in 1968.

After American Sound Studio closed in 1972, Mr. Young moved to Nashville, where his soulful less-is-more approach graced hits like Dobie Gray’s “Drift away,” Waylon Jennings’s “Luckenbach, Texas” and Willie Nelson’s “Always on my mind.”

Mr. Young’s Nashville session credits also include Billy Swan’s “I Can Help,” which topped both the country and pop charts in 1974.

Mr. Young made an indelible contribution, especially during his years in Memphis, to the Southernization of pop music in the 1960s and early ’70s. This influence was felt not just by the number of records made in the South that were played on AM radio throughout the nation. It was also evident in the procession of artists, among them Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon and the jazz flutist Herbie Mann, who came from outside the region to make records steeped in the Southern musical vernacular.

Reggie Grimes Young was born on 21st December 1936, in Caruthersville, Mo., and was raised in Osceola, Ark., and later in Memphis. His father, Reggie, was an accountant who played Hawaiian-style classical guitar and taught his son to play when he was 14. His mother, Thelma (Mayes) Young, was a homemaker.

In 1956 Mr. Young joined Eddie Bond and the Stompers, a rockabilly band that had a regional hit with a record called “Rockin’ Daddy” and opened shows for Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.

Mr. Young, with his arms folded, with Elvis Presley and other session musicians at American Sound Studio in Memphis in 1969. Mr. Young played on the No. 1 single “Suspicious Minds” and other Presley recordings in the late 1960s.

Mr. Young, with his arms folded, with Elvis Presley and other session musicians at American Sound Studio in Memphis in 1969. Mr. Young played on the No. 1 single “Suspicious Minds” and other Presley recordings in the late 1960s.

Three years later he joined Bill Black’s Combo, an instrumental quintet led by Presley’s former bass player. He played on two No. 1 R&B singles with the group, “Smokie” and “White Silver Sands,” before joining the Army in 1960, and rejoined after his return to civilian life in the early ’60s.

He arrived just in time to travel with Bill Black’s Combo when it opened for the Beatles on their 1964 tour of the United States. During that tour, Mr. Young had the opportunity to introduce George Harrison to the finer points of his Southern style of playing.

“George asked me, because I’m a blues player, ‘How do you bend and stretch your strings like that?’ ”Mr. Young recalled in the Soul and Jazz and Funk interview. “I told him, ‘You have to have light-gauge strings,’ and after that I think he went to lighter gauge strings on his guitar.”

A compilation album of 24 tracks from sessions on which Mr. Young played, including recordings by Merle Haggard, Jackie DeShannon and Bobby (Blue) Bland, is to be released by the English label Ace Records this week.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Young is survived by a son, Reggie III; a daughter, Cindy Evans; a sister, Alice Weatley; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Young played with so many luminaries over the course of his career that he said “it was nothing special” for him and his fellow Memphis Boys to be tapped to support Elvis Presley in the studio in the late ’60s.

“We played with all the top stars of the time, and Elvis hadn’t had any hits for a while and didn’t have an album on the charts,” he said in a 2013 interview with Premier Guitar magazine.

“As he stepped into the studio though — boy,” he continued. “I never met any other person with such charisma. It was very special for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 22, 2019, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Reggie Young, 82, Prolific ’60s and ’70s Studio Guitarist.

George Harrison & Pete Ham in New York, July 1971.  

Dylan & Harrison at Madison Square Garden in August 1971.