Michael McClure, a beat poet from the 1st hour...

Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco, in 1965.

Robbie Robertson, McClure, Dylan & Ginsberg. 

Michael McClure, present at Beat Poetry’s birth, dies at 87.

He took part in the storied San Francisco reading where Allen Ginsberg unveiled a version of “Howl.” He went on to have his own moments of fame and notoriety.

The poet Michael McClure, left, with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco in 1965. Ten years earlier, Mr. McClure had read his work at an event that famously included an early version of Mr. Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

By Neil Genzlinger for The New York Times

6 May 2020

Michael McClure, who at 22 helped usher in the Beat movement as part of a famed poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, then went on to a long and varied career as a poet, playwright, novelist and lyricist, died on Monday, 4 May 2020, at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 87.

His wife, Amy Evans McClure, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had last year.

Mr. McClure was one of the poetry readers at the Six Gallery, a former auto repair shop that had been turned into an art gallery, on 7 October 1955, a date that Beatdom magazine, marking the 60th anniversary of the event, called “arguably one of the most important dates in American literature.”

To an audience of perhaps 150 people (the number varies in the tellings), Mr. McClure read a poem called “For the Death of 100 Whales,” said to have been inspired by a report that bored American soldiers stationed in Iceland had amused themselves by shooting a pod of whales. But he and the other readers — Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, with Kenneth Rexroth as M.C. — were overshadowed by the sixth man on the bill, Allen Ginsberg.

That night Mr. Ginsberg premiered an early version of “Howl,” the landmark poem (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) that became the defining work of the Beat generation.

The night, Mr. McClure wrote in “Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision From Blake to Kerouac” (1982), constituted a collective throwing down of the gauntlet.

“In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before,” he wrote. “We had gone beyond a point of no return — and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void — to the land without poetry — to the spiritual drabness.”

For Mr. McClure, the event was also a proving ground for a concept.

“What the Six Gallery really did was show us that there was an audience out there that really wanted to hear poetry off the page,” he told The Washington Post in 2017. “That night at the Six Gallery greatly inspired us to go ahead.”

The evening may have belonged to Mr. Ginsberg, but Mr. McClure had his own moments of fame and notoriety in the ensuing years.

His play “The Beard,” first performed in 1965 in San Francisco, caused censorship uproars there and in other cities where it was staged over the next decade, for its obscenity-filled dialogue and a scene of simulated cunnilingus. Actors were sometimes arrested, along with the occasional director or producer.

On a lighter note, a fragment of a ditty that Mr. McClure would sing in gatherings with friends, improvising new lyrics each time, found its way to Janis Joplin. With the help of her friend Bob Neuwirth, she gave it her own tongue-in-cheek spin, called it “Mercedes Benz” and recorded it  a cappella on her album “Pearl,” which was released posthumously in 1971.

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,” the memorable lyrics, credited to all three, begin. “My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.”

The song, a wry commentary on materialism less than two minutes long, became one of Ms. Joplin’s most recognizable tunes. In the mid-1990s, somewhat incongruously, Mercedes-Benz used it in a commercial.

Poet Michael McClure on 5 February 1967.

Michael Thomas McClure was born on 20 October 1932, in Marysville, Kan., northwest of Topeka, to Thomas and Marion (Johnston) McClure. He spent much of his childhood in Seattle but returned to Kansas with his mother and stepfather, finishing high school in Wichita. He started college there as well before switching to the University of Arizona, but an interest in art took him to San Francisco in 1954.

“He wanted to study painting,” his wife said in an interview, “not to be a painter but to use the Abstract Expressionist ideas in his poetry.”

He had hoped to study at the California Institute of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), but when that didn’t work out he enrolled at San Francisco State University, studying under the poet Robert Duncan and earning a bachelor’s degree.

Mr. McClure lived near the Six Gallery. The origin story of the famed reading varies depending on the teller, but Mr. McClure said he had initially been asked to organize the event. Over coffee with Mr. Ginsberg, whom he had met at a party, he lamented that he didn’t have time because he and his first wife were expecting a child.

“Allen said, ‘Do you want me to put together the reading?’” Mr. McClure recalled in a 2015 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, “and I said, ‘Absolutely, man, that would be good.’”

“The Beard,” a play that imagines an encounter between the Hollywood sex symbol Jean Harlow and the outlaw Billy the Kid, had Mr. McClure in the news a lot. He wasn’t arrested when it was performed - as the writer, he was constitutionally protected - but actors in several productions were, on charges including public lewdness. A production in Los Angeles turned into a circus of sorts.

“Every night the actors got two ovations from the enthusiastic packed house,” The Edmonton Journal of Canada recalled in 2005 when “The Beard” was being revived there, “one when the play ended and one when they were escorted out the door and into the paddy wagon to be booked.”

A well-heeled theatrical angel would post bail, and the ritual would be repeated the next night. The charges didn’t stick.

Clive Barnes of The New York Times, reviewing a 1967 production in Manhattan, did not find the play obscene but did find it tedious.

“The author turns his phrases around and around,” he wrote, “like animals wearily pacing up and down a sweating cage. Imagine Norman Mailer mated with Gertrude Stein and you have the picture.”

Mr. McClure’s many poetry collections include “Dark Brown” (1961), “Star” (1970) and “Rain Mirror” (1999).

His novels include “The Mad Cub” (1970), a sexual coming-of-age story. He taught poetry for many years at the California College of the Arts.

Mr. McClure and his first wife, Joanna, married in 1954; the marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1998, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Dr. Jane McClure.

Mr. McClure, whose circle of friends and acquaintances included Beat figures and many others in the San Francisco counterculture, makes a brief appearance in “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary about the final concert of The Band. He recites a snippet of Chaucer from the stage.

Mr. McClure gave countless poetry readings over the decades, sometimes with a musical accompanist; Ray Manzarek, keyboardist of the Doors, was a frequent performing partner. He was also friends with Jim Morrison, that band’s lead singer, although when they first met they did not instantly bond.

“We took one look at each other, and we didn’t like each other,” Mr. McClure told Las Vegas Weekly in 2016. “He had long hair, and I had long hair. He had leather pants, and I had leather pants. But over drinks, we started talking. We became close friends. I inspired him to publish his poetry books.”

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. @genznyt • Facebook.

Nat Farbman & a young Michael McClure in 1957. 

Robbie Robertson, McClure, Dylan, Ginsberg, 

'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.