Bonnie Pointer of the Pointer Sisters dead at 69

Bonnie Pointer, a founding member of the Grammy-winning sibling vocal group the Pointer Sisters, has died at age 69, according to a statement released by her sister and bandmate Anita Pointer to TMZ. "It is with great sadness that I have to announce to the fans of the Pointer Sisters that my sister Bonnie died this morning,” Anita announced Monday. “Our family is devastated, on behalf of my siblings and I and the entire Pointer family, we ask for your prayers at this time. … Bonnie was my best friend and we talked every day, we never had a fight in our life, I already miss her and I will see her again one day." A cause of death was not revealed.

Bonnie was born July 11, 1950 and came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the ‘60s. (Her activist older brother, Fritz, was a college major in African studies, sociology, and theology who organized study groups and civil rights meetings in the Pointer family’s hometown of in Oakland, Calif.) After singing gospel music at a local Church of God in Christ congregation in West Oakland as a child, Bonnie founded the Pointer Sisters with the family’s youngest sister, June, in 1969.

Although Bonnie and June’s strict parents, Reverend Elton Pointer and Sarah Pointer, looked down upon rock ‘n’ roll as "the devil's music,” the secular group, which later included sisters Anita and Ruth, became darlings of the late-‘60s/early-‘70s San Francisco rock scene. Through their manager David Rubinson, a record producer associated with legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, soon the Pointers were performing onstage and in the studio as background singers for the likes of Grace Slick, Boz Scaggs, Elvin Bishop, and even Sylvester and the notorious performance/drag troupe the Cockettes. After Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler caught their act with Bishop at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, he offered them a deal in 1971.

A string of singles for Atlantic proved unsuccessful, in part due to the sisters’ refusal to pigeonhole themselves (even their ‘30s/’40s retro image, reminiscent of Billie Holiday and the Andrews Sisters, was out of step with the times). The Pointer Sisters moved over to Blue Thumb Records to release their self-titled debut album, thus embarking in earnest on a long career that crossed genres, encompassing disco, jazz, dance music, R&B, pop, and even country. Their first hit was a 1973 cover of the funky, Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey sociopolitical anthem “Yes Yes We Can Can.” Their single "Fairytale,” co-written by Bonnie and Anita, established them as the second black artist (and the first and, to date, only black group) to win a country music Grammy, when it picked up the award for Best Country Vocal Performance in 1975. The Pointer Sisters also became the first black group to perform at the Grand Ole Opry thanks to the crossover success of “Fairytale,” which was later covered by Elvis Presley.

Although Bonnie left the Pointer Sisters in 1978 and did not appear on the singles of the group’s ‘80s heyday, she enjoyed a modestly successful solo career with Motown, with her single "Heaven Must Have Sent You" reaching No. 11 on Billboard Hot 100. In February of this year, she reunited with Anita for the single “Feels Like June,” a touching tribute to June Pointer, who died of cancer in 2006 at age 52. Bonnie and June leave behind a legacy with the Pointer Sisters of three Grammy wins, three American Music Award wins, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Read More»

THE LONG, UNWINDING ROAD - Solo Beatles

On New Year’s Eve 1970, Paul McCartney filed for divorce. The marriage he was suing to dissolve was not his recent one to photographer Linda Eastman, but a decade-long musical collaboration with three friends from his hometown. The next morning, the world found itself officially without the Beatles.

It’s difficult now to understand how cataclysmic the split seemed at the time. Pop culture, especially pop music, has been so fragmented for so long that the concept of a single galvanizing force like the Beatles seems far-fetched. But during the roughly seven (could it have been only seven?) years they were going full steam, the Beatles tallied twenty Number 1 singles and thirteen Number 1 albums. They played before the largest concert audiences of their day With producer George Martin, they expanded the creative scope of the recording studio, bringing to rock and roll artistic heft it had never had before. Their fans were legion, their influence pervasive. They became musical-political-spiritual gurus during a period of furious social upheaval. What John Lennon meant when he opined in 1966 that the group was “more popular than Jesus” was simply that, at the time, they were the four best-known blokes on the face of the earth.

Apologies to Michael Jackson, Madonna, and U2, but there will never be another Beatles.

In the aftermath of the unthinkable breakup, abandoned fans, journalists, and fellow artists searched for someone to blame. They found McCartney. All Paul had really done, though, was the paperwork: each of the Beatles had already issued solo albums by the end of 1970 (including McCartney’s McCartney, Lennon’s Live Peace in Toronto, Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey); Harrison and Starr had each quit temporarily at least once; and Lennon, now collaborating mainly with his new bride, conceptual artist Yoko Ono, had long since announced his intention to leave permanently. In point of fact, the breakup took seven years. It began with The Beatles (1968), essentially a bunch of solo albums in one (white) package, and wasn’t really over until Apple Corps., Ltd., was dissolved in 1975. Still, McCartney frequently found himself called upon to explain his actions.

He answered with music. “Another Day,” his tuneful slice-of-life debut single, would have been at home on any late-model Beatles album. It may not have ranked with grand statements like “Let It Be,” but it was long on melody and lyrical detail, strengths that continued to inform McCartney’s work for several more years. From astounding, multi sectioned singles like “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey,” “Live and Let Die,” “Band on the Run,” and “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” to straight-ahead rockers like “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Jet,” “Junior’s Farm,” and “Helen Wheels” (named for Paul’s Land Rover), McCartney was the consummate pop melodist.

Oddly enough, friends and foes alike described him this way. In rock criticism, “melodic” is a pejorative term, implying a kind of weak-kneed, sing-along commerciality, and McCartney probably exacerbated the situation with 1976’s defensive “Silly Love Songs.” The single, his biggest of the seventies, marked the end of a fertile five-year period and was a mission statement for much of his later career.

Meanwhile, John Lennon was following his muse wherever it led him, sometimes down blind alleys. “How Do You Sleep?,” his vindictive attack on McCartney, indicated an unwillingness to give peace a chance, at least where band relations were concerned. Besides, after experiments with populism, minimalism, and rock revivalism, the eldest Beatle had a solo catalog that compared rather unfavorably to his old mate’s. Exceptions included the Spectorian “Mind Games,” a chamber-rock classic whose hypnotic flow made its big ideas digestible; “Whatever Gets You Through The Night,” a loping R&B duet with Elton John; and a few acknowledged classics like “Imagine” and “Jealous Guy.”

George Harrison was the Buzz Aldrin of the Beatles — always second to Lennon and McCartney — but after two acclaimed triple albums (All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh), a blockbuster hit single (“My Sweet Lord” / “Isn’t It a Pity”) and several Grammy nominations, Harrison seemed ready to put an end to all that second-fiddle stuff. His early-seventies oeuvre presented a new set of questions, chief among them being: Why are love songs about God so often boring? When Harrison’s singles succeeded, it was in spite of their spiritual intentions: “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” had a quirky, rhythmically restless melody that made the Utopian lyrics a red herring. But go deeper into the albums at your peril.

One of Harrison’s best cracks at a pure pop song was a minor masterpiece he co-wrote for Ringo, the 1973 Richard Perry-produced blockbuster that made Ringo Starr a commercial force (if only briefly). “Photograph” went to Number 1 in eight weeks, and gold shortly thereafter. The song’s opening lines reflected the mood of many fans as they watched the solo Beatles lumber forward under the weight of recent history: “Every time I see your face / It reminds me of the places we used to go.” Starr’s other hits, mostly retreads and novelties, were more or less what people expected from the world’s drollest drummer.

In addition to a spate of Beatles covers by names big (Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” with Lennon on guitar, Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” Joan Baez’s “Let It Be,” Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Got to Get You into My Life,” Richie Havens’s “Here Comes the Sun”) and small (Johnny Rodriguez’s “Something,” the Gary Toms Empire’s “Drive My Car,” Katfish’s “Dear Prudence”), the early seventies not surprisingly produced a number of Fab Four imitators. Of these, Badfinger was the only authorized one. The Liverpool quartet was signed to Apple in 1968, and songs like the McCartney-penned “Come and Get It” and the Harrison-produced “Day After Day” probably stayed truer to the Beatles’ legacy than the lads themselves did. To this day, many people mistakenly remember Badfinger’s hits as Beatles songs.

Beatles-style pop ran the gamut from the sublime (the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way”) to the ridiculous (the Hudson Brothers’ “So You Are a Star”), and was ultimately unnecessary; as of 1971, the solo Beatles had plenty of creative ammunition left. Compare the band’s twenty-one Top 10 hits from 1965 to 1970 to the individual members’ twenty-two during the following five years.

To the generation that had come of age with them, though, the Beatles would never be good enough again. Collectively they had raised expectations they could never live up to individually, and it fell to their original fans’ younger brothers and sisters to sort through four erratic solo careers. Too young to remember firsthand Beatlemania, these proto-X’ers listened to the Beatles as exactly what Lennon had insisted they were all along: four individuals. Or, as the joke goes, did you know Paul McCartney was in another band before Wings?

Read More»

Listen to New Wave Rock! THE KNACK: “MY SHARONA”

The Knack’s career seemed to have suffered greatly because Capitol Records appeared to go out of its way in hyping the group as something approaching the second coming of the Beatles (which it was not), the band’s refusal to grant interviews, and because the Knack fit in a stylistic slot that made the band a bit difficult to define. For some music fans of the day, the hype the band was given raised questions about its authenticity. In any case, this Los Angeles band enjoyed a couple of significant hits that were part of the new wave scene, “My Sharona” and “Good Girls Don’t,” and might easily have been more commercially and critically successful than it was had it not been for the aforementioned apparent career miscues.

The Knack consisted of singer/guitarist Doug Fieger, lead guitarist Berton Averre, bassist Prescott Niles, and drummer Bruce Gary. Significantly, the members of this group had extensive professional experience in other bands, as backing musicians for solo performers, and as studio musicians before the Knack was formed in 1978. The Knack’s early performances in 1978 in Los Angeles were highly touted and attended by some of the elite of the rock-music world. So, this was a band that could clearly connect with an audience and had the experience and technical skills to perform virtually any kind of popular music they chose. It seems, then, that the extramusical part of the group’s career was really what got in the way for Fieger, Averre, Niles, and Gary.

Easily the Knack’s biggest hit, and one of the biggest hits of the new wave era, “My Sharona” was written by Doug Fieger and Berton Averre, a team that had collaborated even before the establishment of the Knack. According to Fieger, the song was inspired Sharona Alperin, a friend of Fieger’s then-girlfriend, with whom Fieger became enamored upon meeting. Fieger also acknowledged that the insistent musical setting of the song and the famous opening instrumental riff were influenced by the songs on Elvis Costello’s This Years Model album (Konow 2017).

Perhaps one of the most important things to keep in mind about “My Sharona” is the song’s use of what are known in the world of pop music as hooks. According to NPR’s Tom Cole (2010), a hook is “a catchy combination of melody, lyrics and rhythm that stays in the listener’s head - something that songwriters from the dawn of time have wanted to achieve.” “My Sharona” is a song that contains several particularly strong hooks, melodically, rhythmically, and accompanimentally. The instrumental introduction includes a distinctive rhythm, which eventually turns out to be virtually identical to the rhythm in Fieger’s vocal melody in the song’s verses. The instrumental figure associated with the rhythm in the introduction also contains references to the later vocal line, particularly on the title words; however, the very opening of the instrumental riff consists of alternations of pitches an octave apart. There certainly is nothing magical about the interval of an octave, but its use in “My Sharona” as the basis of an instrumental riff is highly distinctive and easily memorable.

The strong pop hooks of “My Sharona” apparently made a strong, favorable impact on a large part of the public, as the single release is reputed to be one of the biggest-selling singles of the rock era. In fact, as the Knack’s official website puts it, “During the summer of 1979, culminating with a riotous sold out performance in New York’s legendary Carnegie Hall, the Knack was unavoidable. It seemed as if every stereo and car radio reverberated with the thunderous hook of their number one smash. It took rock icons Led Zepplin to finally relieve them of the number one album position in the fall of ’79. Billboard named ‘Sharona’ as the number one single of 1979. Today it still ranks as one of the biggest selling singles of the rock era” (Knack n.d.).

Unfortunately, “My Sharona” represented the Knack’s first and biggest brush with commercial success. The single “Good Girls Don’t” was not quite as successful, and the group’s albums subsequent to Get the Knack did not sell nearly as well as the band’s debut. “My Sharona” itself reentered the singles charts when the song was used in the 1994 film Reality Bites. Although the band officially broke up just a few years after “My Sharona” made the Knack a household name, the group did undertake several reunions over the years, some with the original members and some with substitute personnel. Unfortunately, drummer Bruce Gary died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2006, and lead singer and songwriter Doug Fieger died of cancer in 2010.

In 2003, VH1 ranked “My Sharona” at No. 64 in the music-video network’s list “The 100 Greatest Songs of the Past 25 Years” (Cosgrove-Mather and Lemire 2003). One might debate whether or not a song parody suggests the importance or the popularity of its source. However, for a parody to be successful, particularly from a commercial standpoint, there has to be a certain degree of mass familiarity with the source. Interestingly, “My Sharona” played a significant role in the establishment of one of the United States’ best-known musical humorists of the rock era. Weird A1 Yankovic’s homemade recording of his parody of “My Sharona,” entitled “My Bologna,” was the great parodist’s first exposure to the public and helped to secure Yankovic his first record contract. In this way, the Knack unwittingly helped to kick off the career of one of the most successful musical comedians of all time.

Read More»