Four alerts today! The doors to the pearly gates (if you believe in such a thing) are swinging wildly.
First, on Monday my brother Howard alerted me to the death of film director William Friedkin, who died at the age of 87. He won the Oscar for Best Director for *The French Connection* and is probably best known for *The Exorcist.* He also directed two seminal LGBTQ+ classics, *The Boys in the Band* and (ew) *Cruising.* Howard also mentioned *Sorcerer,* which I hadn't even heard of.
Here's a nice little overview of his career from Good Morning America:
Yesterday Howard alerted me to the deaths of two musicians I didn't know, Erkin Koray and Sixto Rodriguez.
Koray was a Turkish music legend. This is from DailySabah.com:
"Born in Istanbul on June 24, 1941, Koray covered a countless number of traditional Anatolian folk songs, as well as classical Turkish music pieces and was hailed for his contribution to protect Anatolia's cultural heritage."
A YouTube clip is worth a thousand words, right? Howard chose this song, it's pretty damn groovy:
Here's the start of Sixto Rodriguez's Wikipedia bio:
"Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (July 10, 1942 – August 8, 2023), known professionally as Rodriguez, was an American singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan. Though his career was initially met with little fanfare in the United States, he found success in South Africa, Australia (touring the country twice in his earlier career), and New Zealand. Unbeknownst to him for decades, his music was extremely successful and influential in South Africa, where he is believed to have sold more records than Elvis Presley, as well as other countries in southern Africa. Information about him was scarce, and it was incorrectly rumored there that he had died by suicide shortly after releasing his second album.
"In the 1990s, determined South African fans managed to find and contact Rodriguez, which led to an unexpected revival of his musical career. This was told in the 2012 Academy Award-winning documentary film *Searching for Sugar Man* and helped give Rodriguez a measure of fame in his home country."
I guess I need to see *Searching for Sugar Man* and learn more about this dude. Howard chose this song to represent Rodriguez:
And Stephanie alerted me to the death of Robbie Robertson, who Rolling Stone described as a "master storyteller who led The Band. The Band's guitarist and primary songwriter collaborated with Bob Dylan and penned 'The Weight,' 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' and 'Up on Cripple Creek,' among other classics. He was 80."
If you haven't seen *The Last Waltz,* Martin Scorcese's documentary film about The Band, you have to see it immediately. Stephanie chose two performances from that movie to represent Robertson:
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