Editorial: The influence of Brian Wilson, Sly Stone and … St. Charles?
Though their music was similar only in being groundbreaking, Wilson and Stone's lives followed similar, tragic narrative arcs. Both reached artistic peaks achieved by few others in pop music over periods of just a few years. Both were masters of the recording studio at a time when most artists left that part of their work to producers and focused on live performance. And both suffered from the ravages of drug abuse and mental illness for much of the remainder of their lives, making their many fans mourn for what more they could have offered.
But what they created in their primes served as inspiration for legions of artists to come.
Prince, Public Enemy and OutKast counted Sly Stone as a major influence. Wilson's lush, deceptively sophisticated harmonies and instrumentation were foundational for too many orchestral pop artists to count, and thanks to his epic rivalry with the Beatles in the mid-'60s, they pushed each other to greater heights. The Beatles' 'Rubber Soul' stirred Wilson to create his masterpiece, the Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds,' which then inspired the Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'
Speaking of 'Rubber Soul,' Wilson told the Tribune a little over a decade ago, 'I was so blown away by that damn album that I went and wrote ('God Only Knows.')' Paul McCartney subsequently called Wilson's work of genius possibly the greatest song ever written.
Wilson set out to top the Fab Four yet again with what would have been 'Smile,' but threw in the towel on that legendary 'lost album' amid intra-band acrimony and debilitating mental health issues.
Stone and Wilson both were children of California, but we choose to remember the brief but fascinating role of west suburban St. Charles in Wilson's life. Having remarried and feeling revived, Wilson moved to the suburb in the late 1990s to live near producer Joe Thomas, who worked on Wilson's 1998 comeback album, 'Imagination.' Wilson, an iconic Southern Californian, didn't learn to love Midwestern winters and in a few years' time moved back to where he once belonged.
But we like to think our slightly less glamorous region played a significant role in Wilson's latter-years career resurgence that followed from what we'll call 'the St. Charles years,' topped by his 2004 celebrated re-creation with a stellar band of his vision for 'Smile.'
God only knows what we'd do without the immense musical legacies Wilson and Stone left us this week.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Robert Wilson, visionary playwright, director and visual artist, dies at 83
Robert Wilson, a leader in avant-garde theater who collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga over his six-decade career, has died. He was 83. The 'Einstein on the Beach' director died Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y., after a 'brief but acute illness,' according to his website. 'While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end,' the statement reads. 'His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as the Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson's artistic legacy.' Wilson was born on Oct. 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, to a conservative Southern Baptist family. He struggled with a speech impediment and learning disabilities as a child but was aided by his ballet teacher, Byrd Hoffman. 'She heard me stutter, and she told me, 'You should take more time to speak. You should speak slowly,' ' he told the Observer in 2015. 'She said one word over a long period of time. She said go home and try it. I did. Within six weeks, I had overcome the stuttering.' In 1968, Wilson opened an experimental theater workshop named after his mentor: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. He created the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation in 1969, under which he established the Watermill Center in 1992. In his early 20s, Wilson moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he studied interior design and architecture at the Pratt Institute. Later, he joined the recreation department of Goldwater Memorial Hospital, where he brought dance to catatonic polio patients with iron lungs. 'Because the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he was doing with them was more mental than physical,' wrote his former colleague Robyn Brentano in Frieze. 'With his unconventional frankness and tenderness, he drew out people's hidden qualities.' Wilson started teaching movement classes in Summit, N.J., while he wrote his early plays. One day in 1968, he witnessed a white police officer about to strike a deaf, mute Black boy, Raymond Andrews, while walking down the street. Wilson came to Andrews' defense, appeared in court on his behalf and eventually adopted him. Together, Andrews and Wilson created 'Deafman Glance,' a seven-hour 'silent opera,' which premiered in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa. 'The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours, we went to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, 60 people had no words except to move,' wrote French Surrealist Louis Aragon after the 1971 Paris premiere. 'I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never, never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that's inexplicable in the life of deaf man.' In 1973, Glass attended a showing of Wilson's 'The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,' which ran for 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The two artists, united by their interest in experimenting with time and space in theater, soon teamed up to create 'Einstein on the Beach,' which premiered in 1976 in Avignon, France. 'We worked first with the time — four hours — and how we were going to divide it up,' Glass told the Guardian in 2012. 'I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper; everything emerged as drawings. I composed music to these, and then Bob began staging it.' Wilson and Glass partnered again to create 'the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,' which also featured music from Talking Heads frontman Byrne, for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The project, meant to span 12 hours, was ultimately never completed due to funding problems. In 1995, Wilson shared his concerns about arts funding in the U.S. with The Times. 'The government should assume leadership,' Wilson told Times contributor Jan Breslauer. 'By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell. We need to have a cultural policy [instead]. There has to be a balance between government and the private sector. 'One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing,' Wilson says. 'They are the journal and the diary of our time.' In addition to his stage work, Wilson created drawings, sculptures, furniture and installations, which he showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York beginning in 1975. In 2004, Wilson produced a series of video portraits featuring Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming and Alan Cumming. He would return to the medium again in 2013 with Lady Gaga as his subject. One of Wilson's last projects was an installation commissioned by Salone del Mobile in April 2025. Centering on Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà at Milan's Castello Sforzesco, the project explored the Virgin Mary's pain following Christ's death with a combination of music, light and sculpture. 'I'm creating my own vision of the artist's unfinished masterpiece, torn between a feeling of reverential awe and profound admiration,' he told Wallpaper. Wilson is survived by Andrews; his sister, Suzanne; and his niece, Lori Lambert.
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business Insider
Sharon Stone will play the villain — on one condition
Sharon Stone has been asked to play the villain so many times in her career that she's lost count. But she gets it. Her most famous role, playing the ice-pick-wielding seductress Catherine Tramell in the 1992 sensation "Basic Instinct," turned her from a 1980s B-movie starlet into an international sex symbol, while her character instantly became an iconic movie villain. So when she got the call recently from Universal asking if she'd be up for playing the baddie in "Nobody 2," the sequel to the ultra-violent 2021 thriller starring Bob Odenkirk as an unlikely assassin, she was ready to pass. "I just don't want to play a cookie-cutter villain, which is something that I really have a thing about," Stone, 67, told Business Insider over Zoom from her home, sporting light blue shades she'd often take off when she got excited while telling a story. "After 'Basic Instinct,' everybody wanted me to play a villain. But that was not cookie-cutter; it was a villain that touched upon the zeitgeist of the moment. That was why it was so specifically successful, and why it remains interesting to watch." So Stone came back to the studio with an idea for a character she'd been thinking about playing since watching her three sons play violent video games during the pandemic. "It was like living in a frat house, they were all screaming out of their rooms while they were playing," Stone recalled. "There is no cruelty like the kind that came out of those computers. So this character I made up came through that. I said, 'I want to play a character that essentially comes right out of social media.'" It resulted in Stone delivering a ruthless and delightfully unhinged performance as Lendina, a crime boss who causes trouble for Odenkirk's character Hutch while he's vacationing with his family. Stone's recollections of "Nobody 2" were just a warm-up for the stories she told me while reminiscing about her legendary career. From breaking down her confrontational first meeting with Michael Douglas before auditioning for "Basic Instinct," to sharing her reaction to getting slapped by Gene Hackman in " The Quick and the Dead," to plotting to play the late comic legend Phyllis Diller in a biopic, Stone's decades in Hollywood have been as fruitful as they are colorful. Below, she looks back at some of her most memorable roles. On roller-skating to auditions and getting cast by Woody Allen Sharon Stone: I'm still modeling, and I still make more money today modeling than in film. It's still a huge part of my reality. But back then, I wanted to be a director. But the pesky vagina has stood in my way. Because how could you possibly have a brain and a vagina? It seems to have confounded so many. How did you land that now-memorable shot of you inside the train in Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories"? The casting agent Riccardo Bertoni cast extras in New York. He was a guy who really saw talent. He helped Sly [Stallone] get "Rocky" made. He saw me and said, "Girl, you're a star, and I'm going to get you in front of people." I didn't have any money, so I would rollerskate to all my modeling appointments. This was back in the Studio 54 period of New York City. I went over to Riccardo's and he told me that Juliet Taylor was casting extras for this Woody Allen movie. He told me to go to this bus stop. Woody was actually sitting at the bus stop. Juliet had a podium placed in front of it, and she would look at everyone's headshots. So I rollerskated over there and had my giant modeling portfolio with me and showed it to her. She turned around and passed it to Woody in the bus stop. Then she said, "Woody would like you to sit down with him." So I skated into the bus stop and sat with Woody, and he looked at my stuff and didn't say anything, and handed it back to me, and I skated away. And I later found out I got the job. On the day of shooting, the 1st AD came out and he said, "Sharon, there was a girl who was going to play a part and she's sick, Woody's going to come out and talk to you." Woody comes over and tells me, "I want you to do this job, it's today." I was self-conscious, I was 19, and they put me in this tight dress, and I was so awkward about my body. The hair person put a real gardenia in my hair. It really meant the world to me that she did that. It made me feel important. And then Gordon Willis was the DP, the man who shot "The Godfather." It was an amazing experience. On her contentious first encounter with Michael Douglas before they co-starred in 'Basic Instinct' Did Paul Verhoeven ever bring up "Basic Instinct" to you when you two made "Total Recall"? No. And what happened was I wanted the part, but nobody would give me the script. So my manager, Chuck Binder, broke into the office by picking the lock with his credit card and stole the "Basic Instinct" script for me. I read it and I said, "I'm having this part." Everyone they went out to would turn it down. But the thing was, Michael Douglas did not want to put his bare ass out on the screen with an unknown. And I understood that. He wouldn't even test with me. But that was also for a different reason; we had an argument prior to that. This was at Cannes. A bunch of us were all sitting, and he was talking about someone and their kids. I really, really knew this person he was talking about. So I said something and he responded to me, saying, "What the fuck do you know?" It was in regard to a father/child relationship. Clearly, it triggered him. So he screams this at me across a whole group of people. And I'm not the person who goes, "Oh, excuse me, superstar." I pushed back my chair and said to him, "Let's step outside." That's how we first met. Did you two step outside? Yeah. And I explained to him what the fuck I knew about this family he was speaking about, and that I was best friends with the children and the parent. And then we parted, I wouldn't say as best friends, but amicably. So, fast forward to casting "Basic Instinct," I don't think he wanted me to be his costar. [ Laughs.] (Editor's note: Michael Douglas did not reply to a request for comment.) But I would imagine that tension between you two fueled the dynamic your characters had in the movie. It worked great, because I was not rattled if he yelled at me. That was interesting for the character, because Michael has a temper, and I didn't care. That worked very well in our dynamic. Eventually, we became the greatest of friends, to this day. I admire him tremendously. The role of Catherine Tramell made you an icon, but you had a price to pay. From the way you learned what was shown in the leg-crossing scene to the custody battle you endured afterwards with your child, if you could do it all over again, would you take the role? It made me an icon, but it didn't bring me respect. But would I do it again? We don't get to make these choices in life. I don't participate in the fantasy world in this way. What I did with what happened is exactly the way I wanted to do it. Verhoeven and I have a wonderful relationship. I would work with him again in a second. We both understand, even though we have different public ways of discussing it, we understand very well what happened regarding the crotch scene. I very much believe that none of us knew at the time what we were getting in regard to that shot, and when Paul got it, he didn't want to lose it, and he was scared to show me. And I get that. Once I had time to calm down, I didn't make him take it out of the movie when I had the legal right to. So I did have the chance to do it differently and I didn't, because once I had the chance to step back, I understood, as the director, not the girl in the film, that that made the movie better. On getting slapped by Gene Hackman in 'The Quick and the Dead' and Robert De Niro getting under her skin in 'Casino' Is the legend true that while shooting "The Quick and the Dead," the scene where Gene Hackman slaps you was improvised? Yes. And it's also true that right after he did it, I grabbed him by his lapels and picked him up off his feet. The people who played our bodyguards in the scene didn't know what to do, so they all cocked their rifles. And [director] Sam [Raimi] yelled, "CUT! CUT! CUT! EVERYBODY CALM DOWN!" [ Laughs.] Did Gene give any explanation for why he slapped you? No, and I don't think there should be. I think it's good. I have worked with actors who really get cranked up in their performances and can get violent in their work. We talk before we work, or I know going in. In "Casino," was it more fun working across from Robert De Niro or Joe Pesci? It's apples and oranges. Joey really, really fought for me to be seen and get the job. So I have a serious loyalty to Joey because he's always backed me. It was always Joey and Jimmy Caan. They backed me since I was 19. I always wanted to work with Bob. I had auditioned with him many times before "Casino." It was my dream to work with De Niro and hold my own. There's a scene in the movie where we're sitting across a table arguing and he says to me, "You're a good actress, you know that?" And I remember in that scene when he said it, how furious it made me because it was my dream to do it, and then he challenged me at the table. I remember thinking, "Oh, buddy. Not today, pal." He knew every button to go for with me because he is the greatest observational actor. He can crawl under your skin and get in there. On wanting to make a Phyllis Diller biopic and learning her laugh Do you want to play Phyllis Diller one day? I do want to play Phyllis Diller very, very badly. She and I were very close friends. She cooked me dinner a lot of times. That woman could cook. I told her I wanted to play her, and she sat down and taught me her laugh. She made me practice her laugh! Phyllis made little paintings for all my kids. Are you actively trying to get a biopic off the ground? I'm trying. You know, she didn't hit it big until she was 49. She lived in a trailer park with 5 kids and her schizophrenic husband, and practiced her act on women at the laundromat. It's unbelievable. I think there are great actors who could play Bob Hope, Red Buttons, Johnny Carson. Sam Rockwell could play Johnny in his sleep. We were tight. Yes, I'm desperate to play her. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. "Nobody 2" hits theaters August 15. More from this series
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
The Bright Side: Leopard seal love songs structured like nursery rhymes, study finds
Male leopard seals compose and sing their own songs to woo potential mating partners, scientists in Australia have found. The songs are structured much like nursery rhymes, making them easy to remember. "It kind of sounds like sound effects from an '80s sci-fi" movie, the lead author of the study said. When male leopard seals dive down into icy Antarctic waters, they sing songs structured like nursery rhymes in performances that can last up to 13 hours, scientists said Thursday. The Australian-led team of researchers compared the complexity of the songs composed by the big blubbery mammals to those of other animals -- as well as human musicians like the Beatles and Mozart. Lucinda Chambers, a bioacoustics PhD student at Australia's University of New South Wales, told AFP that people are often surprised when they hear the "otherworldly" hoots and trills sung by leopard seals. "It kind of sounds like sound effects from an '80s sci-fi" movie, said the lead author of a new study in the journal Scientific Reports. During the spring breeding season, male leopard seals dive underwater and perform their songs for two minutes before returning to the surface for air. They then repeat this performance for up to 13 hours a day, according to the study. The researchers determined that all leopard seals share the same set of five "notes" which are impossible to distinguish between individuals. However each seal arranges these notes in a unique way to compose their own personal song. "We theorise that they're using that structure as a way to broadcast their individual identity, kind of like shouting their name out into the void," Chambers said. The researchers believe the males use these songs to woo potential female mates -- and ward off rivals. 'Songbirds of the ocean' The team studied recordings of 26 seals captured by study co-author Tracey Rogers off the coast of Eastern Antarctica throughout the 1990s. "They're like the songbirds of the Southern Ocean," Rogers, who is also from the University of New South Wales, said in a statement. "During the breeding season, if you drop a hydrophone into the water anywhere in the region, you'll hear them singing." The team analysed how random the seals' sequences of notes were, finding that their songs were less predictable than the calls of humpback whales or the whistles of dolphins. But they were still more predictable than the more complex music of the Beatles or Mozart. "They fall into the ballpark of human nursery rhymes," Chambers said. This made sense, because the songs need to be simple enough so that each seal can remember their composition to perform it every day, she explained. She compared it to how "nursery rhymes have to be predictable enough that a child can memorise them". But each seal song also needs to be unpredictable enough to stand out from those of the other males. Leopard seals, which are the apex predator in Antarctic waters, swim alone and cover vast distances. They likely evolved their particular kind of song so that their message travels long distances, the researchers theorised. Varying pitch or frequency might not travel as far in their environment, Chambers said. Female seals also sing sometimes, though the scientists do not know why. Chambers suggested it could be to teach their pups how to sing -- exactly how this talent is passed down is also a mystery. But she added that this behaviour has never been observed in the wild. The females could also just be communicating with each other, she said. (FRANCE 24 with AFP)
