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NZ Herald
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Connie Francis, a top-selling singer of the 1950s and '60s, dies at 87
Francis came of age when popular music was changing from jazz-flavoured swing music to the teen-driven energy of rock-and-roll. She was a reliable hitmaker during that interlude, reportedly selling more than 100 million records. Starting with her revival of the 1920s Tin Pan Alley hit Who's Sorry Now in 1958, Francis charted 35 Billboard Top 40 hits over the next six years, including 15 in the Top 10. She became a pop star at a level rivalling Elvis Presley and her onetime boyfriend, Bobby Darin. Managed by her father, George Franconero, a former New Jersey dockworker, Francis released more than 30 albums between 1958 and 1964, and her songs were constantly on the radio. She received 5000 letters a week, appeared on countless TV variety shows and earned more than US$1 million a year ($1.6m). She sold more records than any other female performer in the 1950s and had the third-highest sales in the 1960s, after the Supremes and Brenda Lee. Music critics often cited Francis as one of the most deserving performers not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On-screen, Francis starred with Paula Prentiss, Dolores Hart and George Hamilton in Where the Boys Are (1960), a film depicting college students on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Francis' recording of the buoyant title song reached No 4 on the Billboard pop chart and sold more than 1 million copies. 'I hated 'Where the Boys Are,'' she told People magazine in 1992. 'I didn't like the way I looked. I didn't like the way I acted.' She skipped the film's premiere but, to please her fans, she performed the song at nearly all of her concerts for decades to come. Not quite a rock or R&B belter and not widely regarded as a song stylist, the 1.5m tall Francis had a big voice with a clear tone and could inject a quavery, almost tearful touch at the end of a note for emotional emphasis. She sometimes ventured into country music, including all three of her No 1 singles: Everybody's Somebody's Fool, My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own (both from 1960) and Don't Break the Heart That Loves You (1961). In a few of her albums, such as Songs to a Swinging Band (1960) and A New Kind of Connie (1964), she demonstrated a flair for jazzy standards by the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein and showed a dimension of her talent that she never fully explored. But those weren't the albums that sold. She updated older songs such as Who's Sorry Now with guitars and a rock-and-roll beat to appeal to younger listeners, and recorded many tunes about teen angst, such as Stupid Cupid (1958), Lipstick on Your Collar and Frankie (both 1959). 'They were the least artistic endeavour of my career,' Francis said of her early hits in a 2006 interview with the Arizona Republic. 'They were bubblegum songs. They were teenybopper songs. But I enjoy seeing the reaction of people when I do them.' Francis, who spoke Italian and some Spanish, began recording in other languages early in her career. Using phonetically spelled lyrics, she released albums in 15 languages, including German, Hebrew, Japanese and Romanian, adding to her worldwide popularity as she toured internationally. She was a mainstay at nightclubs and hotels in New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Miami Beach, usually accompanied by her parents, with whom she lived until she married for the first time at 25. She appeared in three more films, all knockoffs of Where the Boys Are. But with the arrival of the British Invasion bands of the mid-1960s, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the relatively innocent songs and public persona of Francis seemed out of step during an era of a rising counterculture. Nevertheless, she maintained a devoted following and performed for US service members during the Vietnam War. During one stop, she recalled to CNN host Larry King, a general warned her not to sing her closing tune, God Bless America, because the embittered soldiers 'hated their country'. 'And without a single word, no introduction of any kind, no music of any kind,' Francis said, 'I just walked up to the microphone. I sang the first four lines of 'God Bless America' before one lone soldier stood up, put his hand over his heart and with tears streaming down his face began singing along with me. Then there was 100, then 1000. 'People through the years have always asked me, what was the greatest, ultimate - the greatest moment of your life in show business?' she added. 'And I never fail to mention it, because it was.' Father's control Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, the older of two children, was born December 12, 1937, in Newark, and grew up in a heavily Italian section of the city. 'There was music in the streets,' Francis recalled to the Newark Star-Ledger in 1997, 'and vendors selling sweet potatoes and chestnuts, and people would sit on their porches at night, singing, and my father would play the concertina.' Young Concetta absorbed her father's love of music, played the accordion for years and made her singing debut at 4, belting out Anchors Aweigh at an amusement park. In 1950, after she won first place on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, the host suggested she change her name to Connie Francis. She spent four years on a weekly children's variety show, Startime, while attending high school in Belleville, New Jersey. Francis began making records at 14 but found little success at first. She was a student at New York University in 1957, when she recorded Who's Sorry Now? On January 1, 1958, Dick Clark played the song on his American Bandstand show, and it immediately caught on. She left college to focus on music. 'If there wasn't a Dick Clark,' Francis said, 'there would be no career.' In later years, Francis spoke about her father's controlling manner – over her career and personal life – as a form of 'emotional abuse'. She had one date in high school, and her father wouldn't let her go to her senior prom. When she and Darin became close in her late teens, her father entered the studio where a rehearsal of The Jackie Gleason Show was taking place. 'Bobby and I were sitting in the audience holding hands at rehearsal,' Francis said on Larry King Live in 2002, 'and he came in brandishing a gun, intent on shooting Bobby. It took four men to restrain him.' Darin later married and divorced actress Sandra Dee before dying of a heart condition in 1973 at age 37. 'It was the most significant relationship of my life,' Francis later told the Toronto Star, 'and I still regret that it didn't work out.' All four of her marriages, to publicist Dick Kanellis, businessman Izzy Marion, restaurant owner Joseph Garzilli and TV producer Bob Parkinson, ended in divorce. Survivors include a son, Joseph Garzilli jnr. Tragedy and struggle On November 8, 1974, after Francis appeared at the Westbury Music Fair on New York's Long Island, she went to her room in a nearby Howard Johnson motel. In the overnight hours, a man broke into her room, held a knife to her throat and raped and beat her for two hours. She was tied to a chair and pushed to the floor, with two mattresses piled on top of her. Her assailant was never caught. 'You don't ever really get over a thing like that,' she told an interviewer in 2005, 'no matter how hard you try.' Francis filed a negligence suit against the Howard Johnson chain, a jury ruled in her favour and she was awarded US$2.5 million ($4.2m). Francis went into seclusion and did not sing before a live audience for seven years, in part because of a botched plastic surgery procedure on her nose that affected her voice. In 1981, Francis was left shaken by the gangland-style fatal shooting of her younger brother, George A. Franconero jnr, at his New Jersey home. A lawyer, he had reportedly given information to federal authorities investigating mob-related involvement in banking. Francis' fragile emotional state worsened. In interviews and in two autobiographies, she revealed that she became addicted to prescription medicines and attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She was arrested for striking her hairdresser, for refusing to put out a cigarette on a commercial flight and for threatening a police officer with broken glass. She went on spending sprees, once buying three stretch limousines in a single day. The next day, she spent US$178,000 ($300,472.90) on clothing. Courts twice declared her incompetent to handle her own affairs. Her father once had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility – one of 11 times she was institutionalised for mental illness. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with shock therapy and lithium. After her father's death in 1996, Francis moved to Florida and said she slowly began to put her life and career back together. When she was on the road, she always had a female assistant stay with her and refused to sleep alone in a hotel room. She continued to appear in occasional concerts until shortly before her death. 'I relax only when I'm in front of an audience,' she once told Ladies' Home Journal. 'It's the only time I really know who Connie Francis is.'
Edmonton Journal
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Edmonton Journal
Brian Wilson, singer-songwriter who created the Beach Boys, dies at 82
Article content They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequaled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys' signature angelic vocal harmonics, Mr. Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music. A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California.
Hindustan Times
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Donald Trump mourns Brian Wilson's death, says Beach Boys co-founder was ‘true musical genius'
Donald Trump has paid tribute to The Beach Boys founder and songwriter Brian Wilson. The music icon and the creative force behind hits like Surf's Up and California Girls died on June 11 at the age of 82. His family announced the news on social media but did not offer any reason for the cause of death. Wilson's death has been mourned by music industry veterans, including Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and more. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump called Brian Wilson a 'true musical genius' and expressed condolences for his demise. 'Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys was a true Musical genius, right up there with the greatest, ever. While Brian is no longer with us, his music will live on forever. Warmest condolences to his family, friends and, so importantly, his fantastic legion of FANS!!!' Trump wrote. In 2020, the rock band performed at a fundraiser for Trump in Newport Beach. Band members Brian Wilson and Al Jardine had distanced themselves from the event. The performance was led by Mike Love. In a statement to Variety via a spokesperson, Wilson and Jardine had said that they were unaware about the band's presence at the fundraiser and got to know about it from the media. 'We have absolutely nothing to do with the Trump benefit today in Newport Beach. Zero,' their statement affirmed. Brian co-founded The Beach Boys in 1961 with his friend Al Jardine, cousin Mike Love and brothers Dennis and Carl Wilson. The group achieved significant fame for their albums like Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys sold over 100 million records worldwide and appeared 36 times on the Billboard Top 40, a feat unrivalled by any American band. Brian Wilson was diagnosed with a neurocognitive disorder similar to dementia last year. He had long been suffering from health issues like schizoaffective disorder, whose symptoms included incessant auditory hallucinations and paranoia. Since early 2024, Wilson had been under a court conservatorship, and his medical and personal affairs were being overseen by longtime representatives. The statement by the family did not reveal any details about the cause of death. Yes, a mutual admiration existed between him and the British band. The Beatles member called Wilson 'a musical genius' in a moving tribute after his death.
Vancouver Sun
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vancouver Sun
Brian Wilson, singer-songwriter who created the Beach Boys, dies at 82
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Brian Wilson, the founder and principal creative force of the Beach Boys, whose catalogue of early hits embodied the fantasy of California as a paradise of beautiful youth, fast cars and endless surf and made them the most popular American rock group of the 1960s, has died at 82. The family announced the death on his official webpage, but did not provide further information. Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles, by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, and the regional success that year of their first single, Surfin,' thrust them to national attention when Capitol Records signed them almost immediately as the label's first rock act. They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequaled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys' signature angelic vocal harmonics, Mr. Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music. A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California. Yet Wilson also displayed an ambitious craftsmanship as a producer that culminated in the 1966 Beach Boys album 'Pet Sounds,' which many critics and music historians consider the first and greatest of all rock 'concept' albums building songs around a theme. Alternately celebratory and despairing, making effective musical use of such traditionally extramusical sounds as bicycle bells, car horns, trains and barking dogs, 'Pet Sounds' was not simply a collection of songs but a unified work of art, tracing a love affair from beginning to end, while melding an all-but-unprecedented intimacy of expression in rock with near-symphonic scope. The album and Wilson had a profound impact on musicians of the era and beyond. The Beatles acknowledged that the unity and complexity of 'Pet Sounds' helped inspire the similarly ambitious Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). The mystical singer-songwriter Judee Sill, later heralded by many critics as an overlooked genius, based her first finished piece, Lady-O (1971), directly on the album's emotional climax, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times. And Bob Dylan admired the immaculately polished sound in the Beach Boys recordings, telling Newsweek, That ear — I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian! From the beginning, the Beach Boys were wildly successful. Their work combined traditional American songwriting in the manner of Stephen Foster and George Gershwin, close 'barbershop' harmonies appropriated from groups such as the Four Freshmen, the lushly ornate 'Wall of Sound' production values of Phil Spector and the exuberant rock-and-roll of Chuck Berry. Wilson increasingly moved away from songwriting formulas and turned instead to a deeply personal 'outsider' mode of creation that tested the boundaries of sounds, harmonies and song structures. A 2007 article in the New Yorker by music critic Sasha Frere-Jones went so far as to call Wilson 'indie rock's muse,' and it is hard to imagine the works of such latter-day bands as the High Llamas, Yo La Tengo and Belle & Sebastian without his influence. Although the Beach Boys occasionally recorded songs by other musicians, including members of the band, Wilson's brother Dennis summed up the group as Brian's 'messengers.' 'Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,' he said in 1971. 'He is all of it. Period. We're nothing. He's everything.' Yet there was an abiding pathos in Wilson's best records. It consisted not merely of the idealized scenes the songs depicted, but the fact that they were created by a depressed, socially awkward, partially deaf young man who never surfed or much liked the beach and spent a great deal of his time alone in his room. Indeed, Mr. Wilson led what was often an unhappy and unsettled life, and suffered a breakdown in the late 1960s that drastically curtailed his life and later work. After Wilson mostly withdrew from the Beach Boys, he stayed in bed much of the time, put on weight and became addicted to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. In 1976, his first wife, Marilyn Rovell, sought help and found an unconventional Hollywood therapist named Eugene Landy to take over the care of her rapidly deteriorating husband. Landy assembled a team that included himself, another doctor, a nutritionist and a group of handlers to watch him 24 hours a day. He charged a monthly fee that was said to exceed $20,000, and later estimated that Wilson had paid him more than $3 million between 1983 and 1991. For a while, he also lived in Wilson's mansion. In 1989, Landy's license to practice psychology was stripped by the State of California. But he continued to work with Mr. Wilson and claimed a third of the $250,000 advance for a spurious 1991 autobiography, 'Wouldn't It Be Nice.' Eventually, Wilson — with the strong support of his family and the rest of the Beach Boys — took out a restraining order to break his last ties with Landy. Wilson's brother Dennis drowned in 1983, and his brother Carl died of cancer in 1998. Wilson's relationship with the rest of the Beach Boys devolved into a squalid series of suits and countersuits that lasted until the three surviving members of the band — Wilson, Love and Jardine — joined forces with David Marks and Bruce Johnston, both of whom had been 'Beach Boys' at one point or another, to play together again in 2012. An album, That's Why God Made the Radio, was issued that summer and the group embarked on a 50th anniversary tour. But the last official Beach Boys hit had been Kokomo in 1988, with which Wilson had nothing to do and initially sold more copies than any of their earlier songs, largely due to its inclusion in the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. That same year, Wilson released his first solo album, titled Brian Wilson, to encouraging reviews. It was his first collection of new songs in more than a decade. The opening piece, Love and Mercy, became Wilson's signature piece. (That also became of the title of a 2014 film biopic featuring two actors, Paul Dano and John Cusack, playing the younger Wilson.) Further solo discs appeared and, in 2002, Wilson recorded a live version of Pet Sounds as part of a world tour. By then, he had recovered much of his original vocal luster, but the new rendition seemed alarmingly robotic, as though it had been learned rather than felt. Indeed, in later years, he grew increasingly adept at 'playing' Brian Wilson onstage but he never appeared fully comfortable doing much more. 'It's a hard truth for those of us who love and admire him to admit, but it can be painful to see Wilson in concert,' Will Hodgkinson, chief rock and pop critic for the Times of London, wrote in 2018. The Wilson talent lived on into another generation as Mr. Wilson's daughters Carnie and Wendy Wilson, by Rovell, made names for themselves as two-thirds of the band Wilson Phillips. His marriage to Rovell, which had long been complicated by affairs and his precarious mental state, collapsed in the late 1970s. In 1995, he married Ledbetter, a model and car saleswoman who became his manager and with whom he had five children. She died in 2024, at age 77. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. After Ledbetter's death, Mr. Wilson's family sought to place him under a conservatorship, saying that he was taking medication for dementia and 'unable to properly provide for his own personal needs for physical health.' For all of the Beach Boys's musical infatuation with the carefree life in the surf, Mr. Wilson admitted to getting 'conked on the head' the one time he tried to ride a wave. But in summing up the band's most enduring aesthetic, he told the Sunday Times of London in 2019 that Southern California was 'more about the idea of going in the ocean than actually going in the ocean.' 'I liked to look at the sea, though,' he added. 'It was like a piece of music: each wave was moving around by itself, but they were also moving together.' Love concerts, but can't make it to the venue? Stream live shows and events from your couch with VEEPS, a music-first streaming service now operating in Canada. Click here for an introductory offer of 30% off. Explore upcoming concerts and the extensive archive of past performances.
Calgary Herald
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
Brian Wilson, singer-songwriter who created the Beach Boys, dies at 82
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Article content Brian Wilson, the founder and principal creative force of the Beach Boys, whose catalogue of early hits embodied the fantasy of California as a paradise of beautiful youth, fast cars and endless surf and made them the most popular American rock group of the 1960s, has died at 82. Article content Article content Article content The family announced the death on his official webpage, but did not provide further information. Article content Article content The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles, by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, and the regional success that year of their first single, Surfin,' thrust them to national attention when Capitol Records signed them almost immediately as the label's first rock act. Article content They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequaled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys' signature angelic vocal harmonics, Mr. Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music. Article content A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California. Article content Article content Yet Wilson also displayed an ambitious craftsmanship as a producer that culminated in the 1966 Beach Boys album 'Pet Sounds,' which many critics and music historians consider the first and greatest of all rock 'concept' albums building songs around a theme. Article content Alternately celebratory and despairing, making effective musical use of such traditionally extramusical sounds as bicycle bells, car horns, trains and barking dogs, 'Pet Sounds' was not simply a collection of songs but a unified work of art, tracing a love affair from beginning to end, while melding an all-but-unprecedented intimacy of expression in rock with near-symphonic scope. Article content The album and Wilson had a profound impact on musicians of the era and beyond. The Beatles acknowledged that the unity and complexity of 'Pet Sounds' helped inspire the similarly ambitious Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).
