Sandy Pearlman, Who Pretty Much Invented Me, Died This Morning

I'm bad at remembering dates things happened. I remember my birthday; not much else. But other things besides numbers-- markers-- remind me when significant events happened. So many of them in my life have it do with Sandy Pearlman. I met Sandy at freshman orientation at Stony Brook in 1965... wow, 5 decades ago, my first day at school. Neither Sandy nor I ever imagined we'd live for 5 more decades after our time at Stony Brook. He wasn't a freshman that day. He was a senior-- a senior-plus. He was spending an extra year at Stony Brook because he had been elected moderator, head of the student government, in the spring. There must have been some other reason, like not having finished something he needed to do to go on to the next step... graduate school at Brandeis, something to do with his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, something to do with the band he was working with as songwriter, manager, producer, inspirer, the Blue Öyster Cult. I'm getting ahead of myself.

This morning when I got up at 4, I found an e-mail from Robert and Roni Duncan, our old friends. They've been watching over him this year. "His suffering is over. He passed peacefully, surrounded by love, with Mars peeking in the window, at 12:30 am, July 26, 2016, in Marin County, California." If it wouldn't have been today it would have been tomorrow or the next day. Sandy was dying. When I looked back at the posts he had done for DWT, I found one, basically a lecture he did at McGill-- where we were both teaching music classes for a time, he more seriously and consistently than I-- about frisson, "What Makes Music Thrilling?" As an intro, I wrote that Sandy has been one of my closest friends since 1965. He introduced me to music. Probably best known as the producer (and writer) for Blue Öyster Cult, he also produced albums for The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, Dream Syndicate and many other artists. He also introduced me to politics-- music and politics... a pretty big chunk of my life. And more than that; he inspired me to dream and think outside myself; that's a big deal. He asked me to embed Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" from The Planets to illustrate the piece.

I was a cook once, in Amsterdam's meditation center, the Kosmos, for a few years. I arranged a photo album in a macrobiotic cookbook, pasting the pictures from my life over the recipes, each chapter representing another astrological house. I put pictures of Sandy in the 9th House, Sagittarius, meant to represent the superconscious mind-- understanding, expansion of horizons-- in other words, spiritual philosophies and visions, intuition, inspiration, long journeys... a different place for pictures than, say, a chapter about friends or lovers or personality. I always thought of it as my guru chapter-- my teachers. There are a bunch of Sandy snapshots pasted over recipes for Ter-Yaki and some French dishes.

Sandy-- anytime between the late '60s and now

Sandy, if I recall, was a philosophy major-- maybe sociology and philosophy. He would have been 73 had he lasted another couple of weeks. But last year he had a stroke, hit his head hard on the pavement when he fell and was in a coma for a very long time. At one point he came out of it and I thought he was going to recover. He wasn't; it was just something I told myself to make it lesser horrible.

About 7 years ago Sandy did a couple of posts for DWT, one on his old and dear friend Patti Smith, who he introduced me to when she was a poet living above a shoe store on 14th Street in Manhattan with a photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe. It seemed pretty bohemian. I was visiting from Amsterdam and he wanted me to meet her and to see her perform in a church basement. I told him it was one of the most thrilling performances I had ever seen but that it could never be captured on vinyl. Years later, the first week I was hired as general manager of Sire Records, I managed to find the masters of "Piss Factory" and "Hey Joe," which my boss, Seymour Stein, had financed in 1974, and released them, for the first time, on a CD. I felt I was making a contribution to culture that day.

The other post he did for us that year was an obit for Ellie Greenwich, one of his idols. In a writing class somewhere along the way, a professor of mine taught the class that when you're writing about an artist, the hardest-- and most important-- thing would be to convey the art itself. The 3 links about Ellie, Patti and frisson posted above make that part easy. Please read them for a better idea about Sandy. He was always a much better writer than I ever was.

He wrote Imaginos, a collection of poems, which would become Blue Oyster Cult songs, while we were still at Stony Brook. Up top is "Astronomy" from that collection, produced many years later by Sandy, himself... his dream come true on some levels. Maybe you can get a sense from it how he helped open a new world for me, an unformed teenager from Brooklyn searching for... an idea of who I was. I went up to him on that first day of freshman orientation-- the first guy I had ever spoken with who was an authority figure of around my own age and the first guy who I had ever spoken to who had long hair. He told me about the Rolling Stones and asked me to run for freshman class president. I was hoping to score some pot from him; he had never tried it. Later that year I was walking around in Greenwich Village with a joint in my pocket that I had just bought. It started raining and I was getting wet. I heard a tinny little beep beep and looked up and it was Sandy in his little green Sunbeam. Like me, he often found his way from Long Island to the Village. I jumped in and lit up my joint. He didn't want any, but at least I didn't have to take the Long Island Railroad back to Stony Brook. We drove that route in his Sunbeam countless times, usually to hear music or see a film. He's tell me about extraterrestrials long after midnight on the Long Island Expressway.

What did I discover with Sandy? The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol. The Jefferson Airplane. The Grateful Dead. The Doors. The Byrds. I had my first acid trip with him, Bill Graham, Paul Kantner and Marty Balin. Sandy didn't take any acid; he was driving. And I think he thought drugs would fuck him up profoundly. Later he introduced me to The Clash and I introduced him to U2. I don't know what to make of his passing. I'm glad he isn't suffering any more-- stuck inside a body wracked with pain, partially unable to move, unable to communicate for the most part, trapped. I need to think about it today.

Christopher Walken played the Sandy-based character on one of Saturday Night Live's most iconic skits once. Sandy, always the philosopher, took it in good stride and always laughed about it. My friend is dead.

UPDATE: From Our Friends Helen Klein and Michael Bart

Through Howie, I met Sandy early in my freshman year at Stony Brook, in the fall of 1967. He was the hippest, coolest, most brilliant guy, immersed in rock ’n roll, and I was in awe of him. At college concerts, and there were many, there was Sandy, standing off to the side, dressed in black and wearing a hat and sunglasses, bopping his head to the beat. Lucky for me, he considered me a friend and opened up my world. He knew what was in the forefront of culture and I went along for the ride. Sandy took me to the first Star Wars movie when it opened at the Ziegfeld, my first Bruce Springsteen concert at the Palladium and so many other events. He even brought me along to hang out with Joe Strummer of The Clash. I listened to the Blue Oyster Cult, aka the Soft White Underbelly, in college lounges and went to a Texas barbecue with the Dictators when they played there. Being in his company and listening to him speak was amazing. He was the most interesting person I ever had the pleasure to meet. I had not seen him often in recent years, but I cherish our interaction. I spent time with him in Austin at South by Southwest, and he surprised everyone by showing up at a Stony Brook gathering at a friend’s house in Napa, regaling everyone with his wit. He came to my house for decade-celebrating birthday parties. His discussion with my physicist friend was so high level it was incomprehensible to me. Our last communication was in the fall. I love you Sandy and I will miss you terribly. Your were a great influence on my life and a wonderful friend.

-Helen

Sandy with Mick and Joe of the Clash in NYC, 1978

Until I met Sandy Pearlman I thought that I was the only motor-head who appreciated the psychedelic music coming out of San Francisco. Then I read his Crawdaddy article about the the Byrds with the cryptic title, "Beyond Andy Granatelli." I immediately made the connection between race-car builder Granatelli, his development of STP engine additive, and Sandy's sly reference to the drug by the same name.

I was pretty certain that only a small handful of people on the planet would've connected those dots. It was that sort of elliptical thinking and broadly-informed creativity that attracted me to Sandy.

My first LSD experience took place on the Stony Brook campus during the summer of '68. I don’t remember where or how, but I ended up in a room that was filled with BOC equipment. Sandy appeared at one point, dressed all in black leather. In my delirium, I was convinced that he was the devil, but I made it out of there with my soul intact.

About eight years later, the devil surprised me with an act of kindness. I was at a particularly low point in my life, and Sandy let me crash at his Setauket digs while Joan was vacationing in Europe. After all, someone had to walk the dogs-- Angelina and Elflandria-- and take the Porsche in for servicing.

Sandy put me to work fulfilling mail order requests for BOC lyrics and merchandise. After much wheedling on my part, he took me to the NYC studio where he was in the process of mixing one of the Cult's albums. I had the opportunity to watch him earn his "more cowbell" reputation as he put the individual musicians-- Donald in particular-- through endless takes.

It was a real eye opening lesson in how the "sausages" of rock and roll are actually made. On another occasion he let me tag along to a Grateful Dead mixing session. Garcia and Lesh were working on “Anthem of the Sun.” Jerry ordered Sandy and me to lie flat on the floor so as not to disrupt the sound pumping out of two speakers-- each the size of a large refrigerator. It was a weird and wonderful experience, and something that you took for granted if you hung out with Sandy for any length of time.

In spite of our proximity, Sandy always maintained an aloofness, and I gladly accepted my place as a young "hanger on." He was brilliant, and I was struggling to keep up with his restless imagination.

Then, as the years rolled by, Sandy mellowed, and our infrequent interactions became more personal. We met up at South by Southwest a few years back and again at an impromptu Stony Brook reunion in Napa. On both occasions, I encountered a much mellower and more welcoming Sandy.

 
And that's how I will remember him-- for his wit, his brilliance, his creativity and his generosity.

-Michael

Patti Smith, A Guest Post By Sandy Pearlman

photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino, 2009

The Museum of the City Of New York just put out a compendium of the 400 most essential people in NYC's 400 year history. It's quite an inspiring list and one of the names on it is Patti Smith, someone I first met long before she had recorded anything. I was visiting NYC for the first time since having moved abroad in 1969 and she was living in a loft on 23rd Street with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Sandy Pearlman, an old college chum, brought me over to meet her and later to see her and Lenny Kaye do a beat poetry session in the basement of a church. I was floored by the performance, which I told Sandy was probably too spectacular to ever capture on vinyl. I was wrong. On Thursday Patti is giving a talk on the poet William Blake at the Morgan Library. Sandy, who now teaches music at McGill University agreed to help put Patti into some kind of context for DWT readers who might not be familiar with her work.

Of the Matter of Patti Smith’s Horses, Horses

-by Sandy Pearlman
15 November, 2009

(1) Sing Goddess. Of things now past but not forgotten. It’s 1975 OK. Avery Fisher Hall, home of the NY Philharmonic, sanctified space under Bernstein & Boulez, about to be re-energized as the 1st Big-Box Venue for Patti, in honor of release of Horses. A full house is in the house. Two Goddesses have converged. The ancient antagonists, Aphrodite and Athena back at it for one more fall that’s all.  Taking a back seat for once, though seated in the front row, the world’s de facto reigning sex goddess, Marilyn Chambers, the Queen of Porn herself, is perched for good view of the stage. As above so below, Aphrodite for a Day, know your competition. Above her, was the Girl with the Tie, Patti Smith, commanding the stage with full panoply of Athena’s playbook. From onset of Patti Smith’s project way back with Jesse James, live in 1971 w/Lenny Kaye (one time only and ever only so) at St Mark’s in the Bowery, the Athenoid parallelisms have been too dense for mere coincidence: Wisdom, Fury, Poetry, Guardian of Heroes, the Merciless Heart, Tamer of Horses. Athena was the archetypal Tamer of Horses. Incarnation or possession, perhaps, but, mere coincidence, never. As above so below, the dance of the archetypes begins. Needles and Pins. Two Goddesses on the track, but one of them will sing. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."

(2) That there’s no such thing as coincidence. That Patti Smith often hung w/the alien that ran the Saucer News Book Store over at 45th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. That he was not human. That Patti would wind up 30 years later, totally by coincidence, with the sign that hung outside that store, when she discovered it on a wall of the house she was about to buy. That Birdland was written with crop circles in mind and UFOs on the brain when no one even knew what crop circles were. That Wilhelm Reich, who’s at the controls, in, and whose son is inhabitant, of, Birdland, wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism. That what Patti Smith stands for, now and forever issues a challenge to the very existence of essentially pessimistic Mass Cult Fascist Art, and, by extension, to insidious propagation of those industrial music objects, which, deploy entrainment by repetition and commodity fetish compulsion as compliance mechanisms first to captivate, with exclusionary repetition like airplay, then to capture, their captive audiences. That the Cult Patti simultaneously embodies and serves is of the truth that music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation: Love Minus Zero/No Limit. That the truth is music is neither wallpaper, nor means of entrainment; neither vehicle of domination, nor of its mass psychology; neither an industry, nor industrial. That when music is treated as if it is of that kind, then what we get is more of what we’ve got now and no more Horses. That for exposing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich got run out by the 3rd Reich. That as a function of insights developed earlier around his Mass Psychology, in the late 1940’s thru mid 1950’s, Wilhelm Reich went on to dream up a comprehensive theory of the great world systems, even accounting for UFOs, the age of which was at first dawning. That this theory anticipates and encompasses the X-Filing Corpus Mulder/Sculley.,That this theory got him run off the Planet (i.e. he died in prison) by his next government, the same US government that brought leading lights of the 3rd Reich home to build Space Ships in Area 51,White Sands and Huntsville, Alabama. That Moon of Alabama written by Kurt Weill (also run out by 3rd Reich), not Steven Foster, was covered by the Doors and eventually recovered by Patti’s Crew on Brecht/Weill Night at her London Meltdown performance in 2005. That Horses as recorded at the Meltdown now closes, or, better, recapitulates with a 3rd cover (…beyond Van Morrison and Cannibal and the Headhunters…) and that cover is the Who’s My Generation. That on the night of her Meltdown, the night when Patti’s Band played all of Horses from cover to cover, for the first time, live, in the order it was recorded, Patti revealed the corrosive irony that dare not speak its name: That Our Generation had given the world George Bush.


(3) There is a geography of Horses. Its territory is divided into two parts: Birdland and The Land of a Thousand Dances. They are the same but different. Twins again, since we’ve seen this before. Twin states of mind, of matter…? As above so below. Upper and Lower Egypt, The Twin Towers, Places Charmed and Ordinary, the State of Maine and New Orleans… Twins again, but not identical. Perhaps “twinned” would be better. Each twin influences the other, but, their differential “gravities” disruptively interact to produce unpredictable dynamical outcomes. With chaotic perturbations in the orbits of their spheres of influence and dialectical chaos at their structural core. The center will not hold. Actually there is no center. This territory has no capitol city. When systems collapse like this, for better or worse, liberation attends. Not just of, and, from things. But of, and, from process itself. Including the process of language. Within the concept logic boundaries of Horses transit is possible without transition. Transformation is possible without process. To get anywhere it’s not necessary to go through somewhere. Transformation Direct, that’s the ticket. With Horses, truly the transformational generator’s on interstellar overdrive and all wormholes fully activated. There are no loops but Mobius and Patti Smith is their prophet. And the radical, clearly counterintuitive leaps of lyrical faith that characterize the “texts” of Birdland, Land, Kimberly, Free Money, Redondo Beach… all pass for intuitively logical in the final analysis. Free Money/Free Language. If poetry like music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation, then the first principal of Patti’s excellent adventure w/Horses was to bet the ranch on a poetic language that directly transforms itself by means of clearly counterintuitive unstaged leaps of word faith, that, wind up being perceived at the other end of the combinatorial wormhole as inevitable intuitive logic. As if creation of Horses somehow entailed the simultaneous running of an infinite number of data loops, and, where they stopped and started nobody knows, nor, cares, since, all their data are already mapped for previously unknown intuitive validity anyway. As if by coincidence. Or paradox of limitless individuation. Or by virtue of Patti Smith, Our Lady of Perpetual Intuition’s Greater Magdalenic Cloud of Grace. Consider, for example, the dialectical orbit of Patti Smith and Chris Carter, the X Files/Millennium Creation God. That Chris Carter would cut Lara Means’ awesomely creepy revelation overload sequence from “Time is Now,” the 1998 Millennium season finale, to the full 9 minutes and 26 seconds entirety of Land, closes the Mobius Loop that Patti opened 25 earlier with Birdland, her comprehensive premonitory dream of Domaine Mulder/Sculley, dreamt up before anyone had ever dreamt of an X File.

(4) Pulling out of Birdland. On the Glossolalia Moonlight Express. Riding the Trend Line. Somewhere near the end of the Line. Where Do Wop Shaman reveals mastery of autoexstatic trick of Singing In Tongues by singing own name to produce sax parts Charlie Parker would have played, if only not precluded by circumstances unforeseen (i.e. his death), this being Birdland after all. A function of access to the Exstatic Instruction Set, induced by consumption of Maine Blueberries under unique plasmatic moonlight environment. (Plasma being the 4th State of Matter.) The photoreactive bacterial noble rot (more noble than that of Sauternes even) on the surface of these blue berries being activated thru exposure to a one time per year manifestation of extremely limited edition light from the Harvest Moon. It was the last discovery by Wilhelm Reich, made on his farm in Maine, just before the US Government put him on ice, that blue was the color of the fundamental energy of the Universe. By 1957 he would be dead enough to discover nothing more. Speaking in Tongues was only 1st level of this Adventure. Singing in Tongues is actual bomb. Then there’s the Tonguing in Tongues. The viscous, plasmatic eroticism of Birdland. Swimming the Thick Ocean. Singing in Tongues while you swim. Be bop Do wop Re bop Zo bop. Mostly of the Voodoo Lexicon. The Glossolalia Express embarking now for Haiti, ultimately bound for Guinee, the Old Country, all by way of New Orleans. The Mobius Loop is closing. In 1962 Chris Kenner is back in New Orleans. He’s pretty much blown whatever he’s made from his monster hit, I Like It Like That, way back in 1961. Please sir, may I have another is what he says to himself. Which is how "Land of a Thousand Dances" gets to be written. Nobody really knows who’s recorded the song, or, how many times since Chris Kenner launched the trend back in 1962. Certainly its enough to be a trend, including Fats Domino, Rufus Thomas, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Little Willie and Thee Midnighters, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Tom Jones, Junior Walker… Notwithstanding the manifest greatness of the whole cover crew, the only versions that matter are Patti’s and the Cannibal. Alone of all their kind they discovered the dark chaos ritual inhabiting the antic shell of the song. This was always there, but, an interpreter of genius was needed to bring down the night. The first such interpretive breakthrough was made by Cannibal and the Headhunters in 1965. In an Alternative Universe this band was actually a gang in East LA. But they wanted to become a band. They were looking for simple songs, since, that was all they could play and they landed on "Land of a Thousand Dances." That was their first mistake. Their 2nd mistake would make them immortal and is outlined by Cannibal (nee Frankie Garcia) below: 

“Now the original of that song, if you've ever heard it, is lyrics from beginning to end. Dances all the way through. Lots of lyrics. And on stage, I blacked out and couldn't remember the words. So I started ad-libbing, 'Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.' After the show, the other musicians went 'What were you doing?' and I said 'I don't know.' And they said 'Well do it again, it sounded real good. Could you do it again?' Finally we got to where I could remember it, but didn't care about the words anymore. I just wanted to get to that 'Na na na na na.”

What Cannibal had done was to recover the sanctified incantorial stuff still latent from Chris Kenner’s original inspiration for "Land," an old Spiritual (Are there any new ones?) called “Children Go Where I Send Thee.” Once the latent sanctified incantorial got dressed down to preverbal reptile brain sex moans coupled to a very modern prepunk amphetamine anti-Disney fright park shred track. Well, the dark side of entrainment was in the house and on your phone. In 1975 Patti Smith’s left handed re/sanctification of the Cannibal Worldview gets released upon an unsuspecting world. Recalling Cannibal’s complaint about “Lots of Lyrics” from a piece in Hit Parader or a show at the Camden Armory, she reacts the way anyone other than Emily Dickinson would, with lots more. Somewhere a young Chris Carter takes note and we’re back to where we started. Sing Goddess.

Death Notice: Ellie Greenwich, Dead this August 26

-by Sandy Pearlman



A life of firsts. She beat Pat Benatar to the punch with the pixie slut haircut. Signaling that feminine power source, the union of opposites. She came down from Levittown on Long Island, that Levittown, first of the planned post war suburbs. She was first among equals in the triumvirate of Ellie/Carole/Cynthia, Great Girl Songwriters that ruled the Song Generator of the Brill Building in the 1960’s. First (and last) time that girls ruled America’s culture in general, only to be overthrown by the British Invasion. A crucial 1964 setback for feminism, that. The first line she gave Mary Weiss to sing (as opposed to speak) in Leader Of The Pack:

[Spoken:]

Is she really going out with him?

Well, there she is. Let's ask her.

Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?

Mm-hmm

Gee, it must be great riding with him

Is he picking you up after school today?

Uh-uh

By the way, where'd you meet him?

[Sung:]
                          I met him at the candy store

He turned around and smiled at me

You get the picture? (yes, we see)

                  That's when I fell for (the leader of the pack) 

“I met him at the candy store.” That line is underwritten by the most authentically anguished music since Puccini wrote Vissi d’Arte for Tosca. That line and its music inflate emotional affect not through the easier gambit of cognitive dissonance, but, rather down the far more difficult neural pathway of cognitive unification. A mystic union of form and function. Reflexive inflation of text and music. Absolutely no trace of ironic distancing here. Here and always her music would simultaneously refuse and overpower the cynically attractive opportunity for corrosive irony. That’s how great a composer she was. Brian Wilson, Beach Dude himself, said of her: “She was the greatest melody writer of all time”. He said her song Be My Baby was “the perfect rock and roll song.” It was his favorite record  “of all time.” In his house once stood a jukebox, with 100 hundred selections in all, all of them Be My Baby. So he must have meant it. So perfectly anguished is the music of this quatrain, which begins with “I met him at the candy store” and ends with “I fell for the leader of the pack,” it cannot be followed by any more music. Apparently that would be impossible, not merely anticlimactic. No, such an extreme of anguish in music is only to be followed by an utterance so prehistoric, so primordial, so prehuman as to invoke our deepest genetic intimations of original chaos and the birth of tragedy. Of the time before there was any music: The pre-recorded roar of a specially modified (i.e. miked) 1960’s Harley-Davidson Ironhead engine. Harley Rex, sui generis. It is here that the dialectic of the (Eternal) Feminine is fully engaged. As the reptile brain confronts the ethos of suburban America c. 1964. “Goin’ to the Chapel (of Love).”

“She was an accordion player…” said Shadow Morton. As definitive as Tom Petty’s “She was an American Girl.” Since she composed on the accordion, she automatically became (yet not merely by default) the most important accordion babe since Edith Piaf. Through the accordion, she met both Shadow Morton, Producer of Leader of the Pack and Jeff Barry her husband and Brill Building partner in song genesis. The latter at a Thanksgiving family dinner, as she slaved not over a hot stove, but rather over a hot accordion: Playing tunes to the family. Even then as a teenager, so true was she to be to herself-- as her very own muse in the mirror, that no turkey could ever dominate her image. With Jeff Barry she wrote "Be My Baby," "River Deep Mountain High," "Going To The Chapel," "Leader Of The Pack," "Baby I Love You," "And Then He Kissed Me," "Baby I Love You," "Hanky Panky," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Doo Wah Diddy" and more. Of these latter three songs, she thought them equivalent to Nursery Rhymes. A powerful insight, that. With their archaic looping indelibility, these songs invoke the primordial metrical power rhymes of trochaic tetrameter, the speech of Puck and fairies. “Everybody of every age can sing them,” she said, “because they are so easy to remember.”  Apparently they are so easy to remember because we humans are almost born remembering them. As if we were never without these indelible loops. Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time included six by her and Jeff Barry-- more than by any other songwriting team. They had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964, the year the Beatles conquered America and the feminine fell.  Only John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles and Holland, Dozier and Holland of Motown surpassed their total. So for a long time now, we have never been without her indelible music. Which is itself a loop and the way the culture works.

“She was an accordion player at Levittown High or maybe East Meadow... down Wantagh Avenue, just before Southern State Parkway. There was a lot of excitement and energy then. We thought every town was like that. The energy coming out of Hicksville, out of Bethpage was unbelievable…” said Shadow Morton. He “thought every town was like that.” But they weren’t.  In the 1960’s these Long Island towns were the center of the Universe. Not Gatsby’s Long Island, but Thomas Pynchon’s LI. The land of V. On the Map of Long Island, there’s a line drawn from Hempstead on the West to Bethpage on the East. Just East of midway on this line is Levittown, where she grew up on the corner of Starlight and Springtime Lanes. This line is called Route 24. It’s a ten-mile line. Not very long at all as maps go. And yet in the mid 60s here’s what was going on down that line: In Hempstead, Shadow Morton was getting ready to launch Heavy Metal from Ultrasonic Studios with the Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.  In Bethpage, on the other hand (or was it?) Grumman was building the Apollo’s Lunar Excursion Modules, Heavy Metal, which would take us to the Moon. When Shadow Morton needed music he “ went to The Farmer’s Market across from Grumman and went through the record pile.” You can’t make this stuff up. Both Thomas Pynchon and Shadow Morton, both of them great Long Island artists of the 1960s, knew they inhabited a geocultural even a geophysical singularity, an energy terrain, an inexplicable confluence of influences which somehow wound up all tied up.

When you think about all this, in the light of the perfect union that her music attained, that she grew up at the intersection of Starlight and Springtime Lanes does make all the sense in the Universe. Of her partnership with Jeff Barry, she said, "Wherever our heartbeats were, they were kind of all beating together. We thought along the same lines. We were hopeful romantics, and our songs came out that way."

She was Ellie Greenwich: On August 26, 2009, Greenwich died of a heart attack at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, New York City, where she had been admitted a few days earlier for treatment of pneumonia.

After Ellie Greenwich’s death I found some interesting posts in the blog tail to Rolling Stone’s online Rock&Roll Daily death notice. Amongst them these three following:

Naz | 8/28/2009, 2:45 pm EST
Man yall a buncha losers. I saw this post and wondered who the hell is Ellie GRenwich, never heard of her. I read the story and listened to tha song clipz, and man this is some old, old, tired-ass shit. Not one song thats half as good as anythin by Lil WAyne ROFLMAO

Barry Miller | 8/28/2009, 12:31 pm EST
I knew Ellie and her sister in 1960 when I worked at Captree Day Camp on LI which I believe her aunt owned. You could tell what a great talent she had when she sang and produced talent shows. I have enjoyed folowing her career.

Mark | 8/27/2009, 3:21 am EST
Credit where credit is due-- we have lost the greatest songwriter of all time.

#

Sandy's one of my oldest friends in the world, the president of the student body when I was a freshman. He persuaded me to run for president of my class and explained the Vietnam War to me... and the Rolling Stones and The Byrds. I've been trying to get him to write for DWT for years. Stuff about him:

Schulich Distinguished Chair, McGill University. Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the History of Ideas. New School Fellow in Sociology and Anthropology. Over the last few years, at McGill, Pearlman,  has taught and created, often in collaboration with Dean Don McLean of the Schulich School, a boat load of provocative new courses in the Music, English, Religious Studies, Law and Management Faculties. Recently appointed to the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress.  Relentless brainstormer of the ever-tightening embrace of Music by Technology and Technology by Music. Producer, creator, songwriter, manager and theorist for many of the most important bands and musical trends of the last 25 years: Blue Oyster Cult, Clash, Black Sabbath, Dictators, Pavlov’s Dog, Dream Syndicate… Described by the Billboard Producer’s Directory as “the Hunter Thompson of rock, a gonzo producer of searing intellect and vast vision.” Gonzo enough to be played by Christopher Walken in Saturday Night Live’s infamous skit on the making of The Reaper(which Pearlman produced for Blue Oyster Cult).