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    Dr. Demento Announces His Retirement After 55 Years on the Air

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    Barry Hansen, mostly known by his D.J. name, said he’d end his show’s run after 55 years of playing parody songs. His syndicated show was once heard on more than 150 radio stations.“Monster Mash.” “Another One Rides the Bus.” “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”The D.J. most responsible for lodging these earworms in listeners’ heads, Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, said last month that he would retire from the airwaves in October, on the 55th anniversary of his radio debut.Mr. Hansen, 84, started on KPPC-FM, a free form and progressive rock station in Pasadena, Calif., (now KROQ-FM) in 1970 and soon began focusing on what he called “funny music” because of listener requests for songs that made them laugh.After he played “Transfusion,” a song by Nervous Norvus, which had been banned on many radio stations in the 1950s, another D.J. at the station called Mr. Hansen demented.“Transfusion” — featuring the sound effects of vehicle crashes — is about a reckless driver who repeatedly gets seriously injured in car crashes by breaking traffic laws. In the lyrics, the driver gets a blood transfusion after each crash and vows to drive safely, before getting into another one.The novelty song struck a chord with Mr. Hansen, who would spin up similar parodies for his playlists for the next half century. The nickname Dr. Demento, which he adopted shortly afterward, also stuck.He referred to his fans as dementoids and dementites.“I have been doing this show for nearly 55 years, about two-thirds of my life,” Mr. Hansen said on his May 31 show, which broadcasts online. “It’s been a blast, but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon. The show you just heard is the last of my regular shows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater: Quiet, Intricate, Masterly

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      Subtlety reigned as the musician played his post-farewell tour in New York, which included a full performance of his 33-minute LP, “Seven Psalms.”Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing.He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss.Simon played to a reverently attentive audience on Monday night at his hometown sanctuary, the Beacon Theater. When the refurbished, regilded venue reopened in 2009, Simon was its first performer. And on Monday, he stepped onstage smiling broadly and announced, “I love playing in this room.”Simon has been making poetic, tuneful pop hits — songs that found mass audiences with lapidary craftsmanship and terse, enigmatic insights — since the 1960s. He had less commercial success with larger formats: his 1980 movie about a songwriter, “One-Trick Pony,” and his 1998 musical, “The Capeman.” But he has still been thinking bigger than individual songs.After performing the entirety of his album “Seven Psalms,” Simon returned with a set of hits and deeper cuts.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” — and the unknowability of God. “The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor,” he sang, but also, “The Lord is the ocean rising / The Lord is a terrible swift sword.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Musical Mysteries Brian Wilson Left Behind

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      The Beach Boys mastermind has been the subject of pop scholarship and major boxed sets, but some corners of his oeuvre remain unreleased.Though Brian Wilson was one of pop’s most studied artists, he largely remained an enigma. The Beach Boys leader, whose death at 82 was announced this week, made music for the masses with an artisan’s eye for detail. While his biography was well known, questions about what drove him to the top of the charts — and ultimately deep into darkness — could never definitively be answered.Since the start of the CD era, Wilson’s legacy has been burnished by a series of deep-dive archival efforts, including the 1993 “Good Vibrations” boxed set, the revelatory “Pet Sounds Sessions” collection from 1996, a series of early 2000s reissues focused on the band’s Brother label years, and ultimately the holy grail: the release of his abandoned mid-60s masterwork, “Smile,” in 2011.“Everything Brian created is worth hearing and it all has a kind of historical value in terms of understanding his life,” said David Leaf, the Beach Boys historian who published “Smile: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of Brian Wilson” this spring.In more recent years, that effort has continued with sets focused on the Beach Boys’ overlooked and often deceptively strange 1970s work. “These projects continue to come out with all this new and unheard material,” said the author Peter Ames Carlin, who wrote a 2006 biography of Wilson, “Catch a Wave.” “It’s a testament to just how creative and prolific Brian was — despite the many ups and downs of his life.”Even with the consistent release of music from the vaults, there are fascinating corners of Wilson’s oeuvre that have yet to see the light of day. Here’s a rundown.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul McCartney, Carole King and Others Pay Tribute to Brian Wilson

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      Wilson, whose death was announced on Wednesday, leaves behind an immense musical legacy that spans several decades. King and others share how his music shaped them.Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys who death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, provided a joyous soundtrack for beach vacations and summer road trips for generations of people.Among pop and rock musicians he will also be remembered as a talented songwriter and studio pioneer whose music has had an immense influence for decades on those who followed him.The Beach Boys had 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10, with three of them reaching No. 1. Their influence on the surf rock genre and on popular music generally was recognized by the variety of people who paid respects on social media to Wilson on Wednesday.Here’s what some of Wilson’s friends had to say about his death and legacy.Paul McCartney, a Wilson contemporary, noted that there was a chorus of tributes from other musicians, saying Wilson had a “mysterious sense of musical genius” that made his songs special. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time,” McCartney said. “I loved him, and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows.’”Carole King, also a contemporary, wrote on Facebook that Wilson was her friend and brother in songwriting. “We shared a similar sensibility, as evidenced by his 4 over 5 chord under ‘Aaaah!’ in ‘Good Vibrations’ and mine under ‘I’m Into Something Good,’” she said. “We once discussed who used it first, and in the end we decided it didn’t matter.”In 2015, “Love & Mercy,” a biopic about Wilson’s life starring John Cusack was released. On Wednesday, Cusack said that the “maestro” had died, adding that the hitmaker was an open heart with two legs “with an ear that heard the angels.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

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      Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.The album peaked at No. 10 — low for one of the most popular acts at the time — and was the first Beach Boys album in three years not to reach gold status, Butler wrote in a chapter of an academic book. The Beach Boys’ record company, Capitol, rushed out a greatest-hits that outsold the album of original music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Roger Nichols, Songwriter Behind Carpenters Hits, Dies at 84

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      With Paul Williams, he wrote enduring 1970s soft-rock classics like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.”Roger Nichols, a California songwriter and musician who, with his pop-alchemist partner Paul Williams, wrote an advertising jingle for a bank that turned into “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a milestone hit for the Carpenters and a timeless wedding weeper, died on May 17 at his home in Bend, Ore. He was 84.His death, from pneumonia, was confirmed by his daughter Caroline Nichols.Mr. Nichols was best known for his collaborations with Paul Williams, the songwriter, lyricist and all-around celebrity known for songs like “Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog’s forlorn anthem from “The Muppet Movie” (1979).With Mr. Nichols focusing on the music and Mr. Williams conjuring up the words, the duo churned out silky pop nuggets like Three Dog Night’s “Out in the Country” (1970), which rose to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100; “Traveling Boy,” which Art Garfunkel released in 1973; and “I Never Had It So Good,” recorded by Barbra Streisand in 1975.But it was with their work for the Carpenters, the hit-machine sibling duo Karen and Richard Carpenter, that Mr. Nichols and Mr. Williams scaled the heights of pop success.“We’ve Only Just Begun” peaked at No. 2 in 1970, sold more than a million copies of sheet music and served as a timeless showcase for Ms. Carpenter’s spellbinding contralto vocal stylings.The single “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by Mr. Nichols and Paul Williams, rose to No. 2 on he music charts and became a staple of weddings. A&M RecordsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Billy Joel Documentary ‘And So It Goes’ Traces His Early Days

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      The first half of the HBO documentary premiered at the Tribeca Festival on Wednesday night. Joel, who is fighting a brain disorder, sent a message via its directors.The Tribeca Festival’s opening-night premiere of the upcoming HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” was marked, in part, by the absence of Billy Joel himself. Late last month, the musician announced that he was canceling all of his upcoming concerts because of a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which has led to problems with his hearing, vision and balance.After Robert De Niro called Joel “the poet laureate of New York” and helped introduce the film with a dramatic reading of some of his lyrics (“He works at Mr. Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street,” he intoned), one of the film’s co-directors, Susan Lacy, told the Beacon Theater audience that Joel sent his greetings — with typical wry humor: “In fact, he said, ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’” The audience roared with laughter. On a note of encouragement, Lacy said Joel “will be back.”The crowd broke out into applause throughout the screening, which included just the first part of the two-part film. It still ran nearly two and a half hours as it covered Joel’s childhood and rise to fame through his infamous 1982 motorcycle accident. (To put that in perspective: It doesn’t get to the writing of “Uptown Girl.” No Christie Brinkley yet.)There are pictures and footage of early Joel performances and stories about the surprisingly robust Long Island rock scene of the 1960s. But “Part One” is largely an intimate portrait of Joel’s relationship with his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, who would eventually become his manager, and it elevates her to a starring role in his life. It also features a host of stories about the making of some of his best-known songs, and tidbits about his Long Island obstinance. Here’s some of what we learned.As Joel’s relationship with Weber first foundered, he attempted suicide twice.Joel and Weber’s relationship began in dramatic fashion: She was married to Jon Small, Joel’s early bandmate, and had a son with him. Joel and Small first played together in a group named the Hassles, then broke off to start a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal outfit called Attila. (An album cover shoot featuring a longhaired Joel standing amid sides of raw beef, wearing fur, is something to behold.) Eventually, Joel fell in love with Weber, but when a guilt-ridden Joel shared his feelings with Small, he got punched in the nose and Weber left.Despondent, Joel overdosed on pills and was in a coma for days. His sister, Judy Molinari, who had provided the pills to help him sleep, recounts her guilt onscreen. “I felt that I killed him,” she says. Joel drank a bottle of furniture polish in another attempt on his life. After moving back into his mother’s house, he checked into an observation ward where his own struggles were put into perspective. From there he started to channel his feelings into music, and the songs that he wrote as a result of the experience would become his first solo album, “Cold Spring Harbor.” After about a year, Weber re-entered his life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rick Derringer, 77, Who Sang ‘Hang On Sloopy’ and ‘Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,’ Dies

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      A Zelig-like rocker, the guitarist, singer and songwriter collaborated with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Peter Frampton and composed Hulk Hogan’s “Real American” theme.Rick Derringer, the ubiquitous rocker who sang the hit songs “Hang On Sloopy” and “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” in a music career that spanned several decades and also included collaborations with Hulk Hogan and Weird Al Yankovic, died on Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. He was 77.His longtime caretaker and friend, Tony Wilson, announced his death in statement on Tuesday. No cause was given.From his early garage rock success to his many contributions to albums or tours by music royalty — Barbra Streisand, Cyndi Lauper and Peter Frampton all enlisted him — Mr. Derringer introduced himself to audiences across several generations.One of his better-known and enduring collaborations was with the Edgar Winter Group, for which he produced the instrumental chart-topper “Frankenstein,” which the band released in 1972.Early on, Mr. Derringer was the shaggy-haired guitar impresario who was the frontman for the band the McCoys, who rose to the top of the Billboard singles chart in October 1965 with their catchy rendition of “Hang On Sloopy.”The song, about a girl known as Sloopy from a rough part of town, has become synonymous with Ohio State University, where the marching band first played it during a Buckeyes football game in 1965. In 1985, the Ohio Legislature adopted it as the official state rock song.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bruce Springsteen Will Never Surrender to Donald Trump

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      Since the 1980s Bruce Springsteen has been writing songs that emphasized, even romanticized, a polyglot vision of America and what it means to be an American. That vision is, broadly speaking, an updated version of New Deal America: one that recognizes not only the dignity and pride of honest labor but also the importance of respecting our differences, whether they are based on culture, gender, ethnicity or race. It’s a vision of unity summed up in the phrase that in past concert tours Mr. Springsteen has used to close out the show: “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.” And when Mr. Springsteen says “everybody,” he means everybody — including undocumented migrants and border patrol agents, unwed mothers, distant and irresponsible fathers, Black victims of police brutality and the cops who (regret) shooting them, emotionally scarred Vietnam vets and Southeast Asian war refugees trying to make America their new home.The 1980s also saw the rise of an alternative vision of America: one that sought to tear down what was left of the New Deal. Its exemplar was Donald Trump, then a tacky developer and a tabloid fixture. It was based on the idea that could be summarized as: I win only if everybody else loses. Today Mr. Trump is president, and full of petty rage at Mr. Springsteen for daring to criticize him at the opening show on his current European tour.Nothing irks Mr. Trump quite as much as the disrespect of a fellow celebrity. But it’s more than that. Mr. Springsteen, 75, and Mr. Trump, 78, are in many respects two opposing faces of modern America as it was built and performed by their generation. They offer their fan bases a promise of entirely different futures.Just as Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign sought to make (his) America great again, Mr. Springsteen’s current Land of Hope and Dreams Tour is a nod to his idea of another, more generous vision. The lyrics to the song of the same name offer up an idealistic vision of inclusion with a train packed with “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” “whores and gamblers” and “lost souls.” It promises, “Dreams will not be thwarted” and “faith will be rewarded” with “bells of freedom ringing.” It may also be a reference to Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration celebration, where he sang the same tune.Introducing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as the first song on the tour’s opening night in Manchester, England, Mr. Springsteen told the crowd that the United States was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” that has “no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”Mr. Trump heard this as a challenge. The president threatened an “investigation” into Mr. Springsteen’s support for Kamala Harris and blustered on Truth Social that this “Highly Overrated … not a talented guy” was “Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” Later he put out a fake video in which he hits Mr. Springsteen with a golf ball.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More