Alex Higgins
Alexander Gordon Higgins was a Northern Irish professional snooker player, remembered as one of the most iconic figures in the game. Nicknamed Hurricane Higgins because of his fast play, he was World Champion in 1972 and 1982, runner-up in 1976 and 1980, he won the UK Championship in 1983 and the Masters in 1978 and 1981, making him one of ten players to have completed snooker's Triple Crown. He was World Doubles champion with Jimmy White in 1984, won the World Cup three times with the All-Ireland team. Higgins came to be known as the "People's Champion" because of his popularity, is credited with having brought the game of snooker to a wider audience, contributing to its peak in popularity in the 1980s, he had a reputation as an difficult character. He was a heavy smoker, struggled with drinking and gambling, admitted to using cocaine and marijuana. First diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, Higgins died of multiple causes in his Belfast home on 24 July 2010. Higgins still holds the highest break to win a World Championship, being 135 in the 1982 final against Ray Reardon.
Higgins was raised in the Church Of Ireland religion. He started playing snooker at the age of 11 in the Jampot club in his native Sandy Row area of south Belfast and in the YMCA in the nearby city centre. At age 14, he left for a career as a jockey. However, he never made the grade, he returned to Belfast and by 1965, aged 16, he had compiled his first maximum break. In 1968 he won Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships. Higgins turned professional at the age of 22, winning the World Championship at his first attempt in 1972, against John Spencer winning 37–32. Higgins was the youngest winner of the title, a record retained until Stephen Hendry's 1990 victory at the age of 21. In April 1976, Higgins faced Ray Reardon. Higgins led 11–9, but Reardon made four centuries and seven breaks over 60 to pull away and win the title for the fifth time with the score of 27–16. Higgins was the runner-up to Cliff Thorburn in 1980, losing 18–16, after being 9–5 up. Higgins won the world title for a second time in 1982 after beating Reardon 18–15.
Higgins would have been ranked No. 1 in the world rankings for the 1982/83 season had he not forfeited ranking points following disciplinary action. Throughout his career, Higgins won 20 other titles, one of the most notable being the 1983 UK Championship. In the final he trailed Steve Davis 0–7 before producing a famous comeback to win 16–15, he won the Masters twice, in 1978 and in 1981, beating Cliff Thorburn and Terry Griffiths in the finals respectively. Another notable victory was his final professional triumph in the 1989 Irish Masters at the age of 40 when he defeated a young Stephen Hendry; this was the last professional tournament he won, is referred to as "The Hurricane's Last Hurrah". After his retirement from the professional game, Higgins spent time playing for small sums of money in and around Northern Ireland, he made appearances in the 2005 and 2006 Irish Professional Championship, these comebacks ending in first-round defeats by Garry Hardiman and Joe Delaney respectively. On 12 June 2007, it was reported that Higgins had assaulted a referee at a charity match in the north-east of England.
Higgins returned to competitive action in September 2007 at the Irish Professional Championship in Dublin but was whitewashed 0–5 by former British Open champion Fergal O'Brien in the first round at the Spawell Club, Templeogue. Higgins continued to play regularly, enjoyed "hustling" all comers for small-time stakes in clubs in Northern Ireland and beyond. On 8 April 2010, Higgins was part of the debut Snooker Legends Tour event in Sheffield, at the Crucible. Appearing alongside other retired or close-to-retiring professionals, including John Parrott, Jimmy White, John Virgo and Cliff Thorburn, he faced Thorburn in his match, but lost 2–0, it is estimated that Higgins spent £ 3 -- 4 million in his career as a snooker player. Higgins's speed around the table, his ability to pot balls at a rapid rate and flamboyant style earned him the nickname "Hurricane Higgins" and made him a high-profile player, his unusual cueing technique sometimes included a body swerve and movement, as well as a stance, noticeably higher than that of most professionals.
The unorthodox play of Higgins was encapsulated in his break of 69, made under unusual pressure, against Jimmy White in the penultimate frame of their World Professional Snooker Championship semi-final in 1982. Higgins was 0–59 down in that frame, but managed to compile an challenging clearance during which he was scarcely in position until the colours. In particular, former world champion Dennis Taylor considers a three-quarter-ball pot on a blue into the green pocket memorable, not only for its extreme degree of difficulty but for enabling Higgins to continue the break and keep White off the table and unable to clinch victory at that moment. In potting the blue, Higgins screwed the cue-ball on to the side cushion to bring it back towards the black/pink area with extreme left-hand sidespin, a shot Taylor believes could be played 100 times without coming close to the position Higgins reached with cue-ball, he went a little too far for ideal position on his next red but the match-saving break was still alive.
Higgins drank alcohol and smoked during tournaments, as
UK Singles Chart
The UK Singles Chart is compiled by the Official Charts Company, on behalf of the British record industry, listing the top-selling singles in the United Kingdom, based upon physical sales, paid-for downloads and streaming. The Official Chart, broadcast on BBC Radio 1 and MTV, is the UK music industry's recognised official measure of singles and albums popularity because it is the most comprehensive research panel of its kind, today surveying over 15,000 retailers and digital services daily, capturing 99.9% of all singles consumed in Britain across the week, over 98% of albums. To be eligible for the chart, a single is defined by the Official Charts Company as either a'single bundle' having no more than four tracks and not lasting longer than 25 minutes or one digital audio track not longer than 15 minutes with a minimum sale price of 40 pence; the rules have changed many times as technology has developed, the most notable being the inclusion of digital downloads in 2005 and streaming in July 2014.
The OCC website contains the Top 100 chart. Some media outlets only list the Top 75 of this list; the chart week runs from 00:01 Friday to midnight Thursday, with most UK physical and digital singles being released on Fridays. From 3 August 1969 until 5 July 2015, the chart week ran from 00:01 Sunday to midnight Saturday; the Top 40 chart is first issued on Friday afternoons by BBC Radio 1 as The Official Chart from 16:00 to 17:45, before the full Official Singles Chart Top 100 is posted on the Official Charts Company's website. A rival chart show, The Vodafone Big Top 40, is based on iTunes downloads and commercial radio airplay across the Global Radio network only, is broadcast on Sunday afternoons from 16:00 to 19:00 on 145 local commercial radio stations across the United Kingdom; the Big Top 40 is not regarded by the industry or wider media. There is a show called "Official KISS Top 40", counting down 40 most played songs on Kiss FM every Sunday 17:00 to 19:00; the UK Singles Chart began to be compiled in 1952.
According to the Official Charts Company's statistics, as of 1 July 2012, 1,200 singles have topped the UK Singles Chart. The precise number of chart-toppers is debatable due to the profusion of competing charts from the 1950s to the 1980s, but the usual list used is that endorsed by the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and subsequently adopted by the Official Charts Company; the company regards a selected period of the New Musical Express chart and the Record Retailer chart from 1960 to 1969 as predecessors for the period prior to 11 February 1969, where multiples of competing charts coexisted side by side. For example, the BBC compiled its own chart based on an average of the music papers of the time; the first number one on the UK Singles Chart was "Here in My Heart" by Al Martino for the week ending date 14 November 1952. As of the week ending date 18 April 2019, the UK Singles Chart has had 1352 different number-one hits; the current number-one single is "Someone You Loved" by Lewis Capaldi.
Before the compilation of sales of records, the music market measured a song's popularity by sales of sheet music. The idea of compiling a chart based on sales originated in the United States, where the music-trade paper Billboard compiled the first chart incorporating sales figures on 20 July 1940. Record charts in the UK began in 1952, when Percy Dickins of the New Musical Express gathered a pool of 52 stores willing to report sales figures. For the first British chart Dickins telephoned 20 shops, asking for a list of the 10 best-selling songs; these results were aggregated into a Top 12 chart published in NME on 14 November 1952, with Al Martino's "Here in My Heart" awarded the number-one position. The chart became a successful feature of the periodical. Record Mirror compiled its own Top 10 chart for 22 January 1955; the NME chart was based on a telephone poll. Both charts expanded in size, with Mirror's becoming a Top 20 in October 1955 and NME's becoming a Top 30 in April 1956. Another rival publication, Melody Maker, began compiling its own chart.
It was the first chart to include Northern Ireland in its sample. Record Mirror began running a Top 5 album chart in July 1956. In March 1960, Record Retailer had a Top 50 singles chart. Although NME had the largest circulation of charts in the 1960s and was followed, in March 1962 Record Mirror stopped compiling its own chart and published Record Retailer's instead. Retailer began independent auditing in January 1963, has been used by the UK Singles Chart as the source for number-ones since the week ending 12 March 1960; the choice of Record Retailer as the source has been criticised. With available lists of which record shops were sampled to compile the charts some shops were subjected to "hyping" but, with Record Retailer being less followed than some charts, it was subject to less hyping. Additionally, Retailer was set up by independent record shops and had no funding or affiliation with record companies. However, it had a smaller sample size than some ri
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is an American monthly magazine that focuses on popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California in 1967 by Jann Wenner, still the magazine's publisher, the music critic Ralph J. Gleason, it was first known for political reporting by Hunter S. Thompson. In the 1990s, the magazine shifted focus to a younger readership interested in youth-oriented television shows, film actors, popular music. In recent years, it has resumed its traditional mix of content. Rolling Stone Press is the magazine's associated book publishing imprint. Straight Arrow Press was the magazine's associated book publishing imprint, Straight Arrow Publishing Co. Inc. was the publishing company that published Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Ralph Gleason. To get it off the ground, Wenner borrowed $7,500 from his own family and from the parents of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim; the first issue carried a cover date of November 9, 1967, was in newspaper format with a lead article on the Monterey Pop Festival.
The cover price was 25¢. In the first issue, Wenner explained that the title of the magazine referred to the 1950 blues song "Rollin' Stone", recorded by Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan's hit single "Like a Rolling Stone": You're wondering what we're trying to do. It's hard to say: sort of a sort of a newspaper; the name of it is Rolling Stone which comes from an old saying, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Muddy Waters used the name for a song. The Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy's song. "Like a Rolling Stone" was the title of Bob Dylan's first rock and roll record. We have begun a new publication reflecting what we see are the changes in rock and roll and the changes related to rock and roll."—Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, November 9, 1967, p. 2 Some authors have attributed the name to Dylan's hit single: "At Gleason's suggestion, Wenner named his magazine after a Bob Dylan song." Rolling Stone identified with and reported the hippie counterculture of the era. However, it distanced itself from the underground newspapers of the time, such as Berkeley Barb, embracing more traditional journalistic standards and avoiding the radical politics of the underground press.
In the first edition, Wenner wrote that Rolling Stone "is not just about the music, but about the things and attitudes that music embraces". In the 1970s, Rolling Stone began to make a mark with its political coverage, with the likes of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson writing for the magazine's political section. Thompson first published his most famous work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas within the pages of Rolling Stone, where he remained a contributing editor until his death in 2005. In the 1970s, the magazine helped launch the careers of many prominent authors, including Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, Joe Klein, Joe Eszterhas, Ben Fong-Torres, Patti Smith and P. J. O'Rourke, it was at this point that the magazine ran some of its most famous stories, including that of the Patty Hearst abduction odyssey. One interviewer, speaking for a large number of his peers, said that he bought his first copy of the magazine upon initial arrival on his college campus, describing it as a "rite of passage".
In 1977, the magazine moved its headquarters from San Francisco to New York City. Editor Jann Wenner said San Francisco had become "a cultural backwater". During the 1980s, the magazine began to shift towards being a general "entertainment" magazine. Music was still a dominant topic, but there was increasing coverage of celebrities in television and the pop culture of the day; the magazine initiated its annual "Hot Issue" during this time. Rolling Stone was known for its musical coverage and for Thompson's political reporting. In the 1990s, the magazine changed its format to appeal to a younger readership interested in youth-oriented television shows, film actors and popular music; this led to criticism. In recent years, the magazine has resumed its traditional mix of content, including in-depth political stories, it has expanded content to include coverage of financial and banking issues. As a result, the magazine has seen its circulation increase and its reporters invited as experts to network television programs of note.
The printed format has gone through several changes. The first publications, in 1967–72, were in folded tabloid newspaper format, with no staples, black ink text, a single color highlight that changed each edition. From 1973 onwards, editions were produced on a four-color press with a different newsprint paper size. In 1979, the bar code appeared. In 1980, it became a large format magazine; as of edition of October 30, 2008, Rolling Stone has had a smaller, standard-format magazine size. After years of declining readership, the magazine experienced a major resurgence of interest and relevance with the work of two young journalists in the late 2000s, Michael Hastings and Matt Taibbi. In 2005, Dana Leslie Fields, former publisher of Rolling Stone, who had worked at the magazine for 17 years, was an inaugural inductee into the Magazine Hall of Fame. In 2009, Taibbi unleashed an acclaimed series of scathing reports on the financial meltdown of the time, he famously described Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid".
Bigger headlines came at the end of June 2010. Rolling Stone caused a controversy in the White House by publishing in the July issue an article by journalist Michael Hastings entitled, "The Runaway General", quoting criticism by General Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force and U. S. Forces-Afghanistan commander, about Vice President Joe Biden and oth
Garage rock
Garage rock is a raw and energetic style of rock and roll that flourished in the mid-1960s, most notably in the United States and Canada, has experienced various revivals since then. The style is characterized by basic chord structures played on electric guitars and other instruments, sometimes distorted through a fuzzbox, as well as unsophisticated and aggressive lyrics and delivery, its name derives from the perception that groups were made up of young amateurs who rehearsed in the family garage, although many were professional. In the US and Canada, surf rock—and the Beatles and other beat groups of the British Invasion—motivated thousands of young people to form bands between 1963 and 1968. Hundreds of acts produced regional hits, some had national hits played on AM radio stations. With the advent of psychedelia, a number of garage bands incorporated exotic elements into the genre's primitive stylistic framework. After 1968, as more sophisticated forms of rock music came to dominate the marketplace, garage rock records disappeared from national and regional charts, the movement faded.
Other countries in the 1960s developed similar grass-roots rock movements that have sometimes been characterized as variants of garage rock. During the 1960s garage rock was not recognized as a distinct genre and had no specific name, but critical hindsight in the early 1970s—and the 1972 compilation album Nuggets—did much to define and memorialize the style. Between 1971 and 1973, certain American rock critics began to retroactively identify the music as a genre and for several years used the term "punk rock" to describe it, making it the first form of music to bear the description, predating the more familiar use of the term appropriated by the punk rock movement that it influenced. "Garage rock" came into use at the beginning of the 1980s and gained favor amongst devotees. The genre has been referred to as "proto-punk". In the early to mid-1980s, several revival scenes emerged featuring acts that consciously attempted to replicate the look and sound of 1960s garage bands. In the decade, a louder, more contemporary garage subgenre developed that combined garage rock with modern punk rock and other influences, sometimes using the garage punk label and otherwise associated with 1960s garage bands.
In the 2000s, a wave of garage-influenced acts associated with the post-punk revival emerged, some achieved commercial success. Garage rock continues to appeal to musicians and audiences who prefer a "back to basics" or "do-it-yourself" musical approach; the term "garage rock" used in reference to 1960s acts, stems from the perception that many performers were young amateurs who rehearsed in the family garage. While numerous bands were made up of middle-class teenagers from the suburbs, others were from rural or urban areas or were composed of professional musicians in their twenties; the term "garage band" is used to refer to musical acts in this genre. Referring to the 1960s, Mike Markesich commented "...teenge rock & roll groups proliferated Everywheresville USA". Though it is impossible to determine how many garage bands were active in the era, their numbers were extensive on a still unprecedented scale in what Markesich has characterized as a "cyclonic whirlwind of musical activity like none other..."
According to Mark Nobles, it is estimated that between 1964-1968 over 180,000 bands formed in the United States, several thousand US garage acts made records during the era. Garage bands performed in a variety of venues. Local and regional groups played at parties, school dances, teen clubs. For acts of legal age, bars and college fraternity socials provided regular engagements. Groups had the opportunity to open at shows for famous touring acts; some garage rock bands went on tour those better-known, but lesser-known groups sometimes received bookings or airplay beyond their immediate locales. Groups competed in "battles of the bands", which gave musicians an opportunity to gain exposure and a chance to win a prize, such as free equipment or recording time in a local studio. Contests were held, locally and nationally, three of the most prestigious national events were held annually by the Tea Council of the U. S. A. the Music Circus, the United States Junior Chamber. Performances sounded amateurish, naïve, or intentionally raw, with typical themes revolving around the traumas of high school life and songs about "lying girls" being common.
The lyrics and delivery were more aggressive than the more polished acts of the time with nasal, growled, or shouted vocals, sometimes punctuated by shrieks or screams at climactic moments of release. Instrumentation was characterized by basic chord structures played on electric guitars or keyboards distorted through a fuzzbox, teamed with bass and drums. Guitarists sometimes played using aggressive-sounding bar chords or power chords. Portable organs such as the Farfisa were used and harmonicas and hand-held percussion such as tambourines were not uncommon; the tempo was sped up in passages sometimes referred to as "raveups". Garage rock acts were diverse in both musical ability and in style, ranging from crude and amateurish to near-studio level musicianship. There were regional variations in flourishing scenes, such as in California and Texas; the north-western states of Idaho and Oregon had a distinctly recognizable regional sound with bands such as the Sonics and Paul Revere & the Raiders.
In the 1960s, garage rock had no name and was not thought of as a genre, but
Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist, critic and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, was known for his leading influence in rock music criticism; the music critic Jim DeRogatis called him "America's greatest rock critic". Bangs was born in California, he was Conway Leslie Bangs, a truck driver. Both of his parents were from his mother from Pecos County. Norma Belle was a devout Jehovah's Witness. Conway died in a fire; when Bangs was 11, he moved with his mother to El Cajon in San Diego County. His early interests and influences ranged from the Beats and jazz musician John Coltrane and Miles Davis, to comic books and science fiction, he had a connection with an underground newspaper of the late 1960s. Bangs became a freelance writer in 1969, after reading an ad in Rolling Stone soliciting readers' reviews, his first piece was a negative review of the MC5 album Kick Out the Jams, which he sent to Rolling Stone with a note requesting, if the magazine were to decline to publish the review, that he be given a reason for the decision.
His 1970 review of Black Sabbath's first album in Rolling Stone was scathing, rating them as imitators of the band Cream: Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master's tiredest Cream days, they have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other's musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch—just like Cream! But worse. Bangs wrote about the death of Janis Joplin in 1970 from a drug overdose: "It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that has become disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly."In 1973, Jann Wenner fired Bangs from Rolling Stone for "disrespecting musicians" after a harsh review of the group Canned Heat. Bangs began freelancing for Detroit-based Creem in 1970. In 1971, he wrote a feature for Creem on Alice Cooper, soon afterward he moved to Detroit.
Named Creem's editor in 1971, Bangs fell in love with Detroit, calling it "rock's only hope", remained there for five years. During the early 1970s, Bangs and some other writers at Creem began using the term punk rock to designate the genre of 1960s garage bands and more contemporary acts, such as MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges, their writings would provide some of the conceptual framework for the punk and new wave movements that emerged in New York and elsewhere in the decade. They would be quick to pick up on these new movements at their inception and provide extensive coverage of the phenomenon. Bangs was enamored of the noise music of Lou Reed, Creem gave significant exposure to artists such as Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Captain Beefheart, Brian Eno, the New York Dolls years earlier than the mainstream press. Bangs wrote the essay/interview "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves" about Reed in 1975. Creem was among the earliest publications to give sizable coverage to hard rock and metal artists such as Motörhead, Judas Priest, Van Halen.
After leaving Creem in 1976, he wrote for The Village Voice, Playboy, New Musical Express, many other publications. Writing in Stereo Review, Bangs described the album Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals as "perfection, the most exciting and diversified set of reggae tunes by a single artist yet released". Bangs died in New York City on April 30, 1982, at the age of 33, of an accidental overdose of dextropropoxyphene, NyQuil. Bangs's criticism was filled with cultural references, not only to rock music but to literature and philosophy, he was known for his radical and critical style of working, apparent in this quotation: Well I just started out to lead with the most insulting question I could think of. Because it seemed to me that the whole thing of interviewing as far as rock stars and, just such a suck-up, it was groveling obeisance to people, really. It's just a guy, just another person, so what? On one occasion, while the J. Geils Band were playing in concert, Bangs climbed onto the stage, typewriter in hand, typed a supposed review of the event, in full view of the audience.
In 1979, writing for the Village Voice, Bangs wrote a poignant piece about the White supremacy from a Punk music scene perspective, called "The white noise supremacists". Bangs was a musician in his own right. In 1976, he and Peter Laughner recorded an acoustic improvisation in the Creem office; the recording included covers/parodies of songs like "Sister Ray" and "Pale Blue Eyes", both by the Velvet Underground. In 1977, Bangs recorded, as a solo artist, a 7" vinyl single named "Let It Blurt/Live", mixed by John Cale and released in 1979. In 1977, at the famous New York City nightclub, CBGB's, while Bangs was talking to guitarist Mickey Leigh, Joey Ramone's brother, the idea for a band named "Birdland" came to fruition. Although they both had their roots in jazz, the two wanted to create an old school rock & roll group. Leigh brought in his post-punk band, The Rattlers, cut "Birdland with Lester Bangs"; the recording took place at the under renovation Electric Lady Studios. Bassist David Merrill, working on the construction of the studio, had the keys to the building a
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state in the Southeastern United States. It began as a British colony in 1733, the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established. Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Province of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788. In 1802–1804, western Georgia was split to the Mississippi Territory, which split to form Alabama with part of former West Florida in 1819. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, was one of the original seven Confederate states, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870. Georgia is the 8th most populous of the 50 United States. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing, second only to Texas. Georgia is known as the Empire State of the South. Atlanta, the state's capital and most populous city, has been named a global city.
Atlanta's metropolitan area contains about 55% of the population of the entire state. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, to the west by Alabama; the state's northernmost part is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Mountains system. The Piedmont extends through the central part of the state from the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the Fall Line, where the rivers cascade down in elevation to the coastal plain of the state's southern part. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet above sea level. Of the states east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area. Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures; the British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733. The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by King George II.
The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king; the Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778, was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788. In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861.
The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that U. S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi; this forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of over 4,000 Cherokees. In early 1861, Georgia became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service one of every five who served.
In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union. With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering. In 1908, the state established a white primary, they constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population, African American dropped thereafter to 28% due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration. According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States, Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South; the overwhelming number of victims were male. Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. An Atlanta-born Baptist minister, part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement.
King joining with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South. By the 1960s, the proportion of
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