Mike Pinder, one of the founders of the Moody Blues and the last surviving member of the band’s original line-up, passed away on Wednesday, April 24^th at the age of 82.

As the group’s primary keyboardist, Pinder was responsible for adding the mellotron, an early synthesizer, that gave the band its distinctive orchestral sound, especially after Pinder tinkered with the instrument, doubling the number of string section tape loops.

Mike also was the one who called up his pal, Justin Hayward to join the group after their initial vocalist, Denny Laine, quit. The group then added bass player John Lodge and locked in the personnel that would carry them to international fame beginning with the new line-up’s first effort (and second Moodys LP), Days of Future Passed.

Among the many songs Pinder wrote for the group are “Dawn (Is a Feeling),” “Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel,” “Om,” “Have You Heard,” “Out and In” (co-written with Hayward), and "Melancholy Man.”

Pinder passed away at his home in northern California surrounded by family.

His work has been recorded by artists all over the musical map – from Perry Como to the Beatles, from roots rocker Gene Vincent to Neil Diamond, from Nat King Cole to Elvis Costello. Next to Lennon & McCartney, he may be the most successful composer of the latter half of the 20^th century. Along the way he penned 73 songs that hit the Top 40 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and earned 6 Grammys, 3 Oscars and 1 Emmy.

He is, of course, Burt Bacharach. Over 1,000 different artists have recorded his compositions. His collaboration with lyricist Hal David, produced a string of hits for 60s pop icons like Dionne Warwick, Gene Pitney and Dusty Springfield. Along the way he also composed the title tune for the schlock teenage sci-fi film that became a cult classic, The Blob, while also building a surprisingly successful career as a live performer, playing his hit compositions on piano while backed by a full orchestra.

While primarily seen as a “pop” composer, Bacharach’s ability to work with rock acts like Vincent, the Drifters, Elvis Costello and others make him an undeniable part of rock history.

Born in Kansas City, but raised in New York City, Bacharach used a fake ID, not to drink, but to sneak into New York’s jazz nightclubs where he soaked up the music Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others. Trained by his mother to be a classical pianist, Bacharach much preferred the jazz and pop he heard on his nightly sojourns.

Following a stint in the army, Bacharach started the 1950s as arranger and pianist for singer Vic Damone. From there, he served in similar capacity for a variety of other singers until he finally wound up leading the back-up band for Marlene Dietrich in 1956. While touring the world with Dietrich, he also began working as a songwriter, teaming with Hal David in 1957. They sold their first song, “I Cry More,” to the motion picture, Don’t Knock the Rock. The song went nowhere. They finally broke through with a song they wrote for Marty Robbins, “The Story of My Life,” which hit #1 on the Billboard country chart. They next scored a top 10 hit with Perry Como and “Magic Moments” (in the days before rock came to dominate the charts).

As the 60s began, Bacharach’s success as a songwriter led to him taking a more active role in the studio. He was first listed as arranger & conductor on Jerry Butler’s 1962 recording of the Bacharach-David tune “Make It Easy on Yourself.” That same year, Bacharach thought one of the backup singers doing session work showed some potential. Her name was Dionne Warwick. He and David wrote a tune specifically crafted for her, “Don’t Make Me Over.” That recording launched a long and successful collaboration that lasted into the 1980s.

Among the many artists who have found success with Bacharach tunes are the Drifters, the Beatles (a cover of the Shirelles’ “Baby, It’s You”), Tom Jones, Frankie Avalon, Manfred Mann, B.J. Thomas, Bobby Vinton and dozens more.

Elvis Costello had a father who was a cabaret singer in the UK, so Elvis had developed a fondness for Bacharach-David compositions from childhood. He used to sneak one or two into his early sets (particularly “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”). Ultimately, he became one of Bachrach’s later collaborations, co-writing the album Painted from Memory.

In addition to writing specifically for the movies (two of his most acclaimed movie tunes being “The Look of Love” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”), his work has also been found lightening up such later films as Austin Powers and My Best Friend’s Wedding.

A composer whose versatility is unmatched, Bacharach passed away in February of 2023 at the age of 94. His music lives on.

Can you pass the test?

Time was when we mostly paid our bills by sending out physical checks. In those days, fraudsters would engage is something called check washing. This involved treating a stolen check with certain solvents that would remove everything you wrote on your check except your signature. That allowed the crooks to fill any amount and any payee to steal from your checking account. While devastating, a washed check could only be used once.

In our digital age, bunko artists are now doing something known as check cooking. This involves the thief taking a digital picture of a stolen check and manipulating the image with various phot editing software to alter. In this way, they can use that stolen check multiple times, simply printing out new copies or using smartphone technology to deposit the altered check multiple times into a bank account.

What can you do to protect yourself? The experts urge you to do as much bill paying as possible using your bank’s online payment services or using those verified money apps like Venmo. If you still have to send a paper check, don’t leave in your mailbox for your local carrier. Instead, take it directly to your nearest post office and drop it off there.

Sad, but true. As we age, we experience more aches and pains. Many of them can bet treated fairly easily with over-the-counter pain medications. The 4 most common are Aspirin, Ibuprofen. Naproxen and Acetaminophen.

All are effective for headaches, muscle pains, toothaches and backaches. However, there are some conditions for which you should avoid using one or more of these choices:

DON’T use Aspirin: Wounds, bruises or nerve pain. Also, you should never use Aspirin if you’re on blood thinners or run the risk of excessive bleeding.

DON’T use Ibuprofen or Naproxen: Nerve pain.

DON’T use Acetaminophen: Nerve pain or inflammatory conditions (like Arthritis).

If every girl you knew in college back in the day had a copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, every guy probably had a copy of this album, Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut LP.

When the Yardbirds disbanded in 1968, somehow Jimmy Page (a late arrival in the band’s ever-shifting line-up) wound up with rights to the name and an obligation to honor some Yardbird concert dates in Scandinavia still on the books. Page recruited fellow session musician John Paul Jones on the bass, added Robert Plant as vocalist when Page’s original choice, Terry Reid, turned him down and finished off with John Bonham on drums.

The group honored those concert dates as “The New Yardbirds,” playing a mix of Yardbirds songs as well as working up some new material. Returning to London in the fall of 1968, the lads decided to carry on as a group, but with a new name. Legend has it that, at one time, Page, Jeff Beck, Keith Moon and John Entwistle considered forming a rock band. Moon remarked that the group would go over like a lead balloon. “More like a lead zeppelin,” added Entwistle. So, Page thought the name would suit their new effort.

Lacking a recording contract, the group took the then-unheard of step of recoding their first album on their own. Studio time was paid for by Page himself and the group’s manager, Peter Grant. That meant two things: 1.) the band could record exactly what they liked with no interference from a record label and 2.) they needed to record it quickly because they were paying for the studio time out of their own pocket.

The album we know as Led Zeppelin was recorded quickly, in about 36 hours over just a couple of weeks. Page served as producer while bringing in his childhood mate, Glyn Johns, to serve as engineer. Most of the songs were actually recorded live with the band playing as one in the studio. Fortunately, the group had worked out most of the album’s songs while touring as the New Yardbirds and we’re already fairly tight as an ensemble.

With the completed album tucked under his arm, manager Grant had little trouble attracting label interest, signing Led Zeppelin to Atlantic Records fairly quickly. Their debut disc was released in the States in January of 1969 and in their native UK in March of the same year. Surprisingly, the initial reviews for the record were not good. Rolling Stone remarked that the LP had “little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago.” Several other rock publications offered equally lackluster reviews.

However, the disc quickly became a smash on the then-emerging genre of “progressive rock” radio stations with virtually all of the album’s track getting substantial airplay. Grant also made the shrewd decision to bringing the boys to America almost immediately where their bombastic, exciting stage show generated sensational word of mouth.

Now, of course, the album is correctly lauded as a classic. It pioneered the smash-up of hard rock with traditional blues that came to dominate the music scene as we moved out of the 60s into the 70s. The group is also credited with pioneering the genre of rock that has come to be known as heavy metal, although their status as one of rock’s most popular acts meant Led Zeppelin has really transcended genre labels.

Led Zeppelin consistently makes those lists of the “Greatest Rock Albums” of al time and has been reissued (often with outtakes and other material added) mulitple times over the years.

We can guarantee you that if you strap on an accordian, your friends really will be astonished, but we doubt you'll "make" the party!

As we age, our immune system tends to become less focused. It can overreact to small threats, overcompensating in way that create health problems of their own. The most typical is known as “chronic inflammation.” This can lead to problems like arthritis, heart disease and more.

So, how do we fight chronic inflammation and keep our immune system as sharp as possible? Exprts say the best and easiest ways is to cut out sugar. Now, many food companies here in America will sneak all kinds of added sugar into a wide variety of products, even some they tout as having “health benefits.”

Fortunately, the FDA has recently mandated a change in the Nutrition Facts label you see on all the processed food your buy. They are now required to disclose the amount of sugar they’ve added to whatever is inside that package.

So, to maintain your best health, make sure you check out that label before you buy!

We all remember Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly, founding fathers of rock who wrote and sang their own material. But one founding father has been almost totally forgotten.

He wrote and sang early rock rave-ups like “Bony Maronie” and “Short Fat Fannie,” but was dead and gone before the age of forty-five. If not for one kid from Liverpool, his contributions to rock & roll might be as forgotten as he is.

The man is Larry Williams and the kid from Liverpool who helped keep his music alive is John Lennon.

Williams was born in New Orleans in 1935. Twenty years later, he met and became friends with Little Richard, who was recording for Specialty Records in NOLA at the time. When Richard left the rock scene to become of minister in 1957, Specialty’s front man, Richard Blackwell quickly recruited Williams and started grooming him to be Richard’s replacement.

Williams’ first two singles for Specialty (the aforementioned “Bony” and “Fannie”) both hit the Top 20 on Billboard’s singles chart, each becoming a million-seller. But his subsequent singles failed to chart in the U.S. The situation was different over in the UK, particularly the northern part of the UK where he developed a strong following with the young teddy boys who were leaving skiffle music behind and catching up on American Rock & Roll.

Young John Lennon was quite taken with Williams’ music and so, worked quite a few of his numbers into the sets Lennon performed with his bands the Quarrymen and a little combo eventually named the Beatles. When it came time to record, the Beatles’ early albums are filled with Larry Williams covers, including “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie” and “Slowdown.” Lennon covered “Just Because” on one of his solo albums and many other artists have covered “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”

Sadly, Williams had trouble with drug addiction that hampered his career as he moved into the 1960s. Eventually, he became part of Little Richard's band (after Richard dropped the ministry and went back to rock), even producing some of Richard’s albums for Okeh Records.

Williams was found dead of a gunshot wound in 1980. Officially ruled a suicide, there are those who claim the death resulted from his involvement with drug dealers and prostitution. If you love that old-time rock & roll, Williams’ greatest hits album is still in print and well worth a download or purchase.