7/4

I hope it's not true!

I saw this on the Yahoo Jazz Gtr list within the last hour.

Early word: I hear he died from Cancer. Looking for confirmation on the net now...

nice try.

What makes you think it was in the chicken all that time?

I'm listening to it for the first time, sounds great to me. Mo later...

Photo of a Fender Stratosonic with P90s.

Doesn't a certain someone have to complain first?

I don't see why not. I just bought Win XP Pro and installed it on a new machine last week.

I think it always was a wig, even way back then.

November 28, 2007 Cracking the Code of the Zombie By STEVEN KURUTZ, NYTimes THE culinary world seems to inspire a certain kind of dedicated, if slightly obsessive, connoisseurship. Think of Elizabeth Tashjian, who for 30 years ran the Nut Museum out of her house in Old Lyme, Conn., and spent her off hours painting portraits of walnuts. Or, more recently, Steven Kaplan, an American academic whose scholarly energies are principally focused on French bread. Add to this list Jeff Berry, an easygoing California native who has spent more than a decade tracking down original recipes of drinks with names like the Cannibal Grog and the Nui Nui. A self-described “tropical drink evangelist,” Mr. Berry, who goes by the name Beachbum Berry, has written four slim books that serve as remarkably detailed bar guides to the tiki culture that began in the 1930s, sputtered out in the ’70s, and was revived a decade ago. He sees his mission as elevating the lowly reputation of umbrella drinks to their rightful standing. “When people see that parasol hanging out of the glass they usually laugh,” said Robert Hess, a cocktail historian and host of “The Cocktail Spirit,” a show on smallscreennetwork.com. “It’s kind of sad, because when done properly a tiki drink can exemplify the culinary side of the cocktail." Mr. Berry believes in doing them properly. His latest book, “Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari” (Club Tiki Press), published this summer, represents a culmination of his research. In it, he reveals what he believes to be the original recipe for the Zombie, a famed rum drink that has been made often but rarely well. “The Zombie was the Cosmopolitan or Margarita of its day,” Mr. Berry said recently. “There are hundreds of recipes for it — and they all stink.” Many of the cocktails that Mr. Berry has studied, the Zombie included, owe their creation to a raconteur named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt who remade himself as Donn Beach and started the tiki craze in 1934 by opening Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. In their interior design, the tiki joints inspired by Mr. Beach tended to thoroughly fake pastiches of tropical themes — swaying hula girls, angry savages — that can offend some modern eyes. But Mr. Beach was a gifted mixologist, and his drinks were the real thing. His “Rum Rhapsodies” were elaborate concoctions that called for multiple brands of rum, fresh fruit juice, crushed ice, obscure syrups and esoteric ingredients like honey-butter mix. Unlike Trader Vic, who was born Victor Bergeron and who wrote several books and printed his recipes, Donn Beach kept his formulas a closely guarded secret. “His recipes were all in code,” Mr. Berry said, “so a recipe might say one half-ounce of number two, a dash of number four.” To recreate the Beachcomber drinks, Mr. Berry became a kind of cocktail shamus. He visited libraries and thumbed through old issues of Gourmet on the chance any recipes had been printed (they hadn’t). Eventually, he learned that some of the Beachcomber’s bar staff had kept the secret recipes in little black books. Mr. Berry got his hands on one of the recipe books — but found that it too was coded. Undeterred, he began frequenting the Tiki-Ti, a bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles run by a son and grandson of a Beachcomber bartender. Armed with the coded recipe book, he would order, say, a Montego Bay, and attempt to reverse-engineer the ingredients. Through this slow but sybaritic method he figured out that an ingredient obscurely identified as “Golden Stack” was a brand of Jamaican rum, or that “Markeza” meant passion fruit syrup. After tracking down a few more black books, he said, “it all came together.” Mr. Berry’s single-minded scholarship has gained him respect in the cocktail world. Wayne Curtis, author of “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails,” (Crown, 2006) called Mr. Berry “the Indiana Jones of tiki drinks” for his trailblazing work in uncovering recipes and marveled at his commitment to craft. “I’ve seen Jeff at cocktail events where he’s serving drinks to 300 people,” Mr. Curtis said, “and if it doesn’t taste just right he gets very upset and wants to throw the whole thing out and start over.” A few weeks ago, Mr. Berry was in New York City from Asheville, N.C., where he lives. At Otto’s Shrunken Head, a neo-tiki bar in the East Village, he further demystified the subject of tropical cocktails by drinking a few. Mr. Berry is 49, with a slim build and a bushy white goatee that lends him the appearance of an aging beatnik. He said his fascination with tiki culture began as a kid when his parents took him to a Polynesian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley that had jungle-pattern carpeting and an indoor waterfall. “If you walked in there as a grown man, you might think it was tacky,” Mr. Berry said. “But for me it was like walking onto a Hollywood movie set. It was this cocoon of tropical fantasia.” After graduating from U.C.L.A. film school, Mr. Berry spent several years as a screenwriter and director, achieving some success as a rewrite man on movies like “Inspector Gadget.” During that time he fell in with a crowd of tiki aficionados who threw backyard luaus. Mr. Berry became the resident bartender and soon after published his first book, “Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log.” When his film career stalled, he dedicated himself full-time to tikiana. “I really am a bum,” he said. Mr. Berry turned his attention to the Zombie at Otto’s. In a clever bit of reverse marketing, Donn Beach once claimed the drink was so strong that he would serve no more than two to a customer. “I’m getting some dark rum taste, which is good,” Mr. Berry said, trying Otto’s version, “but it also tastes like a Jolly Rancher. Of course, to be fair, nobody really knows what goes into a proper Zombie anyway.” (Mr. Berry later said that a second visit to Otto’s yielded much better drinks.) Mr. Berry’s own arrival at the Zombie recipe is convoluted. In 2002, he stumbled upon an old copy of “Barbecue Chef,” a cookbook self-published in 1950 by one Louis A. Spievak that contained a Zombie recipe supposedly given to Mr. Spievak by Donn Beach himself. Following the formula, which called for three kinds of rum, three kinds of juice and passion fruit syrup, Mr. Berry was pleased to discover a superb drink. A few years later, he found another Donn Beach-sanctioned Zombie recipe — this one in a 1956 issue of the men’s magazine Cabaret. That recipe called for 11 ingredients, only five of them matching the Spievak formula. The drink was equally good but darker in color and heavier in body. Then the story took one more twist. In 2005, Mr. Berry was given a little black book belonging to a Beachcomber waiter named Dick Santiago that dated to around 1937. The notebook contained a recipe for “Zombie Punch,” which was the drink’s original name. Mr. Berry concluded that the recipe was truly the original Zombie formula, and set about decoding an ingredient listed cagily as “Don’s Mix” (two parts grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup, it turns out). “It took a year to crack it,” he said. Mr. Berry’s lasting contribution may be in salvaging tropical drinks from decades of bad bartending. Because drinks like the Zombie and the Mai Tai were so popular, bars felt compelled to offer them, whether their employees knew how to make them or not. The results were one-dimensional drinks that substitute high proofs and sugary sweetness for balance. “When people think of tropical drinks, they think of the syrupy slush that gets served on a cruise,” Mr. Berry said, his voice rising in pitch. “But when you get a properly structured tropical drink, it’s unbelievable.”

It was a wig.

Sounds right to me. The Electric Nylon seems to be real popular.

November 27, 2007 Robert Cade, Gatorade Creator, Dies By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- Dr. Robert Cade, who invented the sports drink Gatorade and launched a multibillion-dollar industry that the beverage continues to dominate, died Tuesday of kidney failure. He was 80. His death was announced by the University of Florida, where he and other researchers created Gatorade in 1965 to help the school's football players replace carbohydrates and electrolytes lost through sweat while playing in swamp-like heat. Now sold in 80 countries in dozens of flavors, Gatorade was born thanks to a question from former Gator Coach Dwayne Douglas, Cade said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press. He asked, ''Doctor, why don't football players wee-wee after a game?'' ''That question changed our lives,'' Cade said. Cade's researchers determined a football player could lose up to 18 pounds -- 90 to 95 percent of it water -- during the three hours it takes to play a game. Players sweated away sodium and chloride and lost plasma volume and blood volume. Using their research, and about $43 in supplies, they concocted a brew for players to drink while playing football. The first batch was not exactly a hit. ''It sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner,'' said Dana Shires, one of the researchers. ''I guzzled it and I vomited,'' Cade said. The researchers added some sugar and some lemon juice to improve the taste. It was first tested on freshmen because Coach Ray Graves didn't want to hurt the varsity team. Eventually, however, the use of the sports beverage spread to the Gators, who enjoyed a winning record and were known as a ''second-half team'' by outlasting opponents. After the Gators beat Georgia Tech 27-12 in the Orange Bowl in 1967, Tech coach Bobby Dodd told reporters his team lost because, ''We didn't have Gatorade ... that made the difference.'' Stokely-Van Camp obtained the licensing rights for Gatorade and began marketing it as the ''beverage of champions.'' PepsiCo Inc. now owns the brand, which has brought the university more than $110 million in royalties since 1973. Cade said Stokely-Van Camp hated the name ''Gatorade,'' believing it would was too parochial, but stuck with it after tests showed consumers liked the name. Gatorade held 80 percent of the $5.5 billion-a-year sports drink market in 2005, according to Beverage Digest. Current figures were not immediately available. Cade said he thought the use of Gatorade would be limited to sports teams and never dreamed it would be purchased by regular consumers. ''I never thought about the commercial market,'' he said. ''The financial success of this stuff really surprised us.'' The researcher also said he was proud that Gatorade was based on research into what the body loses in exercise. ''The other sports drinks were created by marketing companies,'' he said. Since its introduction, Cade said the formula changed very little. An artificial sweetener has replaced sugar. Instead of the original four flavors, there are now more than 30 available in the United States and more than 50 flavors available internationally. Born James Robert Cade in San Antonio on Sept. 26, 1927, Cade, a Navy veteran, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Cade was appointed an assistant professor in internal medicine at UF in 1961. He worked until he was 76, retiring in November 2004 from the university, where he taught medicine, saw patients and conducted research. Cade and his wife, Mary, had six children.

TS was/is a local band here in NJ. QR was part of the LA scene. I was never really into '80's pop metal. Too watered down to rock. I am curious about how this guy died.

November 27, 2007 Kevin DuBrow, the Leader of Quiet Riot, Dies at 52 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Kevin DuBrow, a gravelly voiced singer for Quiet Riot, a heavy-metal band that peaked in the 1980s, and who captivated decibel-tolerant fans with high-intensity musicality, quirky theatricality and a hint of menace, died on Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 52. Samantha Charles, communications officer for the coroner’s office of Clark County, Nev., said the cause of the death remains the subject of investigation. Web sites and blogs quickly began buzzing with tributes and speculation about the cause of death. Frankie Banali, Quiet Riot’s current drummer, wrote, “I am already having to deal with untrue rumors and speculation,” and he asked for them to stop. Mr. DuBrow’s music evolved from an early love of British rock acts that included Small Faces, Spooky Tooth, Rod Stewart and Humble Pie. He favored suspenders and hats, splashy antics and no-holds-barred banter. As Quiet Riot changed in membership and style, Mr. DuBrow was the persistent driving force in the group’s uninhibited aggressiveness. Sometimes during concerts he dressed up in a strait jacket and metal face mask to appear as Quiet Riot’s mascot, which is on the covers of almost all the group’s albums. Quiet Riot is credited with helping start the 1980s glam-metal scene and is probably best known for its take on Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” which appeared on “Metal Health” (1983) and eventually spent two weeks at No. 5 on Billboard’s list of hits. The album sold more than 4 million copies and is considered by many to be the first heavy-metal record to climb high in the pop charts. “Although bands such as Motley Crue get the lion’s share of credit for popularizing pop metal in the 1980s, the first band of the genre to break through to a massive audience was Quiet Riot,” Billboard.com said yesterday. Kevin Mark DuBrow was born on Oct. 29, 1955. He grew up first in Hollywood, Calif., and then in suburban Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley. Randy Rhoads, who assembled the group, auditioned Mr. DuBrow in his garage. Mr. Rhoads, who went on to establish a big reputation as the guitar player for Ozzy Osbourne, died in a traffic accident in 1982. The band’s original lineup included Mr. Rhoads, Mr. DuBrow, the bass player Kelly Garni and the drummer Drew Forsyth. The group first released two albums in Japan. After Mr. Rhoads left to join Mr. Osbourne in 1979, the band’s name was changed to DuBrow. After Mr. Rhoads’s death, the group was reconstituted as Quiet Riot. After its success with “Metal Health,” Quiet Riot’s next album, “Condition Critical” (1984), was a disappointment in sales. The band continued to go through changes, and in 2004 Mr. DuBrow left to make a solo album, “In for the Kill.” He later returned. At the peak of the group’s popularity, in the 1980s, Mr. DuBrow said he was making as much as $500,000 a year and delighting in “completely gorgeous women who are absolutely crazy,” according to an interview with Rock Eyez, an online magazine specializing in heavy-metal music. Information on survivors was unavailable, but Mr. DuBrow never married nor had children. In 2006, Quiet Riot released an album called “Rehab.” In 2001, Mr. DuBrow told The Birmingham (Ala.) Weekly that he eschewed alcohol, liked doing housework and exercised regularly. He said in a 2004 interview in Worcester Magazine: “I’ve read interviews where certain guys are trying to escape their past. I am my past.” That sounds so...masculinely challenged. This bit about escaping his past sounds like 12 step/recovery program talk. RIP, ya goofball.

I'm sorry to hear that.

The last Quiet Riot album was Rehab. Interesting title. I wonder what's up with that.

52, that's pretty young. I wonder what was the cause.

The current D'Angelico Excels are made in Korea, the D'Angelico New Yorkers in Japan. Excellent point.

Thanks, I see it now. from the 20th Century Gtr review:

I think it's all made in Brooklyn. $3300 for a Semi Hollow, $3900 for a Jim Hall...I didn't see anything on the web site or guitars that indicated that they were not made in the USA.

The kind who allows greed or lust to triumph over reason and good judgement. I know that dipshit is calling me a moron, but I trust that you are not implying that I allow greed or lust to triumph over reason and good judgment, Chris. No. It never occurred to me that you might actually have responded to that piece of spam--your political persuasion aside , I grant you far more intelligence than that, Dan! But someone was paying attention to spam.

Crap. I forgot to turn off CNN...

Brooklyn. And there's a dealer about 15 min from my apt. I suddenly have a bunch of gear I want to sell.