Gone But Not Forgotten: Celebrities Who Left Us in 2023

Jimmy Buffet (foto Gary Firstenberg)

They danced, they sang, they made us laugh, they made us think. And sometimes they made us wince... As 2023 closes out, newspapers and magazines around the world will assemble a veritable list of iconic figures and pop culture makers whose lives are now gone, but not forgotten.

This morning I read that actor Tom Wilkinson, who played major roles in two of my favorite films--The Ghostwriter and Michael Clayton--died yesterday. This prompted me to see who else left us behind this year.

Entertainment Week has a very long page of celebs with photos and mini-bios, which I skimmed through just now. Many who left us were in their 80s and 90s, and a few over 100. It's sad to read of others who died in their fifties, or earlier.

Here are some of the many whom we no longer have among us, with a comment or two of my own as they relate to my own life.

Bob Barker was the host of The Price Is Right for oh so many years, an all around nice guy, so it was hilarious when he got into a rough-and-tumble fist fight with a hot-headed Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore. Barker was 99 when he died.

Tony Bennett was one of many crooners who emerged before my time, whom I actually had little interest. But like the little engine that could, his longevity and vocal chords resulted in many accolades. It caught my attention when he recorded with Amy Winehouse, whose music was introduced to me by my son.

I discovered author Cormac McCarthy via a pair of audiobooks at our Duluth Public Library, one of these being No Country For Old Men which I read ten months before it became a film. This fall I devoured Blood Meridian, a book like no other that I have ever read, brutal and dazzling. McCarthy was 89.

There were two Robertsons who passed this year. Pat Robertson, the Christian media personality/founder of the 700 Club, and Robbie Robertson, who made a name for himself with The Band, Bob Dylan's backing group during that famous mid-Sixties world tour. Controversies swirled around each, but I'm not going to get into it.

Tina Turner died this year, definitely a force. She overcame a lot to get where she got.

Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown was my hero as a kid growing up in Cleveland and one of the NFL's greatest running backs. (I could make a case that he was indeed the greatest.) In 1963 I got a Jimmy Brown football card for the first time in years of trying. Unfortunately, my brother Ron was shoplifting football cards from the Klir's store and my mother punished him by burning ALL of our football cards. I saved Jim Brown from the fire and slid the card between the cinder blocks in the wall of the garage. Though irretrievable, he was at least preserved from being burned.

Gordon Lightfoot died this year. A Canadian singer/songwriter he never achieved the acclaim of a Bob Dylan, but definitely wrote a lot of excellent songs. In college "If You Could Read My Mind" was a track that repeated itself in my mind. Gord's Gold was listened to much over the years.

Actor and singer Harry Belafonte was born in Harlem to Jamaican-born parents. His daughter produced a documentary about his career, which included his work in the civil rights movement. Bob Dylan played harmonica on one of Belafonte's albums, Dylan's first paid recording gig in the Big Apple.

Al Jaffee was a cartoonist for Mad Magazine for six decades. When I was a kid the satirical mag only cost a quarter. One time in the early Sixties I bought a box of them for a penny apiece at a sidewalk sale in Mapletown. How cool is that? Jaffee was 102 when he passed.

Raquel Welch was one of those sex symbol heart throbs that Hollywood would thrust onto posters to the delight of teenage boys. She was 82 when she died this year.

Gina Lollobrigida was an Italian sex symbol from a decade earlier who died at age 95 this year. I doubt I ever saw her in a movie and couldn't even say I knew what she looked like, nor did I have any fantasies about her. I only recall that her name sounded sexy.

David Crosby of CSN&Y passed away this year. If you ever compete in a Bob Dylan Trivia Contest, DC is the answer to the question, Who was Bob referring to in his song "Day of the Locusts"? Crosby was 81.

Lisa Marie Presley was only 54 when she died this year. Only child of The King, it must have been hard growing up in that world.

Jeff Beck was once dubbed one of the most influential guitar players in rock history by Rolling Stone magazine. Eight or ten years I go I obtained permission from Beck to use one of his collector cars in one of my ads for AMSOIL. I'm half curious where his car collection is today.

My brother Ron and I used to enjoy watching the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I would pretend I was the Robert Vaughn character Napoleon Solo, and he would be Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum who died this year just six days after his 90th birthday.

Everyone remembers Burt Young as Paulie in the Rocky series of films starring Sly Stallone. I remember him for his role in the perfectly crafted Polanski film Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.

I once performed Margaritaville, by Jimmy Buffet in a celebrity fundraiser at the Sports Garden here in Duluth. Backed by a live band and patterned after one of those TV shows where you're critiqued (lacerated) publicly, I chose the song that Roger Reinert had intended to select. Roger, a state legislator, is now Mayor of Duluth. I wasn't the first time I competed against local mayors. 15 or more years ago I beat the mayors of Hermantown, Duluth and Superior in a celebrity race at Proctor Speedway. Buffet, who was born on Christmas Day, would have been 77 had he not passed away in September.

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For a more complete list of Celebrities We Lost in 2023 visit EW.

Flashback Friday: Off the Record, An Oral History of Popular Music

The late Tom Petty

Imagine that you have been invited to a huge party, and when you get there everyone is a somebody... a Somebody in the history of pop music. Who do you talk to first? Do you walk around looking for your favorites first? Or do you just saunter around talking with whoever you run into next?

 

That's what it's like to pick up the book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music.

Obviously a party like that can only be assembled by someone with connections. In this case the author is Joe Smith, who happened to be president and CEO of Capitol Industries-EMI (the same ones who signed the Beatles, Dylan and so many more.) Before this he had been president of Warner Bros./Reprise and Elektra. A Yale grad who became a popular and successful disc jockey, Smith seems like just the right guy to gather all these other pop celebs under one roof.

The book is handled just right. There are no long interviews. Like the party, you can bounce around for a brief spell with Tom Petty, then George Harrison, Little Richard, Ray Charles. Over here is Dylan and is that Yoko Ono? Oh yes, talking with Joni Mitchell, Phil Collins and Ella Fitzgerald. Joan Baez, Robert Plant and James Taylor seem to be enjoying themselves over there with Tina Turner and David Bowie. Then you see the jazz guys, Lionel Hampton, Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck staring out the window onto the lawn where Quincy Jones is listening to Robbie Krieger, Mary Travers, Frankie Valli, Al Kooper and Herbie Hancock. Donovan pensively listens to John Fogerty and David Lee Roth. Judy Collins seems to be reminiscing with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills. Lou Rawls and Tom Petty can't seem to get enough of Henry Mancini.

O.K., you get the picture. And the stories they tell are fascinating because pop culture has played a role in all of our lives.

My bedtime reading ended with Mike Nesmith talking about the Monkees. They were not a music group, they were characters on a television show. The purpose of the show was not to end up with hit records, he says. But one day they're driving along in the car and hear that their song Last Train to Clarksville is #2 on the national charts. Nesmith says the very notion of it was bizarre. Suddenly everything changed.

Jimi

The Monkees were shipped to London to prepare for a road tour as a music group, but they weren't really sure about how they really felt, nevertheless they followed through. One strange quirk about the tour was having Jimi Hendrix open for them. Mickey Dolenz had heard Hendrix in a London club and made the recommendation, which Nesmith off-handedly thought was O.K., sight and sound unseen. When they arrive in Raleigh, North Carolina, to do their first gig, the Hendrix trio is mind blowing, even in appearance, but the teeny bopper screamers are there only for one purpose, and it's not the Experience of Jimi Hendrix.

Nesmith says he disguised himself and went into the crowd to snatch a listen. He'd never heard anything like it. "It was the most exhilarating, the most majestic, the most entertaining, the most fulfilling music I'd ever heard," said Nesmith.

But the mismatch was self-evident and after eight gigs Jimi had had it. The girls were chanting, "We want the Monkees," and in the middle of a song the most incredible guitar player of a generation left the stage in the middle of a song, disgusted.

For the record, this book offers a lot. It's real, it's intimate, up close and personal. Recommended.

You can find the book here on Amazon

Illustrations by the author