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Recording Academy Grateful for the Dead, Doors, Baez
12/19/2006 2:56 PM, E! Online
The quintessential jam band. Opera's most renowned diva. An L.A. quartet whose flame still burns bright 25 years after the death of their frontman. The first lady of folk rock.
The artists chosen by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences to receive a 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award not only represent a broad swath of the music that has influenced the last 80 years in rock and roll, jazz, blues, opera and country.
The Grateful Dead, the Doors, folk star and activist Joan Baez, opera legend Maria Callas, saxophonist and jazz composer Ornette Coleman, country singer-songwriter Bob Wills and soul band Booker T. & the MG's also are part of that regretfully large number of highly influential artists who have never won a Grammy for their efforts.
But, just as the film industry honors Oscar-less titans year after year with lifetime achievement awards, the Recording Academy works to remedy its inevitable oversights, one year at a time.
"This year's group of accomplished honorees are as diverse as they are influential as creators of the most renowned and prominent recordings in the world," Recording Academy president Neil Portnow said in a statement.
"Their contributions exemplify the highest artistic and technical standards that have positively affected the music industry and music fans."
In terms of Grammy glory, Baez, 65, has come the closest, collecting six nominations over the years. Starting on the folk circuit in 1959, the New York native was one of the earlier champions (and girlfriends) of Bob Dylan. She followed him along the more socially conscious songwriting path back in the 1960s on her way to becoming one of the best-known protest artists of that era.
After a memorable appearance at Woodstock in 1969, Baez began to move toward more of a pop rock sound, scoring a U.S. top 10 hit in 1971 with her cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and releasing her highest-selling album, 1975's Diamonds & Rust. She has continued to record and perform for a number of causes, appearing at Earth Day events, benefits for Hurricane Katrina and Iraq war protests.
Perhaps it was the Grateful Dead's status as one of the most boot-legged acts, ever, that kept the Recording Academy from bestowing any official kudos until now. Fifty albums later and 11 years after the death of ex post facto frontman Jerry Garcia, however, the Anthem for the Sun rockers are getting their due.
The country's most successful touring band has seen a few faces come and go since it rose out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury counterculture in the mid-'60s, but the Academy will be paying tribute to original members Garcia, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh, along with eventual second drummer Mickey Hart.
Meanwhile, although lead singer Jim Morrison broke on through to the other side at the age of 27 in 1971, the surviving members of the Doors—guitarist Robby Krieger, drummer John Densmore and keyboardist Ray Manzarek—also continue to rock out, albeit separately.
Densmore and Morrison's estate won a permanent injunction against Krieger and Manzarek in 2005 preventing them from performing under any incarnation of the Doors name (although they can call themselves "former members of the Doors"). But although these are strange days for the remaining Doors, their eclectic early recordings continue to sell and their tunes are always popping up in movies. Densmore has refused to license the band's music for television commercials, though, feeling it would violate Morrison's wishes and the spirit in which the songs were created.
Western swing pioneer Bob Wills, a Texas native who was a major influence on last year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner Merle Haggard, led his band, the Texas Playboys, for 30 years before a heart attack sidelined him in 1964.
A triple threat on the guitar, fiddle and mandolin, Wills crisscrossed the U.S. with the Texas Playboys throughout the 1940s and '50s. Utilizing electric guitar and drums (which were forbidden at the Grand Ole Opry when Wills took them onstage in 1944), the group was known for being able to churn out big-band swing and pop music along with Dixieland tunes.
Haggard's 1968 album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player sparked a western swing revival and moved Wills back into the public eye until his death in 1975 at 70.
Southern soul band Booker T. & the MG's likewise inspired a generation of artists, including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and the Queen of Memphis Soul, Carla Thomas. The multiracial group—an uncommon attribute in the 1960s-era South—served as Stax Records' house band, churning out bluesy tunes such as "Green Onions," "Groovin'" and "Time Is Tight," all top 40 hits.
Drummer Al Jackson died in 1975, but frontman Booker T. Jones still tours with guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, who replaced original member Lewis Steinberg in the mid-'60s.
Now one of the elder statesmen of jazz, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, 76, known for his emotional, improvisatorial style, recorded a series of albums for Atlantic Records that were later reflected in the recordings of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and other "free jazz" stars of the '60s.
In the 1970s Coleman pioneered a sound he dubbed "harmolodics" with his double quartet Prime Time—two guitars, two electric bassists, two drummers and his alto sax. The music, focusing equally on harmony, melody, and rhythm, influenced a younger generation of jazz artists, including the M-Base Collective.
And even people who have never been to the opera, listened to an operatic recording or who think that Rent's storyline was a nifty original idea have heard of Maria Callas.
The New York-born and Greek-raised soprano, who passed away in 1977 at 54, added her interpretation to nearly all of the most well-known classic and bel canto operas, whether through onstage performances or studio recordings.
Callas sang parts in, among many others, Verdi's Aida and Macbeth, Puccini's Tosca and La Boheme, Bizet's Carmen, Cherubini's Medea and Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, part of the German composer's famed Ring Cycle.
The Lifetime Achievement Awards will be handed out at a private ceremony during Grammy Week in February. The 49th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony takes place Feb. 11 in Los Angeles.
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