Music News & Notes

Grammy Award Legend Dies

Pierre Cossette, the man responsible for bringing the Grammy Awards to television, passed away on September 11th at the age of 85 after suffering congestive heart failure in Montreal, the New York Times reports.

Along with music executive Lou Adler, Cossette was a founder of Dunhill Records, a label that oversaw releases by Three Dog Night and the Mamas and the Papas before Cossette segued into television production in the 1970s. It was on the small screen that he would make his biggest mark, helping elevate the Grammy Awards to an international TV event on par with the Oscars and Tonys.

When the Grammys first began in 1957, the ceremony wasn’t televised. Seeing the potential in music’s biggest night, Cossette purchased the awards’ rights from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and managed to convince ABC to broadcast the first Grammys in 1971 with singer Andy Williams serving as host. Two years later, the ceremony jumped to CBS — where it remains to this day. Thirty-eight years later, the Grammy Awards remain one of the most significant nights for both the music and the television industries.

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Veteran Musician Dead

Jim Carroll, who chronicled his early life in the book The Basketball Diaries and went on to form his own punk band, passed away on Friday in Manhattan from a heart attack. He was 59.

In the late 70's, friend Patti Smith encourage Carroll to get into the punk scene, helping him form the Jim Carroll Band. Their 1980 release, Catholic Boy, has been considered one of the last great punk albums. He also wrote lyrics for artists likes Boz Scaggs and Blue Oyster Cult.

Neil Young has announced the artists for this year's Bridge School Benefit, to be held on October 24 & 25 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA. On the ticket are Jimmy Buffett, No Doubt, Chris Martin (Coldplay), Sharyl Crow, Monsters of Folk, Fleet Foxes, Wolfmother, Gavin Rossdale and Adam Sandler.

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Mick Taylor Needs Money

Mick Taylor, who joined the Rolling Stones after Brian Taylor left in 1969 and stayed until 1974, has revealed to the BBC that the group has not paid him any royalties in years and that he is broke.

The payments stopped due to a loophole in the agreement the band made to leave Atlantic Records in 1982. Since then, he claims that he has lost millions of dollars. Taylor is looking into a way to recoup the losses for the royalties for the six Stones albums on which he performed.

Taylor says that he would be dead now if he had stayed with the band due to drug addiction. Today, he says he is clean. "My life is so much better now than being a drug-ravaged member of the Stones. So no, I don’t regret leaving."

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Paul McCartney: 'It Would Have Been Wrong For The Beatles To Reform'

But they did talk about it...

Sir Paul McCartney has revealed that The Beatles decided against reforming because they didn't want to “ruin” their legacy.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Sir Paul said the band often discussed getting back together following their split in 1970.

But despite lucrative offers, all four members were against the idea.

"We talked about it a lot and we always said that if we did [reform] it might not be great, whereas The Beatles' career had been great,” he said.

“We'd gone from A to Z and it had been a great journey. If now we were going to go to 'Z plus' and it wasn't very good, you'd ruin the whole thing.”

Sir Paul added: "Even though the offers were huge, and there were people [saying], 'I'll pay you this to do it!' we talked about it and we sort of said 'nah'.

“[There was] something not right about it."

Elsewhere in the interview, former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr described the Liverpool group as “the band of brothers”.

The pair were speaking to promote the release of the video game Rock Band: The Beatles, which was released last week.