It Came From The Man Cave!: Music Monday

Music Monday

Hi, all sure hope you had a nice Easter weekend. Let us take a look at what happened in music on April 13th.

Ah musicals, you know they are a big thing in this house so why not start with the Musical "Grease" closing at Broadhurst Theater NYC after 3,388 performances in 1980. I could not find any video's from that far back sorry. Grease was first performed in 1971 in the original Kingston Mines nightclub in Chicago (since demolished). From there, it has been successful on both stage and screen, but the content has been diluted and its teenage characters have become less Chicago habitués and more generic. At the time that it closed in 1980, Grease's 3,388-performance run was the longest yet in Broadway history, although it was surpassed by A Chorus Line on September 29, 1983. It went on to become a West End hit, a successful feature film, two popular Broadway revivals in 1994 and 2007, and a staple of regional theatre, community theatre, and high school and middle school drama groups. It remains Broadway's 16th longest-running show.

Famous Illinionin Howard Keel was born in 1917 in Gillespie, Il in Southern Illinois. Keel was the Errol Flynn of the "golden age" of movie musicals back in the 1950s. His body of work includes "Camelot," "South Pacific", "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", "Man of La Mancha", and "Show Boat". But most of us know him best when he replaced Jim Davis as the upstanding family patriarch of the nighttime soap drama Dallas (1978) after Davis' untimely death. Keel passed away at the age of 85 in 2004.

And on this day in 2013 Chi Cheng, the bassist for the Deftones died at the age of 42. Cheng had been involved in a car accident in 2008, which left him in a coma for some time. Although he eventually began showing signs of improvement, he was never able to make a full recovery. Cheng’s bass playing can be heard on such early Deftones classics as 1995’s Adrenaline, 1997’s Around the Fur, and 2000’s White Pony. Additionally, Cheng issued a spoken word release in 2000, The Bamboo Parachute.