Sax player and arranger Sam Butera was ‘Keith Richards to Louis Prima’s Mick Jagger’ once he joined the great trumpeter, singer and bandleader in Las Vegas in 1...
For 60 years, Fred Willard made us laugh playing the same character, from early comedy club gigs with Vic Greco and appearances on Steve Allen’s and Ed Sullivan...
Neil Innes, one of the true gentlemen of rock & roll, died at the end of 2019. A founding member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, collaborator with Monty Pyth...
Circus performers were, in some ways, the punk rockers of their day, and nobody was more punk than Lillian Leitzel. Feisty, fearless, tiny and yet unbelievably ...
Once described as ‘half Waylon and half Johnny Rotten,’ Dan McLain was a mortal drummer from San Diego who transformed himself into Country Dick Montana, drivin...
One of the key jokes in Spinal Tap is the long line of drummers who met unfortunate ends, including three who died onstage. That death march of the timekeepers ...
Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer was the most popular star of the classic Our Gang comedies. But the facts of the Little Rascal’s untimely death have been clouded in Holl...
There were once two men named Jerry: Salinger and Lewis. And one of them wrote a famous novel, Catcher In the Rye, which the other wanted to turn into a movie, ...
The teenage pop star from Australia ignored the warnings and embarked on a tour of military bases in Vietnam. Things were going well with her "Sweethearts On P...
Four weeks after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, a tabloid news producer made a discovery that stunned the world and turned a family name i...
The faces of these three actors were familiar to Baby Boomers raised on TV situation comedies. Their private lives were not. In a way, though, they helped to bl...
Filmmaker Mu Tunc describes his film, Arada, as “Liquid Sky meets The Decline of Western Civilization,” which, of course, automatically makes it worthy of atten...
She called it ‘performance art’ when, in 1964, she casually strolled into Andy Warhol’s Factory, pulled out a handgun and shot a bullet through four paintings o...
Frank Sutton, who played the gruff sergeant foil to Jim Nabors’ country bumpkin Gomer Pyle, was a talented actor on screen, tube and stage. He lived and died,...
BURT KEARNS produces nonfiction television and documentary films. He wrote the books TABLOID BABY and, with Jeff Abraham, THE SHOW WON’T GO ON: THE MOST SHOCKING, BIZARRE, AND HISTORIC DEATHS OF PERFORMERS ONSTAGE.
