Word: isaac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...blown away by the article on the [nightclub and restaurant chain] House of Blues [MUSIC, July 1]. I could not believe that its founder, Isaac Tigrett, suggested the black community had turned its back on the blues music genre. How could this middle-aged yuppie white man make an intelligent assessment of the role blues has in our community? Blues is a result of the racism, poverty and hopelessness felt in the black ghetto, experiences Tigrett has never been familiar with. For the record, blues music was never ignored by the black community; it has simply manifested itself in different...
Back in the 1950s, science-fiction literature earned a reputation as the opiate of supernerdy teenage boys: sturdy but unimaginative prose that waxed rhapsodic about G-forces and interstellar trajectories. It wasn't quite fair even then; early works by authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke relied as much on clever plot twists and thought-provoking views of societal evolution as on visions of rocket ships and interplanetary travel. Still, there was sufficient truth for the stereotype to sting...
...blues have never looked so green. Revenues from the Los Angeles and New Orleans HOBs totaled more than $35 million last year. "If you watch Isaac at work, he's a genius--he looks rock 'n' roll, but he thinks Madison Avenue," says John Sykes, president of the music video network vh1 and a friend of Tigrett's. "He is building a quality brand--you come and hear the blues, buy a burger and a T shirt on the way out. That's pure Isaac. He's not a quick-buck guy. He thinks long-term, and he puts together...
...more personal than financial gain from the music, and they stuck by it for years when it didn't make any money," says Mike Kappus of the Rosebud Agency, a management company that represents bluesmen John Lee Hooker and Robert Cray. "It's a very real, emotional music. If Isaac has a true love for the music, he has to be very careful about its legacy and not intentionally or unintentionally, five years down the road, create the impression that the Blues Brothers are the best-known icon of the blues...
Still, Tigrett seems to revel in being the bad boy of the blues, the Dennis Rodman of an authentic American musical form. "I came to the Blues Foundation symposium last year, and one of the lectures was titled: 'Isaac Tigrett, House of Blues: Devil or Angel?' " says Tigrett with a laugh. "And I went down there, and I said, 'I am the devil.' I said, 'I'm going to take this music and take it away from small-minded people who want to keep it in dirty little clubs. And I'm going to do what I do best...