Word: stringing
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...American music is constellated with real characters, do-it-yourselfers who couldn't stop asking "What if..." and who had the drive - and thick enough skins - to follow through on their hunches. From the basements and garages of the heartland came the electric guitar, the electric bass, the five-string banjo, the multitrack tape recorder and the pedal steel guitar. Perhaps it's our penchant for excess that leads us to make it louder, faster, different - especially different - and not everyone may see the results as signs of progress. But these brash creations are as accurate road maps...
...WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ALVINO, you ask? Well, it's about a sound that can by turns be as lush and languid as a full string section or as bright and bouncy as a banjo, that can be applied to the most complex jazz progressions as well as the rawest foot-stomping moonshine music. It's deeply sophisticated and wholly honky-tonk at the same time, and it's the ultimate American instrument...
...Americans, as we know, are a tinkering breed, and in the early '50s a fellow named Bud Isaacs got the idea of hooking up a pedal that would pull a single string to a preset pitch while the instrument was being played, making the movement of the note part of the style. The first recording to feature this was 1953's "Slowly," by Webb Pierce, with Isaacs on steel, and the cat was out of the bag. More pedals were added, and then knee levers, which provided new ways to raise or lower the pitch of the strings...
...room for the big deal that might seal a No. 1 content position for Bertelsmann. The private Bertelsmann's board has a deep-rooted aversion to debt. So Middelhoff redoubled his efforts to reorganize the company around digital content and in one stroke sold off its stake in a string of companies before the dotcom meltdown. That netted an estimated $15 billion in cash ($8 billion from AOL Europe alone) to shop with...
DIED. STEVE ALLEN, 78, late-night talk-show pioneer; of an apparent heart attack; in Encino, Calif. The first host of NBC's Tonight show, Allen went on to star in a string of influential talk and comedy shows. He was also an author, pianist, songwriter (This Could Be the Start of Something Big) and, in recent years, vocal crusader against sex and violence on TV. (See EULOGY, below...