An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
12 December 1944: The unprepossessing-looking Rob Tyner was the lead singer of the MC5, who along with The Stooges were Detroit's finest rock bands. The best evocation I've come across of the era is Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me, an oral history of punk and its origins, which graphically tells the whole story by interviewing a cast of hundreds. Most of whom should have known better.
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Worth catching the introduction to the above programme, a period piece where Gail, the presenter, who is now hopefully a contented granny somewhere, tells the viewing audience "not to freak out". Then there is a scorching version of "Ramblin' Rose" with Wayne Kramer on falsetto lead.
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12 December 1944: Rob Tyner got his stage name from McCoy Tyner, best known for playing in John Coltrane's group. Here he plays a version of the tune he and Coltrane made famous among jazz buffs. Everyone else knew it as a song from The Sound Of Music.
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Pianists wishing to emulate McCoy Tyner's distincitve percussive style could do worse than watch the video below a few hundred times.
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19 December 1918: Professor Longhair was as distinctive a 20th-century pianist as anyone. His group The Shuffling Hungarians were the toast of New Orleans. No video is going to teach you to sing like this.
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10 December 1974: Meg White, the drummer of The White Stripes, the modern successors of the MC5.
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12 December 1945: Alan Ward, founder of the Honeycombs, who had one giant hit, the Joe Meek-produced "Have I the Right". The percussive stomp was provided by the band stamping on Meek's stairs in Holloway, London. One of very few bands, like the White Stripes, to have a female drummer, Honey Lantree.
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12 December 1944: Booker T Jones of Booker T and the MGs. This isn't the one they use for Test Cricket.
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10 December 1980: Sarah Chang was a child prodigy as a violinist and is still one of the top violinists of the world and not at all controversial, or seemingly that interesting. If she has a problem, it's maybe that she doesn't appear to have one. If it could only be revealed that she had a phase of being a lesbian heavy metal fan, was once hooked on crack, or she tried to poison Nigel Kennedy, she'd be so much more famous.
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