Sam Moore, who as half of the 1960s R&B duo Sam & Dave sang gritty but hook-filled hits including “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Coming,” died Friday in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jeremy Westby, who said the cause was complications from an unspecified surgery. Dave Prater, Moore’s partner in Sam & Dave, died in a car accident at age 50 in 1988.
With Moore as the tenor and Prater as the baritone, Sam & Dave were one of the signature acts at Memphis’ Stax Records, which offered a tougher, sweatier alternative to the more polished R&B sound that Detroit’s Motown had turned into pop gold.
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Yet Sam & Dave were no strangers to the charts: In 1965, they kicked off a four-year run in which they reached the top 40 of Billboard’s R&B chart a dozen times and hit No. 2 on the all-genre Hot 100 with “Soul Man,” which was written and produced by Isaac Hayes and David Porter and featured backing by Stax’s crackerjack house band, Booker T. & the M.G.’s. “Soul Man” won a Grammy Award in 1968, beating Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “I Second That Emotion” to be named best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocals.
Among Sam & Dave’s other hits were “I Thank You,” “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “Something Is Wrong with My Baby” and “You Got Me Hummin’,” which a teenage Billy Joel went on to cover with his group the Hassles.
“Most bands … could get away with doing a lousy version of a Sam & Dave record and still get an incredible reaction to it,” Joel said when he inducted the duo into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. “But they all suffer when you compare them to the original.”
For all they accomplished in the studio, Sam & Dave were perhaps most highly regarded as an explosive live act, one known as both Double Dynamite and the Sultans of Sweat.
Samuel David Moore was born in Miami on Oct. 12, 1935, and grew up singing in the church. He met Prater at Miami’s King of Hearts nightclub in the early ’60s when Prater performed at an amateur night that Moore was hosting. The two formed Sam & Dave and toiled mostly in obscurity until Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd — the creative braintrust behind Atlantic Records — caught their show and signed the duo to a deal that had them recording for Stax, which Atlantic was distributing.
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Moore and Prater, whose relationship was always more professional than friendly, broke up in 1970 but reunited after each man’s solo career fizzled. In 1978, the Blues Brothers — comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd — released a cover of “Soul Man” that went to No. 14 on the Hot 100; the renewed attention propelled Sam & Dave for a few more years until they played their final gig together in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve in 1981. (To Moore’s chagrin, Prater later toured as Sam & Dave with a different singer, Sam Daniels.)
In 1982, Moore married Joyce McRae, who also began managing his career and helped him overcome an addiction to heroin. He went on to sing on albums by Don Henley and Bruce Springsteen and received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2019. Moore’s survivors include his wife, their daughter and two grandchildren.
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
