Don Kirshner, the impresario behind Brill Building pop, the Monkees, the Archies and his own music-television show, has died of heart failure.
Kirshner was 77 and died in Boca Raton, Fla., according to a statement from his publicist cited by Billboard.com. He was born on April 17, 1934, according to Ancestry.com, which would have made him 76.
Called "the man with the golden ear" by Time magazine in 1966, he wrote songs with Bobby Darin as a college student. In the late 1950s he co-founded Aldon Music, a publishing company whose songwriters included the hit-making teams of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield.
After selling Aldon to Columbia Pictures, Kirshner moved into TV. He supervised the music for "The Monkees" and "The Archies" series and produced "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," a live-performance television show.
When "Rock Concert" ended in 1982, Kirshner retired. He made a comeback attempt two decades later with a publicly traded company, Kirshner International Inc., whose efforts to create an Internet TV channel and a media player were unsuccessful. He was in bankruptcy proceedings for six years, ending in 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment