Long Beach’s 2ND & PCH opens for business Thursday amid lots of pomp, ceremony and music
Barricades will come down, shades will go up and cash registers will be ready to ring Thursday after dignitaries cut the ribbon at 2ND & PCH, the long anticipated and debated commercial center at the corner of Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway.
Some of the stores and eateries at the 11-acre, two-story center still are a ways away from opening. But the center’s anchor, Whole Foods, is opening its 45,000-square-foot store on Wednesday, Oct. 23, and developer CenterCal officials promise plenty to keep visitors busy in four days of opening hoopla, from giveaways to free concerts.
Whole Foods is offering swag bags and gift cards with varying amounts to the first shoppers Wednesday. The first 200 arrivals Thursday from 8-10 a.m. will receive a Golden Ticket swag bag from the center with giveaways, discounts and more.
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The officials will congregate at 10 a.m. for speeches and a ribbon cutting. Developer CenterCal’s president, Jean Paul Wardy, will be on hand, and city officials, elected and appointed, will help cut the ribbon, among others.
At 11 a.m. Thursday, Pow!Wow! mural event founder Jasper Wong and some of his artists will be on hand to talk about the murals that grace areas of the center.
The rest of the day will include individual retailer events, art tours and more, spokesperson Annie Goldenberg said. A free concert by Common Sense at 7 p.m. will wrap up the first day.
On Friday, retailer events and character meet and greets will take up the day. A free screening of the Halloween classic “Hocus Pocus” will usher in the last weekend before Halloween starting at 6:30 p.m.
There will be free Pink Fong/Baby Shark shows at 2 and 4 p.m. Saturday along with other special events for the family.
A Long Beach Music Showcase will be Sunday from noon-7 p.m. An Adam Topol & Matt Costas concert at 6 p.m. Sunday will wrap up the opening festivities. There also will be a beer garden and games that day.
There are more than 1,000 parking spaces on the property, and parking will be free all weekend
The center’s address is 6400 E. Pacific Coast Highway, but there are entrances from northbound Second Street and Marina Drive as well.
For more information, go to www.2ndandpch.com.
Here’s a look at the businesses projected for the center. Tenants will begin to open Thursday, with more openings coming throughout the rest of 2019 and into 2020, according to spokesperson Annie Goldenberg.
Retail stores anticipated at 2ND&PCH:Source: Long Beach’s 2ND & PCH opens for business Thursday amid lots of pomp, ceremony and music
Berry Gordy's 60-year Motown competition fueled American dreams, music and healing
Richard Williams, Opinion contributor Published 1:57 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2019 | Updated 2:17 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2019
Gordy created a friendly competition among artists and told them to innovate or stagnate. He modeled his music business on an auto assembly line.
“Competition breeds champions.” Was that said by 18th century economic philosopher Adam Smith? 20th century economist Milton Friedman? Neither. It was Berry Gordy, a former boxer and auto assembly line worker turned film producer, author, songwriter, television producer, and founder of Motown Records.
Gordy announced his retirement a month ago during Motown’s 60th anniversary celebration in Detroit. This year’s festivities have also included groundbreaking on a major expansion of the Motown Museum, the Showtime documentary “Hitsville: The Making of Motown,” and a night of Motown films Oct. 22 on Turner Classic Movies.
Millions of us who grew up listening to The Supremes, the Four Tops, The Temptations, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles remember Motown for the best music we’d heard before or since. Some have come to believe, as Jimi Hendrix said, “Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.”
Motown music helped heal a nationIn the 1960s, something needed to change. Race problems resulted in riots like Bloody Sunday in 1965, when 600 peaceful demonstrators were beaten and teargassed by Alabama police for protesting the killing of a black civil rights activist. But at the same time, kids of every color were dancing to Motown hits like “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “It’s the Same Old Song.”
I could never sit when the Four Tops played “Reach Out.” It felt like my song. Gordy —affectionately known as B.G. — understood Motown’s appeal, saying “it’s not really black music. It’s music by black stars.”
Berry Gordy in New York in 2017. (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
In his memoir, he explained, “I learned we all basically wanted and needed the same things.As a songwriter, that’s what I wanted to write about — what people needed —whether it was love, a reason to dance, a reason to cry.”
He recalls Martin Luther King Jr. saying that Berry was “bringing emotional integration.” As King made a monumental impact with his words, Berry softened Americans’ hearts with dance music. At Motown concerts, the ropes that divided black and white kids came down and everyone danced together.
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Motown’s music and message were bolstered by Gordy’s business acumen. He created a friendly competition among singing groups and, as Motown artist Valerie Simpson said, “It made you sharpen your tools … to come up with something that would stand apart." Another motto Berry impressed on Motown writers, choreographers and singers was “Innovate or stagnate.” He was certainly an innovator. Before starting Motown in April 1960, Gordy had worked on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line in Detroit. He set out to apply that production method to the seemingly unrelated music business.
Creating greatness amid povertyIn some ways, Gordy’s motivation was just like most people’s. One of the first songs he co-wrote was “Money, (That’s What I Want),” and, as he once put it, “I can make a lot more money if I sell it to white people, too.”
I visited Hitsville U.S.A., Motown's first headquarters, a few years ago and hung around for a few hours. I was struck by what I saw. Nine out of 10 visitors looked like me, older and white. They also had that same dreamlike look on their faces as they recalled the wonderful music of their youth and realized it was all made in this small house on West Grand Boulevard.
Gordy created so many great musicians, often from very poor districts in Detroit. His friend Smokey Robinson reflected on this and said that while every place on Earth has the same amount of talent, “they just don’t have a Berry Gordy.” Smokey was also right when he said, “Motown is a great example of the American Dream.”
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In his 1776 book, “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Berry put it more simply: “When I started, all I wanted to do was make some music, make some money, and meet some girls.”
He did all of that, but he also did what Motown artist Marvin Gaye sang about in one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded, “What’s Going On.” Berry found a way “to bring some lovin’ here today.”
Richard Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
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Source: Berry Gordy's 60-year Motown competition fueled American dreams, music and healing
Nick Tosches, swaggering music writer and biographer, dies at 69
His friend and lawyer Gregory P. Cimino II, who confirmed the death, said Mr. Tosches (pronounced TOSH-ez) had been ailing but did not cite a precise cause.
In “Dino,” his best-selling 1992 biography of Martin, Mr. Tosches described the famed actor, singer and comedian as a menefreghista, Italian for someone with a couldn’t-care-less attitude. The term just as easily applied to Mr. Tosches, a swaggering tavern-owner’s son who donned silk homburgs, sprinkled his prose with profanity and Homeric metaphors, and espoused the earthy pleasures of French wine, fine opium and fried pork chops.
Mr. Tosches likened writing to prostitution; was banished from Rolling Stone magazine after he and colleague Richard Meltzer prankishly filed stories under each other’s bylines; railed against his publisher in a 2002 novel, “In the Hand of Dante”; and once fabricated the date of his own death in biographical materials, selecting 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s passing.
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Ginger Baker, the prodigiously talented and volcanically temperamental rock drummer who helped form Cream, rock-and-roll’s first supergroup, and inspired awe and imitation in a generation of drummers, died Oct. 6 at 80. Read the obituary (Mj Kim/AP)He often cited the Italian poet as an influence, alongside Hesiod, William Faulkner and Thomas Mann — even as he began his career in what was then considered a literary backwater, penning rock criticism in the late 1960s and ’70s for Creem, Rolling Stone and Fusion magazines.
Mr. Tosches was credited with helping to elevate rock journalism and was dubbed one of the “Noise Boys,” a group of bold and idiosyncratic writers that included Meltzer and Lester Bangs. “They were all partisans of rock at its noisiest — culture as ecstatic disruption,” fellow critic Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice.
Nonetheless, Mr. Tosches often seemed less interested in analytical criticism than in broader commentary. He said he sometimes reviewed records without tearing off the shrink wrap and fabricated the release of albums as a hook to riff off his latest idea.
“I never took the whole thing that seriously,” he told the New York Times in 1992. “What I was doing, I don’t know if it would be considered criticism or even journalism. I was just using it as a rubric to get away with things in print, things that probably would be impossible to get away with now.”
Perhaps his most infamous early piece was a Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath’s 1970 album “Paranoid,” which began with an imaginative description of satanic sex rituals involving “Shadaic numinae,” “the mirrored sign of Ariael” and a hookah bowl filled “with black opium tars and a dash of Asthmador powders.” The review concluded with Mr. Tosches seeming to confuse Black Sabbath with a rival band, Black Widow.
In addition to reviewing new releases and bluntly interviewing artists such as Patti Smith and Muddy Waters (“Do you like getting drunk?”), Mr. Tosches bestowed late recognition on forgotten and underappreciated performers. His first book, “Country” (1977), profiled musicians including yodeler Cliff Carlisle and emerged out of Mr. Tosches’s conviction that country music had been “damned, ignored and dismissed” by most critics.
He later wrote a companion volume, “Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll” (1984), spotlighting Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris, among many others. In Mr. Tosches’s telling, the story of rock was “one of greed and innocence, tastelessness and brilliance, the ridiculous and the sublime,” all coming together to create “a funhouse-mirror reflection of the American dream gone gaga.”
His interest in questions of wealth, fame and desire went on to inform his work as a novelist and biographer, beginning with “Hellfire,” his 1982 book on Lewis. The singer-songwriter and pianist was known as much for his hell-raising style as for tracks such as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”; Mr. Tosches opened his biography with a scene in which Lewis tried to ram his Lincoln Continental through the gates of Elvis’s Graceland mansion.
Police soon arrived to arrest Lewis, who “grinned and shook his head,” Mr. Tosches wrote, “for he knew that the cold, brilliant handcuffs would not long contain him.” In a later sequence, Mr. Tosches quoted Lewis as saying he was “glad” when Elvis died: “Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. What . . . did Elvis do except take dope that I couldn’t git a hold of?”
In 2006, Britain’s Observer newspaper named “Hellfire” the greatest music book ever written. “Jerry Lee was, to me, like a figure out of the Old Testament, out of William Faulkner,” Mr. Tosches told the newspaper. The book ended with Lee still alive and essentially contemplating eternity, he said, but “it’s the way we all live. Shallow life, shallow ditch. Big life, big abyss.”
Mr. Tosches was born in Newark on Oct. 23, 1949. A grandfather came to the United States from the Italian region of Abruzzo , where Mr. Tosches later traced Martin’s ancestry, and his father worked as a bouncer at a burlesque house before running a bar.
“The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archaeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer,” he told the Times in 1992. “If I had become a garbage man, I could have retired by now.”
Instead, he began writing what he described as “reams of garbage,” publishing his first story when he was 19 and also crafting poetry, collecting many of his later pieces in the book “Chaldea and I Dig Girls.” To support himself, he worked in the early 1970s as a snake hunter for the Miami Serpentarium, pouring gasoline down rattlesnake holes. Around that same time, he also took a job as a paste-up artist at the Lovable Underwear Co.
“I had a glue pot, some strips of type, and heart-shaped stickers for pantyhose that said, ‘No bag, no sag,’ ” he told the Times. “One day, I think it was January 1972, I got drunk at lunch and I figured, Well, I’ve been calling myself a writer, let me see if I can do it. I never went back to work after lunch.”
Mr. Tosches went on to combine investigative reporting with flamboyant, first-person writing for magazines including Esquire, Playboy, GQ and Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor and once chronicled his quest to visit an opium den.
“Nick has the ability to get completely loose and seem to be saying whatever pops into his mind — to say things that are scabrous, outrageous, confusing — and at the same time do this in a stylistic framework of absolute eloquence and really pristine form,” music journalist Greil Marcus told the Boston Globe in 2000. “It’s like there’s a wild heart beating in this late-19th-century dandy.”
Mr. Tosches’s first novel, “Cut Numbers” (1988), was about crime, a recurring subject of his biographies. In addition to “Dino,” which was slated for several years to become a film directed by Martin Scorsese, he wrote “Power on Earth” (1986), about Italian financier and felon Michele Sindona; “Where Dead Voices Gather” (2001), about minstrel singer Emmett Miller; and “King of the Jews” (2005), on New York mobster Arnold Rothstein.
He also wrote “The Devil and Sonny Liston” (2000), in which he suggested that the former heavyweight boxing champion had thrown his two title bouts against Muhammad Ali because he was controlled by the mob. “Mr. Tosches is an exhaustive reporter,” wrote New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “He seems to have dug up everyone ever connected to Liston and got them to talk, particularly about the network of mob connections.”
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
While Mr. Tosches pored over documents and conducted dozens of interviews for his nonfiction books, he said he never wanted to write as a “just the facts” journalist and sought to impart a kind of beauty and wisdom that he found more often in fiction. “There are times when I try to write beautifully, but I don’t know if I’m trying to exorcise my own demons,” he told Esquire in 2012. “If I am, there are other ones lurking beneath, because they keep coming out. Maybe little by little I’m fumigating.”
Source: Nick Tosches, swaggering music writer and biographer, dies at 69