|
|
Change Your Life! |
Oscar-winning composer Jack Nitzsche dead at 63 |
|
News
|
|
|
August 31, 2000
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jack Nitzsche, an Oscar-winning songwriter, record producer, arranger and studio musician who played keyboard on some of the Rolling Stones' hits and collaborated with many other major pop figures of the '60s, has died at 63. Nitzsche, who died of a heart attack Friday, won the best original song Academy Award for 1982 for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" for the movie "An Officer and a Gentleman." For the Rolling Stones, Nitzsche contributed keyboard parts to such classics as "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?" "Play With Fire" and "Paint It Black." He also wrote the choral arrangements for "You Can't Always Get What You Want." As an arranger, Nitzsche worked with master record producer Phil Spector in 1962 on the Crystals' "He's a Rebel." Their association lasted through Ike and Tina Turner's acclaimed "River Deep, Mountain High" in 1966. That was the last of Spector's lush musical arrangements known as the "Wall of Sound." Nitzsche also co-wrote the pop hit "Needles and Pins" with Sonny Bono. It became a top 20 single for the British group the Searchers in 1964. His 1963 instrumental "The Lonely Surfer" was one of the few records in which he received performing credit. He worked at one time or another with Elvis Presley, Neil Young, Captain Beefheart, Marianne Faithfull, the Monkees and Doris Day. He gradually turned more of his attention toward film scores, working on the avant garde 1970 Mick Jagger film "Performance." He succeeded in more mainstream films as well, contributing original music to "The Exorcist" in 1973. His score for 1975's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" brought him his first Oscar nomination. The song that won him the Oscar seven years later, "Up Where We Belong," was written with his wife, folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. Among his other film credits are "Mermaids," 1990; "When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?" 1979; "Stand by Me," 1986; and "The Razor's Edge," 1984. Nitzsche is survived by his son, Jack Jr., from his first marriage, to Gracia Ann May.
|