Photos by Arnie Goodman
Every other year, the Long Island Music Hall of Fame inducts a few of their own into a justly star-studded group. This year, frontmen, songwriters, bands, educators, and movers-and-shakers not necessarily known to the general public got together for an evening of music and deserved recognition. Dinner and ongoing performances were seamlessly planned and executed by Jim Faith, Barry Fisch and their team.
A personal favorite, songwriter Jimmy Webb played lush piano and performed just a few of his hundreds of famous songs, which include “Wichita Lineman,” Galveston,” “If You’re Still Within the Sound of My Voice,” “All I Know,” “MacArthur Park,” “Didn’t We,” “Up, Up and Away,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Worst that Could Happen”…the list is only slightly longer than the list of singers who would have had a short career without Jimmy Webb.
Another inductee, Seymour Stein, chairman of Sire Records, put cutting-edge artists like the Ramones, the Pretenders, the Talking Heads, and Madonna in front of the nation, and yet he can walk into almost any Starbucks without being besieged. That’s smart. With a little higher public profile, but still un-besieged, Woodstock entrepreneur Michael Lang joined the LIHOF ranks, just months before the culture-changing festival celebrates its 50th Anniversary in August 2019. Richard Branciforte founded Good Times Magazine in order to get free tickets to shows—including Michael Lang’s Woodstock—and now it’s America’s oldest regional entertainment paper.
Saucy Lynette Carr-Hicks didn’t pick up her “Music Educator of Note” award alone, she came with her Uniondale High School Choir, which has performed on most major TV networks, and on stage with such diverse talents as Barry Manilow, Kenny Rogers and Foreigner; this night they performed several numbers, including one with a costume quick-change, onstage, by all members, without missing a beat in dance or vocally.
Longtime Long Islander Billy Joel, himself a LIMHOF member, inducted two of his own kind: Tommy Byrnes, Joel’s own lead guitarist (Hired Gun Award), and musician and fiction author Elliott Murphy. Jon “Bowzer” Bowman, of Sha Na Na fame, Melanie, Taking Back Sunday, rappers EPMD and trumpeter Glenn Drewes rounded out the performers’ list, clearly illustrating the breadth of talent on Long Island.
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