{"id":2025379,"date":"2023-09-08T01:28:02","date_gmt":"2023-09-08T05:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/legendary-rock-n-roll-artist-rebuilds-after-maui-fires\/"},"modified":"2023-09-08T01:32:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-08T05:32:09","slug":"legendary-rock-n-roll-artist-rebuilds-after-maui-fires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/legendary-rock-n-roll-artist-rebuilds-after-maui-fires\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock legend rebuilds after Maui fires."},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Flegendary-rock-n-roll-artist-rebuilds-after-maui-fires%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2025379&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><h2>Excitement Builds as the Ruby \u200cMazur Gallery Sign Goes Up<\/h2>\n<p>&#8220;OH BOY \u2026 the \u200b<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/alleged-serial-killer-in-custody-after-robbing-rite-aid-in-del\/\" title=\"Alleged serial killer in custody after robbing Rite Aid in Del.\">front sign<\/a> is going up on the gallery,&#8221; an excited Ruby Mazur posted on his Instagram account on Aug. 7, accompanying a video of his son hanging a carved wooden sign \u2062reading &#8220;The Ruby Mazur Gallery.&#8221;\u2064 The sign is instantly recognizable\u2064 because even if you don&#8217;t know Mazur, you \u2062probably know his work.\u200b In between the words Ruby and Mazur is the \u2063world-famous &#8220;Mouth and Tongue&#8221; design from the Rolling Stones&#8217;s Hot \u200dLips record, seen on T-shirts\u200b everywhere. That logo is the most\u2064 famous thing the 77-year-old has made in\u2062 his long career in rock and roll art, but by no means the only famous thing.<\/p>\n<h3>A Legacy of Iconic Album Art<\/h3>\n<p>Mazur created the art for over 300 records for the likes of B.B.\u200c King, Steely Dan, Bob\u200b Marley, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, and Elton John. In fact, after talking music \u200bwith Mazur for a while, it \u200cfeels like naming the acts he hasn&#8217;t worked with is easier than naming those he has. But today, it&#8217;s hard to watch the video of the triumphant hanging of the Ruby Mazur Gallery sign on Front Street in Lahaina, on the island of Maui.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;When the \u200dfire hit, I was just going to open up the gallery,&#8221; Mazur told me, referring to the August wildfires that consumed much of the historical seat of the\u2063 kingdom of Hawaii. Inside, the gallery building held some incalculable treasures from the\u200c history of rock, both \u2063&#8221;a collection of 50 years of paintings&#8221; and, Mazur told me,\u2062 &#8220;some of my vintage <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-15-most-anticipated-albums-of-2021\/\" title=\"The 15 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021\u00a0\">album cover<\/a> art in there.&#8221; Mazur himself barely made it out, sleeping in a U-Haul truck in\u2064 an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/life-after-cancellation-how-one-literary-agent-reclaimed-her-life-from-the-mob\/\" title=\"Life After Cancellation: How One Literary Agent Reclaimed Her Life From The Mob\">airport parking lot<\/a> for days after the fires. His son and dogs were nearly swallowed \u2063by the flames, the former only surviving because he disobeyed the police and\u2062 drove around a\u2064 barricade to speed past \u2014 the last car, Mazur says, out of town.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It was the high winds that \u2063alerted Mazur to the coming\u2062 danger. He felt gusts of up to a hundred \u2064miles \u2062an hour in his house up the hill from Lahaina and saw his \u2062patio furniture being blown around &#8220;like \u2064toothpicks.&#8221; After\u200c conferring with his son and realizing they and the\u200c scared, barking dogs were in danger, he decided to evacuate. &#8220;We&#8217;re going down the volcano, and we start seeing flames \u200call over\u2063 the\u200d place.&#8221;\u200d Eventually, after hitting police roadblocks and finding no hotel rooms available in the safer parts of the island, they hatched their plan to sleep in Walmart airbeds in the back of a U-Haul. When communications \u200dcame through, &#8220;the next thing we\u200d heard, Lahaina was gone. Totally gone. Completely. Ashes. Everything. Ashes.&#8221; \u200dThey&#8217;d spend three days in the U-Haul before \u2063Mazur heard from a \u2062collector of his work in LA,\u200c who had a house on the unaffected side of the island and offered the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/legendary-rock-n-roll-artist-rebuilds-after-maui-fires\/\" title=\"Rock legend rebuilds after Maui fires.\">favorite artist-turned-disaster victim<\/a> its use.<\/p>\n<h3>A Life in Art and Music<\/h3>\n<p>It was a long road to life \u200bin Hawaii for Mazur. Born at the first bang of the \u200cbaby boom in 1946 in Brooklyn, \u2062Mazur started painting at 4. His family moved to Long Island, and his father was in the nightclub \u200dgame, \u2062which is how as a young man Mazur came to meet a \u2063pre-stardom Billy Joel. \u2062Art and music combined early. After going to the Philadelphia College of Art, he moved to New York, \u200cand at only \u206321, in 1967, he was\u200b art director of Paramount. &#8220;That first year, I was nominated for the Grammy Award \u2064for best album cover.&#8221; Not bad.<\/p>\n<p>Mazur&#8217;s art graced the sleeves of vinyl pressings of some of the\u200b biggest and best sounds. He was as close to a rock star as you \u200ccan be as a painter and artist in that era. \u200bSometimes, even, more than he realized: &#8220;When\u2063 I was doing all these album covers \u200cin America, I decided I wanted to move to England,&#8221; he told \u200cme, \u200d&#8221;and when I went to England, I would call up\u200d a record company and say, &#8216;Listen, I was wondering if there&#8217;s any way\u200d I could set up\u2064 a meeting with the art director. I&#8217;d love\u2063 to do an album cover for you \u200dguys.&#8217; &#8216;What&#8217;s your name?&#8217; they&#8217;d ask. And I say, &#8216;Ruby Mazur.&#8217; &#8216;No way!&#8217; they&#8217;d say. My name was on all these album covers. Everybody knew. I opened up \u200bmy studio in London, and I \u200dwas doing so\u200b many album covers for Warner Brothers, Pye \u200cRecords, EMI, everybody!&#8221; That&#8217;s how\u2063 the kid from Long Island got \u2062to work with the Stones, Elton John, and so many others.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s were gone, and radio stations playing \u200dthe music that had been created during those decades \u200cstarted to be called classic rock stations. Mazur didn&#8217;t like covers for CDs, seeing the canvas as too small, though he&#8217;s delighted to\u200c see vinyl making a comeback today. The rockers were taking farewell tours (sometimes\u2062 even\u2063 six\u200b or seven of them, ahem, Sir Elton), and Mazur was surprised to find himself falling in love with a warmer clime. &#8220;Twenty years \u2062ago, a friend of mine asked me, &#8216;Do you want to come to Hawaii with me?&#8217;\u200b We went to Oahu first and I went, &#8216;Yuck, I\u2063 hate it.&#8217; Honolulu, it&#8217;s like LA. And then we\u2064 went to Maui, and I went, &#8216;Oh my god. \u2062I found my home.&#8217; The Aloha, the love, the people. So laid back and friendly. And everybody says good morning, and they really care. It was just paradise. And I woke \u200bup every morning with a smile on my face. It was just the happiest 20 years of my life.&#8221; Luckily, though \u200dhis gallery and so much of his work was\u200c incinerated, Mazur&#8217;s home up the hill from \u2064Lahaina was spared total destruction. But still, you can&#8217;t live through something like \u2062those fires without rethinking your picture of where you live as a paradise. &#8220;Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up, and move\u2063 on,&#8221; Mazur told me, describing his attitude, which has taken him through three bouts with cancer and now through this. He&#8217;s downbeat when we talk, but only because his old friend Jimmy Buffett just died. He&#8217;s taking his own hardship in remarkable\u2064 stride, \u200dalready making plans to\u2062 rebuild his life and painting every day. &#8220;That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m doing again, getting up and moving on.&#8221; But for him, that&#8217;ll mean moving, literally.\u2062 &#8220;I can&#8217;t stay on Maui anymore. I can&#8217;t. I\u2062 woke up \u200devery day crying. My beautiful Maui \u2064was gone.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Rock and roll, they say, will never \u2062die. It will, and it has, moved on from its\u200d most glorious phase, when the \u2064icons of the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s changed the way\u2064 the world\u2064 sounds, so often sheathed in art Ruby Mazur made. For Mazur, today, regrouping \u200cand figuring out\u200b his new life in California, he&#8217;s still got\u200d dreams. He&#8217;s excited\u2062 about\u200d the new collaboration Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are apparently working on with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, having always wished he&#8217;d gotten to \u200cdo art \u2064for the Beatles. &#8220;I would be so intrigued to get a call from them and hear the tracks\u200d and\u200c come \u2064up with an\u2062 album cover to blow the world&#8217;s mind. That would be\u2064 the highlight of my life.&#8221; \u2063It&#8217;s almost cute for someone with such a \u2063deep \u200brock legacy to feel still like he&#8217;s got work to do and inspiring \u2063to hear someone focusing on that when only weeks ago he saw his own dream gallery in paradise burned down right on the eve \u2062of its opening. But that&#8217;s the \u2063ambition and the good attitude that it takes \u2063to\u200b make stuff that lasts and to rebuild from the ashes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>CLICK HERE TO\u2064 READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Nicholas Clairmont is Life &#038; Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cFront sign going up on gallery! Exciting!\u201d Ruby Mazur shared on Instagram. A video showed his son hanging a carved wooden sign that read \u201cThe Ruby Mazur Gallery.\u201d Instantly recognizable, even if you don&#8217;t know Mazur, you&#8217;ve likely seen his iconic work. (55 words)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2025380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[538],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2025379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-washington-examiner"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2025380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}