Famous NY injury attorney ( Cellino & Barnes ) dies in plane crash

Mr. Met

Mr. Met

So Amazin
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Wow! I used to hear them everywhere on the radio and TV. There will be a foul joke in there before the week is over.



 
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Damn I remember his ads too. :eek2: :eek2:

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i prefer not to fly in turbo props.....its bad enuff you have to do your flight training in them.
RIP
 
Steve Barnes of Cellino & Barnes Reportedly Dies in Small Plane Crash
By Halle Kiefer@hallekiefer
Partners in law Ross Cellino (L) and Steve Barnes. Photo: Cellino & Barnes
Steve Barnes, one half of the Buffalo-based law firm Cellino & Barnes and best known for his ubiquitous commercials with partner Ross Cellino, featuring their signature jingle, has reportedly died in a single-engine plane crash in New York’s Genesee County. According to the Buffalo News, a female relative also died in the crash, which had no survivors.
The attorneys, who have worked together since the mid ‘90s, expanded their personal injury legal services nationwide over the next two decades. However, mounting tension and different professional visions caused friction between the two, leading to their dissolution of Cellino & Barnes in 2017, which was finalized in June of this year. In its stead, the pair agreed to separate into the Barnes Firm and Cellino Law respectively, a divide that was still in the process of taking place at the time of the attorney’s death.
Following news of his long-time partner’s demise, Ross Cellino memorialized Barnes in a statement, and in doing so, identified the female victim of the crash as Steve Barnes’ niece Elizabeth Barnes. “It is with great sadness that I learned of the tragic passing of Steve Barnes in a plane crash,” he said in a statement reported by Spectrum News Buffalo’s Stephen Marth. “Steve and I worked together for many years at our firm. He was always a fearless advocate for his clients. His passing is a significant loss for the legal community.”

“Steve’s greatest accomplishment was his three children Josiah, Rachel, and Julia,” Cellino continues. “Steve is survived by his longtime partner, Ellen Sturm, also an attorney at our firm. Equally heartbreaking is the passing of Elizabeth Barnes, sister of Brian Barnes and daughter of Rich Barnes, Steve’s brother and an attorney at our firm. All of us at Cellino and Barnes are deeply saddened. My thoughts and prayers are with the entire Barnes family during this difficult time.”
 
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The story behind the best-known local jingle in America

The mysterious power of local jingles, like the famous Cellino & Barnes ad, explained.
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The story behind the best-known local jingle in America
The mysterious power of local jingles, like the famous Cellino & Barnes ad, explained.
By Kaitlyn Tiffany@kait_tiffanykaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com Aug 8, 2019, 7:30am EDT
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Cellino & Barnes/YouTubeThis story is part of a group of stories called



For me, childhood is a blur. But it has an extremely memorable soundtrack. I can still hear the unshakable and baffling sung-through invitations: “Make your car a kidney car!” “Seabreeze, come get your summer!” The promises: “The sweetest dreams happen on a City Mattress.” Most importantly, the legends: “There’s a place I know in Ontario where the sea lions kiss, so the story goes!” My coworkers, who have widely varying geographical heritages, can sing to me about Stanley Steamer, Empire carpets, Kars4Kids, and assorted boring back-of-phonebook services.
When I pose my theory of the local jingle — that repetition creates nostalgia; that jingles call us back to a time in our lives when we were powerless to make our own consumer choices; that nobody knows their best friend’s number but everybody can phone a used car dealership in their hometown; that this is sinister but comforting, incorporating the absurdity of advertising and the myth of community — to legendary western New York jingle writer Ken Kaufman, he tells me I’ve only discovered what the Catholic Church figured out hundreds of years ago. “I mean, people hear these hymns from when they’re in vitro up through when they’re rolling on their backs.”



Kaufman knows from music theory and religion. He trained at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, and worked as a music director at several Catholic churches (although he emphasizes that he’s Jewish, excluding the handful of years that he was a Scientologist). Kaufman is an artist, who has studied the way music works since childhood (his favorite teacher at Eastman taught theory based on Beatles songs).



After school, he became a piano player in a Buffalo, New York, rock band after meeting the band members at the Scientology center. And then he started writing jingles to make money. “The band wasn’t making much money, but jingles … [with] jingles, I could make money.”
And he’s written quite a few. “If I played you every jingle that I’ve done back-to-back, you’d go to the moon three times, you know? I’ve got a demo reel that could make you go crazy.” He tells me to go to his website, AdSongsJingles.com, and “bathe in the wealth” of western New York state commercial music.



But I’m most interested in one he wrote more than 20 years ago: the Cellino & Barnes jingle, and how a local commercial for two dubiously useful personal injury lawyers has gotten so famous, it is now a meme.
It was a central joke in a Saturday Night Live sketch called “Legal Shark Tank” this March. Broadway actors including Katharine McPhee have somewhat spontaneously decided to release covers of it, dubbing it the “Cellino & Barnes Challenge.” In 2017, the New York Times ran the headline “Cellino Sues Barnes. Who Gets the Jingle?” as if the import of this question were self-evident.

You can scroll through tweets about the Cellino & Barnes song for hours, though most of them have a similar tone, summed up recently: “Thinking of walking down the aisle to the Cellino and Barnes jingle on loop.” The jingle — which goes “Cellino and Barnes, injury attorneys, call 800-888-8888” — can’t be this popular because of the content, but its place in the cultural imagination can’t be an accident either.
In 2015, the US Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform published a report on the state of law firm advertising spending, writing that even while the broader TV advertising industry was in decline, lawyers were spending $892 million a year, up nearly 70 percent since 2007. And Cellino and Barnes’s TV ad is arguably one of the most memorable legal advertisements of all time, largely because of that little song.
“IT ECHOES IN YOUR HEAD. YOU HEAR IT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WHEN YOU LEAST WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING.”

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“It’s simple, it’s simple, it’s simple,” Kaufman says, explaining why the jingle works so well. “Something sinks into the public mind. A song sinks into your mind through repetition, and as soon as you’ve heard something several times, it becomes part of what in the industry is called echoic memory. Sound memory is echoic memory. Sight memory is iconic memory. Icons, just like on your computer. ... Echoic memory is exactly what it sounds like. It echoes in your head. You hear it in the middle of the night when you least want to hear anything.”

Kaufman often works with lyricists, but Barnes came to him with all the words ready to go. “They’re the injury attorneys. Not just some of the injury attorneys or some of the guys. It’s a preemptive slogan, which was brilliant. I have to hand it to them.” In 2017, the New York Post reported that Cellino and Barnes had spent $4.6 million on TV and radio plays of the song linking them inextricably with the idea of injury attorneys.
“They are not afraid to spend piles of money, as they did in Buffalo when they first did their billboard campaign,” Kaufman says. “Long before I did the jingle, there was, believe me, a multimillion-dollar billboard campaign throughout western New York. It was amazing. Everywhere you looked, there were Cellino & Barnes billboards. In the poorest neighborhoods there were Cellino & Barnes billboards. They were everywhere.”

Kaufman remembers his mid-’90s meeting with Steve Barnes fondly, and refers to him as “probably one of the most famous bald heads in America.” Barnes wanted the jingle to be “friendly” and straightforward: just their name, what they do, and the phone number. At the time, it was 854-2020. Years later, when Cellino and Barnes expanded from Buffalo to Rochester, they wanted a separate phone number for the new city — 654-2020 — so they called Kaufman back.

“I had the same two vocalists drive all the way to Rochester to record in my studio, to record one single word, ‘six,’ which I fit in there perfectly,” he says. (By the time I was in high school, the number was, for whatever reason, 454-2020.)

“PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS BALD HEADS IN AMERICA”

Once well-known in only the Buffalo and Rochester areas, Cellino and Barnes spent two decades hustling with those billboards and that jingle, moving into New York City and much of California. Each attorney reportedly makes tens of millions of dollars per year. But Cellino and Barnes have also been embroiled in a years-long legal battle, which started with various nepotism- and workload-related disputes and escalated with the removal of Cellino’s name from all the law firms offices in California. Cellino has been trying to dissolve his partnership with Barnes completely, but the trial has been postponed several times. (Barnes has accused Cellino of trying to burn his career “to the ground,” and of being a lazy lawyer who is more concerned with “building a lake home [and] running a tree farm.”)



This drama — far from being confined to the pair’s home city — has been the subject of New York magazine rundowns and Brooklyn independent theater productions. The New York Post reported in August 2017 that Cellino was suing Barnes to prevent him from using the signature jingle in California. By October 2017, Barnes had seemingly acquiesced, launching an ad campaign for the Barnes Firm without what Buffalo News called “the sweet, sweet sounds of 800-888-8888.” His new phone number, 800-800-0000, reportedly cost more than $900,000, and the jingle, unfortunately, is not as catchy.

Arguably, the first big commercial jingle was for Wheaties, and Wheaties did not ask for it. In the 1920s, the wheat and bran cereal became the second product offered by the Washburn Crosby Company, which had previously sold only flour. Two years after launch, Wheaties sales were still bad everywhere, except for in St. Paul, Minnesota, for reasons that were not immediately clear to advertising managers who had no access to things like Twitter.

As it turned out, 60 percent of the cereal’s sales were coming from the Minneapolis and St. Paul region because that was the only place where the company-owned radio station was regularly broadcasting a quartet of jazz singers performing “Have You Tried Wheaties?” to the tune of the 1919 hit “Jazz Baby.” The singers were paid $15 a week for three years to sing the song live on air, a national campaign was launched, and Wheaties was saved.

“Media was so non-fragmented at that point, and radio was the only true broadcast media,” jingle writer Yeosh Bendayan, co-founder of Push Button Productions in Orlando, Florida, tells me. “So, to develop a piece of music for a brand, if you pushed it out enough on the radio, you were going to get attention.”

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The jingle that really kicked off decades of jingle mania was Pepsi’s in 1939, according to Tim Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. “That one got so much attention that a lot of companies decided they had to have a jingle.” At the same time, the Pepsi jingle was mostly the word “nickel” said over and over, and it was extremely annoying; New York Public Radio’s WQCR banned it from its airwaves, followed by banning all jingles, period.

THE PEPSI JINGLE WAS MOSTLY THE WORD “NICKEL” SAID OVER AND OVER, AND IT WAS EXTREMELY ANNOYING

Jingles have always drifted around and on the border between “good marketing that helps people remember your name” and “horrible nuisance that makes everyone hate you.” (See: Meow Mix.) The heyday of the jingle was the late 1950s into the ’70s, Bendayan says. Brands used to invest real money in a “showstopping” piece of music recorded with live instrumentation in a fancy in-house studio. Both he and Taylor point to the 1971 Coca-Cola ad “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” as perhaps the most famous jingle of all time — two different bands did versions of it that became global hits in the early 1970s.

But the ’80s and ’90s have big-deal jingles you can pull out of the recesses of your brain too. Band-Aid. Burger King. Kit-Kat. Huggies. Folgers. Cotton! Oscar Mayer’s jingle dates back to 1965, but it was just as big for ’90s kids as it was for their parents.“Wanta Fanta” started in 2002. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin It” feels timeless but was actually used first in 2003 (and was written by Justin Timberlake). And now, brands can play on nostalgia and capture the current moment by hiring pop stars to record new takes on old tunes.

Bendayan says the jingle business has never really gone away — “If you want something remembered, you sing it” — but it’s obviously gone through phases of being less than cool. The American Association of Advertising Agencies conducted a survey of national TV ads in 1998 and found a jingle in about one of every 10 ads, then conducted it again in 2011 and found that the number had fallen to more like two in every 100. (The survey was not conducted again.) In 2016, the Atlantic declared the jingle “dead,” citing marketers’ shift to the much less risky choice of just licensing preexisting music, which they had spent $355 million doing the year before. But local businesses are not in a position to cut deals with top recording artists.

Local jingles are more interesting than national jingles. Local jingles are the radio-born memes that make up the culture of small and unspecial areas. Ken Kaufman also wrote the jingle for Tops Friendly Markets, a regional grocery store chain with locations mostly in upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania. It goes “Tops never stops / saving you more!” but everybody I ever met sang, instead, “Tops never mops / just look at the floor!” A local jingle is built to last, small-business owners being far less likely than Coca-Cola to pay for a remix — and it is typically not under pressure to be “relevant” to anything other than a community’s anodyne mythology.

“For many, many people, music that makes up their childhood isn’t just what was on the Billboard charts; it’s also what was playing on their television, what was playing on their radios, in local markets,” Bendayan says. “It’s as identifiable as a piece of pop music, a jingle for a local car dealership or a jingle for the fair — it makes up the tapestry of local communities, which is something we really love about the jingle-writing business.”

“IT’S AS IDENTIFIABLE AS A PIECE OF POP MUSIC, A JINGLE FOR A LOCAL CAR DEALERSHIP OR A JINGLE FOR THE FAIR — IT MAKES UP THE TAPESTRY OF LOCAL COMMUNITIES”

Kaufman says he prefers local jingles too, because they’re the ones that tend to have the most impact. He wrote a jingle for Hamburg Overhead Door, a garage door company based in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg. The company’s big issue was that it was named “Hamburg,” so everyone thought they only installed garage doors in Hamburg. He wrote them a song that went “Overdelivery all over western New York, Hamburg Overhead Door. Hamburg Overhead Door, overdelivery, all over western New York.” He remembers it because their business “exploded.”
(Jen Kuhn, the owner of Hamburg Overhead Door, confirmed this story to Vox via email, adding, “I can tell it is successful by the number of people who come up to me in public and sing the jingle to me ;) I do not have any hard numbers to share.”)

Alex Moffat and Kyle Mooney as Cellino and Barnes on Saturday Night Live in March. Will Heath/Getty Images

“My favorite jingle is the jingle that works for my client,” Kaufman says. “When I see my client, when the needle has moved, and they are now more profitable than they were the year before and more profitable than the year before that, that’s the jingle that I love.” (He also calls himself an “unabashed capitalist.”)

To him, local jingles are special, if not always in form then at least in craft. “If somebody says to me, ‘Oh, my god, you’re too expensive for me,’ I say to them, ‘Go on the internet.’ There are other people that do what I do,” he says. “I mean, look, when I want a cello recording, I hire the first chair of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. He ain’t cheap. There are probably 10,000 cello players in western New York, but I hire the best, that’s all. I don’t play around with this stuff.”

Bendayan tells similar stories, saying a credit union he recently wrote a jingle for called him to say that the VP of her company had just heard an entire school bus of kids singing along to it. “We find Facebook pages sometimes for jingles that we’ve written,” he adds. “For fans of jingles, or for people who say, ‘I can’t stand this jingle.’”

Ken Kaufman has a Steinway grand piano and a Hammond B3 organ. “My Steinway is just gorgeous. I have a wonderful set of drums,” he says. “They’re miked up with some of the best mics you can buy. My vocal mics are pristine.”

A beautiful sound, but not necessarily a cool sound. In fact, the Cellino & Barnes jingle, Kaufman’s most famous work, is a decidedly uncool sound. That is, possibly, the point: A slightly dorky ad makes a pair of lawyers with a seemingly horrible personal relationship and several reportedly shady business dealings seem actually charming.

“These modern styles, EDM, hip-hop, alternative rock, it’s harder to align a jingle with those styles. Cellino & Barnes brings you back to a different era,” says Josh Rabinowitz, a former ad agency music director and owner of the Brooklyn Music Experience consultancy. “Cellino & Barnes, their target is not necessarily someone looking for a lifestyle brand. You don’t need to do something super cool or super relevant or hip.” I ask him if he has actually heard it, and he sings it. “Yeah, totally, I mean, I watch cable television.”

“CELLINO & BARNES, THEIR TARGET IS NOT NECESSARILY SOMEONE LOOKING FOR A LIFESTYLE BRAND”

Brands have gotten too cloying. They’re pretending to be your friend. They’re pretending to entertain you. They’re pretending they just want to help you be cool and happy — they’re companies! Jingles, Bendayan agrees, can make a comeback by returning advertising to a less duplicitous time.
“The more modern thing to do is to be straightforward about your product and what you’re selling,” he says. “Most people want you to be direct about it; they don’t want you to pretend like you’re not selling.” The injury attorneys, and where to reach them. A new garage door, and what region of the state it is available in. Used cars, and their address. Come buy them! This is a useful piece of information if you’re in the market, and if you’re not right now, maybe you will be later, at which time you’ll remember that you still know exactly which exit to take to get to the discount furniture store and the region’s fourth-best cheeseburger.

Cellino and Barnes in front of a Cellino & Barnes billboard in 1997. Sharon Cantillon/The Buffalo News

There are other reasons to believe the jingle could be important again. With artificial intelligence from IBM, Sony, Google, and others getting better and better at writing music, a jingle could get cheaper and cheaper. (Although it won’t have the same spirit as Ken’s work. Kaufman is, decidedly, wary of technology, and of the internet. “We were warned not to bite the apple, weren’t we? We were warned, and Steven Jobs knew exactly what he was doing when he created that logo,” he tells me, a little cryptically.) Analysts are jumping out of their socks to put up estimates about how many tens of billions of dollars voice shopping will be worth once there’s an Alexa or a Google Assistant device in every single home; everyone is listening to podcasts, and streaming ad-supported music, and attempting not to look at screens. We love audio again. What a time to be alive and writing jingles!

When I ask Kaufman if he remembers what he charged for the Cellino & Barnes jingle, he says, “If I told you what it was, you would go, ‘Oh, my god, did you undercharge him.’ But it’s always privileged information between me and my client. It’s like HIPAA.” (In 2017 the New York Post reported that Kaufman charged a one-time fee of $5,000. A year later, Inside Edition said the figure was actually $3,500.)



In any case, after Cellino & Barnes broke big outside of western New York and changed their phone number to the nationally famous string of 8s, they had one of Kaufman’s competitors rerecord it — “with fake strings,” he adds, not with focused disdain, but with soft regret that it had to happen that way, to his song. “Why [Steve Barnes] didn’t call me, only my competitor knows,” he says now. “My competitor alleges still to this day to be the writer of the jingle, and that is a false allegation, okay? It’s something that I have to have out with him one of these days.”
He’s not dwelling on it. He wrote the melody. They bought it, used it. They changed to 8s and fake strings, that’s their business. In his opinion, Ross Cellino is a great guy and a humanitarian who gives away a ton of money. He doesn’t know anything about Steve Barnes these days, he says. “I don’t know whether he gives or takes. I don’t know. He may be a wonderful man for all I know, but all I do know is he was running the show and he gave the jingle over, for some reason or another, to my competitor and I never found out why. Maybe he lost my phone number.”
It is impossible to imagine a time when Cellino and Barnes will not be the most famous personal injury attorneys in all of America. They lost Kaufman’s phone number, but he made all of us remember theirs — forever. So, that’s it: a few thousand dollars to make one of the most well-remembered pieces of music in modern America, for one of its most famous bald heads.
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Steve Barnes of Cellino & Barnes Law Firm Reportedly Killed in Plane Crash

Steve Barnes of Cellino & Barnes law firm reportedly died in a plane crash.
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