Category: Memoriam
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Meatheads All Around
On muting one’s sympathies.
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Totally No Good, Very Bad Weekend
It was a lousy weekend in the world of music – one of what promises to be years of them, for fans of music that came out 40-60 years ago. Joey Molland passed away over the weekend. He was the last surviving member of Badfinger – protegés of the Beatles, and one of the most…
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Bob Richardson
A years and a half ago, in a series of pieces I wrote about people who had huge impacts on my life, I devoted a story to Bob Richardson. Bob owned KEYJ, my first radio station. He hired me when I was in high school. He started me on my first career and my most…
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Jimmy Carter
Remember the movie “Miracle”? One of the last great Disney movies? For a lot of us, the opening credits were intensely evocative: These credits were as concisely effective a history of the 1970s, especially the Carter Administration, as I’ve seen. I was 13 when Jimmy Carter took office, and 17 when he left. I’m not…
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Business Before Pleasure
Former Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic passed away last Friday after a protracted battle with cancer. She was 62. “Senator Kari Dziedzic was a passionate legislator, a respected leader, and a trusted colleague and friend. She will be remembered for her integrity and her compassion for Minnesotans, something that we all saw as she…
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Ruben Rosario
This blog tangled with former Pioneer Press columnist Ruben Rosario a time or two – and applauded him a few times as well. I’ve also urged prayers for what seemed like insurmountable health problems – 13 years ago. He’s passed away at age 70: Condolences and prayers for his family and friends.
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Everywhere, All The Time
I had no idea if I had any musical talent at all when I was in fourth grade. But one day, a string quintet came over from the high school – and I was intrigued. I knew playing violin would be a problem – people would beat me up. And the bass looked like an…
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Bob Beckwith
Bob Beckwith was the FDNY firefighter who stood with then-President Bush during one of the moments in my life when I was proudest to be an American. It occurs to me there’s a generation for whom “FDNY” isn’t instantly mentally associated with tragedy, heroism, and that particular moment 22 years ago.
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Do It Yourself
Tomorrow is the 65th anniversary of “The Day The Music Died” – the plane crash in Clear Lake IA that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Jiles “Big Bopper” Richardson. I’m a huge music trivia nerd – and even I was unaware of the impact Holly made, not in terms of songs, but in how…
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Bach To The Future
Peter Schickele – better known to decades of music geeks as the author of the “PDQ Bach” music history saga – has passed away. He was 88. It occurs to me that calling. him the “Spike Jones of Music Satire” depends on a generation of people who know who Spike Jones was. “They were playing…
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Do It Yourself
Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio. Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM.…
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Shane MacGowan
Well, I’ll be. Something can kill Shane MacGowan. MacGowan, the lead singer of the legendary Irish punk-folk band The Pogues, passed away overnight. He was 65, going on 110. He was a Keith Richards/Ozzy Ozbourne-level drinker, a brilliant songwriter, an irreplaceable bandleader… …and, like most British punks of the era, full of political hot air:…
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Mark from Saint Louis Park
One of the great lessons Don Vogel taught me when I was working as his call screener was that there are four types of callers on radio talk shows; “Mark from Saint Louis Park” was one of the great callers over the past decade or so at AM1280. How great? He’s the only regular caller…
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Dick Butkus
Another thing I missed when I was out of the country – the death of the only sports figure I ever actually wanted to be. Dick Butkus, Chicago Bears legend and the man who defined the position of middle linebacker, died last week at the age of 80: A ferocious tackler drafted out of the…
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Everything Nice And Rough
Tina Turner is passed away yesterday, in her home 83. It was about this time forty years ago that radio programmers were asking “Tina who?“ I mean, she popped on on “oldies” radio. She had some staples there, in fact: But Turner was… …well, in her forties. No woman in the Billboard Chart era had…
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There Were No Illusions On The Summer Side Of Life
I get the impression that Gordon Lightfoot knew time was short when he recorded his last album, three years ago. At 81, it wasn’t a big stretch. It’s the best album he’s done in quite a while – done solo, just Lightfoot on an acoustic guitar, solo, his voice nowhere near it’s strength and power…
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“The Only Way Home Is Through Berlin”
It’s an aphorism I’ve kept in my mind through a *lot* of life’s ugly travails and misfortunes this past 20-odd years, along with “This, Too, Shall Pass”. Together, the two lines are wonderful, complementary views of coping with life’s vicissitudes; trouble ain’t forever – but sometimes, the only way past a problem is to finesse,…
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RIP Paul Johnson
No single book has shaped not just my understanding of modern history, but my own journey from adolescent leftist to conservative more than Modern Times, Paul Johnson’s epic history of the world from 1918 to about 1980 (and, in a revised edition, through the 1990s. It wouldn’t be a great exaggeration to say that Johnson…
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Jeff Beck
Over my years of teaching myself to play guitar in an era before the Internet and Youtube, I aped the styles of an awful lot of guitar players: Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend, Keith Richard, Mark Knofler, Mike Campbell, Hendrix… …but there were a few that I could never even think about copying. The fingers on…
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Singular
Angela Lansbury died earlier this week. She was just short of her 97th birthday. I’m from a generation, sociology and geography that mostly knows her from Murder She Wrote and thousand viewings of Beauty and the Beast when my kids were little, and the bit of trivia that she was in, and exceptional, in one…
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday at 91. The media has been eulogizing him as the person who led the way in ending the Cold War – the coverage lists Reagan almost as an afterthought. A quick remiinder: In 1980, literally nobody was predicting the fall of the USSR. Everyone…
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Drew Lee
In the radio industry I grew up in – especially the one I came of age in, in my later twenties, at places like KDWB – competition in radio was a constant, ugly thing. Especially in big-market music radio, getting ratings was mortal combat, a bloodsport where morality and ethics (and, often as not, sobrieity)…
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Mom
For those of you who know my family; my mother passed away over the weekend after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Mom was Janice Brooks. Before that, Janice Berg. And before that, Janice Hall. Like me, Mom was the oldest of three kids. I never knew much about her childhood – that’s a conversation I…
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“I’m Not A Liberal, So I’m Not An Expert At Stuff I Know Nothing About”
Converting to conservatism started simply enough – intellectually. Personally? It was still a tough pill to swallow, growing up in what passed for a “liberal” home in rural North Dakota in the eighties. Conservatism made sense. Conservatives, as people, made sense – to the extent that stereotypes always do. . Conservatives looked and acted –…
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P. J. O’Rourke, RIP
P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell…