Category: Memoriam
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Go Home, Facebook. You’re Drunk
First things first; condolences to the family, and the entire nation, really, on the death of Colin Powell. Now, let’s talk social media.This was how the “Drudge Report“ posting appeared; Forget for a moment the “fully vaxxed“ bit; there’s plenty of inadequate reporters jumping up and down yelling “see! See!, Who need to be reminded…
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Point Of Light
My high school and college classmate Pennie Werth died from Covid a couple weeks ago. Pennie and me go way back – elementary school, anyway. In high school, we did the various high school plays together. And she played piano in the first band I ever got onstage with. It was in tenth grade, for…
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The Big Beat
Charlie Watts, one of the most estimable drummers and reluctant superstars in rock and roll history, dead at age 80: A jazz aficionado at heart, Watts helped them become, with The Beatles, one of the bands who took rock ‘n’ roll to the masses in the 60s with classics like (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,…
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Condolences…
…to the friends and family of Dr. William B. Gleason. That is all.
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The Voice
Legendary Twin Cities voice-over artist Dick Ervasti has passed away. Don’t know Dick Ervasti? Oh, yes you do. Like any of the big voiceover guys, you’ve heard him forever. His voice is part of the mental background noise in everyone’s life:
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Memorial Day
The image I’ve posted is an American cemetery in France, near Verdun. These graves are for soldiers killed in World War I. There are nearly 15,000 graves at the site. Over 53,000 Americans died in combat in World War I and 116,000 Americans in total died as a result of the war. My grandfather fought…
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The 2020 Bad News Just Keeps Coming
I wasn’t even aware of this last December – but longtime saxophone player in Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, Alto Reed (born Thomas Cartmell) passed away last December 30. He was 72. His most famous song with Seger was one of his first – the iconic sax part from 1972’s “Turn the Page”: But for…
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Talent, Being Paid Back With Interest To God
Word’s out that Rush Limbaugh has died of lung cancer. He was 70. I never met Rush, but I certainly ran into a key part of his legacy, up front. I was 25, and had gotten riffed from my first talk radio gig, at KSTP-AM. I was down – but not out. I had what…
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The Old School
Two bands I’ve never much cared for are Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Part of it was punky contrarianism; they were both very popular when I was in high school. Naturally, I had to zag away from the zigging crowd. And yet if I had to pick three guitarists whose style mine most resembles,…
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“Why Has This Been A Crappy Month?”
Alex Trebek, passed away at 80 of pancreatic cancer. And there goes one of my bucket list dreams.
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RIP Sid Hartman
Sometimes it seems like everyone in the Twin Cties has a Sid Hartman story. I had one – 34 years ago. And I can’t believe I never wrote about it in my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series. I was working as a stringer – an ad-hoc freelance reporter – for WGN in Chicago. My job…
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A Farewell To King
Neal Peart, drummer for prog-rock and high school sci-fi-nerd-rock mainstays Rush, died of brain cancer last week. He was 67. He’s iconic for his technical prowess on the skins, of course – and that’s nothing to sneeze at. And along with those immense technical chops came a taste for really, really big drum kits. How…
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Passing Lane
All my old heroes are passing. A Moonshiner turned NASCAR racer? Now THAT is the Resistance!Joe Doakes Wow. Shows what I know – I thought Johnson died in the seventies – and that he’d have been a lot older than that. He was a legend when I was a little kid and followed auto racing.…
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Living In Stereo
Ric Ocasek, founder and driving force behind seventies new-wave/pop earth-movers the Cars, died yesterday. He was… …75? Yep. Apparently he spent the better part of 45 years lying about his age. He was well apparently a member of the Class of 1963, and halfway through his thirties and a veteran of years and years of…
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In Passing
I read the news the other day about the escalating violence along the Indo-Pakistani border, and out of curiosity, went over to Facebook to check in on some friends. Specifically, a former co-worker whose husband was a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force. Bit of a good news/bad news situation. Nobody’s been shot down……
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Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin passed away yesterday. She was 78. This Detroit Free Press obit is uncommonly excellent. The first real exposure to Franklin I ever got, growing up in the middle of country-western country, was working at my first radio job. Where I heard “Respect” for the first time – and felt a chill that the…
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A Bad Week For Writers
Tom Wolfe, author of a shelf full of seminal American journalism and literature, dead at 88. And later yesterday, word circulated on social media (although I’ve found no confirmation yet in the dead-tree media) that Nick Coleman, longtime columnist (as with all columnists in the Twin Cities, it seems) for both the Strib and the…
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Taps – Maybe. Probably.
R. Lee Ermey – “Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann” from the movie Full Metal Jacket, and a former USMC gunnery sergeant in real life – has passed away. Maybe. Ermey’s been the subject of numerous internet death hoaxes – but unless someone hacked his official Facebook page, this one may be legit.
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Billy Graham
He may have been the greatest evangelist in history, claiming to have preached to over 200 million in person over the years. Billy Graham passed away yesterday at age 99. Like Charlton Heston, he broke a lot of Big Left’s narratives: In the 1960s, he ardently opposed segregation, refusing to speak to segregated audiences. “The…
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A Terrible Year In Music Gets Worse
Pat DiNizio of the Smitherens is dead at 66. “The who?” Siddown, kid. The Smithereens, from Carteret, NJ, need no introduction to anyone who was listening to the radio in the mid-eighties. Crisp, taut melodic power-pop with just enough garage to make it fun and just enough polish to make it memorable, And against the…
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News That Eluded Me
I ‘m shocked and a little depressed to see that Caleb Palmiter died over the summer. “Caleb who?” Caleb Palmiter has been in a “who’s who” of seminal Twin Cities bands-that-made-it-regionally-big-but-never-broke-out; a founder of the Jayhawks, Bash & Pop, as well as stints in the Mighty Mofos and the Magnolias. I remember him best for …
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Heartbroken
When I was a kid, the cosmology of the musical world was Pete Townsend, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Davies, Tom Petty (Bono and the Edge joined when I was in college)… …with everyone else trailing far behind. Strummer passed 15 long years ago; Springsteen is alive and kicking, but it’s not the same without…
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George Barron
When people talk about what is wrong with American education today, at the end of the day most of the answers come back as some variation of “there aren’t more teachers out there like George Barron used to be”. George Barron was my high school chemistry teacher…sort of. He passed away late last month. I…
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RIP Jerry Pournelle
I’ve never much cared for science fiction. Not sure why – it just never took for me. The exception was always Jerry Pournelle – pretty much the only person who ever wrote sci-fi that ever grabbed me. That goes back almost forty years, to reading, among others, Lucifer’s Hammer – a book that probably grabbed me in…
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RIP Greg Thomas
It was at Holes for Heroes back in 2016 that Brad Carlson and me got to interview Greg Thomas, a man in Montgomery, MN who, when given a terminal diagnosis and mere weeks to live, decided to restore a crumbling country church. His story was spellbinding – it was one of the most interesting interviews…