I just learned that Bo Diddley, the elderly blues-and-rock guitarist best known for the classics “Who Do You Love?” and “Bo Diddley,” suffered a stroke following a performance on Saturday night. And even though articles like this one are optimistic that Diddley will play again, I personally think his career is over. He’s 78 years old, and my personal experience with strokes was not a positive one (my grandmother had one when she was still relatively young — early 60s, I believe — and she ended up trapped in a half-paralyzed body, unable to speak, for the last 16 years of her life).

Diddley played Salt Lake not too long ago and I remember thinking that I really ought to make an effort to go see him, because at his age you never know if he’s going to come around again. I really need to pay more attention to thoughts like that…

The way I remember it, there was one summer when I didn’t think much about music at all, when I was just a wee lad content to listen to whatever Mom put on our gargantuan old hi-fi console, and then the very next year after that, I was a budding audiophile who obsessively followed the weekly Top Ten Countdown and toted around a transistor radio everywhere I went. The biggest song in the land that summer was “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, and I was absolutely crazy about it.

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I was saddened a couple weeks ago by the death of Brad Delp, the lead singer of the classic-rock band Boston, but I’m positively heartbroken to learn this morning that he in fact committed suicide. He sealed himself in his bathroom with a pair of charcoal grills and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A note attached to his shirt said he was “a lonely soul” and had lost his will to live, a curious sentiment considering he was engaged to be married, but then no one ever said that clinical depression was a logical condition.

In a gesture I find deeply touching and even heroic in an small, quiet, odd kind of way, Brad left another note on the bathroom door warning whoever came to find him that there was CO inside. What a damn shame that a man who felt this much compassion for others apparently couldn’t find enough for himself.

Oh, and just to add another layer of sorrow to this already sad story, it looks like Brad’s old bandmates, friends, and family members are squabbling in the aftermath of his death. The bones of contention are complicated and old — the basic grudge dates back to legal battles in the early ’80s — but the practical result is that several people who cared about Brad, including Tom Scholz, Boston’s founder and Brad’s friend for 35 years, were not invited to his funeral.

I know from my own bitter experiences that deaths seem to exacerbate and cement these kinds of ancient hurts, rather than healing them as Hallmark movies would have us believe. Still, I think it’s unspeakably crappy that Scholz, in particular, felt excluded. The article I linked suggests that he hopes to smooth things over so the current Boston line-up can attend a public memorial; I hope he succeeds…

I have to be honest, I’m not a big fan of Christmas music. Actually, I’m one of those grinchy-scroogey curmudgeons that develops an uncontrollable shoulder-cringe and a twitchy eyelid every year right around November 1st — which is, not coincidentally, the same day that FM100, our local “lite hits” station, begins its two-month-long all-Christmas, all-the-time format. Now, you may wonder why this affects me in the least since I don’t actually listen to FM100. It’s the principle of the thing; just knowing that there’s a radio station here in the valley that’s pumping out not just one but two whole months of every imaginable recording of “Jingle Bells”… well, it just gets to me. Especially if I have to call The Girlfriend at work and spend any time at all on hold, because her employer’s hold music is, you guessed it, provided by FM100. Gack.
I think it’s the constant, unrelenting tidal-wave effect that really does it. If the Christmas music was spread out, just a song here and there with regular music in between, maybe I could handle it. But as it is, if you find yourself exposed to it, whether on some company’s hold-music feed or trapped in a department store somewhere, it just goes on and on and on until you want to strangle the nearest elf with a popcorn-string and then pour curdled eggnog into his open, staring eyes. I find almost the entire genre completely and utterly annoying. Almost. There is a small handful of Christmas songs that I do kinda, sorta like. Because, hey, even I am not immune from sentiment and warm childhood memories and all that crap. So, for your ongoing edification on that most important of all subjects — my personal tastes — here are Bennion’s Favorite Christmas Songs, complete with a little video treat at the end…

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I’ve been in a pretty foul mood the past couple of days, owing to several long nights at work, too much caffeine, too little sleep, and a whole lot of minor stuff that usually wouldn’t bother me too much, but, coming as it has during this most crappy of weeks, has been really irritating me. I won’t bore you with any further details; suffice it to say that I feel like I’ve been dragged through a knothole sideways (one of my mother’s quaint expressions) and I really need a break from the grim-faced, clench-toothed treadmill slog that my life has unaccountably turned into. (Some time to turn out a couple of decent-sized blog entries would be nice, too!)

Coincidentally (or maybe not), I’ve been listening to a lot of the music I loved back in high school but have somehow forgotten about in the years since. One of the old recordings that I’ve blown the dust from is Bob Seger’s The Distance, which, as I recall, was one of my favorite albums back around my senior year (class of ’87, for the record). I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I still like this one. It’s a solid set of straight-ahead rockers and wistful ballads by an artist who was in his prime at the time of its recording. (Sadly, Seger’s best years were over by his next album, the over-produced, over-slick, and badly dated Like A Rock; there are maybe four songs on that one that are still listenable these days, including the title track, which is actually a good song if you can get past Chevy using it as a jingle for the last decade or so.)

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Interesting… yesterday, I read that a man named Paul Vance, who wrote the obnoxious 1960 novelty tune “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” had died. Today, however, I see that the report wasn’t true:

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Weird Al‘s new song is called “White and Nerdy.” After my last three four entries, I’m afraid that it applies all too well to yours truly. Here’s the video for you to enjoy while I go somewhere and hang my head in shame:

We weren’t even through the gates yet when we saw the fight. Two guys in baggy shorts and tent-sized white t-shirts seemed to fall inexorably into each other, as if drawn together by the gravitational force of their own beer-bellies. The three of us — myself, The Girlfriend, and our friend Amber — stood there in shock as the battle raged on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a battle. The word “battle” implies something epic, and this wasn’t even particularly exciting. It was just two guys bear-hugging each other, turning around and around like fat, drunken binary planets circling a common point in space, grunting and shouting unintelligibly at each other. One of them eventually got the better of his opponent. A nose was broken, blood and tears began to flow, security arrived, and it was over. Two grown men, fast approaching middle age, who were behaving like jackass teenagers and would probably never speak to each other again. It was pathetic. And I found myself wondering if I was, too, attending a Def Leppard concert at my age.

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I know it’s something of a heretical view, but I must be honest: I’m not much of a Beatles fan. I like many of the band’s singles and I freely acknowledge their significance to the history of popular music, but for the most part, I’ve never understood the deep, almost mystical reverence that so many hold for the boys from Liverpool. They just don’t grab me that way. I think it’s even arguable as to whether their music qualifies as “rock and roll”; the later stuff, especially, sounds to my ears more like a descendant of the English music-hall than anything related to the blues.

Still, I like them well enough, and I’m always interested in stories about lost-and-found treasures. Which is all my roundabout way of saying that I was very intrigued this afternoon by the news that some 500 tapes from the 1969 “Get Back” sessions have been recovered:

The tapes recorded [The Beatles] performing more than 200 cover versions of work by the artists who had influenced them: Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. They played their own version of Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind, and Rod Stewart’s Maggie May. They belted out Great Balls of Fire, Hippy Hippy Shake and Lucille in spontaneous bursts of play.

You know that at least some of this stuff will be released on CD — more likely all of it will in a big old collectible box set — and, despite my reservations about the orthodoxy of the band’s greatness, I’d really like to hear Lennon’s take on “Great Balls of Fire…”