Goodbye to all that . . .
First day of 2012 and I look back at 2011 as a year when too many friends died.
I guess it was not unexpected that Honeyboy Edwards and Pinetop Perkins left us. They were both over 95 and enjoyed their popularity right up to the end.
Hubert Sumlin had a lung removed a while ago but his career took an upturn in his final years and he moved from being Howling Wolf’s guitarist to front man status. Like so many other veterans, he never made any real money in his career and there probably would have been benefits to pay for his funeral but the Rolling Stones picked up the tab.
I was always surprised when Clarence Clemmons recognized me in the years after he became Bruce Springsteen’s horn player. It lifted him into iconic fame as “The Big Man,” but he would always wave from across the room and come over to give me a hug.
I don’t think that today’s rapper have any idea how important Gil Scott-Heron was to music. I remember when “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” first came out and we were bewildered by this free form expression pouring out of him. It sounded like a Lord Buckley track straight from across the tracks.
I never met Jerry Leiber although I have known Mike Stoller for years. The expression “the soundtrack of my youth” is overworked but Jerry and Mike really did write the best songs for my best years.
I will miss Pheobe Snow. I will really miss her a whole lot. Sometimes life gives you bad cards to play but you have a choice on whether to play them or not. Phoebe was dealt a bad hand and then decided that she would play it anyway.
She gave birth to a daughter with severe birth disabilities.They knew this immediately and explained to her how this would impact her life. She was urged to have the child institutionalized because she would be unable to care for her. It would cost her all her money, her recording career and all of her time would be given over to taking care of her daughter.
She listened to all the advice and then told them that she would keep her daughter and take care of her. Of course, the predictions all came true but Phoebe was a fiercely devoted mother until her daughter eventually passed away.
Phoebe died in 2011 and I’m sure that she never regretted for one second the choices that she made in her life.
I think that we miss people who think like us and the closer we are in personality, the more deep is the sense of loss.
That brings us to Andy Rooney.
When Walter Cronkite died, people said that he was the last of his era.
No, I said, Andy Rooney is the last of that era.
When Edward R. Murrow was doing live radio broadcasts from London at the beginning of World War II, he assembled a staff of crack newsmen that became known as “Murrow’s Boys.” If you listened to a lot of radio in the time – and I certainly did – the names were magical: Eric Sevareid, William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Robert Trout and Andy Rooney.
All gone . . . now we can say that the book is closed on the great radio voices of the Forties.
All in all, it was a pretty bad years for having friends go on without me. So it just means that we hold on to the friends that we have around us and look forward to better days . . .
Better than the alternative . . .
