Another sad anniversary

You worked with Hondo?

I was seven and didn't hear about it until the next night. I remember playing football in the hallway of our house (throwing myself a little blue football) and my dad coming home from work and saying John Lennon was killed the night before. It didn't throw me quite like Thurman Munson's death, but I still knew something was not right.

I love that story of the Beatles nearly getting back together on a lark for SNL. A prime example of what SNL used to be, and what it no longer is.

Slightly unrelated...it was two years ago Dec. 8 when ex-Pantera guitarist Diamond Darrell was shot to death on stage by a crazed fan during a gig by his new band Damageplan. A lot was made of the fact he was murdered 24 years to the day of Lennon's death, though it appears the timing was just a coincidence. I was only a casual fan of Pantera--they were a bit too angry and a bit too opportunistic for my tastes, if you want a laugh, check out the pics of Pantera from the late '80s, when they were every bit as poseurish as Poison and Warrant--but the concept of going to a show for a good time and seeing a man murdered on stage shook me up something fierce.

The Pantera Behind The Music special on VH-1, which re-played footage from the frantic stage scene and included eyewitness accounts of the shooting, was pretty harrowing.

 

Wasn't he Dimebag Darrell, not Diamond Darrell?

 

Sorry, you're right. He changed monikers sometime around the mid-90s..."Diamond Darrell" was a relic from their hair metal days. Dimebag Darrell sounded meaner.

 

Geez, Huggy. You sure we're not the same person? This sounds awfully familar, down to the shaken, disbelieving, can't-make-the-news-fit-in-my-mental-Samsonite feeling and the subsequent reading of that brilliant Rolling Stone piece that got lost in one of my college moves.

I remember getting in an argument with someone at my high school about the whole Beatles reuniting on SNL. I said it would never happen (I had reconciled myself to never seeing them perform live) and this guy was insistent it was going down. :

And yes, as Spnited pointed out, Springsteen used to routinely go 4 1/2 hours. Saw him at the LA Coliseum in September of '85. Concert started a little after 7 and we didn't walk out until 11:30ish.

 

My father died of lung cancer Nov. 1, 1980. I was numb for five weeks. Normally I watched football on Monday nights, but on this particular night I went out to a movie and didn't hear the news until the next morning. I was 19.

I woke up to a radio station playing "I heard the news today ..." and knew something had happened. When I heard exactly what it was, my emotions came pouring out -- for my dad's death, for Lennon's death, for a childhood that featured many a "concert" in the living room, where I did my Beatles impressions for my sisters, mom and dad.

It took me a while to feel OK about crying the day after John Lennon died but not the day after my father died. I understood it better years later. There's a lot more to the story, but that will do for now.

 

Remember those 4-4 1/2 hour shows included a 35-45 minute intermission. So you wound up getting 3-3 1/2, 3 3/4 hours worth of music.
My old cassette tape bootlegs of those 80s shows (many of which I've upgraded to CDs) would go 2 1/2 90 minute cassettes.

 

Actually, unions now have a hell of a lot less juice than they did in the 1970s. Thank Grandpa Ronnie for that one.

As far as the 9-hour Hot Tuna shows, just remember, they named the band "Hot Tuna" because the record company wouldn't let them go with "Hot Shit." But, I suppose, listening to a 9-hour show might change their minds...

 

Mind-blowing.

 

"We played for two hours and fifteen minutes… the longest we have ever been allowed to play there [NYC's Beacon Theater]. The fiscal penalty for going over ‘curfew’ is draconian, but that’s another story."

http://www.jormakaukonen.com/Main.php?page=thoughts

Urban legend. I have a video* in which they explain that in the song "Keep on Truckin'," when they got to the line, "What's that smell like fish, oh baby, I really would like to know," someone in the bar yelled, "Hot Tuna!" and thus the band was named.


*Live at the Fillmore:

http://furpeacestore.com/product_info.php?products_id=272

 

I was working at my first paper when Lennon was murdered.

I had been there a few weeks.

The rag was in Texas, in the shadow of the Houston papers. It was a PM paper.

The "news editor," who happened to be the kid brother of the ME at the time, made the call were to play Lennon's death.

As I recall, a 12-inch story was dog-legged around a buncha ads on A-10 or something.

(The ads vs. editorial ratio at this rag was unbelievable.)

I raised hell. Nobody listened.

Something I had to get used to over the years.

 

Frank:

I have a friend interested in Jorma's guitar camp. Sounds like a lot of fun. Have you done that?

 

On the topic of a Beatles reunion I read a hilarious book some years ago called Paperback Writer which parodies the Beatles' story and has them reuniting on a bill at Dodger Stadium with the Sex Pistols and Peter Frampton. It's probably been out of print for ages but it's worth looking for online.