Bob Matonis, we loved you yeah, yeah yeah.
One of America’s greatest rock n’ roll fans known as “Beatle Bob” Matonis died on July 27 in his native St. Louis, Mo. He was 70 years old. He died of complications from ALS.
Matonis spent decades dancing a mosh-up of the Twist and the Frug in the front rows of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, South by Southwest in Austin, Tx. FitzGerald’s in Berwyn and hundreds of other music clubs. He often wore black suits that matched his black bangs, even as the world spun into global warming,
Matonis said he saw 9,439 days of concerts in a row.
That number was in an e-mail he sent out earlier this year [...]
Early “North Country Blues” in Hibbing.
HIBBING, MN.–I drove alone into the north country unguarded. I carried no expectation or pretense. A songbird hovered along a roadside lake. A good highway leads to connections.
Hibbing did not disappoint.
I thought Hibbing would be a nice companion piece to last summer’s trip to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Ok. Robert Zimmerman was born May 24, 1941, in Duluth, 75 miles to the east of Hibbing. But he spent his formative years in Hibbing. When Dylan was seven years old his father Abram moved the Zimmerman family to Hibbing where he opened [...]
