“Beatle Bob” Matonis, a life of music: 1953-2023
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 announcing that his streak was coming to an end on Jan. 23, 2023. It began on Christmas Day, 1996 at a Brian Henneman (Bottle Rockets) show in St. Louis. Matonis acknowledged the streak was paused for 85 days because of pandemic shutdowns. In his announcement, Matonis called 2022 the worst year of his life.
“In February of last year I was diagnosed with ALS Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” Matonis wrote. “My neck muscles are so weak I can’t lift my head straight when standing or walking. This past year my voice was so slurred it was hard to understand. Thank goodness for social media that allowed me to communicate. Also, I had great difficulty swallowing and had to give up eating a lot of my favorite foods. As a result, I lost about 25 pounds I didn’t need to lose. This weight loss severely left me in a weakened condition and even though I attended concerts for the past month I sat the entire time.”
Matonis said doctors were alarmed about his weight loss. They suggested an operation to insert a feeding tube in his stomach. “It was a good concert run while it lasted and hopefully my weight will return fast enough to put me back on the dance floor,” he said. He never returned to the dance floor.
I wrote back Matonis to wish him well. I asked him who he was seeing for his streak-breaking concert. It was the St. Louis rhythm and blues duo Jeremy Taylor and LaToya Sharen at the Dark Room in St. Louis.
Matonis was never married. He did not drink alcohol. He did not own a car. I saw my friends give him rides. He kept a diary of every show he attended.
Matonis hosted public radio shows in St. Louis and claimed to do free-lance music writing, to the consternation of some members of the St. Louis music community. There are so many more things to worry about in this world than throwing shade on a loveable character like Matonis.
On Friday his niece Lauren Elizabeth posted on Facebook, “So many memories of with him growing up. He took me to all the Disney movies growing up, and blessed me with gifts over the years. He loved me beyond measure. His carefree spirit and dance moves always inspired me.”
The timeless Springfield, Mo. rock n’ soul band the Skeletons were also fine with Beatle Bob so that’s fine with me. A couple of the band members told me he had been a social worker in his distant past.
On Friday evening Skeletons keyboardist-songwriter Joe Terry wrote, “Ya know, whatever kind of backlash Beatle Bob got during his tenure as a pop/rock aficionado, he loved the Skeletons and we loved him. He was truly a genuine, thoughtful, and good person, and a pal of mine.”
We asked Bob to pontificate on his love of the Skeletons in our Center of Nowhere documentary. On a hot afternoon in late summer 2015, my cameraman Tom Vlodek (one of the kind folks who drove Matonis around Chicago) and I interviewed him in a club near Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis. We were sweating profusely. Matonis showed up in his black suitcoat and black dyed hair.
It was like talking to an extra from “Pulp Fiction.”
He told us he had seen the Skeletons and their precursor band the Morells 102 times. He dreamed about someday wanting to attend Skeletons guitarist Donnie Thompson’s summer backyard reel-to-reel movie parties in Springfield, which we caught for the film. And there was this Matonis story which we didn’t use, but that I found in the film transcripts:
“The Skeletons were doing a show at Off Broadway in St. Louis. The electricity went out. They had to put about 50 candles on the stage to keep it lit, but the band kept playing. (Keyboardist-vocalist) Joe Terry took a toy piano that was hanging up at Off Broadway and played it the rest of the concert. The show rolled on. That’s one thing I will never forget.”
Beatle Bob with myself and Tom Vlodek (right) in 2015.
On Friday afternoon Vlodek remembered Matonis as “one of god’s creatures.”
When I wrote my January tribute to Matonis, Dean Schlabowske of the Waco Brothers commented, “You can count the Waco Brothers among the bands who ‘don’t mind’ Beatle Bob. I remember arriving at a St. Louis gig for load-in, to find Bob in the club waiting for us. He went into this spiel as if he were on a tourism board, welcoming us to the city (“Did you know that St. Louis has the second largest Mardi Gras in the U.S.?”). I don’t see how anyone could view him as anything but a loveable eccentric.”
And, Chicago singer-songwriter Anna Fermin wrote, “I know I’m not the only one, but for years he would send me homemade Christmas compilations on CD (sometimes multiple CDs) always accompanied by a beautiful card and a 3 or 4-page letter detailing the music on those CDs. along with colorful commentary. I always thought it was an extraordinary gesture. I only stopped receiving them 1 or 2 years ago.”
My favorite Beatle Bob memory was at the 1997 edition of the FitzGerald’s American Music Festival in Berwyn. The Skeletons invited him onstage to join guest vocalist Syd Straw for a sweet version of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.’ I can still see Bob gazing into Syd’s eyes like a modern-day Sonny and Cher. It was the first time I wept at FitzGerald’s.
On Friday afternoon former club owner Bill FitzGerald said, “He started to come around our festival 25, 30 years ago. At first it was a bit much and I don’t think I’m alone in that department. The show was on stage and not on the dance floor. And he would dance off the beat. I didn’t understand it. But the more I learned about him he was really knowledgeable about music and he loved it. And musicians loved him. People would say, ‘Hey, great festival! And you got Beatle Bob, too’.”
Beatle Bob at FitzGerald’s (Joe Holtzman photo.)
That same summer of ’97 I visited Matonis in his St. Louis home. The basement of his house looked like a Mississippi River barge on a long passage to adventure. Matonis claimed to have 25,000 ‘45s and 13,000 LPs in his basement. I don’t know if it was that many. But it was a lot.
Matonis told me he was named “Beatle Bob” in the sixth grade at Mount Providence grade school in St. Louis. “It was a Catholic all-boys school,” he said. “We were supposed to be reading our geography book, but behind my book, I had a 16 Magazine all-Beatles issue. Sister Celeste flew down the aisle and said, ‘That will be enough Beatle Bob!’ The name stuck.” He also claimed to have seen 487 concerts in 1996. (Tom Russell with Dave Alvin and Katy Moffatt was his favorite.) I’m no math major, but how could he have seen 487 concerts in 365 days? Matonis included sets at festival shows and double headers where he would see a happy-hour show followed by an evening gig.
Up until about a week ago, I received occasional e-mails filled with Matonis’ musical memories. He and I always got along unless we were talking about the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. Why was Matonis still sending out his musical messages from a hospital bed?
He believed in the promise of music.
Over his lifetime, Matonis saw concerts in 27 different states and seven countries. Matthew Sweet invited Matonis on stage during a show at the City Stages festival in Birmingham, Al. He danced on stage with Roky Erickson at the 2007 edition of Lollapalooza. Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo said that “in a business that breeds pretension, it is heartwarming to see someone respond so honestly to the music.” That’s rock n’ roll.
That was Bob Matonis.
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