Pribek

I want to give you a little update here, guys.

Yesterday morning, one of my closest friends, Robert Arnold, passed away. This is one of those deals that seems unreal and I feel like it hasn’t sunk in yet. If you’ve been following along since the early days of this blog, you will recognize that Robert was the drummer in the three piece band, along with bass player Hugh Walpole, that we put together to perform stuff from the “Trouble Ain’t Over” record and other stuff at live shows.

Anyway, that’s been heavy on my mind.

No internet signal at the old campground yet so, my blog posting will remain spotty.

Yesterday afternoon, my buddy Pat Talburt graciously let me borrow one of his guitars. It’s an Epiphone J-200 which is a replica of the Gibson Jumbo. Since I do not have a quality acoustic laying around, I gladly took him up on his offer and, I can’t leave my hands off of this guitar. He told me he’d let me borrow it as long as I wanted; “maybe you’ll write a good song with it”, that sort of thing. I’m already not looking forward to giving it back.

Thirst N” Howl is at the New Key Largo in Springfield tonight and over at Cody’s South tomorrow night.

Bert Shepard, the only player to appear in a major league game with an artificial leg, died of natural causes over the weekend. He was 12 days short of his 88th birthday.

Shepard was a fighter pilot during WWII. His Lockheed P-38J Lightning was shot down near Ludwigslust, east of Hamburg on May, 21 1944.

First Lieutenant Ladislaus Loidl, a physician in the German Luftwaffe, rescued Shepard. From Baseball In Wartime.

Loidl, with the aid of two armed soldiers, drove the farmers away and checked to see if the pilot was still alive. “He was unconscious, his right leg being smashed, and he bled from a deep wound on his head,” recalled Loidl in 1993. “I recognized that the man could be saved only with an urgent operation. My emergency hospital was not equipped for that. So I drove the wounded man to the local hospital that was headed by a colonel. When he refused to admit the ‘terror flyer’ as he called him, I telephoned the general on duty at the Reich’s Air Ministry in Berlin and reported the case. Whereupon the general called the colonel and settled the matter. Lieutenant Shepard was admitted and operated on. A few days later I inquired about his condition and was told that he was doing fine.”

Shepard’s leg was amputated below the knee but, he started to play catch while at a German prison camp. His goal was to play baseball again.

After a stay a Walter Reed he tried out for the Washington Senators. The Sens hired him as a pitching coach. On August, 5th 1945, during a string of five double headers, he was called on as a relief pitcher, going 5 1/3 innings, giving up three hits and one run. It was his only Major League appearance but he pitched and coached in the Minors until 1954. He went on to work as a safety engineer for I.B.M. and Hughes Aircraft.

In 1993 Shepard was reunited with Dr. Loidl and the event was featured on an episode of This Week In Baseball.

To me, one thing really stands out in the AP piece reporting the death of Bo Diddley.

“I don’t like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it,” he said. “I don’t have any idols I copied after.”

“They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there,” he said.

Bo was right as rain there, if you are “updating” a Bo Diddley riff, you are doing it wrong.

Bo was a true original, a true stylist.

I met Peter Case one night and he told a story about Willie Dixon, in which Dixon offered advice that went something like; “You have to have a style, and that style should be named after you, and your best song should be named after that style. Like, Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley in the Bo Diddley style.” Aside from pointing out that Bo Diddley was way ahead of the game on establishing brand awareness, Dixon was using Bo as the example of a musician with an original style. Think about some of the people Dixon worked with like, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter but, the one guy that he refers to, off the top of his head, regarding individual style, is Bo Diddley.

My friends, the Morells, backed Bo Diddley at a show in Chicago on Bo’s birthday a couple of years back. Donnie told me that Bo had some new amp and that “he’s still looking for that tone” and, Lou talked about Bo giving the guys maraca lessons. It’s nice to hear that kind of stuff because, it brings it all home; after all the bad contracts, all the dirty deals, a lifetime of gigs, Bo was focusing on the music. That’s what mattered.