America 2010: A tragedy in four acts

Sorry, Glenn. In this case, "puppetmaster" George Soros was right.

"A 1957 movie -- made by a communist, appropriately" -- Soros' alleged "gift" for Glenn Beck. That is, according to Beck. You see, Soros thinks the Fox News Channel's resident paranoiac is the real-life "Lonesome" Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan's 1957 "communist" classic.

According to Beck.

Well, heck. It must be true, the John Birch Society's magazine is picking up Beck's "exposé" of Soros and running with it.


OK, DOES Andy Griffith's character remind you of anyone here? Anyone at all?

Substitute Goldline for Vitajex, Lonesome's sponsor in the film. Anything come to mind now?


THANK GOD that the ultimate faith of "Lonesome" Beck's followers rests in the United States Constitution -- not a TV host. At least if Beck starts to steer them astray, the foundational document of our democratic republic -- and Tea Party America's exhaustive knowledge of it -- will be there to steer them (and us) away from the brink of something really nasty.


OH, S***.

I'll give you my $516.32 worth

I am a late Boomer. Either that means I was born in the year of our Lord 1961, or that I had red beans and rice for supper.

Take your pick.

But as a member of a now-aging generation, one facing the creeping shadows of mortality -- and occasionally the discomfort of gastric distress -- I am increasingly compelled to explain myself, my generation, to those who follow. I suppose this is part of the human need to leave a legacy, to live on in defiance of one's biological expiration date . . . ultimately, to not be forgotten.

To be understood is to, in some way, be less alienated from the rest of humanity. To offer a glimpse into one's thoughts, into one's soul, into one's influences and eccentricities is to seek common ground with generations who find us as mysterious as we find them.

And, yes, The Gong Show winners above were that Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo may be another thing that needs explaining, but not right now.


CHILDREN, look. This is who we were. Deep inside, somewhere, this is who we are.

This is who we were before we began to take ourselves so damned seriously. The sum of what you see here is the totality -- or at least a reasonable facsimile -- of today's molders of the world you know.


HERE WE ARE. Understand us. Come to know us a little better.

And please do not gong us after 20 seconds have elapsed.

If you want to know why the world is the way it is, look at the . . . on second thought, avert your eyes. Ignorance is bliss.


WE, THE BOOMERS are not just a generation that now worries about heart health and contemplates bladder-control products.

We once were young. We once were 10 feet tall and bulletproof. We once rocked out. We once laughed.

And we once loved weird s***. Just like you.


TAKE IN what is before you now. Understand that this represents my generation's hopes, fears and insights into the human condition.


UNDERSTAND, too, that we once smoked dope. A lot, a lot of dope.

Which may or may not explain the tea party.

Good night, good luck . . . and I think I'll let Gene Gene the Dancing Machine take us to commercial.

One for Depends, no doubt.

Your Daily '80s: Before Late Night, mid-morning

Before there was The Late Show with David Letterman, there was Late Night With David Letterman, and before there was Late Night With David Letterman, there was The David Letterman Show. Which wasn't on late at all.

It didn't run long, just from June to October of 1980, but you can see what was to come in a couple of years. Not to mention what Jay Leno would be stealing in another decade or so.

So, welcome back to Sept. 30, 1980. Today's featured guest, Steve Martin.

Death in the ruins

This is Detroit.

Charlie LeDuff is on the story for Mother Jones magazine. One place this story of Detroit took him was the morgue.

It's a busy place. It's a crowded one, too.

Life is extraordinarily cheap in America today. Funerals, however, are not:

Dr. Carl Schmidt is the chief medical examiner there. There are at least 50 corpses on hold in his morgue cooler, some unidentified, others whose next of kin are too poor to bury them. So Dr. Schmidt keeps them on layaway, zipped up in body bags as family members wait for a ship to come in that never seems to arrive.

The day I visited, a Hollywood starlet was tailing the doctor, studying for her role as the medical examiner in ABC's new Detroit-based murder drama Detroit 1-8-7. The title is derived from the California penal code for murder: 187. In Michigan, the designation for homicide is actually 750.316, but that's just a mouthful of detail.

"You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered," Schmidt told me.

"What disease was that?" I asked.

"The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit," he said. "Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic."

"BUT IT'S DETROIT!" you may be tempted to scoff. Detroit, though, wasn't always an epithet. Something had to make Detroit into Detroit.

It might be a stretch to see anything more than Detroit's problems in Detroit's problems. Still, as the American middle class collapses, it's worth perhaps remembering that the East Side of Detroit—the place where Aiyana, Je'Rean, and Officer Huff all died—was once its industrial cradle.

Henry Ford built his first automobile assembly-line plant in Highland Park in 1908 on the east side of Woodward Avenue, the thoroughfare that divides the east of Detroit from the west. Over the next 50 years, Detroit's East Side would become the world's machine shop, its factory floor. The city grew to 1.3 million people from 300,000 after Ford opened his Model T factory. Other auto plants sprang up on the East Side: Packard, Studebaker, Chrysler's Dodge Main. Soon, the Motor City's population surpassed that of Boston and Baltimore, old East Coast port cities founded on maritime shipping when the world moved by boat.

European intellectuals wondered at the whirl of building and spending in the new America. At the center of this economic dynamo was Detroit. "It is the home of mass-production, of very high wages and colossal profits, of lavish spending and reckless installment-buying, of intense work and a large and shifting labour-surplus," British historian and MP Ramsay Muir wrote in 1927. "It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of 'Detroitism'."

"It is the home of mass-production, of very high wages and colossal profits, of lavish spending and reckless instalment-buying, of intense work and a large and shifting labour-surplus," British historian and MP Ramsay Muir wrote in 1927. "It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of 'Detroitism'."

Skyscrapers sprang up virtually overnight. The city filled with people from all over the world: Arabs, Appalachians, Poles, African Americans, all in their separate neighborhoods surrounding the factories. Forbidden by restrictive real estate covenants and racist custom, the blacks were mostly restricted to Paradise Valley, which ran the length of Woodward Avenue. As the black population grew, so did black frustration over poor housing and rock-fisted police.

Soon, the air was the color of a filthy dishrag. The water in the Detroit River was so bad, it was said you could bottle it and sell it as poison. The beavers disappeared from the river around 1930.

But pollution didn't kill Detroit. What did?

No one can answer that fully. You can blame it on the John Deere mechanical cotton-picker of 1950, which uprooted the sharecropper and sent him north looking for a living—where he found he was locked out of the factories by the unions. You might blame it on the urban renewal and interstate highway projects that rammed a freeway down the middle of Paradise Valley, displacing thousands of blacks and packing the Negro tenements tighter still. (Thomas Sugrue, in his seminal book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, writes that residents in Detroit's predominantly black lower East Side reported 206 rat bites in 1951 and 1952.)

You might blame postwar industrial policies that sent the factories to the suburbs, the rural South, and the western deserts. You might blame the 1967 race riot and the white flight that followed. You might blame Coleman Young—the city's first black mayor—and his culture of cronyism. You could blame it on the gas shocks of the '70s that opened the door to foreign car competition. You might point to the trade agreements of the Clinton years, which allowed American manufacturers to leave the country by the back door. You might blame the UAW, which demanded things like full pay for idle workers, or myopic Big Three management who, instead of saying no, simply tacked the cost onto the price of a car.

Then there is the thought that Detroit is simply a boom town that went bust the minute Henry Ford began to build it. The car made Detroit, and the car unmade Detroit. The auto industry allowed for sprawl. It also allowed a man to escape the smoldering city.

AND THOSE THINGS that made Detroit into a slur -- into a basket case . . . into a place where some humans have gone feral and nature has started to reclaim its turf from the ruins -- also are turning parts of where you live into little Detroits.

Somewhere near you, hope is dead and humanity itself ain't feeling so good.

Somewhere, some fool on cable television, or on talk radio, is telling you the biggest problem the country has right now is big government and high taxes. That what ails Detroit -- and what ails all the little Detroits just down the road, in all the neighborhoods you dare not enter after dark . . . or ever -- will be fixed by private charity and good morals.

Some say condoms are the answer. Others, Jesus.

A half-century into the collapse, however, neither the Trojan man nor the Savior of the World has made much of a dent. Not only that, charitable contributions these days are as down as the leading economic indicators.

Public policy in these anxious times seems to consist of hoping for a miracle in a world that doesn't believe in prayer. And while it's true that Jesus has no hands and no feet apart from our own, it also is true that Jesus' hands have taken to wringing and His feet have taken a hike.

In an emerging banana republic run by the rich men of Wall Street, it really sucks to be Lazarus. Detroit knows this today.

You will discover it tomorrow.

Your Daily '80s: Still wanna go to London

Speaking of "I wanna go to London," it's Lene Lovich on the BBC's Top of the Pops in 1981.

Apparently, she has a new toy.

Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Two words on Keith Olbermann: Arrogant. Insufferable. Ass.

OK, three words on Keith Olbermann. . . .

Obviously, the man has no concept of humility. He is as entitled as his -- my -- entire generation, and journalistic ethics (not to mention NBC News rules) are dumb and irrelevant "to 21st-century journalism" because, primarily, Olbermann didn't feel like abiding by them.

Because American citizenship is all rights and no obligations. Obviously.

AMERICA IS two warring camps now, left and right, and all that matters to either is destruction of the Other. Three hundred thousand viewers petitioned MSNBC to bring Olbermann back merely because he is of their tribe (principle, justice and journalism be damned) and, more importantly, because he hates the Other Tribe.

That's all that matters today. Hating the right people. Well, hating the right people . . . and loving money. Money, gobs of which can be earned by giving the people exactly what they want to hear. Just look at Fox News, for God's sake.

So MSNBC caved in a couple of days, and Keith Olbermann gets to come back on the air unapologetically "apologetic," kicking his bosses in the nuts the whole time.

And the lonesome, painful . . . soprano . . . moaning you hear off in the distance is that of MSNBC's president, Phil Griffin, lamenting his lost manhood.

That settles it

It's scientifically official: Tom Dempsey da man!

As it turns out, the New Orleans Saints' place kicker made his 63-yard field goal the hard way in 1970.

Conan: Very Funny

OK, Conan's back. And this opening had me about to fall off the couch laughing.

Just sayin'.

Your Daily '80s: Wanna go to London

Skinny ties are back in, I hear.

Good. I have some.

That's reason enough, on this edition of Your Daily '80s, to revisit local music in 1982. That local music would be the U.S. Times, a New Wave band that was in the forefront of hip in Baton Rouge, by God, Louisiana.

Well, at least as far as we LSU students were concerned at the time.

But if you want to know the truth, I think the Times -- as the band was known before it adopted the "U.S." as part of its name -- remains pretty hip today, even though now they're just a footnote in the history of a middling town's "college bands."

THE TITLE TRACK from the band's "Wanna Go to London" album pretty much sums up a time and a place . . . and the music we loved. We just as soon would have loaded up a trunk and flown to London town -- skinny ties, rock 'n' roll stars.

Heck, in 1982, I actually sent my resumé and clips to an English newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the economy was crappy all over, and the editor politely informed me he didn't have jobs for British reporters, much less ones from -- What was the name of that place in the colonies again?

STILL, dreaming was as cheap as air-mail postage.

I wan, I wan, I wan, I wanna go to London,

Go to London, England. . . .

(NOTE: Contains a single F-bomb, not overly noticeable.)

Barking up the Ducks' tree

Washington's athletic director didn't mince words -- or make an attempt at being a gracious guest -- during the Huskies' visit to Oregon last weekend.

Instead, he went on and on to the Huskies' radio crew about how the university in Eugene had become an embarrassment because of state budget cuts, and about how UW was superior in every way. (Except, of course, on the gridiron.)

NORMALLY, I wouldn't give a duck's tail (or a Husky's hind quarter) about Pac-10 pissing matches. I don't have a dog in that fight. Then again, neither did Washington, as it turned out.)

One thing occurred to me, however. This, as reported on Sports by Brooks, is exactly what somebody's going to be saying about my alma mater, LSU, if and when Gov. Bobby Jindal gets his budgetary way and finishes his ongoing work of destroying the state's flagship university:

Mahler to Woodward: “What do you make of this place? When you come down here, you see the new baseball field, you see the brand new turf, you see the atmosphere. And don’t know if motivation is the word but obviously this is kind of where Washington wants to be, ranked #1 in the country and have all eyes on them.”

Woodward: “Sure, it’s not really where we want to be Softy (Mahler’s nickname), because it’s an embarrassment what their academic institution is, and what’s happened to them as far as their state funding has gone. In my mind it’s a wonderful athletic facility but they’ve watched it at the expense of the university go really down.

“The athletic facility is impressive. The fans at Oregon should get down on their hands and knees at night to Phil Knight and pray to him because this is an incredible facility he’s built.“

Mahler: “Talk more about what you were just mentioning, about academics, is that backed up by some stats that just came out? Or numbers? Tell me about that.”

Woodward: “Sure, any of the rankings you look at, you watch how far they’ve (Oregon) dropped because of their state funding. And it’s a message for us too. Our state needs to get its act together because we can’t continue to progress without investment in our institution. But we’re doing extremely well and we’re very proud of that fact.

“We’re a part of the whole University of Washington. That’s who we are.”

OK, TIGERS. You have been warned. You will be embarrassed . . . that is, if anyone in Louisiana still is capable of such.

Happy Dempsey Day!

Forty years ago today, Nov. 8, 1970, a guy with half a foot kicked himself into the record books . . . and into the hearts of New Orleans Saints fans forever and ever, amen.

The scene: Tulane Stadium.

The foe: the Detroit Lions.

The score: Detroit 17, New Orleans 16.

Until. . . .

Peter Finney of the New Orleans Times-Picayune picks up the story:

"Tell Stumpy to get ready to go in and kick a long one,'' said Heinrich that sunny Sunday in Tulane Stadium.

A 22-year-old kid, born with half a right foot and four fingers missing on his right hand, had no idea "long" meant 63 yards.

With 11 seconds remaining, Errol Mann of the Detroit Lions had just booted an 18-yard field goal to put his team ahead, 17-16.

Now, with two seconds left, the Saints had the ball at their 45-yard-line, following a kickoff return by Al Dodd and Dodd's catch of a Billy Kilmer pass as he went out of bounds.

In those days, the goalposts were on the goal line, not at the rear of the end zone.

As Dempsey looked downfield into the north end zone, the uprights reminded him of "a tiny target'' for someone who had booted three field goals that day, the longest from 29 yards.

"I was more concerned about kicking it straight because I felt I could handle the distance, whatever it was,'' Dempsey said. "I knew I was going to get a perfect snap from Jackie Burkett and a perfect hold from Joe Scarpati. It was all up to me. I had to hit it sweet.''

Dempsey had complete confidence in Scarpati. "Joe told me he was going to put it down eight yards behind the snap, a yard longer than normal. He asked the linemen to hold their blocks a little longer.''

As Scarpati awaited the snap at the Saints' 37, with the crossbar sitting 63 yards away, Kilmer, standing on the sidelines, remembered some members of the Detroit special team laughing. "They thought Tom had no chance,'' he said.

Dempsey would remember something else: a photograph he was given days later.

"It's my favorite,'' he said. "It doesn't show me. It shows what Wild Bill Cody did defending the rush. Bill used his body to take care of the inside rusher and he used his foot to take care of the guy on the outside, who was the great Alex Karras. Wild Bill kicked Karras in the groin.''

And there went Tom Dempsey's historic kick, sailing north, actually sailing a shade more than 63 yards (the ball unofficially cleared the crossbar by a foot).

And there went Dempsey, carried off the field on the shoulders of teammates.

HAPPY DEMPSEY DAY!

Your Daily '80s: Total sports

Back in December 1980, cable systems still had to be sold on ESPN. Go figure.

Your Daily '80s: Lotsa space in this mall

Blues Brothers Tour the Maill | Sports | SPIKE.com

The Blues Brothers.

1980.

"They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God."

Meanwhile, 30 years later. . . .

Wonderful WOKE Radio

When you look at radio today, it is impossible not to dwell on what's been lost in recent decades -- provided you're old enough to remember what we once had.
One thing we had was humanity . . . humanity that, more often than not, rang out through the speaker of your radio along with the music, news, weather and jingles. Humanity flowed from a relationship between broadcaster and listener.

That relationship flowed from personal involvement.

Personal involvement flowed from a deep sense of caring.

And that deep sense of caring flowed from love. I get the feeling that Wonderful WOKE Radio in Charleston, S.C., was all about love.

BACK IN 1979, on Top-40 radio stations around the world, Earth, Wind & Fire described where we find ourselves now this way:

Something happened along the way
What used to be happy was sad
Something happened along the way
And yesterday was all we had

And, oh, after the love has gone
How could you lead me on
And not let me stay around?
Oh, oh, oh, after the love has gone
What used to be right is wrong
Can love that's lost be found?

INDEED. In a bottom-line world of corporate rule and "cost saving" -- a world where young people no longer know radio and, frankly, don't care -- "can love that's been lost be found?"

WOKE's Harry Weaver is long dead now. So are legions like him. And our questions for the future hang just as heavily as our longing for all the love we've lost.

Hannity's mom can deal with Hannity

This is all fine and dandy, Rachel Maddow. We get it.

Fox News Channel and its video politicos using an alleged cable-news outfit for unending political propaganda is bad. Worse than Keith Olbermann even.

Fine.

Now, if you're in high school and get called into the vice-principal's office -- or, hell, get called into your boss' office at work -- on a disciplinary matter, what is the instantaneous response when you earnestly point out how much worse (and unpunished) everybody else is than you?

C'MON, this is a no-brainer. I'm sure your mom came back at you with this one a bazillion times.

The instant, and universal, response to your protestations is "This is not about them. This is about what you did. I will deal with them when the time comes."

And then you get suspended. Or fired. Or grounded.

Because Mom always liked him better.

Listen, Rach. We all know what Fox is. Fox is not MSNBC's kid.

We all know that Fox is a spoiled juvenile delinquent and, chances are, he's going to come to no damned good. He'll probably wind up in jail. You're not being raised that way.

I DON'T WANT to hear anymore of your whining. Now go to your room.

And I don't want to hear that stereo of yours blasting, either, young lady! Don't you give me that look!

3 Chords & the Truth: Let's just be

There. I've just poured myself another cup of minty tea, and that makes it the last of the pot.

It has been that kind of a day. A chilly day here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, as well as a laid-back kind of day. I say it's been a fine day just to be.

As in, "Just be."

As in "Let the day come to you. No need to expend any excess energy on it."

THAT'S THE kind of day it's been here around the 3 Chords & the Truth studios, and that's the kind of show you're going to get this week. It's a fine show all about sitting back, enjoying the tunes, and just letting it be.

The Beatles, 1970.

IT'S A laid-back affair on the Big Show but, to tell you the truth, I think those are some of the best ones. And this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth is a fine one, indeed.

So click on a link, or click on the player at the top of this page. I don't care. Just click on something, sit back, listen to the music . . . and be. Just be.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. "Be" there. Aloha.

Your Daily '80s: When pinkos advertised

Back in 1981, television viewers would, from time to time, see these ads for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Thirty years ago -- shockingly -- this sort of thing was perfectly respectable. Unenlightened as we were, we didn't once think we were being indoctrinated by leftist union goons.

Worse, if one came from a blue-collar background, chances were that the Old Man belonged to one of these socialist-front outfits. I know, it's shocking. Lots of people smoked then, too.

Now, thanks to tea-party edjumacashun outreach and Mr. Glenn Beck and Mr. Rush Limbaugh, we know socialists when we see 'em, and we take appropriate action.

And you won't see these commercials on the tube anymore. In fact, you won't see the ILGWU anymore, either.

Heh.

Ratings or credibility, that is the question

Keith Olbermann is many things. Until now, I didn't figure that moron was one of them.

I may have been horribly wrong. At any rate, MSNBC's liberal firebrand -- amid a whole cable channel of them -- is sitting on the bench, sans paycheck, "indefinitely," according to management.

Benched for being a moron. And for giving maximum contributions to three political candidates, all of whom he had as guests on his Countdown program.

That's a gross violation of a pretty unambiguous NBC News policy. It's also a gross violation of common sense for anyone who calls himself a journalist.

It's one thing to have a point of view as a reporter or news personality. It's entirely another to be "in the tank" for one -- or several -- of the people or entities you cover.

OLBERMANN, whether he thinks so or not, nevertheless has given the strongest impression that he's absolutely, positively in the tank. Politico, which broke the story of the TV host's faux-est of journalistic "pas" reports on the aftermath:

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely without pay after POLITICO reported that he made three campaign contributions to Democratic candidates.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement Friday: “I became aware of Keith's political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay."

Olbermann made campaign contributions to two Arizona members of Congress and failed Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway ahead of Tuesday’s election.

Olbermann, who acknowledged the contributions in a statement to POLITICO, made the maximum legal donations of $2,400 apiece to Conway and to Arizona Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords. He donated to the Arizona pair on Oct. 28 — the same day that Grijalva appeared as a guest on Olbermann’s “Countdown” show.

NBC has a rule against employees contributing to political campaigns, and a wide range of news organizations prohibit political contributions — considering it a breach of journalistic independence to contribute to the candidates they cover.

Chris Hayes, the Washington editor for The Nation and a previous fill-in for Rachel Maddow, will fill in for Olbermann tonight, MSNBC confirmed.

Olbermann is one of MSNBC’s most recognizable faces, and has emerged as one of the country’s most prominent liberal commentators. A former ESPN star, Olbermann’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” started in 2003 as a traditional news show but evolved into a left-leaning opinion program – and in some ways, led the network into its new identity as the cable-news voice of the left and an attempt to be a counterweight to Fox News.

Inside MSNBC, employees were shocked at the news of Olbermann’s suspension. Despite a reputation for a prickly personality off-air, Olbermann was given wide berth inside the network because of his stature – and his ratings.

Insiders were stunned that Griffin moved so swiftly to yank one of the network’s true stars off the air, and some suspected that the recent tensions with NBC News, which has grown increasingly uneasy with its sister network’s more ideological stance, contributed to the swift decision. Some have even speculated that Comcast’s coming merger with NBC Universal has heightened sensitivities about MSNBC’s ideological profile.

MSNBC has branded Olbermann as a prominent face in its new “Lean Forward” marketing campaign. He tripled MSNBC’s ratings at 8 p.m. In the past two years, MSNBC’s more opinionated hosts have helped propel it past CNN in prime time, and even lately during the daytime, too.

Despite MSNBC’s embrace of a more opinionated format, NBC News has a policy against its employees making political contributions – and it appears that Olbermann ran afoul of that policy, even by contributing to candidates he gave a platform on his show, like Grijalva.

In addition, Olbermann has been a critic of the political donations made by Fox News’s parent company, News Corp., which contributed $1 million each to a pair of organizations trying to defeat Democratic candidates.

Griffin also tweaked rival network Fox over the contributions. “Show me an example of us fundraising,” Griffin told The New York Times last month.

GETTING good ratings is one thing. As far as I'm concerned, the lengths to which America's cable-news outfits have gone to obtain them neither is good for journalism nor good for the civic life of the country.

Basically, how much is a soul worth -- either human or institutional?

If MSNBC's is worth anything anymore, Keith Olbermann, the sports commentator turned liberal news host, needs to be taken off the bench . . . and put on waivers.

No, forget that. He just needs to be flat-out released.

Mr. Rock and Mr. Roll . . . together again

Go grab youself a cold one, Cap, then get back here.

You good?

OK, now sit youself down and watch this story from WWL-TV in New Orleans. After a bunch of years, Channel 4's Eric Paulsen brought Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew back together to remember the days when they were helping to birth rock 'n' roll . . . and to play some of the old songs, too.

This is as close as you're ever going to get to seeing -- alive and still kickin' and in the flesh -- the origins of the music that changed the world.

Look at this. These are the men of a time, of the glory days, of the most musical place on earth.

IF YOU WANT to see inside the soul of Louisianians of a certain age -- black and white, rich and poor -- if you want to see what makes up a goodly portion of my soul . . . formed in my parents' back bedroom in Baton Rouge, playing Fats Domino 78s on a 1949 Silvertone console, you're looking at it right here.

The Times-Picayune's Keith Spera describes the scene:

Dave Bartholomew straightens up and pulls on his gray suit jacket. He enters the home, the residence of an old friend he hasn’t seen in years.

Fats Domino.

Together, Bartholomew and Domino authored the richest chapter in New Orleans music, making rock ’n’ roll history along the way. Bartholomew “discovered” Domino, co-wrote his hits and produced the recordings that sold millions of copies in the 1950s and early ’60s.

Next week, Bartholomew and Domino are the subject of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s 15th American Music Masters series. A week of lectures, interviews and film screenings at the museum and a day-long conference at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland culminate with a Nov. 13 tribute concert featuring Toots & the Maytals, Lloyd Price, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Theresa Andersson, the Dixie Cups and many more. Bartholomew, 89, plans to travel to Cleveland for the concert; Domino, 82, is not making the trip.

In 1999, Bartholomew and Domino sat down with me for a joint interview prior to their separate performances at that year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Since then, they’ve had little contact.

In advance of the Hall of Fame festivities — only the third time the prestigious American Music Masters series has honored living musicians — WWL-TV news anchor Eric Paulsen conspired to reunite Bartholomew and Domino. Paulsen and Domino are buddies; it was Paulsen who spirited Domino to the Fair Grounds in an unsuccessful gambit to get him to perform as scheduled at the 2006 Jazz Fest.

Paulsen arranged for Bartholomew to visit Domino’s post-Hurricane Katrina home in Harvey for the first time on Oct. 5. The result of that effort airs on Thursday, Nov. 4 during WWL-TV’s 10 p.m. newscast.

(snip)

Domino’s infamous performance anxiety stems in part from doubts about his own abilities. He’ll tinker on a piano at home with family and friends, but his days of performing publicly are likely over.

With a camera rolling, he is reluctant even to play at home. But grudgingly, he takes a seat at a black baby grand. A Lifetime Achievement Grammy and a commemoration of his 1986 induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame rest atop the piano. Gold records hang above a couch fashioned from a classic pink Cadillac’s tail section. The couch was salvaged from his flooded Lower 9th Ward home, and restored.

Bartholomew hoists his trumpet to his lips. Domino touches the piano keys. Instinctively, his right hand reels off triplets as his left struts to a distinctly New Orleans rhythm.

Bartholomew encourages him: “Antoine, you still got it, man!”

“You still got it, too!”

They knock off the first verse of “The Fat Man,” Domino’s first single, recorded in December 1949 on North Rampart Street. Bartholomew reminisces about their initial encounter at the Hideaway Lounge in the 9th Ward.

Meanwhile, Domino picks up steam at the piano.

“Just get him started and he’ll never stop,” Bartholomew says. “Yeah! Yeah you right!”

Paulsen notes that the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame considers “The Fat Man” one of, if not the, first rock ’n’ roll songs.

“I’m glad they said that,” Bartholomew says. “Because Fats had been playing the blues for a long, long time. It was good that somebody actually recognized what we were doing.”

They slip into their old roles of producer and artist, with Bartholomew directing and coaching. “Why don’t we play ‘The Fat Man’ all the way?”

Domino plunges in. Bartholomew cheers him on: “That’s you! That’s you!” But Domino loses steam, and they don’t make it all the way.

Bartholomew spins tales set in Philadelphia and London, two stops for the barnstorming Domino band back in the day.

Paulsen wants them to do “I’m Walkin’”: “How’s that song go, Fats? I can’t remember.”

“How I start it, Dave?”

“A-flat,” Bartholomew says, humming the melody as a guide. Domino launches, then abandons “I’m Walkin’” in favor of “Blue Monday,” a favorite of his. He turns to the WWL cameraman and grins, a sign that he’s having fun.

“The city of New Orleans has been so good to us, spread our music all over the world,” Bartholomew says. “We’ve been blessed by God. At this age I still can play the trumpet. And you can still play the piano. Two blessings together.”

“I’m still hanging in there,” Domino agrees.

FROM THEIR lips to God's ear. And may we always be walkin' to New Orleans.

Your Daily '80s: Cold coffee. I blame Reagan.

Cold coffee.

Before Starbucks.

Came to Omaha.

The state of office coffee drinking, circa 1983, immortalized by University Television at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The weekly TV show was called Cityscape; the music was by Citydog.

Welcome back to when Omaha was New Wave.