Author: brucehhackett

Oh, we won’t give in, let’s go living in the past

Posted on by brucehhackett

We all say and write things we later regret.  We change our minds, we temper our more strident opinions, we gain a little wisdom and rethink our naive viewpoints.  We hope for forgiveness regarding our more egregious statements, and we pray that our more regrettable thoughts will be lost with the passage of time.

But for those of us who ever wrote under a byline, well, we must face facts:  Everything is still there in print to forever haunt us.  (These days, every email/text/twitter remark is apparently saved in data banks forever and ever, so I guess I have a lot of company now.)

From 1979 until 1994, I wrote as a staff writer and freelancer for the Sun Newspapers and Scene Magazine in Cleveland, Ohio, writing reviews of local concert appearances and new album releases.  For a rock music fanatic like me, it was a dream job.  Not only did I get to see the best bands, from great seats, for free, I was sometimes even paid for my time “working,” with free parking to boot.

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If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?

Posted on by brucehhackett

images-9“I’ve lost a lot of friends on this highway, so long, everyone, I watched them all sail into the distance, like a setting sun, they’d only just begun, and we just lost another one…”  Graham Nash, 2002

It’s a sad truth that the creative arts fields — music, film, literature — have had more than their fair share of gifted artists who have died prematurely.  In popular music in particular, a disturbing number of promising, successful talents have left us at a young age.  Considering that the average age of death in the US these days is nearly 79, anyone dying in their 40s or 50s has died young.  Those passing away in the 20s or 30s have died WAY too young.

In rock ‘n roll’s first couple of decades, it seemed to be an almost monthly occurrence that we’d lose a major player to drugs, or suicide, or a plane crash, or a bullet, or a terminal illness.  I don’t know about you, but for a while there, I got really tired of grieving for yet another musical hero who bit the dust for whatever reason.

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