ROCHESTER, ILL.--- Somewhere along the way in the mid-1990s I detoured from a Spring Training trip to visit deep gypsy Bob Waldmire at his Old Route 66 Visitor Center & Preservation Foundation in Hackberry, Az, just west of Flagstaff. Waldmire had purchased the Old Hackberry General Store (circa 1930) with money generated from his family's Cardinal Hill Farm in Rochester, Ill.
That was the first time Bob gave me his recipe for vegetarian chili.
I visited Bob earlier this week. He is dying from cancer. He is spending his final days in his converted 1966 Chevy bus/home on his family farm south of Springfield.
In the 1990s Bob concocted an Old Route 66 Chili Mix (cumin, Mexican chilies, onion, garlic, hot peppers, oregano, curry, coreander, paprika, salt, pepper, sugar and other spices). Variety is the spice of life.
Here's the hottest tip in the blogosphere:

Musician-band leader Paul Shaffer answered almost all of my questions during a recent hour-long interview to promote his memoir "We'll Be Here For The Rest of Our Lives (A Swingin' Showbiz Saga)" [Flying Dolphin/Doubleday, $26] with one exception.

I inquired how many songs he knows.
Twice.

"I know a lot of standards from my parent's generation because they had music playing in the house all the time," said Shaffer, who turns 60 on Nov. 28. "As far as rock n' roll goes, I have an intimate knowledge of 1962 through 1974. Then it stops. But within that narrow area, I know a lot."
As a hard core "Late Show with David Letterman" fan I'm always amazed at how quick Shaffer picks up a musical cue......

Slapstick comedian Soupy Sales has died.
His former manager reported that Sales died of multiple health problems Thursday night in a New York City hospice. Sales was 83.
Another bit of my childhood has been chipped away. I had to revisit this 1997 piece I did with the Soupman when he came Merrillville, Ind. to open for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons at the Star Plaza Theater.
Hope you chuckle at the cornball jokes. I apologize for my puns.

Life has been a bowl of cheeries for Soupy Sales.

Stop it.

The gags are going to fly like pies in the sky. I asked Soupy what people can expect when the 70-year-old pop culture icon opens for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

"Jokes," he answered in a call from his Manhattan home. "A woman goes to the doctor, the doctor says, `What's your problem? The woman says, `My water just broke, what should I do? The doctor says, `Get off my rug.' "

Ba-da-boom.

"What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is all the time? A widow."
Let's hang on. The soup's on........

My colleagues wanted me to ask filmmaker Micheal Moore about his "good riddance" to American newspapers in a September press conference at the Toronto Film Festival. Moore told the gathering that elsewhere in the world newspapers are supported first by readers and then by advertising. He argued that in the U.S. greed for advertising and profit margin supersedes quality journalism and grass root writers like Joseph Mitchell (my favorite).
Newspaper staffs are cut, news holes shrink.
Many forget that Moore, 55, began his career in print in Flint (Mich.) as the founder of the Flint Voice, an alternative newspaper. In 1986 he moved to San Francisco for a brief period to become editor at Mother Jones magazine........

FLINT, Mich.----The GM Flint Assembly plant opened in 1947, when Hal Newhouser won 17 games for the Detroit Tigers and modern homes were being built in Flint's sprawling neighborhoods.
Over the years Flint plant workers have made station wagons, pick up trucks and Chevelles. The Corvette was born in June, 1953 at Chevrolet Plant Number 35, a since-razed facility across the street from the plant. [Sticker price just over $3,000.]

4:45 p.m. Aug. 18

I visited Jim Dickinson on a confederate gray Sunday morning during the winter of 2002. He invited me into the pack-ratted front area of his trailer on a forgotten plot of land in North Mississippi.
A trailer. Perfect.
Mr. Dickinson was always going somewhere.
Our two-hour conversation included Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, Bob Dylan, Memphis wrestler Jerry Lawler (a faded photo of the wrestler hung above Mr. Dickinson's sofa), Oxford writer-fireman Larry Brown and Chicago ragtime player Two Ton Baker.
Mr. Dickinson played piano on the beautiful soundtrack of "Paris, Texas," produced the Replacements and the watershed reggae album "Toots in Memphis." Dickinson also brought the Rolling Stones to Muscle Shoals (Ala.) Studio where they recorded "Wild Horses." He played piano on Dylan's 1997 Grammy winner "Time Out of Mind."
Mr. Dickinson died early Aug. 15 in his sleep. He was on the mend from heart surgery at Methodist Extended Care Hospital. He was 67. Listen to "When You Wish Upon a Star," which he released earlier this year:
He still has places to see..........

7 p.m. July 29----
My interest in poetry was reborn earlier this year in part by the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of writers Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Plath also checked out by putting her head in an oven.

When Nicholas was in his 20s, Hughes told him this: "The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt....And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

That's poetry to live by.
Then I picked up an anthology of poems by St. Louis native Frederick Seidel, who writes in measured but wonderfully cockeyed steps.
Earlier this month, before the finals of the 12th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival.
at the Chicago Theater, I had middle school students from the Chicago writers group Nuestra Mezcla ("Our Mix") interview the Illinois All-Stars, a group of writers age 17-19 who emerged from Young Chicago Authors in Wicker Park,
The half-hour backstage session was riveting.
Listeners hung on to every word........

5:40 p.m. July 16----

Merle Haggard.
On the road again, just nine months after undergoing surgery for lung cancer.
He is standing at center stage in the 300-seat Northern Lights showroom at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino in Milwaukee. He wears a black cowboy hat and black fringe jacket with white cowboy boots. He is 72 years old. His face is as ruffled as a 48-starred Old Glory.
According to a New York Times report, this is the first tour of Haggard's career that he has performed without smoking tobacco or marijuana. It is Wednesday, July 15 and Haggard is opening for Loretta Lynn, another country legend. During a break between songs he tells the sellout audience that he has conferred with Lynn for the first time in a long while. They don't see each other much. Time is a crap shoot......

Just in case this stuff isn't enough for you, visit Dave Hoekstra.com

More music, more travel, and maybe more original writing.
Cheers.

   
    Imagine if John Lennon and Yoko Ono had their 'Bed-In For Peace' today.
    Celebrity journalists would soak it up. There would be no vacancy at the bed-inn.

    But when John and Yoko camped out in suite 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel (now Fairmont) in Montreal between May 26 and June 2, 1969 they drew about 150 journalists on a daily basis. The hipster hobknobbers were not your Sean Penn/Brad Pitt types. Celebrities hanging around the bed included comic Tommy Smothers and Chicago activist-comic Dick    Gregory.

    On June 1, 1969 Lennon wrote "Give Peace a Chance" on the spur of the moment in the suite. Smothers, Gregory, space cowboy Timothy Leary and local Hare Krishna temple members sang along in suite 1742. Cartoonist Al Capp was in the house. He did not sing.
The Fairmont Queen Elizabeth is offering fans to experience their own "Bed-In" with an "Imagine" package in the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Suite (1742)......

5 p.m. April 21----

Lists.
Everyone likes them.
Hall and Oates even had a hit with "Kiss on My List."
I love the way Bob Dylan becomes a listamaniac on "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and Hank Snow sang the all time travel list in "I've Been Everywhere," later popularized by Johnny Cash. Long time reader/Chicago artist Margie Lawrence recently suggested I list the best regional restaurants I ate at during a road trip down Highway 61 to Natchez, Miss., over to New Orleans and back up Highway 49 through the Gulf Coast.
I made a note of it:

1. Ella Kizzie's peach cobbler pie at the Center for Southern Folklore, Memphis, Tn. (www.southernfolklore.com GOOD FOOD).
The rich recipe is a secret, but an ample slice of homemade pie topped with nutmeg and ice cream is $4..................

1:45 p.m. April 16---

I had not learned of the death of Edwin Joseph Bocage, Sr. (a.k.a. Eddie Bo) until last week when I visited New Orleans. The visionary Crescent City piano player had a 1962 hit with "Check Mr Popeye," updated by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Little Richard recorded Bo's "Slippin' and Slidin' and Etta James had a hit with Bo's "Dearest Darling." His sense of wordplay in tunes like "Pass the Hatchet" are a precursor to hip-hop.
Bo died of a heart attack on March 18. He was 79.
In 2006 I talked Bo into taking a break from a busy New Orleans Jazz Festival weekend to meet me. I was on vacation, but I wanted to see Bo to preview his first-ever appearance in Chicago at the 2006 blues festival.
There was only one caveat: Bo insisted that the conversation take place on a Sunday morning near a small lake in Audubon Park........

"I come here to relax," Bo said while sitting on a park bench. "Music is a series of mathematical sounds that get to your emotions. It soothes people for a short while, anyway. If I didn't have music, I'd be like other people, jumping off bridges or whatever."
Katrina was still on his mind.
Bo looked around the park. It was quiet. Bo spoke in the rich, syncopated rhythms that underscore his music. His hit "Check Your Bucket" has become a staple of sets by Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans.
"Check your bucket?" Bo asked. "What does that mean? If your kisses fail to move her and your rap don't seem to groove her and your touch don't turn her on, you got troubles. You better check your bucket. That's what it means.
"Check yourself."

Bo checked in at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and was reared in Algiers and the 9th Ward. His remarkable resume included production credits with Irma Thomas, Art Neville and Al "Carnival Time" Johnson. He had his own 1962 hit with "Roman-Itis" and also wrote the 1963 Oliver Morgan smash "Who Shot the La La," which was a jazz fest standard until Morgan suffered a serious stroke. Bo cut a few sides with bandleader Paul Gayten for Chess Records and had many hits on the regional Ric and Cinderella labels out of New Orleans.
During the mid-1950s, Bo played in the New Orleans house band at the Club Tiajuana, a sister club of the legendary Dew Drop Inn near Charity Hospital. Soul singer Joe Tex lived above the Dew Drop Inn and Bo would catch Ray Charles when he passed through town. The Dew Drop Inn was open between 1938 and 1969. Little Richard was discovered there. It was one of the most important music clubs in the Deep South.

"People just don't get that type of experience anymore," Bo told me. "There's no hangout place. I was beginning. After the gig, there were at least 10, 15 trumpets, saxophones, maybe a dozen bass players. Everyone came to that one place because we couldn't go anywhere else. Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan. I couldn't keep up. Dinah would play as much piano as you wanted to hear. We enjoyed what we did because we passed things on to each other. We'd hang out until daybreak.
"Ray Charles was playing with Guitar Slim. One day, we were rehearsing in an outer room upstairs at the Dew Drop. Ray was playing piano and crying. I said, 'What's the matter?' He kept playing and then he paused for a minute and said, 'If I could only hear my mother pray again.' That moment put me in a different frame of mind musically, because what he played was from his heart. He was crying and playing. I can't begin to explain the experience."

Bo eyed the lake. Swift ripples were being formed by a lean second line. "Look at that," he declared. "That's a water moccasin. That is no water to play in."

In 1989 Bo studied at the Yaweh Institute in New Orleans. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune he said the institute "teaches en that we should seek love and distribute love, and seek to be moral." During the early 1990's Bo's early evening piano gig was a staple at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville in the French Quarter.

Bo was called "The Thelonious Monk of New Orleans R&B" due to his intricate exploration of rhythm schemes. He's also an accomplished carpenter. His family comes from a line of shipbuilders, and Bo rebuilt a former New Orleans doctor's office into the Check Your Bucket Cafe, which he ran with his sister Veronica Randolph for two years before the club was taken out by Hurricane Katrina. They did not reopen.

Bo equated carpentry with music.

He leaned over and told me, "You need a mathematical mind for both. You need to know the 16/18/20 beats. You need to know how to voice horns and strings and where to put them on the track. You don't have to write charts when you're dealing with minds that are good with rhythmic patterns."

Bo's studo was in a century-old New Orleans firehouse with separate rooms for guitar, drums and piano.

"During Katrina my roof decided it liked another neighborhood, so it left," he said. "I'm in the process of putting on another one." Bo lost his previous Tulane Avenue studio in a fire. "Katrina is going to bring a lot of things together," Bo continued. "And things have to come together to be successful. We've been divided in different areas for so long. Music and politics definitely don't go together. Musicians are free to observe what's going on and to try to give people some healing. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm just starting."

12:20 p.m. April 15---

We were hungry.
Adriana and I were camping on a mountaintop an hour south of Tupelo, Miss. along the Natchez Trace. It was around 10 p.m. and the heavens were clear. The sky was a star-filled skillet and the heat of possibility kept me warm against a cool breeze.
But were hungry for something. The boiled peanuts we picked up at the Shady Acres Fruit Stand on blue Highway 49 outside of Hattiesburg didn't do the trick. Adriana was longing for a can of Colt 45. I missed my Diet Mountain Dew.
We awoke early the next morning with empty stomachs. We exited the pristine trace around Tupelo and we agreed we would not stop until we found a Waffle House.
No Huddle House.
No Toddle House.
It had to be a Waffle House......

3:21 p.m. March 31---

MONTREAL, Quebec---Yoko Ono has made her first visit to Montreal since the 1969 Bed-In For Peace with John Lennon in Suite 1742 of Fairmont/The Queen Eiizabeth.
Ono appeared at a weird press conference Tuesday morning to talk up the exhibit "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko" opening Thursday at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The Fairmont suite is also being opened to the public and later tonight I'll be having drinks in 1742. The late Timothy Leary was part of the "Bed-In," where John and Yoko recorded "Give Peace a Chance." I suspect he will be hovering around the room.
The Fairmont has even created a martini in Yoko's name.....

2:30 p.m. Sat Mar. 28--

Aubrey Mayhew has checked out of the library.
Mayhew, 81, died last weekend at hospice care facility in Nashville.
He was one of the nation's biggest collectors of 1960s JFK memorabilia, with more than 300,000 Kennedy related items in his possession. He was so obsessive about Kennedy, he purchased the infamous Texas School Book Depository at a 1970 auction.

Mayhew also was the left-of-center producer at Little Darlin' Records.
The renegade country label sprang came from the big dreams of the 1960s. Bodacious songs such as Stonewall Jackson's "Pint of No Return," Groovy Joe Poovey's "He's in a Hurry (To Get Home to My Wife)" and Johnny Paycheck's "(Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill" were drenched in steel guitar, edgy vocals and pop-top bass.
I spoke with Mayhew in 2005 when Koch Records/Nashville reissued the Little Darlin'
catalog. Here's some excerpts from a very memorable conversation...........