It may be in a low voice or one that we can’t quite decipher. But there’s no way that any of these authors are going to be satisfied they had the last word just because some publisher somewhere said their manuscript had to be in by such and such a time and that was that. Right.

You’re telling me someone had the cojones to tell, say, a Mark Twain that he was out of time, he had to have his completed manuscript in, like now. That would be a conversation I’d have liked to have seen.

I can tell you from personal experience that just because you’ve sent a manuscript in, seen the proofs, OK’d them and are waiting for your book to arrive, you don’t think of things you could have added. Or deleted.

Henry David Thoreau, as usual, took things to the extreme, actually making hand-written corrections in his copy of “Walden.” We know this because somebody got ahold of Thoreau’s personal copy and marveled at all the corrections inside it. That’s pretty devoted, don’t you think?

There was a mistake - not mine - in my “Diamond Duels” book on Page 182 where it says [“Insert 15.1 _ Jim_Wilson here.] And there’s a baseball card of Jim Wilson on 183. (He made the book because he held Ted Williams to a 3-for-17 (.177) average in the 1957 season when Ted almost hit .400 again (.388.) I’m sure Ted had something to say about that. Probably couldn’t print it, though.

So that’s why I say these books -I’m flanked on either side by bookcases - are talking. I actually encourage it. Well, the truth is, I couldn’t stop it.

That’s why you need to be careful or at least thoughtful in loading up your bookcases with books that can stand one another’s company. For example, Bono’s “Surrender,” a sincere, deeply felt examination of his life in and out of U2 is adjacent to Britta Lee Shain’s “Seeing The Real You At Last,” a scabrous tell-all about a female groupie/fan who saved Bob Dylan’s cigarette butts, among other things. It sort of balances things off.

To make her feel more comfortable, I have her wedged next to a marvelous collection of Dylan essays “Do You, Mr. Jones,” C.P. Lee’s “Judas” about Dylan’s 1966 World Tour, “The Dylan Compendium,” another essay collection and Michael Gray’s monumental “Song And Dance Man” - the book I simply “forgot” to return to the Milford, New Hampshire library, fifty some years ago. So far, Mr. Bookman from “Seinfeld” hasn’t tracked me down yet.

I’m quite sure there is a lively conversation going on at all hours between the two books immediately below Shain and company on Shelf Two. That’s between Bob Mehr’s masterful, if a bit skin-crawly “Trouble Boys,” the at times harrowing story of The Replacements and Keith Richards’ extraordinarily vivid “Life” where, in Chapter Two, Keith tells us that for several years, he only slept on average twice a week. So you know he has a lot to talk about including Paul Westerberg stealing his Rolling Stones’ chords. (Which Westerberg freely admits.)

For ballast, I put the two Clinton Heylin Dylan bios next to each other on Shelf Three, with a hearty Rolling Stone collection of Dylan interviews (that probably contradict a lot of Heylin) and then, acclaimed historian Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan In America,” and Greil Marcus’s “can-you-believe-it?” an entire book on one song, “Like A Rolling Stone” in which Marcus, who got to listen to the entire Dylan recording sessions, correctly notes that of the twenty-or-so tries of the song, they only got all the way through once. Take Four. They didn’t know it, of course, and kept on going. Thanks for that, Greil! That’s research, ain’t it?

So, it’s understandable that Wilentz and Marcus would have a lot to say to one another, probably about Heylin, who has always presented himself as God’s Gift To Bob Dylan. Hahahaha.

Back up on Shelf Two, there are seven books in a row that are just classics, if you ask me and it’s my bookcase, right? That’s Bob’s “Chronicles, Vol. 1,” (which yes, I believe HE WROTE) then Marcus’s surprisingly recapitulational “Folk Music” - this is a guy who has really thought a LOT about all this stuff and brings it all together - Peter Guralnick’s “Careless Love,” Part Two of his masterful Elvis bio, then Guralnick’s early book “Lost Highway” (written before he knew too much) and then, Part One of his Elvis “Last Train To Memphis” right next to his book on Sam Phillips, who founded Sun Records in Memphis. The logical place for that was right next to Dylan’s strange - even for him - “The Philosophy Of Modern Song.” Bob wrote the whole damn book in Second Person. “You did that, you did that…” According to what I read on the Internet, there are other writers who’ve written a whole book that way. Leave it to Bob to find an uncompromising way to have his say. I think he wrote that book, too.

Being a former English teacher, I had to keep the literature books stuff separate. So on Bookcase Left, I have Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” right next to Lester Bangs’ “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” of course. Bangs died early before he could get around to writing a novel as classic as Heller’s but he might have had it in him. For fun, I put Lester’s book next to Dylan’s “Tarantula” which if it wasn’t drug-influenced, anyone trying to read it will wish they were drug-influenced.

I’m not enough of a medical expert to know if women can get a hernia but the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich might have come awfully close in writing a piece explaining/justifying “Tarantula” for this gigantic Bob Dylan book authorized by the Dylan Center in Tulsa that I got at Sam’s Club. Really.

That’s right on Shelf Three, Bookcase Left, next to the most unreadable Dylan book ever - “Bob Dylan Approximately (that’s an understatement)” by Stephen Pickering who writes about Dylan’s Jewishness (or something like that.)

On Shelf Two, I have Ron Powers’ very readable Mark Twain bio (more so than Ron Chernow’s!), next to a small book of E.L. Doctorow essays, including a great one on Ernest Hemingway. Those two stand next to a well-worn paperback copy of A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” his masterwork on boxing in the 1950’s that I bet I’ve read more than just about any other sports-related book. That stands next to Hemingway’s posthumous “A Moveable Feast” since he writes so lovingly of Paris and Liebling loved Paris, especially its food, so very much. Gotta do things right.

There are a few other books that I move around from time to time, just because I know how restless these books can get. On Shelf Three, Bookcase Right is Jimmy McDonough’s wonderful “Shakey” about Neil Young, for example. It’s such a lively, damn readable book that Neil tried to stop after cooperating for so much of it, it won’t be tamed - not unlike its topic. Writing my own Neil Young book - due out next year, I guess - I could relate just a bit to what Jimmy went through.

Another book like that, also at the other end of Shelf Three is Bill Flanagan’s “At The End Of The World” which is an absolutely marvelous glimpse of U2 on their ground-breaking “Zoo TV Tour.” Flanagan was close to the band from the start and they trusted him, which made for some interesting reading and the kind of thing you’d want on a bottom shelf, just to keep things grounded in reality.

I especially loved how he ended the book, getting Bono’s crusty father Bob to share a deeply moving (and religious!) letter the young Bono wrote him. Then this:

“You mentioned God’s plan,” he tells Flanagan. “There’s something I’d forgotten that my sister-in-law reminded me of recently. Years ago, before either of the boys were born, my wife and I went down to Sligo for a week. She went to a fortune-teller and the fortune-teller told my wife she would have two children and one of them would have the initial “P” (Bono’s real name is Paul) and he would be famous in whatever life he took up…

The memories kept coming…

“I remember when he was about three, only a toddler. He was out in the back garden. He went over to a flower with a bee. He put out his finger, lifted the bee up, talked to the bee, and put it back again. He probably doesn’t remember it. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but I can remember to this day the horror of my wife and myself. He could go flower to flower, picking up bees and never get stung.”

So, you can see there’s a lot for all these books to talk about. Yes, I have lots of books on music, some on literature, boxing, sports. And yes, some Hunter Thompson, too. You can’t ignore him. He wouldn’t stand for that. I’m sure he would be setting off fireworks somewhere.

There are also quite a few baseball books, some on Ted Williams, who was one of the world’s great swearers, which I made sure to put on the same shelf with Twain’s stuff. You may remember Twain said “Swearing provides a relief denied even to prayer.” He and Ted would have had quite the chat.

Pretty blue, I imagine.

Author John Nogowski has been writing a Substack since May of 2024. He’s currently working on a book about Bruce Springsteen, has contributed to the Hartford Courant for several years and recently celebrated having over 1,000 subscribers. All his books are available on Amazon or by order at your bookstore except the Neil Young book, which will be out - they tell me - sometime in 2027. Fingers crossed.

Hi folks, I’m back on the Stack after a week’s respite in the heat and humidity of Jacksonville, watching my son steer the Triple A Syracuse Mets to four victories over the Jumbo Shrimp. And now, evidently, I’m writing to a millenary audience. Hey, I don’t write a Substack for a week and suddenly, my subscribers grow to over 1,000! Funny, isn’t it. “All you had to do, Nogo, was shut up.”

Looking back, it’s amazing how often someone might have had occasion to offer that very comment throughout my 72 years, 11 months and 21 days on this planet. All timing, isn’t it?

So, what was it like watching all that baseball? As I’ve said before about NASCAR and sex, they’re both much better in person. There are those who suggest the sport is boring but no less an expert than the famed sportswriter Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith once noted “baseball was dull only to those with dull minds.” Or something like that.

In my mind, the game remains the most unpredictable, continually surprising and intricate of all the major sports. And the more I read and write about baseball, the less it helps you anticipate what a season will be like. It was fascinating to be there watching, even in the nearly unbearable heat.

Here he is, the vacationing Substacker, to quote David Puddy: “Gotta support the team.”

Here I am on my 713th post, writing to an audience of at least 1,000! Hello, friends! Welcome! If you’re new to this Stack, let me explain. Since my focus last week was mostly on baseball along with reading a couple of books (more on that later) and sweating, what I tried to do with my Notes was pull up something different every day and put it in a Note.
You know, the idea was resurrect a few pithy Substacks that maybe new readers hadn’t seen yet or ones I hoped were fun or intriguing or chatty. One thing I’ve noticed as I head into my third year on the Stack, folks tend to stay in their lanes. I just can’t do that. I wouldn’t know what lane to start in. And by not writing last week, that really hit home to me. I had a lot to pick from.

If you looked at what went down in my Notes, here I was going from my junior high football career, to a great, most undiscovered Paul Westerberg song, to Charles Dickens’ remarkable popularity to my surprising - and delightful - apparent ability to teach Shakespeare to high school kids to a Kurt Vonnegut blessing, a brief nod to the late Jeff Beck (BTW: finished the book “Blow By Blow”! More on that coming) and then there’s the one time I was able to fix those principals who try to find ways to nail their teachers with their lame-ass “Marzano Evaluation Sheet” by outsmarting them with a killer once-in-a-lifetime-assignment on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener” (really cool, weird story) - hey, that’s a pretty diverse field. And before that, there was Johnny Cash, Muhammad Ali, Bob Cousy, Henry Thoreau and The Edge (from U2).

I guess the message is, if you’re a stay-in-your-lane person, you might wonder where in the name of St. Peter I’m going with this Substack. I wonder the very same thing. I don’t know that I could really answer it. I don’t think it’s that strange to go from Ernest Hemingway to Bryan Ferry to Ted Williams, those are all characters I’ve read (and written) a lot about. I think this ended up being an advantage when I wound up teaching English classes because I couldn’t help but go against the grain, it was built in. I had to go somewhere else.

That meant, of course, you had to get some buy-in from your students. “Hey, this is NOT like any other English class I’ve been in, what gives?” When then-Tallahassee Community College’s Dr. Sam Cunningham interviewed me about teaching 1101 many years ago, he asked what would I do?

And I blurted, “Well, it sure wouldn’t be like my high school English classes. They were boring.” Which, even though it might have been a stupid thing to say, I think got me the job and started me down the immortal Path to Education. I had to teach these kids not just to write but to really read, too. I had to find a way that would work for me - and them. So if it was U2 or Bob Dylan besides Shakespeare or Raymond Carver or Laurel & Hardy, strap yourself in.

I remember being in one of my early classes and talking to my wide-eyed students, asking them “Why wouldn’t you want to know something?” I still think that’s a good question. And evidently, one that I hope informs these 713 pieces on Substack.

No, I can’t tell you where we’ll wind up, like that Vonnegut joke - “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.” Which, of course, reminds me of that great Randy Newman song, “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” I wonder if Newman knew that joke? See, Vonnegut to Randy Newman. Not that hard. Sorry, folks, it’s how this brain works. Or doesn’t.

A while back, a Substacker named Benjamin Antoine wrote this: “Every time someone reads your writing, they’re choosing to spend their time with you. That’s something to be grateful for.”

A thousand! Damn!

Author John Nogowski recently found a whole box of CDs that he hadn’t listened to in years. How cool! He’s written three editions of a book on Bob Dylan (“Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”) a forthcoming book on Neil Young (“Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”), two books on baseball “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and a book on his experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling Florida minority high school. He’s written a free Substack since May of 2024 and regularly contributes to the Hartford Courant. All of his books are available on Amazon. He welcomes all his new readers and is working on a book on Bruce Springsteen, who he predicts “some day will be big!”

I’m sure there is a marketing term for it. And I don’t want to know what it is. I do know it works. At least it did with me.

With the move north and all, I recently came upon an entire box of my CDs that I purchased (and honestly, don’t remember buying most of ‘em) when I ALREADY HAD THE ALBUM. In vinyl.

Yes, folks, this is the kind of thing rock and roll fans do and it helps keep the record companies and, we presume the artists (who surely do better than 14 cents on a $25 sale) in cars, houses and drugs.

The reason I bring up Charles Dickens is this. He was a marketing genius along with being one of our greatest writers. He did things like write two novels at the same time, serialize them monthly in newspapers that sold out all over London - why, he had the whole city’s attention, the hands on Big Ben wouldn’t even move until the next installment came out - then, once he was finished with the novels, he’d publish the whole deal - all the stuff he’d already written - and THAT would sell out, too. Or pretty close.

This, in principle, is what the Polydor record company did with Eric Clapton’s (or Derek and The Dominos) “Layla and Assorted Love Songs,” a double album that came out originally in November of 1970. Which, as an Eric Clapton fan, I immediately bought.

Next came a box set of the Layla Sessions, which included the double album as well as studio jams between Clapton and his special recruit for this album, the great Duane Allman. Clapton and Allman in the studio jamming? I had to hear that. What guitar fan wouldn’t? So I bought that. In cassette, I think.

So, in my teaching days, I had music in my classroom all the time and had a CD player. And you never know when you’re going to want to hear “Layla” again. So I bought the double CD. (Which I suspect is my real motive behind having all these “doubles.”)

Next came “Derek and the Dominoes, The Layla Sessions, the 20th Anniversary Edition,” all the same tracks but, uh, “remastered.” The big selling point. Same stuff. And on we go.

Now, I’m not picking on Polydor. All the record companies do this sort of thing. There’s “The Band,” the brown cover classic album on Capitol, which came out in 1969 and the re-release in 2000 that included nice liner notes from Rob Bowman and seven bonus tracks, alternate takes of “Whispering Pines” and “Jemima Surrender,” a new performance of “King Harvest,” and a few other tracks. Of course, I bought it.

Speaking of Eric Clapton, another double dip was “Eric Clapton’s Rainbow Concert” which was a show Clapton, along with Pete Townshend and other notables did in an attempt to get Clapton off heroin to stay, which worked. (Instead, he later took up drinking - and hey, don’t write me: I love Eric Clapton!)

The original album had just six songs and though it was far from his best, understandably, in 1995, Polydor put out a 14-song CD, fleshing out the rest of the show. Bought it. Listening to it now. They opened with “Layla.” Gave it a good try.

Having seen Clapton twice on the tour that followed in 1974, he was weak and had to be helped off the Boston Garden stage at the end of each show. I was just glad the guy was still alive and even if the album he was touring to support, “461 Ocean Boulevard” had some nice songs but not much Clapton flash, hey, we still had him around.

Speaking of The Band, one re-release that I do recommend (and yes, it was in this box, too) is “The Band: Live At The Academy Of Music 1971” the same show that was carved up for their terrific “Rock Of Ages” double album, which had 17 tracks - NOT in the order they were played at the original show. The 2013 re-release added eight Band tracks and, get this, the four encore tracks with one Bob Dylan! And this time, instead of just telling us it was “remastered” (how would we know, really?) they got Bob Clearmountain to remix the album. And he did an amazing job. It sounds fantastic.

And yes, I admit that I bought the “Rock of Ages” double CD once I saw the Dylan cuts. Yes, the Capitol release BEFORE this Bob Clearmountain one. So, if you’re counting - and The Band’s accountants surely were - that’s three times I bought essentially the same material.

Since I’m writing for friends, I trust that my profligate ways with these recordings, whether in CD or vinyl (let’s not discuss cassettes) don’t make me sound like an idiot. There are so many great CDs in this box, I’m sure I’ll be revisiting and writing about many of them, lots of which I haven’t heard in decades. That should be fun.

And, listening to Pete Townshend introduce the band on that January night 53 years ago at the Rainbow: “Eric Clapton on third rhythm guitar,” all that comes to mind is something Bruce Springsteen used to say on stage near the end of his three-hour shows.

His shirt usually ripped open, his bare chest soaked with sweat, Clarence Clemons trying to hold him back, Bruce would look out at the audience, crazed look on his face and scream “I’m just a prisoner of rock and roll.”

I know how you feel, Bruce.

Here’s the box from whence I speak. Lots to look forward to.

When he isn’t buying the same album a second or third time, author John Nogowski has been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and has published several books, including three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a forthcoming “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due in 2027, two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” a deep dive into the game’s historic pitcher-hitter matchups, “Last Time Out” a collection of stories about the final games of baseball’s greatest players and “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” a book about his experiences teaching Twain’s classic at a struggling Florida minority high school. They are all available on Amazon.

That was where Nashua High head baseball coach Charles “Buzz” Harvey shipped all the sophomores who didn’t figure in his plans for the season. It was sort of a baseball purgatory. You weren’t on the varsity - didn’t really expect to be. Nashua High was a huge school, my graduating class was over 1,000, supposedly one of New England’s largest high schools. Or so we were told.

This was not exactly comforting news to the 16-year-old me, who had recently been bitten by the baseball bug. Sure, I played all the time in our neighborhood but I had never played Little League - there was no such thing in Brookline. Now, I was just one of a couple dozen hopefuls, trying to make the team at this enormous school.

For some of my teammates, who had junior high success or maybe a brother who’d preceded them, these guys had played Little League together and knew one another. And with the coaches, there was the chance of some familiarity, some name recognition. “Ulbin. I coached your brother, Gary.” None for me. I was just a kid from Brookline, twenty five minutes out of town, often hitchhiking home after practice.

So when Buzz’s trusted assistant Tony Marandos, who we mostly knew as NHS’s basketball coach for many years, gathered us together, I wondered, what would it take to make the team? He was an older man with wobbly knees and walking was difficult for him. He was soft-spoken, never yelled, unlike just about every other coach I’d seen.

How did I match up? What can you tell from batting practice? Or catching fly balls? How was Marandos going to pick his team? When he picked guys to play positions for a scrimmage, did that mean they had the job? Nobody knew me. And really, I didn’t know, either.

But I did notice one thing. Watching us throw from the outfield, it seemed as if I had the best arm of the bunch. That was, as the scouts would say, my No. 1 tool. Maybe my only one. I fielded fine - easy chances - and I swung the bat as well as anyone in batting practice. But nothing that would separate me, I didn’t think.

So what do you do in a situation like that? I’m not sure what the recommended remedy would be but for me, it was this. I lied. On Day Two or Three, I walked up to Coach Marandos and told him I pitched. He smiled.

“You pitch, huh? OK. Let me see you throw.”

Problem. Pitchers, at least in those days, had to have a windup. Trying to improvise one in the middle of a major lie, well, let’s just say it made things immediately clear.

Marandos just smiled. “We’ve got to work on that delivery,” he said. Then walked away.

What did that mean? For me, it meant one thing. Now, I was a pitcher. I didn’t have a windup and hadn’t thrown in a game yet and had to teach myself a curveball by bringing the Sports Illustrated book on baseball to the Brookline Ballpark and figuring it out by myself. But now, I was a pitcher.

And it sounds corny to say it, especially now when I think of how little went into that long-ago decision, but it changed my life. Now, I was an athlete, part of a team and so loved sports that it became my world, becoming a sportswriter for 25 years, writing books about the damn game and much later, a dad and coach, watching my son go all the way to the major friggin’ leagues. If there had been a way to spin the dial ahead that afternoon in the Holman Stadium outfield, there’s no way I could have imagined what ended up happening.

Over the next few practices, Marandos worked with me, teaching me to how to use my whole body to throw, a big leg kick and follow-through, adding velocity and I hoped, accuracy to my every pitch. It was a pitch now, not a throw any more.

Guess who was the starter for our season opener? And who came within an out of throwing a no-hitter against Fitchburg, my mother’s old hometown, while she was watching in her Impala across the street.

“I was talking to the bus driver,” she told me on the way home. “And he said, “I like the way that kid was pitching for Nashua.”

“That’s MY SON,” she said as if the bus driver’s praise was more important than my one-hit shutout. Moms.

It became a one-hitter when our left fielder, Jim Robbins, suddenly decided he wanted to talk to our shortstop and was playing way in, when what should have been the last out - a fly ball to left field that, naturally, dropped right where he should have been playing.

I was so pissed, I struck out the next batter on four pitches. It should have been three but the ump missed the 0-2 heater at the knees. I snapped my glove at the throw back from my catcher after that miss and took the sign - though I didn’t really need one at that moment - and cut loose with the same exact pitch, about ten MPH faster.

“STRIKE THREE!”

For the only time all season, Coach Tony Marandos sprung those creaky knees off the bench, stood up and let out a yell.

“That’s the way to pitch!”

I blushed. Can pitchers blush?

A couple years later, pitching for first-year coach Charlie Mellen’s Nashua High varsity, now a senior, I was the first guy out of the bullpen in our second game of the season - our ace threw a complete-game no-hitter in the opener - hurriedly bringing me in on a chilly Sunday afternoon with us trailing, the bases loaded and two outs. The batter at the plate had hit a 400-foot triple in his previous at bat. No pressure.

I wound and threw and Manchester Memorial’s Stan Pinkus hit a mile-high popup to first. He was almost to second base by the time it was caught. We came up and got seven runs. I got the win. Pitchers do that sort of thing, you know.

Author John Nogowski’s two baseball books, “Last Time Out” about the MLB finales of the game’s greatest players (and my son’s MLB debut with the St. Louis Cardinals!) and “Diamond Duels” a deep dive into baseball’s greatest pitcher-hitter matchups. Both are available on Amazon or by order at your local bookstore.

Happening upon a remarkable Pete Erskine interview for Sounds Magazine with Bryan Ferry from January of 1974, what was amazing to me, was the lead singer and songwriter for Roxy Music, then just three albums into his career, seemed to have a vision for where his career was going to go - and that was exactly where it went. Was it really a vision or an apparition? It’s hard to know exactly what else to call it.

It was as if, at 28, Ferry could see it all unfolding before him, the tuxedos, the wide swings in instrumentation and experimentation, his unique singing style and lyrical approach, the elegance, rock in a ballroom, He could already imagine the highly original, divergent path that he, as a solo artist, - and Roxy Music - was going to take en route to their eventual spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Reading the interview now, more than half a century later, Ferry’s grasp of popular music and where he wanted to go - and did - still surprises.

While as a romantic obsessive - is there any other kind? - he would most often go on to write about love, lust, relationships, romance, betrayal, all that fun stuff - he would, on occasion, take aim at something bigger - like the remarkable “Mother Of Pearl.”

The first Roxy Music song that hooked me was “Out Of The Blue” off “Country Life.” The sound was exotic, creative, different from anything else out there. I got out of work, walked over to Paperback Booksmith and bought the album, went home and played it for days. Bryan Ferry’s music, about as far from standard American music (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, The Band) as you can get, somehow drew me in. When they came to Boston on the “Siren” tour the next year, I had to be there.

But all those years ago, Ferry seemed to understand that he could go somewhere else. There was room for him and his music.

“I’ve never been much of a “message” person,” he told Erskine. ”I’ve always tried to pick flaws in songs like that. I never liked the old protest songs of the 60’s so I’ve never felt capable of being a message carrier - I would never dream of stating a cause.

“I like to try and create atmospheres and moods and they tend to get more literary because there are so few musical lyricists I like, apart from the old style like Gershwins and Cole Porter. I feel I have more in common with them in a way in the craftsmanship side of the the thing than with contemporary pop writers. You often get the feeling that they’ve developed some very nice music and they get in the studio and say “Well, let’s get a few words to fill in the gaps then.”

With “Mother Of Pearl,” a song Ferry later explained he wrote on bass, he does something quite different, asking questions about “life’s inner meaning,” his own rock and roll lifestyle and, of course, love. As he sings, “If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world, it’s pretty hard to find.”

Always allusive - and elusive! - with clever asides and punctuations thrown in for effect, it was rock aimed at an intelligent, sophisticated, well-read audience, something Ferry, way back in 1974, seemed to know was out there. And he was going to find them.

“Lyrics have become more and more important all the time,” he continued. “On the first album, they were obviously thought about but I didn’t consider them great poetry which is why they’ve never appeared on any of the sleeves. As that album was a hit and as the audience gets bigger and bigger, I feel the need to make the lyrics more important…I dunno, a lot of musicians have sort of gone straight from school into being professional musicians and they haven’t really lived through much other than being musicians on the road. They probably have very little to write about and even if they do, they may not be able to articulate it in any kind of original way.”

That was what Ferry did with “Mother Of Pearl,” - lyrics that really aren’t like anyone else’s. Literate. Witty. Heading where rock had not gone yet.

Like here:

Well I’ve been up all night (Again?) Party time wasting It’s too much fun
Then I step back thinking of life’s inner meaning and my latest fling

It’s the same old story all love and glory, it’s a pantomime
If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world
It’s pretty hard to find

or

Divine intervention aways my intention so I take my time
I’ve been looking for something I’ve always wanted but was never mine
But now I’ve seen that something just out of reach, glowing
Very holy grail Oh Mother of Pearl, Lustrous lady of a sacred world.

Nobody wrote like that. That was intentional. Somehow, he saw that audience out there for him and his band. It was as if he heard the siren song off in the distance and like the romantic obsessive, he had no choice. He went chasing after it.

Author John Nogowski writes often about popular music on his Substack, now in Year Three. He’s written several books, including three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a Neil Young similar volume due in 2027, two books on baseball - his son is a former major-league first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and a book on his experience as a classroom teacher “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling Florida minority high school. He’s a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. All his books are available on Amazon or by order at your local bookstore.

Working on a companion volume on Bruce Springsteen. (I think he’s going to be big!)

“An Editor’s Burial.” Oooh, it would be wrong to admit that might have been something that crossed my mind occasionally throughout a 25-year newspaper career, wouldn’t it?

I like the way Mark Twain, whom I wrote about yesterday, expressed similar sentiments on that matter. “I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all other recreations and attend it.” That’s about the way I felt about most editors. (And maybe the way they felt about me.)

Actually, “An Editor’s Burial” is a curious little volume that I happened to spot in Savannah in E. Shaver Books (an exceptional bookstore!) recently. And it has a strange little history. The filmmaker Wes Anderson, known for his quaint, stylish and off-beat films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom) made a movie about putting a weekly magazine (a-la - The New Yorker) together and the various and peculiar ways these exotic characters - writers - assemble the stories and for Anderson, he decides to have it all take place in Paris. (He explains he’s had an apartment there for years “and any time I walk down a street I don’t know well, it’s like going to the movies.”) Oh.

The resulting film, “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s homage to The New Yorker. “The French magazine in the film, “ he explains, “obviously is not The New Yorker - but it was, I think, totally inspired by it. When I was in 11th grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what were labeled “periodicals.”

They were copies of The New Yorker. And he was hooked. “When I went to the University of Texas in Austin,” he explains in an interview that opens - and explains - the book. “I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library because you could find things like a J.D. Salinger story that hadn’t been collected. I somehow managed to find out that UC Berkeley was getting rid of a set, forty years of bound New Yorkers, and I bought them for $600.”

So, “An Editor’s Burial” (a line from the film) is a collection of articles that mostly originally appeared in The New Yorker from some of the magazine’s most noted writers. We’re talking about writers like James Thurber, Lillian Ross, James Baldwin, Brendan Gill, Mavis Gallant, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell and my personal favorite, A. J. Liebling.

Liebling, who I came to know from his marvelous book on boxing - “The Sweet Science” - contributes two pieces on his true pastime - eating. “Memoirs Of A Feeder In France: A Good Appetite” which are delightful and somewhat mind - and stomach - boggling. He writes enviously of a friend’s lunch “of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pink in rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne…” I’m reaching for the Tums already.

Lillian Ross, whom I’ve written about before and her famous Hemingway profile “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?,” is also included here, offering a brief profile of (at the time) a noted French comedian. She finds a way to bring him to life, as she did, famously, with Hemingway on his 1950 visit to New York. (I’ve attached that Substack from February 2025 at the bottom here.) She finds ways to get her subjects talking in surprising ways.

Jacques Tati tells Ross that the comedian who makes him laugh is the late W.C. Fields. “He admires (Charlie) Chaplin but for the most part Chaplin doesn’t make him laugh. “Chaplin is full of ideas,” Tati said, “I am so busy watching the working out of his beautiful ideas that I never find time to laugh.”

There are also several reminiscences of the legendary two editors of The New Yorker, Harold Ross and William Shawn that give you some sense of what it must have been like to work there. It’s probably fair to say that just about any serious American writer aspires to write for The New Yorker and reading these reflections on those two men who edited the magazine, you get a sense of the pressure, their lofty expectations and the stress that goes along with trying to put out a superbly written magazine each and every week.

As for the film, “The French Dispatch,” which stars Bill Murray as the magazine’s editor. Arthur Howitzer Jr., I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. But I will. Reading “An Editor’s Burial” is the next best thing.

If you missed my Hemingway-Ross Substack from 2025, here it is.

It was a full quarter-century ago that the estimable George Saunders wrote “The United States Of Huck” as the Introduction to a new edition of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In full disclosure, Mr. Saunders was kind enough to allow me to reprint his superb Introduction in my own book, “Teaching Huckleberry Finn.” It was something I used in my classroom as part of our discussion of Twain’s book and a way to help my students, almost all African-American, examine the many sides of his controversial novel.

His words - “We got Twain when we got him” - rang in my reddening ears as I sat in Thomasville’s “The Bookshelf” the other day, reading Ruth Franklin’s “Twain Town U.S.A.”, an essay that appeared in the latest issue of “The American Scholar.” A day earlier, I’d read a lengthy - but fascinating -- story in Harper’s Magazine by John Jeremiah Sullivan called “Twain Dreams.” Mr. Clemens died in 1910 but his words haven’t.

Mark Twain certainly doesn’t need some cranky old retired teacher sitting in his den coming to his defense. But I want to do it anyway. Judging a 141-year-old book - and its author - by contemporary standards and values and prejudices seems, to me at least, wrong-headed and unfair. Now, I recognize Ms. Franklin certainly is an accomplished literary critic and “The American Scholar” always seems to have something worth thinking and talking about in every issue.

But her “Twain Town U.S.A.” seemed to take aim at Twain and the undeniable cultural impact of both the “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as if some of the built-in wrongs of American society could be pinned to these novels. That’s how I read it, anyway.

Her story takes place in Hannibal, Missouri on the Fourth of July on National Tom Sawyer Day, now in its 70th year, where the town has what seems to be a fierce competition to name a “Tom Sawyer” and “Becky Thatcher,” after characters in Twain’s novel. And Twain, as Franklin notes, is big business in Hannibal.

There’s the Mark Twain Boyhood Home, The Mark Twain Cave, “the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.””

Of course, this is way over the top but can we blame Twain for that? And how are we supposed to remember literature from that time? For what it brought us or what it didn’t?

Franklin notes Twain’s complex history. “A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message.

“At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel “James,” a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people.”

I had to read that again. “his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people.” It was written 141 years ago. To have the most popular writer in America, just twenty years after the Civil War, take on racism - and let’s face it, that is the central topic of the book - didn’t that take considerable artistic courage? This was just 20 years after the Civil War, with veterans on both sides still alive and, we presume, reading.

Should we have expected Twain to be able to “adequately present the experience of Black people?” In 1885? Were there a lot of American authors at that time willing to take on the issue of race? I must have missed that chapter in American Lit.

Franklin’s assessment of Everett’s “James,” a re-telling of Huck Finn, this time from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave, “shows that interest in Twain remains high.” That’s one way to look at it.

Another might be to suggest it’s literary revenge, of a sort. “I’m going to bring back Jim and, uh, I’ll make him an intellectual.” In other words, Twain was really selling Jim short, so Everett took the ball and really ran with it. As Sullivan notes in Harper’s “Twain Dreams,” that’s a bit much.

“The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd….”

Whatever your thoughts on Twain, his use of the “N-word” (for authenticity, in my view - that’s how people spoke then) he clearly and I think bravely depicted Jim as uneducated but nurturing, caring and loyal. Was it a perfect portrait? No. But does the reader, particularly then, come away from the book, thinking Jim is the hero, the best person in the novel? Let me say that again. Particularly then.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think that was Twain’s intent. In 1885! And in spending a dozen years in a classroom teaching the novel to an audience of young African-Americans, it worked for many of them. One student wrote me: “Mr. Nogo: Huck is the brother I never had.” Another student skipped his lunch, walked all the way across the campus to ask me one question. “I’ve gotta know, Mr. Nogo. Will Jim get to Cairo today?”

There are other issues with “Twain Town, U.S.A.” that seem wrong-headed. When Franklin describes the engagement scene between Tom and Becky, “During our conversations, I asked some of the Beckys whether they were troubled by the gender dynamics, but no one took the bait.” The “gender dynamics”? What would Twain have done with that phrase?

Franklin also discovers a one-room museum opened by G. Faye Dant called “Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center” that explains Hannibal’s Black history, which, her “Twain Town, U.S.A.” makes clear isn’t something citizens spend much time with.

“People that like American literature … are some of our brightest people,” G. Faye Dant tells me. “But they go right over there to Huck Finn’s house and don’t walk across the street to Jim’s place. A lot of people don’t want to make that connection.”

Is that all that surprising? You’re in Hannibal and if you’re there, chances are you came to find out about Mark Twain, not America’s unforgivable sin, slavery. There is no getting around it, slavery happened. And I don’t know that we’ll ever get over it.

When I drove to the South from Michigan thirty-four years ago, I remember going around a corner in Georgia and coming upon an empty cotton field. And I choked up. “My God. Slavery happened here.” I had to pull over.

As Sullivan notes in closing “Twain Dreams” he quotes the American historian Arthur G. Petit: “Twain befriended Frederick Douglass, financed a black artist’s apprenticeship in Paris, and supported several black students through Yale Law School. As Mark Twain he lectured in all-black churches, championed the cause of Booker T. Washington, wrote blistering essays about atrocities committed against blacks, and gave large doses of dignity and power to three of the outstanding black characters in nineteenth-century literature. He began his career as a segregationist, turned himself into a champion of interracial brotherhood, and ended his life as a prophet of racial war.

“ “Having learned about the man’s protean personality,” Pettit writes, “we find that his feelings on race and region move in an intelligible direction . . . there is a clearly traceable movement away from the white South and toward the black race.”

In “Twain Town, U.S.A.” Ruth Franklin doesn’t seem to see that side of Mark Twain. Or that Hannibal is doing anything but perpetuating the Twain myth, which, to her, seems so wrong, so one-sided.

It’s as if, in 1885, Mark Twain had only been able to see into our future and tell the real story instead of fanciful tales like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.”

As Saunders said in “The United States Of Huck,” “we got Twain when we got him and thank goodness we did…”

The author of “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” standing in the Mark Twain House in Hartford.

The irony is the theme of that song could well have been applied to Stewart’s entire career. It was another song of his - “Maggie May” - that changed his world and for some of us, ours, too. Not only did it almost not make the album, it was stuck on the B-side of the first single, “Reason To Believe,” destined to be forgotten.

So how did a near-outtake end up catapulting a 5:46 single (I didn’t even have to look up the time, I played that single so often) to the No. 1 spot? It’s quite a saga. As noted by the picture, it was some 55 years ago that Mercury Records released a single from Rod’s third solo album, “Every Picture Tells A Story.”

Mercury record folks thought the single should be Rod’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “Reason To Believe.” The B-Side was the album afterthought, “Maggie May.” Stewart later explained that because the song didn’t have a hook or a chorus, it wasn’t even going to be included on the album. But the record company thought the album was a bit short on songs, asked if he had anything else. Rod offered up “Maggie May.”

How we got to hear it is told on the website “Forgotten Hits.” A Cleveland disc jockey named Mitch Michaels for whatever reason, decided to play the B side of the single on WMMS instead of the A-Side. The phone lines lit up.

Later, Michaels happened to run into Stewart backstage after a concert. The two took a limo ride together, Stewart asked him about the album and the single and Michaels told him “Maggie May” was lighting up the phone lines.

A bit later, the single was reissued with “Maggie May” as the A-Side and it took off across the globe. It topped the charts in the USA for five weeks, the UK singles chart for five weeks, too and was the No. 2 record for 1971. Rod Stewart was one of the very few artists to have a No. 1 album, “Every Picture Tells A Story” and a No. 1 single here and in England at the same time.

Rod told interviewer Dan Rather he based “Maggie” on his brief (very brief, he said) encounter with an older woman at a jazz festival. But the clever way Rod constructed the lyrics gave this old English teacher a chance to play one of his favorite songs in class and teach the kids about an unreliable narrator. Rod does a masterful job of faking us - and himself - out. But you have to read it closely.

From the opening lines, “Wake up, Maggie, I think I got somethin’ to say to you
It’s late September and I really should be back at school. I know I keep you amused, but I feel I’m being used. Oh, Maggie, I couldn’t have tried any more…” it sounds as if he’s had enough and is ready to walk out. But he doesn’t.

He continues having this imaginary conversation - we imagine Maggie is sleeping - as he gives his reasons - “You led me away from home just to save you from being alone. You stole my heart and that’s what really hurts.”

Then the whole age-thing kicks in. As well as the complexities of love. “The mornin’ sun when it’s in your face really shows your age. But that don’t worry me none, in my eyes, you’re everything. I laughed at all of your jokes, my love you didn’t need to coax
Oh, Maggie, I couldn’t have tried any more.”

I played this song over and over and over. My record player had a thing where if you left the arm over, it would keep playing the same single. And trust me, I probably listened to this one song more than any other. Why?

Maybe it was this next line that somehow connected with me as this shy, date-less, high school senior who had three different girls ask if I’d take them to the prom. Of course, I said “No” to each one. I was chicken.

“All I needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand…” A girl as a friend? What a concept! By this point in my life, I did talk to girls. But date one? Without a car? Or a driver’s license?

Of course, as a teenage boy, I loved it when Rod got to the good stuff… “But you turned into a lover, and mother, what a lover, you wore me out. All you did was wreck my bed, and in the morning, kick me in the head. Oh, Maggie, I couldn’t have tried any more.”

As he goes back to what he’d said before, blaming her on the one hand but at the same time, admitting he was stuck, the truth keeps creeping in. Love is like that.

“You led me away from home ‘cause you didn't wanna be alone. You stole my heart, I couldn't leave you if I tried.” You could call that line foreshadowing, right?

So Rod considers his alternatives if he does go. “I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school. Or steal my daddy’s cue and make a living out of playin’ pool. Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helpin’ hand…”

Then he gets mean. “Oh, Maggie, I wished I’d never seen your face.” That would hurt, so you know he didn’t really say it! “You made a first-class fool out of me. But I’m as blind as a fool can be. You stole my heart, but I love you anyway.”

Then the brilliant construction of the song really drives it home. There’s a great, understated Ron Wood guitar solo, a sweeping mandolin piece from Ray Jackson of the British folk-rock group Lindisfarne (Rod famously forgot his name in the liner notes and just wrote "mandolin player in Lindisfarne"!) raising the stakes for a big, dramatic finish. And what a finish!

He’s hooked. We know it. He knows it. And he’s got to have this big finish to get it all out of his system. And ours.

Micky Waller’s drums thump and we hear him try to talk himself out of it as the song winds down. But look how that last line, that unreliable narrator who may have convinced you at first, he was splitting, now admits, he isn’t. Not yet anyway.

“Maggie, I wished I’d never seen your face. I’ll get on the way home one of these days…
Ooh, ooh, ooh.”

A soulful scream, letting us know he isn’t going anywhere. The way he stretches out “day-aaysss” Not yet, anyway.

Just a brilliantly written, superbly sung, dramatically constructed song that doesn’t need a chorus. If it hadn’t have been for a Cleveland disc jockey, who maybe played the B-Side by mistake, we don’t really know, “Maggie May” might not ever have found the airwaves and made Rod Stewart an international star or burned itself into my brain for several years. My students loved it, too.

Some guys have all the luck, indeed. Thanks, Rod. And “Maggie” I guess.

Does this look like a guy who wouldn’t go to a prom? Author John Nogowski writes often about music in his free Substack, now entering Year Three. He’s written books about Bob Dylan and Neil Young, two books on baseball (“Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and about his experience teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling Florida minority high school. He also regularly contributes to the Hartford Courant. His books are available on Amazon. He’s currently at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen, whom he first saw in concert in Providence the day he finished the “Born To Run” album.

Sam Staples had no idea what he had just done. The resulting essay Thoreau penned, which has evolved into what we now know as “Civil Disobedience,” impacted protest movements all across the globe from Mahatma Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King. And you can only imagine what Thoreau would have to say about ICE, the Supreme Court and the current Administration.

It’s just a guess but my strong suspicion is, having taught and shared Thoreau’s words for years and I read him still, his tone would be a lot more fiery than the rather reasoned way he started “Civil Disobedience.”

“I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

Sometimes?

It was originally called “Resistance To Civil Government” and from what I’ve read, he first aired it at the Concord Lyceum in January of 1848. It was then published in a magazine called “Aesthetic Papers” and after his death in 1862, it was collected in a book of his writings called “A Yankee In Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers” with the revised title “Civil Disobedience” four years later. No idea about the Canada angle. (I guess it was about a Thoreau travelogue.)

Oddly enough, visiting the Books A Million yesterday, what are they displaying as a “new” book but a pamphlet-sized re-printing of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” with a counterargument from Hannah Arendt’s firm rebuttal in the New Yorker from 1970? You may draw your own conclusions as to why Books A Million thought these essays were topical. (And they may be.)

When Thoreau gave this lecture at the Lyceum, the windy title was “The Rights and Duties Of The Individual in Relation To Government.” The Lyceum must have been a happening place but it’s hard to imagine that packing them in. I’ve read that Thoreau, contrary to what you might think having read him, was somewhat comical on the stand. And there was certainly no questioning his commitment to what he wrote or how he spoke about it.

After a colleague offered me a textbook of the wonderful play “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” I knew I had to share it with my classes. The school I taught at was all African-American, with only a few Hispanic students, and had historically been a well-below average school. As revealed in the play, here was a white American writer who was sticking up for black people, twenty years before Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation.” And he was contrary enough and funny enough - as shown in the play - to catch their spirit, I thought. And I was right.

Doing a play in class was fun. And so was blowing the kids’ minds. There’s a passage in “Walden” where Thoreau talks about taking all his furniture - all three chairs (“for society”) and putting them outside his little house and how it seemed freeing to them.

So when we got to that part in class, I said “OK, everybody, get your stuff. We’re going outside.” And we did. You should have seen the stunned looks on their faces when we went out and sat at the picnic tables, a beautifully sunny afternoon and had them reading Thoreau’s words, maybe written in pencil in that little hut on Walden Pond out loud on in the middle of a Florida campus all those years later. It would have made the old crank smile, I bet.

As you may remember, at the end of March, I wrote about the recent PBS series on Thoreau. It was terrific, voiceovers from all sorts of big names, and it gave you a sense of how Thoreau was truly ahead of his time. While he wasn’t as big a star in his day as his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his words have endured.

As I wrote back then, I grew up just 31.8 miles from the guy and I didn’t know a damn thing about him until I got to college. Nothing. Not his name, not his work, not a stinking word. Some of that’s on me. Some of that is on the teachers, who ought to have smartened up. Especially with all the social change that was going on around us. He helped inspire a lot of that.

After we finished the play, I asked the kids to write him a letter. They wrote with great warmth and affection for a guy who might well not have responded in kind. And thinking of Thoreau, I always remember what one of my students wrote. There was a genuine connection there.

“Dear Henry: Thank you for your writing. I truly wanted to see if I could find in nature what you do. After I got home from school, I went out in the woods behind my house, thinking about all the things of yours we read. There were a lot of things I’d never noticed before. Maybe that was your point. It was fun. It was beautiful. Thanks, Henry.”

Near the PBS’s shows end, actor Jeff Goldblum, reading as Thoreau, says: “There is a season for everything. You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land. There is no other life but this.”

Which, in a way, was kind of what my student was getting at. The teacher was, too.

Action photo of some of Nogo’s students, taking in a little bit of “Walden.” The young lady to the left, foreground, recently emailed me and told me she was going to become an English teacher. And she wasn’t blaming me. That makes, I think, seven students I’ve taught that went into teaching despite having my class. (Wink). Since retiring in 2023, I’ve been writing a Substack and working on books. I’ve published three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and have a forthcoming “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due in 2027. I’ve written two books on baseball - my son was a former major-league first baseman for the Cardinals and Pirates - “Diamond Duels” a look at the game’s historic pitcher-hitter matchups (Hank Aaron was 1-for-23 against Don Drysdale until he figured him out and hit 17 HRs against him.) Also two editions of “Last Time Out” a collection of stories about the MLB farewell of some of the game’s greatest players. Like Satchel Paige, at age 59, throwing three shutout innings against the Boston Red Sox. Or Dizzy Dean, retired for years, blasting the sad St. Louis Browns all season long, getting called to the owner’s office, handed a contract for $1 and told he was pitching that day. He went out and threw four shutout innings and hit a double. Take that! All my books are available on Amazon. I’m on Year Three of my Substack and now have over 700 posts. Stop by. You might find something fun.

It took a few years before I realized that the Ring Classics library was, uh, abbreviated. Yeah, you could get a Rocky Marciano fight but it was against Rex Layne. Not against Jersey Joe Walcott or Ezzard Charles or even Archie Moore, the fights you wanted to see.

So, historically speaking, you could say there were holes in my boxing knowledge that I’ve been catching up on. Or it might simply be that watching the intense strategies of two fighters is good viewing late at night when it’s quiet, the sound is off (other than maybe Liz’s gentle snoring) and the kid can wind down watching a good swift sock to somebody’s kisser.

Then it hit me. It seemed every third fight I was watching on YouTube was involving Jerry Quarry. I’d seen him fight plenty of times before, of course, most memorably in the Muhammad Ali comeback fight in Atlanta in 1970. What I didn’t know or realize or even comprehend was just how many top-notch fighters Quarry fought. And how, there’s no question that such a rugged, relentless schedule led to his horrific post-boxing life and early death.

There is no schedule in boxing. You fight, pretty much, who you choose to fight. As I wrote earlier about the career of Smokin’ Joe Frazier, his manager Yancey Durham was exceptionally clever about who and when he matched Joe. When they held an elimination tournament to determine who would be recognized as champion once they stripped Muhammad Ali of his title, Joe said “I’ll fight the winner.”

In other words, the heck with everybody else, who will all have to go through some tough fights to get to the finals. I’ll wait. It worked out. Frazier easily handled Jimmy Ellis and won the overall title. While Frazier did fight Oscar Bonavena (who knocked him down twice) and a couple other decent fighters, his schedule was much softer. And smarter. He also, of course, fought Jerry Quarry, whom he beat twice.

So, then I took a look at Quarry’s record, who took the exact opposite approach to Frazier. And I was stunned. Look at who the guy fought in chronological order:

1966 - Eddie Machen, a top challenger, L 1967 - Brian London, top British fighter W

1967 - Floyd Patterson, former two-time champ Draw (he knocked him down twice!) 1967 - Floyd Patterson, re-match W

1967 - Thad Spencer No. 2-ranked heavyweight W 1968 - Jimmy Ellis for the WBA world title L

1969 - Buster Mathis, a top five heavyweight W 1969 - Joe Frazier, Ring’s Fight Of The Year L (on a cut)

1969 - Brian London W 1969 - George Chuvalo, top Canadian heavyweight L

1970 - Mac Foster, top five heavyweight W 1970 - Muhammad Ali, former champion L (on a cut)

1972 - Muhammad Ali (rematch) L (by KO) 1973 - Ron Lyle, top-five heavyweight W

1973 - Earnie Shavers, top-five heavyweight W (by KO1) 1974 - Joe Frazier L (by KO)

1975 - Ken Norton L (by KO) LIFETIME RECORD: 53 - (32 KO) - 9 - 4 record

This is the best of the best. Why would you take on so many great fighters? At the time, Muhammad Ali called him “the last of the White Hopes,” which sadly might have been true and maybe the impetus for Quarry to take on so many difficult fighters, way more, than you would think, would be wise or healthy.

Network TV at the time had discovered that heavyweight boxing, with the inimitable Howard Cosell at ringside, got ratings and that meant larger purses for the fighters. So Quarry kept signing on (and these are only the prominent fights I listed. There were others.) Did his race figure into the whole picture? Interesting question.

The whole unfortunate “White Hope” thing started back when the first black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, ranked by Ring Magazine founder Nat Fleischer as the greatest of all time, was mowing the competition down. Sportswriters at the time started a campaign to bring the undefeated (at that point) ex-champion James J. Jeffries out of retirement to challenge Johnson for the title. They fought on July 4, 1910 in a steaming hot Reno, Nevada and Johnson toyed with Jeffries, winning easily.

Ken Burns’ documentary “Unforgivable Blackness” about Johnson’s life and career, tells that story very well. There’s also a fictional film of Johnson’s life with James Earl Jones in the title role called “The Great White Hope” which gives you an idea of the racial climate at the time. It wasn’t one of boxing’s proudest moments. And neither, sad to say, was the end of Jerry Quarry’s life.

He suffered from “dementia pugilistica” and died of cardiac arrest at 53 in 1999. Watching his YouTube bout with Ken Norton yesterday, sort of his last stand, you might say, started out pretty competitively. Though you could see his once-handsome face (see the b/w photo with ex-welterweight champ Luis Rodriguez) was now puffy and battered and sure enough, he suffered a cut early in the fight.

Sensing that fate was against him one last time, he fought desperately, throwing punch after punch at the muscular, but awkward Norton, landing some, missing others, fighting for his ring life, which he really was.

He was stopped a few rounds later, his face an absolute mess and who knows what was going on under that brown mop of hair? He was “Irish Jerry Quarry” and some wise guy sportswriters had always said he fought “too Irish.” In other words, he was too willing to mix it up instead of boxing smartly and counterpunching and trying to win on points. But as that great ring philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It’s a lot easier to win fights in front of a keyboard.

I’ve watched a lot of his fights now and there is some truth in that. But at the same time, I look at that record, all those terrific fighters that he kept stepping in the ring against, confident that he could beat them and climb up to the heavyweight title.

There were times when he was brilliant, knocking out Earnie Shavers in one round, defeating dangerous Ron Lyle by decision, beating two-time champ Floyd Patterson who was on the way out, but still, a good win. And scoring a knockout win over Thad Spencer, the No. 2-ranked heavyweight at the time and the hard-punching Mac Foster, too, also a knockout win.

But he couldn’t beat Frazier. Couldn’t beat Ali. He had two tries at both. There’s no shame in that. Neither could hardly anyone else.

Jerry Quarry’s been gone now for more than a quarter-century. He’s remembered as a pretty good, game fighter. Not for the sad way his life ended. Which is a good thing, I think.

His fights live on if you happen to wander onto YouTube like me. From time to time, maybe you, too, will find yourself talking to the screen in the dark, trying not to wake the wife.

“Duck, Jerry, duck.”

Author John Nogowski has been a fan of boxing since his teenage years. He even bought a pair of boxing gloves and for a while, sparred with his fellow Brookline boxing enthusiast Mark Fountain. Fountain had very long arms and Nogowski said he suspected his best punches landed there. But it was fun to try. As a writer, Nogowski’s favorite boxing book, which he’s written several Substacks about, is A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science.” There’s a subsequent collection called “A Neutral Corner” of additional Liebling pieces, including a prophetic piece he wrote about the young Cassius Clay. Nogowski has written several books about various topics; three editions of a book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a forthcoming book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and two books on baseball - his son is a former major-league first baseman - “Diamond Duels” about the game’s historic pitcher-hitter matchups (Hank Aaron was 1-for-23 against Don Drysdale before swatting 17 HRs off the guy) and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories about the game’s greatest players’ MLB signoffs. They are available on Amazon. He’s been writing a free Substack since 2024. He’s also been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant and is at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen.

That was me. In 1995 in the first of three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”

“Tangled Up In Blue,” the opening track on Dylan’s monumental “Blood On The Tracks” album, is, to my estimation, as perfect a song and performance as anything the old guy has ever put on vinyl. Being Bob Dylan, of course, it was only a matter of time until he had to come up with something to steer us in another direction, a comment to make it clear that HE didn’t think he got it right - even if all of us all over the damn world sure did.

This is one of the infuriating things about him. Also something endearing. I can’t explain that. Can you?

“I always wanted it to be the way I recorded it on “Real Live,” he told Bill Flanagan in “Written In My Soul.” “But there was no particular reason for it to be that way, because I’d already made the record. That was another of those songs where you’re writing and you got it, you know what it is about, but half of it you just don’t get the way you wanted to. Then I fixed it up and now it’s where it should be.”

To me, that’s classic Bob Dylan Bullshit. If you listen to both versions of the song - they are included here - and you BUY what he’s selling, well, we must have different sets of ears, standards, values and taste.

If you’ve followed Dylan’s career, you know that he first recorded those “Blood On The Tracks” songs in New York and had played them for a bunch of folks in the meantime, supposedly including David Crosby, Neil Young and Stephen Stills. It was Stills who commented afterwards that Dylan was a great songwriter “but he’s not a musician.” Those versions eventually came out on The Bootleg Series “More Blood, More Tracks.” Some people prefer those to the “Blood On The Tracks.” Not me.

But there was something about those New York recordings that made him hesitate about releasing them. Returning to Minnesota for the holidays, he decided to re-record some of the songs, happily, including “Tangled Up In Blue” at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis. And the story goes that after he’d re-recorded a version of the song, he played it back for the studio musicians in there and asked guitarist Kevin Odegard what he thought. Odegard famously replied that the version was “passable.” Oooh…A chill must have gone through that studio. You’re telling BOB DYLAN a song he just performed was, uh, well, sort of, kind of, you know, uh, passable.

Odegard also suggested changing the key from G to A. And Dylan said “Let’s try it.”

Dylan’s response was the remarkable version we heard on “Blood On The Tracks.” Which confirms my thinking that ol’ Bob does need to be poked from time to time. Like, by Daniel Lanois, say, if the stories about the recording of “Time Out Of Mind” and “Oh Mercy” are on the money.

Which brings us back to why Dylan acts this way. After “Time Out Of Mind” wins a Grammy Award for Album of The Year for the 56-year-old Dylan - a pretty remarkable achievement any way you slice it, 25 years later, Columbia releases “Fragments,” a collection of “Time Out Of Mind” outtakes and a few live tracks that, essentially, give us a different way of hearing the album as if Bob wasn’t satisfied with the Grammy and everybody hearing what Lanois cooked up.

According to what we find online, mix engineer Michael Brauer was asked to “strip away Lanois’ heavily processed, “murky” atmospheric effects to present the songs exactly how the musicians sounded playing together in the room.”

Brauer told Rolling Stone that he did this gingerly. He explicitly informed Dylan's team, "I'll do this, but I'm not reinventing it. I don't want it to be a completely different thing," noting it would be the first record he would turn off if he went "crazy with it.”

So, Bob, you win a Grammy. And all these years later, you poke your manager Jeff Rosen or Steve Berkowitz to get somebody to give another listen to the outtakes and come up with an altogether different presentation of these classic songs. It had to be Dylan’s idea, don’t you think?

And listening to the box set, it is great, so I have to say I’m glad Brauer did what he did. But where do you get the idea in the first place? I guess you have to be Bob Dylan.

HERE’S THE CLASSIC STUDIO VERSION OF “TANGLED UP IN BLUE”

HERE’S THE BOB DYLAN RE-WRITE ON “REAL LIVE”

Author John Nogowski first wrote about Bob Dylan’s “Planet Waves” for the Rivier College newspaper called “The Perspective.” At that time, he had no idea that all these years later, he’d still be writing about Dylan, would have done three editions of a comprehensive book about his career and would have gone to see him ten times in concerts all over North America. He’s written about him often in his free Substack, going on Year Three, and has shared many of the articles with Karl Erik Andersen’s wonderful website “Expecting Rain.” He’s also written a similar comprehensive music book on Neil Young, due next year. A former sportswriter, he’s written two books on baseball - his son is a former major-leaguer - “Diamond Duels”, about baseball’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories about the game’s greatest players MLB farewell. All are available on Amazon.

The most recent of three editions of the book. It includes “Rough And Rowdy Ways.”

Having spent 33 years in the South, most of it in Tallahassee, I can tell you, Florida high school football is good, very good. But compared to how HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL IS TALKED ABOUT, PLAYED AND WATCHED IN GEORGIA, it’s a whole different ballgame up here.

As a recent Thomasville resident, I can feel it in the air. The defending state champion Thomas County Central Yellow Jackets STARTED their practices last night. At midnight. Really.

Given how hot it is here during the day, maybe that makes sense. If football practice at midnight could ever make sense. Central ran up 62 points in their title win last year so maybe this is a good thing.

Some suggest it was started by the late great Ed Pilcher, who won a bundle of state titles (5) with TCC. His reasoning was if basketball can have a Midnight Madness, why can’t football do the same, where there likely are a lot more players whose approach to physical contact may bring them a lot closer to madness. On purpose.

Like former Florida State defensive coach Jim Gladden told me once, “John, we’re looking for collision experts.” This is serious business here.

Moving to the South in 1993, covering a Florida State team that would finally win that long-sought-after national championship, I noticed Thomasville’s two local high schools, Thomas County Central and Thomasville would play one another for the state championship. I’d just started at the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper as a columnist. While I saw they didn’t pay much attention to Thomasville, from what I could see, this was a game for the ages. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

With a dramatic - and it turned out, controversial - goal line stand, Thomas County Central prevailed 14-12 and it was one hell of a high school football game. Little did I imagine many years later that I’d be writing a story, trying to settle things down in Thomasville over what happened in that final series. Do people here still argue about that game? Bet on it.

The Bulldogs trailed 14-10 with 7:37 left but drove to the Central 5. Thomasville’s QB Danny Jones ran to the 1. On second down, Nic Davis plunged. The Bulldogs thought he scored. Central said no. What really happened?

Years later, research led me to view each team’s game film. Viewing the Thomasville game film, shot from midfield, it did appear the Bulldogs’ Nic Davis got in. But looking at the same play on the Central game film, shot from a different location, it was clear he didn’t.

As a writer, how was I to document this and maybe settle this long-held argument? I found a way to get a freeze-frame photo from each team’s game film and it seemed clear, the officials had it right. Central took a safety to make the final, 14-12 Jackets.

Now, I ended up winning an award for that story, my last in the newspaper business as a sportswriter. Probably no applause from Bulldog fans, though.

Since my last two years of newspaper work were up here in Thomasville, I got to cover the last two TCC playoff runs, including one that ended in 2002 to Marist and their quarterback Sean McVay, who now happens to be coaching the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams! I also got to see - and hear first-hand - just how Georgia high school football sounds, looks and plays different.

The intensity, the level of play, the caliber of the athletes and the quality of the coaching and the focus of the Georgia small-town fan base - maybe it’s because Tallahassee had Florida State and Florida A&M - that high school football didn’t quite have the zing there that it does here. Hey, it’s in the air already and it’s July!

Historically speaking, it’s sad that Thomasville and Thomas County Central won’t play each other this year. Back in December, Thomasville Athletic Director Jeremy Rayburn said “For us as a program, it just made more sense for us not to continue at this point.”

Though Thomasville had won as recently as 2021 (23-14, Bulldogs), Central’s program seems to have taken off under coach Justin Rogers. They beat the Dawgs 31-0 in 2022, 45-7 in 2023, 48-10 in 2024 and 55-7 last year, en route to a 15-0 season and a subsequent 62-21 win over Gainesville in the title game. You might call it “high school football” but it feels a lot more serious than that.

And let’s say this: Last year’s FSU team might not have wanted to tangle with that TCC ballclub. Georgia high school football. Practice at midnight. Some 62 points in the title game. Hey, these guys aren’t messing around.

Author John Nogowski covered Florida State and Florida A&M sports for seven years and some high school football, too. Covering Georgia high school football was a different experience, however. Here’s the author with his books, three editions of a comprehensive book on the career of Bob Dylan - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”, a new book on Neil Young due sometime next year - “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” - a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out” about the final game of baseball’s greatest players. He’s also written a book about his experience teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a minority Florida high school. He’s written a Substack going on Year Three and has been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant.

I used to have a black Ted Williams’ model bat that was maybe 36 ounces, way too heavy to ever use to hit in a game. But there was a rough patch of dirt and gravel between our house and the neighbor’s house so I used to hit rocks into the frog pond across the street. Eventually, I grew out of it.

I’m sure all of you readers out there can think of things you did or loved back in the day that you’ve left behind. It’s part of growing up, right?

Why, back in the day, I remember a friend of mine was fanatical about disco. Whether it was “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae, or “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps, “Love Hangover” by Diana Ross, or anything by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, we used to battle over the car radio. As soon as the opening notes of a disco song came on, the buttons were pushed. Literally and figuratively. (I was a damn tolerant friend, I must say.)

I would assume - we haven’t ridden in a car for decades now - he’s grown out of it. Certainly hope so (for his ears’ sake.)

Yet, on this sunny July afternoon, I’m sitting in my den, my “man cave,” listening to an album I bought nearly 50 years ago and here I am, still enjoying it.

I am marveling at just how absolutely repulsive - on purpose - the legendary Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) made himself on the Sex Pistols’ kick-ass debut “Never Mind The Bollocks.” It was simply extraordinary.

Sorry, America, they still sound good to me. Well, maybe “good” isn’t the word to use to describe the Sex Pistols. Lydon would find that term highly offensive, I imagine. Objectionable, he’d probably say. Along with a few curse words and some expectorating.

And of course, it is rude and objectionable. That’s the point. You never hear them on the radio any more, never read anybody talking about them or discussing the rather remarkable set of songs they somehow put together and recorded in Wessex Sound Studios in London sometime around 1976-1977.

Now, I had absolutely no connection with the punk movement in England, the safety pins in the cheek, the ripped clothes, the spitting onstage but I did find it funny and genuinely sincere kick in the fanny to some of the high falutin’ rock bands of the time. GET REAL, they were saying. You’re not royalty just because you’ve sold a few records. F-off. Or something like that.

While I preferred The Clash, who were smarter, more literate (not saying a lot, I suppose) and they would go on to have a longer and more important career, it’d be difficult to say that the Clash wrote songs that matched the utterly explosive snarl that Lydon brought to “Anarchy In The U.K.” or “God Save The Queen” or “Holidays In The Sun” or “Bodies.” He wasn’t faking, that’s for sure.

My personal favorite might be the extraordinary “Pretty Vacant” where Lydon (assuming it was him - the songs are credited to the group) was writing critically about his own generation, (pretty accurately, too.) Is there a better, funnier, more angry song than that? “We’re so pretty, oh so pretty vacant.” Love it.

They were trying to offend, that was Johnny Rotten’s particular talent and he did it superbly. He seemed to love every single insulting second in the spotlight, on stage or off. Remember how he closed the Sex Pistols’ final concert in San Francisco’s Winterland in 1978 with the line “Did you ever get the feeling you’d been cheated?”

How could you not laugh at a character like that? Shakespeare’s Richard III would have been envious. He had such gusto, such disdain for everybody and everything and threw it into that first set of recordings so ferociously, you knew it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.

Opening their debut (and really only) album by singing about the Berlin Wall and “I wanna go to the new Belsen” on the cheery “Holidays In The Sun,” you had to laugh at their defiance, their outrageousness, their middle-finger-extended attitude towards everything and everyone. Who opens a record with the sound of storm troopers marching, then sings about Belsen?

And then to go into song two: “Bodies” where we learn Johnny Rotten is a PRO-LIFER? OMG. “She was a nowhere who killed her baby…I’m not an animal,” he sings. Where is this guy going? Where did these guys come from? What hole did they dig this guy out of?

I mean, it’s nearly 50 years since they recorded this and it still roars off the vinyl. What is the point of rock and roll if it isn’t to disrupt things? Right? Isn’t that what Elvis did, even if he wasn’t necessarily trying to? Johnny Rotten WAS trying to and for a little while, he did. Which I’m sure both amazed and sickened him. And us.

I’ll be turning 73 in a month. Yes, Father, I should have grown out of this. But I haven’t. I admit it. The Sex Pistols make me laugh and marvel that this oddball bunch of ne’er-do-wells from London could concoct something with such sting and rage and that it holds up, to me at least, all these years later. Remarkable.

Back in my classroom days, if my students did particularly poorly on some test, I might put “Pretty Vacant” on when the class opened, hoping one of them might ask me why that song. Nobody ever did. So, yeah, I was right.

So, no, I haven’t grown out of it. Not yet.

The author around the time he first heard The Sex Pistols and The Clash. Got to see The Clash at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre on the “London Calling” tour. The single loudest concert I ever attended (put tissue paper in my ears.) It was amazing. I’ve written a lot about popular music on my Substack, now on Year Three, Post No. 702 so if you like The Clash or popular music in general (No Disco) check it out. I’ve written a few books, two on music - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due out next year, two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and a book about my teaching experience with Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a minority Florida high school. I’ve been a contributor to the Hartford Courant for the past two years and am at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen. My Substack is now and will stay free. I don’t think that would impress Mr. Lydon, though.

“Here’s why I had this character do this. I included this description because… I had to end the story this way because…” Stuff like that.

Maybe they couldn’t really explain it, other than to know what was, instinctively, the right thing to do. And let’s face it, explaining WHY a story works just isn’t that easy. I recently wrote about the great Anton Chekhov story “The Lady And The Little Dog” which no less an expert than Vladimir Nabokov explained was a story that did just about everything wrong but was nonetheless, one of the greatest stories of all-time.

Fortunately, Ernest Hemingway was in a chatty, explanatory mood when he wrote a letter to Robert McAlmon, one of his friends from his early days in Paris in November of 1924. It was two months after he’d submitted the stories for his acclaimed collection “In Our Time,” and he wrote to McAlmon about an editing decision he’d made about his long, deceptively crafted short story “Big Two-Hearted River.”

The lengthy story, a subdued yet very specific account of a fishing trip, was a story where nearly everything significant happened beneath the surface. If you needed an example of Hemingway’s famous “Iceberg” theory, where the actual events of the story are just the tip of the iceberg, you couldn’t do better than “Big Two-Hearted River.”

As Hemingway later explained his intent in a proposed Introduction to a collection of his short stories that never got published, “A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit. A story in this book called “Big Two-Hearted River” is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war. Beat to the wide was an earlier and possible more severe form of beat, since those who had it were unable to comment on the condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted.”

But not at first. In the process of writing the story, apparently Hemingway had originally included a lengthy interior monologue with Nick, had him talking about the war, how it impacted him and so on. Then, after re-reading the story and thinking about it, he wrote to McAlmon about his self-editing decision.

“I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit and have cut it all out,” he wrote. “The last nine pages. The story was interrupted you know just when I was going good and I could never get back into it and finish it. I got a hell of a shock when I realized how bad it was and that shocked me back into the river again and I’ve finished it off the way it ought to have been all along. Just the straight fishing.”

So, for example, when Hemingway takes great care in describing Nick patiently, intently watching the trout in the stream finding a way to hold themselves steady against the rush of the water, he’s not just talking about a would-be fisherman thinking of what might make a good dinner. He’s going much deeper. How would Nick hold himself steady after what he’d been through. Again, not mentioned.

Hemingway actually had two parts to the long story and, understanding the depth of his intent helps you grasp the opening perhaps in a different way than you might have otherwise. The story opens like this: “The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.”

He arrives in a town he used to frequent on the edge of the Michigan woods only to find it has all been burned to the ground. The saloons, the hotel, gone, even the stone chipped by the fire. Something awful, a fire in this case — not a war — has transformed this place.

Perhaps this was his dream place, the site he kept in his mind when lying in an Italian hospital trying to recuperate from his wounds, or at night alone, out on the battlefield. Now to finally arrive and find this place, too, has been altered, scarred, like him. He’s not there to go to the town — there’s no town to go to — he’s there to fish, to get away from it all. But as those subtle shifts in the story show, he can’t quite get away from it all. And he won’t. It’s delicately, craftily written. It’s not a story to breeze through.

Would it be a help to readers if we had more writers explaining their intent, really getting into the nuts and bolts of creating the text? It’s hard to know for sure. We don’t have many examples like Hemingway’s.

What if we had Herman Melville explaining his mysterious “Bartleby The Scrivener” tale? Or would that spoil it, steer us in a direction that he didn’t intend? Maybe it’s better to just write it and if it lands, it lands.

With “Big Two-Hearted River,” reading Hemingway’s letter to McAlmon did seem to sharpen our focus as it seemed to sharpen his. It’s fascinating that we have that letter and with that particular story and self-edit, Hemingway grasped something about his art on his own.

Later, in that Introduction, he explained that the river he based the story on was the Fox River, near Seney, Michigan.

“The change of name was made purposely,” he wrote, “not from ignorance or carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry…”

He might have a point.

HERE’S THE PDF OF THE FULL STORY

https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/big-two-hearted-river.pdf

Author John Nogowski taught Ernest Hemingway’s short stories for a dozen years in college and high school classrooms. Though many of his greatest short stories were written over 100 years ago, I found my students consistently loved his work and responded well to stories like “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “Fifty Grand.” I’ve written often about Hemingway’s work and my experiences teaching on my Substack, which celebrated my 700th post yesterday. I’ve written a book about my teaching experience with Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” as well as books about baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and popular music - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”. I’ve been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and have been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. My books are available on Amazon.

Well, yeah, I did. Reading that sentence sounds somewhat egotistical, I suppose, but you’re not putting words down just for the hell of it, are you? You do want some sort of connection, right? Isn’t that the point? You’re trying to get a reader to whip through your ideas on a particular topic, maybe to agree, to disagree, to react. Hey, what do you think about this? Here’s what I think…

Here it is, friends, Substack Nogo post #700!

What are you going to write about? Writing? Music? Literature? Politics? History? Sports? Movies? Writers? How about “G” - all of the above? And just who do you think wants to read what you think about all these things? Good question. I didn’t know. Not really.

I was pretty sure, based on my long newspaper career, I could write pieces that people would like to read. They always had, anyhow. And now, with Substack, I had the freedom and the motivation - not exactly sure where that came from - to speak up about all these things I’d read or thought about or responded to. I was free. And felt it.

Best of all, I didn’t have to run it by some editor, some gatekeeper who’d ask me stuff like “Why did you use that word?” Or “I don’t get what you’re saying here.” Or “Why are you writing about this?” I know that sounds bad, like what I was writing was too high brow or too complicated or something for them to get the point but looking back, that is how it felt most of the time.

I wanted to tell them, “Look, I’m not writing for YOU. I don’t really care what you think.” And I didn’t. But, of course, I never said that. Not out loud. Should you be writing to impress your editor? Nobody ever told me that. Maybe they should have. I never thought that way. I’ve never asked other writers that question. Ever. Would they have laughed if I had? Are you writing to please an editor or your readers?

Maybe I’m too naive about this but there is an imagined direct connection between the words you put down and how you imagine your reader is going to receive them. Why would you want anybody to get in the middle of that?

Once I got rolling on Substack, geez, there were some days I’d write two posts. I hadn’t written on a regular basis - that is, daily - for over a decade so maybe there was a backlog there, I’m not sure. All of a sudden, I’m writing about short stories I taught, remembering my first day of school, loving record stores, offering my famous “Asteroid Theory Of Hitting,” reviews of a new book by Bob Dylan, talking to Jake LaMotta on the phone, all these little bursts of prose that just seemed to keep pouring out of the ends of my fingers every damn day. It was fun. Yeah, that’s right. FUN.

You know, that’s something, that, now as I sit and think about it, almost every editor I ever had to deal with NEVER brought fun to the page. Even if there was something funny there. For them, it was work. Or maybe they knew they’d have to deal with a writer who was going to question every single change they wanted to - or did - make. Maybe that’s why we clashed. Yeah, you’re assigned to make sure what I wrote is OK. But remember, it’s not YOUR name on this story. Can you make my story/column better? If not, LEAVE IT ALONE. You know the old dog/fire hydrant thing. NO! Not here. Not with my stuff. Sorry, but that’s how I felt.

On Substack, it’s all on me. If I screw up, leave a word out or something, hey, I’ll get over it.

So, looking back, how did I do? Here I am, 26 months in with 975 subscribers, thanks in part to my friend, Karl Erik Andersen and his wonderful “Expecting Rain” website who’ve helped share some of my posts. There are some regular readers, who are kind enough to drop a note every so often. And there are newbies (Welcome!) who continue to sign up daily. (11 in the last four days. Hi folks!)

What does that mean? I’d like to think that this unpredictable array of topics that I’m bringing up five or six times each week are interesting, worth reading, spending a few minutes with, something to think about.

A while back, I heard from a reader who had bought and was talking about my Bob Dylan book. It couldn’t have been nicer or more considerate. “You are like, in my living room drinking a beer and just speaking to me in a very relatable way,” he wrote.

I guess it’s voice. The impression I get is there’s a constant voice in these words. My writing is conversational. That’s what I hear all the time. I don’t know that I ever knew enough to try for that, it just happened. So when I read: “Voice happens when the distance between the writer’s mind and the page gets thin enough that the reader can hear the thinking as it happens,” well, that sounded like something worth shooting for.

After 700 posts, I figured, now was a good time to see what our friends at A-I thought of all these words, 900,000 or so, the equivalent of 10 non-fiction titles on a wide-ranging assortment of topics. How would A-I describe what I’ve laid on the 492,000 readers who’ve wandered through NogoLand over the past couple years?

Here goes: “The strongest thing is this: you don’t really sound derivative. The voice feels accumulated rather than manufactured. A few traits that seem distinctly yours:

• the conversational setup that suddenly deepens,

• the willingness to admit uncertainty midstream,

• the layering of cultural memory with personal memory,

• the newspaper columnist cadence,

• and especially the way humor protects sentiment without erasing it.

That last quality matters. A lot of memoirists become unbearably solemn once they begin discussing “what it all means.” You usually undercut yourself just enough to stay human. Which is probably why the Substack form fits you so naturally. Your pieces feel discovered in the act of writing rather than over-engineered beforehand. Readers trust that kind of voice.”

Good thing you haven’t heard me sing. Hey, thank you, everybody.

THE THOUSAND-VIEW CLUB (For new readers: 2026 posts that drew 1,000 views)

Elvis’ Pay Stub: July 17 Tom Petty songs ain’t easy: July 16 Neil and Daryl’s new film: June 29

Bob’s Basement Tapes: June 12 What if Dylan played Woodstock: May 24 Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday: May 23

Paul Westerberg’s last hit: May 7 Dylan in Dothan: April 24 The Spanish Inquisition: April 22

U2’s The Edge: April 10 Led Zep: Genius Dumb: April 2 Bruce, Bruce and more Bruce: March 29

Bob, Bruce end tour: March 23 Where Elvis started: March 18 Me and Elvis: March 13

George Martin’s mistake: March 6 Born To Run - Then what? March 3 The Faces: March 2

U2’s new EP: February 18 Dylan’s decisions: February 18 Good news on Elvis: February 12

Rockin’ Dylan on stage: February 1 Song Sung Blue ain’t kidding: January 27 Bob, The Band, Big Pink: January 21

My record collection: January 18

HERE’S TO THE NEXT 700

My wife, Liz, was kind enough to get this shot of the author with all his books - thus far. Since this picture was taken, I’ve written a book on Neil Young that will be out sometime in 2027, it looks like and I’m at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen. As you can see, I’ve written three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography 1961-2022”, two books on baseball: “Diamond Duels” a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out,” my two-edition collection of stories about the final games of some of baseball’s greatest players as well as my son, John’s first MLB game with the St. Louis Cardinals. Since 2024, I’ve also contributed 35 columns to the Hartford Courant in addition to these 700 Substack posts. Good thing these words are free, right? Thanks for stopping by.

Long before TV, ESPN, sports talk radio, the sport of boxing was one of America’s most popular sports. Along with baseball and horse racing, boxing was one of the three sports that people followed. There was not much of an NFL to speak of, the NBA wouldn’t begin for another quarter century and the NHL didn’t come to America until the next year.

So, when heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey brought 90,000 fans into New York City’s Polo Grounds for his September match with Argentina’s “Wild Bull Of The Pampas” Luis Angel Firpo, even the newspaper of record agreed the story belonged on Page One.

Re-reading Dawson’s breathless prose now, reporting from ringside with a stadium full of noise around him, brings back an innocent era when the average fan had one - and only one - way to find out what happened. They had to read the newspaper.

Writing with the sports world hanging on his every word, Dawson punched down on his typewriter keys the way Dempsey dispatched Firpo.

“In the shortest and fiercest battle ever fought between heavyweights, Jack Dempsey last night knocked out Luis Angel Firpo before a crowd of 90,000 at the Polo Grounds 57 seconds after the second round began.

“But no champion ever had a closer call. In the first round, after Firpo had gone down seven times, one of his long smashing rights caught Dempsey fairly and knocked him clear through the ropes. The champion’s head disappeared over the edge of the ring, his white-clad legs shot up in the air, and it seemed that a new world’s champion was about to enter into his glory.

“On the count of nine, Dempsey managed to stagger back into the ring, but the end of the round found him obviously badly shaken and staggering as he had never staggered before.

“To the spectators at the ringside it looked as if Dempsey were all gone, but his head and his heart were still there and enough punching power to carry him through to victory in the second round.”

Writing on deadline, you can almost feel the sweat on Dawson’s palms as he pounded out the thrilling details of what he had just witnessed in the past five minutes (3:57 of actual fighting with a minute rest period in the middle.)

The champion was, what, KNOCKED OUT OF THE RING? He got back in and KNOCKED THE GUY OUT IN THE NEXT ROUND? And you were there to SEE THAT?

Dawson’s story was a long, detailed one, especially for a less-than-two-round fight. But he was there and you weren’t. And in 1923, everybody wanted to know what in the world happened.

The reason I have the story is some years ago, I found The New York Times Encyclopedia of Sports at a yard sale and kept the boxing volume. It was printed in 1979, long before the Internet and YouTube made tracking down archival stories as easy as logging in.

As a kid, I had that Aurora model which, somewhat ironically, depicted Dempsey slamming Firpo on the ropes when the reason we remember the fight is because it was Dempsey who went flying through the strands, landing on the typewriter of New York Tribune writer Jack Lawrence. Firpo was down 10 times in less than two rounds, according to the NY Times headline, yet he knocked Dempsey out of the ring. Wild.

Aurora’s “Dempsey vs. Firpo” model. Dempsey is winning here, not why we remember it.

When, as a kid, I got a DeJur projector one Christmas and some time later found an ad in Ring Magazine for “Ring Classics,” a series of silent 8MM movies, obviously one fight that I could not wait to see was Dempsey-Firpo. Twelve knockdowns in two rounds, Dempsey knocked out of the ring, holy smokes, the movie might be silent but the action would jump off the screen, right?

Wrong. Firpo was big and strong and as crude a boxer as you ever saw. Dempsey went flying at him at the opening bell, Firpo landed a bomb of a right hand that knocked Dempsey to one knee, then Firpo spent most of the rest of the round getting knocked down. Sometimes from punches, sometimes from the wind. Sometimes from Dempsey, standing over his prone body, waiting to wallop him once he tried to get up.

The neutral corner rule, where the fighter who has knocked a man down is supposed to go to a neutral corner while the count continues either wasn’t applied or forgotten or ignored. In Dempsey’s title fight with Gene Tunney a few years later, it would cost him as he knocked Tunney down in the seventh round and did not immediately hustle to a neutral corner, costing him precious seconds where Tunney, on the canvas, might have had to arise before he was ready to resume fighting. That was called “The Long Count.”

Near the very end of that first round, Firpo lands a thunderous right - Dempsey might still have been fuzzy at that point - and then another with a sort of punch/shove that launched the champ out of the ring. He gets back in - we don’t know for sure if he was out for more than 10 seconds - and the round ends.

When the second round begins, Firpo is on his back after just a few punches and a few knockdowns, is then counted out. The Times said it was ten knockdowns in their headline. After Firpo was counted out, Dempsey comes over and helps the guy up. Really. I’m not sure Firpo really understood the fight was over.

A little over a quarter century later, the Associated Press did a poll ranking the Dempsey-Firpo fight as “the most dramatic sports event of the first half of the 20th century.” Reading that today, even after Dawson’s stirring account of the fight, makes you laugh. We’ve seen so many dramatic sporting events on TV since then. Would Dempsey-Firpo even draw a single vote?

Looking at that archaic film of Dempsey-Firpo, even as well done as it was for 1923, it’s hard to even imagine the breathless excitement that must have rumbled through the offices of the New York Times that September night, front page editors deciding to put a sports story on the top of Page One. That kind of thing did not happen. That’s how big that story was.

Watching the actual film for the first time way back then when my Ring Classics film arrived, sure, I was disappointed. The stories I’d read from writers who spoke about these events with such unquestioned authority and maximum drama, the film did not convey that at all. You saw a relentless Dempsey, and Firpo, a big lug of a heavyweight from Argentina who was as crude a fighter as you might see in some local tavern on a night of the full moon and that fluke knockdown through the ropes that might have been half-punch, half-push. But was it a memorable fight?

If you were one of the 90,000 in the Polo Grounds or maybe a reader, picking up a New York Times issue still warm from the press, sure. Watching the film, the actual account of what happened in those memorable four minutes in the Polo Grounds, the story was a lot more exciting.

History can be like that, I guess. There’s what we were told happened, then there’s what really did happen and sometimes, like Dempsey-Firpo, the two don’t agree. The question that remains is all those sportswriters who voted in the Associated Press poll in 1951 had probably seen the films of the fight. They were shown in theaters, everybody was talking about the fight, there had never been such a wild title fight and they had to truly know what that night, that fight was truly like. And they voted it No. 1 anyway. Were sportswriters in those days romantics, too?

I’m glad I read the stories before I saw the fight. When I got my turn to write about sports a few years later, I remembered writers like James P. Dawson, how he understood that he had an audience of readers hanging on his every word. He couldn’t let them down. Re-reading his story over 100 years later, I don’t think he did. Reality stepped in, damn it.

Author John Nogowski, a boxing enthusiast, once got to write a story for Boxing Illustrated magazine on the inaugural Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canastota, New York. Publisher Bert Randolph Sugar ran the story but never paid me. That tells you a lot about boxing, doesn’t it? Nogowski has been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and has written several books; two on baseball - “Diamond Duels” - a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups, “Last Time Out” - a collection of stories on the final MLB games of baseball’s greatest players. He’s also written two books on music, three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and a similar volume on Neil Young - “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due next year.

Then the guy heads to Virginia. North Carolina after that. Heads to Georgia and finally, Nashville to end this part of the tour on August 1. It’s tiring just writing down the dates, ain’t it?

After a couple months off, he starts a 30-date tour in Europe starting in October where he’ll visit Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Luxembourg. Then Switzerland, Italy, Austria, winding up in the UK with stops in Bournemouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Blackpool and five closing dates in London, finishing December 8.

There really is no reason to worry. At 85, Bob Dylan seems to be defying age, logic, fans, maybe even gravity. He’s on what seems an endless tour, just added a whole bunch of shows overseas, all the way into December. Why? You wonder.

Now, we should be clear about this. Yes, I’ve written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan’s career, the records, the books, the interviews, the speeches, the movies, the performances (Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography) but I am about as far from trying to figure out or explain the guy as anybody.

Where does he get the energy? The motivation? Is his goal to make every single person who was alive in his lifetime see him in concert?

If it was just the concerts, that’s one thing. He shows up, plays an hour and a half of whatever the hell he feels like. Hires and fires guitarists if and when he feels like it. That’s not all. For some inexplicable reason, he’s started a Patreon pay site where he (or somebody) posts things like “Letters Never Sent” - a letter from Soupy Sales to Phil Silvers or one from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino or one from James Baldwin to Walt Disney. Quite a clever - if somewhat twisted - idea, isn’t it?

There are a bunch of them and these name drops - Huey Long, P.T. Barnum, Jack Johnson, Rocky Marciano, Gene Vincent, Charles Darwin - are daring, imaginative and out of this world. There are short stories, too. The site is advertised as “A living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan.”

Curated? We know he’s welded gates, painted pictures, created whiskey and who knows what else? But a Patreon website? Why? And there’s also an Instagram site (@bobdylan) with odd, unexplained videos, over a million followers and even more unexplained items.

As we know - I’m one of them - there are all sorts of authors writing all sorts of books about Bob Dylan. I’ve got another one ready to go. And you wonder what it is about the guy that gets under everybody’s skin so?

I listened to some of a podcast the other day with author David Hajdu, who wrote “Positively Fourth Street” a book about Dylan’s formative years in Greenwich Village and on the podcast, Hajdu explains that when he heard Dylan say that the first time he’d really heard The Beatles, he was in Colorado, Hajdu didn’t think that was true. (Imagine Bob telling a lie!)

So he found out about a cross-country trip that Dylan had taken in 1964, when Hajdu says, The Beatles held the top four spots on Billboard and that on the trip, there was nothing but AM radio available in the car he rode in. So he went to the trouble of tracking down the actual playlists from the radio stations that Dylan would have been able to get on the car radio, just to confirm that he had to have heard The Beatles before Colorado.

Really. I’m not making this up. Compared with the rest of America, I suppose someone who’s written three editions of a book and all sorts of Bob Dylan posts on my Substack since I cranked this sucker up in May of 2024 would qualify as Dylan-obsessed. I plead guilty.

But I’m not in Hajdu territory. Or even interested in all that Patreon stuff. Who knows if it’s really from Bob or if he has some A-I hookup, just having a big laugh on all of us?

I’ve been very critical and skeptical of those Dylan Dissectors who insist Dylan stole sentences from Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald and all sorts of other writers in “Chronicles, Vol. 1” And looking at this mind-bending flurry of stuff on Instagram and Patreon along with this endless tour, how can you take any of this seriously?

Is Bob just linking his name to all this stuff just to blow everyone’s mind. Sort of the same attitude John Lennon had with writing “I Am The Walrus.” Remember when Lennon learned that his old teachers at Quarry Bank school were having students pick apart Beatle lyrics, he thought he’d really give them something to work on and came up with “I Am The Walrus.” What if Bob Dylan is doing a broader scale version of that? Will we ever really know?

Is he ever going to explain or comment on his intent with all this? Does he get a secret sort of kick sending some of his fans and writers down these rabbit holes? We will likely never know. Bet he likes that, too.

Here’s the third edition of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” which covers all of Bob’s studio albums, his recordings, films, books, you name it, it’s probably in here. I’ve written a similar volume on Neil Young’s work, due later this year. I’ve also written two books on baseball - my son is a former major-league first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates. “Diamond Duels” is a look at the game’s historic matchups - Hank Aaron was 1-for-23 against Don Drysdale before hitting 17 HRs off the guy. “Last Time Out” is a collection of stories about the final games of some of baseball’s all-time greats. All my books are available on Amazon.

Within a matter of a few months, Presley wouldn’t even consider $37.91 tip money. How many people do you know whose life has had that kind of turnabout? It was a rise as improbable as it was remarkable. And to think it almost never happened.

It was at the end of what looked to be a failed recording session that steamy July night, Presley started banging out an old Arthur Crudup tune, “That’s All Right, Mama,” an old blues song Sun Records owner and producer Sam Phillips was stunned Presley even knew.

Phillips came out of the recording control booth, got Presley to back up and start over. He asked guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black to follow him and the three of them recorded the Crudup song.

A couple nights later, when Phillips brought the acetate over to his friend and radio DJ Dewey Phillips over at WHBQ a mile and a half away in the lobby of the Hotel Chisca and asked him to give it a spin, neither he, nor Dewey or Elvis had any idea what was going to happen. Nobody could have.

As writer Peter Guralnick explained in the first half of his superb two-volume Presley biography “Last Train To Memphis,” the song was an immediate hot connection.

“The response was instantaneous,” Guralnick wrote. “Forty-seven phone calls, it was said, came in right away, along with fourteen telegrams? – he played the record seven times in a row, eleven times, seven times over the course of the program. In retrospect, it doesn’t really matter; it seemed all of Memphis was listening as Dewey kept up his non-stop patter…”

As we celebrate 250 years of America, the story of the wholly improbable rise of Elvis Presley still surprises us and it always should. Even now, 72 years later, the depth of such an immediate response to a record is startling. It was as if, starting in Memphis, entire cities all across America had kept their late-night radios on for years and years, hoping for some sort of sign or message of hope, excitement, jubilation, anything to shake things up. Here it came from a guy earning less than $40 a week. There was so much more to come. More than anyone could have expected, including Elvis himself.

The 19-year-old Elvis Presley, about to become a worldwide sensation.

The artifacts of Presley’s tumultuous life are still being uncovered. What seemed a rather tacky coffee-table book called “Elvis Presley Treasures” came out a couple years ago, collecting 100 items from his life. Here’s a library card Elvis signed taking out Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus.” Here’s a job application where Presley is described as a “rather flashily dressed ‘playboy’ type.”

Or how about this, an Elvis-written response to a fan letter, errors and all?

“ Dear xxxx: I have received your letter and I don’t think your crazy. I understand how you feel because before I started singing and lived in the poorest part of town and my father made only 45$ a week. Please try to understand that I cannot do what you ask. It would not be the right thing to do. Also somday you will be glad I didn’t! There is somebody in this world that’s meant for you and you only. With him only you will find happiness. I don’t love you and I doubt if I ever could so let’s please be friends and let it drop there. You don’t know the kind of life I lead and the letters I receive so please understand. Your friend, Elvis Presley. P.S.: If you write again, send me a picture for my scrapbook.”

Can you imagine getting a letter back from Elvis Presley, especially one as considerate and gentle as this?

“You don’t know the kind of life I lead,” he says and at this stage of stardom, we can only imagine what he might be talking about. And Elvis keeping a scrapbook, as if he couldn’t quite believe all that was happening to him and wanted to paste some of those letters and newspaper stories so he could believe it, too.

In an earlier Guralnick book “Lost Highway,” there’s a line from Elvis that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post around this time that shows he was as mystified as everyone else.

“I don’t know what it is,” Elvis told writer C. Robert Jennings. “I just fell into it, really. My daddy and I were laughing about it the other day. He looked at me and said, ‘What happened, El? The last thing I can remember is I was working at a can factory, and you were driving a truck.’ We all feel the same way about it still. It just…caught us up.”

In some ways, in 2026, the life of Elvis Presley, at least the first half of it, seems almost impossible to believe. Could something like that still happen in America?

Reading Guralnick’s two-part biography of Presley, Bob Dylan offered this:
“Unrivaled account of Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible, not the whitewashed golden calf but the incendiary atomic musical firebrand loner who conquered the western world, he steps from the pages, you can feel him breathe…”

We can still hear him sing, too. Can talent and drive still triumph? It did once. Was that enough? Can we ever truly measure the distance Elvis Presley traveled, from where he was to where he rose?

Starting at $37.91 a week.

Author John Nogowski writes often about popular music on his free Substack, now in Year Three. He’s written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a forthcoming book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,”; two books on baseball - his son is a former major-leaguer - “Diamond Duels,” a deep dive into the game’s great historic matchups, “Last Time Out,” a collection of stories about the final games of baseball’s greatest players and a book about his experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling minority Florida high school for a dozen years. He’s a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant and is currently at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen.

Since I’ve written three editions of a book on Bob Dylan, you’d have to think he’d be up there on my personal list. And the guy has been making records since the 1960’s. My new Neil Young book should be out at the end of the year or the beginning of next so I spent a lot of hours with him last year. And since I’m working on a Bruce Springsteen book at the moment, there’s a lot of Bruce, too. But there has been since I first saw him the day he finished the “Born To Run” album in 1975.

But you know who I bet would be a surprise on my personal list, maybe even to him if he was still around to look at the numbers? Tom Petty.

It’s hard to believe that we lost the guy nearly a decade ago at the end of a grueling tour he was trying to finish with a broken hip. He passed on October 2, 2017 at 67. And speaking selfishly, the guy had so much more music in him, didn’t he?

I’m not sure about your own listening habits but when I’m in the car and I have my Sirius XM on, I seem to wander between Elvis Radio (Channel 75), Bruce Springsteen (Channel 20), U2 (Channel 32) and Petty (Channel 31). And with Petty’s terrific “Buried Treasure Show” mixed in there, I might spend more time there than anywhere else.

And reading Zollo’s thoughtful, comprehensive book of conversations with the guy, you miss him all the more. What was always fascinating to me about Petty’s music was it was of a piece - you knew it was him right away - but within that well-defined sound, there was creativity. “Breakdown” sounds nothing like “The Waiting” which is on the other side of the pond from “Here Comes My Girl” and a track like “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is also him, fun, refreshing and still surprising.

While his best songs sound effortless, as if they just poured out of him (and probably did), don’t think for a moment that they were easily thrown together or just tossed off one afternoon. There was some genuine craft there. As Petty explained to Zollo near the end of the book.

“Yeah,” he told Zollo, “it always makes me laugh when I read that my music is simple. Because if you think it’s simple, try and do it. It’s not simple. There’s a lot of nuance. And light and shade. It’s not a simple thing. It’s sometimes much harder to do, really…”

Zollo agrees. “I think your songs seem to be simpler than they are,” he says.

“They’re not simple,” Petty continues. “I was in a music store recently, and a guy was trying to impress me and he was playing all our licks. Saying, “Hey, look at this!” And he had every one wrong. He had the right root of the chord. But we use a lot of variations of chords. For example, I use a lot of variations of G. I don’t play, necessarily, a straight G. There’s a lot of variations on those chords. And this guy was playing everything straight. So he thought it was right, but it wasn’t.”

As a fledgling guitarist myself - and you can’t get more fledgling than me, now in my 40th year trying to go from C to A minor without a hitch - many of his songs do seem pretty easy to play. You can certainly recognize the chords of “I Won’t Back Down” or “A Heart With A Mind Of Its Own” or “Free Fallin’” when you can find them on your guitar but getting it to sound exactly like Tom Petty and the brilliant, underrated guitarist Mike Campbell, that’s a tough task.

As Petty described himself many times, he was the kind of guy who walked around the house, guitar strapped on all the time, always playing, riffing, trying to find something new. Often enough, he did. And when they came on the radio, you were excited. It was something new from Petty, yet somehow familiar, too. That’s not easy to pull off.

For many bands, the box set is an easy way to fill the coffers. Collect your greatest hits, a handful of B-sides maybe or an outtake or two or a live track and you’re all set. Some bands have put out several of them.

In 1995, for whatever reason, Petty and the Heartbreakers decided to put out “Playback” which is a six-CD collection of their most celebrated hits on the first three CDs but the remaining three have all sorts of outtakes, surprises, fun tracks that give you a broader perspective of their music.

I’ve been listening to it all morning and it’s one of the best box sets I have. Petty talks about it with Zollo late in the book and gives the track-by-track breakdown that made me want to break it out again. I’m glad I did. If you’re a Tom Petty fan, Zollo’s book is comprehensive and highly recommended.

Unlike the career-long hosannas for a Neil Young or a Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, I’m not sure Petty ever felt quite as appreciated as he might have been. To be around that long, to have that many hits, to be a part of the Traveling Wilburys, too, the guy made a major contribution to popular music. But do we think of him that way? I wonder.

His solo album “Full Moon Fever,” for example, might have been played more than any other single cassette I ever had. I wasn’t the only one. Famed record producer Rick Rubin, who finally got to work with Tom late in his career, said the same thing. He didn’t listen to anything else in his car for over a year. It’s that good a record. And to think the record company rejected it on first listen.

“I brought the record in,” Petty told Zollo, “and they didn’t like it. Which had never happened with me. I was stunned. They didn’t like it…They didn’t hear a single…So I was pretty devastated. And I just put it on the back burner…then later on, I brought the record back. And the regime had changed at MCA. And I brought exactly the same record in, And they loved it.” As did just about everybody else who ever bought it. One of the great solo records.

That cassette included Petty’s hilarious between sides message to listeners. Remember it?

“Hello, CD listeners. We have come to the point in this album where those listening on cassettes or records will have to stand up or sit down and turn over the record or tape. In fairness to those listeners, we’ll now take a few seconds before we begin side two. Thank you. Here’s side two.”

Tom Petty’s music was rich, full of excitement and fun, a guy who sounded as if he was having the time of his life. And he wanted that for his fans, too. Listen to “Playback” or Tom Petty Radio some afternoon and you’ll miss him, too.

Good thing you can always turn to Sirius XM Channel 31. He’ll be there waiting.

Author John Nogowski has been a fan of Tom Petty’s music since his first album. He’s written about popular music for many years, including three editions of a comprehensive book about Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and forthcoming book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and two books on baseball: “Diamond Duels” a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories of the final games of baseball’s all-time greats. He’s also written a book about his teaching experiences at a struggling minority Florida high school, teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” He’s been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s currently at work on a book about the music of Bruce Springsteen. His books are all available on Amazon.

Well, as someone who spent a lot of time in the classroom with J.D. Salinger’s classic “The Catcher In The Rye,” I surely would like to celebrate the novel, one of the most impactful in my lifetime. And it’d surely be fun to discuss the book and how it connected with the 116 patrons so far who’ve registered and coughed up the $13.61 admission charge, or roughly ten times what Salinger charged for the hardback in 1951 ($3.00) to attend. There’s always lots to talk about with “Catcher.” Why, it even made the New York Times today.

That’s part of it. The other, and perhaps more intriguing aspect of that evening will be to hear what Salinger’s son Matt has to say about the rest of the Salinger canon. If he says anything.

You see, back in February of 2019, Alison Flood, a writer for England’s “The Guardian” published an interview with the younger Salinger in response to what had been revealed in Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” 2013 docudrama that ended with a prospective list of all the unpublished, completed works that Matt’s father had carved out in his Cornish, New Hampshire bunker and refused/declined/was simply reluctant to publish.

So these manuscripts have sat around at least since J.D.’s death on January 27, 2010. And in the interview with Flood, Matt, the executor of his dad’s will, vowed the work was coming. She wrote: “JD Salinger’s son has confirmed for the first time that the late author of The Catcher in the Rye wrote a significant amount of work that has never been seen, and that he and his father’s widow are “going as fast as we freaking can” to get it ready for publication.

“He wanted me to pull it together,” Matt said, “and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

“This will take years,” he said. “I don’t owe an apology, I don’t think, but your readers should know that we’re going as fast as we freaking can … I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did.”

That was seven years ago. Some time later, your correspondent stumbled into a Diego Courchay post on Substack where he happened to run into Matt Salinger at a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. Here’s what Matt told him: “What will be published is not what some biographers have promised,” Matt said. “There is this ridiculous biography which chest-thumpingly announced he wrote these five or six novels and that they’re going to come out, and even gave a date for when they were going to come out. Great! And then Harvey Weinstein made a movie of it…My father didn’t write any of those five or six novels. I mean, I’m not even sure he wrote one novel.”

“There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of beautiful writing, profound writing, hysterically funny writing, great dialogue, all the sort of raw nuggets that he mined from this vein that he was mining his whole life of the Glass family [the subject of two of his novels and various short stories].

“So all that will be available to readers who loved his writing, and I think they will rejoice. But to those who were given false expectations of other jewel-like, perfectly polished finished works, they’re going to be sorely disappointed, and shame on those biographers who gave them false expectations. But I don’t want to say much about what it is, because I don’t want to affect the reader’s expectations myself. I want them to discover it.”

Maybe Matt will clear all that up tomorrow night. Since the New York Times hyped the event, perhaps they’ll send a reporter to ask those questions. Nobody will ask him why his dad just stopped publishing. We’ve sort of clued into that. And the biographies and legal wranglings that closed out his life made it pretty clear Salinger was deadly, legally serious about his privacy and that his words were “for him.”

But any writer writes to be read, don’t they? Did he truck out to that “Do Not Disturb” bunker every day for years and years thinking that all those words he carefully crafted would never be shared?

The story goes that Salinger once got into a grudge match with a New Yorker editor who wrongfully (in Salinger’s view) inserted a comma in the wrong place. His words mattered that much.

So what did he work on after “Hapworth 16, 1924” was published in the New Yorker on June 19, 1965, taking up almost the whole magazine. It was a dense, hard-to-read story that drew all sorts of criticism that some assumed drove him into publishing silence for the next 45 years of his life and now, another 16. It was a struggle to get through, I’ll tell you that.

Maybe he was written out, realized it and just didn’t know what else to do. Or, as critic Christian Kriticos wrote for The Millions in 2015, he was up to something else.

“One of the most common criticisms leveled against the Glass stories was that Salinger was writing them purely for himself, at the price of alienating his readers,” he wrote. “Salinger even admitted as much, stating “I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” and “there is enough real danger, I suppose, that sooner or later, I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods.”

“Thus,” Criticos writes, “Hapworth” came for many to represent the culmination of this, and the ultimate in insufferable self-indulgence, with its endless verbosity and preposterous length. Even within the story, Salinger appears to acknowledge this, with his narrator warning us that “This is going to be a very long letter!” and later urging the reader “Please, please, PLEASE do not grow impatient and ice cold to this letter because of its gathering length!”

So, Criticos wonders if “Salinger was “trying something new, arguably something different than any other American writer: to reconcile non-material (Eastern) ways of transcendence with the particulars of American daily life.” Writer Roger Lathbury contends that this accounts for its unusual style — “a letter that is not a letter” — and that to write what Salinger wanted to write necessarily required “a seismic shift in sensibility.”

“Salinger addressed this exact concept in an earlier story entitled “Teddy,” which also takes a child prodigy with spiritual gifts as its protagonist: “It’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America.” Likewise, the form of “Hapworth” is recycled from an earlier unpublished story, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” which is also presented as a letter written home from summer camp.

“Thus, one might hypothesize that in “Hapworth” Buddy’s voice is apparent via a brief introduction before the letter begins, in which he assures us twice that he intends to type up an “exact copy,” which is what we will read. This over-assurance is immediately suspicious, and the opening line, in which Seymour states “I will write for us both,” might also serve as evidence.”

What if that is the case? What if Salinger had outdistanced his critics? Watching “Salinger” — with all its flaws and overdone bits — made me think about that. But reading the story is a mighty task. So must have been writing it.

As Critikos concludes: “This is the crux of “Hapworth” — it defies interpretation, and in this way stands as Salinger’s ultimate embodiment of the Glass family’s ideals. Just four years earlier he had admitted that Buddy was his “alter-ego,” blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and here we see him bringing the ideals of his fictional world into the reality of his work as a writer.

“In Franny and Zooey, Salinger quotes at length from Swami Prabhavananda:“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.” “Hapworth” can be seen as a culmination of this ideal, as it represents Salinger writing purely for himself, and for the pleasure of the work. The fact that he continued to write for the rest of his life, but ceased publishing, also meant he was rejecting considerable “fruits.”

As far as we know, Matt Salinger’s are the only pair of eyes that have looked at those manuscripts. Does he think they’re worth sharing with a world of curious readers? Did his father ever try and clue him into his intent with all these pages? Or is he just as baffled as critics were in 1965 after “Hapworth”?

His father did leave the door open for further publication, otherwise Matt would never have given that Guardian interview, right? It seems unlikely that any posthumous writings would do anything to add to the Salinger canon. But what if “Hapworth” was, as Criticos suggests, a breakthrough and we missed it? Maybe the distance, hearing Salinger’s voice again after all this time will change things.

We know this much. Something was driving J.D. Salinger to walk across his Cornish property into that writing bunker just about every day for decades. Maybe he was indeed, writing just for himself and his own pleasure, as he once explained. Maybe he was on to something else. That’s a question I hope someone throws at Matt tomorrow night. Wish it was me.

Author John Nogowski taught “The Catcher In The Rye” in high school and college classrooms for over a decade. In almost every case, the students connected with main character Holden Caulfield, surprising given the decades that had passed since the book’s original publication. Teaching at an all-minority school up through 2023, the novel seemed to carry surprising weight, prompting one of my star students to suggest she wished “she could date him.” Salinger’s short stories were very popular with my classes, especially “For Esme - With Love And Squalor” - clearly about his World War II experience. Nogowski has written about his teaching experience with another American author - presenting Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” to an all-black high school classes. One student called Huck “the brother I never had.” He’s also written two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and two books on popular music - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and the forthcoming “Neil Young, A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due at the end of the year. He’s written a Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen.