One of the sad byproducts of being 64 is watching as, bit by bit, the people who have been standing ahead of you in the line of life slowly fall by the wayside until, one day, you wake up and realize there’s nobody in front of you anymore.
These reminders hit you at the strangest times, too. You suffer through all the important ones, such as your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and so on. You get through them, somehow, and you’re so busy trying to cope and soldier on you have neither the time nor inclination to ponder their significance in the bigger picture.
Then you get hit with something that comes out of nowhere. The first bit of news that hits you on a particular day is that David Bowie is dead, or that David Cassidy is gravely ill and about to die. You never even liked David Cassidy, and you certainly couldn’t stand The Partridge Family. But they were the wallpaper of your youth.
Ray Thomas and Keith Jackson probably never met each other. I’d be surprised if they even knew each other existed (unless Jackson did fishing shows on TV, in which case Thomas may have caught a few, as angling was a real passion of his).
Both, however, were much more important to me than wallpaper.
I’m sure somewhere along the way, I’d heard the expression “whoa, Nellie!” before Keith Jackson said it during a college football game on TV, but he’s the only one I remember saying it. Something bizarre would happen in a game, and there would be Keith, screaming “whoa, Nellie!” I’d break out into a chuckle and all was right with the world.
I think of Keith Jackson, who died Friday night, and it brings me back to nippy autumn afternoons and colder evenings, parked in front of my TV set, watching whatever games ABC deemed important enough to assign him to broadcast. A few times, it was Boston College, including the game the Eagles won in Alabama (or, as Keith might have said, “Uh-lah-bum-uhhhh) when Lynn’s Tony Thurman intercepted a pass in the end zone with 45 seconds left in the game.
That rated a great, big “whoa, Nellie!”
Jackson once said that the most important aspects of his job were to amplify, enunciate, clarify, and then get out of the way.
Boy, could he enunciate. We’ve already discussed the dramatic way he pronounced Alabama. Or “fumbbblllllllleee!”
When I was in the 10th grade, I was a “sophmore.” No second “o.” Then, one day, Jackson was extolling the virtues of some behemoth lineman (or, as he liked to call them, “big uglies”), and next thing you knew, you were hearing about a “6-foot-4, 290-pound soph-o-more from Uh-lah-bum-ahhhh.”
Nobody could pronounce words the way he could. He didn’t just broadcast games. His words were music, and he — as much as anyone — made me understand and appreciate the music of language.
Almost everything in my life circles back to music. So when I heard last week about the death of Ray Thomas, the crowd in front of me in line had a huge gap in it.
For those who don’t know, Thomas was the flautist and a singer in (my favorite) rock ‘n’ roll band — the Moody Blues. Apparently, neither Thomas nor the other four members who made up the most prolific aggregation of the group, was seen by those who “matter” as being in any way significant. They’ve been around since 1964, and have no less, by my count, than nine bonafide rock classics to their credit and several others that even casual fans could probably recognize. But they didn’t get elected to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame until late last year. Their induction will take place in April.
But it’ll be too late for Ray, who died Jan. 7 of a heart attack.
Thomas was a pioneer in the annals of rock. He was laying down flute solos on songs such as “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon” long before Ian Anderson refined the use of the instrument with Jethro Tull. Others soon followed. Even the Marshall Tucker Band.
His magnum opus with the Moodies was “Legend of a Mind,” a paean to LSD guru Timothy Leary. Other than the fact that it was a very funky, trippy song, it also introduced the term “astral plane” to the rock lexicon. He made every performance of it in concerts a true highlight.
The Moodys were definitely a college band for me. I discovered them at the exact moment when my life was opening up to new ideas, new possibilities, and a growing maturity. Their music may have been dippy sometimes, but it fit in nicely with how I was beginning to view the world.
Keith Jackson’s words were music. Ray Thomas and the Moody Blues showed me another dimension to music. Both were fixtures in front of me in that long line of life.
Now they’re gone.
