By Bob Gaydos

Tony Bennett
… made my list twice

They — whoever “they” are — say that once you hit a certain age all you do is talk about how great things used to be and how not as great they are now.

Guilty. Child of the ‘50s and in full faculties.

I’m thinking about this because a lot of my recent conversations with somewhat younger colleagues were of the “I just saw Freddy and the Hot Tones at Central Park and they were still great!” variety. “100,000 people!” Or, “Just saw The Undead do The Dead Tribute in the Grand Canyon! Killer!” Or, “Manny, Moe and Jack are coming back! Gotta make my list! Can’t believe they’re still alive!”

I blame Woodstock. This drive to be surrounded by thousands of others somewhere outdoors to hear someone they never heard of, or once heard, or sounding like someone they once heard to add to the list of wow, wasn’t that concert something!

It’s kind of a status thing, I think. A friend (younger) of mine said he once had to skip some event because he got to hear some famous aging singer perform at Bethel Woods, site of the original Woodstock gathering in upstate New York.

Feeling a little snarky, I replied that, once upon a time, I got to hear Tony Bennett sing in the Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Not quite Woodstock, but nice. Heads nodded. Talking with another friend about this phenomena, I recalled that, once upon a time, I heard Ahmad Jamal play the piano at a club in Greenwich Village, saw Ray Charles at the keyboard in Carnegie Hall, caught the Moiseyev at Lincoln Center and had a couple of drinks with the Clancy Brothers at a hotel bar in Binghamton, N.Y. Oh yeah, I saw Harry Belafonte at The Concord in the Catskills.

Not sure what the point here is except maybe that those things just happened with no sense of urgency that they had to happen because, well, that’s the way it is. Or was.

While I’m at it, once upon a time it was more important in baseball to have a .300 hitter on the team than to have someone whose meaningless occasional singles got to the outfield faster than a speeding bullet. Or to have a starting pitcher last more than five innings or to actually get a runner to second base in scoring position rather than having one placed there automatically in extra innings to speed up the game and remove any drama.

Once upon a time, the box scores of those baseball games used to be printed in newspapers around the country along with comics pages and articles about what was going on in local communities, including political news, which I will avoid here so as not to spoil the nostalgia.

People in most decent-sized communities knew what was going on there because they actually had fully staffed newspapers and had the newspaper delivered to their door daily, sometimes by teenagers looking to make a few extra bucks so they could go to the movies Saturday. This was possible because the teenagers didn’t have to carry phones around with them feeling they would miss something important if they weren’t constantly looking at them. I may be somewhat prejudiced here, but I believe reading levels were higher all around, once upon a time, when the news was delivered in print on paper without worrying about the Internet being down.

But hey, what do I know? Old and full faculties. Well, I know that Tony Bennett was great at the Waldorf in the 1970s and also at the Paramount Theater in downtown Middletown, N.Y., about a decade later, where I heard him again. And I’d be willing to bet that one of the songs he sang was “Once Upon a Time.” Beautiful. Check it out on YouTube.

***

Full disclosure: I did attend the Woodstock 50th reunion concert at Bethel Woods along with a whole lot of others where I heard Santana and the Doobie Brothers. I also caught James Taylor and Carly Simon at the Naval Academy in Annapolis back in the ‘70s. Enjoyed all. Cross them off my list.

By Bob Gaydos

“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack …”                 RJ Photography

   I think I’m making this a thing. In a world of TikTok, Twitter (no bird!?), streaming and binge-watching, the world we live in is more and more like a stream of consciousness experience.

    So, let me report on the past week in which two events affected me in a personal way, the first being (1.) the death, at 96, of the legendary Tony Bennett who seemed determined to go on forever, singing standards despite Alzheimer’s and being decades older than his collaborators and 70 years removed from his first big hit, “Because of You,” which I sang as an 11-year-old in front of Mrs. Godlis’(?) 6th grade class in P.S. #3 in Bayonne, N.J., for reasons I can’t remember but a memory which still fills me with warm feelings, as does the memory of an old friend, the late, great musician, Hal Gaylor, of Greenwood Lake, who backed Bennett up on bass on many recordings and, like Bennett, was also a wonderful artist, the kind of person you wish could just go on forever, unlike the (2.) Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect, charged with the murder of three young women and suspected in many more on Long Island between 1996 and 2011 and who, it turns out, police in Suffolk County had a solid description of (as well as his truck) within days of the discovery of the bodies 13 years ago but (3.) were too busy covering up an assault by their police chief to bother doing anything about it, which is kind of like (4.) what Chief Justice John Roberts did when asked to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the lack of any code of ethics among the ethically challenged justices, a decision which (5.) prompted the Senate committee to propose Legislation to set ethics rules for the court and a process to enforce them, including new standards for transparency around recusals, gifts and potential conflicts of interest, which (6.) all the Republicans on the committee voted against because the party is too busy (7.) in the House of Representatives trying to manufacture an impeachment of President Joe Biden somehow connected to his son Hunter, who (8.) agreed to plead guilty to tax evasion charges and unlawful possession of a weapon, with no jail time, which (9). a judge questioned and delayed and Republicans said was a sweetheart deal because of his dad being president, which (10.) is pretty much what the Education Department says it’s looking into regarding Harvard’s legacy admissions policy wherein top colleges give preferential acceptance treatment to children of alumni, who are often white (and sometimes rich), a practice which has been under fire since (11.) the Supreme Court last month struck down the use of affirmative action as a tool to boost the presence of students of color, which was in stark contrast to (12.) the same court’s recent ruling that Alabama had to redraw its district voting lines to more fairly represent black voters in the state, an example of reasonable thinking which stands in contrast (13.) to BiBi Netenyahu’s increasingly autocratic Israeli government, which voted to remove the “reasonableness” of an action as something for Israel’s Supreme Court to consider, a vote which (14.) has led to massive anti-government demonstrations and (15.) strained the relationship between Israel and the U.S., which has historically been strong, much like that of American men and baseball, a bond which (16.) drew four relatively new friends (me being one of them) to a minor league baseball game on a Thursday night in Dutchess County, N.Y., to see the Brooklyn Cyclones (a Mets farm team) meet the Hudson Valley Renegades (a Yankees affiliate) on a comfortable summer night billed as Halloween in July at the ballpark, where hot dogs and caps came with the price of admission, peanuts and Cracker Jack were also consumed and the home team lost because of one horrendous inning by the starting pitcher, several bad base-running decisions by other Renegades, a couple of questionable umpiring calls and a leaping catch at the wall with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning by the Cyclones’ right fielder to take a game-tying home run away from Spencer Jones, the Renegades player everyone says is the next Aaron Judge, who (17.) reported to Tampa, to practice swinging again with the toe he injured a while back breaking down a wall in right field in Los Angeles while taking a home run away from the Dodgers, who used to play in Brooklyn where the world-famous roller coaster called the Cyclone is located and (18.) who says there’s no symmetry in this world?

(PS: Cracker Jack boxes are now smaller, but come in a pack of three ($4) and the “prize” is a code to some online game. I preferred the whistle.)

rjgaydos@gmail.com