Ramblin' with Roger

Should Singers Pack It In?

Six Iconic Singers Who Should Call It a Day

Periodically, I see articles asking whether specific singers should pack it in, whether their vocal cords are too shot to keep performing in public. I’ve long been of the school that the market should decide whether the performer should hang it up.

It’s often difficult for players in many endeavors to know when to hang up the cleats. Willie Mays, the best baseball player in my lifetime, cringed as he noted he batted only .211 in 1973, his final season. (It’s not very good.)

I recall that Mick Jagger didn’t think he’d still be singing in his fifties. Yet, he’s still at it in his eighties, even though he was on more than one of those lists of “he should stop” more than a decade ago.

When Pete Seeger would perform in his later years, his voice was largely shot, but he could still play the banjo and tell stories; Pete was being inspirational Pete, whom I saw dozens of times and met once.

The 85-year-old Martha Reeves blamed her backup singers for her national anthem performance.

I saw a PBS event, America Made In Virginia: 250 Years Together on July 4. One of the performers was Judy Collins, whose voice I adore; I saw her live in 1980. In the presentation, she was a bit shaky early on, but she got better over time. Still, the 87-year-old is on her retirement tour

Several people had newsworthy physical ailments that have sidelined them for a time recently, such as Frankie Valli, Rod Stewart, and Barry Manilow.

Call it a day?

Rand Bishop’s piece on Medium recommends Six Iconic Singers Who Should Call It a Day and Pack It In. “The human voice is a machine. And machines break down.”

He praised the incomparable Tony Bennett, who still could produce at 95. I watched his special that featured Lady Gaga. He might not have remembered the performance the next day, but he delivered musically when it mattered.

Conversely, Stevie Nicks, Jon Bon Jovi, and Ann Wilson make the list of should-be retirees. I have no specific info on them. Neil Diamond is noted, but the very few times he’s performed in recent years, his fans don’t mind carrying the load.

This leaves two Pauls. Bishop notes, correctly, “McCartney’s guest appearance on a recent Saturday Night Live revealed severely compromised vocal chops.” He has put together a decent album recently, however. One commenter said that he hasn’t been any good in 30 years, which is nonsense. The show I saw in 2014 was great!

There goes Rhymin’ Simon

As for Simon, he was quite open about his hearing loss in this November 2024 interview. He’s been able to perform by changing mic placement and creating different arrangements for some songs. I watched a show from his A Quiet Celebration tour online, and it sounded much like his Stanford show in early June.

“Simon and company closed the second set with the always-fun ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,’ with [Edie] Brickell reappearing to handle the famed whistle solo that her husband originally did on the 1972 studio recording. The whole crew then returned for a four-song encore — highlighted by the gorgeous take on Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” to close — before taking their bows in front of the highly appreciative audience.

“Yet, Simon still had one more in him and remained on the stage after the other musicians departed. What came next was the moment that everyone in attendance will likely remember for years to come as he glided into a precious, humbling and completely raw solo take on Simon and Garfunkel’s classic ‘The Sound of Silence.’

“It was one of those perfect concert moments, as Simon turned to the only song that could really bring this Quiet Celebration to a close in such a fitting and heartfelt manner.”

A buddy saw one of the two nights he was at Tanglewood in late June. This review was of the other night but is just as complimentary as my pal reported. Paul Simon needed a workaround and found it. Bravo for him; let him keep plucking away.

Movie review: The Odyssey

“faithful” to the source material?

My wife and I saw the film The Odyssey at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany a couple of weekends ago, and I somehow neglected to write about it. Busyness has its costs.

I’ll admit to never having read the book/books; he also referenced Homer’s The Iliad and other period pieces. So I have no feeling about whether Christopher Nolan was “faithful” to the source material, though I find the debate endlessly fascinating. It’s a three-hour movie, not thirty.

The movie is vast and often impressive, especially visually. I thought the first palace-intrigue, extended scene dragged a bit, though the pacing improved after that.

The action scenes are memorable. Because of my lack of foreknowledge, the Cyclops, many of the storms, and the Circe’s magic narrative took me by surprise. What was particularly striking was the treatment of Circe’s magic; someone suggested correctly that it recalled “the unsettling body horror of David Cronenberg rather than traditional fantasy spectacle.”

Yet I thought the recapitulation of the Troy was what I found most unnerving. It was the point that Odysseus (Matt Damon) seemed to grasp the consequences of the “battle.”

A lot of the debate about the film centered on the religious content. A story from Religion Unplugged pondered, “No Divine Powers: Where Are All The Gods In Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’?” Yet my wife and I spent the ride home very conscious of the film’s faith basis. “Many have noted that [Nolan] conflates aspects of Homer’s religion with Christianity and modernity.” This is a fair point.

Still, it rated a 93% (critics)/97% (fans) positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t love it, but I was glad to see it in the theater, at least until…

Technical difficulties

The real problem, though, was technical – not Nolan’s fault but the Spectrum’s. If you’ve ever played a DVD in a player and it momentarily sticks, you’ll get some idea. It happened a couple of times about 2/3s of the way through. But in the extended consequential fight scene, it happened frequently, not severe enough that we couldn’t make out the dialogue, but it was mightily distracting.

I mentioned this to the ticket seller after the film, and he said he’d let someone know. Meh.

I recently saw an interesting piece in the Boston Globe (behind a paywall): ‘The Odyssey’ and the death of the Hollywood epic. The year’s most celebrated film is destined to be forgotten. “From opening title card to closing credits, “The Odyssey” is a nearly three-hour barn burner, racing from event to event with whirlwind kinetic energy. Blink, and you’ll miss some roaring fire, raucous tempest, or piggy sorceress on the spinning carousel of adventure. Nolan’s film zooms along as though locked into a high-speed drag race with the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise.

“That’s why it’s so forgettable.” This was not my experience, but time literally will tell.

Even before seeing the film, I enjoyed the story of thirteen-year-old Mason Cufari, from Rotterdam, Schenectady County, who played young Sinon.

Labor Day heroes who aren’t even working

climate.us

I’ve come to honor Labor Day heroes who aren’t even working for pay.

ITEM 1: Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People. Scientists are preserving vital climate-related information amid the regime’s attacks on climate science.

“Since June 23, a group of former employees of the communications branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been busily resurrecting one of the government’s premier educational websites on climate change.

“Climate.gov was started in the early 2010s by communicators with NOAA, and for more than a decade it consistently produced high-quality graphics and other charts documenting rising global temperatures, changing rain patterns, drought conditions, El Niño impacts, and other climate-related data….

“In February 2025, as the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) purges accelerated, most of the staff and contractors attached to the website were fired…

Let me interrupt this with something I did not fully know:

ITEM 2: DOGE officially shuts down on July 4, 2026!

“But the initiative did not come without a cost to taxpayers. In December 2025, the executive director of the environmental nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) claimed the [regime] cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in 2025 through its deferred resignation program.

“Ironically, this unreasonably costly mass idling of civil servants was done in the name of ‘government efficiency.’

Back to our main story:

“A year after Climate.gov’s demise, [former employees] resurrected the vast majority of its materials…The new, privately run site is Climate.us, and it contains a wealth of sophisticated data sets and graphics on the world’s climate…”

Their work has inspired ex-government employees in several other agencies.

Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) communicators are… now looking to resurrect climate-related EPA pages that have been taken down; a group called the Public Environmental Data Partners is attempting to rescue specialist environmental monitoring tools — it has some information online, but not yet a fully interactive website. Another group, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, is working to save specialized environmental justice screening tools. As the [regime] deliberately shreds decades of climate-related research, ex-government employees are attempting to ride to the rescue by creating a sort of shadow information-dispersal system. The American Geophysical Union, which most U.S. Earth scientists are members of, has been instrumental in putting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back on track after the Trump administration pulled support for its annual reports….

Replacement

The Climate.us site now is seeing close to a million visitors a month, putting it up there with where the NOAA-run site was before its demise. Teachers use it frequently, as do an array of others simply trying to get an accurate read on what is happening to the climate.

As with the old government-run website, Climate.us has a network of scientific advisers around the country willing to lend their expertise to the project and to make sure that what the communications people write up is scientifically accurate.

Preserving “this vital climate-related information in an era of administration-enforced environmental ignorance has become a mission. ‘Climate information shouldn’t be available to the public just on a political basis or a whim.’ There ought to be a way to ‘promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions.'”

I shared this news with a former dedicated employee of one of the agencies mentioned, and they were thrilled and heartened that the work they had participated in could be preserved.

“SO glad to see this! It reminds me of how people hurriedly photocopied files that Anne Gorsuch wanted destroyed under ray-gun. I knew some of them.” Not incidentally, Anne Gorsuch was the mother of current SCOTUS justice Neil Gorsuch.

They mentioned the Wayback Machine; unfortunately, I have found that route to climate.gov unsuccessful.

These unpaid workers are heroes, in my book. So on Labor Day, let me salute those who are doing the work to undo ignorance.

Sunday Stealing, before summer slips away

URGENT and IMPORTANT

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Since it’s the Labor Day weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. On us all! The first question came courtesy of AI.

Labor Day Questions

1) What’s something you want to do before summer slips away?

Back in January, I wrote to a good friend, “The more I do, the further behind I am. How is this possible?”

He wisely replied, “The financial planner I worked for said it’s because we have two to-do lists in our heads (probably on paper, or your computer, for people like you and me): they are labeled URGENT and IMPORTANT, and new URGENTS always shove the IMPORTANT ones further and further down. Since you asked.”

So the biggest URGENT series – certain of you have some idea what that is- has utterly obliterated the IMPORTANT items on my list since June, such as:

Cleaning my office. Now worse off.

Cleaning my side of the bedroom, the Great Reorganizing. I had a brief window where I made some progress, but it stalled at the beginning of August.

Finding speakers for the FFAPL book reviews/author talks.

Calling a meeting of a genealogy group; I’m the chair, and I meant to do it in August.

What are books?

2) What book are you currently reading?

I’m not reading any books. I don’t even have time to read a daily newspaper. Eventually, I will have to tackle The Spirit of Philadelphia: A Call to Recover Founding Principles by Chris Gibson because I am reviewing it on October 27, but that’s SO far away; he lied.

3) What have you been listening to?

THAT I do because it’s necessary for the soul. Random Dolly Parton videos that pop up on YouTube, often as part of the Trio, with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, such as After the Gold Rush on David Letterman.

Two Beatles covers: the fascinating Blackbird by New York Vocal Collective and Can’t Buy Me Love by Casey Abrams, featuring Haley Reinhart, Charles Jones, and my first niece, Rebecca Jade.

September birthdays: Billy Preston – Do Want You Want To from the That’s The Way God Planned It album produced by George Harrison, which I first heard in Poughkeepsie, NY, in May 1971.

Chrissie Hynde and Martin Chambers of the Pretenders have birthdays this week. That first eponymous album had three or four singles, but the track that caught my attention in my recent play was the penultimate track, Lovers of Today.

Daniel Lanois is a record producer whose first album of his own, Acadie, features The Maker.

Time and Tide – Basia.

4) What shows or movies have you been watching?

My wife managed to get through seasons 3 through 5 of Only Murders in the Building. I watched ESPN JEOPARDY, since the regular show is on hiatus for the summer; I knew so little, yet there were things I got that none of the contestants even rung in on.

Hot Adult Contemporary #1 hits for 1986

hefty crossover with the Hot 100 pop hits

The #1 Hot Adult Contemporary Hits of 1986 had been a category called easy listening for the latter half of the 1960s and most of the 1970s. It became Adult Contemporary in the spring of 1979, then Hot Adult Contemporary in the autumn of 1984.

The roster has a hefty crossover with the Hot 100 pop hits, which I linked to last week. So I’m only linking to the songs that differ, but I’m listing them all.

Greatest Love Of All – Whitney Houston, five weeks at #1 AC, three weeks at #1 pop

Glory Of Love – Peter Cetera, five weeks at #1 AC, two weeks at #1 pop

Stuck With You – Huey Lewis & the News, three weeks at #1 AC and pop

Sara – Starship, three weeks at #1 AC, one week at #1 pop

These Dreams – Heart, three weeks at #1 AC, one week at #1 pop

Live To Tell – Madonna, three weeks at #1 AC, one week at #1 pop

Love Is Forever – Billy Ocean, three weeks at #1 AC, #16 pop

That’s What Friends Are For – Dionne & Friends, two weeks at #1 pop, four weeks at #1 pop

The Next Time I Fall- Peter Cetera with Amy Grant, two weeks at #1 AC, one week at #1 pop

The Way It Is – Bruce Hornsby & The Range, two weeks at #1 AC, one week at #1 pop

Friends and Lovers – Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson, two weeks at #1 AC, #2 for two weeks pop, thanks to exposure on TV’s Days of Our Lives

Throwing It All Away – Genesis, two weeks at #1 AC, #4 pop

Words Get In The Way – Miami Sound Machine, two weeks at #1 AC, #5 pop. Featuring Gloria Estefan

Your Wildest Dreams – The Moody Blues, two weeks at #1 AC, #9 pop

Love Will Conquer All – Lionel Richie, two weeks at #1, #9 pop

I’ll Be Over You – Toto, two weeks at #1 AC, #11 pop

Overjoyed – Stevie Wonder, two weeks at #1 AC, #24 pop

#1 AC for one week

How Will I Know – Whitney Houston, two weeks at #1 pop

They’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry) – Billy Ocean, one week at #1 pop

Secret Lovers – Atlantic Starr, #3 pop for two weeks

No One Is To Blame – Howard Jones, #4 pop

The Sweetest Taboo – Sade, #5 pop

My Hometown – Bruce Springsteen, #6 pop

Go Home– Stevie Wonder, #10 pop