Update 5/14: Here’s a nice appreciation on NPR.org. On my Facebook timeline, I noted that Dunn and Helm grew up a short distance away from each other, right on the Mississippi River delta. “You could feel that rich soil under your feet every time they played,” I wrote. That’s the feeling I try to conjure up when I’m on stage.

Previously: The end game on The Show | Hokum home

Personally, I love this guy. He’s Otis F. Redding personified — except with more range. He’s not the greatest interview in the world — he still seems a little dazed by it all, and who can blame him? — but once he hits the stage: POW. The problem is that he seems like a throwback even to me, and I don’t think the text-messager army has a clue who Otis F. Redding even is. I can root for him — but that probably means he is a dead man walking. Predicted finish: Fourth.

I have been alternatively amazed by the vocal prowess this teen displays and creeped out by the way the show keeps dressing her like she’s Jody Foster in Taxi Driver. Going against her: America’s already thrown her over the side once, but the judges hauled her back in with their one and only boat hook. She’s also a diva-style singer, and diva-style singing seems even more old-fashioned these days than Otis F. Redding. Predicted finish: Third.

If you told me even a month ago that this once-terrified kid would still be around, I would have professed amazement. But something clearly has happened here — she’s gotten used to being in the spotlight and now seems able to shed the stress that was holding her and her voice back. There is nothing — NOTHING — that the teen texters like better than a late comer racing three-wide down the stretch. I’ve seen this kind of personality win The Show repeatedly. If she keeps it together — and in her case, that’s always an open question — she could win it. Predicted finish: Second.

Can somebody explain him to me? I don’t get it. Week after week, the judges talk about what an original artist he is. Wha-wha-what? He looks like Dave Matthews, he sounds like Dave Matthews, he dresses like Dave Matthews, he moves on stage and even has the same facial expressions as Dave Matthews, and he plays a Taylor acoustic — the same guitar favored by You Know Who. He has less vocal range than anyone who has reached this stage of The Show ever and I can’t recall him ever venturing more than four feet from his microphone on stage. Oh, yeah: The tween girls and their bedazzled smart phones, armed with Mommy’s Unlimited Text Messaging Plan, appear to love him. Predicted finish: First.

It all plays out over the next three weeks. We’ll see what happens. More importantly, we’ll see if the winner can make an actual impact on the music industry. Last year’s champ actually has done pretty well, but I’m not super-confident about the long-term chances of any of this crew.

Previously: The best sporting event you’ll see… | Hokum home

He came over and decided to take pity on the American. In a very British accent, he carefully explained to me that City was the real Manchester football club — not those posers who played for United. He used a lot of small and simplistic words to explain to me the importance of this — not knowing that I’ve watched the Premier League for the last several years via cable sports networks.

United probably is the most famous sports team of any type in the world, and City has spent whole decades playing a very distant second fiddle to the Red Devils. But not this year. This year, United and City stand 1-2 in Britain’s Premier League, and if City beats United on Monday, City will take the league lead with only a couple of games remaining. Considering that City stomped United 6-1 on United’s home field earlier this year, City’s chances look good.

You can watch Premier League games almost every day if you’re lucky enough to have Fox Soccer Channel available to you. On Monday afternoon, the big boy in the room — ESPN — is going to broadcast the game live. It’s certainly the biggest club soccer match since United met Barcelona for the European team championship last spring. If you’re a sports fan who’s had little exposure to really top-notch professional soccer, this is the game you want to see.

P.S. — I’m a fan of the Blues, although I’m also a fan of Wayne Rooney’s remarkable hairline.

Previously: The official NPR ant farm | Hokum home

Live stream by Ustream

Previously: Proof that the Mayans might have been right… | Hokum home

I guess we can enjoy this until December.

Previously: Jack Tramiel and the Commodore 64 | Hokum home

It was Tramiel’s company, Commodore International, that made the fantastic Commodore 64 — the machine that taught me and thousands of other people about personal computing. The Commodore 64 was the second computer I owned, after a Timex-Sinclair TS-1000 that really was a glorified calculator. It was the 64, along with an achingly slow modem and a CompuServe subscription, that let me see all the way back in the mid-1980s that there was going to be a digital news medium.

“We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes,” Tramiel was fond of saying. I was certainly the masses: an Apple or IBM PC was out of my reach in that era. At a time when I made about $13,000 a year, both of those machines were priced well north of $1,000. The 64, on the other hand, eventually cost less than $200 and you could use a TV set as a monitor. A commercial from the era:

It also was a great gaming machine — far superior to an Apple II or an IBM PC (heck, a lot of PCs didn’t even have graphic cards then). I spent hour upon hour playing Jumpman or Zork II on my Commodore 64.

The 64 also hosted a part-time computer bulletin board system for me and I burned through a scary amount of money in CompuServe’s online chat rooms. Yes, there was social media, even back in 1983.

The popularity of the Commodore 64 faded as the 1980s moved on. Commodore came up with the Amiga, a great computer that got squeezed by competitors. Tramiel got forced out of Commodore International and went over to Atari, where he released the Atari ST, another great machine that never quite got over the commercial hump. Apple and (seemingly) a million clone PC makers started carving up the market, and I went down the PC road because I could build a cheaper machine out of parts. I’m still building my own PCs today, even though it’s no longer really less expensive to do that.

Thirty years later, my Nook Color e-reader has far more power and memory than the 64, but there was a ‘fun’ factor in the old machine that remains hard to beat. And I owe most of my professional career to the curiosity that bloomed from using this computer.

Previously: One for Levon | Hokum home

True story: The first time I ever saw Levon Helm in person, he was sitting in a lawn chair on the levee in Helena, Ark., amid thousands of other people, watching the performances at the King Biscuit Blues Festival. Nobody bothered him. I’m not sure how many people recognized him under that trucker hat, and I was too shy to introduce myself. Mind you, this was at a festival where I got Mike Huckabee to pose for a photo with a stuffed cow, so this was a very specific shyness.

By that time, I’d read Levon’s autobiography, which to my mind is second only to Jerry Wexler’s on the list of great rock ‘n’ roll autobiographies. I’d also listened to mountains of his music, and I’d learned how to sing high and lonesome harmonies by listening to those recordings. When I met drummers, I generally judged their talents — and heck, their overall I.Q. — by how much they sounded like Levon.

In short, I wanted to be Levon Helm — or at least, I wanted to have the musical parts of his life (the other parts were kind of rough at times). To my thinking, Levon had as pure of a musical soul as I was ever likely to experience, and he became the biggest influence on the way I play music and sing. There aren’t too many people who can shift from R&B to old-timey music to driving rock in a single set and make it all sound real — and on top of that, create a signature drum sound. In fact, there is only one person who could do that.

Levon’s family said Tuesday he was “in the final stages of his battle with cancer.” I didn’t even know until then that he had cancer again. I’d heard he was having back problems, and that issue was why he’d had a string of recent gig cancellations. I also was hoping I’d get to one of his Midnight Rambles some time soon, so I could check that off my personal bucket list. Now it appears I won’t have the chance.

***

I knew next to nothing about Levon until I saw The Last Waltz for the first time in the mid-1980s. Although Martin Scorcese’s camera spent too much time worshiping Robbie Robertson in that movie (Scorcese and Robertson were running buddies at the time), the film still educated me to the music of The Band. I had missed them almost completely in the 1960s and 1970s because they rarely hit the Top 40, and that was all I listened to at the time.

When the film opened and those rough-looking older dudes climbed onto the stage and sang “Don’t Do It,” well, that was pretty much all I needed to get hooked. My musical tastes already were changing, and I started digging deeper for something a little more authentic than the predictable stuff that had dominated my record collection.

Everyone in The Band was a fabulous player, but I’d never seen anyone play drums like Levon did in The Last Waltz. First, he held his snare stick underhanded, jazz-style. It gave his playing a sensitivity and control that you rarely see in rock ‘n’ roll, and you never saw it in that beat-the-drums-senseless era. Second, he didn’t set up his kit in the middle of the stage, behind the lead singer. The Band had no true lead singer — everyone sang — but Levon got a lot of the leads and he put his kit stage left, upstage. I still haven’t seen anyone else do that.

Years after The Last Waltz, The Band sort of re-formed minus Robertson. That effort eventually ground to an end for reasons too complex and painful to get into here, and then Levon was diagnosed with throat cancer and lost his voice. I thought I had heard the last from him. Instead, his second act was just beginning.

It took a long round of therapy, but Levon got his voice back. It was different, and more limited, but it was still very much his. And he began holding weekly get-togethers at his home/studio in Woodstock, which developed into the now-legendary Midnight Rambles. Then came Dirt Farmer, an impossibly good Americana album that netted Levon a Grammy and cemented his place as a performer again.

I saw Levon’s band last summer when they opened for John Hiatt at Wolf Trap. Frankly, he had a bad night. His voice, which had a tendency to bloom and fade after the cancer, was little more than a squawk. But he was great on drums and mandolin, and his band acted more like a family than a backing group. I filed the performance away in my mind, hoping I’d get a chance to see him in better form further on up the road.

***

Levon has done a lot of living. He developed his skills (musical and otherwise) by playing rockabilly on a brutal bar circuit in the late 1950s and early 1960s; he did the whole ’70s-rocker-excess thing, burning through a few Corvettes, a huge amount of money and a heroin addiction; he was a surprisingly good actor with some solid Hollywood credentials; he’s had moments of pure joy and pure terror that you and me will never experience, and he’s lived long enough to go through cycles of success and failure and success again.

Through all of that, he has stayed true to himself as a musician and a man. Few people can make that claim. His has been a musical life, well-lived.

Addendum, 4/19: From Levon’s Facebook page: “Levon Helm passed peacefully this afternoon. He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul.”

Previously: Today on Facebook | Hokum home

Previously: ‘Red’ is a flavor of Kool-Aid | Hokum home

Great baseball looks like the 2012 Nationals. There. I said it.

Edwin F. Jackson — you know, the Nats’ No. 4 starter — struck out nine Cincinnati Reds, gave up only two hits and pitched a complete game Saturday as the Nats won, 4-1. And more than 35,000 people showed up in April. And there was timely hitting and great defense.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Washington Nationals are 7-2. This is not a fluke. This is a team with what might be the best pitching in baseball and an offense that might be better than advertised. Other teams — and Washington residents themselves — just don’t realize it yet.

Heck, Michael Morse hasn’t played an inning yet this year, and won’t for a while. Detwiler is on the mound Sunday, and he’s beatable, but then come Strasburg, Gonzalez and Zimmermann-with-two-Ns. It’s not unreasonable for this team to suddenly be 10-3 or even 11-2.

People around here don’t want to believe that this is happening. They’re accustomed to mediocre-to-horrible Washington baseball teams, and too many people assume the Nats will spit the bit in the end. I don’t know if — in fact, I seriously doubt that — the Nats can win the National League East title this year. But what I do know is that we are going to see a lot of exciting baseball at the stadium in 2012 — and this time, it’s going to matter.

Previously: Fears of change | Hokum home

That was ridiculous, of course, but it also was a symptom of classic newsroom curmudgeonliness. Newspaper newsrooms of that era were about as change-resistant as you could get, and anyone pushing change was instantly suspect. At that time, there were still people bitching about having to use a computer as opposed to a typewriter, a fact that went beyond curmudgeonliness and straight to childishness. The worst part is that people got away with these temper tantrums, with corrosive results.

So I jumped into the online world — not just because I felt so comfortable there (I already had been online for more than a decade) but because I wanted to get away from these entrenched newsroom assholes.

Seventeen years and a lot of adventures later, I worry that it will be me who develops late-stage curmudgeon sickness. I already notice that if I gripe about something, my younger colleagues may hint that I have an old-fart problem. But I really have the opposite problem — when change doesn’t occur, and I expect it to, I become frustrated to the point where the anger can paralyze me. And I particularly have to fight off bouts of destructive self-pity when this sort of thing happens.

Steve Buttery, who’s older than me, feels my pain. He sees these issues and writes about them in this open letter to a newsroom curmudgeon.

My favorite part: “Maybe you think you’re too old a dog to learn new tricks. Bullshit. I am 57, probably older than you but certainly a contemporary unless you’re past the normal retirement age…I also stumble and fumble in learning new digital tools and techniques. But learning new tricks helps me feel young again. It energizes me and it can you, too.”

I’m right there with you, Steve. It’s change that energizes me. It is the atmosphere of change that has attracted me to new jobs, and it’s the lack of change that has caused me to leave some old ones.

I’m a Sun Tzu kind of guy — I really try to avoid unwinnable battles — but I don’t always see the difference between a battle that will be lost and one that might be lost. Change usually involves fighting the latter battle. If you don’t fight, change doesn’t happen. And then you have a career that is full of yesterdays, instead of a career full of tomorrows.