It's Not Plagiarism If You Link To It Eulogizes

by Hawkeye State on Jun 26, 2009 10:01 AM CDT Comment 11 comments

(Note: INPIYL2I will return to its usual self on Monday -- HS)

RIP, Coach Thomas The horrific, senseless murder of Coach Ed Thomas has dominated the Iowa blogosphere over the last few days. Here, a compilation of the eulogies from friends of the BHGP.

As usual, nobody does it better than Marc Morehouse:

Your high school football coach puts expectations on you that run out after the last time you take off a helmet. Or do they? Your coach’s expectations stay suspended in your life. Don’t try, do. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Morehouse, wake up (film put me in a coma, sorry coach Weitz). It might be simplistic or naive, but your coach’s expectations are still there, at the base, in the work ethic.

Ed Thomas clearly understood this. Something like 90 percent of the male students at Aplington-Parkersburg go out for football, big and small and fast and slow, doesn’t matter. A-P hasn’t been the dynasty it is because 11 kids do all the work every season. Ed Thomas brought everyone in. He was the face of the town after last May’s killer tornado.

He was a "coach," in the highest sense of the word.

In football, the weightroom is the family room. You grow there. You kid, push and cheer each other there.

Wednesday, Ed Thomas was murdered there. A father was taken while tending to 30 members of his family.

Mike Hlas:

Ed Thomas Field. "The Sacred Acre." As much as anywhere in town over the years, it’s the place that has given Parkersburg its sense of community.

Falcon football has been about winning, absolutely. But it’s been about how the things that make people true winners. Wow, was that ever evidenced after the tornado, when the team and its town fought back like state-champions.

"You get beat up, battered," Thomas told the New York Times last fall, "but you get back off the ground."

Thomas, who lost his home in that tornado, spent the last year of his life helping kids and an entire town get back off the ground. He succeeded marvelously.

Then a madman with a gun shot Ed Thomas dead Wednesday morning in a weight room, before several A-P students.

It was a cold-blooded reminder there are much-worse things than tornadoes in this world.

Scott Dochterman, on how Ed Thomas might have singlehandedly saved Parkersburg from death by consolidation (a legitimate concern in small-town Iowa):

Where would that town be today without Ed Thomas? Certainly the school district moves all home football games to Aplington. Maybe the school district decides to build a new high school at another location. It’s not that far-fetched that the school district would have considered combining with another nearby district.

Maybe many in the town decide to move away to other communities, possibly the Cedar Falls-Waterloo area. Instead, Thomas demanded the high school remain in Parkersburg. He picked up debris and glass shrapnel on the football field and demanded the school play its first game following the tornado at the "Sacred Acre."

From cidsports:

Sadly, society saw a lost 24-year old throw his life away, along with the life of a beloved man, who inspired so many that he meet or those who were able to learn from his story in Parkersburg. It is sad that there is so much hatred or anger in the world today.

May we find peace. May our prayers and thoughts remain with those impacted and touched by this tragic day and this tragic event. Ed Thomas was a fine man and much more to those who really knew him.

Hlas also did some digging, and found an interview Thomas gave in 2005, an essay Thomas wrote after last year's tornado, and a New York Times piece on the aftermath of the 2008 storm.

We are now two days removed from the shock of Wednesday morning, and it's still as stunningly sad as it was when we first heard the news. There is nothing I can write to fill the void; any further attempts at summing up the life of a great man just feel like futile attempts to add words to an unspeakable tragedy that needs no more context. It's that old Wittgenstein quote: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent." Godspeed, Coach.

With the death of Ed Thomas, not to mention the events of yesterday, this week has been depressing as hell. So let's wrap things up with a song so staggeringly simple, depressing, and beautiful that the mere anticipation of its performance made Dave Letterman sound like a kindergartner with a speech problem. Come Pick Me Up is, in fact, so plaintively depressing, so brutally honest in its assessment of heartache, that it borders on comical (in an ancient bootleg of Adams' first performance of the song, the crowd actually laughs at the chorus).* In the wake of all of this, maybe what we need more than anything else is a laugh from the bottom of the well.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

* -- It's also the single greatest whiskey drinking song I've ever heard. So if you prefer a stiff Jack Daniels to a laugh, feel free to join me.

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Ryan Adams....

Here is my story about Ryan Adams.

I have a friend who went to Lillith Fair once while we were in high school. I gave him a lot of verbal abuse for that, called him gay for about 5 or 10 years. Then, as I tired of that, he told me he likes Ryan Adams.

At that time, I had never heard of Ryan Adams, and I asked “You like Brian Adams? I guess the ‘Summer of ’69’ is OK, but really?” My friend replied that no, it was Ryan Adams whose music he enjoyed. He then played some of that music for me and the other friends we were with. After about 40 seconds of that, I asked him to put in a different CD, or just turn it off. Sure, the music was awful, but it did not inspire me to make continued degrading comments about my friend.

Then, today, you – HawkeyeState, convinced me to give that video a play. I did. I will now return to another 5 or 10 years of telling my friend he is gay.

by WaterlooChazz on Jun 26, 2009 4:32 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

That fucking song, man

Ryan Adams has been hit or miss as hell since Heartbreaker (mostly because he has no edit fuction and was putting out like 10 CDs a year for awhile there), but goddamn did he knock it out of the park with that one. If there’s ever been a greater sad song, I haven’t heard it.

by NorseHawk on Jun 27, 2009 12:05 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Grievous Angel

This guy is the only true successor and extender of Gram Parsons. I hope he does a better job of chemical management than Parsons did. I can’t imagine how good Adams will be once he’s a grown-up. I’m sure if he lives that long he will learn to say to himself, “I already wrote that song.”

Prolific and erratic, sure, but 2/3 of Sam Shepard’s plays are unreadable. Among the others there is immortality. I’m happy to wade through the dross to find the truth, in Ryan Adams, Sam Shepard, Merle Haggard, or, Iowa-locally, the fiction of David Rhodes.

Mr. Boh Knows ...

by Bellanca on Jun 27, 2009 6:12 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Love Gram Parsons

I bought the Flying Burrito Brothers anthology a few years ago. Their arc took a nosedive without GP. They went from transcendent to OK to the Eagles.

I like Ryan Adams. Saw him in IC a few years ago. Cold Roses is his best and the Cardinals seem to bring the best out of him.

"I always like it better when the clowns seem to try to be happy."

by MarcMorehouse on Jun 27, 2009 3:37 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

I concur on Cold Roses.

It’s great from start to finish.

by telepathetic on Jun 29, 2009 12:44 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

The Eagles...

Ugh.

by Bucketochicken on Jun 27, 2009 9:32 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

oh no you didn't

No self-respecting man from Iowa goes anywhere without beer

by Hayden Fry's Moustache Ride on Jun 29, 2009 11:04 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

saw adams play that song in los angeles in 2000

he opened for superchunk unannounced (the actual band got delayed on the road by weather). so we we all waiting for some suitably rambunctious act to prime us for some post-punk funness and this slovenly kid shambles out with an acoustic guitar and a chair. he puts the chair down in the center of the stage under a single spotlight, lights a cigarette, takes one single long pensive puff and places it in the frets and proceeds to play that song and blow me completely and totally away. and since i was unfamiliar with the then-recently-released heartbreaker, i had no idea who the hell he was. that simple arrangement proved to be – easily – among the top five performances i’ve ever had the good fortune to behold (and superchunk proved to be pretty awesome too).

by kleph on Jun 28, 2009 6:19 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

My Ryan Adams story

I saw him at the Iowa student union in 2002, which is generally the worst place in the world to see a show. He came out looking like hell (and wearing a pair of jeans he’d borrowed from his opening act), lit a smoke (in a vehement non-smoking venue), explained that his band was all playing with the flu but that he was OK “because germs can’t live in this environment,” and rocked our fucking socks off.

About 5 songs in, he looked out in the crowd, saw that nobody was drinking (the IMU is even more vehement about its non-drinking rules than it is about the non-smoking thing), gave the front row his Heinekens from backstage, and sent a roadie named Chief to the gas station with his wallet to get more beer for everyone else. He called the ushers Nazis when they confiscated the beer. The Union tried to cut off his encore for violating the University noise ordinance, which required he wrap things up by 11; he told the sound guy “don’t touch the fucking board, I’ll pay the fucking fine,” then ran through an 8-song encore of mostly old Whiskeytown stuff. It had to be at least a 3-hour show.

Until I saw Wilco’s last show of the Kicking Television tour in Des Moines a few years back, that Ryan Adams show was the best concert I’d ever seen. It was so good, in fact, that I bought all those crappy albums between Gold and Cold Roses.

storminspank: "Or we could join you can take our pants off."

by Hawkeye State on Jun 29, 2009 12:38 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Great story

I went from Marshall Crenshaw at Gabes in 1995 to Pernice Brothers at Vaudeville Mews 2006 in DM without seeing a live show. I grew up in DBQ and went to Madison all the time, seeing the Replacements (four times), Husker Du, Minutemen among others. Then we started have careers and kids and all that.

Now, I try to go as often as I can. My last one was Neil Young in Omaha in April. Fantastic. He was pissed off and rocking.

I am still kicking myself for skipping the mighty DBT and the Flaming Lips at 80/35 last summer.

"I always like it better when the clowns seem to try to be happy."

by MarcMorehouse on Jun 29, 2009 10:29 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

I knew I would regret

skipping that Neil Young show. I’ve heard from a bunch of people who said it was fantastic. I’m hoping to make up for it by seeing Son Volt next week.

by telepathetic on Jun 29, 2009 12:56 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs