It was a year ago today. 

On the 15th April last year, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, on Patriots' Day, two bombs exploded on Boylston Street in an horrific attack on a city in which the perpetrators had made their home and which had welcomed them as it has welcomed generations of immigrants for centuries.

Boston has a very special place in my heart - and not just because of the Red Sox, around which the city gathered in the days after the bombing last year. 

It has one (arguably, three) of the world's leading art galleries. It has one of the most vibrant music scenes in the States. It has bred writers as good and as diverse as Henry James and Robert B Parker, TS Eliot and Sylvia Plath. It has more colleges and universities than most countries. And it has some of the warmest and most welcoming people I have ever met.

I was there last week, for a couple of home series at Fenway. (For the record, we were swept by the Brewers - I know, I know - but beat Prince Fielder and the Texas Rangers.) I re-established contact with many old friends and made several new ones. I ate more oysters than are strictly necessary and drank some very good wines in excellent company.

Boston is like that. Sit at any bar and the chances are, the person next to you will be interesting, fun and loquacious. Not surprising, really, in a town which was built by successive waves of Irish and Italian immigrants.

It is the sociability and gregariousness of these two nations which, blended with Afro and Hispanic joie de vivre, has taken over a city founded by Puritans. 

I found myself, one afternoon, sitting in a bar on Boylston and Arlington, happily arguing a Marxist line against an Italian Catholic proponent of Weber - you know, the stuff about the rise of capitalism being the result of the Protestant work ethic. 

How we moved on to this topic from our initial disagreement about the merits of different Pinot Noirs and Sox short stops I am not clear. But that's Boston.

Conversation in Boston is like the weather in Boston: it changes by the minute. One minute, it is cold and hard and bitter; the next, it is warm and wet and witty.

And that's why I love that dirty water; why I love the people who live on the Charles, the Muddy and the Mystic rivers; in Beacon Hill and Kenmore, North End, Southie and Charlestown.

Boston is my kind of town. And on this first anniversary of the bombings, I send my love to the the city and its people, to Boston and the Bostonians.

Thank you.

Boston, B strong!

Today from the everysmith vault: I've been listening a great deal to Geoff Mauldaur and the Texas Sheiks, a CD gifted to me by the excellent Rick Hough from Boston; and also to some recent shows from Phil Lesh and the Terrapin Family Band, who have just announced a couple of dates in London this summer, at about the time Cassidy's first-born is due. Serendipity?

Dangerous things, books.

Nazi Germany burned them. So too has Iran. Apartheid South Africa banned them and China is still doing so.

Reading exposes you to new ideas. Reading is a way out, up and forward. Illiteracy sentences you to a life of low income, misery and crime. It is no accident that, according to the National Literacy Trust, one in six of our prison population have difficulty reading and writing. 25% of young offenders have literacy skills which are below that of the average 7 year old.

So what is the rationale behind Justice Minister Chris Grayling’s ban on parcels containing books sent by family and friends to inmates?

Grayling, of course, has had access to pretty much any book he chose throughout his life. He attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, before moving to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which – I can confirm - has a pretty decent library in its own right, and is only a gentle stroll through Clare to the University Library itself, a legal deposit library which is entitled to request a free copy of any and every book published in the UK and Ireland.

And as the first non-lawyer for more than 300 years to become Lord Chancellor, he surely knows the value of books and ‘book-learning’.

The problem is, Grayling regards reading as a privilege. He is entitled. Prisoners are not. The book ban is part of the creation of “a regime that is more Spartan unless you do the right thing”.  (By the by, as an historian, he should be aware that Sparta may have been a cruel and militaristic society, but it never banned the written word.)

To be fair, not all books are banned per se. The rubbish in the ill-stocked prison libraries will of course be available.  What will not be available is anything that you want to read or that friends recommend you read. Ricky Tomlinson has spoken movingly about being given a copy of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists when serving a prison sentence in the 1970s. It changed his life. It changed who he was and who he has become.

Books can do that. Which is why they need to be freely available as a right to the very people who, as the statistics demonstrate, have been starved of them.

By withdrawing the opportunity for prisoners to read widely, Grayling is implicitly confirming that prisons under this government have lost even the pretence of being about rehabilitation.

The move has rightly been condemned by writers, prison reformers and everyone who believes that the majority of crime is the result of a lack of education and opportunity.

It is nasty, and peevish, and a reflection of a particular way of thinking which we have seen too often from this government.

Grayling and his privileged colleagues should be ashamed of themselves.

Today from the everysmith vault:  The megapod has been stuck in the Country genre for the last couple of days, revealing some great shows from Railroad Earth, Poco, Emmylou, Gram Parsons, NRPS, Flying Burito Brothers and Johnny Cash. Not minded to change it at the moment ….

10-15. 

It’s not a great record so far, and there have been enough fumbles in the field, poor pitching and wild swinging to give some cause for concern. But we’ve been through this before. As we know, these are not games but training exercises. And, even in defeat, there have been more than enough reasons to be cheerful.

Reasons to be cheerful Part 1: The kids look good. Sizemore looks really good. 

Reasons to be cheerful Part 2: Papi has re-signed and Lester is about to. The pitchers still have another week to get fully extended and sort out those dead arm issues – yes, I’m talking about you, Felix – and it appears that Farrell has decided to be ultra-careful with Bucks. Good thinking. 

Reasons to be cheerful Part 3: In the outfield, the problem will be which of many get the everyday slots. The bullpen has the same issue. But these are problems which almost every other team would like to have. Hey, would love to have.

So I am pretty confident that when I land in Boston for the first homestand, I’ll be watching a winning team.

The question is, to what extent can this this team repeat the rolling, rollicking ride they gave us last year? Will the Sox be up there after 162 games? How will we fare against the rest of the ALE, which is once again, the toughest division in MLB?

Well, the Yankees have thrown money at the problem, their traditional response to both success and failure. And there can be no doubt that they will benefit (and we will suffer) from Jacoby's move south. But I've a feeling they are not going to do much better than .500. Wishful thinking perhaps. Those pesky Yankees, you can never write them off.

The Os have problems in the rotation, no proven closer, and the brilliant Machado has that knee, or lack of it. But Jiminez and Cruz are good signings and will make a significant difference.

The Jays? A healthy Reyes is still capable of being sensational and Buhrle and Dickey will surely improve on career-worst seasons. So surely they can’t be as dreadful as they were last year. They can. I’ve a feeling they will have a better record but still prop up the basement.

And the Rays. Regular readers will know of my admiration for Joe Maddon, and this year, he will have even more to work with. The rotation looks very good indeed - no-one would meet the price for Price - but the offence is an issue. If the pitchers can limit the opposition, the run shortage might not matter. And that's why I think they will be right up there with ...

the Sox.

My prediction for 2014 is exactly the same as it was last year: we will reach the post-season but will need a little luck and a major signing to go all the way.

Last year, we had some luck. Then we signed Peavy. And then we took the Series. This year, I’m looking to Ben to come up with a big trade at the appropriate moment. And keeping my fingers crossed that the baseball gods look favourably on us when the calls are close.

I’ve seen 97-65 predictions. I think that’s over-optimistic. But we will be 90 plus. One thing I do know is that it will be a great season. And if we end up facing and defeating those smug Cardinals in October, I will be very happy indeed.

Same again, please. Go Sox!

Today from the everysmith vault: I've been asked to contribute a piece to a learned journal about Dylan. 20,000 words. I'm working backwards, and have had enough of Tempest. But Love and Theft - now that's a different matter.

Yesterday was the 52nd anniversary of the release Dylan’s first album, the eponymous Bob Dylan. Bob was just 20. I was 13. We were both so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

Listening to that album for the first time on an old record player which I shared with thirty other members of the Junior Common Room in my house at school, I was overwhelmed. Brought up on classical music and musicals, listening to pop on Radio Luxembourg (yep, I can spell 
K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m), this was revelatory.

Only two of those songs were original in the sense that they were written by Bob, Song to Woody and Talkin’ New York . The rest were what we we came to know as covers, but we didn’t use that term in those days. This was still a time when lyricists and composers sat in garrets somewhere collectively known as Tin Pan Alley and wrote songs which were subsequently recorded by performers, the ‘talent’. And folkies always stole from each other and from the tradition. Talent borrows, genius steals.

The extraordinary thing about this album was that the voice and the style bore no relationship to the (famously reversed) portrait on the album cover.

The portrait showed a young cherub. The voice was old. Old even by the standards of the folkies that we had heard in other contexts. Old by the standards of the singers we heard on the radio. There was an authenticity, a sense of tradition, an originality,  which impressed us young 13 year olds in a way which few albums have since.

Bob Dylan was, in the mythology of Bob, recorded in a couple of short sessions and cost “around $402”. Yet it is, in the words of Michael Gray, “a brilliant debut, a performer’s tour de force”.

Bob has said that he was hesitant to record any more of his own songs because he didn’t want to give too much of himself away.  But, whether he wished to or not, he gave a great deal away.

He showed himself to be a man with a sense of purpose, an instinctive understanding of “the poetry of the blues”and its place in the musical and American traditions. His producer, John H Hammond, quotes him as refusing to re-record, that he would never do the same song twice – a philosophy which irritated Daniel Lanois 37 years later during the recordings of Oh Mercy.

He wouldn’t learn from his mistakes because, in his view, they were not mistakes. They were authentic performances, each as valid as the other.

Which is pretty much how he has continued to work. Why each album is a new road. Why each gig reveals or hides another element of his music and himself.

Twenty years old, yes. But even then, he knew he was “just headin’ for another joint”.

We may be ecstatic or disappointed, and I have been both too many times to count.

Over the last 52 years, I have measured out of my life, not in coffee spoons, but in Dylan albums and Dylan shows. The last time was a disappointment (my problem in retrospect) but I too am with him on the road, just headin’ for another joint, a new song or a new interpretation of an older one.

On the 19th of March 1962, I would have settled for a hell of a lot less. And could never have imagined that I would be listening with pleasure and delight to that album in my 65th year. 

But I am.

Nevertheless, by the time the album was released, Bob was already headin' for another joint. As you can hear here - also from 1962.

I love America. I love the myth-making of Americana even more.

As regular readers will know, my 20th century music vault is primarily American, with embarrassing quantities of Dylan, the Band, the Grateful Dead, the Airplane, Miles Davis, John Coltrane as well as hours of old blues, folkand jazz. My book shelves feature swathes of (randomly, as they spring to mind) Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Hemingway, Hammett, O’Neill, Lowell, Berryman, Hunter S Thompson and Saul Bellow. I am obsessed by baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular. I count Boston as one of my favourite cities in the world, and am proud to number many Americans amongst my closest friends.

But any European of a certain age will struggle to resolve the ambivalence one feels about the US.

We grew up under the shadow of the Cuban crisis and the struggle for black emancipation. We moved on to the Vietnam war, what the Vietnamese call the American War. We watched fascinated as the Watergate scandal unfolded. We were horrified by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy.

For us, at that time, this was America. And these were American events.

But were they?

As I learned on my first visit many years ago, the United States is not in any sense united. It is not a single, monolithic force but, rather, a series of parochial regions which are as different from each other as … well, Europe and America.

And for every event there was an opposite; for every thesis an antithesis. For every racist in the south, there was an idealist struggling to change structures and attitudes. The Vietnam war created the anti-war movement and the Weather Underground. Watergate gave new life to a free press and investigative journalism.

The American Dream, "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement", still exists and is still dreamt by millions of Americans.

But America has the highest incarceration rate and the largest prison population in the world. It has the highest obesity rates. It spends some 280 billion dollars on the prescription drugs that kill more people than cocaine and heroin: one in five Americans are taking at least five prescription drugs; one in 6 are on food stamps. One in three children in the US live in homes without a father. The US national debt is $17 trillion. America has more lawyers more capita than any country in the world.

It is still possible to live that dream but it seems that the majority of Americans live a nightmare.

We don’t see this, of course. When I sat in Wilde’s last evening to celebrate the birthday of Michelle, from America, listening to American music played by Clayton Denwood, from America, we were celebrating what unites us rather than what divides.

And when I land at Logan Airport in three weeks, I will feel instantly at home. Because we in the UK and Europe cannot feel superior. We have the same problems but, as in so many things, America does problems on a larger scale, with a greater intensity and a higher profile.

Here’s to that devalued phrase but not, I hope, devalued concept: our special relationship. This land is our land.

Today from the everysmith vault: David Bromberg, Try Me One More Time. 

Most of us, if we are fortunate, had a teacher. A real teacher, who inspired as well as taught, who mentored as well as educated, who selflessly and tirelessly shared both passions and erudition.

In my case, it was Christopher John Dixon. If you were at Oakham School in the mid-60s, when he taught English, or at Victoria College at the University of Toronto where he was subsequently Assistant Professor of English Literature, you will know him as Chris. If you were a reader of obscure novels in the mid-70s, you will know him as Matthew Vaughan, the author of Chalky, which won the first David Higham Prize for Fiction, Major Stepton's War, and The Discretion of  Dominic Ayers. All were excellent. All were unsuccessful. All appear to be out of print but not unavailable. (I commend them to you.)

Chris committed suicide. I don't know precisely why, and I didn't find out about his death until many months after it happened. But I think about him a great deal, whenever I open a volume of poetry, or pick up a literary novel or hear a learned and passionate talk on the radio or in the lecture hall.

I have been thinking about him especially in the last few days because my friend Parn has sent me a link to recordings of Sylvia Plath reading the poems from Her final volume, Ariel.

It was Chris who introduced Sylvia Plath to me and my English literature classmates. And although we shared the usual rivalries of schoolboys at that time - Dylan v Donovan, Beatles v Stones, Truman v Statham, association v rugby football and so on - the major rivalry in our small group was Plath versus Hughes.

Chris had been at Selwyn College, Cambridge, at the same time as Plath was at the adjacent Newnham. It was rumoured at school that they had briefly dated, which might account for Chris's overt dislike for Hughes, though he was always remarkably complimentary about the poetry itself, and I still have the copies of both Ariel and Crow which he personally gave to me. But he was convinced, and convinced me, that it was Hughes who had driven Plath to suicide, and that the imminence of this suicide was evident in the poems of Ariel and could have been predicted (prevented?) by a close reading, a very practical criticism, of the text.

These days, I understand the situation to be more complex. I know that the poem Daddy was, at least in part, really about her relationship with her father as well as her relationship with her husband. And I know that Hughes was genuinely distraught and destroyed when she eventually succeeded in her suicide. “That's the end of my life” he wrote to a friend (of plath's). “The rest is posthumous.”

Maybe it was. Hughes was an axis around which suicides and potential suicides revolved. Not just Sylvia Plath, but his lover Assia Wevill (who also killed their daughter) and his son Nicholas. I once argued forcibly to a friend who knew the Hughes family that the deaths of both Plath and Wevill could not be unconnected to Hughes; must, indeed, be post hoc ergo propter hoc. My friend suggested politely and reasonably that Hughes may have been a man who attracted those with a predisposition to suicide.

There may be some truth in this.

Where there is truth is in the poems that Sylvia Plath wrote and which became owned by Hughes with the rest of her literary legacy. We are not privy to all of it: some was destroyed, some suppressed, some ’edited’.

But the link sent to me by Parn Taimsalu is to a series of readings which she made in 1962.

I was unaware of these recordings and they are extraordinary. The accent will be familiar to any Bostonian, the poems familiar to all of us. But what is revelatory is that this is her own voice. Pure. Unadulterated. No self-serving gloss by friends or family, enemies or editors. Here you will hear the real, authentic Plath, for whom:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.

The English preoccupation with the weather has had a serious point recently, as the Jetstream changed course and produced the appalling flooding which dominated our news broadcasts for weeks. The climate change which is almost certainly responsible for these meteorological events is too big and too complex a subject for both me and this blog. But there are economic and political issues on which we can all take a view.

We chose to follow the advice of Elizabeth David: an omelette and a glass of wine. I was in the French bistro Angelus, with Rick Gekoski, having an all-too-infrequent and, on this occasion, all-too-brief lunch. We were talking books, because Rick is a Booker Prize judge, rare-book dealer and writer, and I would like to be any or all of those.

At some point, Rick mentioned that he had enjoyed a particular blog of mine, which concerned a restaurant which we had both frequented many years ago. And digging it up from the archives on the train home, I noted that I had announced my plan to blog about Rick's last book, Lost, Stolen or Shredded, as soon as I had given it due consideration. By which I meant as soon as I had read it again, because one reads Rick firstly for entertainment and secondly for education and elucidation. Or I do.

I realised that I have never honoured that promise. So I will do so now, because it is almost a year since publication and Rick is already well-advanced on his next book. And because I realised this weekend that a couple of works were missing from my shelves. And yes, I did read the book a second time.

The sub-title of Lost, Stolen or Shredded is Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature. This is not, I suspect, merely to attract the attention of internet search engines, but because each chapter is, in fact, a great story told by a great story-teller, with a wonderful turn of phrase.

Consider the opening sentences of the foreword: “He collected absences. For him they were more intense, vibrant and real than the presences that they shadowed.” I remember reading this to Jill on the train back from the launch party, and remarking that it was worthy of the subject, who is, of course, Franz Kafka, and the  story concerns his visit to the Louvre to gaze not upon the Mona Lisa, but at the space that the painting had occupied before being stolen.

“He collected absences.” There is no way one is not going to read on after that. And so one does, learning about the stolen Mona Lisa, the destroyed Churchill portrait by Sutherland, the burned manuscripts of Byron and Larkin's diaries and Joyce's juvenilia, Et Tu, Healey, and the bejewelled copy of the Rubaiyat which went down on the Titanic. All are written as he talks - with eloquence and fluency and wry humour. 

I doubt whether the transformation from Radio 4 talks to book required too much editing. In both forms, he tells stories, each of which addresses the general (the art or literature and its place in the world) and the particular (Rick's individual relationship with it).

Absence, caused by loss, theft, shredding or sinking, is the theme. Does the absence of a poem, a diary, a painting leave the world a worse place? Rick mentions his inability to look at the work of Eric Gill without "a shudder of remembrance" of Gill's activities with children. I share that revulsion. I also care little about the destruction of Larkin's diaries, for example, and think that everything else the man wrote is diminished by the fact that those diaries were once written and did exist, that they were part of the 'complete works' of Larkin and that one's response to a Larkin poem now is informed by the knowledge of those diaries and their contents.

Today of course those diaries could probably have been erased not by the ceremony of ritual burning, but by the simple click of the delete button. And Rick's current preoccupations include the life and death of the book itself. Like me, he reads primarily on the Kindle, buying the real thing only for writers and volumes of particular importance. (I bought an actual copy of the reissue of Keywords by Raymond Williams this morning, the first such purchase for some months, probably since Lost, Stolen or Shredded, come to think of it.)

But for Rick, as a publisher of beautiful books and a dealer in rare ones, the convenience of the Kindle medium must be also a source of regret. We do not own an iBook or a Kindle book; we merely have the right to read it. (Nor do we own an iTune: Bruce Willis is currently engaged in a law suit to enable him to leave his iTunes music to his children.)

This is what we have lost, or had stolen from us. Our sense of direct, proprietary involvement with our books and our music. Our ownership, on a personal level, with both the artefact and the intellectual content.

I know this is not on the same scale as the loss of the library in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, another of Rick's stories.

But is for me. As well as my missing first edition of Keywords, inscribed to me by Raymond Williams, I discovered yesterday that my cassettes of Dylan and the Dead rehearsing in San Rafael in 1987 are also gone, baby, gone.

To paraphrase Stalin, which I do seldom, the loss of thousands of scrolls in Herculaneum is a statistic. The loss of that book, and those tapes, is a tragedy.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Miles Davis, opening for the Dead at Fillmore West in April 1970. Here's Phil Lesh in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound, “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing on stage, I was thinking, 'What's the use. How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.”

The Patriots didn't make it to the Super Bowl this year, and the Seattle defence is so invincible, that I decided to give the whole thing a miss.

I even missed the ads, which are a traditional highlight, especially for someone who has worked in the advertising field for years and even scripted a commercial (for the Volvo VN truck) which featured in the Super Bowl back in the mid-90s. So I've been catching up via YouTube.

This year, of course, we had two which featured Columbia recording artist, Mr Bob Dylan. The first was merely an appalling misuse of his song I Want You for yoghurt or something; the second, for Chrysler, actually starred the man himself and incorporated an analysis of international manufacturing capabilities, culminating in an exhortation to buy cars from Detroit: “Well, it's sundown on the union/And what's made in the USA/Sure was a good idea/'Til greed got in the way” as he didn't say in the commercial.

However, the commercial which provoked the most attention (outside the Bobosphere, that is) was for Coke.

It was kept under wraps until the moment it showed on Fox, and you might think that it was pretty old-fashioned and innocuous, if truth be told. It featured a number of American people doing American things in American landscapes with a soundtrack of America, the Beautiful, sung in nine different languages.

And that is the issue. Nine different languages! English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, French and Arabic. What's going on here?

As Michele Bachmann told Fox News, “if English was good enough for Jesus when he wrote the bible, it should be good enough for Coke”. Todd Starnes, another Murdoch mercenary, claimed that “Coke is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border”. And others too numerous to mention and too obscure to dignify with a reference jumped in with equally absurd comments.

The problem with this is that it prompts people like me to want to defend Coca-Cola, which I have no wish to do. The Coke bottle is the iconic symbol of American imperialism. Through Coke, the cultures of scores of countries were - and are being - transformed. Whole generations are being Americanized at the expense of their own national cultures.

But what is wrong with that? We can see from this commercial that America is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-cultural. Everything for which one might wish. A beautiful country, home of the brave and land of the free.

Except that what is portrayed in this commercial is very different from that which Coke has represented over the years, when the real thing has been WASP-ish to say the least. And very different from what the increasingly desperate right wing of America wish it to be, which does not include the prefix “multi-”.

That Coke, the epitome of the imperialist right, is now a target of the imperialist right is vaguely encouraging. I think.

Not least because one thing I do know is that advertisers do not, in any way, wish to be cutting edge. A successful advertising campaign is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Its starting point is the existing cultural consensus of its target audience.

And it’s clear that Coke and its agency, Weiden+Kennedy, now believe that diversity is the essence of the American zeitgeist.

It is equally clear that there are still many who find this as unpalatable as I find the product.

But you’ve got to admit, if Coke is using multi-culturalism to shift soda, America might be moving in the right direction.

Which isn’t to the right.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Been listening to the Dylan and Dead shows from ’86 and ’87 to mark the 25th anniversary of the official, and dreadful, album. 1987-07-19 at Eugene is quite brilliant. Subsequently, moved on to a quality audience tape of my Royal Albert Hall show last year. It appears that it was better than I thought and wrote at the time, musically at least. Sorry Bob.

One of the occasional delights of the bleak mid-winter in the UK is a chance encounter with a fellow Sox fan and the opportunity to talk baseball when there is no baseball to talk about.

One such occasion was Tuesday evening last week in Wilde’s, when three guys strolled into the bar, and one ordered with an unmistakeable New England accent.

“Where are you guys from?” said I.

“Connecticut.”

Now we know that Connecticut is, in the words of Rick Hough, “a twilight state”. It is split pretty much 50-50 between the Red Sox Nation and the Evil Empire. So, with some trepidation, I asked: “Sox?”.

Not just Sox, it turns out, but someone who has actually played at Fenway. Who was coached by Johnny Pesky and Bill Lee.

Cue serious Sox talk, while his colleagues chatted amongst themselves.  Being Sox fans, we first of all discussed the disappointments and the failures of many, many years. We moved on to those greats who never won a ring (Peskey, Tiant, Williams). We spoke of Tim Wakefield and, through him, to those players who gave back so much to the community, especially those whose work was so often unheralded.

And Mark, because this is you Mark DeLuzio, told me a story about Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice, our own power-hitting left fielder, who hit for power and average, which I have his permission to write about here.

Mark comes from New Britain and is an alumnus of New Britain High School, where he was a year ahead of Tom Thibodeau, the Associate Head Coach of the Cs a few years ago and now Head Coach of some team called the Chicago Bulls.

Anyway, Mark told me a story about a young kid, maybe 12 years old,  from New Britain, who wrote to Jim Rice asking for advice on hitting, mentioning that he was scheduled to be in Florida during Spring Training. Now, you can be sure that almost every MLB player gets scores of such letters everyday, and the huge majority of them are ignored. If the kid is lucky, he gets an autographed photograph and a scribbled note about working hard, staying off the booze etc etc.

Not this one. Jim Rice called his home and told him to be at the Sox training ground at 5am on a given day. The kid turned up. So did Jim Rice. No-one else.

This was not a photo-op. This was not a publicity stunt.

With no-one else around, Jim Rice taught this kid everything he knew. And he was hard on him, too. He wasn’t going through the motions. He was taking it seriously. Because baseball is serious and Jim Rice took hitting seriously.

But, as anyone who saw that moment in 1982 when he left the dugout and rushed into the stands to help a 4 year old boy who was bleeding heavily after being hit by a line drive, he was so much more than a baseball player. Rice carried the boy onto the field, through the home dugout and into the clubhouse, so that he could be treated by the Sox medical staff.

Jim Rice was voted into the Hall of Fame at the 15th and final attempt. There are still those who argue that vote, citing a plethora of sabermetric stats. But in my view he should have been a shoo-in on the first ballot. 

And anyway, as Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, "The longer a man's fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming."

It took a long time coming. But Jim Rice's fame will last long. As a ball-player. And as a human being.

Almost time for Pitchers & Catchers. My tickets for the opening homestand in April are confirmed. Go Sox!

Today from the everysmith vault: Stumbled over a Jefferson Starship show, but have no details of date or venue. Set list sounds as if it's about 2008, but can't trace it. Wherever it was, the locals heard a great gig.