Nevada Bob Gordon

Earlier this summer Nevada Bob Gordon recorded his memoir 50 Years with the Wrong Woman at Wild Horse Studio in Stillwater. While there, Bayard Godsave of the Stillwater Gazette dropped in to meet Bob and do a story.  The article posted online yesterday and it's a really fun read.  Godsave successfully captured the Nevada Bob's spirit, and also uncovered some facts that even I didn't know about the rancher, singer/songwriter and author. Here's the beginning of the article with a link to the rest. I especially like the non-clickbait nature of the article title. Just the facts. All good. Nevada Bob Gordon records audiobook at Stillwater studio If you were to hear Nevada Bob Gordon’s voice, you might think you were in a room with Johnny Cash. The entrepreneur-turned-musician-turned-author has led a long and interesting life, which he recounts in his memoir, 50 Years with the Wrong Woman . The audio book, which was recorded in a studio in Stillwater, was released last week,...

Reflecting. Photo: Gary Firstenberg This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Nevada Bob Gordon's 50 Years with the Wrong Woman . This is a continuation from Part 2 regarding Nevada Bob's "ailment," his euphemism for the C-word. You can read Part 2 Here . With a growing family and the American doctors essentially giving up hope, Bob Gordon decided to give "alternative medicine" a try. What follows is not intended as medical advice; it is simply the path Nevada Bob followed.  * * * I was not informed right away that I could be dead in six months. My  tumor was, in fact, malignant. When Carol had learned that the test  had revealed I had cancer, she met with her girlfriend Darlene Marley.  Darlene told me that Carol was sitting in our car with all of our children,  including the baby, and said to Darlene, “What am I going to do with  all these kids if Bob dies?” Carol was never one to exhibit emotional displays, but in that moment  she looked pretty forlorn. ...

Photo credit: Gary Firstenberg Something very important in rock and roll history happened here in this house. Do you know the story of Little Willie John? I, like many teens who came of age in the Sixties, was unaware of how many of the pop singles we listened to had their origins in black R&B. The things we've learned in retrospect could fill volumes. There's a whole chapter devoted to this in David Halberstam's  The Fifties .  The McCoys' two big hits in 1965 were "Hang On Sloopy" and "Fever." I never knew that the song Fever had been first recorded by Little Willie John. In fact, it had been a #1 hit on the R&B charts in 1956. Over a five year period Little Willie had 13 songs reach the Top Ten on the R&B charts. He also had many regional hits including "Leave My Little Kitten Alone," of which The Beatles recorded five takes while recording Beatles For Sale  in August 1964. The song was very popular in the Northwest, which wa...

If you're a Baby Boomer, you very likely remember exactly where you were when two specific Sixties events took place. The first, which made an indelible mark on all of us, much like a concussion, was the assassination of JFK. The second was wholly other, the first appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show . In olden times, tribes and people groups discussed their histories by noting "markers" in time. The old-timers had value because they remembered these histories. The year of the flood or the year of the locusts. For me, these two events mark a major change in my life. I was in sixth grade, living in Ohio when JFK was killed in Dallas. In January our family moved to New Jersey, and three weeks later the Beatles shook the world with their appearance on Ed Sullivan.  At the time, I knew very little about the rest of their American Tour, so it was fun to read Nevada Bob's account of his experience in Seattle as a policeman hired to protect the Fab Four on their...

I have been a longtime fan of the work of Orson Welles. His War of the Worlds radio broadcast showed the power of the medium of radio. His entry into Hollywood grabbed a lot of attention right out of the chute with Citizen Kane . His camera angles were bold and the stories he produced in film were thought provoking. So at one point this all led me to read a biography or two about the man, which led me to discover yet another man who made a mark in Hollywood, the man who most influenced Welles, Josef Von Sternberg. The common denominator between these two men, the latter from an earlier era, was their determination to follow their own vision, to not cave in to the pressure to conform. The book Welles recommended, either in one of his interviews or one of the books I read, was Josef Von Sternberg's Fun in a Chinese Laundry . The book is essentially a memoir of a Hollywood director who shares anecdotes and stories about his life. One of his stories is about how he discovered Marlene ...