When Julia Child died, I was struck by how surprisingly sad that news made me.
Just seemed like such a classy lady, so full of joy, and so willing to share that joy.

Also, when Jim Henson died, I was working on the docks with the Teamsters at McCormick Place. I got in to work that morning, and all these tough South Side guys were wearing the longest faces.
[SuperFan]"Did yous hear? Kermit died!"
"No shit! Kermit The Frog?"
"Yeah."
"Oh man."[SuperFans]

Johnny Cash -- I grew up with that man's music and it had a huge, huge affect on me

Princess Diana -- dunno why, maybe cuz she was the same age as me, plus I admired her courage to stick it to the royal family.

kurt
Big L
river phoenix

Johnny Carson

shannon hoon
jerry garcia
kurt cobain


i'll echo river phoenix.

kurt cobain
layne staley

robotboy, pull out the kermit sex to make Todd cry.

kurt

Not at a good time in my life, and one of what I saw as the last links to the world my grandparents inhabited.

A lot of my friends called me to see if I was OK when this happened. I have said it before, but I regard Cash and Dylan as modern day prophets.

Derrick Thomas kinda got me, but in a different way. He died on Super Bowl Sunday a few years ago, and Isaac Bruce said that if Thomas had taken his hands off the wheel and prayed to Jesus, he would still be alive. I hate more than any NFL Player or Athlete you can imagine.

Michael Hutchence.
John Belushi.

Hank Gathers - my dad's good friend (and a guy i've known since i was very young) was his high school basketball coach. Hank was a really nice kid and a class act and he died months before he would have been a top 10 NBA draft pick. He was the kind of person who would have brought it back to his neighborhood.

it sucked.

i cried like a baby when belushi died.
i was stunned by the murder of john lennon.
madeleine kahn.
gilda radner.
the most recent death i was hit hard by was playwright, wendy wasserstein.

oh forgot one.
roberto clemente.

Chris Farley - i miss that dude. I get sad when i watch Tommy Boy.

Probably this one made me pause more than others. And two SNL'ers, Phil Hartman and Chris Farley. The former really bothered me the entire day. It just seemed like such a fucked up way to go out for such a funny guy, being shot to death by your crazy cokehead wife.

yeah, good call on Hartman.
the Simpsons were never the same after he died. (not to mention News Radio and all the movie roles he would have done)

Len Bias too. That was awful.

Well, given the Obner Cook Book you seem to be writing, this doesn't surprise me a bit.

;)

andy wood.
shannon hoon

and i even got caught up in the kurt cobain memorial, and watched mtv's replay of the unplugged performance like 75 times in a 3 day span.

Cash - I remember I was building my house and me and the framers heard it on the radio..kind of a weird shared silence between us. My mom called a few minutes later to see if I was OK.

Hunter Thompson - I wasnt the least bit upset when I first heard about it but upon reading the memorial issue that Rolling Stone put out I got pretty fucking upset.

Cobain and Brad Nowell were weird but not terribly upsetting. Kind of anticipated really.

Yeah that was an excellent issue. I felt the same way.

I remember when Garcia died we were listening to Album 88.5 on the way to lunch and they were like "we don't have any Grateful Dead or Jerry---sorry kids"

so they played the Jane's Addiction version of "Ripple"

Due to a convergence of tragedies, I was paralyzed when Roy Orbison died. My best friend had died suddenly the week before of an aneurism- he was 28. I felt like the fabric of my life was being torn away.

I felt a little sad when George Harrison died but the only one to really affect me was my guiding hand, John Peel.

D. Boon

I had been listening to Minutemen more than just about any other group in the year before he died.


More obscure:

Rich Mullins, a Christian singer-songwriter, whom I'd met briefly twice. He was a brilliant, difficult man who was disgusted by the shallowness and hypocrisy of the Christian music industry. A Catholic in a mostly Protestant industry. A mystical and complex guy. Not your everyday Jesus-dude at all.


Both killed in car wrecks.

The summer that Jerry died, I was only just becoming familiar with the Dead, at the hands of a very inspiring person I had met in late June, and who two weeks later committed suicide. Jerry passed away on what would have been her 15th birthday. I was at summer camp, which was essentially hippie breeding ground, and the whole camp was stunned.

I still cry every time I see the replay of Bo Kimble shooting the free throw left-handed as a tribute to his fallen teammate.