Best of Show, definitely goes to Petit Glory. But I wondered if it was the guys in lab coats who got to live, or the roaches. I know this story is awful, but it's so hilarious I'm raising my co-workers' eyebrows.

I saw Chuck Berry in Albuquerque in the early 1980s, like maybe 1981. I had only been a reporter for a year or two and was working for the Albuquerque Journal. Wrote a story about Chuck Berry -- don't think I got an interview with him, just one of those icky stories you have to do on deadline because the damned subject never called you back and there's a hole in the paper with your name on it so you have to come up with something. And I did. But my fella at the time was a radio announcer whose station was sponsoring the show, so we got free tickets and I was really looking forward to the performance. I couldn't figure out where, exactly, on the horseracing track they were going to do this performance.

Well, time came and went for the show to start and after about 45 minutes, the audience was getting loudly restive. The bleachers were set up by the track and all of a sudden out of Gates 4,5,6,and 8, a big truck hauls ass, pulling a flatbed trailer behind it. And there was Mr. Berry, holding onto a sort of large guitar stand for dear life -- I honestly think they just tied him to the mast -- and trying not to fall off the trailer.

The truck comes to a dusty halt in front of the bleaghchers and Mr. Berry springs, sort of, into action. He was so completely wasted it didn't matter what song he was singing, since no one could have picked out two complete words in a row. He just sort of stayed in one place, cradled by the man stand. Then, the pathetic part really started. He got out of his little stand and did a couple of passes along the front of the trailer doing a hollow shadow of his famous "duck walk." The backup band was good -- it also was a bunch of local pickup musicians -- and the show would have been fine if they'd just stuffed a sock in ol' Chuck and partied on. The really sad thing was that a bunch of kids had come to the show and they left thinking THAT was the old-time rock 'n' roll.

Notice how much substance abuse has to do with the worst of the worst here? Small wonder. I have one itsy bitsy drinkie poo and my pitch slides south and the lyrics go to the bottom of the glass. Two drinks and I'd probably be reciting nursery rhymes in an unknown tongue.

WW