The blog will soon venture away from topic of Neil Diamond and his audience singing "Sweet Caroline" but we have two matters to cover before we do. The first of these is a note I got from my pal Tom Hensley, who played keyboard in Mr. Diamond's band for a long, long time. If any of you are sick of hearing "Sweet Caroline," imagine how many times Tom heard (and played) it…
I enjoyed your account of ND's appearance for the post-bombing game. He told us about that the day it occurred. The above photo is from 2008. The owner and mascot flew out to L.A. and visited our pre-tour rehearsal on a sound stage, where we made a video of, what else, "Sweet Caroline," for them to show on opening day at Fenway, when they announced that we would be doing a show there during our tour. Tickets for the Fenway show sold out that day.
The show itself was in August, and I snapped a picture of the scoreboard that day, with Neil's name notably seen. Also, the prescient ad on the scoreboard, from a time when COVID wasn't a loaded word. I don't remember the number of times we did "Sweet Caroline" during that show, but it was far above the recommended daily dose.
We played Boston many times over the years, but this was a memorable one.
Thanks, Tom. It must have been wonderful to have a job that was (a) so steady and (b) involved playing to such appreciative audiences.
Then: F.O.T.S. (Follower of This Site) Jon Reeves suggested I post this. I have long been a fan/follower of John Green and Hank Green, two brothers and authors who post frequent videos in which they converse and talk about not only their writing but a great many humanitarian causes with which they are involved. I've posted a few of their videos in the past.
This is Hank discussing something they did on one of their tours. They played "Sweet Caroline" but requested that the audience not sing along. The video explains why…
I think that's kind of wonderful in its way. And one other thing: To Hank and (I assume) John and to many (most?) of those in the audience, the line they interject after the singer sings "Sweet Caroline" is "Bah-bah-bah." But that's not what Mr. Diamond intended, at least when this phenomenon began.
Here's a video of him performing it in 2002 in front of a stadium packed with seventy jillion people. He sings the song and then he does an encore in which he asks his audience to join in…and as you'll hear at 4:10 into the video, what he asks them to sing is "Whoa-whoa-whoa."
So how did "Whoa-whoa-whoa" turn into "Bah-bah-bah?" Beats the heck outta me. One of those mysteries for the ages…like whatever happened to the Robot Fred Flintstone. We may have some new information about that Scientific Marvel here in the next few days.