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Veteran Nitpicker Tom Nash of Mahopac, New York, is thrilled that dB’s main man and occasional R.E.M. touring buddy Peter Holsapple is among the ranks of this site’s Nitpickers. “I actually own his CD with Chris Stamey, and while this fact does not, perhaps, qualify one as a Rock Snob per se, it should gain one entry to the exalted realm of... what, rock crazy? Something like that. And while I am in a confessional mode, allow me to add that I not only own the Holsapple-Stamey CD, but actually have it downloaded on to my MP3 player! Having rediscovered the physical CD in a box with some other one that included some missing gems, in my rush and enthusiasm to download these onto the MP3 player, the aforementioned Holsapple-Stamey disc was included in the batch job.”

Well, Tom, your day just got a whole lot better, because Peter Holsapple of Arabi, Louisiana, has just written in again, this time to quasi-Nitpick our item in the “Annals of Rock Snobbery” section about Freddie “Brother of Sly” Stone’s reminiscences about the song “Loose Booty,” and his memory that Sly lifted the “Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego” chant straight from scripture, with no musical precedent. “There’s a great song by the Golden Gate Quartet called ‘Shadrach’ which has a similar chant of the three names,” notes Peter. “Do we think that somewhere in that ‘mad’ time, someone channelled the Gates? Just wondering, as nitpicking slightly with someone else’s memories doesn’t seem quite like fair game...” But you make an excellent point, Peter. The Gates, as everyone called the great gospel quartet, did their version in the 1950s, and Sylvester and Freddie Stewart (as Sly and Freddie Stone were known in their boyhoods) were reared on gospel music, and most likely grew up listening to the Gates in their own home (not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, in fact). So, today’s Lenny Kaye Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rockology goes to Peter Holsapple!

Now, let’s see if we can get Marc Mulcahy from Miracle Legion to write in about Delta blues.