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DeWitt: A tribute to Logan Neill, Tampa Bay's own music man

 
Logan Neill leads a bluegrass picking session in the living room of his home in Crystal River.  For many years, parties at the eight-acre property brought journalists and great musicians together.
Logan Neill leads a bluegrass picking session in the living room of his home in Crystal River. For many years, parties at the eight-acre property brought journalists and great musicians together.
Published Sept. 10, 2015

Logan Neill caught what was maybe Bill Monroe's last performance 19 years ago and, while he was at it, caught the great bluegrass musician himself.

Hearing that Monroe might make one of his impromptu appearances at a bar in Tarpon Springs, Logan, who was then this paper's pop music critic, and Dave Scheiber, his editor, raced to the club and took front-row seats shortly before the 84-year-old Monroe began to mount the stage.

"Somehow Bill lost his grip. He was falling back, and he was going to hit that dance floor, hard," Scheiber recalls. "And Logan reached out and caught him. ... We always said Logan saved Bill Monroe's life."

This story about Logan — who died of heart disease Sept. 1 at the too-young age of 61 — was new to me, but not at all surprising.

In recent years, Logan covered local news like the rest of us in the Times' Hernando County bureau. But we all knew he'd lived previous, more glamorous lives — lives that put him in regular contact with legends, lives that made him a regional legend in his own right.

"Logan was the hub," said award-winning bluegrass banjo player Mark Johnson of Levy County.

"Whenever anybody put out an album in Central Florida, they would go to Logan. He would write about them or get them on the radio. He was one of the best assets a musician could have."

Logan, who worked at the Times on and off from 1977 until becoming the victim of downsizing last year, was the newspaper's pop music critic in the mid 1990s, a job in which he regularly interviewed entertainment giants such as Warren Zevon, George Carlin and Bonnie Raitt.

My favorite of his stories from this period was an epic profile of music folklorist Alan Lomax, who helped record and discover, among others, Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie.

Scheiber remembers the initiative and breadth of musical appreciation Logan showed in writing about "America's Polka King," Frankie Yankovic, whom Logan tracked down in a retirement community in Pasco County.

"You should check it out," Scheiber said of the story. "It was really artfully done."

For about 15 years before taking that job, Logan volunteered at WMNF-FM 88.5 in Tampa, helping to get the community radio station started in 1979, and, with his then-wife, Susan, hosting a Friday afternoon bluegrass show that morphed into the eclectic and popular "Friday Traffic Jam."

They brought that same wide-ranging taste to St. Petersburg's State Theatre, where they booked now-famous artists who weren't nearly so famous at the time, including Lucinda Williams and Alison Krauss.

During that same period, Logan also worked as general manager and, based on the number of bylines in each edition, the primary writer for a St. Petersburg publication called Southern Bluegrass News, said his old friend, bluegrass musician Clay Simmons of Dunnellon.

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Simmons goes even further back, when Logan ran a music store in South St. Petersburg in the 1970s. And even before that, he was a teenage fan at ground zero of a surprisingly vibrant Tampa Bay-area rock 'n' roll scene — able to talk about, for example, paying next to nothing to see a bunch of scruffy unknowns called the Allman Brothers in a quad at what is now Eckerd College.

It's easy to forget, with all his appreciation and promotion of other people's music, that he also was very good at making it, Simmons said. He played mandolin and guitar in several bluegrass bands, including his own, memorably named Whiskey Before Breakfast.

"He sure put a lot of music into people's lives over the years," Simmons said. "He inundated the area with it. He really did have an impact."

It was a potentially kid-unfriendly world, said his son, George. But it didn't keep his mother and father from being great parents.

George, 31, works as a satellite image analyst in Tampa; his sister, Sally Nielsen, 29, is a nurse in San Francisco. Logan did standard good-dad activities with them, coaching youth soccer and taking them to sporting events, including an annual pilgrimage to the 12-hour race at Sebring International Speedway. He also put them to work as elementary school kids, clearing tables and running the spotlights at the State, and later invited them along when he reviewed concerts — once giving a thumbs-up back stage when Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker offered his underage son a beer.

"I didn't get all the coolest toys as a kid," George said, "but I had more cool experiences than most people ever had."

So, of course, had his dad. But he didn't lord it over his sources and co-workers after the family moved to Citrus County in 1998. Not at all.

Until his divorce and the sale of the family's house a few years ago, the rural property near Crystal River was party headquarters for Times reporters in Citrus and Hernando counties. The annual highlight was the Christmas tree-burning celebration, where, thanks to Logan, young journalists easily mixed with much older musicians.

"If you had Logan and a campfire and a guitar and a bottle of wine, you were going to have a good time," Simmons said. "You just had to love him."

"He was one of my favorite, favorite people," said Joanne Schoch, former executive director of the Humane Society of the Nature Coast. "I found him to be an extremely fair and objective reporter."

They bonded over cigarettes, their inability to quit smoking them, and their love of animals. Logan was so attached to his mixed-breed dog, Freckles, that when she died last month, he insisted on burying her near the woods where he had always taken her to run, George said. He suffered the heart attack that would eventually kill him while digging her grave.

Logan lived long enough to see the birth of his first grandson, George's son, Nolan, three months ago. Sadly, he just missed the birth of a second grandchild. Sally is only weeks away from her due date.

The family is still trying to figure out arrangements for a memorial service, George said. Because it's for Logan, it will have to be unconventional. It will also have to wait until the baby arrives and Sally can travel.

"That's probably not going to be until, like, December," George said. "So, maybe we'll do a Christmas-tree burning."

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.