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By B John Burns
November 19, 2008
 This has nothing to do with law or politics, but Bobby Beers died today. He was 82.
If you Google the name, you find a host of sites concerning Bobby Beers, lead singer for the heavy metal band Steel Dragon. Steel Dragon, however, exists only in fiction. Early in the 2001 film "Rock Star" Mark Wahlberg's character, Izzy Cole, replaces Bobby Beers at the front of the iconic band.
This was not THAT Bobby Beers, although the real Bobby Beers was himself the lead singer for a pair of musical groups that were legendary in their time. He toured with the Blue Barron Orchestra and, before there was television, Lawrence Welk. With Welk, Bob recorded one of the best-selling versions of the nonsensical popular song “Mairzy Doats” in 1944. When Elvis recorded “Love Me Tender”, it is reported that he relied stylistically upon a 1950 recording of that tune by Bob with Blue Barron.
I’ve known Bob Beers since 1987. He’s my brother-in-law’s father. Before that, I can remember the soft, bassy voice of KRNT Radio personality Bob Beers in the 60s.
More recently I’ve come to learn, incrementally, who he was. There are a number of people walking around in this community who have lived lives like that, and nobody even knows it. When you see Julius Brooks playing his saxophone on a Des Moines street corner, for example, you wouldn’t know that in his day Julius played with people like Ray Charles and the Ink Spots.
Bob Beers was one of those guys. Until he started to weaken with age, pretty much every Easter, every Christmas, and every Thanksgiving for the past two decades he’d be sitting right there across the table. He was a kind, quiet man, never interested in boasting about how he traveled the country with the great bands when the great bands were in their heyday. Believe me, I would have boasted.
A lot of it came to light for me in 2002, when Bob and his wife Donna celebrated their 50th anniversary. There were several tables scattered with artifacts and memorabilia from the glory days. Off and on since then, I’ve Googled Bob’s name and, after wading through site after site about “Rock Star” and Steel Dragon, I would find more evidence that Bob Beers had once truly lived the life.
I Googled him again today, and learned a couple more things I didn’t know about him before. One of them was that his real name, given at birth, was Oliver Eldon Beers. I don’t know if my brother-in-law is even aware of that. Another is that, as a teenager, Bob appeared in uncredited roles in two films, the 1944 “Lady in the Dark”, starring Ginger Rogers (who, according to the film’s tagline, was a “minx in mink with a yen for men”), and “South of Santa Fe” in 1942, starring Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes.
I don’t know how much attention, if any, the local media will pay to Bob’s passing. They should, because Bob was one of the last survivors of a lost era in our culture. And because he was a hell of a nice guy.
But if they don’t, you saw it here.
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