Here’s a couple interesting remembrance pieces you might have missed recently.

Firstly, singer-songwriter Dave Alvin remembers the night in 1983 that he and a group of musicians from X and The Blasters backed up the late Bo Diddley at the Music Machine in West Los Angeles.

“Whatever you do, do not play ‘the Beat!’ ” Alvin distinctly remembers Diddley saying. It got better from there, of course.

Then, longtime Los Angeles Times editor Eric Malnic remembers working the desk that night in 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was shot.

“Nothing ever happens on primary election night,” he writes. “Why not try some kid who had never worked the desk before? I was that kid.”

The news came late, of course. Presses were rolling, Kennedy had just delivered his victory speech, and everyone thought they knew how the night would end.

“All the top brass — City Editor Bill Thomas, Managing Editor Frank Haven and their cohorts — were in Haven’s corner office, already enjoying the bourbon that was always broken out after election night was in the bag,” Malnic writes. (Remember bourbon?) Then it happened.

“[City desk resporter Bill] Drummond, who was seated opposite and facing me, suddenly looked up, straight at me, and shouted, ‘Kennedy’s been shot!’ ”

Malnic delivers a riveting account of what happened inside one newspaper, that night in June 1968.

Tags: assassination, bo diddley, California, city desk reporter Bill Drummond, City Editor Bill Thomas, Dave Alvin, Eric Malnic, Long Beach, Los Angeles Times, Managing Editor Frank Haven, obituary, Robert F. Kennedy, Southern California, The Blaster, The District Weekly, the Music Machine, Theo Douglas, West Los Angeles, X