Tommy DeCarlo, a longtime fan of Boston who became the classic rock band’s lead singer in the late 2000s, has died. He was 60.

DeCarlo died Monday following a battle with brain cancer, his family announced on Facebook.

“[H]e fought with incredible strength and courage right up until the very end,” the family’s statement said. “During this difficult time, we kindly ask that friends and fans respect our family’s privacy as we grieve and support one another.”

Born April 23, 1965, in Utica, N.Y., DeCarlo said he first started listening to Boston — the 1970s rock band known for its instrumental overtures and hits including “More Than a Feeling,” “Don’t Look Back” and “Peace of Mind” — as a young teenager, according to the group’s website. The vocalist credited his love for Boston’s original frontman Brad Delp and his desire to sing along with him on the radio for helping to develop his own singing voice.

After Delp’s death in 2007, DeCarlo, then a manager at a Home Depot, sent a link to his MySpace page filled with Boston covers as well as an original song in tribute to Delp to the Boston camp, hoping for a chance to participate in a tribute show for the singer. They kindly turned down his offer.

But eventually, Boston founder and lead songwriter Tom Scholz heard DeCarlo’s cover of “Don’t Look Back” and invited the singer to perform a few songs with the band at the tribute. That tribute show would be DeCarlo’s first time ever performing with any band in front of a crowd, but it wouldn’t be his last. He continued to perform with the band at live shows for years, and even joined them on some tracks for their 2013 album, “Life, Love & Hope.”

DeCarlo also formed the band Decarlo with his son, guitarist Tommy DeCarlo Jr. In October, the singer announced he was stepping away from performing due to “unexpected health issues.”

“[P]erforming and sharing music with all of you around the world has been one of the greatest joys of my life,” DeCarlo wrote in his Facebook post. “I can’t thank you all enough for the incredible love, support, and understanding you’ve shown me and my family during this time. It truly means the world to us.”

NEW YORK (OSV News) – As its title suggests, “Scream 7” (Paramount) is the latest extension of a long-lived horror franchise, one that’s currently approaching its 30th anniversary on screen. Since each chapter of this slasher saga has been a bloodsoaked mess, the series’ longevity will strike moviegoers of sense as inexplicable.

Yet the slog continues. While the previous film in the sequence shifted the action from California to New York, this second installment, following a 2022 quasi-reboot, settles on a Midwestern locale and reintroduces us to the series’ original protagonist, Sidney Evans, nee Prescott (Neve Campbell).

Having aged out of the adolescent demographic on whom the various murderers who have donned the Ghostface mask that serves as these films’ dubious trademark over the years seem to prefer to prey, Sidney comes equipped with a teen daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Will Tatum prove as resourceful in evading the unwanted attentions of Ghostface as Mom has?

On the way to answering that question, a clutch of colorless minor characters fall victim to the killer, who sometimes gets — according to his or her lights — creative. Thus one is quite literally made to spill her guts, while another ends up skewered on a barroom’s pointy beer tap.

Through it all, director Kevin Williamson and his co-writer Guy Busick try to peddle a theme of female empowerment in the face of mortal danger. They also take a stab, as it were, at constructing a plotline about intergenerational family tensions. When not jarring viewers with grisly images, however, they’re only likely to lull them into a stupor.

The film contains excessive gory violence, including disembowelment and impaling, underage drinking, mature topics, a couple of profanities, several milder oaths, pervasive rough and considerable crude language and occasional crass expressions. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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The artist known as Jeffrey’s Human Persona has remained anonymous for nearly 25 years — the same length of time that he has staged guerrilla-style musical puppet shows titled “almighty Opp” on a gritty street corner in Koreatown on the last Saturday of each month. He missed only three shows in the first 19 years of what he refers to as his “services.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him online in 2020 and a family tragedy kept him away from the corner for another few years.

In December he returned live in front of the used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. In February he staged his first ticketed event called “Secret Somewhere Services,” which drew close to 50 guests who paid $100 each for the pop-up show at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley where Willie Nelson’s youngest son, Micah, served as the opening act with his art rock project Particle Kid.

“I missed funerals, I missed Christmases, I missed friends’ birthdays. I never took a vacation,” Jeffrey says of his devotion to his monthly performances during a recent phone interview after his late January show, which also drew a large, excitable crowd of supporters. “I treated it like a knife to my heart.”

“Almighty Opp” is truly about Jeffrey’s heart. Services take place in a specially designed black stage populated with a variety of custom fabricated puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. At a recent show the ringleader wore a red dirndl with gray knee socks and black ankle boots. His angular head topped with a green felt crown; his toothy mouth a sinister, grimacing gash; his eyes blackened with what looks like charcoal. Other puppets cavorted around him: A tubby, clownish, snowman-like creature that spits water at the crowd; a tall, spindly clown that uses a miniature pump; a weird sock puppet made out of adhesive bandages; a discarded, disheveled baby doll on strings.

One of the main marionettes used in the “almighty Opp” street show. The puppets sing songs written by the show’s creator, an artist who goes by the name of Jeffrey’s Human Persona.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Music is the focal point of each service, with Jeffrey playing guitar and keyboards behind the curtain, singing in a wavering voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the subjects, ideas and feelings that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “almighty Opp” has put out 33 albums on Bandcamp featuring songs from services over the years with titles including “Every Day’s the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings” and “Bubble Burster.”

“Pretending I had a choice, just as long as we said we did, but now it’s much worse than it seems five years later,” sings a puppet that looks like a bizarro Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on a body of red pants during January’s show. “Supporting someone else’s dreams because your good nature’s being used.”

“Almighty Opp” employs a variety of richly detailed, hand-crafted puppets. The show’s creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

A common refrain, which almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk sings in unison, is, “It’s OK to not be OK.”

Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “stumble upon” nature of the services, but the core audience is a returning one. The nearly 200 people gathered on this January evening just past 9 p.m. stand on stools and chairs in the back and loll on the sidewalk on their elbows in the front. They scream and chant and sing along. They turn and hug one another or shake hands when Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors at different points in the show.

Lars Adams attends an “almighty Opp” show on the last Saturday in January. During the show the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

“Even though I’m performing, I don’t really consider myself a performer,” Jeffrey says. He also isn’t a busker, although his shows are free community events. And even though there are puppets, he doesn’t call “almighty Opp” a puppet show. He is, he says, “an obsessive maker.” The audience is “just coming along for the ride with me — life’s ride — of how I’m feeling at that time. It’s kind of like a Catholic Church service, where the sermon changes, but the structure of it remains the same.”

Unlike a church service, shows are rowdy and a bit untethered. A bus whooshes by, an unhoused man screams as he walks by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey’s wife, known as Shambles, operates the puppets from behind the curtain, while wearing their 5-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other assistants, called DingDing and Cylo, can also be seen behind the black curtain — their faces hidden in knitted clown masks or shielded by makeup. Jeffrey comes before the crowd toward the end of the show — wearing a white mask and a red hoodie — and asks audience members to give testimonials. People stand up and talk about having been changed by the show over the years.

That’s what happened with Micah Nelson. He came when Jeffrey used to hold mirrors in front of people’s faces and have them watch themselves while the crowd watched them. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to say he was covering some of his songs, and that his experience with the mirror had a profound effect on him.

When Nelson introduced Jeffrey at the recent “Secret Somewhere” show, the things he said about Jeffrey made the performer blush. Life, Jeffrey said, has a funny way of coming full circle.

Jeffrey’s Human Persona, who created “almighty Opp” in the early aughts, asks audience members gathered on a Koreatown street corner to give testimonials about the show, which he calls a “service.”

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Jeffrey moved to L.A. from Pittsburgh in 1995 when he was 19. His father bought him the plane ticket after Jeffrey found himself in a bit of a boredom rut with friends and getting into the wrong kind of trouble. He wanted to work in the film industry — he thought L.A. would be like a 1970s Jim Morrison fever dream, but found it not as inspiring. The film business, in which he worked making fantasy art and other fabrications, was not a creative haven, but rather a soul-sucking void.

“I’m tired of making other people’s puppets,” he told a friend one day, and “almighty Opp” was born.

“If you just show up for a paycheck, what are you really doing?” asked Jeffrey during our interview. “I’d rather be a flop and believe in it.”

Children gather at the very front of the stage during January’s “almighty Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. A total of 33 “almighty Opp” albums are available on Bandcamp.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

He made the original puppets and wrote the first “almighty Opp” album in the second-floor apartment where he lived, just a stone’s throw from the corner where he still performs — the corner where he would propose to his wife during a particularly difficult period of his life. During all those years he worked in a variety of creative roles to support himself: for the toy industry; briefly for the Disney Imagineers; and for about eight years as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden for whom he helped fabricate the whizzing future land “Metropolis II,” which resides in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Now that “almighty Opp” is live again, Jeffrey is benefiting from the therapeutic aspects of writing down his emotions and experiences. The “Secret Somewhere Services” will continue once a month, or maybe every two months. Guests can check Instagram for tips on how to score a coveted ticket, which comes with its own handcrafted entrance token and map to the ever-changing private venue. Jeffrey is making big puppets for these performances — one is 7 feet tall — and experimenting with the form of the event.

Still, the street corner will remain the soul of his operation — and the music at the heart of it all.

“It’s all about honesty, and the people who understand it and keep coming, they know that it’s something absolutely real,” he says.