How many people can boast about having Bono (a rock star so famous he only needs one name) attend their retirement party? For Boston Globe scribe Steve Morse, a music critic at least as legendary as a few of the star-powered folks he wrote about over the course of five decades, that kind of happenstance was just another day at the office. And by office, I mean the clubs, pubs, arenas, concert halls, outdoor sheds, and stadiums that Steve, by his own account, frequented around 250 times a year — for half a century.

When you do the math and add it up, the surreal number of live shows he attended likely outflanks even the career touring schedule of two of Steve’s favorite subjects, Bruce Springsteen and The Grateful Dead.

Anyway, back to Bono. That moment in December 2005, during a late-night celebration for Steve at one of Morse’s favorite after-hours hangouts, JJ Foley’s Cafe on Kingston Street in downtown Boston, will forever be a glittering jewel of joy in the crown of my fond memories of Steve.

Why? Because I’m the lucky guy who was asked by Bono himself to “go ahead and climb up on that table” in the bar to be better seen and heard (unlike the unnervingly lanky 6’6″ subject of this appreciation, the larger-than-life Bono and I are actually a very compact, portable 5’8″ or so in our boots; a detail of dimension I happily discovered when I stood face to face with the man for a brief conversation).

By standing on the table, reasoned the wise sage Bono, I could better introduce U2’s singer to the room gathered for the guest of honor. As if “The Fly” needed any introduction to that buzzing room of celebrants, colleagues, friends, and other nearby rock stars and luminaries, among them Peter Wolf, ex-frontman of the J. Geils Band, and Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager.

But first, a little backstory. I had reviewed the first of U2’s two sold-out shows at TD Banknorth Garden for the Boston Globe the previous night, and cabbed it over to Foley’s for Steve’s send-off that night, right after covering a Dinosaur Jr. show at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge. Soon, a rumor swept through the room that after U2’s second night’s performance, Bono might swing by and say hi to Steve.

Twenty five years before, Morse had seen U2 perform at the Paradise in Boston, written a favorable review about them, and was among their first champions in the United States. The band never forgot Steve’s largesse. Sure enough, Bono himself — hobnobber of kings, queens, prime ministers, and presidents — did indeed materialize inside the pub, majestically emerging from his smoked-window Escalade in what I imagined was a slo-mo stride to the bar as dry ice dramatically swirled around his flowing duster and fabulous black leather trousers. That’s how the movie always plays in my mind, anyway.

“Hey Jonathan, I want you to meet somebody,” Morse grinned, ushering me through the noisy gathering of revelers toward a corner of the room. I felt as if I was making a sacred pilgrimage to meet the Pope. In retrospect, I guess in a way I was.

“Bono!” Steve’s unmistakeable voice boomed above the din toward a seated figure on a barstool at a table. After the show, he was still in full Bono mode, replete with cowboy hat and wraparound shades. “I’d like to introduce you …” Hell, it all went blurry after that. Steve mentioned, with jovial fanfare, that I was the guy who had reviewed the previous night’s show at the Garden. Oh, and that I’d be taking the reins of Steve’s long-running “Rock Notes” column, so Bono should talk to me if, y’know, I happened to ring up U2 one day to chat. (Being entrusted with the living legend’s “Rock Notes” column, especially as a freelancer, was a genuine privilege and post I held for three years).

I mentioned to Bono that I appreciated the poignant then-new song, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” that the band had performed at the Garden. The song dealt with the recent loss of his father, and I told him I had also lost my dad the year before, so it particularly resonated. I sheepishly asked if he’d sign my reporter’s notebook to mark the surreal occasion. Bono grinned gamely, took it from me, and started scribbling. When he handed it back, he had drawn a caricature of himself toasting Steve and signed with a flourish. I gulped my thanks, and my Guinness.

Soon after, his manager whispered something in the singer’s ear about it being time to go back to the hotel or wait in the limo or whatever. Champagne glasses started clinking. Bono leaned in to me conspiratorily. “Would you introduce me, so I can say a few words? Just jump up on this tabletop here.” Huh? After a few seconds of studying the practical logistics of actually “jumping” up on the table and remaining vertical, of course I did. Because, like E.F. Hutton in those old TV commercials, when Bono talks (or sings, or pushes his hands into the small of your back to help hoist you tabletop-ward), people listen.

“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but there’s someone here in the bar I’d like to introduce you to who wants to say a few words about Steve: namely, the singer for the biggest band in the world — freakin’ Bono!”‘ I clambored down and Bono slapped me on the back and stepped up onto the table (not sure he needed the hoist). And then he proceeded to be “freakin’ Bono,” larger than life after all, and paying tribute to a music critic that, for at least a couple of generations of readers, had also been a giant.

“It was just an absolute dream to be validated by a person of that stature,” Steve told me a couple of days later for a recap of the evening I was writing for The Boston Phoenix. “You want to go out with a bang and I feel lucky to say that I was able to do that.”

Indeed he did. Over the past week, a staggering number of people have shared their own treasured memories of Steve Morse, befitting the stature and, more importantly, good will and gregarious heart of a man who we lost jarringly and suddenly to Stage 4 lung cancer late last Saturday night, October 26, at the age of 76 – a scant two weeks after he was diagnosed.

Through tears and a collective sense of shock and loss, Steve is rightly being honored for his legacy as a humble, beneficent elder statesman of the New England music scene. But perhaps even more importantly and impressively, and as anyone who came across him knew immediately, Steve was one of the good guys; an open-hearted guy in a competitive profession where a friendly, down-to-earth personality isn’t always par for the course. And as many have also noted with admiration, Steve was a supremely proud father and spirited champion of his adult son Nick, a gifted abstract painter on the autism spectrum who is mostly non-verbal. Their bond was sweet to behold.

By the time I arrived in town in the summer of 1997, Morse had long been established as the towering — literally and figuratively — summit of Boston rock journalism. He was the senior rock critic at the Boston Globe, whose work began appearing when I was eleven years old growing up in Western Massachusetts (for perspective on how much and long he wrote, I’m sixty now). And it never really stopped, even in retirement, when he continued to contribute freelance stories to the Globe (his last piece was an interview with Bonnie Raitt this past summer). He also created and taught an online rock history course at the venerable Berklee School of Music for many years.

As Steve told me in a Facebook exchange after announcing his illness, he was proud of his run of 49 straight years of having his byline in the Globe. Over that incredible span, he had written about and interviewed just about every major rock star, from Bruce and Bob Marley to Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder to Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones, among innumerable others.

So I was surprised when the phone rang one hot July day in my apartment, still stacked with wall-to-wall, record-filled boxes and unpacked moving cartons. I had just moved to Boston with a handful of music clips after doing a career about-face, having left a decade-plus of daily news reporting to finally act on my dream of becoming a music journalist in my early thirties. On the other end of the line was Steve Morse. He had read my clips and liked them. Would I like to tackle a few record reviews?

I quickly pitched a few possibilities veering in different directions, in hopes one might stick: the Scottish rave-adelic outfit Primal Scream’s new “Vanishing Point”; Luna’s “Pup Tent” (a band led by Dean Wareham, ex-frontman for the ’80s Cambridge, MA. Velvet Underground-inspired Galaxie 500); and “It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best,” a reissue of forgotten work from the late, cult folk singer-songwriter Karen Dalton. Steve enthusiastically greenlighted them all. I felt as though I had won the lottery.

I’ll always remember Steve’s voice on the phone (yes, it was still the era of landlines and answering machines). It had a grandiose flourish; an exaggerated, upward-vowel-emphasizing, melodic cadence that invited playful imitation (guilty as charged). It was as unassuming and friendly as an arm around your shoulder. It lifted me up instantly. As I never hesitated to tell people over what turned out to be a 15-year run writing about music in the city, Steve Morse was the first person to welcome me to Boston and offer me work. For a music critic, that’s like The Beatles welcoming a fledgling musician to Liverpool.

Steve was a good man to know. When he arrived at my brand new apartment in Brookline around midnight to attend a house-warming party for my wife’s and my first stab at home ownership, Steve apologized profusely at the lateness of the hour because he had just caught a slate of shows around town (of course he did!). He immediately made up for his tardiness by carrying a car trunk full of cases of Heineken beer into the bash. The party soon got its second wind. Steve wasn’t called “The Closer” for nothing.

To say Steve was a night owl was a severe understatement. One late night, I called the arts desk at the Globe on deadline in a rising panic because the Rolling Stones, whose concert I was assigned to review for the next day’s paper, had shut off all the electricity in Gillette Stadium. The Stones wanted everything dark during their encore for dramatic effect, so their massive fireworks display would have no irritating visual distractions. That meant killing all the lights in the joint.

As a result, the press room’s dial-up connections weren’t working properly and I was facing the prospect of having to file my review right onto the paper’s delivery trucks to make the next morning’s edition (a slight exaggeration, but just slight). In that harried moment, clenched fist shaking ineffectually at the miniscule Mick Jagger prancing imperiously on stage far below me, my most beloved band became my most loathed.

Steve picked up the phone at the Globe like a lifeline. He just happened to be there burning the midnight oil on a story. I related the dire situation as the band, oblivious to my plight, happily chugged through “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” In a do-or-die, last-ditch move out of The Daily Planet, I made like Jimmy Olsen to Steve’s Clark Kent and dictated my review to him right off the top of my head, riffing with as much thrown-together critical contemplation as my frazzled synapses could connect.

For the fifteen years I covered music and attended shows of every stripe in Boston, mostly for the Globe and the Boston Phoenix, no matter what time of night, it was almost impossible not to encounter Steve. He was always somewhere and everywhere, at big-ticket arena concerts and small residencies in clubs. And he dedicated himself to all of it equally, without one iota of snobbish hierarchy, according the same respect for, and interest in, a local singer-songwriter playing a Tuesday night tavern to a dozen people, as he did a glitzy headlining act topping a Saturday night festival bill.

While not specifically modeling my own approach to covering music on Steve’s sense of democratic inclusivity, it was a sensibility I shared and appreciated. I applied that perspective to my various music beats over the years, paying substantially more attention to up-and-coming acts or overlooked local and national artists on the margins, as I did famous touring bands hitting town. “After all, what else is there to say about the Dave Matthews Band?” was what I always asked myself as a barometer when deciding who and what I wanted to write about.

My own favorite music critics growing up as a reader had always been (and continue to be) those who championed independent (or at least, independent-minded) artists who made compelling music but, for whatever reason, perhaps hadn’t broken through to a bigger audience (yet). I preferred musicians who explored darker detours or illuminated their own paths rather than those who tromped down well-trod ground and smoothly paved genre highways. (The latter were usually the most massively commercially successful ones). There are always exceptions to this rule of thumb, and guilty pleasures, of course, and I have plenty of both.

Steve once described me as “a generalist” and, although at the time it sounded slightly derogatory, I eventually realized he was complimenting me in having a broad musical palette and taste that embraced spectrums of sound and style. Steve knew, as I did, that the key to the craft was being a curious listener; exploring the history and context fueling the music; fashioning a thoughtful, engaging point of view; and being a good enough reporter and writer to be able to convey to the reader why our words about the music we heard were worth reading, and seeking out. My biggest kick was always turning listeners onto new discoveries, not tearing down easy targets, and I think Steve shared that view.

But every writer has an area or two they have a soft spot for and personally gravitate to. Mine was indie rock and (non-Top 40) independent pop with a minimum of polish and production, as well as strains of post-punk, power-pop, neo-psychedelia, shoegaze, lo-fi bedroom pop, alt-country Americana … see how many sub-genres we critics can invent?

Steve, who was born fifteen years earlier than me, in 1948, was really a child of the ’60s who had witnessed legends like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. He even caught Led Zeppelin when they barnstormed London as a new, lean and fearsome blues-rock band, and the massive Stones concert at Hyde Park in London right after Brian Jones died in July, 1969 (I’ve searched for Steve’s head looming above everybody’s caftan-wearing shoulders on my bootleg tapes of the memorial concert, to no avail). During the years I was writing in Boston, Steve leaned deeply into both classic and modern rock and tye-dyed jam bands, as well as traditional country and pretty much everything having to do with reggae. He loved Jimmy Buffett to an absurd fault. (But then, we all have our blind spots).

In at least one instance, he seemed less convinced than I was by a few of the new alternative-country artists that sprang up during the mid-1990s in the wake of the demise of Uncle Tupelo, a band led by singer-songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, each of whom would go on to form the highly regarded Son Volt and Wilco, respectively. (That emerging scene, as a point of personal history, was the subject of my own first feature written for the city’s alternative weekly publication The Boston Phoenix; I recall Steve telling me he had read the piece with interest, and engaging me about a few of the new bands I mentioned, always open-minded and curious).

In particular, Steve didn’t think there was anything special about the merits and so-far modest accomplishments of then-critical darling Ryan Adams (this was well before Adams’s well publicized troubles came to light a couple of decades later), a singer-songwriter who had recently turned solo after breaking up his acclaimed band Whiskeytown. Adams’s first solo effort, “Heartbreaker,” had garnered positive comparisons to ’70s country rock pioneers like Gram Parsons, a few years earlier. Now he had a new album, “Gold,” coming out and it, too, was getting alot of buzz, despite what would eventually turn out to be the terribly ill-fated timing of a September 11, 2001 release date. In any case, Steve wasn’t buying the hype.

So it was a kick and an honor for me when Steve and I squared off in dueling pro/con columns concerning this prolific twenty-something’s potential and promise that ran splashed across the front of the Globe Arts page. I can’t remember if the idea was Steve’s, but the proximity of my byline being next to his in a Siskel & Ebert kind of critical point-counterpoint made me feel like my name was in lights that day — or at least was getting some of the glow emanating from the Morse marquee.

When Steve told us, barely three weeks ago, that doctors had discovered a concerning mass on his lungs, the news left his many hundreds of friends, colleagues, and the legions of musicians he had championed over the decades, shocked and reeling, and scrambling to make sense of something that never does. I did the same, joining the growing chorus of those offering comfort, prayers, praises for all he’d done, and hopeful encouragement in his fight for a future he wanted to see.

That’s when I told Steve, for what turned out to be the last time, on his Facebook page, how much that first phone call all those years ago meant to me. His reply, and final five words to me, now mean even more. “Proud to be your colleague,” he wrote back simply, generously. The feeling then, now, and forever, my friend, is mutual.