Big Hair and Plastic Grass

A 'Fro-Tastic Farewell: Oscar Gamble, RIP

You can't talk about major league baseball in the 1970s without talking about Oscar Gamble. Well, maybe you can, but it's impossible for me to conceive of baseball's funkiest decade without him — which is why, back in 2009, when plans for the publication of Big Hair and Plastic Grass were finally underway, I insisted that the St. Martin's Press art department include his image on the book's cover. And which is part of why my heart is so heavy today after learning about his passing at the far-too-young age of 68.

Oscar Gamble was not a superstar. He finished in the MVP voting only once (in 1977, when his 31 home runs for the White Sox earned him exactly one vote), never made an All-Star team, never led the league in any batting or fielding category, never won a World Series ring. He was often benched against left-handed starters, and only once in the course of his 17-year MLB career (1974, his best season with the Indians) did ever he log more than 500 plate appearances. Though he had a better arm than he was generally given credit for — he threw out 10 runners from the outfield in 1976, and another 12 in 1978 — Oscar's range and glove were a tad below average, and thus he spent over a third of his 1584 career MLB games as a designated hitter.

It's true that a player of his particular caliber (he walked more than he struck out, had a lifetime OBP of .356 and a lifetime OPS+ of 127) would likely be more prized today than he was in an era where Triple Crown stats were the be-all/end-all. And yet, Oscar Gamble epitomizes 1970s baseball to me. There was, of course, that gloriously funky Afro of his — arguably the greatest in the history of the game, and which in its peak state could have accommodated three caps simultaneously — and his even funkier batting stance, where he crouched so low at the plate that his elbows practically touched his knees. Both of those things were beautifully emblematic of baseball in the 70s, an era in which ballplayers finally began to feel free to express themselves on a major league diamond. But while he generally looked like the coolest cat at the disco (and he actually owned one — Oscar Gamble's Players Club in Montgomery, Alabama), Oscar always came to play; and despite his less-than-imposing size (5'11, 165 lbs in his prime), he could easily launch a pitch into the stratosphere whenever that left-handed swing uncoiled. Though never a showboat on the level of, say, Mickey Rivers or Reggie Jackson (to name two of his teammates during his Yankees stints), he was nonetheless tremendously entertaining to watch, in part because he seemed to be enjoying himself so damn much out there.

But beyond all that, Oscar Gamble was an intrinsic part of my own 70s baseball experience — he truly was a cornerstone of my love for the game and its history, and ultimately one of the main inspirations behind my baseball writing. His legendary 1976 "Traded" card was in one of the first wax packs I ever opened, which meant that I knew of him before I knew of Mark Fidrych, Dock Ellis, Bill Lee, Luis Tiant, Dick Allen, Lenny Randle, or any of my other favorite players from the era. Oscar was a starting outfielder for the 1976 Yankees, who played against the Tigers in the very first MLB game I ever attended, and whom I studied at great length during their run through the first post-season I ever paid actual attention to. (Oscar's immortal quote, "They don't think it be like it is, but it do," was in reference to the insanity and dysfunction of the Yankees clubhouse under George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin.)

Oscar enjoyed his finest season as rent-a-player for the 1977 White Sox "South Side Hitmen," who nearly slugged their way to the AL West title, and whom I became obsessed with despite observing from a distance. He was a free-agent bust with the 1978 Padres, who my paternal grandparents took me to see that year when I visited them in San Diego; and the following year, he was traded back to the Yankees while I was visiting the same grandparents at their new digs on Long Island. I rooted for him even when he was playing against teams I rooted for — because, c'mon, how could you root against Oscar Gamble? "He was a sweet, decent man without a single ounce of malice in his heart," Reggie Jackson told the NY Daily News today, "one who came through the door every day with a smile on his face." And even from the stands, or on TV, I could totally pick up on that.

Oscar's 'fro attained its greatest shape and circumference during his 1973-75 stint with the Indians, a period during which he could have easily been mistaken off-field for a member of the Chi-Lites or Rasputin's Stash. I didn't learn until many years after the fact that the Yankees had made him cut it when he was traded to the Bronx from Cleveland, or that said haircut forced him to pass on a possible Afro-Sheen endorsement deal with Johnson Products. I talk about his haircut at length in Stars and Strikes, and also got into it a bit in this "Bicentennial Baseball Minute" video I did a few years back in conjunction with the book.

I've long loved that story, because — even if the world was deprived of what could have been a seriously dy-no-mite Afro-Sheen commercial — it underlined how much of a team player Oscar Gamble really was. Though the Yankees were uptight and old-fashioned about grooming, and he would have been well within his rights to cop an attitude about their edict, he saw the bigger picture. After all, he'd spent the bulk of his career playing for lousy teams in Philadelphia and Cleveland, and he was not about to let a little (or a lot of) hair get in the way of him being part of a contender.

There is a sadder side to that story, though, one which I didn't fully grasp until a year or two ago, when I turned up an interview with Oscar Gamble while digging through some newspaper archives from 1977. In a Chicago Sun-Times article with the headline "Oscar Gamble Sheds Bad Boy Image," Ron Rapoport writes about how Gamble — by all accounts a chatty, affable guy and a dependable teammate — was widely viewed as a "troublemaker" by baseball GMs, simply for having the temerity to groom himself like the proud, handsome black man he was... and that a lot of reporters were flat-out afraid to talk to him because they perceived him to be some kind of black militant in double-knits.

"After I got a haircut [in 1976]," Gamble told Rapoport, "a lot of writers came over and said, 'We didn't talk to you because we thought you were violent.' They just came up and admitted it. That's what the hair meant to them. I just wore it that way because it looked good on me and I looked good in it. It's funny in a way — people always judge people the way they think you should be. You never know what people are thinking. I've always been a nice friendly guy, easy to talk to."

This, in a nutshell, is the side of sports that I've always hated — the side that not only encourages conformity, but also casts character-assassinating aspersions upon those who refuse to knuckle under accordingly, and punishes those who stand up for what they believe. And 40 years later, things haven't gotten a whole lot better on that score — just ask Colin Kaepernick, a gentleman whose own 'fro and ironclad sense of self surely caused Oscar to flash a knowing grin or two. Then again, that's why so many baseball players of the 70s continue to inspire me to this day; they were true to themselves, even when the game's old guard — the owners, skippers, General Managers, journalists and even veteran players — did their best to tamp them down...

It always hurts when one of the favorite players from your childhood dies, especially one who thoroughly embodied the fun, excitement freedom you felt whenever you ran out onto your local diamond as a kid. But Oscar's passing hits me extra hard today, because I'd love to commiserate about it with someone else who's no longer with us — James Saft, a brilliant Reuters columnist and one of my oldest and dearest friends, who passed away in October. One of the first things Jim and I bonded over in high school was our shared Alabama connection; my maternal grandparents lived in Tuscaloosa, and his aunt lived in Greensboro, and we each spent many formative summers in the state, which may as well have been Mars as far as our private-school classmates on the north side of Chicago were concerned. As such, we both shared a particular affection for Bama ballplayers; and Oscar Gamble, who was scouted by the legendary Buck O'Neil while attending Montgomery's George Washington Carver High School, was one of our favorite members of that fraternity. Jim spent the last years of his life in Huntsville with his wife, daughters and dogs, and I would always ask him to keep an eye out for Oscar Gamble's Players Club memorabilia at the thrift shops in Montgomery, whenever he was there. (None ever turned up, but a man can dream, right?) When the rumor of Oscar's passing first hit Twitter this morning while I was still waking up, my first instinct was to drop Jim an email, asking him if he'd heard anything... and then I remembered that I couldn't do that anymore.

And so, unfortunately, it goes; in the words of Hank Williams, another great son of Alabama, I'll never get out of this world alive. But I'm not in the mood to play any Hank right now — I'd rather spin some Delfonics, whose sweet Philly soul strains doubtless caught Oscar's ear early in his playing career, and whose gorgeous "Delfonics Theme" both fills me with the same sense of joy and wonder that I experienced while watching Oscar Gamble in action, and echoes the sadness that I feel now that he's gone. Rest in funky peace, Oscar. And thanks for everything. 

Happy Birthday, Neil Diamond!

Sometime in the spring of 1990, I came home to the house I shared with two of my band mates to find a USPS package delivery notice waiting for me in our mailbox. I probably groaned audibly, because I knew that retrieving the package would mean getting up earlier than usual the next day, because our local post office was about a mile north of our pad, and the record store I worked at was several miles to the south.

The next morning, after dragging myself off my futon and trudging over to the p.o., I grabbed a southbound #36 to work. After finding a seat, I took a closer look at the package, which was actually a flat envelope about the size of a magazine, and had my Uncle John's return address on it. John is an immensely talented artist, so I though maybe he'd sent me one of his works for my walls. I gingerly opened the envelope to take a peek at what was inside, and my mind was promptly blown by the autographed sheet music that you see above. Apparently, John's son (my cousin) and Neil Diamond's son went to the same school in L.A.; knowing that my band Lava Sutra were all big Neil fans, and that we had been covering "Shilo" as part of our live sets — and actually recorded it as a "hidden track" for our demo cassette — John purchased the sheet music and took it with him to a school event, just in case Neil would be there. When he ran into Neil that night, he showed him the sheet music; "I remember that song," Neil laughed, before very graciously signing it for me. It's one of the greatest gifts I've ever received, and has hung prominently in every house and apartment I've lived in since.

I've never had the opportunity to meet or interview Neil Diamond, which is a shame; the music world is filled with douchebags of all stripes, but I've never heard anything bad about Neil from anyone who's ever crossed paths with him. He's always come across like a true gentleman — maybe one with a slightly heightened sense of self-importance, or a goofy sense of humor that doesn't always translate well, but a gentleman nonetheless. Which is why, my fandom aside, it made me really sad to hear that he's retiring from the road after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In light of that news, I wrote a few things about his history as a performer for the Forward, which you can read here.

And in honor of Neil's 77th birthday today, I went back and dug up a few other things I've written about him over the years. In 2015, after witnessing the greatest Neil Diamond concert I've ever seen (and sadly, will ever see), I wrote this piece for the Forward; and a year earlier, I reviewed his most recent studio album — the unexpectedly excellent Melody Road — for the same outlet. And though it's no longer available on Rolling Stone's site, I made a list of ten great Neil Diamond tracks for them back in 2005, which has since been re-posted here.

Obviously, Neil's music means a lot to me, so it's been gratifying to be able to express that in these pieces. It's also been encouraging to see how younger generations of listeners have come around to him in the past 25 years. When I first saw him in concert, at the Rosemont Horizon in 1992, my friends and I (then in our mid/late 20s) were the youngest people in the place; but when my wife and I went to see him at the Greek Theatre in 2015, probably half the crowd was younger than me by a decade or two. Over the course of fifty years, Neil Diamond went from being a Solitary Man to a legendary one; and if he got cheated out of a victory lap by this disease, hopefully he can at least take comfort in reflecting on a half-century of celebratory performances, and knowing that so many of his heartfelt songs have stood the test of time.

So Happy Birthday, Neil. Long may you rock, in whatever manner you choose to do so from here on out. You got to me, and then some.

 

The Dope's That There's Still Hope

Though I do have some nice memories from it, 2017 was an undeniable shit-show for me in all manner of ways (and quite possibly for you, too). But rather than crawling under my desk and assuming a fetal position, I am fully resolved to make this coming year a better one on every level — and the fact that my first gig of the year involved writing something on Bruce Springsteen's first album bodes pretty well for that, I'd like to think.

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was released 45 years ago today, and I've counted it among my five favorite Springsteen albums since the days when there were ONLY five Springsteen albums. It's fair to say that it's his loosest and looniest record, as well as (for better or worse) his most verbose, and spinning it again (and again) while doing research for this Rolling Stone piece was kind of like having an evening out with an old friend who I'd lost touch with for awhile — lotsa laughs, lotsa good memories, lotsa stories that don't always get finished. True, "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" is a song I never need to hear more than once a decade (and "The Angel" isn't a whole lot better, though I love the melody on the bridge), but the rest of the record still totally delivers the scraggily poetic goods for me.

Anyway, a very Happy New Year to whomever's reading this, and may your 2018 be filled with love, joy, good health and great music.

 

Midnight Magic

 

Christmas came early for me in December 1979 — about a week early, in fact.

This pre-Christmas Christmas was necessitated by the fact that my mom, sister and I were preparing to move to Chicago from Los Angeles, where we'd spent the past year living with two of my aunts, my uncle and my two young cousins in their airy Spanish Revival duplex on Sixth Street. Our plan went like this: My mom was flying to Chicago to meet Froggy, her fiancee, while my sister and I would fly to New York City to spend Christmas (and a few days before and after) with my dad and stepmother, and then we'd meet up in Chicago in time to start the new year (and new decade) in our new home. So on December 19th, our final evening in Los Angeles, my sister, mom and I exchanged presents with the rest of our L.A. family.

Among the more memorable gifts I received that night were a Strat-O-Matic College Football set, a copy of The People's Almanac #2, and a copy of the Commodores' Midnight Magic LP. In retrospect, it seems kind of strange that the one record I got that Christmas was far mellower than the music I'd gotten deeply into that fall through local FM radio station KMET, as well as via various friends — new wave-ish things like Cheap Trick, Blondie, the Knack, the Cars, the Records and Bram Tchaikovsky, and older hard rock stuff like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foghat and Jethro Tull. But I'd been a fan of the Commodores since the summer of '77, when "Easy" oozed like cosmic honey out of every radio in earshot, and they were one of those bands that my mom and I both shared an affection for (even if she'd aptly described them as "corny" on more than one occasion).

And frankly, I wasn't the kind of kid who got off on pissing off my mom with my record collection; I happily absorbed the harder stuff on my own time, but also really enjoyed the times when my mom and I would listen to music together, finding common ground in the melodies that transported us. So when writing out my Christmas list that year, I thought Midnight Magic would be a better bet to ask for than, say, Get The Knack, because I knew with the latter that it'd only be a matter of time before my mom's ears picked up the line "When she's sitting on your face" from "Good Girls Don't," and an awkward conversation would inevitably ensue...

Since we were due to leave the next day, my sister and I immediately packed up all our new presents — except for the Strat-O-Matic game, which I insisted on taking with me to NYC — in a suitcase for my mom to take with her to Chicago. I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to listen to my new album for another ten days or so, but then again it gave me something to look forward to, a new thrill to savor once the excitement of spending our first Christmas in Manhattan was over.

I finally got a chance to pierce the album's shrink wrap on our first night in Chicago, while we got comfortable at Froggy's one-bedroom apartment on the 67th floor of the John Hancock Building. From his living room window, Froggy pointed out a black, glass-and-steel rectangle below — the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed apartment building on Lake Shore Drive where we'd all be moving in a matter of days. For now, though, we'd ride out the remaining days of '79 in his comfy bachelor pad in the sky, which came complete with a wooden-based BSR turntable that I popped Midnight Magic onto at my earliest opportunity.

Up til this point, I had only heard "Sail On" and "Still," the album's two hit ballads; the country-tinged verses of the former seemed a little odd to me, but I loved how the song built to a mighty chorus crescendo. "Still," on the other hand, I didn't dig at all — in retrospect, the sappy ballad was a dry run for Lionel Richie's solo career, but at the time it just seemed both convoluted and dull. Nevertheless, I was a loyal fan, and remained hopeful that Midnight Magic would contain a funky track or two along the lines of "Brickhouse," or even "Too Hot Ta Trot". In that respect, I would be sorely disappointed; once I finally spun the record, it became apparent that there was nothing on it that could touch the funkiest highlights of the Commodores' back catalog. However, the upbeat cuts like "Getting It," "Sexy Lady" and the title track were a different (and appealing) animal altogether — they were clean, smooth and sophisticated in a way that somehow seemed to perfectly befit our new surroundings.

But the track that I really connected with was "Wonderland," which opened Side 2. A lush, slow-grooving seduction ballad, the song found Lionel promising to sweep a girl off to the land of love with a ride down "Paradise Drive," if she'd just take his hand. While "Wonderland" was entirely too "adult" for me to relate to on a literal level, I was completely enraptured by the luxuriously silky sound of the track, and completely caught up in its evocative promises. "Hello, honey, this is your lucky day," Lionel sang, and yeah, this was my (and our) lucky day — after a year of scraping by in Los Angeles with so little money that I'd felt guilty about asking my mom to take me shopping for new clothes, she was about to marry a guy who lived in a skyscraper, and who was about to move us all into a sleek apartment building with an actual door man. The building was even located on Lake Shore Drive — not Paradise Drive, perhaps, but damn close enough...

I played the album again that unseasonably New Year's Eve, shortly before we boarded a CTA bus to take us up to Rogers Park, where we quietly rung in the new decade by watching a late screening of Going In Style — a bittersweet heist comedy starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg — at the 400 Theater. On the way home, as our bus cruised southwards along Lake Shore Drive, I looked out at the lights of Lincoln Park, which seemed to bob and beckon in the distance like fairy lights, and heard "Wonderland" playing in my head. I knew next to nothing about my new home at this point, but I couldn't wait to learn everything — couldn't wait to become a part of this historic and enchanting metropolis where I'd been lucky enough to land. I was so pumped, I wasn't even stressed about having to enroll in a new school the following week, which would be my fourth school in less than two years.

Sadly, life never flows as quite smoothly as a late-70s Commodores track. In time, Froggy would turn out to have deep-seated anger issues that primarily manifested at me; living in a Mies Van Der Rohe building would prove a cold (often literally) and depressing experience; and my desire to fit in with the rock-loving, WLUP-listening kids at my new school would eventually cause me to renounce my love for all things Commodores. But for a couple of weeks at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, Midnight Magic represented all of my hopes and dreams I had for the new year, the new decade, and my new life. As I sit here in Chicago on a bitingly cold New Year's Day, I listen to "Wonderland" and can still feel the same heady sense of excitement, promise and wonder — that same Midnight Magic — that I did thirty-eight years ago. And I find myself wondering where the hell all the time went.