Hey, folks — long time.
Sorry for the lack of updates; there's been a lot going on in these parts. The biggest (and saddest) news is that my wife and I are splitting up, and I'll likely be moving from North Carolina to New York's Hudson Valley (where I'll be much closer to my folks) in the next few months. It's an amicable split, and for the best, but it's been a heavy and emotional time for us. Please send good vibes.
Thankfully, I've had plenty of work to keep me distracted, including this FLOOD magazine interview with Steven McDonald of Redd Kross, which I conducted in honor of the new 35th Anniversary edition of Neurotica, which drops June 24 via Merge Records. Neurotica was an absolute revelation to me when I first heard it in the fall of 1987, so it was a real treat to be able to speak with Steven about the making of the album, as well as get the lowdown on the bonus disc of 1986 demos included in the 35th Anniversary reissue — which includes a (to me at least) vastly superior version of "What They Say," which is not only much rawer than the one that made it onto the finished album, but also features a completely unhinged vocal by Robert Hecker in full-blown Paul Stanley mode. If you're a Redd Kross fan, you definitely need to grab a copy; and if you're not a Redd Kross fan, well, I weep for your eternal soul.
I also recently did a preview writeup for the Forward on the new Lou Reed exhibition that has opened up at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This looks absolutely fantastic — the friends of mine who have already seen it assure me that it is, indeed — and I can't wait to get back to NYC to spend some serious time with "Uncle Lou".
And speaking of major cultural figures — the new George Carlin documentary inspired this piece for the Forward, in which I look back on the impact that his 1972 album Class Clown had upon the fragile eggshell minds of myself and my grade school classmates, even though we didn't actually discover the album until a good five years after its release. (For the record, his "Teenage Masturbation" and "Baseball-Football" bits also had a profound influence on us, but since those were both on 1975's An Evening With Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, I didn't get into 'em here.)
Though Rolling Stone left my name off the byline because of... reasons, I still massively enjoyed writing a feature for them in which six artists of varying ages, backgrounds and musical styles talk about the first time they ever heard The Sex Pistols. My absolute favorite part of it was getting to talk to Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order fame about how seeing the Pistols in Manchester back in 1976 quite literally changed his life forever. I'd never spoken with Hooky before, and the 20 minutes or so we spent on the phone together had me laughing so hard I thought I was gonna cough up a lung. Check out the piece and see why!
The Dan Epstein Trilogy sounds like the name of my next power trio (and it might well be!) — but it's actually what That Seventies Card Show host John Keating has dubbed my three baseball books. I could argue that The Captain & Me doesn't actually qualify as the third installment of what began with Big Hair & Plastic Grass and Stars & Strikes, since I co-authored it and it thus has a different voice and feel than the other two, but I'm really just happy to have published enough baseball books to qualify for a trilogy. In any case, John and I recently had a really fun (and occasionally emotional) conversation about 70s baseball and music, and if you're in the mood to hear me gab at length on those topics with someone who definitely knows their shit, I highly recommend clicking the above video.
And finally, speaking of The Captain & Me — folks have been asking me since before the book was even released if they could buy copies signed by both Ron and myself. Unfortunately, the pandemic washed out our book tour before it could even begin, and various other issues have prevented Ron and I from meeting up to sign a stack of them together. However, we may have finally breached that hurdle; so if you're interested in buying a copy signed by both co-authors, check back here in a week or two for more info!
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