Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Farewell, Tom Terrific

I knew this was coming, but I still haven't been able to fully wrap my mind around it.

I don't remember ever learning about the existence of Tom Seaver, just like I don't remember learning about the existence of the Empire State Building; both were just always there, iconic symbols of the greatness of the city I'd been born into but didn't really begin to experience until I was almost 13. By then, of course, Tom was no longer there, having been shipped to the Reds in 1977 as part of the most heartbreaking trade in Mets (and maybe even MLB) history. And by then, seeing a Mets game at Shea Stadium was kind of like watching a Hubert Robert painting of Roman ruins come to life; you knew that greatness had previously occurred on these once-hallowed grounds, but actual traces of it could no longer be found anywhere on the field or in the neglected, urine-soaked structure.

I think I only got to see one Hall of Fame pitcher play in person while he was in his 70s prime: Jim Palmer, who efficiently beat my Tigers 3-1 with a complete game, 8-strikeout performance on April 24, 1977. And I got to see Luis Tiant, who SHOULD be in the Hall, throw a three-hit shutout against the A's that August. Both are among my most treasured 70s baseball experiences, but I really wish I could have somehow witnessed Seaver in action during his 1967-75 prime, that absolutely Olympian nine-year stretch where he won the NL Rookie of the Year award and three Cy Youngs while averaging 16 complete games and 233 strikeouts a season with a 2.46 ERA, and helped pitch the Mets to two pennants and one World Series championship. If I had to pick one pitcher from the era to take the mound for a crucial start, it would be that dude.

Still, I got to watch Seaver many times on TV from 1976 to 1979, when he was still pretty damn great; even when his fastball lost its zip, as it clearly had by 1979, he was such a tough and smart pitcher that you would have been foolish to bet against him.

But perhaps my fondest Seaver memory is of watching him pitch in an all-star softball game that was televised as part of (I think) ABC's Wide World of Sports during the spring training of 1977. Unlike his regular season starts, when he was "all business" on the mound, he was in total prankster mode that day—tossing a golf ball to one unsuspecting hitter, and lobbing an actual grapefruit to Thurman Munson, who duly (and grumpily) juiced that baby with a vicious swing...

My other favorite Seaver moment? This 1976 Sears ad for "The Travelknit Fourpiece," an Astroturf-colored set comprising a blazer, a leisure suit jacket, and two pair of trousers. In it, you can glimpse the many moods of Tom Seaver; the guy second from the right is clearly the grapefruit-throwing Seaver from the softball game, while the one at far-right appears to have wandered in from the set of The Rockford Files, where (in my dreams, at least) he's playing one of Jim's old army buddies who has sought him out for help with a business situation that is NOT WHAT IT SEEMS...

I don't know what else to say right now, other than I know how badly this must hurt for my Mets fan friends, especially the ones slightly older than me who grew up with Tom Terrific, and who got to see (or hear) their hero take the mound every fourth game. As rough as his trade to the Reds was for you folks, the news of his passing might be even rougher. Peace to you all, and to Tom Seaver, too.

Evel Walks Behind You

Funky bday salute to 1970s icon Evel Knievel.

I put his Stunt Cycle set on my Christmas list one year when I was a kid, but my mom shot me down.

"Why won't you buy it for me?" I asked her.

"Because Evel Knievel is an asshole," she replied.

 

Take My Life, Please!

In honor of Eddie Money's funky birthday, here's a sweet Robert Landau shot of Eddie's Life For The Taking ("Hey, take my life, please!") billboard on the Sunset Strip in early 1979. My sister and I moved to L.A. right around the time this photo would have been taken, and I vividly remember driving past that Cher billboard in our mom's Toyota Corolla, as we took the long way home from Tower Records just so we could check out all the Strip advertising...

Twenty years later, I would interview the Money Man himself for BAM magazine. Even though it was a phoner, it remains one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. You can read the whole thing here: http://lavieenrobe.typepad.com/files/money-1.pdf

 

Where Chicago Rocked — And I Did, Too

When I moved with my mom and sister to Chicago from Los Angeles at the tail end of 1979, I knew little about the Windy City beyond which sports teams called it home. But there were two things that I was certain would happen once I set foot in Chicago: 1) I would become a White Sox fan, and 2) WLUP (a.k.a. "The Loop") would be "my" radio station.

These two things were, of course, inextricably linked via the infamous "Disco Demolition" promotion at Comiskey Park during the summer of 1979, wherein WLUP DJ Steve Dahl blew up a mountain of disco records in the outfield between the halves of a double header, and hundreds of wasted rock fans swarmed the field to celebrate. The controversial event put Dahl and the radio station on the national map, and put them squarely on my radar, as well — even though I was seven hundred miles away (spending part of my summer vacation with my grandparents in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) at the time.

I loved disco music, but I also had to admit that the market had become completely over-saturated with songs for and/or about dancing, the majority of them several notches in quality below what I considered to be the "good stuff" (Chic, Bee Gees, Sylvester, Donna Summer); and having already become completely cynical about the way the American public dutifully gobbled up any trend that People magazine or 20/20 told them was hip and happening, I found it refreshing to observe what appeared to be a consumer rebellion against the "product" foisted upon them by the record business. (That said "rebellion" had a racist and possibly homophobic undercurrent to it was entirely lost on me at the time.) And as a 13 year-old boy with an adolescent male's intrinsic attraction to all things rowdy and radical, I watched the TV news footage of the Disco Demolition riot and desperately wished that I could have been there to witness all the fuck-shit-upping in person.

My musical tastes were also shifting and changing, with the intense rapidity that only seems to occur when you're in your teens. Brilliant power pop singles like Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams," Sniff N' the Tears' "Driver's Seat" and Blondie's "Dreaming" were pulling me away from disco as the summer of 1979 turned to fall; and at the same time, the hard rock sounds of KMET-FM were increasingly distracting me from the Top 40 stations on Southern California's AM dial. As if my obsession with Strat-O-Matic Baseball wasn't sufficiently nerdy enough, I'd started playing Dungeons & Dragons with a couple of school pals, and the stuff KMET typically played — Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Queen, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd — had a heavier, more mysterious vibe that offered a better soundtrack for orc-slaying than anything on KHJ-AM or Ten-Q.

KMET also broadcast The Dr. Demento Show every Sunday night, and the good Doctor regularly played "Do You Think I'm Disco" and "Ayatollah," two novelty tunes (based on Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" and the Knack's "My Sharona," respectively) recorded by Steve Dahl with his backing band Teenage Radiation. So by the time we were ready to leave L.A. that December, my ears had basically become completely primed for what WLUP had to offer — namely, Dahl (and his co-host Garry Meier) hilariously pushing the bounds of comedic taste in the morning, and heavy AOR action the rest of the day. While my nascent White Sox fandom would never really flourish, despite my great affection for Bill Veeck (that uninspiring 1980 Sox squad was a long way down the road from the glory of the 1977 South Side Hitmen, and Comiskey Park turned out to be a pain in the ass to get to from our apartment on the Near North Side), The Loop was there for me from the first time I turned on my clock radio in my new bedroom. And it was everything I wanted it to be.

And much more, really. Within the first week of regular listening, the station turned me on to AC/DC, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Rush, ZZ Top, April Wine, Angel City (a.k.a. The Angels), Montrose and Rainbow, to name several bands whose existence I'd been (at best) only dimly aware of before moving to Chicago. WLUP dug deeper into aforementioned Led Zep, Tull, Queen, Purple and Floyd catalogs than KMET ever did, while also serving up proggier stuff like Yes, ELP and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and more straight-up rock fare like the Who, Heart, Aerosmith, Foghat, Bad Company, Humble Pie, Robin Trower, Joe Walsh, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, much of which was pretty new to me, as well. And not just these artists' hits, but deep cuts as well — especially if you tuned in later on in the evening.

After decades of ossified "classic rock" programming, where "Free Bird" is inevitably followed by "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Stairway to Heaven," it's kind of hard to convey just how exciting and eye-opening this all seemed at the time; I felt like I'd gotten a free ticket to a far cooler world than the one I actually inhabited, and every week I seemed to hear something else that opened up new dimensions in my musical universe. Come the spring of 1980, The Loop would be the station that hipped me to Def Leppard's first album, On Through the Night, as well as Van Halen's Women and Children First, Pete Townshend's Empty Glass, and Judas Priest's British Steel, all of which I still love to this day. And while the station pushed "local boys" Styx, REO Speedwagon and Survivor way too hard for my taste, they made up for it with endless spins of Cheap Trick deep cuts — I swear I must have heard them play every single song off Heaven Tonight and Dream Police at one time or another in the spring of 1980...

Cheap Trick really were the consummate Loop band, circa 1980, in that they embodied a musical world in which hard-driving, arena-ready guitar rock could happily co-exist with sharp, crunchy, catchy-as-all-hell power pop. Because along with all the bong-rattling sounds mentioned above, WLUP program director Sky Daniels kept the New Wave-friendly likes of Tom Petty, Blondie, Pretenders, Pat Benatar, the Romantics, the B-52s, Flying Lizards, the Clash, the Ramones, Todd Rundgren (and Utopia), Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, and even the syntho-futurist sounds of Gary Numan's "Cars" in regular rotation. Off Broadway, a brilliant power pop band out of nearby Oak Park, had a massive local hit at the time with the song "Stay In Time," but The Loop also gave regular spins to three other killer tracks — "Full Moon Turn My Head Around and Around," "Bully Bully" and "Bad Indication" — from On, the band's debut album.

My ears were wide-open to all of this, but even at the time I sensed it was an unusual mixture. I have a vivid memory from that spring of walking down Michigan Avenue on a Saturday morning, on my way to the animation class I was taking at the Art Institute, and seeing three scary-looking, denim-clad stoner dudes in their late teens walking towards me, one of them carrying a giant boom box. As they got closer, I noticed that the radio was completely covered with Loop stickers, and that it was blasting "Back of My Hand" by British band the Jags — which was being played on WLUP at that moment. These were exactly the kind of guys who, back in L.A., would have called me "Devo" for wearing short hair and a skinny tie, and threatened to kick my ass unless I could name at least four songs off of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. But on this morning, we just gave each other a friendly grunt of "The Loop!" over the sprightly tune of a track that was essentially Costello-lite; after all, if The Loop was playing it, it had to be cool, right?

That was the kind of cultural impact The Loop had in those days, at least among rock listeners in Chicago; I would estimate that at around 75 percent of the things I talked about at school with my friends that spring were based on what we'd heard on The Loop. (Most of the other 25 percent had to do with either embattled Mayor Jane Byrne and convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, both of whom were also subjects of Teenage Radiation parodies.) We would sometimes even go to Steve & Garry's early-morning "Breakfast Club" broadcasts from the Carnegie Theater (which was only a few blocks away from Ogden, where I attended the second half of eighth grade), or hang out after school around the elevator banks of the John Hancock Building, where WLUP's studio and offices were located, in hopes of catching Steve Dahl on his way home — and despite his stature as the premiere radio bad boy of the day, he was incredibly pleasant to us the few times we actually met him. When we went to Chicagofest '80 that August at Navy Pier, the Loop booth was probably the most popular attraction outside of the live music stages; it was completely swarmed by long-haired guys and gals wearing faded plaid flannel shirts over black t-shirts that read, "The Loop FM 98 — Where Chicago Rocks". It was like a tribe, one which I felt stoked and proud to belong to.

So it's kind of amazing, in retrospect, to look back and realize that I was pretty much "done" with The Loop by fall of 1981. Part of it had to do with WLUP's unexpected firing of Steve & Garry that February, which made mornings a lot less fun and cast a pall over the station as a whole; but a bigger part of it had to do with the changes that were happening in the rock landscape, as well as in my own head. When I first started listening to the station, the perfect rock dreamworld that WLUP presented and represented seemed magically infinite, like it was going to keep expanding (and rocking!) forever; in reality, it was on the verge of running out of gas. By the end of 1980, John Lennon was dead, Led Zeppelin was done, Queen had gone funky, Pink Floyd was on post-Wall hiatus, and UFO, Thin Lizzy and most of the other Loop mainstays were reaching the point of diminished artistic returns. The brief, Knack-fueled industry vogue for "skinny tie" bands had also cratered, which meant that most of the New Wave-associated acts that once dotted the playlist were now persona non grata. WLUP filled the void with the platinum-selling likes of REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity, Styx's Paradise Theater, Phil Collins' Face Value, the Who's Face Dances, Journey's Escape and Foreigner's 4, all of which were grisly enough on their own but profoundly depressing when taken in toto. I instinctively knew I was going to need something angrier and more interesting to help me survive the Reagan years, so I eventually gravitated down the dial to WXRT, which at least played the likes of the Clash, Costello, Parker, Ramones, etc., even if you had to sit through shitloads of Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell to get to them...

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I felt some sadness when I heard the news that WLUP was bought out by a Christian broadcasting group and will, for the first time since its inception in 1977, cease to play rock music. I can't say that I've even listened to the station in 25 years, and I certainly spent much of the decade before that actively avoiding (and even mocking) it. But that first year-and-a-half of Loop listening completely changed my life — it made me care about music on a much deeper level than I ever had before, and made me want to play (and write about) it — and the news of WLUP's demise reminds me of how lucky and grateful I am that I got to experience the station during its early peak, at a time in my life where I was completely receptive to what it was layin' down. It's like hearing about the death of a ballplayer whom I passionately rooted for as a kid, or of a former best friend whom I hadn't heard from in 35 years; my current life won't be impacted at all by WLUP's absence, and yet respect must still be paid for the difference that it made. Thanks for rocking me, WLUP.

Sammy and the Saucers

Ever since the Christmas of 1974, when my Uncle John introduced me to the weird and wild wonders of his EC Comics collection, one of my favorite holiday pastimes has involved chilling out with a stack of old horror comics while listening to Christmas music. I fully understand that it might not be everyone's cup of eggnog — and I'm not even that much of a comic book collector, myself — but there's something about paging through a particularly choice issue of such gory, twisted 1950s classics as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear while listening to John Fahey's The New Possibility (or the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Christmas Album) that really puts me blissfully in the Christmas groove.

This year, though, I've been spending less time with my EC reprints from the 1990s (most of which I've read at least two dozen times by now) and more time with issues of Ghosts, a DC title that I read semi-regularly back in the 1970s. Sub-titled "True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural," Ghosts wasn't as well-written (or as gruesomely rendered) as its EC forebears; but the artwork was usually quite solid (even borderline psychedelic at times), and the stories were usually good for a scare or two — at least for a young horror fiend like myself. I've really been enjoying giving them another look, not least because of all the ads they include for Topps baseball cards, X-ray specs, novelty t-shirts, and war games from the Helen of Toy Company (Tank Trap! Task Force! Woods Edge!), all of which I vividly remember drooling over during my childhood.

I have no memory, however, of "Eyes From Another World," a two-page story from the July 1975 issue that recalls the rash of UFO sightings that occurred in the US during the years immediately following World War II. Though it's kind of an unremarkable piece in itself, it does include brief accounts of UFO sightings by such celebrities as Sammy Davis, Jr, Muhammad Ali, Arthur Godfrey and Buddy Rich. And the panels with Sammy and Buddy's flying saucer encounters are just too good not to share with you here...

Pretty cool, huh? Certainly a lot cooler than AMF Voit's nylon baseball bat, which is advertised on the back of the issue. I'm really glad nobody ever gave me one of those for Christmas — I would have been immediately laughed out of my local little league.

Anyway, I'm gonna get back to my comics. May you all have a relaxing, fun and (if you so choose) funky holiday season. Catch you in 2017.

 

Stars and Strikes — Now In Paperback!!!

The first time you see your new book in print is a huge thrill — but it's an almost equally huge thrill to get a paperback edition of said book in the mail, because it means that enough people bought the hardcover version to make a paperback printing worthwhile for the publishers. So I'd like to thank everyone who has already bought Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 for making the paperback possible!

And for those of you who haven't bought it yet — or already did, and dug it enough that you'd like to buy many, many copies for your baseball and pop culture-obsessed acquaintances — the paperback edition officially hits the streets via St. Martins Griffin on February 9. You can pre-order copies from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or of course from your friendly neighborhood indie bookseller.

I probably won't be doing a ton of reading events in support of the paperback — full-scale book tours require copious amounts of time and money — but I'm sure I'll schedule a few things in Chicago and the Midwest before the summer is out, especially since 2016 is the 40th anniversary of the Bicentennial. Watch this space for future updates!

Insert "Bat Flip" Joke Here

Back in the summer 1975, I was nine years old and wanted to grow up to be Flip Wilson. Had I seen this shot of Flip Wilson hassling umpire Nick Colosi at the time it ran on the AP wire, it would have only strengthened my resolve further.

Aside from just being a wonderful (and quintessentially 70s) photo, I love the above pic because of what it foreshadows. In 1975, the Braves were a deeply awful team that boasted Phil Niekro and Carl Morton in the rotation, Darrell Evans, Dusty Baker and 1974 NL batting champ Ralph "Road Runner" Garr in the lineup, and not a whole helluva lot else. The team, which went 67-94 on the season (the only worse teams in the bigs that year were the Houston Astros and the Detroit Tigers), struggled to draw over half a million fans; only the San Francisco Giants drew worse, though Braves PR director Bob Hope later admitted that the Braves' dismal attendance figure of 534,672 was actually padded by the front office, who bought free promo tickets from themselves for a quarter apiece and marked them down as "paid admissions".

But as I detail in my forthcoming book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 — which comes out April 29, though there's already a pre-order link HERE at Amazon — the Braves would do far better at the gate (if not on the field) in 1976, thanks to the arrival of new owner Ted Turner. Between them, Turner and Hope would lure fans to to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium with one insane promotional stunt after another, many of which (like their "Headlock and Wedlock" promotion) made a pre-game appearance by one of TV's biggest comedians look like the most mundane thing imaginable.

Also foreshadowing the chaos and hilarity of Turner's impeding regime is the uniform number that Flip is wearing here: 17. In 1970, Turner bought Atlanta TV station WJRJ, which was located at Channel 17 on the UHF dial. After changing its name to WTCG (for Turner Communications Group or, as Turner liked to claim, "Watch This Channel Grow"), Turner negotiated a deal to broadcast Braves games in the Atlanta area; though Turner hadn't yet purchased the team at the time the above pic was taken, it's highly likely that he arranged for Wilson to sport number 17 as a subtle nod to the station.

Of course, the next guy to wear number 17 would do so in a much less subtle fashion. When Turner and Hope decided to put nicknames on the back of their players' uniforms, Andy Messersmith — Turner's big free agent signing in the spring of '76 — took the field wearing 17 with the word "Channel" above it.

National League President Chub Feeney, though perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer, realized that "Channel" wasn't actually Messersmith's nickname, and came down on Turner for using Messersmith's jersey as free ad space for his TV station. (Forced to pick a new name for the back of his jersey, Messersmith went with "Bluto" instead.)

Feeney didn't realize how much worse it could have been. After all, if he'd really decided take to the Flip Wilson "17" stunt to its illogical conclusion, Turner could have sent his players into a game dressed like Flip's drag alter-ego Geraldine; when pressed for an explanation, Turner would have simply told Feeney that "the devil made me do it, honey!"

 

Autographed Copies — Get 'Em While They're Hot (and Funky)!

Many of you fine folks have asked me, "Hey, Dan — I want a signed copy of Big Hair and Plastic Grass. How can I get one?" Well, since I've a) recently discovered a box full of first edition hardcovers in my office, and b) just figured out how to put a PayPal button on this page, I now have an answer for you!

Just send me $25 (plus $5 shipping) via PayPal, and I will wing you an autographed first edition of BH&PG forthwith. I'll sign it to you, your Dad, your best friend, anyone you want — and if you want me to personalize it further, just put the name of your favorite 70s player or team in the box below, and I'll wittily incorporate them into your inscription.

A critically acclaimed book on the national pastime's funkiest era, signed and personalized by the guy Cardboard Gods author Josh Wilker calls "the Bangsian Herodotus of '70s Baseball"? Get yerself one NOW, baby, while supplies last!

Favorite team or player

The Many (Polyester) Moods Of Tom Seaver

Back in the 70s, before full-scale free agency kicked in and ratcheted up the salaries, major league baseball players often had to find additional off-season employment to make ends meet. Tom Seaver, however, was in the upper echelon of baseball's salary bracket; in late '75, after winning his third NL Cy Young award, the New York Mets raised his salary to a then-whopping $225,000 a year. But as a star player, you get plenty of endorsement deals thrown your way, so... I guess it makes sense that Seaver would have chosen to make a few bucks on the side by shilling for the Sears mens department.

Here's "Tom Terrific" on his 1976 Hostess card. The epitome of baseball cool, right? Now look again at the Sears ad on the top of the page, also from '76, and observe how a baseball hero can be transformed into a schlubby insurance salesman, sleazy private detective or "with-it" high school principal with just one four-piece ensemble. That's right, people — just $110 (or about $400 in today's currency) would have gotten you a two-button blazer, a flap-pocketed leisure suit jacket, and two pairs of "slacks" (one plain, one checked) in your choice of "fashionably new spring shades of blue, green, tan and rust" (that's right, rust), all tailored (perhaps "formed" would be the more accurate word) from bolts of wash-and-wear doubleknit polyester. Jesus, I'm getting skin cancer just thinking about the way that fabric must have felt...

But speaking of 1976, this seems like a good time to mention (since I basically keep forgetting to say something about it on this blog) that I've signed a deal with St. Martin's Press (the same fine folks who published Big Hair & Plastic Grass) for a book about that very same year. Tentatively titled Bicentennial Boogie: Baseball and America in the Star-Spangled Summer of '76, the new tome will be filled with all kindsa good stuff from the year that brought us Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, The Bad News Bears, the return of Bill Veeck, the last glorious championship thrust of "The Big Red Machine," Charlie's Angels, Legionnaire's Disease and the dark horse Presidential victory of Jimmy Carter, is slated to come out in April 2014. I am extremely excited to be working on a book about what's pretty much my favorite year in baseball history, and to be working again with my righteous editor Rob Kirkpatrick.

Will Tom Terrific's fashion faux pas make the cut? It certainly has a good shot, at least at this point. But if any of you fine folks reading this run across any other great baseball-related print or TV ads from '76, please let me know. Ditto for any of you collectors who are sitting on some previously un-published baseball photos from the Bicentennial year, and might be willing to let me include them in the book in exchange for a few bucks, credit, and my undying gratitude. In any case, a major tip of the Monsanto Toupee to all of you who bought, reviewed, talked-up or otherwise supported Big Hair & Plastic Grass. I am deeply thankful for your help, deeply gratified by your enthusiasm, and I really couldn't have made it to this next book project without you. Long may you all groove like Ellis Valentine...

 

The Minnesota Twins Have Something To Prove

A tip of the Monsanto Toupee goes out to Big Hair & Plastic Grass Facebook page fan Kyle Bookholz, who hipped me today to this amazing Minnesota Twins TV ad from 1979, featuring Jerry Koosman, Ken Landreaux, Roy Smalley, Roger Erickson and Ron Jackson. "I've been hearing how the Twins are hurtin' without Carew," sez Kooz, which makes me wonder how many teams today would name a recently-departed star player in a TV ad, even as an act of defiance.

Put it this way: I'm pretty sure the Cardinals aren't running a "We don't need no stinkin' Pujols" spot on St. Louis channels. Though considering how hapless the Twins have been this year, maybe they should consider adopting "We've Got Something To Prove" as their "exciting" new slogan.

Koosman at least had reason to cop a 'tude, having been shipped to the Twins for a couple of minor leaguers (including Jesse Orosco) after going 3-15 for the Mets in '78 (and 8-20 the year before). Getting some decent run support for the first time in years, Kooz would go on to win 20 games for Minnesota in 1979. Unfortunately, his team would only win 82 games in all, finishing 6 games out in the AL West... behind the Rod Carew-infused California Angels, of course.