There's a new Reggie Jackson documentary on Amazon Prime, and lotsa folks have been asking if I've seen it and what I thought of it.
I have indeed seen it, and I do have thoughts — which, given the time of year and the way my mind works, also turned to thoughts of Phil Lynott and the first Thin Lizzy album. And you can read 'em all here at my Substack, Jagged Time Lapse. And I hope you will, and maybe even subscribe while you're there!
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!
After the Easter Bunny failed to show up, I spent most of my Sunday putting the finishing touches on "Funky Squatch, Part One," a (mostly) instrumental tribute to another mythological (OR IS HE?!?) figure of note.
I was going to hold off on releasing this new Corinthian Columns track until the next Bandcamp Friday, but the Funky Squatch wants to get on the good and/or Big foot NOW, and who am I to argue? Clink the link below to join the party!
(And a grateful tip of the crested skull to my pal DB Edmunds for the inspiration!)
Well, one cool thing about last night's Academy Awards was that Summer of Soul won an Oscar for Best Documentary — which ties in nicely with this tribute to the late, great jazz flautist Herbie Mann (whose incredible 1969 band with Roy Ayers and Sonny Sharrock makes a tantalizingly brief appearance in the film) that I penned for today's Forward.
You can read it here:
“I’m the only guy in the world who could throw a ball through a car wash and never get it wet," James Rodney Richard used to say in jest, though more than a few hitters who faced him would probably tell you it was the truth. As my pal Lenny Randle, who was a teammate of J.R.'s at ASU and faced him 19 times in the majors (hitting only .167, but only striking out once, which I suppose was something of a moral victory) once said of him, "He starts out throwing Alka Seltzers, and ends up throwing Anacins."
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.
Let me begin this piece by saying that my wife and I and those nearest and dearest to us are all currently Covid-free, for which I'm immensely grateful. (We'd also like to keep it that way, which is why we're both working from home right now, and venturing out only for walks and limited errands.) Let me also say that we are both lucky enough to be gainfully employed right now, and to live in a lovely rental house with a bird-and-tree-filled back yard, and we're quite cognizant that we have it pretty good compared to a lot of folks in this country and world right now.
So when I say that this is the first summer in our ten years together where we haven't taken a trip somewhere — even just for a long weekend getaway — I'm not asking you to feel sorry for us, but rather to understand why my brain suddenly seems to be more obsessed with traveling than ever. Now that our country's woefully inept and stubbornly idiotic response to this pandemic has turned cross-country travel into a decidedly dicey prospect for the foreseeable future (and has understandably rendered Americans persona non grata in quite a few countries), my mind is all a-churned with dreams and notions of where I'd like to go next, as well as memories of past trips both pleasantly mundane and profoundly life-altering. Thinking is the best way to travel, as the Moody Blues once sang, and I've certainly been thinking a lot lately... about traveling.
Memories of some of those "pleasantly mundane" journeys were kicked loose recently by the discovery of the above matchbook. For several years now, Katie has included a bag of vintage matchbooks among my Christmas stocking-stuffers; I always love sorting through them, picking out my favorites, and generally losing myself in the mental images of long-vanished bars, steakhouses and hotels that these tiny prizes conjure up.
This one from the Downtowner Motor Inn of Vicksburg, Mississippi initially eluded my notice, probably because its monochromatic presentation caused it to get lost in the shuffle amid the gaudier, foil-printed promotional items in my most recent bag o' 'books. But a few weeks ago, when I absent-mindedly grabbed it from the "okay to use" pile, I was immediately struck by combination of the adorable kitten (as I am a sucker for such things) and the flirtatious wink that accompanied the slogan "Hev Fun". And then there was the image and message on the inside:
"Commercial men and other pets welcome"? Was this an artifact from some sort of brothel that catered to traveling salesmen?
Well, not quite... but as this fantastic 2016 post from the Cardboard America blog reveals, there was definitely some adult-oriented action going down at Downtowner Inns in the 1960s and 70s. Founded in 1958 in Memphis, Tennessee, the Downtowner Corporation built motels in cities across the United States, usually within close proximity of major downtown hotels, arenas and convention centers. (The company's Rowntowner chain, introduced in 1967, concentrated on suburban locations.) While these were affordably-priced motels designed to target budget-minded tourists, businessmen and conventioneers, they definitely had more flair than you would have typically found in the Holiday Inns and TraveLodges of the day. Many of their buildings sported colorful, pop-art-inspired Mid-Century exteriors and signage, like these Downtowners from Kansas City and Albuquerque:
(The Downtowner Inn pictured at the top of this post is the one in Vicksburg, MS where my matchbook came from. Though that postcard doesn't catch the property from its most flattering angle — probably because management wanted to show off its expansive parking facilities — you can see that plenty of bright colors were used on its exterior, as well.)
Several Downtowner Inns also contained cocktail lounges and restaurants where things got a little more raucous and rowdy than at your local Howard Johnson's. Singles gatherings seemed to be a pretty commonplace occurrence, and some, like Tony's Restaurant at the Downtowner in Springfield, Illinois (pictured above), featured go-go girls; "modern dancers" Terri and Donna at the intriguingly-named Velvet Swing in the Atlanta Downtowner (advertised below) may have also been among their number. It's unclear from further research I've done whether or not the Vicksburg Downtowner offered similarly risqué entertainment options, but I'm guessing that the winking matchbook was an allusion to the affirmative.
I never stayed at a Downtowner as a kid (at least, I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I had), but going down the Downtowner rabbit hole brings back fond memories of the handful of cross-country road trips my sister and I (and sometimes our mom) took with our maternal grandparents during the 1970s, most of them across the South; we even stayed overnight in Vicksburg once, on our way to New Orleans from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Nothing terribly exciting or truly momentous happened on any of these trips (unless you count the time I left some newly-purchased 45s in a bag in the back window of Grandpa Fred's Buick LeSabre, with warp-tastic results), but the mental images I have from them still fill me with a sense of joy and well-being.
I remember feeling safe, comfortable and content in the air-conditioned splendor of that massive four-door sedan, watching the world go by as we played various word-association and -guessing games, or listened to my grandfather talk about the historical importance of places we were passing; though whenever he stopped the history lessons and started uttering the name of of every restaurant that came into view with long, drawn-out syllables ("Pooooonderooooosaaaa... Aaaaaarthuurrrr Treeeaaachers... Shooooney's Biiiig Booooy...") it was a sure sign that he was getting hungry.
I remember things like the brief ripple of excitement I felt whenever we pulled into the parking lot of the motel where we were going to spend the night, wondering what our room would look like, and anticipating the blissful evening of TV-watching and pop-drinking that would shortly ensue. Or feeling honored whenever my grandfather asked me to make a run to the ice machine, a device so wondrous that I immediately scoped out its location at every place we checked into. (Of course, the pop machine was almost always in close proximity to it, making such reconnaissance that much more important.)
And while I was a notoriously picky eater in those days, I always enjoyed going out for dinner with my grandparents at whatever restaurant or lounge was attached to the hotel. Though not fancy by any means, these establishments usually tried to at least give off a whiff of class and maybe even a little touch of the exotic to lift the spirits of the weary traveler. They were mellow (though maybe things got swinging there later on in the evening), dimly lit, with piped-in muzak and plenty of dark wooden paneling. I'd order my hamburger or fried shrimp, sink back into the tufted leather banquette, sip my ginger ale (with a maraschino cherry if the place was really classy), and imagine that I was a man of the world stopping briefly for refueling on the way to my next international adventure...
I miss those kinds of joints, all of which seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, replaced long ago by sports bars with blaring flat screens and chain restaurants of dubious quality and even worse service. I miss my grandparents. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss road trips. I miss traveling across the U.S. without worrying about running into bare-fanged MAGA bullshit at every turn. And I miss living in a nation where I don't wake up wondering what kind of grievous, infected, suppurating wound we're going to inflict upon ourselves today...
But I can still travel with my mind, and mean to do so until it's cool for the rest of me to hit the road again. So tonight, as I'm falling asleep, maybe I'll ask Grandpa Fred to steer the LeSabre towards the nearest Downtowner Inn. After all, you've gotta "Hev Fun" while you still can.
December is the darkest month.
This is inarguably true from a literal standpoint (according to science, which the majority of us still believe in, these are unquestionably the shortest days of the year), but there's a metaphorical or even metaphysical aspect to December's darkness, as well. Sometime when I was around 11 or 12, I began to suspect that the bright, festive lights of Christmas and Hanukkah were not just lit in celebration of the holiday season, but also to keep something ominous at bay — much in the way that a campfire is lit not just for warmth, but also to ward off any fearsome creatures that may be silently lurking in the shadows.
This suspicion first really took shape for me on December 3, 1979, when 11 concertgoers were trampled to death while trying to see The Who at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Before that infamous incident, music had always seemed pure and magical to me; I probably couldn't have articulated it as such at the time, but I essentially saw music as a transfer of positive energy from performer to listener that elevated both. The only times I'd vaguely (if at all) sensed that there were any darker forces embedded in or around it were whenever I heard "death songs" like Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep" or Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" on LA's oldies station KRLA, or imagined I'd picked up a whiff of something spookily portentous in the songs Buddy Holly recorded shortly before his plane went down in Clear Lake, Iowa. But that stuff was all from an era long gone; the immediacy of The Who concert tragedy, and the knowledge that these kids (who could have easily been me, my friends, or their older siblings) died while trying to experience what was supposed to be a joyful communal experience, seriously freaked me out. And that this horrific event had happened just three weeks before Christmas ("The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!") forever disabused me of the naive notion that music or the holidays were somehow magically impervious to the awful intrusions of real life.
Still, there was so much positive and exciting stuff happening in my life that December, the unsettled feelings I experienced in the wake of The Who tragedy didn't linger long. My mom, sister and I were gearing up to move from L.A. to Chicago at the end of the month, which was thrilling in itself; but on our way to the Windy City, my sister and I would take a holiday detour to New York City, where we would spend Christmas with our dad and then-stepmother. I had been born in NYC, but since we'd moved to Ann Arbor when I was just a little over a year old, I had never consciously experienced the wonder of the Big Apple during the Holidays — and holy moly, did it ever deliver.
(Summer 1979 photo of Max's Kansas City, taken by Buzzcocks drummer John Maher)
My memories of Xmas '79 play back like a montage of stereotypical romantic "Christmas in NYC" images — attending the Rockettes' Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, watching the ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center rink, buying roasted chestnuts from a vendor on Fifth Avenue, checking out the Christmas window displays at Macy's and Lord & Taylor — mixed with even richer, more life-affirming experiences. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing for the first time, fully opened my eyes to the beauty and grandeur of the city's 1920s and 1930s architecture (Was that a Babylonian frieze atop the Fred F. French Building?!?), enjoyed the city's wealth of incredible radio stations and record stores, and learned about Max's Kansas City, which was located kitty-corner across Park Avenue South from my dad's apartment building. I had read a little about punk music, and was already digging some bands classified as "new wave" — Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s — but hadn't yet felt remotely connected to any of it. But from my nocturnal perch in the living room window of my dad's south-facing eleventh-floor loft, I could watch the local scenesters coming and going from this legendary NYC nightclub, and feel like I was somehow part of the action, even if I was way too young to actually get inside.
I'd visited NYC a few times before, but my decades-long love affair with Manhattan really began during that trip; in retrospect, it's not too much of a stretch to say that a large part of the person I am today was forever molded by the six or seven amazing days I spent there that Christmas.
We went back to NYC for Christmas 1980, but the vibe and experience was entirely different. December's darkness had again fallen brutally hard, this time via John Lennon's assassination in front of the Dakota. It was horrifying enough that Lennon had been killed, and that his artistic light had been cruelly snuffed out just when he was beginning to let it shine again; but the fact that it happened in the city that he'd called home for the better part of a decade, which both embraced him as one of its own and — because he was one of its own — acted like it was no big fuckin' deal that he and Yoko could occasionally be seen around town, seemed to have genuinely shaken the Big Apple to its core. (Yeah, sorry about the pun, I know...) This New York Daily News headline really sums it up: It's not just John Lennon Slain, but John Lennon Slain Here. New Yorkers took that shit personally.
I could feel the shift in NYC's mood from the previous December almost as soon as we landed at JFK. Whereas the energy of Xmas '79 was very much the glitzy, disco-fied giddiness of a city still very much on the defiant rebound four years after President Ford had told it to drop dead, NYC circa Xmas '80 felt like a gigantic, barely-stifled sob. We made the rounds again to all the traditionally festive places, but there didn't seem to be much to actually celebrate; Ronald Reagan had been elected six weeks earlier, John Lennon was dead, and even this fourteen year-old could sense that an era was ending, and things were about to take a serious turn for the worse. It seemed like everywhere I went, every radio station I dialed in, was playing John and Yoko/Plastic Ono Band's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a song of hope that now felt like a funeral dirge; and each time its kiddie chorus rang out, that choked sob of the city seemed poised to spill over into a gushing rush of heartbroken tears.
As I always did back then, I turned to the radio for escape, for deliverance from the gloom — though this time, with my station-changing hand perpetually poised to act in case of yet another spin of "Happy Xmas". There was one song in regular rotation on WPLJ which kind of snuck up on me; a song so low-key, I may not have even noticed it the first few times I heard it. It was "Skateaway," a single from Making Movies, the third and latest album from Dire Straits. I had liked "Sultans of Swing" during its hit run in late 1978 and early 1979, but I wasn't exactly a Dire Straits fan (in fact, I was completely unaware at the time of the existence of Communiqué, the band's second album). "Skateaway" changed that.
I didn't know that the song and album had been produced by Jimmy Iovine, who'd been behind the board for several of my favorite records from the last three years (including Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes, and Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Up Escalator), or that Mark Knopfler had been widely hailed as a new guitar hero. For the moment, all that mattered was the song's slinky groove, its clearly NYC-derived images of a rollerskating girl "slipping and a-sliding" her way through the city's traffic, and the way its music and lyrics gradually built to a spiritual celebration of the enchanting lure of urban life and the transcendent power of song.
Listening to "Skateaway" on headphones now, I'm struck by what a strange beast it is. With its tossed-off shuffles and last-minute fills, Pick Withers' drumming is wonderfully idiosyncratic in a way "they" haven't allowed rock drummers to be for decades, but the echo placed on his drums sounds unnecessary (and at times maybe even a little "off"). Aside from Knopfler's soaring single-note accents during the chorus (and his volume swells during the extended outro), Springsteen keyboardist Roy Bittan seems to carry most of the melodic weight of the song, while the admittedly impressive chicken-picking that Knopfler performs during the verses sometimes almost seems to have wandered into the wrong song. Vocally, Knopfler seems like he's laconically talk-singing a la Bob Dylan or J.J. Cale, but upon closer listens it becomes clear how much effort (and variations in tone and energy) he's putting into his performance. But heard all together through the half-dollar-sized mono speaker of my stepmother's radio/cassette player, it cohered into something spellbinding, evocative and irresistibly transportive. And more importantly, "Skateaway" allowed me to glimpse a little light amid the darkness I felt that December.
The song has been in my head again a lot lately, even soundtracking some of my dreams. I suspect it has something to do with this time of year, and the knowledge that so many of my friends — and so many people in general — are badly struggling right now. The appalling corruption of this current Presidential administration (and the equally appalling behavior of its staunchest supporters) would be tough enough to swallow under any circumstances, but that's obviously only part of the equation. So many people I know are wondering if it's all going to be downhill from here with their own lives, this country, or our civilization in general. Some are wondering if they'll ever work again; others if they or certain loved ones will even be alive to see next Christmas. I know that those kind of questions, never exactly easy to bear, become especially heavy during the darkness of December; and I certainly have no answers. All I have is a Christmas wish, which is that they (and you) will be able to find some daily comfort and joy amid the darkness — even if it's just via a song that, for a few minutes at least, will let you skate away. That's all.