When my mother, sister and I moved to Chicago at the end of 1979, the first place we lived was in one of Mies Van Der Rohe's high rises along Lake Shore Drive. I was initially extremely excited by the prospect, since I'd never lived in an apartment building before (at least not since I was a toddler), to say nothing of a building designed by a legendary architect.
However, for reasons both related and unrelated to the building, living there (for 2 1/2 years) is not an experience that I look back on with a lot of fondness. There are some good memories, though: My favorite being of the time that one of our doormen — fed up with the condescending and abusive treatment he'd received from many of the building's residents — got stinking drunk and proceeded to urinate all over the lobby's really expensive mid-century modern furniture before passing out in the corner. The best part of all this was that he'd locked the door that led from the building's entryway to the lobby, which meant that everyone who was coming back from their evening engagements at that moment was forced to stand outside and watch him "do his thing" through the lobby's floor-to-ceiling glass windows...
Earlier this year, having dedicated some of my pandemic-related home time to trying to write songs again, I came up with this salute to the aforementioned nameless (to me at least) hero. And after spending many hours grappling with the idiosyncrasies of GarageBand, I finally have a recorded version that I'm happy with. I've taken The Corinthian Columns as my "nom de rock," since noms de rock are fun and I love Corinthian columns, which of course bear very little resemblance to anything designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. Enjoy!
I knew it felt like there was a disturbance in the Force today… the inimitable Joe Pepitone has apparently passed away.
Joe had some really good years as a player for the Yankees and Cubs, though that was all before my time. But in the summer of ‘78, I checked his autobiography Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud out of the LA Public Library, thinking it would just be another mildly entertaining baseball book with which to while away the long summer hours. What I found instead was something I would later describe as a cross between Ball Four, Goodfellas and Penthouse Forum. I have truly never been the same since…
Joe was a real character and a “free-swinger” both on and off the field – he was the first MLB player to bring a hairdryer into the clubhouse (at a time when such attention to grooming was considered “unmanly”), he smoked weed when most of his fellow players were still sticking to scotch, and he owned a short-lived Division Street watering hole called Joe Pepitone’s Thing. He also sported some of the greatest muttonchops ever seen on a baseball diamond, and some of the most ridiculous hairpieces. When I went to Cubs Fantasy Camp in 2010 (and again in 2012) I wore #8 on my jersey in his honor. And while I’m not a big collector of MLB memorabilia, my absolute prized baseball possession is a promotional mini-bat from the “Thing,” which I keep prominently displayed on my record shelves.
Joe was his own worst enemy, and he did a lot of things in his life that he later profoundly regretted, not the least of which was letting partying and skirt-chasing get in the way of his playing career. But I will always treasure the handful of phone conversations I had with him around the time his book was reissued in 2015. He was sweet, warm and screamingly funny, as the interview we did for Rolling Stone still attests. (You can also find extra material from that interview here.)
Joe’s passing makes me really, really sad. But if there’s a Heaven, I know Joe is up there right now doing “the popcorn trick” (Google it) for St. Peter, who is laughing too hard NOT to let him through the Pearly Gates.
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.
“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."
From 1976 to 1980 — the most intense years of my early baseball fandom — there was no pitcher as intimidating as J.R. Richard. He stood six-foot-eight, regularly threw around 100 mph, and (even once he sorted out the control issues that caused him to lead the NL in walks in two different seasons) was always wild enough to keep batters from even thinking about getting comfy at the plate. If you ever got to see him pitch in person, you've probably never forgotten the experience; it was not at all unusual to see him fan 12-15 batters in a start.
J.R. seemed on a direct path to Cooperstown, but a series of strokes essentially ended his career at the age of 30 — strokes that might have been prevented if the Astros had only taken his complaints of arm numbness and physical discomfort seriously. (The press didn't help matters — check out any sports page from the weeks leading up to his collapse on July 30, 1980, and odds are you'll find an irate columnist accusing him of malingering, attitude problems, or worse.) It's incredible to look at how dominating he was in the 1980 All Star Game while also knowing that he'd be making his final MLB start less than a week later.
J.R.'s next couple of decades were rough, including losing a bundle via an oil business scam and spending a stretch living under a bridge in Houston. Happily, he got his life back together, found some peace about the way his career ended, and was able to once again enjoy the admiration and appreciation of fans in Houston and elsewhere. Unfortunately, it looks like he'd spent the last weeks of his life hospitalized for COVID, yet another unnecessary victim of a virus that never should have gotten this far...
Hank Aaron hitting home run number 715 is my first vivid baseball memory. Before that, baseball was always something that my dad had going on the TV while I was busy playing GI Joe or reading Mad Magazine or building models or drawing comics. Sports in general wasn't my thing in those early elementary school days.
But when the 1974 baseball season was about to begin, with Hank all but certain to break the Babe's home run record in the first week or two of April, my second grade teacher Mrs. Crippen brought the topic up for class discussion, and impressed upon us the sense that history was about to be made. I knew what a legend Babe Ruth was — after all, there was a gigantic, gilt framed photo of him hanging on the wall of Bimbo's, our favorite Ann Arbor pizza parlor — and even though I didn't understand much about baseball yet, I didn't mind when my dad made us watch Monday Night Baseball on April 5 instead of The Rookies, which was what I usually watched on Monday evenings. And I remember getting chills when Hank actually hit the record-breaker out of the park, which thankfully happened before my 9 pm bedtime.
A few weeks later, my dad had to go to Atlanta for a social work convention that my grandfather was also attending, and he took my sister and me with him so we could hang out with our grandparents. My two most vivid memories of that trip are of getting absolutely tanked on Mountain Dew while watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on the TV in my grandparents' hotel room, and of my grandfather driving us by Fulton County Stadium so I could see where Hank had hit his record-breaking homer. Unfortunately, the Braves were on a road trip at the time; so instead of spending the evening at the ballpark, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Underground Atlanta, a now-long-vanished tourist attraction that managed to be both strange and strangely underwhelming.
It feels very weird to me that Hank's gone now, even though he had a long, full, heroic and rewarding life. His figure has always towered over baseball, or at least my perception of it, even though I never saw him play in person. I never met or interviewed him, either; and as I said to a friend the other day, I don't know what I could have possibly said to him had our paths ever crossed. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon in person — whatever comes to your lips will inevitably sound lame and insufficient.
My one great Hank Aaron story is actually a Neil Diamond story, and it didn't actually happen to me. In fact, it may not even be true, but it's too good not to share. It was told to me in the early 90s by a guy named David, who was a regular customer at See Hear, the record store I worked at in Chicago from 1989 to 1993...
In 1989, David was living in Atlanta, and a friend of his who was working as Neil Diamond's costume (or hair or makeup) person invited him to come and hang out backstage when Neil came to town and played the Omni. David was a friendly and easy-going guy, the kind of person you felt like you'd known forever the first time you met him, and Neil apparently took an immediate liking to him when they were introduced. After giving David a personal tour of his wardrobe and pointing out some of his favorite stage outfits, Neil invited David to join him, his band and crew for dinner, which was being catered by a local restaurant of note.
David happily accepted the invitation, and enjoyed the dinner immensely — at least up until the point when Neil turned to David and asked him, "David, how come there aren't more black people at my concerts?"
David just about choked on his food. For one thing, what a question! For another, David was just some white, Jewish dude from Georgia. "Why the hell is Neil even asking me this?" he thought to himself.
He chewed on the question — and its proper response — for a minute before answering. "No offense, Neil," he said, "but I just don't think black people like your music very much."
Neil, to his credit, did not act at all offended; he merely seemed mystified. "But why not?" he asked David, completely straight-faced. "I'm a SOUL singer!"
Flash forward to that night's show: David takes his seat, which — thanks to the hookup from his friend — is located right in the first couple of rows. He turns back to take in the rest of the arena, as one does in such situations, and immediately notices (much to his great surprise) that Hank Aaron and his wife are sitting directly behind him. David tries to play it cool; as naturally garrulous as he is, even he can't think of a way to break the ice and strike up a conversation with the legendary Home Run King. Still, he can't help himself from looking back from time to time throughout the evening to see what Hank is up to — and sure enough, Hank is genuinely digging the show, knows the words to all the songs, etc.
After the show, David goes backstage to say goodbye to his friend, and winds up passing Neil in the hallway.
"Hey Neil!" he shouts after him. "Hank Aaron was in the audience tonight!"
Neil stops in his tracks, punches the air and yells "YES!!!"
***
Oh, and speaking of baseball and Jewish guys from Georgia, my book with Ron Blomberg — The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson — will be released via Triumph Books on April 20, and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.
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.
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.
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.
I got the idea for this post from a recent online conversation I had with my friend and fellow author Joe Bonomo. Though we didn't actually meet until 2012, Joe and I have repeatedly bonded over how similar our formative experiences were; from music to baseball to teenage alienation, we were definitely on similar (and in some cases outright parallel) paths during our early years. But in the aforementioned chat, we discovered a very crucial difference: Joe was an Action Jackson man, while I was all about G.I. Joes. I suggested we write dueling blog posts about our childhood action figures, and here's my entry — you can read mine first, and then read Joe's, or you can read Joe's first and then come back to this one. Either way works for us!
45 years ago this week, if you’d asked me to name the three greatest things that had happened during the previous twelve months, I would have invariably replied with:
Nixon’s resignation
Blazing Saddles
“Kung-Fu Grip” G.I. Joe
1974 — what a time to be alive, right?
Of the three, Hasbro's introduction of "Kung-Fu Grip" probably had the biggest immediate impact on my life. I had been heavily into G.I. Joe since the May of 1973, when my friend Doug gave me a G.I. Joe Air Adventurer action figure — “with LIFE-LIKE HAIR and BEARD” trumpeted the box — for my seventh birthday. My mom, a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, had previously refused to buy me anything G.I. Joe-related, despite my pitiful entreaties; still, she was wise enough to not make me return the present.
Besides, the Hasbro company — mindful of the growing anti-war sentiment among Americans — had recently repackaged Joe and his mates as a somewhat-less-objectionable “Adventure Team”. Sure, these fuzzy-headed dudes still had guns, grenades, flame-throwers, etc.; but these were all now employed in pursuit of “adventure,” instead of torching Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the evils of Communism. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “He’s not a soldier — he’s an Air Adventurer!” I don’t recall her exact response, but I suspect that there was some eye-rolling involved.
Of course, like any impressionable American boy, I wanted my Air Adventurer to stockpile as many weapons as possible. The big problem was that, given the hard-plastic construction of his hands, it was exceedingly difficult to get him to hold on to any of his equipment, lethal or otherwise, in a functional or vaguely realistic manner. (This became even more difficult for my Air Adventurer after he fell from a tree branch in our Ann Arbor front yard and shattered his left arm.)
Therefore, Hasbro’s 1974 introduction of G.I. Joe dolls with “Kung-Fu Grip” — hands made of soft rubber, with fingers that could be manipulated individually — came as a total godsend to me. “They know that this is exactly what I need!” I marveled. All of my future G.I. Joes would now be able to shoot, stab, climb, schlep and give each other the “soul shake” in a far more secure and realistic manner. For the first time in my young life, I felt validated as a consumer.
When I moved to England that fall with my father and sister, however, a whole new world of “adventure” immediately opened up for me. Action Man, G.I. Joe’s Palitoy-licensed British counterpart, had not only introduced the “gripping hands” concept a whole year earlier, but he also came with a variety of realistic historic military uniforms and weapons as part of Palitoy’s “Soldiers of the World” series. (Holy shit — they even had an Action Man tank!) This absolutely blew my mind; now, instead of just shooting killer cobras and blowing up aggressive octopi, my G.I. Joes could stage actual World War II combat scenarios!
Of course, to fully stage said combat scenarios, my G.I. Joes — now fully attired and armed with period-perfect British and American WWII infantry gear — required an opponent to fight against. To say that my father was displeased when he learned I wanted to spend my allowance on a German stormtrooper uniform set would be to woefully understate the case, but I was adamant that this was exactly what I wanted. “But Dad, G.I. Joe needs an enemy,” I insisted. He okayed the purchase in the end, though also (I’m sure) with no small amount of eye-rolling.
When we returned to Ann Arbor the following year, my Action Man gear was the talk of all my G.I. Joe-loving elementary school pals, most of whom thought I was making up the part about the existence of an Action Man tank (alas, I couldn’t afford to bring one back with me as proof). How was it possible that British kids could have their Action Men reenact the Battle of the Bulge with miniature STEN guns and "potato masher" grenades, while our G.I. Joes had been relegated to searching for buried treasure and engaging in mildly strenuous desert rescues? It seemed grossly unfair.
Nevertheless, I hit it harder than ever with G.I. Joe in 1975, acquiring (mostly via Christmas and birthday gifts) a helicopter, a submarine, and the Adventure Team Training Center, along with various other outfits and equipment. I had the Training Center set up in the basement of the first house we rented upon our return, with the “training slide” cord stretched halfway across the room, and a makeshift landing pad for the copter. Even though I was convinced that the house (especially its basement) was haunted, I still happily spent countless hours down there performing an endless array of G.I. Joe maneuvers. My mania for all things G.I. Joe-related would last another two years or so, until my enthusiasm for sports finally outstripped all my other interests. The turning point was probably the Christmas of 1976, when I fished a pecan out of my grandmother’s holiday nut dish expressly for the purpose of having my G.I. Joes play football with it.
My friends and I admittedly enjoyed additional dalliances with other action figures — like the Johnny West, Steve Austin and Evel Knievel collections — but G.I. Joe was our main man. There were two realms we never entered into, however: Big Jim and Action Jackson. The latter did seem kind of cool (he had some sweet accessories, and that “bold adventure is my game” song from his TV commercials was catchy and fairly stirring), but those AJ figures were just too damned small for our G.I. Joe-sized world. And the commercials for the former always played like scenarios lifted straight from one of the more "open-minded" reader letters that popped up from time to time in my dad’s Penthouse magazines. (“Dear Penthouse: I never thought these letters were real, but last week I went camping with my buddy Big Jim, and we met this guy with a rugged face and a strange tattoo…”) The way Big Jim could bust a strap with his bicep was admittedly impressive, but his whole "hyper-masculine outdoorsman" trip just wasn’t my thing.
So yeah, G.I. Joe was where it was at for me. The gear, the outfits, the play sets — it all just seemed so superior to everything else that was out there, even if it didn’t fully sate my childhood lust for historic combat like Action Man’s stuff did. I finally sold (or, more likely, gave away) all my G.I. Joe/Action Man toys in the fall of 1978, as part of the preparations for my dad moving back to NYC to live with my then-stepmother, and my sister and I moving to L.A. to live with my mom. I know all that stuff would be worth a fortune now, but Joe and I had reached the end of our road long before that; and anyway, most of my figures had already lost some or all of the fingers from their “Kung-Fu Grip” hands, and there would never be much of a resale market for Leprosy G.I. Joe.
Even though we wouldn’t have much to say to each other now, I still think of G.I. Joe every year about this time. The sweet childhood memories of the holiday season come flooding back, and once again I’m sprawled across the floor of one of our Ann Arbor living rooms, listening to Christmas music on the radio, paging through the Sears and JC Penney catalogs, and trying to decide which G.I. Joe stuff I want to add to my Christmas wish list. Eight Ropes of Danger? The Five-Star Jeep? The Mobile Support Vehicle? Guess I’d better put 'em all on there, just in case…
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.