Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Glass and Steel

(Photo by Garrett Rock)

 

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!

 

The Corinthian Columns · Glass And Steel

Growing Up G.I. Joe

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…

The Egyptian Tomb

There are over 34,000 graves in Rosehill Cemetery, the largest cemetery in the City of Chicago. Those interred at the sprawling North Side burial ground include captains of industry, Civil War infantrymen, fifteen Chicago mayors, sixteen U.S. Congressmen, half a dozen 19^th century baseball figures, and legendary sportscaster Jack Brickhouse. “Louise is somewhere in there, too,” my mom told me, right around the time I moved back to Chicago in 2015.

Louise was not quite a relative, but much more than just a family friend. My mom, sister and I first met her in January 1980, shortly after we’d moved from Los Angeles to join my then-stepfather in Chicago. We’d just finished hauling the last of our stuff into our new 9^th floor apartment in the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed glass box at 910 N. Lake Shore Drive, when Louise (who was friendly with my stepfather) invited us to lunch at her apartment somewhere on the upper floors of our building’s next-door twin. Despite knowing almost nothing about her in advance, I had a weird premonition on our way to her place that she was going to play a very important role in my life — a premonition which turned out to be right on the money. A tiny, worldly, hilariously ribald widow in her early seventies, Louise was warm and welcoming to us from the moment we met. She and my mom hit it off immediately, and soon formed a deep bond that would last for over a decade. Louise and I clicked as well, once we each realized that the other was deeply interested in art, architecture and (especially) archaeology.

The shelves of Louise’s living room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows offered a gorgeous panoramic view of Lake Michigan, were filled with books on the aforementioned subjects, not to mention a wide array of ancient artifacts from around the globe. Soon I was going over to her place by myself on a regular basis, and we’d spend hours discussing everything from Bauhaus architecture and surrealist art, to Greek and Roman myths and the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, to her extensive and eventful travels in pre-WWII Europe. Despite the fact that I was only thirteen, Louise spoke to me like I was a learned adult, as opposed to an adolescent whose enthusiasm for these topics far outstripped his actual knowledge. When I graduated from the eighth grade that spring, Louise’s gift to me was a copy of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhnaton. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that not too many other eight graders received the same graduation gift that year…

The intellectual confidence that our friendship instilled in me turned out to be especially significant, as my stepfather — threatened by the closeness of my relationship with my mom — would spend the next two years doing everything he could to eradicate any semblance of self-esteem I might possess. When my mom (who certainly had her own issues with him) finally got fed up and moved us out, all the friends we’d made through my stepfather immediately dropped us — all of them except for Louise, that is. She sided firmly with the three of us, and did whatever she could to be helpful and supportive as my mom gutsily rebuilt her own life and ours.

I confess that, as much as I appreciated Louise’s love and encouragement, I found her presence increasingly difficult to take as I grew older. Louise would think nothing of enlivening a dinner conversation by, say, bringing up an artist she knew in 1930s France who would mix paints with his own shit to achieve a particularly impressive shade of brown; and she could always be counted to kick it up several notches when we were out in public, to flirt madly with any man we encountered, and maybe even “misappropriate” a wine glass, cutlery or some other grabbable item when no one was looking. I was desperately craving some kind of order in my life, and Louise represented chaos to me — charming and massively entertaining chaos, of course, but chaos nonetheless. I can vividly remember her advancing towards me through the crowd at a post-show reception for one of my high school plays, and me feeling both genuinely happy to see her, yet also silently praying that this pint-sized dynamo with the flashing eyes and crimson lipstick wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me.

I don’t recall seeing much of Louise while I was in college, but thankfully we managed to reconnect during the few years between my graduation and her passing. Never exactly a robust physical specimen to begin with, she was now exceptionally frail, but her personality and sense of humor remained as atomic-powered as ever; slightly more grown up and considerably less uptight than I’d been in my high school days, I could now just relax and enjoy our time together. When she died in 1992, after struggling with a variety of illnesses, my mom was there at her bedside. “Daniel — that’s my guy,” Louise told her. She left me her lime-green couch, a heavy stack of archaeology books, and an antique brass nutcracker in the form of a pair of female legs, which was really about the most “Louise” item imaginable.

A lovely memorial gathering was held at Louise’s apartment, where I’d spent so many wonderful afternoons hearing her stories. But I have no memory of there being a funeral, and I had no idea of what happened to her remains until my mom mentioned her in conjunction with Rosehill. Now that I was living in Andersonville, only a twenty-minute walk from the cemetery, I thought I might try to find her grave and pay my respects.

Unfortunately, my mom was pretty sure that Louise’s ashes resided somewhere in Rosehill’s gigantic two-story mausoleum — and most likely in a section devoted to the maternal side of her family, whose name we’d both completely forgotten after two-plus decades. And while I occasionally went for meditative, head-clearing strolls through the cemetery, the mausoleum’s doors always seemed to be locked whenever I visited...

My move back to Chicago, after twenty-three years in Southern California, was a positive one on many levels: I reconnected with old friends, made a few new ones, enjoyed some quality time with my mom, finally banished some lingering ghosts from my difficult adolescence, and somehow even managed to show up in time to witness the Cubs win their first World Series in over a century. But on a professional level, it was a total, deeply dispiriting bust. One promising work opportunity after another either slipped through my fingers or blew up in my face; the countless job applications I sent out resulted in only a small handful of interviews; and none of the book proposals I was writing seemed to be getting any traction. So in the fall of 2017, when a book agent I knew reached out about maybe helping hair-metal veteran Chip Z’Nuff pen his memoirs, I immediately said yes. The project was kind of a long-shot, given that Chip’s band Enuff Z’Nuff didn’t exactly have the name recognition of, say, Motley Crue or Guns N’ Roses; but I figured I’d at least get some funny rock n’ roll stories out of him — and maybe we’d even get lucky and land a book contract with a decent advance…

After a brief preliminary meeting with Chip at the Chicago Recording Company, he invited to come down to his house in Blue Island for a lengthier discussion of the project. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a car; and since riding the CTA all the way down to Blue Island from the North Side would take hours (and maybe wouldn’t be the safest course of action), I decided to rent some wheels for the weekend. But as the Enterprise outlet near me had recently jacked up their rental rates, I had to turn to their considerably cheaper branch over at the corner of Western and Peterson, right across from the northwest corner of Rosehill Cemetery. Two days later, when I returned the car to the branch, the Enterprise people offered me a lift home, but I declined. The early October morning was a spectacularly beautiful one, and I didn’t have any pressing deadlines, so I thought I’d treat myself to a leisurely walk home through Rosehill.

Unlike Graceland, which is built on a perfectly rectangular lot, Rosehill warps outward along its southern border as it proceeds to the west, and none of the cemetery’s paved paths or roads resemble anything close to a straight line. These factors, combined with the sheer vastness of the place, make it pretty easy to lose your bearings, even if you’ve been there many times. On this particular morning, I entered the western end of Rosehill via the Bryn Mawr Avenue gate, which I’d never done before; I took a left at the first fork in the pathway I came to, a right at the next, and so on, slowly wending my way more or less in the direction of the Ravenswood Avenue entrance on the other side. Though this part of the cemetery was pretty unfamiliar to me, I figured I’d eventually see some recognizable landmarks that would help guide me to the other end.

I had originally intended to walk straight home, but since the day was starting to get fairly warm, and my wife was texting me with questions about our Thanksgiving travel plans, I decided to find a shady place where I could stop and sit for a few minutes. I noticed a small Egyptian Revival-style mausoleum coming up on my left — after all these years, I’m still a sucker for ancient Egyptian design motifs — so I walked over and sat down on its cool front steps. I immediately felt very relaxed and happy sitting there, so I decided to hang out for a while and savor the moment, letting my eyes wander dreamily over the tranquil landscape of gravestones, tombs, obelisks and colorful trees.

To keep myself company on the walk, I’d been listening to “Lord Queensbury’s Codpiece,” a Spotify playlist I’d compiled of over two thousand tracks of 1960s British psychedelia, to be played in shuffle mode. The combination of jaunty melodies, fanciful lyrics and pastoral introspection meshed perfectly with both the warm autumn day and the melancholy atmosphere of the cemetery. Even more perfectly than I could have expected, in fact: For while I was relaxing there on the steps of the mausoleum, “Egyptian Tomb” by Mighty Baby suddenly popped on, as if to make sure I was aware of where I was sitting. It was an odd and eerie coincidence, to say the least.

Thinking this might be some sort of sign, I looked up at the name carved into the front of the mausoleum — Ferdinand Siegel — and decided to check Google for any interesting information I might be able to find out about my “host”. There wasn’t much out there, however; Mr. Siegel appeared to have been a German-born real estate investor who’d died in 1928 at the age of 79, presumably after having done well enough in his new country to build an impressive monument to himself. But compared to the fascinating stories of some of Rosehill’s other “residents,” the basic facts of Mr. Siegel’s life didn’t seem to warrant further research. So, feeling refreshed and ready to head home, I put my phone back into my jacket pocket and got up to go.

After I'd walked about ten feet back towards the road, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't actually looked into the mausoleum. Tombs of this size and era typically include a stained-glass rear window, and I silently scolded myself for nearly passing up the possibility of spying some beautiful 1920s glass work. I headed back to the Siegel tomb, walked up its front steps, and peered through the bars of its oxidized iron doors; sure enough, I could see a gorgeous stained glass window set into the far wall, depicting the Nile flowing languidly past a palm-dotted landscape, as if seen through a pair of ancient Egyptian “papyrus” columns. I took a photo of the window, then tried to make out the name plates on the wall below it.

The third one down read, "Louise E. Mora, 1908 -1992". It was Louise. Our Louise.

I stood there in shock for several minutes, first weeping, then laughing. Somehow, in this 350-acre repository of over 34,000 remains, I had found her — or maybe, she had found me.

Cynics reading this will say it was all just a lucky series of coincidences that led me to Louise’s grave. And perhaps it was. But if I hadn’t decided to take a chance on a Chip Z’Nuff book project (which also never panned out, unfortunately), hadn’t needed to rent a car, hadn’t been forced to go to a cheaper rental outlet, hadn’t refused their offer of a ride home, hadn’t taken several semi-arbitrary turns along a series of cemetery pathways I was only vaguely familiar with, hadn’t needed to answer Katie’s texts, hadn’t decided to rest in the shade at that very spot, and hadn’t suddenly thought to walk back and check out the mausoleum’s stained glass… well, that’s rather a lot of coincidences, isn’t it? And really, what were the odds of “Egyptian Tomb” coming up, out of over two thousand songs, shortly after I’d sat down?

“I was born in a world that can easily bring you down,” goes the first line of “Egyptian Tomb”. But for all the soul-crushing horror, cruelty and disappointment of this world, I can hereby attest that there’s still some magic left in the universe. Louise proved it to me on that warm October morning, from her resting place along the banks of a stained-glass Nile.

J.D.'s Revenge, Revisited

My mom, sister and I saw a LOT of movies together in the summer of '76, which was of course totally fine by me.

Even at the age of ten, I was already feeling the pronounced rumblings of what would turn out to be a lifelong fascination with film and film history. Not only was moviegoing a fun and cheap way to beat the L.A. summer heat, but just being able to see Hollywood movies in (or near) Hollywood was a real thrill for this Midwestern boy — it felt closer to The Source (not the Sunset Strip vegetarian restaurant, though of course it was close to that, too), like I was getting a baguette fresh from the baker instead of a pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped loaf from the shelf of the A&P.

I wasn't especially particular about what we saw, just as long as it wasn't a movie "for kids" (I hated being condescended to, even back then) or a foreign flick with sub-titles. If it looked cool, funny, exciting or featured a big-name star, that was lure enough for me — I just wanted to absorb as many movies as possible. And we weren't especially particular about where we saw them, either; that summer, we hit screenings everywhere from Century City's pristine multiplexes to crumbling Art Deco picture palaces like the Pantages and the Wiltern.

Wiltern photo by Anne Laskey, 1978.

We often traveled via public transportation on our moviegoing expeditions, so it was hard to time our arrival perfectly; often as not, we would arrive at the theater a good 30-45 minutes before our intended screening. And since the Wiltern was always showing double features, we would usually just walk in and catch the last reel of whatever was playing before our film. This was not always a sound decision  — the last twenty minutes of Food of the Gods, which perversely preceded (I think) The Gumball Rally, were fully responsible for instilling me with the fear of rats that, er, plagues me to this day. And then there was the time we went to see the Burt Reynolds flick Gator, but wound up catching the end of J.D.'s Revenge. I didn't understand what the hell was going on in it, at all — something about a cackling ghost appearing in a broken mirror, someone getting shot, and a bald man sobbing hysterically. It scared and saddened and confused me all at the same time, and made me wish we had just stayed in the lobby until after it had ended.

Last night, 43 years and change later, I decided to give J.D.'s Revenge another look. Directed by Arthur Marks (Friday Foster, The Monkey Hu$tle) the film has often been cited in books and articles I've read over the years about blaxploitation cinema — specifically those dealing with the horror sub-genre that gave us such classics as Blacula, Abby, and Sugar Hill, and it's been kicking around the bottom of my various streaming queues for a while now. But I only recently learned that J.D.'s Revenge was shot in New Orleans; and, having recently returned from an all-too-short vacation there, I was curious to see if the Crescent City of the mid-Seventies looked anything like I'd remembered from the brief visit my family made to New Orleana in the summer of '74.

On the latter score, J.D.'s Revenge definitely came through: the film features numerous shots of the French Quarter, including a Bourbon Street that's less chaotic but significantly sleazier than the present-day version, just as I'd first experienced it. (One of my most vivid memories from that 1974 trip is of watching horrified parents holding their hands over their children's eyes as they walked past one Bourbon Street strip club after another.) As a film, well... I found myself confused and a little upset by it all over again, albeit for somewhat different reasons than when I caught the end of it back in 1976.

The basic plot: An earnest and upstanding young law student named Ike (Glynn Turman) becomes possessed by the spirit of a zoot-suited hood (David McKnight), who seeks revenge on those who killed him and his sister back in 1942. It's a straightforward if improbable conceit, but it isn't helped by a convoluted screenplay (written by Jason Starkes, who later went on to co-write the basketball comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh) or some strange casting choices — most notably, the great Louis Gossett, Jr. playing a sixty-something jackleg preacher. Gossett would have been about forty at the time of the filming, and an extremely vital and young-looking forty, at that; it seriously took me about two-thirds of the way through the movie to figure out that his character had been one of the people involved in J.D.'s death, because he looks like he would have still been in nursery school at the time.

The film features a fair amount of violence, some of which is cartoonish and played for laughs. But the scenes where J.D.'s spirit abuses and rapes Ike's wife (Joan Pringle) are downright nasty, and the footage of a cow getting disemboweled in a slaughterhouse (which is repeatedly shown as part of J.D.'s flashbacks) is both sad and deeply disgusting. All of which makes it hard to recommend J.D.'s Revenge to anyone other than devoted blaxploitation fans.

That said, Turman is truly excellent in this, really sinking his teeth into (and chewing up) the scenes where J.D. takes over Ike's body and personality. Though occasionally absurd — "You don't like yo' Daddy's CONK?!?" he glowers, when Ike's wife bums out on his new 1940s-style 'do — these are by far the most entertaining moments of the film, with J.D. coming off like a cross between Dave Chappelle in his "Time Haters" skit and a genuinely dangerous Rudy Ray Moore.

While I don't think I'd watch it again, I have to say I'm glad I revisited J.D.'s Revenge. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but over the last few years I've found myself drawn back to a number of films I haven't seen since childhood — not out of nostalgia, per se, but rather to unlock long-forgotten memories of those days, as well as to try and better understand how my young brain perceived life and art, and why certain things stuck with me while others vanished almost instantly from my consciousness. Call it film therapy, I guess, though I don't think I'm ready to give Food of the Gods another shot.  

We Accidentally Did Some Really Wonderful Things: Jim Bouton, R.I.P.

"I thought you might want to read this," said Grandpa Fred, handing me his copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four.

It was the summer of 1977, and I had just arrived at my grandparents' palatial (to me, at least) home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was eleven years old, and looking forward to a blissfully relaxing month of swimming, golfing, throwing a baseball against the back steps, watching baseball on TV, and reading about baseball in the air-conditioned comfort of my grandfather's study. The baseball bug had bitten me hard, and I was determined to get my hands on any reading material that could expand my knowledge of my favorite sport — and, once again, Grandpa Fred had come through for me.

As a child of the Seventies, I was already well aware that baseball men were not necessarily squeaky-clean role models to be looked up to — after all, I had just seen a livid Billy Martin try to punch out Reggie Jackson on national TV — and I'd already heard that Ball Four was supposed to be "controversial". But by "controversial," I was expecting a gritty, hard-bitten exposé, something along the lines of Serpico or All The President's Men, to name two other books that my grandfather probably had no business lending to a grandson who had just graduated fifth grade. What I found instead, much to my surprise and delight, was a riotously funny account of life in the major (and minor) leagues that, if anything, reminded me most of an adult American version of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Down With Skool series. Like Nigel Molesworth, DWS's intrepid schoolboy narrator, Jim Bouton took me into a world full of bizarre rituals, arcane slang, side-splitting pranks, and unforgettable characters. Ball Four's detractors complained that Bouton trashed baseball's heroes; but in my eyes, he not only (further) humanized them, but also made me wish (even more than I already did) that I could be part of their gang.

As these things will do, the sad news about Bouton's death brought back vivid memories of that summer in Alabama, and reminded me of just how much Ball Four — and its sequel, the almost-as-great I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally — formed my understanding of (and attitude toward) major league baseball. With the possible exception of Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff (which I wouldn't read until over a decade later), I can't think of another player memoir that so beautifully captures the joy of playing baseball, yet so unsentimentally delineates the punishing stupidity and cold-blooded venality that permeate the game's executive and administrative sectors... and which have only become more pervasive in the decades since Ball Four's original publication. (As a friend of mine pointed out, the timing of Bouton's death was one final Fuck You to the baseball establishment, since it all but obliterated the buzz around the release of Bud Selig's new autobiography.) 

Most of Bouton's on-field heroics were accomplished well before I became interested in baseball, and I wouldn't learn about his social activist side (he protested the apartheid rule of South Africa in 1968, long before that was on the radar of your average American) until many years after I first read Ball Four. But he became a hero of mine that summer, and even more the following year, when — armed with only a knuckleball and an insouciant smirk — he made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. In interviews, he always came across as warm, witty, and maybe even a little bit silly... and I always hoped that I'd get a chance to talk with him someday.

That chance finally came three years ago, when I was writing a story for VICE Sports on the 40th anniversary of the short-lived Ball Four sitcom, which ran on CBS for only five weeks before being unceremoniously sent to the showers. I had become friends with Michael Bouton, Jim's son, via Facebook, and I approached him about setting up an interview with his dad. Unfortunately, Jim had suffered a stroke by then, and Michael explained to me that his dad preferred to do our interview via email, because he was self-conscious about not being able to "retrieve" certain words. So I sent Michael a list of questions... which Jim apparently enjoyed so much that he decided he wanted to get on the phone with me, after all.

The Jim Bouton I spoke with in 2016 turned out to be just as kind and funny as I'd always imagined, and — except for stumbling over maybe two or three words — was just as articulate, as well. It remains one of my all-time favorite interviews that I've ever done, and this seems like as good a time as any to share the whole thing with the world. I am forever indebted to Michael for making it happen, and forever grateful to the old "Bulldog" for taking the time to go down memory lane with me, even if some of the memories we discussed weren't exactly sweet. May he rest in peace and power...

 

 

Jim Bouton: The Big Hair & Plastic Grass Interview

DAN EPSTEIN: With the 40^thanniversary of the Ball Four TV series coming up, it needs to be —

JIM BOUTON: Forgotten? [Laughs]

No chance of that, at least on my watch. So, whose idea was it to turn it into a TV series?

It was such a long time ago, I don’t remember if it came down to one person. There was a group of friends that would hang out at the Lion’s Head bar in [Greenwich] Village — Vic Ziegel, Marvin Kitman and myself, and others. We just thought this might be a good thing to do. Little did we know! [Laughs]

When Ball Four was first published, nobody was knocking on your door to make a TV show or movie out of it?

Well, this was just within a year of when the book came out; we weren’t sitting around for years waiting for this “golden opportunity” — we just thought, “Well, this will be fun!” And it certainly was fun to be part of Ball Four, and to listen to all those wonderful characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys? It was certainly fun to think about the possibilities of transferring that to the TV screen.

Though obviously, you faced some challenges in doing so…

Standards and Practices, I think was the name of the division — we were not allowed to capture the grittiness and the language, that kind of stuff. We weren’t able to put it on the screen. [Laughs]

You certainly couldn’t have anyone saying “Ah Shitfuck,” a la Joe Schultz.

Yeah, and you couldn’t say “Horseshit” — you could have “Horse!” maybe, or “Horse dot-dot-dot”. There were all sorts of ways they had to neuterize it. When we would sit around at night… our plan was to sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took us so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at 2 in the morning. The funniest part about the whole sitcom was writing aboutthe sitcom, and we had some great fun with that. A sitcom about a sitcom would have been better than the actual sitcom, itself. That should have been the show! [Laughs]

The CBS people would come into the writing room, which is a dark place, in many respects. [Laughs] There were many vice presidents — none of whom could write, but they could “help.” So they’d say something like, “Maybe this guy could be a jerk!” So we’d listen to their ideas, and then they’d leave the room and we’d start laughing about what they were saying. We’d do the best we could with it. They would say things like, “Why can’t you write like Gone With The Windor The Old Man and the Sea? That would be good!”

I’ve been in writing rooms with network vice presidents. It can be a pretty soul-crushingly awful experience.

Well, when I think about it, I never think about it as a negative in my life; it’s not like, “Oh boy, we really screwed that up,” or,  “That was terrible!” It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level. [Laughs] We were having a good time; we were enjoying ourselves. But the censor wasn’t enjoying it, and the vice presidents weren’t enjoying it. And apparently, right off the bat, the audiences didn’t like it very much, either! [Laughs]

Was the shooting of the show fun for you, as well?

Oh, absolutely. We accidentally did some really wonderful things, but we weren’t allowed to do much of them.

For example?

Ben Davidson played Rhino, the catcher. He was a professional football player, from that same era of characters [as in Ball Four] — guys who made it to the big time but barely made it through college to get there. Ben Davidson was the only "real" person on the set, because everyone else was an actor. [There was one scene where] Ben improvised and lifted up one of the coaches, then hung him on a hook in the locker room by the back of his shirt. The guys from CBS saw that and were like, “What are you doing?!? That’s not a good idea! We’ve got a liability here!”

Were you always supposed to play the lead character in the show?

I don’t remember whether anyone thought that would be a good idea or not, but they probably thought it would be inexpensive, because I was not a real actor. And who knew what a difficult chore that would be! Oh god…

Ball Four debuted on CBS in September 1976, and only lasted five episodes before being cancelled. Did you have the sense that it would get a quick axe, or did the cancellation take you by surprise?

Well, shooting an episode would last, you know, a week, and we were always feeling like we were behind — we always had that feeling of, “Uh-oh, this is not any better than the one we did yesterday!” [Laughs] We would watch other sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter, and there would be a put-down line like, ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’ And we would start laughing, and thinking, “Maybe we need a line like that? How about, ‘Stick it in your doo-dah?’” [Laughs] It was four amateurs trying to do something that we’d never done before.

Plus, it’s 2 in the morning, and you’re all punchy…

Oh, exactly. We didn’t even know what day it was! Jesus… Finally, about three episodes in, they told us, “We’re going to have to cancel this show.” We said, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives — we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people!”

Was that when you decided to rededicate yourself to your baseball comeback?

Well, I needed to get out of the TV business by then, for my own safety. [Laughs] I was playing semi-pro baseball in New Jersey, amateur baseball, and I was pitching pretty good for a guy who was in his late-thirties; I was having a good time, and my knuckleball started to move around, and I thought it might be a good idea to go down to spring training, and see if I could work out with some minor league team. And Bill Veeck ended up offering me a minor league contract with the White Sox.

Your brief return to the majors in September 1978 remains one of my favorite childhood baseball memories. It all seemed so improbable — you were thirty-nine, and you hadn't pitched in the majors since 1970 — but you actually pitched pretty well in three out of five appearances!

I did pretty well. This was with the Atlanta Braves organization, and Ted Turner — well, he was agreeable to those kind of things. I said to him, “Give me a shot, and if I don’t embarrass myself, let’s see what happens!” Only a real nut, like a Bill Veeck or a Ted Turner, would say, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” It was kind of like a sitcom, only you had more control over it — and I was not humiliating myself on national television!

So I went to spring training with their minor league Triple-A team, I think it was, and I got better and better. The last game of spring training, they were going to have the Triple-A guys play against the major league Braves. And the idea was, “Let Bouton pitch for the minor league guys against the big leaguers!” I thought, “Well, this sounds better than a sitcom, but not that much different.” I actually pitched a very good game, and I think we won the game. I did so well that they sent me to the minors, and said, “See what you can do!” I did really well there, and they eventually invited me to the big leagues. I beat the San Francisco Giants, and they were not goofing around — they were in a pennant race! But I beat those guys. And then I pitched the next game against the Astros and James Rodney Richard. [Bouton threw seven innings at the Astrodome, giving up only five hits and two earned runs, but didn’t get the decision.] So that was fun!

More fun than sitting in the writers’ room at CBS?

Oh, yeah. It was like, “God, please don’t let me write any more scripts!”

Back to the TV series, though — the episodes covered some controversial topics for the time, such as gay players, female sportswriters in the locker room, and the use of pep pills...

I thought those subjects would be interesting — and I thought that people would be interested in them. But we couldn’t get most of what we wanted to do past Standards and Practices.

Do you think the show was actually a few decades ahead of its time?

It might have been — and it might get there yet, by another route. Who knows?

But a reboot of a Ball FourTV series isn’t something you’d like to be involved with?

Uh, not in an important role. [Laughs]

Harry Chapin wrote and sang the show’s theme song. How did that come about? Were you a fan of his music?

Yeah, Harry Chapin was a nice guy. I was friends with a handball player named Jimmy Jacobs, and Jimmy Jacobs had a great film library. I happened to run into Harry Chapin through him, and I was telling him and Jimmy Jacobs about the sitcom. Harry’s song opened the show — and then it all went right downhill after the song. I think the best part of the show was Harry’s song.

It's the only part of the show that you can currently find on YouTube.

And that’s a good thing, too! [Laughs]

Do episodes of the show still exist?

I’m hoping they don’t exist anymore, just for mercy purposes!

Before I let you go... do you have any thoughts on the enduring appeal of Ball Four, the book? It has long outlived the controversy that surrounded its original release…

When I think of Ball Four, I don’t think of my writing — I think basically of keeping notes. Those players were the funny guys; you can’t make up those guys. They were all characters. Doug Rader, Gary Bell, Don Mincher… One of the great things about baseball players back then was, they were not sophisticated guys. They were not college guys; they were guys outta the mines or off of the farm, guys trying to make a living. And that’s why it took so long [for MLB players] to get real money, because the guys just wanted to play ball.

Sure, they realized, “Maybe we oughta be getting a little more money.” But if they’d said to those guys back in the 1950s or even 60s, “Okay, we’re not going to pay anybody anymore, there’s no money whatsoever,” the players would have still said, “Well, we’ve got two teams here — why don’t we just play and see who can win this game?” You know what I mean? They wanted to play ball. They were very, very interesting people. They came from mostly small towns, and they just wanted to play ball.

And your book immortalized them.

The best thing I ever did was to keep notes and write all that stuff down. I’d keep notes all day long; and when I’d run out of paper, I’d write on a popcorn box or an air-sickness bag, whatever was handy. And then, at the end of the day, I needed to look at my notes because there were so many funny things going on. Wonderful characters; I love them all now, even the ones I hated! Now I was listening to the players, now that I was writing things down, they were now fodder for great material. So I began to think about them in a positive way. They were not competitors for playing opportunities in games; no, these guys were funny! And that’s why Ball Four is so funny — it’s not me, it’s the players.

And because the minor leagues have kind of been replaced by college ball, the players are much more savvy now, much more sophisticated. They’re wiser, and all of that stuff — but I don’t get the sense that the crazy guys, the wacky guys, the funny guys are there anymore.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Jim. It’s been a real pleasure.

Well, it was fun remembering those things. And now I have to go lie down for a while. [Laughs]

Grandpa Fred, LBJ and Me

This January 20th marks what would have been the 104th birthday of the late, great Pardo Frederick DelliQuadri, AKA my maternal grandfather, AKA my beloved Grandpa Fred.

Grandpa Fred was a major force in my young life, and I've written about him here a few times before — both about his contributions to my interest in baseball, and his heartfelt work on behalf of children around the world — and our misadventure following the Dodgers-Braves game we attended in the summer of 1978 inspired my keynote address at last year's Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the Eternals induction ceremony.

I always think a lot about him around this time of year. And the other night, while combing the Internet for some photos from his time in Washington, D.C., I struck serious gold — actual film footage from June 21, 1968 of him being sworn in at the White House as Chief of the Children's Bureau of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. (The full clip is embedded below at the end of this post.)

I had absolutely no idea that this clip existed, but it popped up in the collection of the LBJ Library on a roll of film outtakes from the summer of 1968. President Johnson indeed makes an appearance, saying a few remarks — sadly, the clip doesn't have any audio — before Supreme Court Justice Byron "Whizzer" White performs the swearing-in ceremony with my grandfather. Then my grandfather guides LBJ over to meet some of his family members, including my mother (who is totally killing it in a Marimekko print dress, though I know she now regrets her choice of hat), his wife (my Grandma Velma), and some of his brothers and sisters, who have traveled all the way from their home of Pueblo, Colorado to be there for the event.

It's such a treat for me to watch my grandfather — who's been gone for nearly 30 years now — in this clip. That shy-but-warm smile, that glint of mischievous humor in his eye, that palpable sense of being completely comfortable in his own skin in any situation, even at a White House ceremony presided over by LBJ... that's absolutely the Grandpa Fred I knew. 

There's more to this story, though, and now seems like the perfect time to tell it. I was two years old at the time of this ceremony, and I was supposed to be present for it. In fact, my parents dressed me up for the occasion in what my mother tells me was a very sharp yellow plaid suit — both because they wanted me to look nice, and because there was a plan afoot for me to do a photo op with LBJ. 

By 1968, public sentiment over the U.S. military presence in Vietnam had begun to turn, and the chant "Hey Hey LBJ/How many kids did you kill today" had become a favorite at peace marches everywhere. Aware that my grandfather had asked for me to be allowed to attend his swearing-in ceremony, someone at the White House concocted the idea of putting me and LBJ together for a photo — this was for the Children's Bureau, after all, and wouldn't it be good for the President's image to have a pic of him cuddling a cute little kid?My father, who was very much against the Vietnam War, tells me now that he had serious misgivings about the whole thing. But rather than make any waves, he went along with the plan, carrying me into the White House with him. But as it turned out, I made some waves of my own...

I was, let us say, a rather odd child, and one of my biggest quirks around Age 2 was that I'd developed an absolute and all-consuming horror of painted portraits. My parents will both attest to this: If we went over to any of their friends' houses for a visit, they would have to ask them in advance to remove any portraits they might have hanging on their walls; otherwise, I would have a major meltdown as soon as I saw them. Of course, the White House is filled with large, painted portraits of Presidents and other historical figures, and of course no one thought to ask them to take those down before we arrived...

You can pretty much guess what happened next. I don't recall the specific portrait that set me off, but I was screaming hysterically within seconds of entering the Cabinet Room. President Johnson himself apparently tried to calm me down, but I simply wasn't having it. Finally, my dad (with a couple of Secret Service agents in tow) had to take me out into the hallway so that my grandfather's ceremony could proceed undisturbed by my shrieks of terror. 

Until the day he died, Grandpa Fred never let me forget about what a scene I made on his big day. Not that he was particularly disappointed by it; in fact, he thought it was kind of hilarious. "Hey Dan," he would chuckle, "Remember the time you cried in Johnson's face?" 

I love you, Gramps. It's so nice to see you again.

 

 

 

The London Nobody Knows

There's something about films made and/or set in the New York City of the 1970s that always keeps me coming back for more, and the same goes for the London of the same period. Maybe it's because childhood visits to both of these cities vividly imprinted themselves upon my fragile eggshell mind; while these were clearly not easy cities to live in, the vibrant energy of citizens going about their daily business against a backdrop of faded grandeur and crumbling glory captured my youthful imagination in the same way that Hubert Robert's paintings of "life among the ruins" would later fascinate me. Though there were signs of decay everywhere, there was also beauty in that decay — a beauty so profound that even a midwestern boy raised on TV and the intrinsically American philosophy of "newer is better" couldn't fail to notice.

I recently finished reading Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours, a fascinating and occasionally frustrating book that is less of a history of the original psychedelic era than a series of free-associative essays about why and how LSD impacted popular music the way it did. One of the best aspects of Chapman's book is the way he lays out the differences between American and British psychedelia — not just stylistically, but also culturally. In his British chapters, he repeatedly underlines just how dingy and drab life was in post-WWII England, especially when compared to the space-age shininess of life in the US; and how even at the height of "Swinging London," most of the grumbling grey city still felt barely a few years removed from the traumas and deprivations of life during The Blitz.

If Chapman's book didn't exactly turn me on to any great psychedelic records that I wasn't already aware of, it did lead me to The London Nobody Knows, a haunting documentary filmed in 1967 by Norman Cohen (but apparently not released until 1969), which was based on the 1962 book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher. Narrated by James Mason, who also serves as the film's tour guide, the film explores London's seamy underbelly (and its Victorian remnants) at a time when the wrecking ball of progress was really starting to kick into high gear.

Chapman cites The London Nobody Knows as being particularly illustrative of how shabby the city really was, even at the peak of its pop cultural influence, and the film certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. Though a few sequences here are speeded up a la Benny Hill for comic relief, the London we see here is a bleak place, indeed, one filled with rusting Victorian urinals, rotting pubs, splintering tenements, toothless street performers, and open-air markets filled with wriggling eels and shady pitchmen. The few minutes devoted to the city's fashionably-attired youth seems almost jarringly out of place, like they were only added (and possibly under protest) after the producers begged to see some of the mods and mini-skirts that London was famous for.

Again, though, there is beauty in the decay — and with his dry wit and seemingly unflappable countenance, Mason is perfectly suited to guiding us through it. Whether wryly cocking an eyebrow at the ugliness of the newer buildings along the north side of the Thames, or begging the pardon of a market patron that he's inadvertently bumped, he comes off more like a savvy local than a movie star. In one particularly moving sequence, he unselfconsciously sits down with several senior residents of the local Salvation Army, and lends a sympathetic ear to their hard-luck stories. (I'm guessing he prudently chose not to mention his own brush with Thunderbird wine.)

My favorite moment in the film, however, is a non-Mason one: A shirtless street performer of indeterminate age hectors passerby to bind him with a length of heavy chain, from which he then performs a Houdini-like escape. While the man's performance is quite entertaining in its own right, and certainly harkens back to an earlier London — there were almost certainly escape artists doing the same trick on the city' streets in the 19th century, if not hundreds of years before that — what blew me away was the realization that I had actually seen this very gentleman in action, seven years after this sequence was filmed. While I knew that I would recognize some of the London I experienced in '74 in this film, I had no inkling that I would actually recognize one of the people I'd encountered while I was there.

That year, my sister and I were living in Leamington Spa with my father, who was on sabbatical at Warwick University. On weekends, we would often take train trips to other parts of the country, and of course London was on our hit list. While my most vivid memory from our London trip is of ordering a plate of ravioli at a restaurant, only to find that there was nothing inside of said ravioli — London dining was significantly less worldly than it is today — our visit to the Tower of London also stands out for me, and not just because of the thrill of coming face to face with nearly 900 years of English history. On our way to the Tower entrance, we came upon this very same shirtless gent, who had attracted a rather sizable audience with his salty pronouncements and his impressive feats of escapism. (There was also a younger partner working with him, who was similarly swathed in chains and locks.) After busting free, the man passed the hat, and then cussed the crowd out for not putting enough into it. "There's not enough in here to get me into a pay toilet," he cried. "I hope every last one of ye gets bloody diarrhea tonight!" Oh, how my sister and I howled with laughter; I think I even asked my dad for a few coins to contribute to his cause, simply because I was impressed that anyone would loudly wish diarrhea upon a group of tourists.

Obviously, that's the sort of thing that sticks with you for decades after the fact, and when my wife and I visited the Tower of London last spring — her first visit, and my first time returning since 1974 — I half-expected that this guy would be standing outside the tube station, haranguing us into tying him up. He wasn't there, of course; I'm guessing he'd be around a hundred years old today, if he's even still alive. Still, it was a real thrill to see him again in this documentary, and to feel viscerally connected for a second to the London of 1967, even though I didn't actually experience the city until seven years later.

Anyway, watch the film. You won't regret it.

The Bionic Watermelon

Though it only ran from September 1976 to March 1977, I still have fond and vivid memories of the Captain and Tennille's ABC variety show — especially the recurring "Bionic Watermelon" skit, which always had my sister and I rolling on the floor in fits of laughter. 

The Captain & Tennille definitely soundtracked our childhood — 1977's Come In From The Rain was one of the first LPs my sister ever owned — and they certainly made some classic contributions to the AM pop canon, most notably their version of Neil Sedaka's "Love Will Keep Us Together," which is pretty much a perfect pop record. But in the sad wake of the Captain's passing, I'd like to salute him by replaying this particularly "juicy" Bionic Watermelon adventure. RIP, Captain!

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.

 

Nancy Faust, Tommy John... and Me

I am incredibly thrilled to accept The Baseball Reliquary's invitation to deliver the Keynote Address for their 20th annual Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day, which will be held Sunday, July 22nd at the Pasadena Central Library. This year's inductees include legendary White Sox organist Nancy Faust and White Sox/Dodgers/Yankees/Angels pitcher Tommy John, both of whom will be in attendance.

The Baseball Reliquary is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history — so it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has read my baseball books that I've a big fan of the organization and its mission for a long time. (I mean, their collections include Dock Ellis's infamous CURLERS, people!)

Previous inductees to the Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals include such personal heroes as Dock Ellis, Dick Allen, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Luis Tiant and Jim "Mudcat" Grant, so it will be a huge honor for me to speak at this year's induction ceremonies, especially since Nancy Faust, Tommy John and fellow 2018 inductee Rusty Staub all played such formative roles in my early baseball fandom.

The induction (which is free and open to all) will be held almost three years to the day since Katie and I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I can think of no better excuse to return to Southern California for a few days. If you love baseball and live in SoCal, please mark your calendars for this fantastic event!

 

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