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!
Though I do have some nice memories from it, 2017 was an undeniable shit-show for me in all manner of ways (and quite possibly for you, too). But rather than crawling under my desk and assuming a fetal position, I am fully resolved to make this coming year a better one on every level — and the fact that my first gig of the year involved writing something on Bruce Springsteen's first album bodes pretty well for that, I'd like to think.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was released 45 years ago today, and I've counted it among my five favorite Springsteen albums since the days when there were ONLY five Springsteen albums. It's fair to say that it's his loosest and looniest record, as well as (for better or worse) his most verbose, and spinning it again (and again) while doing research for this Rolling Stone piece was kind of like having an evening out with an old friend who I'd lost touch with for awhile — lotsa laughs, lotsa good memories, lotsa stories that don't always get finished. True, "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" is a song I never need to hear more than once a decade (and "The Angel" isn't a whole lot better, though I love the melody on the bridge), but the rest of the record still totally delivers the scraggily poetic goods for me.
Anyway, a very Happy New Year to whomever's reading this, and may your 2018 be filled with love, joy, good health and great music.
There's so much to be said in the wake of Hugh Hefner's passing, both about Hef himself and the cultural impact (positive and otherwise) of his most famous magazine. But I'm not going to get into any of that here...
No, I think the best way to observe Hef's death is to watch (or at least acknowledge the existence of) this sublimely ridiculous network TV special from the Thanksgiving Weekend of 1979. I myself have no memory of its broadcast, though it certainly would have been right in my 13 year-old wheelhouse at the time. And good lord, look at that cast: Richard Dawson! The Village People! Chuck Mangione! Wayland Flowers and Madame!
And then, of course, there's added "bonuses" like Dawson's recurring bit with ill-fated Playmate Dorothy Stratten, and celebrity walk-ons like James Caan, Marjoe Gortner, Jim Brown, Ruth Buzzi, Robert Culp and Patty Hearst. Honestly, the only way they could have made this more quintessentially "1979" was to have Dave "The Cobra" Parker and the rest of the "We Are Family" Pirates snorting coke in the Playboy Mansion Grotto...
Speaking of "We Are Family," this TV special serves as not only a fascinating (as well as titillating and occasionally nauseating) time capsule from the, er, tail end of the 1970s — the commercials alone are worth the price of admission — but it also serves as something of a riposte to those pro- and anti-disco factions who would claim that July 1979's Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park was what "killed" disco music and culture.
Four months after that legendary/infamous event, disco was clearly still considered commercially potent enough for ABC to broadcast a roller disco special with the Village People as guest stars; at the same time, if this bloated, vapid and coked-up mess accurately reflects where disco culture was at (or at least how mainstream America was perceiving it) by late '79, it clearly would have croaked soon enough on its own, without any help from antagonistic (and opportunistic) rock DJs like Steve Dahl. I loved disco now, as I loved it then — but pop culture trends go in waves, and disco's wave had already crested by the time Disco Demolition kicked it in the skin-tight satin pants.
In any case, you can watch the whole mind-boggling thing here at the amazing Archive.Org site, or dig it in more bite-sized chunks via the following YouTube clips:
Rest in peace, Hef. No one can say you didn't enjoy your time on Earth.
I remember talking to a friend about Hüsker Dü's New Day Rising, shortly after that album came out. "I hear Hüsker Dü are doing POP SONGS now," he laughed, dismissively.
Well, yeah. New Day Rising was the album where Grant Hart's pop sensibilities really stepped up to the mic; not coincidentally, that's also the album where Hüsker Dü went from being a band I genuinely respected to a band I truly loved. New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig (which followed it just eight months later) were my 80s Rubber Soul and Revolver — two perfect records that seemed joined at the hip sonically and artistically, even though the growth of the guys who were making them was happening almost too fast to be fully captured by recording technology. I can't even calculate how much time I spent in the fall of 1985 playing both albums back-to-back in my college dorm room, either playing guitar along with them or just laying back and absorbing their brilliance.
Flip Your Wig's "Flexible Flyer" was one of those rare songs — like the Music Machine's "Talk Talk" or the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action" — where the first time I heard it, it truly felt like it was written FOR me, a massive missive sent directly from the same lonely spot in the cosmos that I hailed from. The music was anthemic, the lyrics were positive and philosophical, and Grant Hart sang them like he was Paul Stanley's stoned-out younger brother. It still stirs my soul today as much as it did in the fall of '85.
"If your heart is a flame burning brightly You'll have light and you'll never be cold And soon you will know that you just grow You're not growing old"
For reasons I can no longer recall — but which probably had at least something to do with my stubborn resistance to taking any sort of extra-curricular instruction in anything that I wasn't already deeply interested in — I got a late start on learning how to swim. My dad didn't sign my sister and I up for after-school swimming lessons at the Ann Arbor YM/YWCA until I was already ten years old, which meant starting at the "Tadpole" level along with kids who were four or five years younger than me.
It was incredibly humiliating. One time after class, while passing the main staircase at the "Y," I was spotted by a group of girls that I knew from my fifth grade class at Burns Park. "Hey, Dan," one of them called out from the upper landing. "What class are you taking?" Faced with the choice of admitting the awful truth, telling an easily debunked lie (my hair was obviously still wet, for one thing), or simply running wordlessly out of the building, I instinctively chose the third option.
I took my final "Y" swimming class in May 1978, just a week or two after I turned twelve. We had to pass a series of individual tests in order to graduate from the "Minnow" level — an achievement which meant that I could officially handle myself reasonably well in the deep end of any pool, if not exactly on the open ocean — so I had plenty of time to happily drift and daydream while the seven- and eight-year-olds in the class took turns demonstrating that they could tread water and float on their backs. As I glided slowly through the heavily chlorinated water, knowing I would never have to dive into that dreaded "Y" pool again, I repeated a mantra in my head in celebration: "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me Deacon Blues."
It seemed like I'd seen the Aja album, with its arresting cover image of a shadowy geisha, in the living room of every one of my dad's friends that spring. But it took me a while to connect it with the lush and languid "Deacon Blues," a song so far removed from what I thought of at the time as pop music that it didn't really register the first twenty or thirty times I'd heard it on the radio. Finally, my friend Abbot — during one of our many CKLW-soundtracked Nerf basketball shoot-arounds — called my attention to it. "You should like this song," he said. "They mention the Crimson Tide."
I zeroed in on the chorus, and realized he was right. I had no idea what the song was about — it seemed both forbiddingly adult and almost surrealistically nonsensical — but I loved the Crimson Tide reference. My grandfather had spent most of the 1970s in Tuscaloosa as the dean of the University of Alabama's School of Social Work, and in that time (and over the course of many summer and Christmas visits) I'd developed a fondness for Bama football that nearly rivaled my love for the U of M's Wolverines. Grandpa Fred even lived two or three doors down from Bear Bryant, Alabama's legendary coach, who we used to run into during evening walks around the neighborhood. I had no idea why Steely Dan (whoever he/it was) would name-check the Crimson Tide, but Abbot's assessment was correct — the mere fact that they did so was enough to make me like the song, and then the music slowly sucked me in from there.
Steely Dan's music was smooth, sumptuous, and seemed aimed at a much older demographic than the one I belonged to at the time. And yet, as the spring of 1978 blurred into the summer and I found myself really caring about popular music for the first time, their omnipresence on the AM dial became increasingly apparent to me. "Peg," "Josie" and "FM (No Static At All)" were all sizeable hits that year, but it also wasn't uncommon for a radio station to whip out "Do It Again" or "Reelin' in the Years," breakthrough hits for the band from '72 and '73, and songs that I now belatedly remembered as seemingly being on the car radio whenever we'd go for an ice cream run to the Washtenaw Dairy. But for some reason, I'd never heard their biggest hit, 1974's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," until one afternoon in July '78. My sister and I were out in Los Angeles, visiting my mom, and at that moment we were edging our way down Laurel Canyon in a VW Bug belonging to John, my mom's boyfriend. "Oh man, is that Steely Dan?" John cried, cranking the volume as the song's opening vamp came rolling through his dashboard speakers.
Indeed it was, and I was completely entranced — not just by the song's hypnotic groove, but by its words. Once again, the lyrics seemed to be way more "adult" than anything I was used to hearing, and they seemed to start somewhere in the middle of the story. "We heard you're leaving/That's okay." Who's leaving? And why? "We could stay inside and play games/I don't know." Like what, Yahtzee? I didn't know, either. But the lines "You tell yourself you're not my kind/But you don't even know your mind" resonated with me, even if only from the standpoint of having "liked" a girl or two in my sixth grade class who hadn't "liked" me back for reasons that they couldn't or wouldn't fully articulate. "And you could have a change of heart," Donald Fagen offered, hopefully. Oh yeah, I could definitely relate.
As much as I immediately loved the song — and at least kind of dug their other hits — it wasn't like I instantly declared myself a Steely Dan fan at that moment. The first time I ever heard Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" or ELO's "Sweet Talkin' Woman," I felt compelled to run out and buy those records as soon as I had enough money in my piggy bank. But Steely Dan's music seemed mysterious and oddly unapproachable; as with the ocean, these were waters I instinctively felt leery about swimming in. Plus, by this time I'd seen photos in the newspaper of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they both looked like some of the creepier inhabitants of the communal Santa Monica Victorian where my mom had lived for a few years in the mid-70s.
Between my insatiable hunger to learn and absorb as much as I could about music — an obsession that really kicked into high gear in the summer of '78, and hasn't really slowed since then — and my mile-wide cynical streak, I also quickly became suspicious about the stealthy ubiquitousness of Steely Dan's music. John, my mom's BF, was a big fan of jazz and blues (he'd previously done time as Taj Mahal's tour manager) so it made perfect sense that he would be attracted to Steely Dan's jazz-influenced sound. But I started to notice that, for many of the adults I interacted with at the time, the Aja LP served as a sort of totem of sophistication, something you had to have sitting out in your fern-shrouded, shag-carpeted living room if you wanted to be taken seriously as a person of taste circa 1978. And then there was stuff like Donny Osmond singing "Peg" during the 1979 Miss Universe pageant TV broadcast (yes, me and a couple of bored friends watched it on one hot summer night in Ann Arbor), which made the song seem like nothing more than mainstream pap.
Maybe this music was "adult," but was it adult in the soulless, acquisitive, middle-class American way that I'd already come to distrust? Hell, Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers had sung harmonies on the original recording of "Peg," and for someone whose tastes were rapidly veering towards hard rock, new wave and even punk, the Doobies were the epitome of lame. By the time Gaucho hit the charts in late 1980, I was off "The Dan" completely, writing the music off as pretentious, self-congratulatory corporate product, the sort of thing that primarily existed as background music for record industry glad-handers like Paul Simon's smarmy Annie Hall character to consume "the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian" to. Wasn't punk supposed to eradicate this kind of shit?
It would take me until the mid-90s to realize how utterly, comically wrong I had been about Steely Dan. I think my "change of heart" was due in part to relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles — whereupon I began to understand how many of their songs were about (or at least inspired by) being uptight, snarky East Coast (and at least half-Jewish) intellectuals adrift amid the decadence of 70s L.A., and how the experience both appalled and appealed to them. I also learned to appreciate how their sleek, hook-filled, impeccably-arranged music served as a Trojan horse for their twisted, sarcastic and decidedly transgressive lyrical worldview. And despite what I'd once perceived as an almost infuriating emotional remoteness in their work, I actually found myself taking refuge and comfort in "Any Major Dude" and (especially) "Any World That I'm Welcome To" during some very dark moments in my life.
There was also the belated realization — driven by articles like Alex Wilkinson's amazing Rolling Stone profile from 2000 — that Becker and Fagen were an incredibly unique, fascinating and (dryly) hilarious creative duo. The "Classic Album" documentary on the making of Aja went a long way towards fostering my appreciation of their work, as well; the meticulousness of their vision is both awe-inspiring and kind of comical, and the way they chuckled over their tormenting of Michael McDonald during the recording of "Peg" (starting at 6:20 in the clip below) just endeared them to me more.
Love 'em or hate 'em — and I have certainly done both in my time — there was no pop duo like Becker and Fagen. And now Becker's gone, which is of course very sad, though in retrospect it's kind of amazing that he actually lived this long (his Gaucho-era heroin habit nearly got the best of him), and that the formerly road-averse pair was able to make a spectacular comeback as a touring act during the last two decades.
Walter Becker leaves behind an incredible body of work, one which I (and so many others) continue to successfully plumb for new joys, and one whose uncompromising singularity of vision would be remarkable in any age. As they say in baseball, Becker took his hacks and didn't get cheated; and as any major (league) dude will tell you, you can't really ask for much more than that. Rest in funky peace, Walter.
Finally got a chance to watch Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch's Stooges documentary, this weekend. I genuinely learned some things (like how Iggy's wanton shirtlessness was inspired by Yul Brynner and other silver screen pharaohs of the 1950s), was annoyed by the repetition of certain footage and the omission or soft-pedaling of some favorite Stooges lore (the band's bloody '73 demise is only briefly mentioned, for example), but overall found the film incredibly entertaining, and it's totally sent me down a(nother) 60s/70s Michigan music rabbit hole.
Sure, there's plenty of things for diehard Stooges fans like myself to carp about, but I'm happy that the film officially exists and is commercially available, so that newcomers can enjoy it and learn about one of the mightiest, most influential bands to ever stalk a stage — as opposed to the MC5's True Testimonial doc, which was much better than this one but will never officially see the light of day thanks to an unfortunate tangle of legal wranglings.
My favorite thing from Gimme Danger, though? This photo of über-guitarist Ron Asheton hanging out at Ann Arbor's Nickels Arcade, which I'd never seen before. My family and I lived in Ann Arbor from mid-1967 to the end of 1978 (just a few blocks away from the MC5's Hill Street enclave, in fact), and during that period we must have walked through Nickels Arcade at least a thousand times, probably more. I often got my hair cut at the barber shop there, and my sister used to buy miniature glass animals from a little shop at the west end of the arcade, just to the left of where Ron is standing here.
It was a magical, otherworldly place for us, with its Beaux-Arts terra-cotta details and vaulted glass skylight that ran the entire length of the gallery. And learning that one of my all-time favorite guitarists hung out there as well, probably killing time while waiting for Iggy to get off work at the nearby Discount Records (where I would eventually buy my first 45s), makes it even more magical for me now.
Ever since the Christmas of 1974, when my Uncle John introduced me to the weird and wild wonders of his EC Comics collection, one of my favorite holiday pastimes has involved chilling out with a stack of old horror comics while listening to Christmas music. I fully understand that it might not be everyone's cup of eggnog — and I'm not even that much of a comic book collector, myself — but there's something about paging through a particularly choice issue of such gory, twisted 1950s classics as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear while listening to John Fahey's The New Possibility (or the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Christmas Album) that really puts me blissfully in the Christmas groove.
This year, though, I've been spending less time with my EC reprints from the 1990s (most of which I've read at least two dozen times by now) and more time with issues of Ghosts, a DC title that I read semi-regularly back in the 1970s. Sub-titled "True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural," Ghosts wasn't as well-written (or as gruesomely rendered) as its EC forebears; but the artwork was usually quite solid (even borderline psychedelic at times), and the stories were usually good for a scare or two — at least for a young horror fiend like myself. I've really been enjoying giving them another look, not least because of all the ads they include for Topps baseball cards, X-ray specs, novelty t-shirts, and war games from the Helen of Toy Company (Tank Trap! Task Force! Woods Edge!), all of which I vividly remember drooling over during my childhood.
I have no memory, however, of "Eyes From Another World," a two-page story from the July 1975 issue that recalls the rash of UFO sightings that occurred in the US during the years immediately following World War II. Though it's kind of an unremarkable piece in itself, it does include brief accounts of UFO sightings by such celebrities as Sammy Davis, Jr, Muhammad Ali, Arthur Godfrey and Buddy Rich. And the panels with Sammy and Buddy's flying saucer encounters are just too good not to share with you here...
Pretty cool, huh? Certainly a lot cooler than AMF Voit's nylon baseball bat, which is advertised on the back of the issue. I'm really glad nobody ever gave me one of those for Christmas — I would have been immediately laughed out of my local little league.
Anyway, I'm gonna get back to my comics. May you all have a relaxing, fun and (if you so choose) funky holiday season. Catch you in 2017.
The holiday season is once again upon us, and along with it the scramble to find the perfect gifts for the ones we love.
Well, if you've got a baseball fan on your Xmas list, why not get them a hardcover first-edition of my book Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 1976, autographed and personalized by the author himself?
That's right, folks — just send me $30 via PayPal (see link below), and I'll send you a copy of my critically-acclaimed journey into the heart of the Spirit of '76. The Big Red Machine, Billy Martin's Yankees, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Charlie Finley's fire sale, Oscar Gamble's haircut, Bill Veeck's wooden leg, the White Sox shorts, Phillies Fever, Ted Turner's Ostrich races, the first free agent re-entry draft — it's all here, along with Salem witches, Jimmy Carter, the nationwide Bicentennial celebration, the Ramones' first album, Frampton Comes Alive, Taxi Driver, Rocky and (of course) The Bad News Bears, along so many other crazy things that made 1976 such a memorable and important year, both for major league baseball and the USA as a whole.
The $30 covers shipping and handling (offer only applies to the continental US, so contact me for shipping rates if you're in Alaska, Hawaii or other countries); be sure to let me know your giftee's favorite 70s team or player when you're checking out via the PayPal link, and I will find a way to work that information into the signature.
I only have a limited amount of these hardcovers left, so act like Mickey "Mick the Quick" Rivers and snap 'em up while you can!
On a chilly Friday afternoon in February 1989, my friend Carl — whom I knew from WVKR, Vassar College's radio station — invited me to take a ride with him over the Mid-Hudson Bridge to New Paltz and do some record shopping. Carl said he knew of a little place near SUNY New Paltz that stocked a lot of cool Sixties records; and since "Peace, Love and Fuzztone," my WVKR show on Friday nights, was all about cool Sixties records, he was definitely speaking my language.
Twenty-seven years on, the name of that store has perhaps understandably slipped my mind, but I vividly remember what I bought there that day: An original pressing of Love's incredible Four Sail LP (which I'd never even seen before, and which in time would become my favorite Love LP), a really cool Big Beat compilation of US pop-psych called Baubles Vol 1 — Down to Middle Earth, and issue #6 of Kicks Magazine.
Truth be told, the third item was something of an afterthought. I'd seen earlier issues of Kicks around, but never picked one up — probably because I perceived the mag as being heavily Fifties-centric. Not that I had any problem with Fifties music, per se (I'd loved doo-wop, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Elvis since I was 12); it's just that, having spent much of my college years on a heavy garage and psychedelia kick, the very idea of pre-LSD music seemed kinda quaint to me. Of course, being a Bo Diddley fan, I should have known better than to judge a book (or a 'zine) by its cover...
Actually, it was the cover of Kicks #6 that convinced me to give the mag a shot. I had no idea who Ronnie Dawson, Arch Hall Jr., Sonny Burgess, the Rockin' R's, the Rumblers or Sparkle Moore were; but I definitely knew who Bobby Fuller was — I'd already spent many hours teaching myself "I Fought The Law" on guitar — and I'd heard that he'd died under some pretty weird circumstances. "The Bobby Fuller Story"? Sign me up!
Carl and I made it back to Poughkeepsie just in time for my radio show, so I didn't get a chance to dig into my new magazine until the next day, which I spent serving as a volunteer "extra" on a friend's student film. Having lots of downtime between shots, I devoured Miriam Linna's amazingly deep dig into Fuller's life and music, laughed my ass off at "Mr. Corned Beef Rising," Billy Miller's phony interview with Jim Morrison (who, according to the mag, was still alive and running Jim Morrisberg's Deli), marveled at the fact that they had a column ("Fish Fry") wherein Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators shared his favorite recipes, and generally tried to absorb all the incredible info packed into the issue's pages. Miriam and Billy were clearly tapped into something cooler than I'd ever imagined existed; this was no American Graffiti/Happy Days nostalgia-fest, but a window into an alternate universe where Esquerita was bigger than Little Richard, Arch Hall Jr. was an Academy Award-winning actor, and Andre Williams' greasy discography was far more compelling and life-affirming than anything Eighties MTV had to offer. I had to know more...
And I wasn't the only one, not by a long shot. When Billy died this past Sunday, leaving us behind after a brutal battle with multiple myeloma, kidney failure and diabetes, my Facebook feed was immediately filled with heartfelt tributes to the man, with many of my friends crediting him and his wife Miriam with changing their lives through the music that they tirelessly championed, sold and released via Kicks and their Norton Records mini-empire. Some of my friends knew him well on personal level, and I wish I could say the same thing — since, by all accounts, he was a truly dynamite cat. But even though I didn't really know him, even though our only real connection was via the U.S. postal service, I still feel compelled to testify to his awesomeness by remembering the mighty mark he made on my own musical tastes and listening habits.
I'd read an interview with Miriam and Billy in RE:Search's Incredibly Strange Music, Volume 1, where Billy mentioned the "Satisfaction Guaranteed Grab Bag" service that they offered through their Norton mail-order catalog — basically, you could tell them, "Here's fifty bucks — send me your craziest doo-wop 45s," or sleaziest instrumental 45s, or whatever, and they'd hook you up. So, in 1994, about a year after the interview was published, I included a letter with my latest Norton order (some Link Wray and surf music comps, if I recall correctly), asking if they still did the "grab bag" deal. "You bet," Billy wrote back to me. "Just let us know what you're in the mood for — we won't send you no crap!"
Off went a $100 check to Box 646 Cooper Station, NY, NY 10003, with instructions to send me a hundred bucks' worth of doo-wop and R&B 45s about drinking, eating and carrying on. A week or two later, I received a sweet stack o' wax that not only fit the bill to the proverbial T, but also blew my ever-lovin' mind and sent me down a Fifties R&B rabbit hole that I'm still enthusiastically exploring some two decades later. And I'm gonna "spin" some of 'em right now for you, in Billy's honor.
Amazing stuff, right? And Billy knew this kinda shit backwards and forwards, and made it one of his many life's missions to turn the rest of the world onto it. "Some people accuse us of being into nostalgia and being narrow-minded because we don't listen to the 'latest' music," he said in the Incredibly Strange Music interview, "but it's not nostalgia — I wish I'd heard all these obscure records when I was a little kid."
Indeed, the well from which he and Miriam drew this incredible music still seems almost bottomless... and amid the darkness and despair of this last week, this is the kind of stuff that's repeatedly lifted me out of my doldrums and made me feel alive and even happy again. I suspect it's because these records weren't made by superstars, but by real people — people who were struggling to make ends meet, who found their joy, release and meaning in the music they made. When Billy would rail against the likes of Sting and Duran Duran in the pages of Kicks, it wasn't just because he hated their music; it was because popular music as a whole had entirely lost touch with the magic that happens four or five kids from down the street walk into a cheap-ass recording studio and sing their hearts out into a single microphone.
My heart goes out to Miriam and all of Billy's family and close friends; I hope they can find some comfort in the fact that he brought so much joy and fun not just to their lives, but to people like me who barely knew him. Rest well, Billy; thanks again for all the kicks.
On Monday, August 8, I'll be doing my only Chicago-area book-signing for the paperback edition of Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 , in conjunction with a rare 35mm showing of one of the biggest film hits of 1976 (not to mention the greatest baseball film ever made): The Bad News Bears.
This joyous event will take place at Chicago's legendary Music Box Theater, located at 3733 N. Southport Ave. in Chicago. I will be co-hosting the event with WGN radio's Nick Digilio, and copies of Stars and Strikes will be available for sale in the lobby via those fine folks at The Book Cellar, my favorite local indie bookstore. Tickets for the screening are $12, or $9 if you're already a member. The actual screening begins at 7 pm, and will be followed by a discussion of the film led by Nick and myself.
If you've already read Stars and Strikes, then you know how much this film means to me; the one-two punch of The Bad News Bears and the sudden emergence of spectacular Tigers rookie Mark "The Bird" Fidrych went a long way towards making ten-year-old Dan transfer his obsession with war comics and G.I. Joe dolls to all things baseball-related. If it wasn't for the Bears and the Bird, my life might have taken a much different path, and I almost certainly wouldn't have written Stars and Strikes or Big Hair and Plastic Grass many years down the road. So it's a huge honor to be able to present this wonderful film — whose slyly subversive script still holds up remarkably well 40 years later — on a big screen.
There are no Cubs or White Sox games scheduled that night — so if you're in or near Chicago, I hope you'll come out and say hey. Buttermaker would have wanted it that way, man...
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.