Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Happenin' Thangs

If 2021 was any kind of normal year, Ron Blomberg and I would be doing in-person book events all over the place right now to promote The Captain & Me.

Alas, while this year has been a marked improvement over the utter shitshow that was 2020, things are still not "back to normal" enough for us to be making the scene in that time-honored way. I will, however, be joining the esteemed authors pictured above this Friday afternoon at 4 pm ET for a virtual panel as part of a series of events hosted by Denver, CO bookstore Tattered Cover in conjunction with this year's MLB All-Star Game. 

This event — which focuses on the many challenges involved with telling a ballplayer's story — is free to all, but you have to register in advance here to view it. Should be a lot of fun, though, so I hope you'll tune in for it. (And click here to check out the full list of the bookstore's ASG-related events.)

And speaking of tuning in... I spent much of this past spring working on a new documentary series for AXS TV called If These Walls Could Rock. Each episode explores the history and legacy of a particular live music venue; some world-famous, some obscure, but all incredibly fascinating. The debut episode, which premieres tonight, covers South Carolina's Old Brick Church — an early 19th century structure which now serves as a venue for acoustic shows, but was once the site of The Cainhoy Riot, an 1876 clash between Black residents of the era and white paramilitary forces who sought to suppress the local Black vote through violence and intimidation. (Hmmm... sound at all familiar?)

I served as the main writer on this particular episode, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I hope you'll give it a look if you have the chance; if you miss the premiere tonight, it will still be available through the channel for later viewing. (Whether or not you have access to AXS depends a lot on your cable set-up. But if you have a Roku, I can attest from personal experience that it's really easy to add AXS to your Roku channels free of charge.)

Here's the trailer for the Old Brick Church episode:

 

Uncle John, 1939-2021

John Padgett was the coolest.

Perhaps that’s all that really needs to be said. And perhaps John, who was never one to toot his own horn beyond the occasional posting of his artwork on Facebook, would prefer I leave it at that. But there is so much more I’d like to share about my favorite uncle, who left this world on Saturday at the age of 82. Finding the best words for the best uncle ever won’t be easy, but I’m gonna give it a shot…

John Padgett was many things, including a devoted husband, father and grandfather, an incredible cook, and a brilliant artist whose impressive and ever-evolving portfolio included pop art, op art, photorealist watercolors, Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblages, Xeroxed collages and spray-painted abstracts. He was a music lover with wide-ranging tastes (though his ear naturally gravitated towards anything based in blues, country or folk), a skillful guitar picker, and a soulful singer and songwriter. He was kind, sensitive, gentle, generous, and really funny in that low-key Tulsa-born way of his. And best of all, at least for me, John Padgett was my uncle. I’m lucky enough to have crossed paths with many mentors, angels and loyal pals in this lifetime; but if I had to pick the three men who truly shaped the person I am today, my father, my Grandpa Fred, and Uncle John would easily outpace the rest of the field.

I first met Uncle John in 1970, around the time he married Aunt Toni, my mom’s older sister. John and Toni came to visit us in Ann Arbor, and my most vivid memory from their stay is of standing with John outside the Food & Drug Mart on Packard and Stadium, and hearing him dryly note the preponderance of “Free John Now” flyers bedecking the store’s parking lot. John wasn’t at all like any of the adult men I’d encountered up to that point; I was used to gregarious gents like my dad and my grandfathers, crazy hippies like my mom’s friends, and sports-obsessed straight-arrows like most of my friends’ fathers. But John was quiet, calm. self-contained, and seemed most comfortable just standing back and taking everything in. He had a strong presence, and a definite twinkle in his eye, but he said very little. I was intrigued, and also a little intimidated.

I got to know Uncle John a little better over Christmas 1973, which my mom, sister and I spent at Toni and John’s Spanish-style duplex in L.A.’s Fairfax District. My two most vivid memories from that visit are of him playing John Fahey’s enchanting Christmas album The New Possibility over and over again, and of him introducing me to the mind-blowing world of EC Comics. Uncle John still had all the EC horror and war comics he’d bought back in the early 1950s — along with several copies from Mad magazine’s days — and he very generously let me page through as many of them as I wanted. Comics would never be the same for me after that, and no subsequent childhood visit to L.A. would be complete without me asking John to pull down his boxes of Vault of Horrors and Frontline Combats for another look. Uncle John was likewise extremely generous with his vast stock of art supplies, and allowed me to spend many hours trying to copy or expand upon the images I saw in his comic books.

It was clear to me even back then that Uncle John was a gifted artist, though I didn’t always understand what he was making or why he was making it. I was always especially drawn to his photorealist paintings, most of which depicted Craftsman or Spanish-style houses he’d spotted around Southern California. There was something simple yet wonderfully otherworldly about these images with their soft sunlit colors, the old cars parked in the foregrounds and voluminous palm trees caught in mid-sway in the backgrounds; in retrospect, these paintings of his really molded how this Midwestern kid saw Los Angeles. To this day, whenever I think of L.A., I immediately think of light stucco exterior walls, red clay roof tiles and cactus-studded front yards; and whenever I see a building with all of those attributes, I immediately think of my Uncle John.

It was also clear to me back then that Uncle John was on a different trip than any of the other adult men in my life. Though immensely talented at graphic design, by the mid-70s he’d bailed out of the advertising world and become what we called in those days “a househusband”. My aunt was able to support their family with her state government gig, so John stayed home with their kids, took care of all the cooking and housework, and concentrated on art and other creative projects in his spare time. It was an unorthodox arrangement for the era, but it worked well for them — and I think it subconsciously instilled in me the notion that devoting your life to love and creativity was just as legitimate as sticking to a standard “career path”.

Much as I’d always loved Uncle John, our relationship and friendship ascended to a new level in my late teens, when I learned to play guitar. Along with accompanying our family’s Christmas Eve carols, Uncle John and I would spend countless joy-filled hours together talking about music and trading guitar licks — I would play the Rolling Stones’ version of “Love in Vain,” and he would respond by showing me how to play the Robert Johnson original. This was around the time where I was becoming really obsessed with the music of the 1960s, and Uncle John (who had witnessed the S.F. and L.A. psychedelic booms firsthand) not only already knew most of the songs I’d learned to play, but often had colorful stories to tell about seeing those artists. (There’s a framed poster from Donovan’s 1967 Cow Palace gig on my office wall that was a gift from Uncle John, who’d pulled it off a wall somewhere in San Francisco and saved it rolled up in a tube for nearly 30 years before he gave it to me.)

Uncle John was immensely encouraging of both my guitar playing and my nascent attempts at songwriting; we even once tried writing a song together — the appropriately titled “Hell, I Don’t Know” — but I was too hung up in those days on getting the words absolutely perfect, and we never finished it. He also turned me on to (and let me tape) many fantastic records from his album collection, which included such crucial artists as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Champion Jack Dupree, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, The Incredible String Band, Tim Buckley, Bert Jansch, Dr. John and Leon Russell, to name just a few. He was also the person who introduced me to Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” a song which forever altered my view of the “Jewish Elvis” and sent me digging frantically for Neil’s old Bang Records 45s at thrift stores. And over Christmas ’87, he took me to Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood, so I could get a pair of cowboy boots at the same place the Flying Burrito Brothers got their Gilded Palace of Sin outfits…

In the summer of 1989, shortly before the photo I’ve posted here was taken, Uncle John came out to Chicago to spend a week with my mom and me. I had just graduated college, but instead of parlaying my degree into some kind of job with some kind of future I’d decided to jump into the deep end of rock and roll, forming Lava Sutra with my friends Jason Walker and Bob Samiljan. Though playing music was absolutely what I wanted to do at that point in my life, in the moments when the amps were off I had to admit that I was experiencing some heavy doubts about my choices; John, having just turned 50, was likewise in the process of sorting through and figuring out some stuff in his own life, and the two of us spent several afternoons smoking weed, drinking Carling Black Label, and having intense discussions about everything from Chet Flippo’s Hank Williams bio Your Cheating Heart to the vagaries of life, love and spirituality.

Uncle John’s visit was totally the tonic I needed; and shortly after he went back to L.A., I wrote a song inspired by our time together called “Uncle John,” which would become a staple of Lava Sutra’s set lists for the next few years, and eventually our first single. The song’s lyrics touched obliquely upon some of the things we’d discussed, but the chorus — “Uncle John, I think your art kicks ass/I think you kick ass too/May you keep on kicking ass until you no longer desire to do so” — was the most important part, a direct and heartfelt message of love and encouragement to someone who had so soulfully given me the same.

Speaking of that Chicago visit — my one attempt to take Uncle John out to “see some Chicago blues” was a total bust. We went to Wise Fools Pub to see former Howlin’ Wolf sideman Eddie Shaw, who proceed to lay on us a set of Blues Bros.-type party-rock so jive that Uncle John (a man not generally given to raising his voice above a quiet drawl) was actually moved to angrily yell “PLAY THE BLUES!” at the stage on several occasions. But after I moved to L.A. in August 1993, we made many far more enjoyable forays together into the world of live music. The very first gig we went to see together out there was Arthur Lee at the Palomino, a show which not only resulted in one of my first freelance pieces for the L.A. Reader, but also led to a lovely (no pun intended) friendship with the Baby Lemonade guys that continues to this day. Uncle John and I saw Jimmy Webb at the Roxy, Tony Joe White at Molly Malone’s, and so many other great gigs.

But best of all in some ways were the many Duane Jarvis gigs we attended around town. As soon as I heard D.J.’s Front Porch for the first time, I knew it would be right up Uncle John’s alley; but what I didn’t anticipate was how wonderfully he and Duane would hit it off. Duane absolutely adored Uncle John, and Uncle John became Duane’s biggest fan, often going to see his shows without me if I had another gig to catch — the entire D.J.’s Front Porch gang had pretty much adopted him as their own “Uncle John” by then — and dutifully informing (and recording it for) me whenever Duane made a live appearance on KCRW or another radio station. John and I even used my 4-track to cook up our own version of Duane’s “Not Young Anymore,” complete with Duane Eddy-esque guitar, which Duane seemed genuinely touched by. Duane moved to Nashville in the mid-90s, but we’d always go see him play and hang out with him whenever he came back to town. The last time I spoke to Duane, shortly before his untimely death in 2009, the first thing he wanted to know was, “How’s Uncle John?”

Sadly, the answer to that question wasn’t always a positive one over the last decade or two, as Uncle John was beset by some serious health problems including diverticulitis and various forms of cancer. But he always kept plugging along, Uncle John-style, making art and music when he felt well enough to do so, and continuously performing all kinds of magic in the kitchen. Just about every meal Uncle John cooked was a perfectly balanced masterpiece, but his holiday feasts were legendary. His stuffed mushrooms, which made an appearance every Thanksgiving and Christmas, were my favorite — tender, juicy and savory morsels of multi-layered, life-affirming flavor — and he was of course kind enough to show me how to make them.

When Katie and I went out to L.A. this past July to celebrate Uncle John’s 82^nd birthday, he was unfortunately no longer able to cook, play guitar or make art, and frankly wasn’t well enough to do much more than sit and watch TV. But he caught a burst of energy out of nowhere on the last day of our visit, and we got to spend some serious quality time together. In the morning, I interviewed him about art and music for a video documentary about his life that his son (my cousin) Whitney is making; and in the afternoon, John, Whitney and I hung out in their garage studio, going through those boxes of old EC comics together one more time. I knew, given his prognosis, that this was probably the last time I’d see him, but we didn’t talk about any of that stuff. Instead, we just hung out and bullshitted about Jack Davis, Graham “Ghastly” Ingels, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Johnny Craig and other great EC artists. In retrospect, I can’t think of a more appropriate or wonderful way to have spent a final hour together.

This Christmas, like I do every year, I’ll pull out my own EC comics and look at them while listening to Uncle John’s original copy of John Fahey’s The New Possibility, which he passed along to me about 25 years ago. And I’m sure I’ll cry, like I’m doing now, but I’ll also smile; because for fifty years, I was lucky enough to have the greatest, coolest, most righteous uncle ever, and that’s a gift I’ll always be thankful for.

Farewell, Uncle John. Thank you for everything. And whatever and wherever’s next for you, may you keep on kicking ass there, too.

 

I Loved It Here

I spent some of my favorite teenage summers and holidays at my dad's old loft apartment on 18th St. and Park Avenue South; not only was it a great base of operations for my exploratory solo excursions into Manhattan, but I also spent countless hours looking out the huge the living room windows across Union Square and daydreaming of all the possibilities that the future seemed to hold.

 

It's a place and period that I've been revisiting a lot in my mind during this pandemic, both because I miss NYC terribly and because I miss those optimistic youthful daydreams almost as much. And it's all taken musical shape in the latest home recording from my solo project The Corinthian Columns... Enjoy!

 

 

The Corinthian Columns · I Loved It Here

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

The Captain & Me: Out April 20!

It's hard to believe that The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson will be released a week from today. The passage of time has been so strangely blurred over the course of the last year, it seems like just yesterday that Ron Blomberg and I had our first phone conversation about collaborating on this project... but it also seems like about ten years ago.

In any case, I am incredibly excited to have the book finally coming out (via Triumph Books, who have done a marvelous job with everything from the cover art to promotion), and incredibly pleased with some of the reviews we've gotten for it so far — most notably in the pages of no less than the Wall Street Journal, where Ben Yagoda wrote that he "gobbled The Captain & Me up like a packet of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies." (Extra points for the period-appropriate pop cultural reference, Ben!)

So far, at least, the response makes me feel like Ron and I accomplished what we set out to do with this book — give people a better sense of who Thurman Munson was as a teammate and a pal, as well as shed additional light on what it was like to play for the New York Yankees during those promising-but-frustrating seasons in the first half of the 1970s. If you dig the Yankees, New York City, 1970s baseball, moustaches, delicatessens, mobsters, locker room japery, and heartwarming tales of friendship, I think you'll find much to enjoy herein. And for those of you who have asked if I was aware that The Captain & Me shares a title with a Doobie Brothers album, I was indeed; in fact, the Doobies were one of Thurman's favorite bands, which is something we get into in the book.

In a normal world, Ron and I would be up in NYC next week to do in-person signing events. While we still hope to be able to do some later this spring and summer, the sad fact is that it would be difficult/irresponsible to put on such events while the pandemic is still raging. So in the meantime, we've got a virtual Zoom event happening on April 21 with Bookends in New Jersey; Ron and I will be talking about the book, and all "attendees" will receive a copy of it with Ron's signature. Ron's a great talker, and it should be a lot of fun.

If you would like a copy of the book with my signature on it, the best way to do that at this point would be to buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Bookshop, or your local bookseller, and then send it to me with a SASE so I can sign it and get it back to you. Message me via the email link on this blog, and I'll let you know where to send it.

As always, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged my writing over the years — especially all of you who bought Big Hair & Plastic Grass when it first came out, thus propelling me on this amazing journey. I hope our paths will cross again, sooner than later.

 

The Hammer and the Jewish Elvis

 

Hank Aaron hitting home run number 715 is my first vivid baseball memory. Before that, baseball was always something that my dad had going on the TV while I was busy playing GI Joe or reading Mad Magazine or building models or drawing comics. Sports in general wasn't my thing in those early elementary school days.

 

But when the 1974 baseball season was about to begin, with Hank all but certain to break the Babe's home run record in the first week or two of April, my second grade teacher Mrs. Crippen brought the topic up for class discussion, and impressed upon us the sense that history was about to be made. I knew what a legend Babe Ruth was — after all, there was a gigantic, gilt framed photo of him hanging on the wall of Bimbo's, our favorite Ann Arbor pizza parlor — and even though I didn't understand much about baseball yet, I didn't mind when my dad made us watch Monday Night Baseball on April 5 instead of The Rookies, which was what I usually watched on Monday evenings. And I remember getting chills when Hank actually hit the record-breaker out of the park, which thankfully happened before my 9 pm bedtime.

 

A few weeks later, my dad had to go to Atlanta for a social work convention that my grandfather was also attending, and he took my sister and me with him so we could hang out with our grandparents. My two most vivid memories of that trip are of getting absolutely tanked on Mountain Dew while watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on the TV in my grandparents' hotel room, and of my grandfather driving us by Fulton County Stadium so I could see where Hank had hit his record-breaking homer. Unfortunately, the Braves were on a road trip at the time; so instead of spending the evening at the ballpark, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Underground Atlanta, a now-long-vanished tourist attraction that managed to be both strange and strangely underwhelming.

 

 

It feels very weird to me that Hank's gone now, even though he had a long, full, heroic and rewarding life. His figure has always towered over baseball, or at least my perception of it, even though I never saw him play in person. I never met or interviewed him, either; and as I said to a friend the other day, I don't know what I could have possibly said to him had our paths ever crossed. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon in person — whatever comes to your lips will inevitably sound lame and insufficient. 

 

My one great Hank Aaron story is actually a Neil Diamond story, and it didn't actually happen to me. In fact, it may not even be true, but it's too good not to share. It was told to me in the early 90s by a guy named David, who was a regular customer at See Hear, the record store I worked at in Chicago from 1989 to 1993...

 

 

In 1989, David was living in Atlanta, and a friend of his who was working as Neil Diamond's costume (or hair or makeup) person invited him to come and hang out backstage when Neil came to town and played the Omni. David was a friendly and easy-going guy, the kind of person you felt like you'd known forever the first time you met him, and Neil apparently took an immediate liking to him when they were introduced. After giving David a personal tour of his wardrobe and pointing out some of his favorite stage outfits, Neil invited David to join him, his band and crew for dinner, which was being catered by a local restaurant of note.

 

David happily accepted the invitation, and enjoyed the dinner immensely — at least up until the point when Neil turned to David and asked him, "David, how come there aren't more black people at my concerts?" 

 

David just about choked on his food. For one thing, what a question! For another, David was just some white, Jewish dude from Georgia. "Why the hell is Neil even asking me this?" he thought to himself.

 

He chewed on the question — and its proper response — for a minute before answering. "No offense, Neil," he said, "but I just don't think black people like your music very much."

 

Neil, to his credit, did not act at all offended; he merely seemed mystified. "But why not?" he asked David, completely straight-faced. "I'm a SOUL singer!"

 

Flash forward to that night's show: David takes his seat, which — thanks to the hookup from his friend — is located right in the first couple of rows. He turns back to take in the rest of the arena, as one does in such situations, and immediately notices (much to his great surprise) that Hank Aaron and his wife are sitting directly behind him. David tries to play it cool; as naturally garrulous as he is, even he can't think of a way to break the ice and strike up a conversation with the legendary Home Run King. Still, he can't help himself from looking back from time to time throughout the evening to see what Hank is up to — and sure enough, Hank is genuinely digging the show, knows the words to all the songs, etc.

 

After the show, David goes backstage to say goodbye to his friend, and winds up passing Neil in the hallway.

 

"Hey Neil!" he shouts after him. "Hank Aaron was in the audience tonight!"

 

Neil stops in his tracks, punches the air and yells "YES!!!"

 

***

 

Oh, and speaking of baseball and Jewish guys from Georgia, my book with Ron Blomberg — The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson — will be released via Triumph Books on April 20, and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.

Give The Gift Of Stompbox!

Yeah, it's been a rough year for most of us, with good news often in short supply. Happily, one of the big projects I've been working on came to fruition in 2020: Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World's Greatest Guitarists, has now been officially released. Co-edited by James Rotondi and myself, and featuring the stunning photographs of Eilon Paz and written contributions from an impressive variety of musicians, music journalists and pedal aficionados, Stompbox is a deep dive into the culture and history of guitar effects pedals, exploring the many reasons and ways that guitarists (and other musicians) use them. 

Stompbox features effects used by some of my personal favorite guitarists of all time, including Jimi Hendrix, Ernie Isley, Davie Allan, Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson — but it covers a wide stylistic spectrum which includes everyone from Tom Morello and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien (who wrote the book's foreword!) to Jack White and Dimebag Darrell. If you love guitar pedals and/or are fascinated by how gear plays into the creative process, this is a book you can get lost in for hours. But hey, don't just trust me on this — check out the sweet write-up the book recently received from WNET's ALL ARTS!

But wait, there's more! In the process of putting Stompbox together, Eilon and I began to come in contact with pedal aficionados whose collections contained some mind-glowingly rare and cool effects; though not specifically used by legendary guitarists, they definitely deserved to be showcased in a book of their own. Thus was born Vintage & Rarities: 333 Cool, Crazy and Hard to Find Guitar Pedals, which is available in a limited first edition run by itself, but can also be purchased in tandem with Stompbox as part of the slipcovered "Stompbox Brick" (so called because it's truly heavy on a variety of levels). If you have a guitar player on your Christmas list — or you're a guitar player who wants to give yourself a nice present (c'mon, you deserve it) — you really can't go wrong with either (or both) of these books!

And while you're at it, scroll down to the bottom of the Stompbox Shop page to enter The Stompbox Motherlode Giveaway, which includes pedals from JHS Pedals, Keeley Electronics, Death By Audio, Earthquaker Devices, Electro-Harmonix, AnalogMan, Walrus Audio, Strymon, Fairfield Circuitry, Wampler, Thorpy FX, Chase Bliss Audio, MXR, and Dunlop, as well as a yearly All-Access guitar lesson subscription from Trufire. The winner will be drawn on December 30, so be sure to enter before then. (And follow the Stompbox Instagram account for more opportunities to enter, as well as to see cool excerpts and outtakes from the books.)

Hope you're all staying safe and taking care of yourselves during these dark times. Hopefully we can all rock together again once summer rolls around!

 

 

 

Skateaway

December is the darkest month.

This is inarguably true from a literal standpoint (according to science, which the majority of us still believe in, these are unquestionably the shortest days of the year), but there's a metaphorical or even metaphysical aspect to December's darkness, as well. Sometime when I was around 11 or 12, I began to suspect that the bright, festive lights of Christmas and Hanukkah were not just lit in celebration of the holiday season, but also to keep something ominous at bay — much in the way that a campfire is lit not just for warmth, but also to ward off any fearsome creatures that may be silently lurking in the shadows.

This suspicion first really took shape for me on December 3, 1979, when 11 concertgoers were trampled to death while trying to see The Who at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Before that infamous incident, music had always seemed pure and magical to me; I probably couldn't have articulated it as such at the time, but I essentially saw music as a transfer of positive energy from performer to listener that elevated both. The only times I'd vaguely (if at all) sensed that there were any darker forces embedded in or around it were whenever I heard "death songs" like Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep" or Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" on LA's oldies station KRLA, or imagined I'd picked up a whiff of something spookily portentous in the songs Buddy Holly recorded shortly before his plane went down in Clear Lake, Iowa. But that stuff was all from an era long gone; the immediacy of The Who concert tragedy, and the knowledge that these kids (who could have easily been me, my friends, or their older siblings) died while trying to experience what was supposed to be a joyful communal experience, seriously freaked me out. And that this horrific event had happened just three weeks before Christmas ("The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!") forever disabused me of the naive notion that music or the holidays were somehow magically impervious to the awful intrusions of real life.

Still, there was so much positive and exciting stuff happening in my life that December, the unsettled feelings I experienced in the wake of The Who tragedy didn't linger long. My mom, sister and I were gearing up to move from L.A. to Chicago at the end of the month, which was thrilling in itself; but on our way to the Windy City, my sister and I would take a holiday detour to New York City, where we would spend Christmas with our dad and then-stepmother. I had been born in NYC, but since we'd moved to Ann Arbor when I was just a little over a year old, I had never consciously experienced the wonder of the Big Apple during the Holidays — and holy moly, did it ever deliver.

(Summer 1979 photo of Max's Kansas City, taken by Buzzcocks drummer John Maher)

My memories of Xmas '79 play back like a montage of stereotypical romantic "Christmas in NYC" images — attending the Rockettes' Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, watching the ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center rink, buying roasted chestnuts from a vendor on Fifth Avenue, checking out the Christmas window displays at Macy's and Lord & Taylor — mixed with even richer, more life-affirming experiences. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing for the first time, fully opened my eyes to the beauty and grandeur of the city's 1920s and 1930s architecture (Was that a Babylonian frieze atop the Fred F. French Building?!?), enjoyed the city's wealth of incredible radio stations and record stores, and learned about Max's Kansas City, which was located kitty-corner across Park Avenue South from my dad's apartment building. I had read a little about punk music, and was already digging some bands classified as "new wave" — Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s — but hadn't yet felt remotely connected to any of it. But from my nocturnal perch in the living room window of my dad's south-facing eleventh-floor loft, I could watch the local scenesters coming and going from this legendary NYC nightclub, and feel like I was somehow part of the action, even if I was way too young to actually get inside.

I'd visited NYC a few times before, but my decades-long love affair with Manhattan really began during that trip; in retrospect, it's not too much of a stretch to say that a large part of the person I am today was forever molded by the six or seven amazing days I spent there that Christmas.

We went back to NYC for Christmas 1980, but the vibe and experience was entirely different. December's darkness had again fallen brutally hard, this time via John Lennon's assassination in front of the Dakota. It was horrifying enough that Lennon had been killed, and that his artistic light had been cruelly snuffed out just when he was beginning to let it shine again; but the fact that it happened in the city that he'd called home for the better part of a decade, which both embraced him as one of its own and — because he was one of its own — acted like it was no big fuckin' deal that he and Yoko could occasionally be seen around town, seemed to have genuinely shaken the Big Apple to its core. (Yeah, sorry about the pun, I know...) This New York Daily News headline really sums it up: It's not just John Lennon Slain, but John Lennon Slain Here. New Yorkers took that shit personally.

I could feel the shift in NYC's mood from the previous December almost as soon as we landed at JFK. Whereas the energy of Xmas '79 was very much the glitzy, disco-fied giddiness of a city still very much on the defiant rebound four years after President Ford had told it to drop dead, NYC circa Xmas '80 felt like a gigantic, barely-stifled sob. We made the rounds again to all the traditionally festive places, but there didn't seem to be much to actually celebrate; Ronald Reagan had been elected six weeks earlier, John Lennon was dead, and even this fourteen year-old could sense that an era was ending, and things were about to take a serious turn for the worse. It seemed like everywhere I went, every radio station I dialed in, was playing John and Yoko/Plastic Ono Band's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a song of hope that now felt like a funeral dirge; and each time its kiddie chorus rang out, that choked sob of the city seemed poised to spill over into a gushing rush of heartbroken tears.

As I always did back then, I turned to the radio for escape, for deliverance from the gloom — though this time, with my station-changing hand perpetually poised to act in case of yet another spin of "Happy Xmas". There was one song in regular rotation on WPLJ which kind of snuck up on me; a song so low-key, I may not have even noticed it the first few times I heard it. It was "Skateaway," a single from Making Movies, the third and latest album from Dire Straits. I had liked "Sultans of Swing" during its hit run in late 1978 and early 1979, but I wasn't exactly a Dire Straits fan (in fact, I was completely unaware at the time of the existence of Communiqué, the band's second album). "Skateaway" changed that.

I didn't know that the song and album had been produced by Jimmy Iovine, who'd been behind the board for several of my favorite records from the last three years (including Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes, and Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Up Escalator), or that Mark Knopfler had been widely hailed as a new guitar hero. For the moment, all that mattered was the song's slinky groove, its clearly NYC-derived images of a rollerskating girl "slipping and a-sliding" her way through the city's traffic, and the way its music and lyrics gradually built to a spiritual celebration of the enchanting lure of urban life and the transcendent power of song.

Listening to "Skateaway" on headphones now, I'm struck by what a strange beast it is. With its tossed-off shuffles and last-minute fills, Pick Withers' drumming is wonderfully idiosyncratic in a way "they" haven't allowed rock drummers to be for decades, but the echo placed on his drums sounds unnecessary (and at times maybe even a little "off"). Aside from Knopfler's soaring single-note accents during the chorus (and his volume swells during the extended outro), Springsteen keyboardist Roy Bittan seems to carry most of the melodic weight of the song, while the admittedly impressive chicken-picking that Knopfler performs during the verses sometimes almost seems to have wandered into the wrong song. Vocally, Knopfler seems like he's laconically talk-singing a la Bob Dylan or J.J. Cale, but upon closer listens it becomes clear how much effort (and variations in tone and energy) he's putting into his performance. But heard all together through the half-dollar-sized mono speaker of my stepmother's radio/cassette player, it cohered into something spellbinding, evocative and irresistibly transportive. And more importantly, "Skateaway" allowed me to glimpse a little light amid the darkness I felt that December.

The song has been in my head again a lot lately, even soundtracking some of my dreams. I suspect it has something to do with this time of year, and the knowledge that so many of my friends — and so many people in general — are badly struggling right now. The appalling corruption of this current Presidential administration (and the equally appalling behavior of its staunchest supporters) would be tough enough to swallow under any circumstances, but that's obviously only part of the equation. So many people I know are wondering if it's all going to be downhill from here with their own lives, this country, or our civilization in general. Some are wondering if they'll ever work again; others if they or certain loved ones will even be alive to see next Christmas. I know that those kind of questions, never exactly easy to bear, become especially heavy during the darkness of December; and I certainly have no answers. All I have is a Christmas wish, which is that they (and you) will be able to find some daily comfort and joy amid the darkness — even if it's just via a song that, for a few minutes at least, will let you skate away. That's all.

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.

Saying Goodbye: R.I.P., Kim Shattuck

The Muffs were one of the very first bands I saw after moving to L.A. in August 1993, and I've long lost count of how many times I saw them after that. (I took this photo of Kim Shattuck during their appearance at the 2006 Tiki-Invasion at the Mission Drive-In Theatre in Montclair, CA.) They never failed to deliver an outstanding show, and the musical (and comedic) interplay between Kim and bassist/co-conspirator Ronnie Barnett was absolutely unforgettable. I can't remember watching two people enjoy playing together as much as they did; onstage, as well as in interviews, they were truly the Burns and Allen of punk rock and roll.

The Muffs put out three great albums for Reprise back in the Nineties, but I always felt that neither the record company nor the mainstream rock press had any real idea of what to do with them. Kim was an amazing songwriter, singer and performer, but she had zero interest in comporting herself in any way that might garner her band additional attention. She didn't make controversial socio-political statements, didn't play the sex kitten, didn't pick fights in public (except with Ronnie onstage, or with any creep in the audience foolish enough to try and look up her dress), and didn't engage in any sort of copy-generating car-crash behavior. She simply wrote the songs she wanted to write, dressed like she wanted to dress, beat the living shit out of that ugly-beautiful Gretsch guitar, and screamed that window-shattering scream whenever she felt like it. If you got it, great; if not, then too bad for you.

Kim was a completely genuine human being, a true force of nature, and easily one of the funniest people I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing. She was also a devoted Dodgers fan, so when Jason Dummeldinger and I were initially conceptualizing The Baseball Furies documentary, we both put her and Ronnie at the top of our L.A. "wants," knowing that the two of them together would produce some true video gold. Unfortunately, it never came to pass, due to Kim's illness; that such an avid baseball fan would be taken down by Lou Gehrig's Disease is a sick irony, indeed.

Rock in Peace, Kim. You kicked some serious ass, and did it without compromise, and those of us who witnessed it firsthand know how lucky we were to do so. The world will be a considerably less tuneful and joyous place without you in it. My heart goes out to your family, bandmates and friends.

My favorite Muffs song? So many to choose from, but this one's the one that first hooked me:

Just What I Needed: RIP, Ric Ocasek

(1978 photo by George Porcari)

It's kind of strange, considering how ubiquitous the Cars became on the AM and FM dials, that I somehow went the entire summer of 1978 without having any idea of what they actually sounded like. I saw the cover of their first album everywhere that summer — on billboards, in magazine ads, at Tower Records on Sunset Blvd — but both the cover image and the band's name were simply too generic to give me any real idea of what they were about. And even though Wikipedia now tells me that "Just What I Needed" was released as a single at the end of May '78, I swear I never heard it played on any of the AM stations (mostly KRLA and KHJ) I was glued to.

My first exposure to the song finally came that September, after I got back to Ann Arbor — during a junior high assembly, of all things. My fellow seventh graders and I had been herded into the gym to watch a performance by a guy calling himself "Crazy George," who in retrospect was kind of a cross between a motivational speaker and a watermelon-less Gallagher. Crazy George's first order of business that morning was to dribble a gigantic basketball (we're talking, like, five feet in diameter) up and down the basketball court as his cassette player blared out what sounded like the coolest song I'd ever heard. I turned to the girl next to me, and asked her if she knew what it was. "DUHHHH," she sneered, severely annoyed at having to be seen speaking to me in public. "It's 'Just What I Needed' by the Cars!"

Though that "DUHHHH" was clearly intended to sting, I was too busy connecting the dots in my head — and grooving to the song — to care. "So that's what The Cars sound like!" I thought, as I began mentally calculating when the next convergence of free time and my weekly allowance would enable me to stroll down to Discount Records and purchase a copy of the single. I remember very little else of Crazy George's performance, but I will never forget that moment.

The timing, as is so often the case with such musical epiphanies, was perfect. I would change schools four times between the ages of twelve and fifteen, but the transition from sixth grade to seventh was the toughest. I had gone from the liberal and progressive Burns Park Elementary, where the teachers seemed to actually care about their students — and where it was actually considered cool to be one of the smart kids — to Tappan Junior High School, a cold and indifferent institution where the teachers all seemed burned out and the jocks ruled the social roost. Tappan was less than a mile from Burns Park, but it seemed like an entirely different world, a dumbed-down linoleum jungle which I was woefully ill-prepared to deal with. While my more athletically-talented friends gravitated smoothly into the popular cliques, I found myself consigned to "brain" status, which basically meant that I had to keep my head down in class and in the hallways, or risk being the target of verbal (and occasionally physical) abuse from the popular kids. (To their credit, my now-popular Burns Park friends didn't disown me, and we still shared tables in the cafeteria and hung out on the weekends; on the other hand, they didn't exactly step in whenever one of their new pals decided to make fun of my adolescent croak, or my 80-pound weakling physique.)

As if the situation wasn't already alienating enough, I'd undergone an intensive musical self-education course during the summer that resulted in isolating me even further. I'd left Ann Arbor that June as just another AM radio kid who was heavy into the Bee Gees, ABBA and ELO; and while I still dug (and still dig) that stuff, the combination of KRLA's oldies-heavy programming and a screening of The Buddy Holly Story had opened up a whole new world of music to me while I was staying with my mom and aunt that summer. I returned to Ann Arbor that fall completely besotted with Buddy, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon and Elvis Presley, only to find that my schoolmates had all spent their summers deeply immersed in the Grease soundtrack. No school field trip would now be complete without everyone on the bus singing "You're the One That I Want" or "Greased Lightning" or some other shitty faux-Fifties song from the film; everyone except me, that is — I just sat there quietly and fumed, wondering how I'd ended up in this hell.

But when I heard "Just What I Needed" in the gym that morning, something immediately clicked for me. So much about the song sounded "state of the art" — the playful synthesizers, the detached lead vocal, the massed harmonies, the clockwork propulsiveness of the instruments — but there was also something about it that seemed to hearken directly back to the straightforward, guitar-driven pop of Buddy Holly and the early Beach Boys. I would learn much, much later that Cars leader Ric Ocasek — who wrote the song but did not sing it — had been a major Buddy Holly fan in his youth, but my ears and gut had already picked up on the connection. The song seemed smart, too; not that the lyrics were particularly complicated, but I perceived an unabashed intelligence behind their construction which was immediately appealing... and, amid the aggressively anti-intellectual atmosphere of my junior high, remarkably comforting.

In retrospect, I believe "Just What I Needed" was probably the first New Wave song I ever heard; it would be another month before I saw Devo perform on Saturday Night Live, and another couple of months after that before I heard Blondie's "Heart of Glass". I would go all-in on New Wave in 1979, but the Cars definitely opened that door for me. Still, as much as I loved "Just What I Needed," the Cars would never really become my band, in the way that Blondie or the Kinks or the Who or Graham Parker and the Rumour or Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band would all become in the next few years. I've always responded to emotion in music, that visceral sense of commitment, that palpable feeling of "I'm singing this song because I have to," and the Cars were way too emotionally distant to resonate with me on that level. But I always liked them, always admired their hook-filled mini-masterpieces, and always rooted for their success, even when Mutt Lange's over-production of Heartbeat City threatened to drain their music of its geeky charm.

Much has already been written in the last 24 hours about Ric Ocasek's brilliance as a songwriter, his innate ability to distill such edgy influences as the Velvets, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Suicide into something you could crank at a Midwestern keg party without risk of being beaten up, and his willingness to use his fame and fortune to lift up deserving but lesser-known artists. (Suicide, for instance, whom I'd never heard of until he talked them up in this 1980 Rolling Stone cover story.) That the Cars were a quintet of enormously talented (and enormously diverse) individuals is also well-known, so I won't bother going into that here. But one thing rarely mentioned about Ric Ocasek was his impeccable style.

Six-four, rail-thin, New Wave mulleted, cheeks pointed inward like he'd just finished sucking the juice from a particularly tart lime, Ric was one unique-looking dude, and definitely not your boiler-plate version of a Seventies rock star. But thanks in part to Cars drummer David Robinson, who also served as the band's stylist in their early years, Ric found a way to make that unique look work for him. I spent high school completely obsessed by his photo on the back of Candy-O, that combination of futuristic sunglasses, two-tone James Dean jacket (with padded shoulders?!?) and loosely-knotted black-and-silver necktie. Sometime in the early Eighties, I read an article on the Cars (I unfortunately forget the author or publication) that described them as an "Art Deco rock band," a description which I absolutely loved. It made perfect sense: Not only was the band's music sleek and shiny, with sumptuous curves and a limited-but-choice chromatic palette, but their look (especially Ric's) was similarly elegant. And, unlike most rockers of the day, you knew that Ric and the boys actually knew what "Art Deco" meant...

While I never wanted to look like Ric Ocasek (which, given my rounded Jewish-Italian features and considerably shorter height, would have been an impossibility to begin with), I was definitely inspired by his style. I spent countless teenage hours combing through Amvets and other Chicago-area thrift stores, trying in vain to find a tie that looked like Ric's on Candy-O, to no avail; but in doing so, I found a lot of other cool clothes, and developed my own sense of style in the process. Much as I loved and admired the Jam's mod revival look, Elvis Costello's Oxfam chic, and Bryan Ferry's tux jackets, it was Ric who showed me that you could blend fashion eras and design elements to create something of your own.

I only interviewed Ric once, about twenty years ago, when I was doing the liner notes for a Cars collection that Rhino put out. (Or may not have ever put out, since I can't find it on Discogs. They did pay me, though!) I really wanted to tell him how much "Just What I Needed" had comforted me during a lonely moment of my adolescence, or how much his unique sartorial blend gave me something to grab for (to quote one of his best solo tracks) when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present myself to the world, but I kept it professional and Cars-centric. I did find, however, that he was incredibly friendly and kind, and also immensely self-effacing about the Cars' recorded legacy. At one point, when I asked whether it was he or bassist Ben Orr singing lead vocals on a particular song, he replied, "The songs with the good singing? That's always Ben."

And now both Ric and Ben are gone. But they were indeed just what I needed, just when I needed them. RIP, RIC