Yes, 2021 was a challenging shitshow in so many respects, filled with stress and loss and portents of doom... But as I rang in the New Year watching old music videos with Mrs. Epstein and the above-pictured Otis and Angus, I had the opportunity to reflect upon all the good stuff that happened to me this past year.
Thanks to the Covid vaccines, I was able to see my parents, sister, aunts and cousins for the first time in nearly two years, and I was able to go back to LA for the first time since 2018 to spend some precious hours with my beloved uncle John Padgett before he left this earthly realm. As 2020 came to a close, I wasn't sure I would be able to see any of these folks in the coming year, so 2021 was a real winner in that respect. Thank you, science...
Additionally, I got to hang out with some really dear friends during my visits to LA and NYC, as well as a few here in NC — like over at Ziggy's Refuge — something that was likewise pretty much out of the question in 2020. Here's to seeing all y'all (and many more of my wonderful pals) again in 2022...
Oh yeah — The Captain & Me, my collaboration with Ron Blomberg about his beautiful friendship with Thurman Munson, came out in April and made it all the way to the #1 spot on Amazon's Baseball Books chart at one point. Huge thanks to everyone who read it, reviewed it, bought it and enjoyed it. Yes, it was disappointing and frustrating to not be able to promote it with a real book tour and in-person signing events; but hey, the book's coming out in paperback this May via Triumph Books, so maybe we'll have a chance to "do it right" this time.
I'd also like to thank all my editors and colleagues who assigned or hooked me up with work this past year. Freelancing is always a rollercoaster ride, but I got to do some really fun and satisfying stuff in 2021, ranging from writing three episodes of AXS-TV's "If These Walls Could Rock" to interviewing the great Sérgio Mendes for FLOOD magazine to having a marathon three-hour chat with the ever-voluble Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet for Revolver. Special thanks to Adam Langer, who has been my editor in various incarnations going back to my freshman year in college, and who trusted me to write about everything from the Marx Brothers to T.Rex to Jaws for him at the Forward this past year.
I made it through the painful horror of a kidney stone and dodged a bullet on a prostate cancer scare — both of which caused me to change my diet for the better. Speaking of food, Mrs. Epstein says I really took it to the next level with my cooking this past year, and I'm hoping to expand my repertoire even further this next one, beginning with today's shrimp-and-veggie sausage gumbo.
I got back — gingerly dipping a toe at first, and then diving in headlong — into making, writing and recording music in 2021, finally laying waste to a creativity/confidence block that had dogged me for the entire 21st century. I even formed a one-man "band," dubbed The Corinthian Columns in a nod to my four-decade fascination with classical architecture, and put several tracks up on Bandcamp with more to come. (And thanks again to everyone who dug and downloaded "Jingle Jangle Christmas"!)
Speaking of music... while watching old favorites last night from The Records to The Jam to Dave Edmunds to KISS to Iron Maiden to, well, Triumph, I started thinking about who I was back in the late 70s/early 80s when I first saw those videos. I don't think I could have even imagined then what my life would be like in my mid-50s, but if you'd told 14 year-old me that I'd be living in a cute little house with a beautiful and hilarious wife and three adorable cats, and that my work would revolve around writing, music and baseball... well, I would have had plenty of questions for you, but I'd ultimately be pretty stoked about the prospect.
So yeah, I'm pretty stoked on the prospect of being able to spend another year in this existence, even with all the massive challenges we face as a people and a planet. As my friend Jeremy Scott (whose band The Toy Trucks delivered my favorite track of 2021, a cover of The Corvettes’ appropriately-titled "Beware of Time") sagely noted this morning, this next year can be better than the last one, "but you gotta want it, not hope for it. Work is required." But I'm making room for hope, too — as my father told me in an email last night, "Hope is the only viable option and love the only route to finding hope. Laughter is good too."
Wishing all of you fine folks unlimited hope, love and laughter in 2022. Don't waste it.
2021 certainly brought its share of frustration, disappointment and tragedy, but one of this year's big positives for me was that — after a lyrical writer's block of two decades — I started writing (and finishing, and recording) songs again.
In fact, I actually wrote a Christmas song, which is now available for your listening enjoyment on Bandcamp, along with the other songs I recorded this year under the "nom de rock" of The Corinthian Columns.
Happy Holidays to all y'all, and I hope my "Jingle Jangle Christmas" brings you a little joy and cheer this week.
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 82nd 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 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!
“I’m the only guy in the world who could throw a ball through a car wash and never get it wet," James Rodney Richard used to say in jest, though more than a few hitters who faced him would probably tell you it was the truth. As my pal Lenny Randle, who was a teammate of J.R.'s at ASU and faced him 19 times in the majors (hitting only .167, but only striking out once, which I suppose was something of a moral victory) once said of him, "He starts out throwing Alka Seltzers, and ends up throwing Anacins."
From 1976 to 1980 — the most intense years of my early baseball fandom — there was no pitcher as intimidating as J.R. Richard. He stood six-foot-eight, regularly threw around 100 mph, and (even once he sorted out the control issues that caused him to lead the NL in walks in two different seasons) was always wild enough to keep batters from even thinking about getting comfy at the plate. If you ever got to see him pitch in person, you've probably never forgotten the experience; it was not at all unusual to see him fan 12-15 batters in a start.
J.R. seemed on a direct path to Cooperstown, but a series of strokes essentially ended his career at the age of 30 — strokes that might have been prevented if the Astros had only taken his complaints of arm numbness and physical discomfort seriously. (The press didn't help matters — check out any sports page from the weeks leading up to his collapse on July 30, 1980, and odds are you'll find an irate columnist accusing him of malingering, attitude problems, or worse.) It's incredible to look at how dominating he was in the 1980 All Star Game while also knowing that he'd be making his final MLB start less than a week later.
J.R.'s next couple of decades were rough, including losing a bundle via an oil business scam and spending a stretch living under a bridge in Houston. Happily, he got his life back together, found some peace about the way his career ended, and was able to once again enjoy the admiration and appreciation of fans in Houston and elsewhere. Unfortunately, it looks like he'd spent the last weeks of his life hospitalized for COVID, yet another unnecessary victim of a virus that never should have gotten this far...
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:
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!
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.
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.
One of my favorite things about spending summers with my grandparents in Alabama during the mid-to-late 1970s was watching the Atlanta Braves on WTCG/WTBS - the Braves were terrible back then, but it was still a treat to be able to see televised baseball broadcasts every night at a time when MLB's TV presence was limited in most markets to Game of the Week and Monday Night Baseball.
And the thing I loved most about watching the Braves were the games where Phil Niekro took the mound and baffled opposing hitters with his knuckleball. And honestly, I loved the games where he got lit up, too; I still smile looking at his 1979 stats, which include NL-leading totals in wins (21), losses (20), games started (44), complete games (23), innings pitched (342), hits (311), home runs (41), walks (113) and hit batters (11), along with very respectable ERA and strikeout numbers (3.39 and 208, respectively). And don't forget the number 40, which was how old he was that season.
Arguably the greatest knuckleballer of all time, "Knucksie" epitomized so much of what I loved about baseball in the 1970s - specifically the unpredictability of the game, and the unusual characters who played it. Here was a silver-haired guy who looked like he should have been working at some used car dealership in the Midwest, yet was calmly putting up some of the best numbers of his career at an age when most MLB hurlers would have long been put out to pasture.
I only got to see him pitch in person once, on my birthday in 1981 at Wrigley Field. It was a poor outing for him - he gave up 5 runs to the Cubs and was gone by the fifth inning - but it was still a thrill for me to watch him do his thing. I never met him, but by all accounts he was a friendly and charming chap who loved to shoot the bull with fans.
Rest in Peace, Knucksie; we will not see your likes again, but those of us who saw how your pitches danced will never forget it.
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.