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:
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
(Eddie Money live in Hawaii, 1979. Photo by Lawrence Movera)
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
That was my initial reaction when I heard a few months back that Eddie Money had Stage 4 esophageal cancer; and I had the same reaction this morning when my wife called to tell me the sad news that the Money Man had passed. I never met the man, but he felt like a friend; his rumpled, shambling figure has loomed large in my life for decades, and not just because he was the very willing subject of what may well be my favorite phone interview I've ever done, which I've attached for your reading pleasure below.
But before we get to that, here are two stories that revolve around my favorite Eddie track, "Think I'm In Love":
1) Back in 1990, my band Lava Sutra worked up a high-energy cover of the song, both because I'd recently had an convenience store epiphany about how awesome it (and he) truly was — see the introduction of the article below — and because every self-respectin' hard-rockin' indie/grunge band of the time was covering the MC5 and the Stooges. Make sense? Well, no... until you realize that we THOUGHT for some reason that Eddie was from Detroit. We believed we were making a snide comment about how fashionable it had become to drop names of these Motor City legends; in reality, we just ended up being more obtuse than we already were. We actually played a gig at a Wayne State dining hall where I announced, "Since we're in the Motor City, we'd like to do our tribute to Detroit!" And then we played "Think I'm in Love" while the students ignored us and ate their lunches. It was truly the most "Eddie Money" thing we ever did.
2) Twenty years later, my dear friends Eric and Rebecca tapped me to do a short DJ set at their wedding reception. Most of the 45s I brought were of the Sixties soul, psych and garage persuasion, with a little Seventies hard rock and power-pop thrown in, because I knew that's what the bride and groom would dig. But I closed my set with "Think I'm in Love," both because it matched the sentiments of the event, and because Eric and I had spent countless hours over the years cracking each other up with our Eddie Money impersonations — which usually involved Eric saying, "Heeeeey - Where's the Party?!?" while I did my best to imitate Eddie's various gurning facial expressions from the "Shakin'" video.
I fully expected that the song would clear the dance floor, but I didn't care; this was my (and Eddie's) way of putting an exclamation point on the night. I stepped down from the DJ both while the song was still playing; but before I could even reach the bottom step, I was enthusiastically accosted by Katie, my date for the wedding. "Did you just play this?" she inquired, beaming gorgeously. "I LOVE THIS SONG!!!" This was only our second date, but I knew right then and there that she was the one for me. We have been together ever since, and (of course) included "Think I'm in Love" in our 2014 wedding mix.
Thanks for everything, Eddie. I know your life and career had its ups and downs, but you just kept going — and you made a lot of people (me and my wife included) very happy in the process. "Can't Keep a Good Man Down," indeed.
(Oh yeah - click on the images below to read them more legibly!)
My mom, sister and I saw a LOT of movies together in the summer of '76, which was of course totally fine by me.
Even at the age of ten, I was already feeling the pronounced rumblings of what would turn out to be a lifelong fascination with film and film history. Not only was moviegoing a fun and cheap way to beat the L.A. summer heat, but just being able to see Hollywood movies in (or near) Hollywood was a real thrill for this Midwestern boy — it felt closer to The Source (not the Sunset Strip vegetarian restaurant, though of course it was close to that, too), like I was getting a baguette fresh from the baker instead of a pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped loaf from the shelf of the A&P.
I wasn't especially particular about what we saw, just as long as it wasn't a movie "for kids" (I hated being condescended to, even back then) or a foreign flick with sub-titles. If it looked cool, funny, exciting or featured a big-name star, that was lure enough for me — I just wanted to absorb as many movies as possible. And we weren't especially particular about where we saw them, either; that summer, we hit screenings everywhere from Century City's pristine multiplexes to crumbling Art Deco picture palaces like the Pantages and the Wiltern.
Wiltern photo by Anne Laskey, 1978.
We often traveled via public transportation on our moviegoing expeditions, so it was hard to time our arrival perfectly; often as not, we would arrive at the theater a good 30-45 minutes before our intended screening. And since the Wiltern was always showing double features, we would usually just walk in and catch the last reel of whatever was playing before our film. This was not always a sound decision — the last twenty minutes of Food of the Gods, which perversely preceded (I think) The Gumball Rally, were fully responsible for instilling me with the fear of rats that, er, plagues me to this day. And then there was the time we went to see the Burt Reynolds flick Gator, but wound up catching the end of J.D.'s Revenge. I didn't understand what the hell was going on in it, at all — something about a cackling ghost appearing in a broken mirror, someone getting shot, and a bald man sobbing hysterically. It scared and saddened and confused me all at the same time, and made me wish we had just stayed in the lobby until after it had ended.
Last night, 43 years and change later, I decided to give J.D.'s Revenge another look. Directed by Arthur Marks (Friday Foster, The Monkey Hu$tle) the film has often been cited in books and articles I've read over the years about blaxploitation cinema — specifically those dealing with the horror sub-genre that gave us such classics as Blacula, Abby, and Sugar Hill, and it's been kicking around the bottom of my various streaming queues for a while now. But I only recently learned that J.D.'s Revenge was shot in New Orleans; and, having recently returned from an all-too-short vacation there, I was curious to see if the Crescent City of the mid-Seventies looked anything like I'd remembered from the brief visit my family made to New Orleana in the summer of '74.
On the latter score, J.D.'s Revenge definitely came through: the film features numerous shots of the French Quarter, including a Bourbon Street that's less chaotic but significantly sleazier than the present-day version, just as I'd first experienced it. (One of my most vivid memories from that 1974 trip is of watching horrified parents holding their hands over their children's eyes as they walked past one Bourbon Street strip club after another.) As a film, well... I found myself confused and a little upset by it all over again, albeit for somewhat different reasons than when I caught the end of it back in 1976.
The basic plot: An earnest and upstanding young law student named Ike (Glynn Turman) becomes possessed by the spirit of a zoot-suited hood (David McKnight), who seeks revenge on those who killed him and his sister back in 1942. It's a straightforward if improbable conceit, but it isn't helped by a convoluted screenplay (written by Jason Starkes, who later went on to co-write the basketball comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh) or some strange casting choices — most notably, the great Louis Gossett, Jr. playing a sixty-something jackleg preacher. Gossett would have been about forty at the time of the filming, and an extremely vital and young-looking forty, at that; it seriously took me about two-thirds of the way through the movie to figure out that his character had been one of the people involved in J.D.'s death, because he looks like he would have still been in nursery school at the time.
The film features a fair amount of violence, some of which is cartoonish and played for laughs. But the scenes where J.D.'s spirit abuses and rapes Ike's wife (Joan Pringle) are downright nasty, and the footage of a cow getting disemboweled in a slaughterhouse (which is repeatedly shown as part of J.D.'s flashbacks) is both sad and deeply disgusting. All of which makes it hard to recommend J.D.'s Revenge to anyone other than devoted blaxploitation fans.
That said, Turman is truly excellent in this, really sinking his teeth into (and chewing up) the scenes where J.D. takes over Ike's body and personality. Though occasionally absurd — "You don't like yo' Daddy's CONK?!?" he glowers, when Ike's wife bums out on his new 1940s-style 'do — these are by far the most entertaining moments of the film, with J.D. coming off like a cross between Dave Chappelle in his "Time Haters" skit and a genuinely dangerous Rudy Ray Moore.
While I don't think I'd watch it again, I have to say I'm glad I revisited J.D.'s Revenge. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but over the last few years I've found myself drawn back to a number of films I haven't seen since childhood — not out of nostalgia, per se, but rather to unlock long-forgotten memories of those days, as well as to try and better understand how my young brain perceived life and art, and why certain things stuck with me while others vanished almost instantly from my consciousness. Call it film therapy, I guess, though I don't think I'm ready to give Food of the Gods another shot.
"I thought you might want to read this," said Grandpa Fred, handing me his copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four.
It was the summer of 1977, and I had just arrived at my grandparents' palatial (to me, at least) home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was eleven years old, and looking forward to a blissfully relaxing month of swimming, golfing, throwing a baseball against the back steps, watching baseball on TV, and reading about baseball in the air-conditioned comfort of my grandfather's study. The baseball bug had bitten me hard, and I was determined to get my hands on any reading material that could expand my knowledge of my favorite sport — and, once again, Grandpa Fred had come through for me.
As a child of the Seventies, I was already well aware that baseball men were not necessarily squeaky-clean role models to be looked up to — after all, I had just seen a livid Billy Martin try to punch out Reggie Jackson on national TV — and I'd already heard that Ball Four was supposed to be "controversial". But by "controversial," I was expecting a gritty, hard-bitten exposé, something along the lines of Serpico or All The President's Men, to name two other books that my grandfather probably had no business lending to a grandson who had just graduated fifth grade. What I found instead, much to my surprise and delight, was a riotously funny account of life in the major (and minor) leagues that, if anything, reminded me most of an adult American version of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Down With Skool series. Like Nigel Molesworth, DWS's intrepid schoolboy narrator, Jim Bouton took me into a world full of bizarre rituals, arcane slang, side-splitting pranks, and unforgettable characters. Ball Four's detractors complained that Bouton trashed baseball's heroes; but in my eyes, he not only (further) humanized them, but also made me wish (even more than I already did) that I could be part of their gang.
As these things will do, the sad news about Bouton's death brought back vivid memories of that summer in Alabama, and reminded me of just how much Ball Four — and its sequel, the almost-as-great I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally — formed my understanding of (and attitude toward) major league baseball. With the possible exception of Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff (which I wouldn't read until over a decade later), I can't think of another player memoir that so beautifully captures the joy of playing baseball, yet so unsentimentally delineates the punishing stupidity and cold-blooded venality that permeate the game's executive and administrative sectors... and which have only become more pervasive in the decades since Ball Four's original publication. (As a friend of mine pointed out, the timing of Bouton's death was one final Fuck You to the baseball establishment, since it all but obliterated the buzz around the release of Bud Selig's new autobiography.)
Most of Bouton's on-field heroics were accomplished well before I became interested in baseball, and I wouldn't learn about his social activist side (he protested the apartheid rule of South Africa in 1968, long before that was on the radar of your average American) until many years after I first read Ball Four. But he became a hero of mine that summer, and even more the following year, when — armed with only a knuckleball and an insouciant smirk — he made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. In interviews, he always came across as warm, witty, and maybe even a little bit silly... and I always hoped that I'd get a chance to talk with him someday.
That chance finally came three years ago, when I was writing a story for VICE Sports on the 40th anniversary of the short-lived Ball Four sitcom, which ran on CBS for only five weeks before being unceremoniously sent to the showers. I had become friends with Michael Bouton, Jim's son, via Facebook, and I approached him about setting up an interview with his dad. Unfortunately, Jim had suffered a stroke by then, and Michael explained to me that his dad preferred to do our interview via email, because he was self-conscious about not being able to "retrieve" certain words. So I sent Michael a list of questions... which Jim apparently enjoyed so much that he decided he wanted to get on the phone with me, after all.
The Jim Bouton I spoke with in 2016 turned out to be just as kind and funny as I'd always imagined, and — except for stumbling over maybe two or three words — was just as articulate, as well. It remains one of my all-time favorite interviews that I've ever done, and this seems like as good a time as any to share the whole thing with the world. I am forever indebted to Michael for making it happen, and forever grateful to the old "Bulldog" for taking the time to go down memory lane with me, even if some of the memories we discussed weren't exactly sweet. May he rest in peace and power...
Jim Bouton: The Big Hair & Plastic Grass Interview
DAN EPSTEIN: With the 40thanniversary of the Ball Four TV series coming up, it needs to be —
JIM BOUTON: Forgotten? [Laughs]
No chance of that, at least on my watch. So, whose idea was it to turn it into a TV series?
It was such a long time ago, I don’t remember if it came down to one person. There was a group of friends that would hang out at the Lion’s Head bar in [Greenwich] Village — Vic Ziegel, Marvin Kitman and myself, and others. We just thought this might be a good thing to do. Little did we know! [Laughs]
When Ball Four was first published, nobody was knocking on your door to make a TV show or movie out of it?
Well, this was just within a year of when the book came out; we weren’t sitting around for years waiting for this “golden opportunity” — we just thought, “Well, this will be fun!” And it certainly was fun to be part of Ball Four, and to listen to all those wonderful characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys? It was certainly fun to think about the possibilities of transferring that to the TV screen.
Though obviously, you faced some challenges in doing so…
Standards and Practices, I think was the name of the division — we were not allowed to capture the grittiness and the language, that kind of stuff. We weren’t able to put it on the screen. [Laughs]
You certainly couldn’t have anyone saying “Ah Shitfuck,” a la Joe Schultz.
Yeah, and you couldn’t say “Horseshit” — you could have “Horse!” maybe, or “Horse dot-dot-dot”. There were all sorts of ways they had to neuterize it. When we would sit around at night… our plan was to sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took us so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at 2 in the morning. The funniest part about the whole sitcom was writing aboutthe sitcom, and we had some great fun with that. A sitcom about a sitcom would have been better than the actual sitcom, itself. That should have been the show! [Laughs]
The CBS people would come into the writing room, which is a dark place, in many respects. [Laughs] There were many vice presidents — none of whom could write, but they could “help.” So they’d say something like, “Maybe this guy could be a jerk!” So we’d listen to their ideas, and then they’d leave the room and we’d start laughing about what they were saying. We’d do the best we could with it. They would say things like, “Why can’t you write like Gone With The Windor The Old Man and the Sea? That would be good!”
I’ve been in writing rooms with network vice presidents. It can be a pretty soul-crushingly awful experience.
Well, when I think about it, I never think about it as a negative in my life; it’s not like, “Oh boy, we really screwed that up,” or, “That was terrible!” It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level. [Laughs] We were having a good time; we were enjoying ourselves. But the censor wasn’t enjoying it, and the vice presidents weren’t enjoying it. And apparently, right off the bat, the audiences didn’t like it very much, either! [Laughs]
Was the shooting of the show fun for you, as well?
Oh, absolutely. We accidentally did some really wonderful things, but we weren’t allowed to do much of them.
For example?
Ben Davidson played Rhino, the catcher. He was a professional football player, from that same era of characters [as in Ball Four] — guys who made it to the big time but barely made it through college to get there. Ben Davidson was the only "real" person on the set, because everyone else was an actor. [There was one scene where] Ben improvised and lifted up one of the coaches, then hung him on a hook in the locker room by the back of his shirt. The guys from CBS saw that and were like, “What are you doing?!? That’s not a good idea! We’ve got a liability here!”
Were you always supposed to play the lead character in the show?
I don’t remember whether anyone thought that would be a good idea or not, but they probably thought it would be inexpensive, because I was not a real actor. And who knew what a difficult chore that would be! Oh god…
Ball Four debuted on CBS in September 1976, and only lasted five episodes before being cancelled. Did you have the sense that it would get a quick axe, or did the cancellation take you by surprise?
Well, shooting an episode would last, you know, a week, and we were always feeling like we were behind — we always had that feeling of, “Uh-oh, this is not any better than the one we did yesterday!” [Laughs] We would watch other sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter, and there would be a put-down line like, ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’ And we would start laughing, and thinking, “Maybe we need a line like that? How about, ‘Stick it in your doo-dah?’” [Laughs] It was four amateurs trying to do something that we’d never done before.
Plus, it’s 2 in the morning, and you’re all punchy…
Oh, exactly. We didn’t even know what day it was! Jesus… Finally, about three episodes in, they told us, “We’re going to have to cancel this show.” We said, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives — we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people!”
Was that when you decided to rededicate yourself to your baseball comeback?
Well, I needed to get out of the TV business by then, for my own safety. [Laughs] I was playing semi-pro baseball in New Jersey, amateur baseball, and I was pitching pretty good for a guy who was in his late-thirties; I was having a good time, and my knuckleball started to move around, and I thought it might be a good idea to go down to spring training, and see if I could work out with some minor league team. And Bill Veeck ended up offering me a minor league contract with the White Sox.
Your brief return to the majors in September 1978 remains one of my favorite childhood baseball memories. It all seemed so improbable — you were thirty-nine, and you hadn't pitched in the majors since 1970 — but you actually pitched pretty well in three out of five appearances!
I did pretty well. This was with the Atlanta Braves organization, and Ted Turner — well, he was agreeable to those kind of things. I said to him, “Give me a shot, and if I don’t embarrass myself, let’s see what happens!” Only a real nut, like a Bill Veeck or a Ted Turner, would say, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” It was kind of like a sitcom, only you had more control over it — and I was not humiliating myself on national television!
So I went to spring training with their minor league Triple-A team, I think it was, and I got better and better. The last game of spring training, they were going to have the Triple-A guys play against the major league Braves. And the idea was, “Let Bouton pitch for the minor league guys against the big leaguers!” I thought, “Well, this sounds better than a sitcom, but not that much different.” I actually pitched a very good game, and I think we won the game. I did so well that they sent me to the minors, and said, “See what you can do!” I did really well there, and they eventually invited me to the big leagues. I beat the San Francisco Giants, and they were not goofing around — they were in a pennant race! But I beat those guys. And then I pitched the next game against the Astros and James Rodney Richard. [Bouton threw seven innings at the Astrodome, giving up only five hits and two earned runs, but didn’t get the decision.] So that was fun!
More fun than sitting in the writers’ room at CBS?
Oh, yeah. It was like, “God, please don’t let me write any more scripts!”
Back to the TV series, though — the episodes covered some controversial topics for the time, such as gay players, female sportswriters in the locker room, and the use of pep pills...
I thought those subjects would be interesting — and I thought that people would be interested in them. But we couldn’t get most of what we wanted to do past Standards and Practices.
Do you think the show was actually a few decades ahead of its time?
It might have been — and it might get there yet, by another route. Who knows?
But a reboot of a Ball FourTV series isn’t something you’d like to be involved with?
Uh, not in an important role. [Laughs]
Harry Chapin wrote and sang the show’s theme song. How did that come about? Were you a fan of his music?
Yeah, Harry Chapin was a nice guy. I was friends with a handball player named Jimmy Jacobs, and Jimmy Jacobs had a great film library. I happened to run into Harry Chapin through him, and I was telling him and Jimmy Jacobs about the sitcom. Harry’s song opened the show — and then it all went right downhill after the song. I think the best part of the show was Harry’s song.
It's the only part of the show that you can currently find on YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, too! [Laughs]
Do episodes of the show still exist?
I’m hoping they don’t exist anymore, just for mercy purposes!
Before I let you go... do you have any thoughts on the enduring appeal of Ball Four, the book? It has long outlived the controversy that surrounded its original release…
When I think of Ball Four, I don’t think of my writing — I think basically of keeping notes. Those players were the funny guys; you can’t make up those guys. They were all characters. Doug Rader, Gary Bell, Don Mincher… One of the great things about baseball players back then was, they were not sophisticated guys. They were not college guys; they were guys outta the mines or off of the farm, guys trying to make a living. And that’s why it took so long [for MLB players] to get real money, because the guys just wanted to play ball.
Sure, they realized, “Maybe we oughta be getting a little more money.” But if they’d said to those guys back in the 1950s or even 60s, “Okay, we’re not going to pay anybody anymore, there’s no money whatsoever,” the players would have still said, “Well, we’ve got two teams here — why don’t we just play and see who can win this game?” You know what I mean? They wanted to play ball. They were very, very interesting people. They came from mostly small towns, and they just wanted to play ball.
And your book immortalized them.
The best thing I ever did was to keep notes and write all that stuff down. I’d keep notes all day long; and when I’d run out of paper, I’d write on a popcorn box or an air-sickness bag, whatever was handy. And then, at the end of the day, I needed to look at my notes because there were so many funny things going on. Wonderful characters; I love them all now, even the ones I hated! Now I was listening to the players, now that I was writing things down, they were now fodder for great material. So I began to think about them in a positive way. They were not competitors for playing opportunities in games; no, these guys were funny! And that’s why Ball Four is so funny — it’s not me, it’s the players.
And because the minor leagues have kind of been replaced by college ball, the players are much more savvy now, much more sophisticated. They’re wiser, and all of that stuff — but I don’t get the sense that the crazy guys, the wacky guys, the funny guys are there anymore.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Jim. It’s been a real pleasure.
Well, it was fun remembering those things. And now I have to go lie down for a while. [Laughs]
Ever since (well, even before) Big Hair and Plastic Grass was published, people have asked me if there were any plans for an audiobook... and now, finally, I can answer that question in the affirmative! And read by the author, no less!
Thanks to Blackstone Publishing, an audiobook version of BH&PG — read by yours truly — will be released next week (June 25). It will be available via Audible, Audiobookstore, Google Play, Kobo and presumably any other audiobook outlet. And for those of you who still prefer physical media, there's a 10-CD set available, as well!
So if you're looking for a little 1970s baseball history to take the edge off your daily commute, or you simply want to luxuriate in my dulcet tones for hours at a time, we've got just the thing for you. An enthusiastic tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to the good folks at Blackstone for making this happen, to their art department for totally nailing that "1979 Topps Baseball Cartoon" look, and to Tom Rowan at the Sound Lab Recording Studio in Greensboro, NC, who expertly guided me through the harder-than-it-sounds process of recording an audiobook.
This January 20th marks what would have been the 104th birthday of the late, great Pardo Frederick DelliQuadri, AKA my maternal grandfather, AKA my beloved Grandpa Fred.
I always think a lot about him around this time of year. And the other night, while combing the Internet for some photos from his time in Washington, D.C., I struck serious gold — actual film footage from June 21, 1968 of him being sworn in at the White House as Chief of the Children's Bureau of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. (The full clip is embedded below at the end of this post.)
I had absolutely no idea that this clip existed, but it popped up in the collection of the LBJ Library on a roll of film outtakes from the summer of 1968. President Johnson indeed makes an appearance, saying a few remarks — sadly, the clip doesn't have any audio — before Supreme Court Justice Byron "Whizzer" White performs the swearing-in ceremony with my grandfather. Then my grandfather guides LBJ over to meet some of his family members, including my mother (who is totally killing it in a Marimekko print dress, though I know she now regrets her choice of hat), his wife (my Grandma Velma), and some of his brothers and sisters, who have traveled all the way from their home of Pueblo, Colorado to be there for the event.
It's such a treat for me to watch my grandfather — who's been gone for nearly 30 years now — in this clip. That shy-but-warm smile, that glint of mischievous humor in his eye, that palpable sense of being completely comfortable in his own skin in any situation, even at a White House ceremony presided over by LBJ... that's absolutely the Grandpa Fred I knew.
There's more to this story, though, and now seems like the perfect time to tell it. I was two years old at the time of this ceremony, and I was supposed to be present for it. In fact, my parents dressed me up for the occasion in what my mother tells me was a very sharp yellow plaid suit — both because they wanted me to look nice, and because there was a plan afoot for me to do a photo op with LBJ.
By 1968, public sentiment over the U.S. military presence in Vietnam had begun to turn, and the chant "Hey Hey LBJ/How many kids did you kill today" had become a favorite at peace marches everywhere. Aware that my grandfather had asked for me to be allowed to attend his swearing-in ceremony, someone at the White House concocted the idea of putting me and LBJ together for a photo — this was for the Children's Bureau, after all, and wouldn't it be good for the President's image to have a pic of him cuddling a cute little kid?My father, who was very much against the Vietnam War, tells me now that he had serious misgivings about the whole thing. But rather than make any waves, he went along with the plan, carrying me into the White House with him. But as it turned out, I made some waves of my own...
I was, let us say, a rather odd child, and one of my biggest quirks around Age 2 was that I'd developed an absolute and all-consuming horror of painted portraits. My parents will both attest to this: If we went over to any of their friends' houses for a visit, they would have to ask them in advance to remove any portraits they might have hanging on their walls; otherwise, I would have a major meltdown as soon as I saw them. Of course, the White House is filled with large, painted portraits of Presidents and other historical figures, and of course no one thought to ask them to take those down before we arrived...
You can pretty much guess what happened next. I don't recall the specific portrait that set me off, but I was screaming hysterically within seconds of entering the Cabinet Room. President Johnson himself apparently tried to calm me down, but I simply wasn't having it. Finally, my dad (with a couple of Secret Service agents in tow) had to take me out into the hallway so that my grandfather's ceremony could proceed undisturbed by my shrieks of terror.
Until the day he died, Grandpa Fred never let me forget about what a scene I made on his big day. Not that he was particularly disappointed by it; in fact, he thought it was kind of hilarious. "Hey Dan," he would chuckle, "Remember the time you cried in Johnson's face?"
I love you, Gramps. It's so nice to see you again.
There's something about films made and/or set in the New York City of the 1970s that always keeps me coming back for more, and the same goes for the London of the same period. Maybe it's because childhood visits to both of these cities vividly imprinted themselves upon my fragile eggshell mind; while these were clearly not easy cities to live in, the vibrant energy of citizens going about their daily business against a backdrop of faded grandeur and crumbling glory captured my youthful imagination in the same way that Hubert Robert's paintings of "life among the ruins" would later fascinate me. Though there were signs of decay everywhere, there was also beauty in that decay — a beauty so profound that even a midwestern boy raised on TV and the intrinsically American philosophy of "newer is better" couldn't fail to notice.
I recently finished reading Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours, a fascinating and occasionally frustrating book that is less of a history of the original psychedelic era than a series of free-associative essays about why and how LSD impacted popular music the way it did. One of the best aspects of Chapman's book is the way he lays out the differences between American and British psychedelia — not just stylistically, but also culturally. In his British chapters, he repeatedly underlines just how dingy and drab life was in post-WWII England, especially when compared to the space-age shininess of life in the US; and how even at the height of "Swinging London," most of the grumbling grey city still felt barely a few years removed from the traumas and deprivations of life during The Blitz.
If Chapman's book didn't exactly turn me on to any great psychedelic records that I wasn't already aware of, it did lead me to The London Nobody Knows, a haunting documentary filmed in 1967 by Norman Cohen (but apparently not released until 1969), which was based on the 1962 book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher. Narrated by James Mason, who also serves as the film's tour guide, the film explores London's seamy underbelly (and its Victorian remnants) at a time when the wrecking ball of progress was really starting to kick into high gear.
Chapman cites The London Nobody Knows as being particularly illustrative of how shabby the city really was, even at the peak of its pop cultural influence, and the film certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. Though a few sequences here are speeded up a la Benny Hill for comic relief, the London we see here is a bleak place, indeed, one filled with rusting Victorian urinals, rotting pubs, splintering tenements, toothless street performers, and open-air markets filled with wriggling eels and shady pitchmen. The few minutes devoted to the city's fashionably-attired youth seems almost jarringly out of place, like they were only added (and possibly under protest) after the producers begged to see some of the mods and mini-skirts that London was famous for.
Again, though, there is beauty in the decay — and with his dry wit and seemingly unflappable countenance, Mason is perfectly suited to guiding us through it. Whether wryly cocking an eyebrow at the ugliness of the newer buildings along the north side of the Thames, or begging the pardon of a market patron that he's inadvertently bumped, he comes off more like a savvy local than a movie star. In one particularly moving sequence, he unselfconsciously sits down with several senior residents of the local Salvation Army, and lends a sympathetic ear to their hard-luck stories. (I'm guessing he prudently chose not to mention his own brush with Thunderbird wine.)
My favorite moment in the film, however, is a non-Mason one: A shirtless street performer of indeterminate age hectors passerby to bind him with a length of heavy chain, from which he then performs a Houdini-like escape. While the man's performance is quite entertaining in its own right, and certainly harkens back to an earlier London — there were almost certainly escape artists doing the same trick on the city' streets in the 19th century, if not hundreds of years before that — what blew me away was the realization that I had actually seen this very gentleman in action, seven years after this sequence was filmed. While I knew that I would recognize some of the London I experienced in '74 in this film, I had no inkling that I would actually recognize one of the people I'd encountered while I was there.
That year, my sister and I were living in Leamington Spa with my father, who was on sabbatical at Warwick University. On weekends, we would often take train trips to other parts of the country, and of course London was on our hit list. While my most vivid memory from our London trip is of ordering a plate of ravioli at a restaurant, only to find that there was nothing inside of said ravioli — London dining was significantly less worldly than it is today — our visit to the Tower of London also stands out for me, and not just because of the thrill of coming face to face with nearly 900 years of English history. On our way to the Tower entrance, we came upon this very same shirtless gent, who had attracted a rather sizable audience with his salty pronouncements and his impressive feats of escapism. (There was also a younger partner working with him, who was similarly swathed in chains and locks.) After busting free, the man passed the hat, and then cussed the crowd out for not putting enough into it. "There's not enough in here to get me into a pay toilet," he cried. "I hope every last one of ye gets bloody diarrhea tonight!" Oh, how my sister and I howled with laughter; I think I even asked my dad for a few coins to contribute to his cause, simply because I was impressed that anyone would loudly wish diarrhea upon a group of tourists.
Obviously, that's the sort of thing that sticks with you for decades after the fact, and when my wife and I visited the Tower of London last spring — her first visit, and my first time returning since 1974 — I half-expected that this guy would be standing outside the tube station, haranguing us into tying him up. He wasn't there, of course; I'm guessing he'd be around a hundred years old today, if he's even still alive. Still, it was a real thrill to see him again in this documentary, and to feel viscerally connected for a second to the London of 1967, even though I didn't actually experience the city until seven years later.
Though it only ran from September 1976 to March 1977, I still have fond and vivid memories of the Captain and Tennille's ABC variety show — especially the recurring "Bionic Watermelon" skit, which always had my sister and I rolling on the floor in fits of laughter.
The Captain & Tennille definitely soundtracked our childhood — 1977's Come In From The Rain was one of the first LPs my sister ever owned — and they certainly made some classic contributions to the AM pop canon, most notably their version of Neil Sedaka's "Love Will Keep Us Together," which is pretty much a perfect pop record. But in the sad wake of the Captain's passing, I'd like to salute him by replaying this particularly "juicy" Bionic Watermelon adventure. RIP, Captain!
I probably spent more time staring at Singles Going Steady than at any other album cover in my slim pre-college collection, combined.
It wasn't because the photo made the band look particularly cool; with the possible exception of bassist Steve Garvey, it didn't. Sure, they were all wearing black, but lead singer Pete Shelley wore an unflattering haircut, and he looked tired and somewhat annoyed at having to have his picture taken. And was lead guitarist Steve Diggle wearing (gasp) flares, or something perilously close to them?
No, the reason I was so fascinated by this cover image was that it allowed me to enter what was then a completely unfamiliar world. Back in the early 80s, when I first became enamored with the music of the Buzzcocks, the rock stars I worshipped all still seemed shrouded in mystery. They worked their magic on stage and in the studio, but the hard work that went into it was largely hidden (intentionally or otherwise) from view. Only just beginning to struggle with the guitar myself, and not having any friends who played in bands, I had no real understanding of rehearsals or recording sessions. I just figured that the gods of music transmitted songs directly to the artist, who then — by virtue of their sheer awesomeness — transmitted them directly to vinyl.
But the cover photo of Singles Going Steady completely disabused me of such naive notions. The serpentine tangle of guitar cables; the precariously angled microphone booms; the quartet of dour, exhausted gentlemen who were all quite possibly well overdue for a shower. This, it seemed to say, is how you do it. No wizardry, no divine intervention, no star trips. Just sweat, electricity and the mutual will to make it work.
This message might have resonated less with me if I hadn't loved the music so much. But I was completely enamored with everything about the songs of Singles Going Steady: the adrenaline-pumping roar of the twin guitars, the tempos that seemed ready to run off the rails at any moment, the instantaneously indelible melodies, and of course Pete Shelley's witty, sardonic and fiercely gender-nonspecific love songs. It might have been too much of a stretch to call Pete Shelley "The Oscar Wilde of Punk," but I could easily picture Wilde enjoying the hell out of the lyrics of "Orgasm Addict," "Every Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" or "Everybody's Happy Nowadays".
Buzzcocks songs seemed like they would be relatively simple to play, but — as I would come to find out — they were actually rather difficult to pull off in a convincing fashion. My first college band, Voodoo Sex Party, was heavily influenced by their piquant melodies and candy-coated chord progressions, but only once did we ever attempt to cover an actual Buzzcocks song. It was "You Say You Don't Love Me," from 1979's A Different Kind of Tension, and to say we didn't do it justice would woefully understate the case. Of course, it would have helped if we'd had a second guitarist, and if I hadn't gotten angrily drunk on (yecch) Southern Comfort right before our set; but even sober and fully-guitared, it's no easy feat to pair that kind of blistering romantic angst with a brilliantly Kinks-y melody and harness it to a breathless punk rock roar, or to deliver it all in a manner that doesn't shortchange any of the elements. (Yes, I still have the recording of that show; no, you can't hear it.)
But for all the brilliance of their songs and performances, the band remained as beautifully down-to-earth as they appeared on the cover of Singles Going Steady. Since Pete Shelley's unexpected passing last week, I've heard and read one testament after another as to how funny, charming, kind and unpretentious he was in real life. Not that this surprised me at all, since I once had the pleasure of experiencing this firsthand. It was in the summer of 1996, when the band was touring in support of their album All Set. I had been assigned to interview Pete for BAM magazine, and we did our Q&A in the dressing room of the Hollywood Palace before their show. (I only saw two Buzzcocks shows, that one and one at Chicago's Cabaret Metro in 1992; both were absolutely amazing, not to mention loud as fuck.)
I was still pretty new to interviewing at this point, and this would, sadly, not be one of my better interviews. Expecting to talk to Pete for half an hour, I was completely thrown when the tour manager sat us down together and announced, "Right, you have 15 minutes!" Rather than just letting the conversation flow, I nervously hurried through my list of questions, all of which Pete obligingly and amusingly answered. (Sample question: "What do you do to keep yourself sane on the road?" Pete: "As little as possible!") In fact, I burned through them so fast that I'd completely run out of questions by the ten-minute mark, and the remaining five minutes of our conversation was spent idly chatting about the recent Sex Pistols reunion as Pete signed the records I'd brought with me. Though our encounter surely wasn't the highlight of his day, he was much kinder and far more patient with this inexperienced interviewer than a legend of British punk could have been expected to be, and I have always been grateful to him for that.
My favorite moment of the interview actually came as we were wrapping things up. The tour manager returned with an all-access pass for Pete, telling him, "You can wear this wherever you like." Pete's eyes lit up. "Oh," he grinned. "I'll wear it on my cock, then!"
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.