Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Highway to Hell

It was only a four-block walk down Walton Place from our new apartment to our new school, but those four blocks gave me a near-kaleidoscopic primer on daily Chicago life circa early 1980.

That ten-minute amble from Lake Shore Drive to Ogden Elementary — the school where I would conclude eighth grade and my sister would finish out sixth — took us from the luxury apartment buildings of the city’s “Gold Coast” to the neon- (and bodily fluids-) encrusted adult playground of the Rush Street district. It took us past where the Drake and the Knickerbocker, two of Chicago’s poshest old hotels, cast disapproving glances at each other from across Walton; past the massive limestone edifice of the Playboy Building, which seemed to simultaneously absorb and disgorge a constant stream of well-groomed older men in expensive trench coats; past swinging singles in velour jogging suits, and wasted winos passed out in doorways; past upscale restaurants, greasy-spoon diners, fortune-telling parlors, glittery discos and the area’s last-remaining strip clubs and adult bookstores, all of them laying in the infernal shade of the giant, criss-crossed black pylon known as the John Hancock Building.

The third block of our walk, the one between Michigan Avenue and Rush Street, was my favorite. It took the longest to traverse, but I was always fascinated by how rapidly it transformed — decayed, really — as we walked west towards Rush, where the adult hotspots like Faces disco and the Cabaret were clustered. Holding down the northwest end of the block was a two-story glass-and-steel rectangle that housed a liquor store, a Hamburger Hamlet, and the Universal Recording Corporation; the latter was a studio where, according to my new stepfather, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and many other legendary artists had recorded.

At a time when the process of making records was still a total magical mystery to me, it was thrilling just to be able to walk past the front door of a genuine, big-time recording studio, even if I never actually witnessed anyone (famous or otherwise) leaving or entering it. A branch of the Downtown Records retail chain sat directly across the street, its long glass windows filled with promotional displays for the latest hits, and I imagined albums being cut at Universal during the night and appearing freshly pressed, sleeved and shrink-wrapped in the Downtown bins the following morning.

Far less alluring was Bughouse Square, the small, dreary park that sat just beyond our school, across from the ancient Newbury Library. Though its official title was Washington Square Park, the place had earned its seedy-sounding nickname in the early years of the century, when it served as a gathering place for radical speakers and their receptive (and sometimes abusive) audiences. It was now primarily known as a gay cruising ground, one lent additional notoriety by rumors that John Wayne Gacy had picked up some of his unfortunate victims there. Though my schoolmates and I could (and did) crack gruesome Gacy jokes all day long, we gave Bughouse Square a wide birth; the killer clown was now in prison, about to stand trial for killing 33 young men and boys, but the residue of his evil still seemed to hang over the place like a foul fog.

One grey and chilly morning in mid-February, I stood by myself on Ogden’s playground, waiting for the bell to ring and usher us inside for the first day of school since the unscheduled break we’d received courtesy of the Chicago Teachers Union’s ten-day walkout. As my schoolmates milled about the blacktop, I found myself gazing out at Bughouse Square, and nervously wondering whether the large, low shapes I could see scurrying about the nearest corner of the park were squirrels, stray cats or some of Chicago’s legendary “super rats”. My queasy reverie was interrupted by a hoarse shout coming from my right.

“Blood on the streets! Blood on the rocks! Blood in the gutter!”

It was Joe, a little, red-faced, straw-haired Irish kid from my grade. Wrapped in an inappropriately lightweight blue nylon jacket, his gloveless hands jammed into the front pockets of his faded, greasy blue jeans, Joe was attempting to ward off the damp February cold by jumping up and down and hollering the chorus of AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).”

Standing next to Joe was Justin, a strapping, dark-haired Jewish kid who lived in one of the nicer buildings near me on Walton, and whose camel’s hair overcoat obviated any need for chill-deflecting calisthenics. Justin chucked indulgently as his diminutive pal bounced around and screamed, his chuckles turning to outright guffaws whenever Joe free-formed some lyrics of his own. “A BLOW JOB in the streets!” Joe screeched. “A BLOW JOB in the streets!” Never underestimate the ability of an adolescent boy to ratchet up the gross-out factor at a moment’s notice…

As with Thin Lizzy, Rush and UFO, AC/DC was a band whose existence I’d only been dimly aware of before moving to Chicago from Los Angeles at the end of 1979. The first time I’d ever even heard of AC/DC had been in December 1978, shortly after my sister and I had moved to L.A. from Ann Arbor; my mom had driven us to the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, where she’d parked her beat-up red Toyota Corolla under a large, painted rendering of the cover for the band’s then-new live album, If You Want Blood. My mom seemed disgusted by the album cover’s bloody artwork, which showed guitarist Angus Young being stabbed by the neck of his own Gibson SG, and which of course I thought was pretty cool. I did wonder, though, about the band’s risqué-sounding name, which I recognized from my surreptitious readings of Playboy and Penthouse as slang for “bisexual”. Hmmm…

Maybe their name had kept AC/DC from getting much airplay in the places I’d lived and visited during the late 1970s, or maybe I just hadn’t been listening to the right radio stations. When I moved to Chicago during the last week of 1979, I quickly discovered that local FM rock powerhouses WLUP (a.k.a. “The Loop”) and WMET were playing the living shit out of ‘em — and not just their newest songs, but also cuts that spanned the Australian hard rock band’s entire back catalog. “Let There Be Rock,” “T.N.T.,” “Problem Child,” “High Voltage,” “Sin City” and “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” all seemed to be in regular rotation, and they all sounded brash, ballsy and incredibly intoxicating to my young and receptive ears. But none of them hit me quite like the songs from their latest album, Highway to Hell.

Sure, it’s easy for me to say in retrospect that Highway to Hell was slicker, cleaner, more polished and more “radio friendly” than AC/DC’s previous records, but such distinctions meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. And even if they had, I’m not sure my ears could have adequately parsed the difference via the quarter-sized monophonic speaker of my Panasonic RC 6030 clock radio. The songs’ punchy hooks were unmissable, however, as was the swaggering attitude and cheeky sense of humor that radiated from the gravelly larynx of Bon Scott as he rode bareback to the finish line upon Malcolm and Angus Young’s raging and roiling riffs.

With his schoolboy costume and manic guitar solos, Angus was undoubtedly AC/DC’s star attraction, but it was all about Bon for me. I could practically hear the randy gleam in his eye as the band burned through “Shot Down in Flames,” a song in which he struck out repeatedly in his attempts to get laid, yet still had the wherewithal to cackle self-mockingly at his rotten luck. I could visualize his lupine leer on “Touch Too Much,” in which he lustily described a woman as having “the body of Venus… WITH ARMS!” And though I’d yet to listen to much actual punk rock up to that point, I’d read plenty about it in newspapers and magazines — and Bon’s lyrics and vocals on “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” struck me as exactly what I imagined punk to sound like: furious, confrontational, and steeped to the bone in festering working-class resentment of the rich and powerful. “It’s animaaaaal, living in a human zoo,” he growled with the bug-eyed intensity of a man about to hurl a brick through the nearest bank window. “It’s animaaaaal, the shit that they toss to you.” (Nearly four decades later, this line rings truer than ever.)

But for me, the ultimate AC/DC anthem — and the one that almost instantaneously enshrined them as my new favorite band — was Highway to Hell’s title track. The song’s opening guitar riff was like a parent’s angry knock on the door of a bedroom filled with teenagers and bong smoke: it froze you in your tracks, leaving you no choice but to wait in rapt silence for whatever was about to happen next. The insistent thwomp-thwack of Phil Rudd’s drums kicked in, swinging from side to side like the unruly caboose of a hard-chugging freight train. And then, with a croak like a copper door opening to let some fresh air into an ancient mausoleum, Bon Scott stepped up to the microphone...

I honestly couldn’t understand much of what he was gargling about in the song’s opening verse. The only words I definitely caught on first (or even tenth) listen were “It ain’t easy,” “One way ride,” “Leave me be,” “Party time” and “My friends are gonna be there too” — the “there” in question being Hell, which was where Bon was gleefully, unrepentantly heading. While he offered no explicit invitation to join him, his assertion that his pals would be coming along for the ride certainly made it seem like an intriguing option to consider.

Though I considered myself to be fairly sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old, analyzing metaphors was not my strong suit. I still tended to take song lyrics at face value — even after being mercilessly teased at a friend’s birthday party a few years earlier for being the only one in attendance who didn’t know that “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band wasn’t really about skyrockets in flight. (To underline the point, several kids at the table formed thumb-and-finger loops with their left hands, and meaningfully slid their right index fingers in and out of them.)

So when Bon Scott sang of being on the “Highway to Hell,” it didn’t even begin to occur to me that he was actually talking about being out on the road with his bandmates, doing endless strings of sweat-soaked one-nighters that entailed walking a constant line between euphoria and exhaustion. Instead, I vividly pictured him essaying a skin-tight denim strut down a brimstone-paved ramp that led to the fiery depths of Hades, where Beelzebub himself awaited his arrival, pitchfork raised in ebullient welcome. Bon returned the greeting with a hearty “Hey, Satan!”, before bidding a final farewell to his own (undoubtedly appalled) mother. “Hey, Mama,” he cried. “Look at me — I’m on the way to the Promised Land!”

Let me be absolutely clear about something right here: I adored my mom, rarely clashed with her about anything outside of my grades or my semi-regular bursts of adolescent stubbornness, and never had any wish whatsoever to cause her pain. And yet, that “Hey, Mama” line was the moment that really sealed the deal for me. Because not only was this guy enthusiastically joining the teeming ranks of the damned, but he was also giving his mother a raised-middle-finger salute on his way down. And that had to be the most straight-up radical shit I’d ever heard in my life.

Driving it home even further for me was the song’s climax, which occurred four gang-choruses after the guitar solo: the band slammed on the brakes, Angus viciously scraped his pick across the strings of his guitar, and Bon yowled as if that pick-scrape was actually the sound of his skin being ripped clean off him in one fell swoop by Satan’s henchmen, leaving only a throbbing, man-shaped mass of bloody muscle and raw nerve-endings. I pictured the bug-eyed remains of Bon Scott screaming along to the chorus as the song faded out, his gruesome form kept upright only by the sheer force of his defiant will. “Hey, Mama, look at me,” indeed.

I’d spent most of the teachers’ strike sequestered in my bedroom on the 9^th floor of our glass-and-steel Mies Van der Rohe apartment building, reading Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and a collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies — my mom suggested these would be an entertaining and illuminating way to fill my temporary educational void — listening religiously to WLUP on my clock radio, and daydreaming as I watched thick layers of ice form, melt and form again on the inside of my un-insulated bedroom windows. On the slightly warmer days, I would venture out on my own and walk over to Downtown Records, where I scanned AC/DC’s album covers for any stray bits of information I could absorb about the band, and mentally calculated just how many weeks of allowance I’d need to save up in order to purchase my very own copy of Highway to Hell. 

It wasn’t a lonely time, per se, since I’ve never really been one to mind a bit of solitude. But the unexpected break from school, coming less than a month after my sister and I had enrolled at Ogden, underlined the fact that I hadn’t made any real friends there yet. I’d gotten on well enough with my new classmates, but it wasn’t like anyone was calling me up to see if I wanted to go to a movie, play Space Invaders at Rubus Game Room or hang out at the Water Tower Place mall, and I didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling anyone to extend a similar invitation.

So, that morning of our first day back, when I heard Joe shouting out that AC/DC song and saw Justin laughing along with him, it seemed like a good time to let them know that I was a big AC/DC fan, too. When the school bell rang, I lined up behind them and said something about how we were back “on the highway to hell.” It was corny, to be sure, but the guys laughed and it seemed to break the ice. The next day before school started, we fell into an easy conversation on the playground, name-checking our favorite AC/DC songs and sharing whatever limited info we possessed about the band. There was more music talk during our lunch break — expanding to include opinions on other hard rock luminaries like Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent and Aerosmith.

We picked up the rock talk again the following morning, and again the morning after that — this time, joined by a few other eighth-grade dudes and a couple of the hipper seventh-graders. A kid named Bruce wowed us all with the story of how his older brother had taken him to see AC/DC a few months earlier at the Aragon Ballroom; he recounted a wild and raucous show with Pat Travers and Molly Hatchet opening, hard-partying fans puking all over themselves, and fragrant billows of pot smoke hanging above the audiece while Angus duck-walked crazily across the stage and Bon led the revelry like a shirtless pirate king. The whole thing sounded way more intense than any concert experience I’d ever had, and I couldn’t wait to join the festivities the next time the good ship AC/DC sailed into town.

Just about a week after our playground music confabs began, my radio alarm went off just as the last part of a breaking news bulletin was coming in over WLUP — the announcer was saying something about Bon Scott dying in London at the age of 33, his lifeless body discovered in someone else’s car after a night on the town. My clock radio, which had alerted me to the sheer awesomeness of AC/DC’s music, now delivered the awful news of Bon’s sudden demise.

In my still-groggy state, I actually thought there was a chance that I might have dreamt the whole thing. The concept of musicians dying before their time wasn’t new to me — I still remembered how sad my Aunt Geri had been on the day that Elvis Presley died, and I couldn’t hear Lynyrd Skynyrd without immediately thinking of their tragic plane crash. But it seemed impossible (not to mention ridiculously unfair) that the lead singer of my new favorite band would suddenly make his final exit not even two months after I’d become a fan of his music.

When I got to school that morning, the glum looks on the faces of my friends confirmed that it hadn’t been a dream at all. “I heard he drank himself to death,” murmured Jimmy, one of the seventh graders, as we huddled together on the chilly playground. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, or what (or even how much) you’d have to drink in order to off yourself like that, but we all nodded in agreement, thinking about how Highway to Hell would be Bon’s epitaph, and his last recorded words to the world would be “Shazbot, Nanu Nanu” — an imitation of Robin Williams’ famous catchphrase from Mork & Mindy, hidden at the end of the album-closing “Night Prowler”.

We stood there in silence until the bell rang, and didn’t have a whole lot more to say to each other for the rest of the day.

A 'Fro-Tastic Farewell: Oscar Gamble, RIP

You can't talk about major league baseball in the 1970s without talking about Oscar Gamble. Well, maybe you can, but it's impossible for me to conceive of baseball's funkiest decade without him — which is why, back in 2009, when plans for the publication of Big Hair and Plastic Grass were finally underway, I insisted that the St. Martin's Press art department include his image on the book's cover. And which is part of why my heart is so heavy today after learning about his passing at the far-too-young age of 68.

Oscar Gamble was not a superstar. He finished in the MVP voting only once (in 1977, when his 31 home runs for the White Sox earned him exactly one vote), never made an All-Star team, never led the league in any batting or fielding category, never won a World Series ring. He was often benched against left-handed starters, and only once in the course of his 17-year MLB career (1974, his best season with the Indians) did ever he log more than 500 plate appearances. Though he had a better arm than he was generally given credit for — he threw out 10 runners from the outfield in 1976, and another 12 in 1978 — Oscar's range and glove were a tad below average, and thus he spent over a third of his 1584 career MLB games as a designated hitter.

It's true that a player of his particular caliber (he walked more than he struck out, had a lifetime OBP of .356 and a lifetime OPS+ of 127) would likely be more prized today than he was in an era where Triple Crown stats were the be-all/end-all. And yet, Oscar Gamble epitomizes 1970s baseball to me. There was, of course, that gloriously funky Afro of his — arguably the greatest in the history of the game, and which in its peak state could have accommodated three caps simultaneously — and his even funkier batting stance, where he crouched so low at the plate that his elbows practically touched his knees. Both of those things were beautifully emblematic of baseball in the 70s, an era in which ballplayers finally began to feel free to express themselves on a major league diamond. But while he generally looked like the coolest cat at the disco (and he actually owned one — Oscar Gamble's Players Club in Montgomery, Alabama), Oscar always came to play; and despite his less-than-imposing size (5'11, 165 lbs in his prime), he could easily launch a pitch into the stratosphere whenever that left-handed swing uncoiled. Though never a showboat on the level of, say, Mickey Rivers or Reggie Jackson (to name two of his teammates during his Yankees stints), he was nonetheless tremendously entertaining to watch, in part because he seemed to be enjoying himself so damn much out there.

But beyond all that, Oscar Gamble was an intrinsic part of my own 70s baseball experience — he truly was a cornerstone of my love for the game and its history, and ultimately one of the main inspirations behind my baseball writing. His legendary 1976 "Traded" card was in one of the first wax packs I ever opened, which meant that I knew of him before I knew of Mark Fidrych, Dock Ellis, Bill Lee, Luis Tiant, Dick Allen, Lenny Randle, or any of my other favorite players from the era. Oscar was a starting outfielder for the 1976 Yankees, who played against the Tigers in the very first MLB game I ever attended, and whom I studied at great length during their run through the first post-season I ever paid actual attention to. (Oscar's immortal quote, "They don't think it be like it is, but it do," was in reference to the insanity and dysfunction of the Yankees clubhouse under George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin.)

Oscar enjoyed his finest season as rent-a-player for the 1977 White Sox "South Side Hitmen," who nearly slugged their way to the AL West title, and whom I became obsessed with despite observing from a distance. He was a free-agent bust with the 1978 Padres, who my paternal grandparents took me to see that year when I visited them in San Diego; and the following year, he was traded back to the Yankees while I was visiting the same grandparents at their new digs on Long Island. I rooted for him even when he was playing against teams I rooted for — because, c'mon, how could you root against Oscar Gamble? "He was a sweet, decent man without a single ounce of malice in his heart," Reggie Jackson told the NY Daily News today, "one who came through the door every day with a smile on his face." And even from the stands, or on TV, I could totally pick up on that.

Oscar's 'fro attained its greatest shape and circumference during his 1973-75 stint with the Indians, a period during which he could have easily been mistaken off-field for a member of the Chi-Lites or Rasputin's Stash. I didn't learn until many years after the fact that the Yankees had made him cut it when he was traded to the Bronx from Cleveland, or that said haircut forced him to pass on a possible Afro-Sheen endorsement deal with Johnson Products. I talk about his haircut at length in Stars and Strikes, and also got into it a bit in this "Bicentennial Baseball Minute" video I did a few years back in conjunction with the book.

I've long loved that story, because — even if the world was deprived of what could have been a seriously dy-no-mite Afro-Sheen commercial — it underlined how much of a team player Oscar Gamble really was. Though the Yankees were uptight and old-fashioned about grooming, and he would have been well within his rights to cop an attitude about their edict, he saw the bigger picture. After all, he'd spent the bulk of his career playing for lousy teams in Philadelphia and Cleveland, and he was not about to let a little (or a lot of) hair get in the way of him being part of a contender.

There is a sadder side to that story, though, one which I didn't fully grasp until a year or two ago, when I turned up an interview with Oscar Gamble while digging through some newspaper archives from 1977. In a Chicago Sun-Times article with the headline "Oscar Gamble Sheds Bad Boy Image," Ron Rapoport writes about how Gamble — by all accounts a chatty, affable guy and a dependable teammate — was widely viewed as a "troublemaker" by baseball GMs, simply for having the temerity to groom himself like the proud, handsome black man he was... and that a lot of reporters were flat-out afraid to talk to him because they perceived him to be some kind of black militant in double-knits.

"After I got a haircut [in 1976]," Gamble told Rapoport, "a lot of writers came over and said, 'We didn't talk to you because we thought you were violent.' They just came up and admitted it. That's what the hair meant to them. I just wore it that way because it looked good on me and I looked good in it. It's funny in a way — people always judge people the way they think you should be. You never know what people are thinking. I've always been a nice friendly guy, easy to talk to."

This, in a nutshell, is the side of sports that I've always hated — the side that not only encourages conformity, but also casts character-assassinating aspersions upon those who refuse to knuckle under accordingly, and punishes those who stand up for what they believe. And 40 years later, things haven't gotten a whole lot better on that score — just ask Colin Kaepernick, a gentleman whose own 'fro and ironclad sense of self surely caused Oscar to flash a knowing grin or two. Then again, that's why so many baseball players of the 70s continue to inspire me to this day; they were true to themselves, even when the game's old guard — the owners, skippers, General Managers, journalists and even veteran players — did their best to tamp them down...

It always hurts when one of the favorite players from your childhood dies, especially one who thoroughly embodied the fun, excitement freedom you felt whenever you ran out onto your local diamond as a kid. But Oscar's passing hits me extra hard today, because I'd love to commiserate about it with someone else who's no longer with us — James Saft, a brilliant Reuters columnist and one of my oldest and dearest friends, who passed away in October. One of the first things Jim and I bonded over in high school was our shared Alabama connection; my maternal grandparents lived in Tuscaloosa, and his aunt lived in Greensboro, and we each spent many formative summers in the state, which may as well have been Mars as far as our private-school classmates on the north side of Chicago were concerned. As such, we both shared a particular affection for Bama ballplayers; and Oscar Gamble, who was scouted by the legendary Buck O'Neil while attending Montgomery's George Washington Carver High School, was one of our favorite members of that fraternity. Jim spent the last years of his life in Huntsville with his wife, daughters and dogs, and I would always ask him to keep an eye out for Oscar Gamble's Players Club memorabilia at the thrift shops in Montgomery, whenever he was there. (None ever turned up, but a man can dream, right?) When the rumor of Oscar's passing first hit Twitter this morning while I was still waking up, my first instinct was to drop Jim an email, asking him if he'd heard anything... and then I remembered that I couldn't do that anymore.

And so, unfortunately, it goes; in the words of Hank Williams, another great son of Alabama, I'll never get out of this world alive. But I'm not in the mood to play any Hank right now — I'd rather spin some Delfonics, whose sweet Philly soul strains doubtless caught Oscar's ear early in his playing career, and whose gorgeous "Delfonics Theme" both fills me with the same sense of joy and wonder that I experienced while watching Oscar Gamble in action, and echoes the sadness that I feel now that he's gone. Rest in funky peace, Oscar. And thanks for everything. 

Happy Birthday, Neil Diamond!

Sometime in the spring of 1990, I came home to the house I shared with two of my band mates to find a USPS package delivery notice waiting for me in our mailbox. I probably groaned audibly, because I knew that retrieving the package would mean getting up earlier than usual the next day, because our local post office was about a mile north of our pad, and the record store I worked at was several miles to the south.

The next morning, after dragging myself off my futon and trudging over to the p.o., I grabbed a southbound #36 to work. After finding a seat, I took a closer look at the package, which was actually a flat envelope about the size of a magazine, and had my Uncle John's return address on it. John is an immensely talented artist, so I though maybe he'd sent me one of his works for my walls. I gingerly opened the envelope to take a peek at what was inside, and my mind was promptly blown by the autographed sheet music that you see above. Apparently, John's son (my cousin) and Neil Diamond's son went to the same school in L.A.; knowing that my band Lava Sutra were all big Neil fans, and that we had been covering "Shilo" as part of our live sets — and actually recorded it as a "hidden track" for our demo cassette — John purchased the sheet music and took it with him to a school event, just in case Neil would be there. When he ran into Neil that night, he showed him the sheet music; "I remember that song," Neil laughed, before very graciously signing it for me. It's one of the greatest gifts I've ever received, and has hung prominently in every house and apartment I've lived in since.

I've never had the opportunity to meet or interview Neil Diamond, which is a shame; the music world is filled with douchebags of all stripes, but I've never heard anything bad about Neil from anyone who's ever crossed paths with him. He's always come across like a true gentleman — maybe one with a slightly heightened sense of self-importance, or a goofy sense of humor that doesn't always translate well, but a gentleman nonetheless. Which is why, my fandom aside, it made me really sad to hear that he's retiring from the road after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In light of that news, I wrote a few things about his history as a performer for the Forward, which you can read here.

And in honor of Neil's 77th birthday today, I went back and dug up a few other things I've written about him over the years. In 2015, after witnessing the greatest Neil Diamond concert I've ever seen (and sadly, will ever see), I wrote this piece for the Forward; and a year earlier, I reviewed his most recent studio album — the unexpectedly excellent Melody Road — for the same outlet. And though it's no longer available on Rolling Stone's site, I made a list of ten great Neil Diamond tracks for them back in 2005, which has since been re-posted here.

Obviously, Neil's music means a lot to me, so it's been gratifying to be able to express that in these pieces. It's also been encouraging to see how younger generations of listeners have come around to him in the past 25 years. When I first saw him in concert, at the Rosemont Horizon in 1992, my friends and I (then in our mid/late 20s) were the youngest people in the place; but when my wife and I went to see him at the Greek Theatre in 2015, probably half the crowd was younger than me by a decade or two. Over the course of fifty years, Neil Diamond went from being a Solitary Man to a legendary one; and if he got cheated out of a victory lap by this disease, hopefully he can at least take comfort in reflecting on a half-century of celebratory performances, and knowing that so many of his heartfelt songs have stood the test of time.

So Happy Birthday, Neil. Long may you rock, in whatever manner you choose to do so from here on out. You got to me, and then some.

 

The Dope's That There's Still Hope

Though I do have some nice memories from it, 2017 was an undeniable shit-show for me in all manner of ways (and quite possibly for you, too). But rather than crawling under my desk and assuming a fetal position, I am fully resolved to make this coming year a better one on every level — and the fact that my first gig of the year involved writing something on Bruce Springsteen's first album bodes pretty well for that, I'd like to think.

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was released 45 years ago today, and I've counted it among my five favorite Springsteen albums since the days when there were ONLY five Springsteen albums. It's fair to say that it's his loosest and looniest record, as well as (for better or worse) his most verbose, and spinning it again (and again) while doing research for this Rolling Stone piece was kind of like having an evening out with an old friend who I'd lost touch with for awhile — lotsa laughs, lotsa good memories, lotsa stories that don't always get finished. True, "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" is a song I never need to hear more than once a decade (and "The Angel" isn't a whole lot better, though I love the melody on the bridge), but the rest of the record still totally delivers the scraggily poetic goods for me.

Anyway, a very Happy New Year to whomever's reading this, and may your 2018 be filled with love, joy, good health and great music.

 

Midnight Magic

 

Christmas came early for me in December 1979 — about a week early, in fact.

This pre-Christmas Christmas was necessitated by the fact that my mom, sister and I were preparing to move to Chicago from Los Angeles, where we'd spent the past year living with two of my aunts, my uncle and my two young cousins in their airy Spanish Revival duplex on Sixth Street. Our plan went like this: My mom was flying to Chicago to meet Froggy, her fiancee, while my sister and I would fly to New York City to spend Christmas (and a few days before and after) with my dad and stepmother, and then we'd meet up in Chicago in time to start the new year (and new decade) in our new home. So on December 19th, our final evening in Los Angeles, my sister, mom and I exchanged presents with the rest of our L.A. family.

Among the more memorable gifts I received that night were a Strat-O-Matic College Football set, a copy of The People's Almanac #2, and a copy of the Commodores' Midnight Magic LP. In retrospect, it seems kind of strange that the one record I got that Christmas was far mellower than the music I'd gotten deeply into that fall through local FM radio station KMET, as well as via various friends — new wave-ish things like Cheap Trick, Blondie, the Knack, the Cars, the Records and Bram Tchaikovsky, and older hard rock stuff like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Foghat and Jethro Tull. But I'd been a fan of the Commodores since the summer of '77, when "Easy" oozed like cosmic honey out of every radio in earshot, and they were one of those bands that my mom and I both shared an affection for (even if she'd aptly described them as "corny" on more than one occasion).

And frankly, I wasn't the kind of kid who got off on pissing off my mom with my record collection; I happily absorbed the harder stuff on my own time, but also really enjoyed the times when my mom and I would listen to music together, finding common ground in the melodies that transported us. So when writing out my Christmas list that year, I thought Midnight Magic would be a better bet to ask for than, say, Get The Knack, because I knew with the latter that it'd only be a matter of time before my mom's ears picked up the line "When she's sitting on your face" from "Good Girls Don't," and an awkward conversation would inevitably ensue...

Since we were due to leave the next day, my sister and I immediately packed up all our new presents — except for the Strat-O-Matic game, which I insisted on taking with me to NYC — in a suitcase for my mom to take with her to Chicago. I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to listen to my new album for another ten days or so, but then again it gave me something to look forward to, a new thrill to savor once the excitement of spending our first Christmas in Manhattan was over.

I finally got a chance to pierce the album's shrink wrap on our first night in Chicago, while we got comfortable at Froggy's one-bedroom apartment on the 67th floor of the John Hancock Building. From his living room window, Froggy pointed out a black, glass-and-steel rectangle below — the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed apartment building on Lake Shore Drive where we'd all be moving in a matter of days. For now, though, we'd ride out the remaining days of '79 in his comfy bachelor pad in the sky, which came complete with a wooden-based BSR turntable that I popped Midnight Magic onto at my earliest opportunity.

Up til this point, I had only heard "Sail On" and "Still," the album's two hit ballads; the country-tinged verses of the former seemed a little odd to me, but I loved how the song built to a mighty chorus crescendo. "Still," on the other hand, I didn't dig at all — in retrospect, the sappy ballad was a dry run for Lionel Richie's solo career, but at the time it just seemed both convoluted and dull. Nevertheless, I was a loyal fan, and remained hopeful that Midnight Magic would contain a funky track or two along the lines of "Brickhouse," or even "Too Hot Ta Trot". In that respect, I would be sorely disappointed; once I finally spun the record, it became apparent that there was nothing on it that could touch the funkiest highlights of the Commodores' back catalog. However, the upbeat cuts like "Getting It," "Sexy Lady" and the title track were a different (and appealing) animal altogether — they were clean, smooth and sophisticated in a way that somehow seemed to perfectly befit our new surroundings.

But the track that I really connected with was "Wonderland," which opened Side 2. A lush, slow-grooving seduction ballad, the song found Lionel promising to sweep a girl off to the land of love with a ride down "Paradise Drive," if she'd just take his hand. While "Wonderland" was entirely too "adult" for me to relate to on a literal level, I was completely enraptured by the luxuriously silky sound of the track, and completely caught up in its evocative promises. "Hello, honey, this is your lucky day," Lionel sang, and yeah, this was my (and our) lucky day — after a year of scraping by in Los Angeles with so little money that I'd felt guilty about asking my mom to take me shopping for new clothes, she was about to marry a guy who lived in a skyscraper, and who was about to move us all into a sleek apartment building with an actual door man. The building was even located on Lake Shore Drive — not Paradise Drive, perhaps, but damn close enough...

I played the album again that unseasonably New Year's Eve, shortly before we boarded a CTA bus to take us up to Rogers Park, where we quietly rung in the new decade by watching a late screening of Going In Style — a bittersweet heist comedy starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg — at the 400 Theater. On the way home, as our bus cruised southwards along Lake Shore Drive, I looked out at the lights of Lincoln Park, which seemed to bob and beckon in the distance like fairy lights, and heard "Wonderland" playing in my head. I knew next to nothing about my new home at this point, but I couldn't wait to learn everything — couldn't wait to become a part of this historic and enchanting metropolis where I'd been lucky enough to land. I was so pumped, I wasn't even stressed about having to enroll in a new school the following week, which would be my fourth school in less than two years.

Sadly, life never flows as quite smoothly as a late-70s Commodores track. In time, Froggy would turn out to have deep-seated anger issues that primarily manifested at me; living in a Mies Van Der Rohe building would prove a cold (often literally) and depressing experience; and my desire to fit in with the rock-loving, WLUP-listening kids at my new school would eventually cause me to renounce my love for all things Commodores. But for a couple of weeks at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, Midnight Magic represented all of my hopes and dreams I had for the new year, the new decade, and my new life. As I sit here in Chicago on a bitingly cold New Year's Day, I listen to "Wonderland" and can still feel the same heady sense of excitement, promise and wonder — that same Midnight Magic — that I did thirty-eight years ago. And I find myself wondering where the hell all the time went.

 

 

Hef A Good Time, All The Time

There's so much to be said in the wake of Hugh Hefner's passing, both about Hef himself and the cultural impact (positive and otherwise) of his most famous magazine. But I'm not going to get into any of that here...

No, I think the best way to observe Hef's death is to watch (or at least acknowledge the existence of) this sublimely ridiculous network TV special from the Thanksgiving Weekend of 1979. I myself have no memory of its broadcast, though it certainly would have been right in my 13 year-old wheelhouse at the time. And good lord, look at that cast: Richard Dawson! The Village People! Chuck Mangione! Wayland Flowers and Madame!

And then, of course, there's added "bonuses" like Dawson's recurring bit with ill-fated Playmate Dorothy Stratten, and celebrity walk-ons like James Caan, Marjoe Gortner, Jim Brown, Ruth Buzzi, Robert Culp and Patty Hearst. Honestly, the only way they could have made this more quintessentially "1979" was to have Dave "The Cobra" Parker and the rest of the "We Are Family" Pirates snorting coke in the Playboy Mansion Grotto...

Speaking of "We Are Family," this TV special serves as not only a fascinating (as well as titillating and occasionally nauseating) time capsule from the, er, tail end of the 1970s — the commercials alone are worth the price of admission — but it also serves as something of a riposte to those pro- and anti-disco factions who would claim that July 1979's Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park was what "killed" disco music and culture.

Four months after that legendary/infamous event, disco was clearly still considered commercially potent enough for ABC to broadcast a roller disco special with the Village People as guest stars; at the same time, if this bloated, vapid and coked-up mess accurately reflects where disco culture was at (or at least how mainstream America was perceiving it) by late '79, it clearly would have croaked soon enough on its own, without any help from antagonistic (and opportunistic) rock DJs like Steve Dahl. I loved disco now, as I loved it then — but pop culture trends go in waves, and disco's wave had already crested by the time Disco Demolition kicked it in the skin-tight satin pants.

In any case, you can watch the whole mind-boggling thing here at the amazing Archive.Org site, or dig it in more bite-sized chunks via the following YouTube clips:

Rest in peace, Hef. No one can say you didn't enjoy your time on Earth.

 

 

If Your Hart Is A Flame Burning Brightly

I remember talking to a friend about Hüsker Dü's New Day Rising, shortly after that album came out. "I hear Hüsker Dü are doing POP SONGS now," he laughed, dismissively.

Well, yeah. New Day Rising was the album where Grant Hart's pop sensibilities really stepped up to the mic; not coincidentally, that's also the album where Hüsker Dü went from being a band I genuinely respected to a band I truly loved. New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig (which followed it just eight months later) were my 80s Rubber Soul and Revolver — two perfect records that seemed joined at the hip sonically and artistically, even though the growth of the guys who were making them was happening almost too fast to be fully captured by recording technology. I can't even calculate how much time I spent in the fall of 1985 playing both albums back-to-back in my college dorm room, either playing guitar along with them or just laying back and absorbing their brilliance.

Flip Your Wig's "Flexible Flyer" was one of those rare songs — like the Music Machine's "Talk Talk" or the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action" — where the first time I heard it, it truly felt like it was written FOR me, a massive missive sent directly from the same lonely spot in the cosmos that I hailed from. The music was anthemic, the lyrics were positive and philosophical, and Grant Hart sang them like he was Paul Stanley's stoned-out younger brother. It still stirs my soul today as much as it did in the fall of '85.

"If your heart is a flame burning brightly
You'll have light and you'll never be cold
And soon you will know that you just grow
You're not growing old"

 
Rest in Funky Peace, Grant Hart.

And You Could Have a Change of Heart (Walter Becker, RIP)

Swimming lessons at the "Y" were the worst.

For reasons I can no longer recall — but which probably had at least something to do with my stubborn resistance to taking any sort of extra-curricular instruction in anything that I wasn't already deeply interested in — I got a late start on learning how to swim. My dad didn't sign my sister and I up for after-school swimming lessons at the Ann Arbor YM/YWCA until I was already ten years old, which meant starting at the "Tadpole" level along with kids who were four or five years younger than me.

It was incredibly humiliating. One time after class, while passing the main staircase at the "Y," I was spotted by a group of girls that I knew from my fifth grade class at Burns Park. "Hey, Dan," one of them called out from the upper landing. "What class are you taking?" Faced with the choice of admitting the awful truth, telling an easily debunked lie (my hair was obviously still wet, for one thing), or simply running wordlessly out of the building, I instinctively chose the third option.

I took my final "Y" swimming class in May 1978, just a week or two after I turned twelve. We had to pass a series of individual tests in order to graduate from the "Minnow" level — an achievement which meant that I could officially handle myself reasonably well in the deep end of any pool, if not exactly on the open ocean — so I had plenty of time to happily drift and daydream while the seven- and eight-year-olds in the class took turns demonstrating that they could tread water and float on their backs. As I glided slowly through the heavily chlorinated water, knowing I would never have to dive into that dreaded "Y" pool again, I repeated a mantra in my head in celebration: "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me Deacon Blues." 

It seemed like I'd seen the Aja album, with its arresting cover image of a shadowy geisha, in the living room of every one of my dad's friends that spring. But it took me a while to connect it with the lush and languid "Deacon Blues," a song so far removed from what I thought of at the time as pop music that it didn't really register the first twenty or thirty times I'd heard it on the radio. Finally, my friend Abbot — during one of our many CKLW-soundtracked Nerf basketball shoot-arounds — called my attention to it. "You should like this song," he said. "They mention the Crimson Tide."

I zeroed in on the chorus, and realized he was right. I had no idea what the song was about — it seemed both forbiddingly adult and almost surrealistically nonsensical — but I loved the Crimson Tide reference. My grandfather had spent most of the 1970s in Tuscaloosa as the dean of the University of Alabama's School of Social Work, and in that time (and over the course of many summer and Christmas visits) I'd developed a fondness for Bama football that nearly rivaled my love for the U of M's Wolverines. Grandpa Fred even lived two or three doors down from Bear Bryant, Alabama's legendary coach, who we used to run into during evening walks around the neighborhood. I had no idea why Steely Dan (whoever he/it was) would name-check the Crimson Tide, but Abbot's assessment was correct — the mere fact that they did so was enough to make me like the song, and then the music slowly sucked me in from there.

Steely Dan's music was smooth, sumptuous, and seemed aimed at a much older demographic than the one I belonged to at the time. And yet, as the spring of 1978 blurred into the summer and I found myself really caring about popular music for the first time, their omnipresence on the AM dial became increasingly apparent to me. "Peg," "Josie" and "FM (No Static At All)" were all sizeable hits that year, but it also wasn't uncommon for a radio station to whip out "Do It Again" or "Reelin' in the Years," breakthrough hits for the band from '72 and '73, and songs that I now belatedly remembered as seemingly being on the car radio whenever we'd go for an ice cream run to the Washtenaw Dairy. But for some reason, I'd never heard their biggest hit, 1974's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," until one afternoon in July '78. My sister and I were out in Los Angeles, visiting my mom, and at that moment we were edging our way down Laurel Canyon in a VW Bug belonging to John, my mom's boyfriend. "Oh man, is that Steely Dan?" John cried, cranking the volume as the song's opening vamp came rolling through his dashboard speakers.

Indeed it was, and I was completely entranced — not just by the song's hypnotic groove, but by its words. Once again, the lyrics seemed to be way more "adult" than anything I was used to hearing, and they seemed to start somewhere in the middle of the story. "We heard you're leaving/That's okay." Who's leaving? And why? "We could stay inside and play games/I don't know." Like what, Yahtzee? I didn't know, either. But the lines "You tell yourself you're not my kind/But you don't even know your mind" resonated with me, even if only from the standpoint of having "liked" a girl or two in my sixth grade class who hadn't "liked" me back for reasons that they couldn't or wouldn't fully articulate. "And you could have a change of heart," Donald Fagen offered, hopefully. Oh yeah, I could definitely relate.

As much as I immediately loved the song — and at least kind of dug their other hits — it wasn't like I instantly declared myself a Steely Dan fan at that moment. The first time I ever heard Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" or ELO's "Sweet Talkin' Woman," I felt compelled to run out and buy those records as soon as I had enough money in my piggy bank. But Steely Dan's music seemed mysterious and oddly unapproachable; as with the ocean, these were waters I instinctively felt leery about swimming in. Plus, by this time I'd seen photos in the newspaper of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and they both looked like some of the creepier inhabitants of the communal Santa Monica Victorian where my mom had lived for a few years in the mid-70s.

Between my insatiable hunger to learn and absorb as much as I could about music — an obsession that really kicked into high gear in the summer of '78, and hasn't really slowed since then — and my mile-wide cynical streak, I also quickly became suspicious about the stealthy ubiquitousness of Steely Dan's music. John, my mom's BF, was a big fan of jazz and blues (he'd previously done time as Taj Mahal's tour manager) so it made perfect sense that he would be attracted to Steely Dan's jazz-influenced sound. But I started to notice that, for many of the adults I interacted with at the time, the Aja LP served as a sort of totem of sophistication, something you had to have sitting out in your fern-shrouded, shag-carpeted living room if you wanted to be taken seriously as a person of taste circa 1978. And then there was stuff like Donny Osmond singing "Peg" during the 1979 Miss Universe pageant TV broadcast (yes, me and a couple of bored friends watched it on one hot summer night in Ann Arbor), which made the song seem like nothing more than mainstream pap.

Maybe this music was "adult," but was it adult in the soulless, acquisitive, middle-class American way that I'd already come to distrust? Hell, Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers had sung harmonies on the original recording of "Peg," and for someone whose tastes were rapidly veering towards hard rock, new wave and even punk, the Doobies were the epitome of lame. By the time Gaucho hit the charts in late 1980, I was off "The Dan" completely, writing the music off as pretentious, self-congratulatory corporate product, the sort of thing that primarily existed as background music for record industry glad-handers like Paul Simon's smarmy Annie Hall character to consume "the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian" to. Wasn't punk supposed to eradicate this kind of shit?

It would take me until the mid-90s to realize how utterly, comically wrong I had been about Steely Dan. I think my "change of heart" was due in part to relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles — whereupon I began to understand how many of their songs were about (or at least inspired by) being uptight, snarky East Coast (and at least half-Jewish) intellectuals adrift amid the decadence of 70s L.A., and how the experience both appalled and appealed to them. I also learned to appreciate how their sleek, hook-filled, impeccably-arranged music served as a Trojan horse for their twisted, sarcastic and decidedly transgressive lyrical worldview. And despite what I'd once perceived as an almost infuriating emotional remoteness in their work, I actually found myself taking refuge and comfort in  "Any Major Dude" and (especially) "Any World That I'm Welcome To" during some very dark moments in my life.

There was also the belated realization — driven by articles like Alex Wilkinson's amazing Rolling Stone profile from 2000 — that Becker and Fagen were an incredibly unique, fascinating and (dryly) hilarious creative duo. The "Classic Album" documentary on the making of Aja went a long way towards fostering my appreciation of their work, as well; the meticulousness of their vision is both awe-inspiring and kind of comical, and the way they chuckled over their tormenting of Michael McDonald during the recording of "Peg" (starting at 6:20 in the clip below) just endeared them to me more.

Love 'em or hate 'em — and I have certainly done both in my time — there was no pop duo like Becker and Fagen. And now Becker's gone, which is of course very sad, though in retrospect it's kind of amazing that he actually lived this long (his Gaucho-era heroin habit nearly got the best of him), and that the formerly road-averse pair was able to make a spectacular comeback as a touring act during the last two decades.

Walter Becker leaves behind an incredible body of work, one which I (and so many others) continue to successfully plumb for new joys, and one whose uncompromising singularity of vision would be remarkable in any age. As they say in baseball, Becker took his hacks and didn't get cheated; and as any major (league) dude will tell you, you can't really ask for much more than that. Rest in funky peace, Walter.

 

Groove On, Big Don

You don't usually see champagne corks a-poppin' in the clubhouse of a team that's just finished their season in second place, but these five members of the 1976 Oakland A's — Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, Don Baylor, Gene Tenace and Sal Bando — were toasting a different sort of victory when Ron Riesterer snapped this celebratory shot following the A's 1-0 loss to Nolan Ryan and the California Angels on October 3, 1976. All five players (along with teammates Willie McCovey and Billy Williams) had played the entire season without signed contracts, which meant that they were now eligible to leave the A's (and Charlie Finley, the team's erratic and dictatorial owner) and market themselves in MLB's first annual free agent re-entry draft, as it was known in those days.

At the time, Don Baylor was the only guy in this photo who wasn't considered a "star" — the other four had won three World Series rings as integral members of the A's "Moustache Gang," while Baylor was merely a very good outfielder and first baseman who had come to Oakland that April (along with pitcher Mike Torrez) as part of the deal that sent free-agents-to-be Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman to the Baltimore Orioles. Baylor, who'd had his first Big League cup of coffee with the Orioles in 1970, began playing regularly in 1972; he'd shown flashes of power along with his considerable speed (he averaged over 29 stolen bases in his first four full seasons), but didn't really start hammering the ball until 1975, when he set then-high marks for himself with 25 homers, 76 RBIs, 79 runs, a .360 on-base percentage and a .489 slugging percentage. His power numbers dropped again during his lone year in Oakland — only 15 homers, 68 RBIs and a .697 OPS — but he did steal 52 bases for Chuck Tanner's theft-happy team, which set a modern major league record that year with 341 swipes. Baylor was also hit by 20 pitches that year, making him the American League leader in that category for the third time in four seasons.

In all, it was enough to land Baylor a a six-year, $1.6 million contract from Gene Autry and the Angels, which worked out to a considerable raise from the $35,200 that he'd earned as a member of the A's. Joe Rudi would do even better, signing with California for five years and $2.1 million dollars, but the Baylor signing would be the one that really paid off for the Angels. Baylor's plate performance improved steadily over the next three seasons, peaking with a 1979 campaign that saw him hit .296/.371/.530 with 33 doubles and 36 home runs, and lead the league with 139 RBIs and 120 runs scored; he also led the Angels with 22 stolen bases, and played in all 162 games that season.

That's the Don Baylor I remember best, a stoic mountain of a man (at least, he seemed mountainous at the time, though Baseball Reference lists him at 6'1" and 190 pounds in his prime) who coolly led the Angels to the post-season for the first time in their 18-year history. That was a really fun Angels team to watch — in addition to Baylor and Rudi, they had Rod Carew, "Disco" Dan Ford, Frank Tanana, Nolan Ryan, Willie Mays Aikens, Carney Lansford, Bobby Grich and Bert Campaneris on the roster — and the only Angels team I ever actively rooted for. In fact, the first post-season game I ever attended was Game 4 of that year's ALCS in Anaheim; unfortunately, it turned out to be an 8-0 blow-out that clinched the AL pennant for the Orioles, and Big Don went 0-4 that day with two strikeouts. (I was utterly miserable, anyway — having just gotten braces the day before, my mouth was in such pain that I could barely eat a ballpark hot dog. My only happy memory from that day is of the streaker who led the Big A security in a post-game chase across the field.)

I loved Don Baylor because, like most of my favorite players of the era, he was an anomaly. He was a big guy who could steal bases as well as hit home runs. His 1979 performance earned him the AL MVP award, which made him "the first Designated Hitter" to do so, even though he only actually DH'd in 65 games that season. He was a badass-looking dude who, unless you were an opposing pitcher or a middle infielder trying to turn a double play, had a reputation for being exquisitely good-natured. Though his nickname "Groove" supposedly came from his brash rookie pronouncement that "If I get in my groove, I'm gonna play every day," he was quite the disco denizen, as well; several years back, when he was serving as the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Baylor waxed effusively about his disco days to a broadcaster friend of mine who'd showed him a copy of my book, Big Hair and Plastic Grass. According to my friend, Baylor pulled Big Hair out of his hands and began enthusiastically thumbing through it, and appeared quite reluctant to give it back.

That's the closest I ever came to meeting Don Baylor, but the news this morning of his death at 68 due to complications from multiple myeloma still hurts really, really bad. Maybe it's because he's another one of my childhood baseball heroes who, like Willie Stargell, Dock Ellis, Mark Fidrych, Gates Brown and George "Boomer" Scott before him, left this life much too soon. Maybe it's because the Don Baylor I cheered for as a kid seemed utterly impervious to any sort of negative force; after all, the guy set a modern-day MLB record (since surpassed by Craig Biggio) by getting hit 267 times with pitched balls — and no matter how hard the pitch, he'd simply shrug it off and head down to first. Maybe it's because, even though the guy never really achieved superstar status, his positive nature resonated with fans at every one of his stops during his 17 years as a full-time major leaguer (and later during his managerial stints with the Colorado Rockies and Chicago Cubs), and I'm seeing a lot of shared sadness online today that attests to how much he'll be missed. Maybe it's because, at a time when lying, cheating, antagonism, maliciousness and willful ignorance are such recurring themes in our daily lives, it feels like the human race can't afford to lose any more of the "good guys". And maybe it's because someone I love dearly is currently gutting her way through cancer issues of her own, and is anxiously awaiting a pathology report that could contain some very bad (or hopefully very good) news...

At least I — and his countless fans — can take comfort in the fact that Don Baylor packed a lot of living into his 68 years. The first African-American to play baseball for the recently-integrated Stephen F. Austin HIgh School in Austin, Texas, Baylor would later become the first African-American manager ever hired by the Cubs. He played in seven American League playoff series, finally reaching the World Series in each of the last three years of his MLB career: With the Boston Red Sox in 1986, with the Minnesota Twins in 1987 (earning his first and only WS ring), and with the Oakland A's in 1988. He won 627 games as a major league manager, including 77 with the Rockies during the strike-shortened 1995 season — a number good enough to get them into the post-season for the first time in their short history. He worked as a hitting coach with several teams (noticeably improving the performance of Chipper Jones, among others) and even served as a broadcaster for the Washington Nationals in 2007. He was active in charity work as well, winning the Roberto Clemente Award in 1985 for his efforts on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. If his untimely death leaves us with a great void, that's only because he made such large mark while he was here.

So groove on, Big Don. If there's an afterlife, I hope it comes complete with the most happening disco imaginable, and that your legs are feeling good enough again to let you bust a few moves on the light-up dance floor. And may you rest in funky peace.

 

 

 

Real Cool Time

Finally got a chance to watch Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch's Stooges documentary, this weekend. I genuinely learned some things (like how Iggy's wanton shirtlessness was inspired by Yul Brynner and other silver screen pharaohs of the 1950s), was annoyed by the repetition of certain footage and the omission or soft-pedaling of some favorite Stooges lore (the band's bloody '73 demise is only briefly mentioned, for example), but overall found the film incredibly entertaining, and it's totally sent me down a(nother) 60s/70s Michigan music rabbit hole.

Sure, there's plenty of things for diehard Stooges fans like myself to carp about, but I'm happy that the film officially exists and is commercially available, so that newcomers can enjoy it and learn about one of the mightiest, most influential bands to ever stalk a stage — as opposed to the MC5's True Testimonial doc, which was much better than this one but will never officially see the light of day thanks to an unfortunate tangle of legal wranglings.

My favorite thing from Gimme Danger, though? This photo of über-guitarist Ron Asheton hanging out at Ann Arbor's Nickels Arcade, which I'd never seen before. My family and I lived in Ann Arbor from mid-1967 to the end of 1978 (just a few blocks away from the MC5's Hill Street enclave, in fact), and during that period we must have walked through Nickels Arcade at least a thousand times, probably more. I often got my hair cut at the barber shop there, and my sister used to buy miniature glass animals from a little shop at the west end of the arcade, just to the left of where Ron is standing here.

It was a magical, otherworldly place for us, with its Beaux-Arts terra-cotta details and vaulted glass skylight that ran the entire length of the gallery. And learning that one of my all-time favorite guitarists hung out there as well, probably killing time while waiting for Iggy to get off work at the nearby Discount Records (where I would eventually buy my first 45s), makes it even more magical for me now.