Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Skateaway

December is the darkest month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Up G.I. Joe

I got the idea for this post from a recent online conversation I had with my friend and fellow author Joe Bonomo. Though we didn't actually meet until 2012, Joe and I have repeatedly bonded over how similar our formative experiences were; from music to baseball to teenage alienation, we were definitely on similar (and in some cases outright parallel) paths during our early years. But in the aforementioned chat, we discovered a very crucial difference: Joe was an Action Jackson man, while I was all about G.I. Joes. I suggested we write dueling blog posts about our childhood action figures, and here's my entry — you can read mine first, and then read Joe's, or you can read Joe's first and then come back to this one. Either way works for us!

45 years ago this week, if you’d asked me to name the three greatest things that had happened during the previous twelve months, I would have invariably replied with:

• Nixon’s resignation
• Blazing Saddles
• “Kung-Fu Grip” G.I. Joe

1974 — what a time to be alive, right?

Of the three, Hasbro's introduction of "Kung-Fu Grip" probably had the biggest immediate impact on my life. I had been heavily into G.I. Joe since the May of 1973, when my friend Doug gave me a G.I. Joe Air Adventurer action figure — “with LIFE-LIKE HAIR and BEARD” trumpeted the box — for my seventh birthday. My mom, a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, had previously refused to buy me anything G.I. Joe-related, despite my pitiful entreaties; still, she was wise enough to not make me return the present.

Besides, the Hasbro company — mindful of the growing anti-war sentiment among Americans — had recently repackaged Joe and his mates as a somewhat-less-objectionable “Adventure Team”. Sure, these fuzzy-headed dudes still had guns, grenades, flame-throwers, etc.; but these were all now employed in pursuit of “adventure,” instead of torching Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the evils of Communism. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “He’s not a soldier — he’s an Air Adventurer!” I don’t recall her exact response, but I suspect that there was some eye-rolling involved.

Of course, like any impressionable American boy, I wanted my Air Adventurer to stockpile as many weapons as possible. The big problem was that, given the hard-plastic construction of his hands, it was exceedingly difficult to get him to hold on to any of his equipment, lethal or otherwise, in a functional or vaguely realistic manner. (This became even more difficult for my Air Adventurer after he fell from a tree branch in our Ann Arbor front yard and shattered his left arm.)

Therefore, Hasbro’s 1974 introduction of G.I. Joe dolls with “Kung-Fu Grip” — hands made of soft rubber, with fingers that could be manipulated individually — came as a total godsend to me. “They know that this is exactly what I need!” I marveled. All of my future G.I. Joes would now be able to shoot, stab, climb, schlep and give each other the “soul shake” in a far more secure and realistic manner. For the first time in my young life, I felt validated as a consumer.

When I moved to England that fall with my father and sister, however, a whole new world of “adventure” immediately opened up for me. Action Man, G.I. Joe’s Palitoy-licensed British counterpart, had not only introduced the “gripping hands” concept a whole year earlier, but he also came with a variety of realistic historic military uniforms and weapons as part of Palitoy’s “Soldiers of the World” series. (Holy shit — they even had an Action Man tank!) This absolutely blew my mind; now, instead of just shooting killer cobras and blowing up aggressive octopi, my G.I. Joes could stage actual World War II combat scenarios!

Of course, to fully stage said combat scenarios, my G.I. Joes — now fully attired and armed with period-perfect British and American WWII infantry gear — required an opponent to fight against. To say that my father was displeased when he learned I wanted to spend my allowance on a German stormtrooper uniform set would be to woefully understate the case, but I was adamant that this was exactly what I wanted. “But Dad, G.I. Joe needs an enemy,” I insisted. He okayed the purchase in the end, though also (I’m sure) with no small amount of eye-rolling.

When we returned to Ann Arbor the following year, my Action Man gear was the talk of all my G.I. Joe-loving elementary school pals, most of whom thought I was making up the part about the existence of an Action Man tank (alas, I couldn’t afford to bring one back with me as proof). How was it possible that British kids could have their Action Men reenact the Battle of the Bulge with miniature STEN guns and "potato masher" grenades, while our G.I. Joes had been relegated to searching for buried treasure and engaging in mildly strenuous desert rescues? It seemed grossly unfair.

Nevertheless, I hit it harder than ever with G.I. Joe in 1975, acquiring (mostly via Christmas and birthday gifts) a helicopter, a submarine, and the Adventure Team Training Center, along with various other outfits and equipment. I had the Training Center set up in the basement of the first house we rented upon our return, with the “training slide” cord stretched halfway across the room, and a makeshift landing pad for the copter. Even though I was convinced that the house (especially its basement) was haunted, I still happily spent countless hours down there performing an endless array of G.I. Joe maneuvers. My mania for all things G.I. Joe-related would last another two years or so, until my enthusiasm for sports finally outstripped all my other interests. The turning point was probably the Christmas of 1976, when I fished a pecan out of my grandmother’s holiday nut dish expressly for the purpose of having my G.I. Joes play football with it.

My friends and I admittedly enjoyed additional dalliances with other action figures — like the Johnny West, Steve Austin and Evel Knievel collections — but G.I. Joe was our main man. There were two realms we never entered into, however: Big Jim and Action Jackson. The latter did seem kind of cool (he had some sweet accessories, and that “bold adventure is my game” song from his TV commercials was catchy and fairly stirring), but those AJ figures were just too damned small for our G.I. Joe-sized world. And the commercials for the former always played like scenarios lifted straight from one of the more "open-minded" reader letters that popped up from time to time in my dad’s Penthouse magazines. (“Dear Penthouse: I never thought these letters were real, but last week I went camping with my buddy Big Jim, and we met this guy with a rugged face and a strange tattoo…”) The way Big Jim could bust a strap with his bicep was admittedly impressive, but his whole "hyper-masculine outdoorsman" trip just wasn’t my thing.

So yeah, G.I. Joe was where it was at for me. The gear, the outfits, the play sets — it all just seemed so superior to everything else that was out there, even if it didn’t fully sate my childhood lust for historic combat like Action Man’s stuff did. I finally sold (or, more likely, gave away) all my G.I. Joe/Action Man toys in the fall of 1978, as part of the preparations for my dad moving back to NYC to live with my then-stepmother, and my sister and I moving to L.A. to live with my mom. I know all that stuff would be worth a fortune now, but Joe and I had reached the end of our road long before that; and anyway, most of my figures had already lost some or all of the fingers from their “Kung-Fu Grip” hands, and there would never be much of a resale market for Leprosy G.I. Joe.

Even though we wouldn’t have much to say to each other now, I still think of G.I. Joe every year about this time. The sweet childhood memories of the holiday season come flooding back, and once again I’m sprawled across the floor of one of our Ann Arbor living rooms, listening to Christmas music on the radio, paging through the Sears and JC Penney catalogs, and trying to decide which G.I. Joe stuff I want to add to my Christmas wish list. Eight Ropes of Danger? The Five-Star Jeep? The Mobile Support Vehicle? Guess I’d better put 'em all on there, just in case…

The Egyptian Tomb

There are over 34,000 graves in Rosehill Cemetery, the largest cemetery in the City of Chicago. Those interred at the sprawling North Side burial ground include captains of industry, Civil War infantrymen, fifteen Chicago mayors, sixteen U.S. Congressmen, half a dozen 19^th century baseball figures, and legendary sportscaster Jack Brickhouse. “Louise is somewhere in there, too,” my mom told me, right around the time I moved back to Chicago in 2015.

Louise was not quite a relative, but much more than just a family friend. My mom, sister and I first met her in January 1980, shortly after we’d moved from Los Angeles to join my then-stepfather in Chicago. We’d just finished hauling the last of our stuff into our new 9^th floor apartment in the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed glass box at 910 N. Lake Shore Drive, when Louise (who was friendly with my stepfather) invited us to lunch at her apartment somewhere on the upper floors of our building’s next-door twin. Despite knowing almost nothing about her in advance, I had a weird premonition on our way to her place that she was going to play a very important role in my life — a premonition which turned out to be right on the money. A tiny, worldly, hilariously ribald widow in her early seventies, Louise was warm and welcoming to us from the moment we met. She and my mom hit it off immediately, and soon formed a deep bond that would last for over a decade. Louise and I clicked as well, once we each realized that the other was deeply interested in art, architecture and (especially) archaeology.

The shelves of Louise’s living room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows offered a gorgeous panoramic view of Lake Michigan, were filled with books on the aforementioned subjects, not to mention a wide array of ancient artifacts from around the globe. Soon I was going over to her place by myself on a regular basis, and we’d spend hours discussing everything from Bauhaus architecture and surrealist art, to Greek and Roman myths and the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, to her extensive and eventful travels in pre-WWII Europe. Despite the fact that I was only thirteen, Louise spoke to me like I was a learned adult, as opposed to an adolescent whose enthusiasm for these topics far outstripped his actual knowledge. When I graduated from the eighth grade that spring, Louise’s gift to me was a copy of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhnaton. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that not too many other eight graders received the same graduation gift that year…

The intellectual confidence that our friendship instilled in me turned out to be especially significant, as my stepfather — threatened by the closeness of my relationship with my mom — would spend the next two years doing everything he could to eradicate any semblance of self-esteem I might possess. When my mom (who certainly had her own issues with him) finally got fed up and moved us out, all the friends we’d made through my stepfather immediately dropped us — all of them except for Louise, that is. She sided firmly with the three of us, and did whatever she could to be helpful and supportive as my mom gutsily rebuilt her own life and ours.

I confess that, as much as I appreciated Louise’s love and encouragement, I found her presence increasingly difficult to take as I grew older. Louise would think nothing of enlivening a dinner conversation by, say, bringing up an artist she knew in 1930s France who would mix paints with his own shit to achieve a particularly impressive shade of brown; and she could always be counted to kick it up several notches when we were out in public, to flirt madly with any man we encountered, and maybe even “misappropriate” a wine glass, cutlery or some other grabbable item when no one was looking. I was desperately craving some kind of order in my life, and Louise represented chaos to me — charming and massively entertaining chaos, of course, but chaos nonetheless. I can vividly remember her advancing towards me through the crowd at a post-show reception for one of my high school plays, and me feeling both genuinely happy to see her, yet also silently praying that this pint-sized dynamo with the flashing eyes and crimson lipstick wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me.

I don’t recall seeing much of Louise while I was in college, but thankfully we managed to reconnect during the few years between my graduation and her passing. Never exactly a robust physical specimen to begin with, she was now exceptionally frail, but her personality and sense of humor remained as atomic-powered as ever; slightly more grown up and considerably less uptight than I’d been in my high school days, I could now just relax and enjoy our time together. When she died in 1992, after struggling with a variety of illnesses, my mom was there at her bedside. “Daniel — that’s my guy,” Louise told her. She left me her lime-green couch, a heavy stack of archaeology books, and an antique brass nutcracker in the form of a pair of female legs, which was really about the most “Louise” item imaginable.

A lovely memorial gathering was held at Louise’s apartment, where I’d spent so many wonderful afternoons hearing her stories. But I have no memory of there being a funeral, and I had no idea of what happened to her remains until my mom mentioned her in conjunction with Rosehill. Now that I was living in Andersonville, only a twenty-minute walk from the cemetery, I thought I might try to find her grave and pay my respects.

Unfortunately, my mom was pretty sure that Louise’s ashes resided somewhere in Rosehill’s gigantic two-story mausoleum — and most likely in a section devoted to the maternal side of her family, whose name we’d both completely forgotten after two-plus decades. And while I occasionally went for meditative, head-clearing strolls through the cemetery, the mausoleum’s doors always seemed to be locked whenever I visited...

My move back to Chicago, after twenty-three years in Southern California, was a positive one on many levels: I reconnected with old friends, made a few new ones, enjoyed some quality time with my mom, finally banished some lingering ghosts from my difficult adolescence, and somehow even managed to show up in time to witness the Cubs win their first World Series in over a century. But on a professional level, it was a total, deeply dispiriting bust. One promising work opportunity after another either slipped through my fingers or blew up in my face; the countless job applications I sent out resulted in only a small handful of interviews; and none of the book proposals I was writing seemed to be getting any traction. So in the fall of 2017, when a book agent I knew reached out about maybe helping hair-metal veteran Chip Z’Nuff pen his memoirs, I immediately said yes. The project was kind of a long-shot, given that Chip’s band Enuff Z’Nuff didn’t exactly have the name recognition of, say, Motley Crue or Guns N’ Roses; but I figured I’d at least get some funny rock n’ roll stories out of him — and maybe we’d even get lucky and land a book contract with a decent advance…

After a brief preliminary meeting with Chip at the Chicago Recording Company, he invited to come down to his house in Blue Island for a lengthier discussion of the project. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a car; and since riding the CTA all the way down to Blue Island from the North Side would take hours (and maybe wouldn’t be the safest course of action), I decided to rent some wheels for the weekend. But as the Enterprise outlet near me had recently jacked up their rental rates, I had to turn to their considerably cheaper branch over at the corner of Western and Peterson, right across from the northwest corner of Rosehill Cemetery. Two days later, when I returned the car to the branch, the Enterprise people offered me a lift home, but I declined. The early October morning was a spectacularly beautiful one, and I didn’t have any pressing deadlines, so I thought I’d treat myself to a leisurely walk home through Rosehill.

Unlike Graceland, which is built on a perfectly rectangular lot, Rosehill warps outward along its southern border as it proceeds to the west, and none of the cemetery’s paved paths or roads resemble anything close to a straight line. These factors, combined with the sheer vastness of the place, make it pretty easy to lose your bearings, even if you’ve been there many times. On this particular morning, I entered the western end of Rosehill via the Bryn Mawr Avenue gate, which I’d never done before; I took a left at the first fork in the pathway I came to, a right at the next, and so on, slowly wending my way more or less in the direction of the Ravenswood Avenue entrance on the other side. Though this part of the cemetery was pretty unfamiliar to me, I figured I’d eventually see some recognizable landmarks that would help guide me to the other end.

I had originally intended to walk straight home, but since the day was starting to get fairly warm, and my wife was texting me with questions about our Thanksgiving travel plans, I decided to find a shady place where I could stop and sit for a few minutes. I noticed a small Egyptian Revival-style mausoleum coming up on my left — after all these years, I’m still a sucker for ancient Egyptian design motifs — so I walked over and sat down on its cool front steps. I immediately felt very relaxed and happy sitting there, so I decided to hang out for a while and savor the moment, letting my eyes wander dreamily over the tranquil landscape of gravestones, tombs, obelisks and colorful trees.

To keep myself company on the walk, I’d been listening to “Lord Queensbury’s Codpiece,” a Spotify playlist I’d compiled of over two thousand tracks of 1960s British psychedelia, to be played in shuffle mode. The combination of jaunty melodies, fanciful lyrics and pastoral introspection meshed perfectly with both the warm autumn day and the melancholy atmosphere of the cemetery. Even more perfectly than I could have expected, in fact: For while I was relaxing there on the steps of the mausoleum, “Egyptian Tomb” by Mighty Baby suddenly popped on, as if to make sure I was aware of where I was sitting. It was an odd and eerie coincidence, to say the least.

Thinking this might be some sort of sign, I looked up at the name carved into the front of the mausoleum — Ferdinand Siegel — and decided to check Google for any interesting information I might be able to find out about my “host”. There wasn’t much out there, however; Mr. Siegel appeared to have been a German-born real estate investor who’d died in 1928 at the age of 79, presumably after having done well enough in his new country to build an impressive monument to himself. But compared to the fascinating stories of some of Rosehill’s other “residents,” the basic facts of Mr. Siegel’s life didn’t seem to warrant further research. So, feeling refreshed and ready to head home, I put my phone back into my jacket pocket and got up to go.

After I'd walked about ten feet back towards the road, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't actually looked into the mausoleum. Tombs of this size and era typically include a stained-glass rear window, and I silently scolded myself for nearly passing up the possibility of spying some beautiful 1920s glass work. I headed back to the Siegel tomb, walked up its front steps, and peered through the bars of its oxidized iron doors; sure enough, I could see a gorgeous stained glass window set into the far wall, depicting the Nile flowing languidly past a palm-dotted landscape, as if seen through a pair of ancient Egyptian “papyrus” columns. I took a photo of the window, then tried to make out the name plates on the wall below it.

The third one down read, "Louise E. Mora, 1908 -1992". It was Louise. Our Louise.

I stood there in shock for several minutes, first weeping, then laughing. Somehow, in this 350-acre repository of over 34,000 remains, I had found her — or maybe, she had found me.

Cynics reading this will say it was all just a lucky series of coincidences that led me to Louise’s grave. And perhaps it was. But if I hadn’t decided to take a chance on a Chip Z’Nuff book project (which also never panned out, unfortunately), hadn’t needed to rent a car, hadn’t been forced to go to a cheaper rental outlet, hadn’t refused their offer of a ride home, hadn’t taken several semi-arbitrary turns along a series of cemetery pathways I was only vaguely familiar with, hadn’t needed to answer Katie’s texts, hadn’t decided to rest in the shade at that very spot, and hadn’t suddenly thought to walk back and check out the mausoleum’s stained glass… well, that’s rather a lot of coincidences, isn’t it? And really, what were the odds of “Egyptian Tomb” coming up, out of over two thousand songs, shortly after I’d sat down?

“I was born in a world that can easily bring you down,” goes the first line of “Egyptian Tomb”. But for all the soul-crushing horror, cruelty and disappointment of this world, I can hereby attest that there’s still some magic left in the universe. Louise proved it to me on that warm October morning, from her resting place along the banks of a stained-glass Nile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just What I Needed: RIP, Ric Ocasek

(1978 photo by George Porcari)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Ticket to Paradise: R.I.P. Eddie Money

(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!)

 

J.D.'s Revenge, Revisited

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.  

We Accidentally Did Some Really Wonderful Things: Jim Bouton, R.I.P.

"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 40^thanniversary 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]

You Can Really HEAR The Hair!

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.

 

Grandpa Fred, LBJ and Me

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.

Grandpa Fred was a major force in my young life, and I've written about him here a few times before — both about his contributions to my interest in baseball, and his heartfelt work on behalf of children around the world — and our misadventure following the Dodgers-Braves game we attended in the summer of 1978 inspired my keynote address at last year's Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the Eternals induction ceremony.

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.