Big Hair and Plastic Grass

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.

Pigging Out

I’ve been a carnivore for probably 99% of my life. Even as a finicky little kid, when eating meals felt more like a chore than a pleasure, I would never turn down a hamburger, meatballs, a strip of bacon or a breakfast sausage patty.

The concept of “vegetarianism” appalled me from an early age — mostly because I associated it with my mom’s hippie friends, who liked to eat sprouts, tofu, carob and other wholesome and flavorless comestibles of the sort that could be found at the “health food” stores and restaurants of the early 1970s. But even as I grew older and began to learn about the potentially negative health effects of a meat-heavy diet, I defiantly continued to consume the stuff. It tasted great, after all, and I had the molars to chew it with; and in my 20s, even a two-cheeseburger-a-day regimen couldn’t seem to put any extra poundage on my skinny frame, so what did I have to worry about?

Of course, that kind of eating — or maybe my genetics, or maybe both — caught up with my cholesterol and waistline in my 30s, so I began to cut down on my meat intake. Well, actually, I just cut down on the beef and pork, and substituted turkey and chicken instead. I (mostly) stopped eating burgers at fast food establishments; beef was now primarily reserved for special occasions, like the “beef and baseball” road trip I took in the summer of 2002 with my friend Josh, or sitting down to a big, juicy steak with some friends at an old-school steakhouse. Living in L.A. for 20+ years, I craved the Italian beef sandwiches I’d grown up with (on?) in Chicago; and two years ago, when my wife and I moved back to the Windy City, I couldn’t wait to eat them again — albeit on a limited, “one per month” basis.

This all despite the fact that, since at least the early Nineties, I’d been well aware that the conditions in the American meatpacking industry weren’t really a whole lot better than they were back when Upton Sinclair wrote about them in The Jungle. I’d also been well aware that majority of the animals slaughtered in service of the food industry had been treated abominably on their way to their unfortunate demise. And yet, despite all the reading I did on the subject — and as much as I loved animals — I still ultimately felt more conflicted than disgusted. I still found ways to justify eating meat (“Oh, free range chicken, that’s okay”), primarily because it tasted so damn good. But I think I also did it because, at a very deep level, I’d been conditioned (or maybe conditioned myself) to think of meat as a reward, and maybe even a right.

Once, in the early 2000s, after reading a particularly heartbreaking article about the treatment of calves and cows in the beef trade, I decided to give up meat for a summer… and wound up gaining ten pounds in the process. “That’s it,” I thought at the time. “I clearly need meat in my diet!”

And on I went, until the day about five years ago when my wife and I were passed on a North Carolina highway by a truck hauling pigs to the slaughterhouse. Katie was driving, so I had plenty of time to observe the pigs’ expressions and body language — and they all looked profoundly depressed, like they knew what was up and had utterly lost the will to fight back. I’d loved pigs and been fascinated by them ever since I was twelve, when it had been my duty to feed a gigantic hog by the name of “Big Pig” during a week-long school field trip to a farm in northern Michigan. I knew that they were smart, sensitive and social creatures, yet even that knowledge hadn’t been enough to make me completely banish pork products from my diet. But that day in NC, I realized that I could no longer eat them. It hurt my heart too badly to see them so sad and defeated, to fully understand in that moment that they were going to be killed just to support the pernicious “baconization” of the American diet. And I just didn’t want to be part of that any longer.

While other meat was still “on the table” for me at the time, this has slowly been changing ever since those pigs opened up my heart and mind that day on the highway. As someone who is staunchly pro-environment, it doesn’t make sense for me to support an industry like factory farming, which — in addition to the myriad cruelties inflicted upon the animals — poisons the surrounding air, water and earth with its waste. And as someone who deeply loves animals, I just feel too hypocritical about loving and doting on my cats while simultaneously consuming other “lesser beasts”.

And frankly, I no longer buy the notion that farm or wild animals are inherently “lesser” than domesticated ones. Facebook may be awful and annoying in any number of ways, but it has enriched my life (and provided daily joy) by making me aware of the work being done at numerous animal sanctuaries around the world, including The Gentle Barn, Happily Ever Esther, Santuario Igualidad and Ziggy’s Refuge Farm Sanctuary. In addition to caring for their animals — many of whom would have otherwise ended up in the slaughterhouse — these organizations do an excellent job of educating their followers about said creatures’ personalities, and encouraging a deeper understanding and appreciation of them as sentient beings who have more to offer than their meat. The posts from these organizations have regularly warmed my heart and made me laugh, but they’ve also set the wheels a-turning in my brain…

Two weeks ago, Katie and I had the immense pleasure of visiting and staying overnight at one of these places: Ziggy’s Refuge Farm Sanctuary in Providence, NC. (All the pics in this post are from our visit.) For years now, we’ve had a dream that we will one day adopt a pig or two, and maybe a few ducks besides; so to actually meet and hang out Ziggy — the irascibly charming 350-pound pig known to his Internet fans as Ziggy the Traveling Piggy — was a real treat. But my heart was additionally warmed (and in some cases stolen) during our stay by dozens of the other animals that proprietors Kristin and Jay also lovingly care for. Whether it was Max the donkey, Whitey the dog, Addie the cat, Elvis the cow, or various other pigs, goats, horses and barnyard fowl, I saw a sweet soul everywhere I looked. Each one of these animals had a story; some had been abused or neglected, some had been too difficult or expensive for others to take care of, some had physically escaped from the trucks that were taking them to slaughter. But at Ziggy’s Refuge, these lucky ones will get to live out the rest of their days in comfort and peace, amid a gorgeous pastoral setting.

When it came time for us to leave, I was filled with an incredible mix of joy and sadness, like my heart was simultaneously expanding and breaking. I was so happy for all of these animals, so stoked to see that the Refuge was actually as real and as full of love and beauty and kindness as it had been portrayed on Facebook; but at the same time, I knew that the situation of Ziggy’s pals was so statistically unusual as to be practically unique. For instance, there are about 10 or 12 piggies living out their lives in the mud, sunshine and fresh air of Ziggy’s Refuge; meanwhile, about 115 million of their kind are killed every year in the US alone. I knew in that moment that I could no longer live disconnected or detached in any way from that kind of reality.

Which is why, at the ripe old age of 51, I’ve decided to go fully vegetarian. I know that some people who’ve known me for a long time will be as surprised by this as if I said I’d decided to stop listening to Thin Lizzy and AC/DC. Others who read this will no doubt wonder what took me so long to get here; I honestly wish I’d come to this conclusion earlier, but here we are. (To her credit, my wife got there much earlier, and has been gently nudging me in that direction, albeit with the intrinsic understanding that I can be a stubborn fucker.) I’m sure there are others who will mock me for giving up delicious meat, and still others will tell me that my decision doesn’t mean shit unless I go fully vegan — an option I’m open to exploring, though I’m admittedly nowhere near there yet. Regardless, I’m very pleased to finally have the meat monkey off my back.

Animal welfare, environmental concerns and dietary considerations are all part of the equation behind my decision to finally go meatless, but there’s another aspect to it, as well. At a time when greed, hate and fear are not only on the rise but are being actively encouraged, I feel like the best, most constructive thing we can do is to promote love, openness, understanding and (above all) kindness — and for me, not eating animals or otherwise contributing to their misery goes right along with that. I guess I’d been leaning in this direction for a while now, but I’d like to say thank you to Ziggy and all his pals for helping me get there. This July 4^th, Katie and I will be grilling up some veggie dogs in your honor.

This Indescribable Chaotic Element: A (Mostly) Unpublished Interview With Chris Cornell

On an appropriately rainy September morning back in 2012, I sat down to breakfast with Chris Cornell at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

We were there to talk about King Animal — the first new Soundgarden album in 15 years — for a cover story that I was writing for Revolver magazine. I'd written about Soundgarden and other Cornell-related projects many times over the previous two decades, but this was the first time I'd ever interviewed him (in person or otherwise), and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I'd chatted several times in the past with Kim Thayil, and always found the Soundgarden guitarist to be gregarious and hysterically funny; but there always seemed to be a sense of "otherness" emanating from Cornell, both onstage and in interviews, which made me wonder what (if anything) was really going on behind his striking visage...

I should probably get this out of the way right here: While I'd followed Soundgarden's career since the release of their Screaming Life EP in 1987, and I saw them live nearly a dozen times between 1989 and their 1997 breakup, I was never a huge Soundgarden fan. I respected what they did, admired their individual and collective talents, related (of course) to their 70s rock influences — yet their music never really resonated with me the way that, say, the music of their Pacific Northwest compatriots Screaming Trees and Mudhoney did. Even today, if you were to ask me what my favorite Soundgarden LP is, I honestly couldn't tell you. They're all impressive — and impressively consistent — in their own way, but I can't say I'm ever "in the mood" for some Soundgarden. Such are the vagaries of musical tastebuds...

That said, I was still incredibly saddened by his unnecessarily premature passing, and my heart hurts not just for his family and all the people out there who knew and loved him, but for all my friends (and I have many) who were legitimately huge fans of his music — Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, and/or his solo work. And it's for that latter group that I'm re-posting this full transcript of our interview, most of which (for reasons of space) didn't make it into my Revolver piece. During our conversation, I felt like I really got a glimpse of the kid inside the man, the diehard music fan inside the rock god, the humor and intelligence churning away behind the quiet reserve that was (probably) equal parts natural shyness and necessary self-protection. I genuinely enjoyed our conversation that morning; and if you were a Chris Cornell fan, I believe you'll probably dig reading this. Rest in Peace, Chris.

*****

Chris Cornell: Hey, before we start — have you heard the whole record?

Me: Oh yeah; I've had a stream of the whole thing for about a week now.

Okay, good. It’s kind of typical for a Soundgarden record — if you hear any of the songs taken out of context, it’s fine, but you don’t get the whole picture.

There's been a lot of expectant buzz about the album on the internet. Do you ever go on Soundgarden chat boards or anything like that, and read what your fans are saying?

I’ve never done that, ever. Things get to me — like, I might hear about something that a fan has said — but most of the time I’m ignorant of it, and kind of want to be. I don’t see it being helpful. And personally, I’ve never been the person that would go online and comment on a message board or posted video, or anything like that. I don’t want to judge people that do it; if that’s something you’re into, I get it. But it seems to me that those venues are mostly for people kind of picking things apart. It’s more about people interacting with each other than the art that someone else is doing. It might be people who are passionate about being fans, but what they’re doing is participating and communicating with each other in some way; it’s a social thing. And that has nothing to do with — and it should have nothing to do with — Soundgarden writing and recording. [Laughs] So I ignore it. Even if someone sends a message, saying, “People are very upset about X,” I immediately try to dismiss it, and hope that I’m not so stupid that I would do something that would upset fans… But you know, fifty percent of my career is doing things that upset a certain group of fans. [Laughs] So I don’t want to neglect that side, either — I’m working on the next thing that’s gonna really piss people off!

The album has a very dramatic flow to it. How involved were you in the sequencing of the album?

This was the first Soundgarden record, because it’s been 15 years, that I could just put the final mixes — or whatever was closest to the final mixes — in an iTunes playlist and just move them around. I probably spent the most time sequencing it that I have on any record. There were some songs, and this is always the problem with Soundgarden, where if you take them out of context and play them side-by-side, it sounds like we’re insane people for trying to put them on the same record. But once you sequence it correctly, it all makes sense. We have a lot of different influences, and we’re pretty liberal about collecting them and putting them all together in one song. And also, all four of us are coming from different angles on each song, because we all hear it our own way, and we all relate to it — cognitively, at any rate — based on what we imagine the influences are. We might do a song, for example, that Ben brings in, and I hear a completely different influence than him or Matt might hear in the same song. So it becomes kind of a collective thing. It takes a little bit of finesse to sequence from beginning to end and have it make sense.

Give me an example of two songs on the album that seem weird together when you remove them from the running order...

Well, on this album, one of the last songs we finished was “Blood On the Valley Floor”. Everybody was super happy with it, but that really pushed the needle a little bit towards super slow, aggressive, riff-oriented Soundgarden. And then there’s the song “Halfway There,” which is almost Beatle-y. And how do those two songs live on the same album without us sounding like insane people? [Laughs] To get all of that through is a little bit of a challenge. But what you get out of it at the other end, I think, is an authentic album experience, [something] I was raised with, and people don’t necessarily, at least in large numbers, give a shit about anymore. But hopefully this album will help.

Was the "authentic album experience" a big part of how you absorbed music as a kid?

Yeah. I did a lot of listening to music alone — that’s sort of how I became a musician, just based on years and years of being a super-geeky music fan. I didn’t really think of being in a band or making records or writing songs until I was probably 17, 18… it didn’t start at 10. I wrote songs and stuff, but I didn’t think that was what I was going to do until I was in my late teens. Listening to an album was definitely like a really important escapist thing that I completely dove into. And that was my only perspective ever while we were making albums, is that it would be that...

Once Soundgarden became a live touring band, then sometimes I would steer into the notion of a live experience when I was writing a song: “What are we missing that we don’t deliver live? Let’s write that!” But the priority was always that it would be an album experience, and that you’d draw your listener into a world that they can only go into through you, and then get lost in that without any missteps by us that would shock the listener out of that and back to reality — like that clunky acting scene in a movie where you’re really into it, and then you see behind the curtain and realize you're in a theater seat with a bunch of people next to you.

It’s a great headphones record, as well. It's very immersive — it sucks you in and never lets you come up for air.

That’s the goal, I think. We don’t go after that from song one; it’s something that kind of naturally happens, but which we also sort of manipulate as we’re reaching the end, when we’re sequencing, mixing and mastering. The artwork also is important, [even though] probably only a fraction of people even look at it any more. To me, that was another triumph for this album — seeing the cover art and the back cover with the song titles on it, seeing the album title work together with the songs, and the whole thing becoming what I would imagine a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album was to me, at least as a kid. I used to buy records at this head shop that was near my house. They would always burn incense in there, so all my albums smelled like that incense, so that was part of the whole trip, too! [Laughs]

Where did the title King Animal come from?

That came from Kim. I was assuming that it came from just sitting with the album art; this is the first time that I can remember where the album art was done before the album was done or before a title came, so the title itself wasn’t really influencing the visual. So Matt and Kim and Ben were all kind of throwing ideas around for titles; I was badgering Kim to come up with something brilliant, like he’s done before. He’s the one who blurted out “Badmotorfinger!” and “Ultramega OK!” — just stream of consciousness. A couple of the ideas we were thinking about didn’t really fit with the artwork, and I think Kim just dreamed that up viewing Josh Graham’s artwork, thinking of how it fit in with the artwork and the song titles and the big picture. And it really drew it all together.

It's like King of the Jungle returning to reinforce its dominance. Is that how you see Soundgarden right now?

Yeah, it’s confident, not passive. And it does that one magical thing which Badmotorfinger and Superunknown and Louder Than Love did, which is, it’s a memorable and strong title to a body of work that you can’t really title with a description. We’ve never been able to do that; that’s why our titles have always been somewhat ambiguous. We can’t really lay out a title that describes the music within in one line, or the band itself in one line, like AC/DC did over and over with High Voltage, Powerage, and on and on.

Louder Than Love always struck me as doing exactly that, though.

It might be closer. Screaming Life was, also… though it was also more brief.

As I understand it, you guys reunited, initially at least, more out of a curatorial impulse than a creative one.

Yeah. It had taken a little time. A couple years after we disbanded, it became sort of clear that our musical legacy had moved into this sort of classic rock embodiment, which was great — that was another triumph to me, like, Okay, our music is going to go on. It’s not dated, it wasn’t "of the moment," it wasn’t listened to because it was part of a genre, it wasn’t because of geography anymore. It was based on the songs. But then, as time went on, it also slowly but surely became clear to all of us that new generations of fans are being born and growing up — and as I did, they’re going to gravitate towards essentially what’s in front of their face. Some of the records that changed my life, I picked up literally by accident; someone left it at my house, or I liked the cover, that sort of thing.

Like what, for example?

Well, like the first Bauhaus record I bought was a live record [Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape]. Peter Murphy’s hiding his face behind a cymbal — which is removed from the drum kit, which I liked — and he’s singing. Something about that just spoke to me, like, “I don’t know what this is, but this has to be great.” I took it home and listened to it once, and I didn’t really like it, and it sat in my record collection. And then I was going through my albums and saw it again, and I was like, “This has to be good — I must have been in a shitty mood when I listened to it.” I put it back on, and they became one of my favorite bands, and I started having friends who were Bauhaus fans; I suddenly had goth friends, and stuff.

So basically, you wanted Soundgarden's music to be discoverable for kids who would have been born to late to know about the band during its actual existence.

Yeah, it became sort of obvious that we need to do that, because no one else was doing it. Management wasn’t doing it. The label, which has a huge part of our history in their catalog, was doing nothing. We didn’t have a fan club anymore, we didn’t have a website; we had nothing. So that’s what started it. And we were super proud of every part of it; there’s no ‘dark period’ where we were bummed out about what happened. The last creative experience we had, Down on the Upside, was a great one, so we didn’t really have to get over that hump of, “Making those last three records was so awful, I don’t know if I can do it again.” [Laughs] We didn’t have that.

At what point did you decide that making new music was going to be part of the plan?

I don’t know. We were sitting in a room together, all four of us for probably the first time in 14 years, and the first five minutes were a little awkward. I guess it’s just human nature. Everyone’s a little guarded and a little cautious, and everybody looks a little different. But after five minutes, we’re remembering when the roadie was lighting his farts, and when someone was in a blackout and swinging from a chandelier, or whatever — just all the funny stories. And that went on for like an hour and a half. And to me, once that was going on, it felt like… you just become a band. That’s all you know how to be together, anyway, because that’s all you ever were. Everyone that’s in the band now, I was friends with before we were a band. But probably some of our most intense life experiences, individually, happened when all four of us were there. So that immediately is resurrected, it just is. So I felt from that moment, whatever it is that everybody wants to do, it has to be unanimous — we would never individually participate in something that was “Soundgarden” if it wasn’t us four.

How soon did you go from that meeting to actually making music together?

It took a little time. We immediately had things to do — putting together the Telephantasm compilation, discovering that we had live recordings we didn’t know about and putting that together, getting the website going, getting the fan club going again, and then rehearsing to play a show. In that first year, we had so many show offers that we turned down, it was kind of ridiculous. It was like, all over the world, all at the same time, insane money — and we all immediately and unanimously said “no” to that. And to me, that seemed to be when suddenly everyone felt comfortable moving forward. Because I think that what caused us to split apart, rather than just take a hiatus, was just that Soundgarden had become a business; and that business had somehow, in a sense, started to be able to dictate to us what, where and how we were going to do things, whether we were into it or comfortable with it or not. I think once we all realized that’s going to happen now — we’d just turned down a year of touring, so obviously nobody’s into it for that reason, nobody’s into it because they need a check, nobody’s into it because it’s a "smart business decision" — I think that just made everybody comfortable. And the actual creative process was natural; everybody had ideas right away. The only obstacle was getting all four of us in a room together.

Synching up the schedules?

Yeah. But I actually liked how that rolled out, in a lot of ways. Because I think there are a few moments, as in the making of any record, where you sort of lose perspective — and I’ll get that perspective back six months after that record comes out. [Laughs] That didn’t happen on King Animal, because we had that little extra time to gain perspective. The downside to that can be, and it can happen to anybody, that if you sit with songs, mixes, arrangements for too long, you can completely fall into a downward spiral and overthink everything; it’s not fresh and exciting anymore, and you forgot what you liked about the song. I was worried about that a few times, just thinking ahead like, “Well, what if this happens?” But it didn’t happen.

Billy Corgan dissed you guys recently, saying that your reunion was clearly all about the money — but from what you're telling me, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

No. And even if it were, wouldn’t that be the pot calling the kettle black? Last time I saw him, he was starting a new Smashing Pumpkins record with one other founding member, that was it. I would even sort of defend a band that did get back together to support their legacy and tour and make money. If you actually are fortunate enough to have created a legacy, what then? [Laughs] What is the appropriate thing to do? What is the honorable thing to do? Set it aside? It’s yours — you can do anything you want with it, and that’s your business. I think that the only dishonorable way to handle it is one that will hurt the individual. Selling off your rights to administer it, for example — that would be doing a bad thing to your legacy for the money. And people have done that; their songs end up in commercials. Sly Stone lives in a van; he sold his publishing for 50 grand. That’s really sad.

Sonically and musically, you guys clearly haven’t lost sight of what made Soundgarden Soundgarden. Or maybe that’s just what happens when the four of you guys get together in the studio?

Well, there’s growth; I hear it in a lot of things, and I also saw it in a lot of ways, where it felt to me like everybody had an easier time getting what they wanted in the studio. Any sort of obstacles that we used to have, all of that showed up in the same way. There’s definitely that sort of alchemy and chemistry where when the four of us play together; no matter what it is, it sounds like Soundgarden. So that was there. But part of it too is this unmanageable, chaotic thing that I’d forgotten about...

I used to think about it a lot, because we would have these shows — even on our last tour of Australia [before the band broke up], we were having some of the best shows of our career, and some of the worst! And I was trying to figure out why, and it kind of came down to this indescribable chaotic element that’s there, and if there’s too much of it, it’s a disaster, and if there’s none of it, it’s a disaster. There has to be a certain amount of it, but it doesn’t seem to be controllable, which is scary. So what do you do? Do you just go out there and hope that that element is there in an adequate amount to make it great? [Laughs] That came right back, and I had not heard that since we split up, and I’d never had that experience with any other people.

That's pretty amazing.

It really was. And then the other thing that was there, and what was evident immediately when we started writing together again, was that we still had vision in the same amount that we always did. Soundgarden always had vision; I guess you’d call it a “collective vision,” because everyone individually had their own vision of what Soundgarden meant, to them and to our fans. We’ve always had that, through thick and thin, because there were periods where people were quite critical of us — critics, the indie scene. The indie scene was always critical of me, from the very beginning, because it was back when the word "alternative" was based on its actual definition, and the biggest selling commercial music of the time was hard rock. I think it appeared to a lot of people that I could have existed in that world, so why am I bothering the post-punk indie people with my presence, if I can actually sing and come up with melodies? It was like, "Go be in a big, famous arena rock band!" [Laughs] So we had all of those [people criticizing us]… and throughout that, we all stuck to the vision, and I suppose that’s sometimes what gets lost in the perpetuation of a band over a long period of time. Do you remember when Chrome just kinda became Damon Edge?

You mean, after he split with Helios Creed and then started making his own records as Chrome?

Yeah. It was still cool, but it was not Chrome — the vision was gone, and it had become something else. And I think that that can happen. But we haven’t lost it, even a little bit. Everyone’s head is still in the game the same way. Whatever problems we had before, personally, with just functioning as human beings, we probably all still have. Just maybe over the course of a few years, we’ve come to understand how to deal with those things a little better, but they’re all still there. Nobody showed up with a Deepak Chopra book in their backpack, you know? [Laughs] Nobody has completely transformed into another human being. And I’m thankful for that, in a weird way.

Are songs ever rejected for not sounding Soundgarden-y enough?

I think that shows up every once in awhile, but almost never has that kept it from being a song that gets recorded — and if it gets recorded and mixed, it usually ends up being on the record. I think no matter what it is, even if it’s a demo where you hear it and think, “That’s not Soundgarden-y enough,” it becomes Soundgarden once everyone plays on it, pretty much every time. I think “Black Hole Sun” was a big outside moment — everyone liked the song, but none of us, including me, were sure that that should be on a Soundgarden album. And then we just recorded it, and it seemed to fit really well within the context of the rest of the album. But none of us ever thought it would be a single; that didn’t make any sense. I’ve always felt that I never really cared what the singles are; whatever it is, it’s fine with me. If it’s on the album, I like it! [Laughs]

There's always been a weirder aspect to Soundgarden’s music — whether it was your prog-rock time signatures or your psychedelic moments — though it's something you haven't always gotten credit for. And that comes through on the new album, as well.

Yeah, it definitely does. I felt like there was an early period, too — and we were loved and hated for it in the indie world — which was bringing in elements of 70s rock. The punk-rock Bible group hadn’t really accepted that notion yet. [Laughs] It was like, “No, wait a minute, you can’t do that!” I remember Soundgarden playing an early gig in Vancouver, and Mike Bordin of Faith No More was there; he was a big early supporter. And I remember an ashtray, a big chunky glass ashtray, whizzing right past my temple. The audience was all completely back against the wall and seated. They just hated us. At that moment, I felt like, “Oh... we know something that they don’t!” It was that confidence that came from getting that reaction, which we got a few more times. And every time we got that reaction, I felt like, “We’re doing something that they don’t know what to do with.” It’s not that it’s bad, because that’s not how people react to bad — it’s something else. You’re talking to your buddy if it’s a bad band playing; you’re ordering another drink and ignoring it. You’re not standing there looking at it, trying to figure out if you should kill them or like them.

But even once people accepted you for being heavy, it was almost like they chose to ignore your more proggy or psychedelic aspects.

I think we’ve always been a little too diverse to figure out easily. And that can be a problem, possibly now more than ever, because people digest things very quickly and then are distracted by the next thing. I think it’s helped our longevity, and I think it will help our longevity after we drop dead; but I also think it was a minus when it came to popularity in the big picture, and selling a lot of records, and existing in the major label world that way. We still have the elements of indie post-punk that was kind of anchoring us, and keeping us from being an easily understandable and accessible commercial rock band. Which we never were. We had our moments, but we were also very difficult, if not impossible, to mimic with any success. [Laughs] I’ve had people send me songs [of other bands] for years, saying, “These guys are totally copping your band, bro!” I’ll hear a couple lines in the song where there will be an element of something that I do, but that’s it. Or it’ll be a big riff and a guy with a huge range, but it sounds like a heavy metal singer. I always felt like we did too many things to have a soundalike band exist, and that’s probably another indication of why we haven’t sold 40 million records, either. People have to be able to understand it easily for you to have that kind of success.

I’ve always summed all that up as good for us. Like, how lucky are we that we can sort of maintain that? Some of the weirdness and versatility, which is super exciting when it’s your band and that’s what you get to do. And yet, to still have enough success that we can continue to make records as long as we want, and we can all have careers separately, and we can all go out on the street or go to a hockey game and not get harassed. And that’s pretty awesome! I think it’s good for us to sort of pause occasionally and realize how lucky we are to have that balance that we created. Even though it seemed like it took us a long time to gain an audience, there was never a moment where it was like, EVERYTHING CHANGED OVERNIGHT, like every single “Behind the Music”. All those Behind the Musics, they're all pretty close to the same story: “Yeah, we met in high school or the first year of college, we started a band, somebody’s friend was an agent who brought in a manager, we made a record, it sold 60 million records in a week, and then we had trouble making the second record because everyone was super-high and we hated each other.” [Laughs] That wasn’t us; we didn’t have that. We chugged away and chugged away and chugged away, and we kind of still do.

Okay, I have to admit this: I remember seeing you guys with Mudhoney and Bullet Lavolta at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in the fall of 1989. The other bands pulled up in vans, and I remember my friends and I were totally ragging on the fact that you guys had a tour bus — like, "Oooh, look at the big rock stars!" Of course, we had no concept at the time of how utterly unglamorous life in a tour bus actually is; plus, in retrospect, that was probably a pretty old and crappy one, right?

[Laughs] Oh yeah, and we rode those dirty old buses all around the world for a long time. At the same time, we weren’t thinking about it, because we were living our life. I think the biggest mistake a band can make, or anybody that’s an artist I suppose, is to ever imagine a finish line. Like, “Once we sell this amount of records, we’ll be cool.” You’ve always gotta be sort of dissatisfied, no matter what it is, otherwise you’re not gonna keep moving on. I can’t remember which of the many Bob Dylan documentaries this came from, but there’s that quote from him about how an artist should never find themselves, they always should be looking, and then they’ll be all right. I’ve always felt that about us, that we’ve never made a defining record.

Really? I know a lot of people who would beg to differ on that.

I think Badmotorfinger in a sense is kind of defining, in that we sort of figured out on that album how to max out what we thought we had been about for the last few years. But then we kind of immediately and easily reinvented that on Superunknown. There was never a moment where we felt like, “This is who we are, and we’ve just done the best version of this that we can do. Now what?” Because it’s always evolving. And I don’t know where that comes from. It could be because you’ve got four members involved in earnest in writing songs, so you have these four different impressions of what Soundgarden should sound like. So it’s always moving. But I feel like we’re still searching...

The last song I finished writing lyrics and singing to [for this album] was “Blood on the Valley Floor." It was funny, because it was the last one, and I felt that that one was, somehow, a triumph — and without ever discussing it or worrying about it, it was like we’d sort of solved a puzzle that had been around for years. We made this slow and heavy song sound only like us, and nobody else. And maybe we’ve done that before, but in my mind I felt like we were always reaching for some version of that sound, and we’d always somehow missed it — whether it was the arrangement, or the way that I sang it, or it was too long, or I tried to put some other element in it that didn’t fit. That’s like a moment I think of defining one of the million ideas that Soundgarden represents to me, like, “Oh, I’ve reached out and actually achieved that, and I don’t have to think about anymore.” Now we’ve got all these other issues, where I’m still dissatisfied with this aspect or that aspect. And then somebody will bring in a song that has nothing to do with any of these ideas, and then suddenly you have this new parameter in considering what the band means. Now it’s a new band! Whoa!

 

 

The Pissenger

My friend John to me, during an all-school assembly at Ann Arbor's Burns Park Elementary in 1977:

"Wouldn't it be great if Iggy Pop showed up right now, and started pissing all over the place?" 

Happy Birthday, Ig. Long may your legacy continue to fascinate and inspire the youth of America.

I Think I'll Call It Mourning

(Originally published June 1st, 2011 on my old blog.)

Gil Scott-Heron died last Friday — which, in our no-attention-span, endless-news-cycle present, means that I'm way late to the funeral party. Everybody's already onto the next big piece of news, like the NBA finals, or that Facebook spam video thang wherein some woman "gives birth" to a grown man's head. A few folks, like Greg Tate of the Village Voice, have already penned some wonderful eulogies for a man who was one of the great poets and prophets of our time; countless others have hung two-paragraph obits upon such easily-digestible (if profoundly limiting) phrases like "godfather of rap" and "spoken-word artist." Why add one more voice to the chatter, this "late" in the game? Well, Gil Scott-Heron's music and message touched me deeply, and I've got a few things of my own to say about him.

But let's start with something someone else has already said. As Tate points out in his fine piece, "Gil knew he wasn't bigger than hip-hop—he knew he was just better. Like Jimi was better than heavy metal, Coltrane better than bebop, Malcolm better than the Nation of Islam, Marley better than the King James Bible. Better as in deeper—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, politically, ancestrally, hell, probably even genetically."

Which is why it tastes like spoiled milk every time I read some obit that calls Gil Scott-Heron a "spoken-word artist"; yes, the man had a gift for words, and he often delivered them with a profoundly resonant speaking voice, but he was also an incredibly soulful singer, songwriter and keyboard player, not to mention an (Tate again) "oracle, troubadour, poet, gadfly, muckraker, and grassroots shit-talker." Yeah, he's the guy who did the brilliantly incisive "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Whitey On The Moon," but to consign Gil Scott-Heron to the "spoken-word artist" box is like calling Curtis Mayfield a "soundtrack composer" — it was truly only one small facet of who he was and what he did.

To me, Gil's greatest gift — and perhaps ultimately his Achilles heel — was his humanity, his empathy for other human beings. For all his righteous anger, for all his intimidatingly sharp intellect, for all his deft wordplay, for all his loose-limbed funk grooves, an open heart was his most important tool. Songs like "Home is Where the Hatred Is," "The Bottle" and "Angel Dust" stared unflinchingly at addiction, just like "No Knock," "Winter in America" and "Johannesburg" faced down The Man, but they were anything but dispassionate journalistic missives. You knew that Gil gave a shit about what was going down, on an emotional level as well as intellectual, and that it hurt him severely to see other people hurting, being exploited, being oppressed.

But when you feel that much, when you care that deeply about the fate of your fellow man, when you make your art and your living by communicating those feelings and concerns to the rest of the world — and creating such nakedly emotional songs as "Save the Children," "Your Daddy Loves You" and "I Think I'll Call It Morning" — and you don't have a filter to shut off the hurt and despair...well, the process comes with an eventual price. Who can really blame him for his tragic, decades-long romance with the crack pipe? “Ten to fifteen minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” he said in last year's upsetting New Yorker profile, referring to his crack smoking. The pain he spoke of was from a spinal issue, but there had to be a great deal of psychic pain going on within him, as well.

Still, it's that same open-heartedness — as well as his clear-eyed anger — that has repeatedly drawn me back to Gil Scott-Heron's records over the years. I recall hearing his stuff for the first time in the late 70s, probably through one of my Mom's friends, and I seem to remember that 1984's "Re-Ron" — a typically scathing indictment of Ronald Reagan and those who wanted to re-elect him — got some decent airplay in Chicago at the time. But it wasn't until 1990, when I was a college grad trying to make sense of the world I'd graduated into, that I really started exploring his work, which thankfully started being reissued on CD in the early '90s. And in late 2000, when George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House in the same way he'd been handed everything else in his life, I spent countless hours curled up with 1971's Pieces of a Man LP; though it was nearly three decades old, it was still the only album I could find at the time that fully articulated and validated my depression and anger, while simultaneously reminding me to live and love life to the fullest, as opposed to becoming fatally consumed by the despair I felt and the bad times that I knew were on the way.

Which is, unfortunately, much more than I can say about 2010's I'm New Here, his final studio album. A haunted, haphazard affair recorded after he was released from his second prison stint, the album lasts only 28 minutes and contains far more of Gil's parched-voiced reminiscences than actual new songs. While XL Recordings head honcho Richard Russell is to be commended for trying to get Gil back into the studio, the results are hard to listen to; though many buckets of critical jizz have been spilled over I'm New Here, Gil frankly sounds like a reluctant guest on his own album. “This is Richard’s CD,” he told the New Yorker. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

The Gil Scott-Heron who shows up in my dreams is the one of "Lady Day & John Coltrane," a song from Pieces of a Man that I have put on countless mix tapes for friends over the years. Quite possibly the best song ever written about the transcendent, transformative, healing and uplifting power of music, "Lady Day & John Coltrane" also manages to be remarkably healing and uplifting in its own right. It's a song that will stay with me for the rest of my life, both as a reminder of why I care so much about music, and as a reminder (and a means) to "let the sun shine through" and keep my heart open during those times when living all of my days in darkness seems an easier option. It's a complicated, maddening, fucked-up world we live in, and Gil saw that clearer than most; but he also communicated its beauty (and the beauty of existence) more effectively than most, and for that I will always be grateful.

Peace go with you, Brother. Thank you for helping to wash my troubles away.

Happy Birthday, Granda Fred

Pardo Frederick Delliquadri, my grandfather on my mother's side, would have turned 101 today. My mentor, my pal, my hero, and the man who taught me to make the greatest tomato sauce you ever tasted, Grandpa Fred had a seemingly unlimited capacity for kindness and (as you can see here) silliness. He would often wake me up in the morning by lobbing sock balls at my bed; and his flair for changing the words of classic songs to something absurd and/or off-color is something I definitely inherited from him, along with his eyebrows.

A first-generation Italian-American, Grandpa Fred was born into a large family in Pueblo, Colorado. He went to the University of Colorado on a full scholarship, worked for the WPA in the late 30s, then got his Masters of Science in Social Work degree from the University of Nebraska. He served as a Lieutenant in the US Navy Reserve during World War II, overseeing port operations in Boston and Panama; after the war, he took on supervisory and directorial roles in the Departments of Public Welfare of Wyoming, Illinois and Wisconsin, all in divisions related to children.

From there, he served as the Dean of the schools of social work at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Alabama. President Johnson appointed him as the Chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; he also served as the U.S. Representative to the Executive Board of UNICEF, and the U.S. Delegate to the Inter-American Children's Institute, and received many honors and awards for his work on behalf of children around the world. Not a bad trajectory at all for a kid who first went to work at the age of eight — shining shoes and selling papers on the streets of Pueblo — to help his struggling family survive.

My wife and I went to see Hidden Figures last night (which we both loved), and I kept thinking about Grandpa Fred through the entire film. Sometime back in the mid-70s, he took me and my sister to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and I think he loved the experience even more than I did; he knew the names and details of all the astronauts and their missions, and clearly felt so much pride in the fact that Americans had reached the moon during his lifetime. He was also deeply proud of the progress that America had made during his lifetime in the Civil Rights arena; in his quiet way, he made very clear to me the contempt he felt for his white neighbors and colleagues in Tuscaloosa who clung to their racism like it was some kind of life raft.

A staunch Democrat throughout his life, Grandpa Fred would have been less than excited about today's inauguration ceremonies. But what would have disturbed him far more than the current occupant of the White House is the cast of venal, cruel and incompetent characters who are using Trump's election as a mandate for undermining and reversing so much of the social progress that we've made since the Great Depression. As someone who cared so much about the well-being of this country's children — especially the disadvantaged ones — my grandfather would have been completely appalled by the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education; and he would have been truly sickened by Paul Ryan's idea that we can somehow "Make America Great Again" by repealing the ACA and leaving millions and millions of American children (and their parents) without health coverage.

Likewise, the notion that white men have somehow been oppressed in recent years by "political correctness" and the extension of equal rights to women, gays and minorities wouldn't have washed with him, not one bit; nor would the scapegoating of immigrants and people of darker skin or non-Christian religions. After all, he and his brothers (and one sister) who served in WWII didn't fight fascism overseas just so it could make landfall here seven decades later.

What Grandpa Fred wouldn't have done, though, is waste time arguing about things like Bernie vs. Hillary on social media, posting snarky Trump memes, or wailing about how he was going to leave the country. No, he would have been about the business of helping our poor and disenfranchised fellow humans (especially the kids) who are going to suffer even more under the boot-heel of this administration. And I hereby pledge to do whatever I can to follow in his footsteps in that regard over these next four years.

I love you, Gramps. Happy Birthday, and thanks for the constant inspiration.