If 2021 was any kind of normal year, Ron Blomberg and I would be doing in-person book events all over the place right now to promote The Captain & Me.
Alas, while this year has been a marked improvement over the utter shitshow that was 2020, things are still not "back to normal" enough for us to be making the scene in that time-honored way. I will, however, be joining the esteemed authors pictured above this Friday afternoon at 4 pm ET for a virtual panel as part of a series of events hosted by Denver, CO bookstore Tattered Cover in conjunction with this year's MLB All-Star Game.
This event — which focuses on the many challenges involved with telling a ballplayer's story — is free to all, but you have to register in advance here to view it. Should be a lot of fun, though, so I hope you'll tune in for it. (And click here to check out the full list of the bookstore's ASG-related events.)
And speaking of tuning in... I spent much of this past spring working on a new documentary series for AXS TV called If These Walls Could Rock. Each episode explores the history and legacy of a particular live music venue; some world-famous, some obscure, but all incredibly fascinating. The debut episode, which premieres tonight, covers South Carolina's Old Brick Church — an early 19th century structure which now serves as a venue for acoustic shows, but was once the site of The Cainhoy Riot, an 1876 clash between Black residents of the era and white paramilitary forces who sought to suppress the local Black vote through violence and intimidation. (Hmmm... sound at all familiar?)
I served as the main writer on this particular episode, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I hope you'll give it a look if you have the chance; if you miss the premiere tonight, it will still be available through the channel for later viewing. (Whether or not you have access to AXS depends a lot on your cable set-up. But if you have a Roku, I can attest from personal experience that it's really easy to add AXS to your Roku channels free of charge.)
Here's the trailer for the Old Brick Church episode:
I am extremely proud and excited to announce that Ron "Designated Hebrew" Blomberg (#12 in this pic) and I have signed a deal with Triumph Books for a memoir of his Odd Couple-esque friendship with the man behind the plate — the late, great Yankees captain Thurman Munson.
Titled The Captain and Me, the book will reveal a lot about Thurman that isn't widely known (not to mention plenty of amusing/interesting tidbits from the glorious days of 70s baseball) and is currently slated for a 2021 release.
A huge thank you and/or a tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to everyone who has bought and supported my previous baseball books — you made this possible!
The Muffs were one of the very first bands I saw after moving to L.A. in August 1993, and I've long lost count of how many times I saw them after that. (I took this photo of Kim Shattuck during their appearance at the 2006 Tiki-Invasion at the Mission Drive-In Theatre in Montclair, CA.) They never failed to deliver an outstanding show, and the musical (and comedic) interplay between Kim and bassist/co-conspirator Ronnie Barnett was absolutely unforgettable. I can't remember watching two people enjoy playing together as much as they did; onstage, as well as in interviews, they were truly the Burns and Allen of punk rock and roll.
The Muffs put out three great albums for Reprise back in the Nineties, but I always felt that neither the record company nor the mainstream rock press had any real idea of what to do with them. Kim was an amazing songwriter, singer and performer, but she had zero interest in comporting herself in any way that might garner her band additional attention. She didn't make controversial socio-political statements, didn't play the sex kitten, didn't pick fights in public (except with Ronnie onstage, or with any creep in the audience foolish enough to try and look up her dress), and didn't engage in any sort of copy-generating car-crash behavior. She simply wrote the songs she wanted to write, dressed like she wanted to dress, beat the living shit out of that ugly-beautiful Gretsch guitar, and screamed that window-shattering scream whenever she felt like it. If you got it, great; if not, then too bad for you.
Kim was a completely genuine human being, a true force of nature, and easily one of the funniest people I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing. She was also a devoted Dodgers fan, so when Jason Dummeldinger and I were initially conceptualizing The Baseball Furies documentary, we both put her and Ronnie at the top of our L.A. "wants," knowing that the two of them together would produce some true video gold. Unfortunately, it never came to pass, due to Kim's illness; that such an avid baseball fan would be taken down by Lou Gehrig's Disease is a sick irony, indeed.
Rock in Peace, Kim. You kicked some serious ass, and did it without compromise, and those of us who witnessed it firsthand know how lucky we were to do so. The world will be a considerably less tuneful and joyous place without you in it. My heart goes out to your family, bandmates and friends.
My favorite Muffs song? So many to choose from, but this one's the one that first hooked me:
It's kind of strange, considering how ubiquitous the Cars became on the AM and FM dials, that I somehow went the entire summer of 1978 without having any idea of what they actually sounded like. I saw the cover of their first album everywhere that summer — on billboards, in magazine ads, at Tower Records on Sunset Blvd — but both the cover image and the band's name were simply too generic to give me any real idea of what they were about. And even though Wikipedia now tells me that "Just What I Needed" was released as a single at the end of May '78, I swear I never heard it played on any of the AM stations (mostly KRLA and KHJ) I was glued to.
My first exposure to the song finally came that September, after I got back to Ann Arbor — during a junior high assembly, of all things. My fellow seventh graders and I had been herded into the gym to watch a performance by a guy calling himself "Crazy George," who in retrospect was kind of a cross between a motivational speaker and a watermelon-less Gallagher. Crazy George's first order of business that morning was to dribble a gigantic basketball (we're talking, like, five feet in diameter) up and down the basketball court as his cassette player blared out what sounded like the coolest song I'd ever heard. I turned to the girl next to me, and asked her if she knew what it was. "DUHHHH," she sneered, severely annoyed at having to be seen speaking to me in public. "It's 'Just What I Needed' by the Cars!"
Though that "DUHHHH" was clearly intended to sting, I was too busy connecting the dots in my head — and grooving to the song — to care. "So that's what The Cars sound like!" I thought, as I began mentally calculating when the next convergence of free time and my weekly allowance would enable me to stroll down to Discount Records and purchase a copy of the single. I remember very little else of Crazy George's performance, but I will never forget that moment.
The timing, as is so often the case with such musical epiphanies, was perfect. I would change schools four times between the ages of twelve and fifteen, but the transition from sixth grade to seventh was the toughest. I had gone from the liberal and progressive Burns Park Elementary, where the teachers seemed to actually care about their students — and where it was actually considered cool to be one of the smart kids — to Tappan Junior High School, a cold and indifferent institution where the teachers all seemed burned out and the jocks ruled the social roost. Tappan was less than a mile from Burns Park, but it seemed like an entirely different world, a dumbed-down linoleum jungle which I was woefully ill-prepared to deal with. While my more athletically-talented friends gravitated smoothly into the popular cliques, I found myself consigned to "brain" status, which basically meant that I had to keep my head down in class and in the hallways, or risk being the target of verbal (and occasionally physical) abuse from the popular kids. (To their credit, my now-popular Burns Park friends didn't disown me, and we still shared tables in the cafeteria and hung out on the weekends; on the other hand, they didn't exactly step in whenever one of their new pals decided to make fun of my adolescent croak, or my 80-pound weakling physique.)
As if the situation wasn't already alienating enough, I'd undergone an intensive musical self-education course during the summer that resulted in isolating me even further. I'd left Ann Arbor that June as just another AM radio kid who was heavy into the Bee Gees, ABBA and ELO; and while I still dug (and still dig) that stuff, the combination of KRLA's oldies-heavy programming and a screening of The Buddy Holly Story had opened up a whole new world of music to me while I was staying with my mom and aunt that summer. I returned to Ann Arbor that fall completely besotted with Buddy, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon and Elvis Presley, only to find that my schoolmates had all spent their summers deeply immersed in the Grease soundtrack. No school field trip would now be complete without everyone on the bus singing "You're the One That I Want" or "Greased Lightning" or some other shitty faux-Fifties song from the film; everyone except me, that is — I just sat there quietly and fumed, wondering how I'd ended up in this hell.
But when I heard "Just What I Needed" in the gym that morning, something immediately clicked for me. So much about the song sounded "state of the art" — the playful synthesizers, the detached lead vocal, the massed harmonies, the clockwork propulsiveness of the instruments — but there was also something about it that seemed to hearken directly back to the straightforward, guitar-driven pop of Buddy Holly and the early Beach Boys. I would learn much, much later that Cars leader Ric Ocasek — who wrote the song but did not sing it — had been a major Buddy Holly fan in his youth, but my ears and gut had already picked up on the connection. The song seemed smart, too; not that the lyrics were particularly complicated, but I perceived an unabashed intelligence behind their construction which was immediately appealing... and, amid the aggressively anti-intellectual atmosphere of my junior high, remarkably comforting.
In retrospect, I believe "Just What I Needed" was probably the first New Wave song I ever heard; it would be another month before I saw Devo perform on Saturday Night Live, and another couple of months after that before I heard Blondie's "Heart of Glass". I would go all-in on New Wave in 1979, but the Cars definitely opened that door for me. Still, as much as I loved "Just What I Needed," the Cars would never really become my band, in the way that Blondie or the Kinks or the Who or Graham Parker and the Rumour or Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band would all become in the next few years. I've always responded to emotion in music, that visceral sense of commitment, that palpable feeling of "I'm singing this song because I have to," and the Cars were way too emotionally distant to resonate with me on that level. But I always liked them, always admired their hook-filled mini-masterpieces, and always rooted for their success, even when Mutt Lange's over-production of Heartbeat City threatened to drain their music of its geeky charm.
Much has already been written in the last 24 hours about Ric Ocasek's brilliance as a songwriter, his innate ability to distill such edgy influences as the Velvets, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Suicide into something you could crank at a Midwestern keg party without risk of being beaten up, and his willingness to use his fame and fortune to lift up deserving but lesser-known artists. (Suicide, for instance, whom I'd never heard of until he talked them up in this 1980 Rolling Stone cover story.) That the Cars were a quintet of enormously talented (and enormously diverse) individuals is also well-known, so I won't bother going into that here. But one thing rarely mentioned about Ric Ocasek was his impeccable style.
Six-four, rail-thin, New Wave mulleted, cheeks pointed inward like he'd just finished sucking the juice from a particularly tart lime, Ric was one unique-looking dude, and definitely not your boiler-plate version of a Seventies rock star. But thanks in part to Cars drummer David Robinson, who also served as the band's stylist in their early years, Ric found a way to make that unique look work for him. I spent high school completely obsessed by his photo on the back of Candy-O, that combination of futuristic sunglasses, two-tone James Dean jacket (with padded shoulders?!?) and loosely-knotted black-and-silver necktie. Sometime in the early Eighties, I read an article on the Cars (I unfortunately forget the author or publication) that described them as an "Art Deco rock band," a description which I absolutely loved. It made perfect sense: Not only was the band's music sleek and shiny, with sumptuous curves and a limited-but-choice chromatic palette, but their look (especially Ric's) was similarly elegant. And, unlike most rockers of the day, you knew that Ric and the boys actually knew what "Art Deco" meant...
While I never wanted to look like Ric Ocasek (which, given my rounded Jewish-Italian features and considerably shorter height, would have been an impossibility to begin with), I was definitely inspired by his style. I spent countless teenage hours combing through Amvets and other Chicago-area thrift stores, trying in vain to find a tie that looked like Ric's on Candy-O, to no avail; but in doing so, I found a lot of other cool clothes, and developed my own sense of style in the process. Much as I loved and admired the Jam's mod revival look, Elvis Costello's Oxfam chic, and Bryan Ferry's tux jackets, it was Ric who showed me that you could blend fashion eras and design elements to create something of your own.
I only interviewed Ric once, about twenty years ago, when I was doing the liner notes for a Cars collection that Rhino put out. (Or may not have ever put out, since I can't find it on Discogs. They did pay me, though!) I really wanted to tell him how much "Just What I Needed" had comforted me during a lonely moment of my adolescence, or how much his unique sartorial blend gave me something to grab for (to quote one of his best solo tracks) when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present myself to the world, but I kept it professional and Cars-centric. I did find, however, that he was incredibly friendly and kind, and also immensely self-effacing about the Cars' recorded legacy. At one point, when I asked whether it was he or bassist Ben Orr singing lead vocals on a particular song, he replied, "The songs with the good singing? That's always Ben."
And now both Ric and Ben are gone. But they were indeed just what I needed, just when I needed them. RIP, RIC
"I thought you might want to read this," said Grandpa Fred, handing me his copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four.
It was the summer of 1977, and I had just arrived at my grandparents' palatial (to me, at least) home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was eleven years old, and looking forward to a blissfully relaxing month of swimming, golfing, throwing a baseball against the back steps, watching baseball on TV, and reading about baseball in the air-conditioned comfort of my grandfather's study. The baseball bug had bitten me hard, and I was determined to get my hands on any reading material that could expand my knowledge of my favorite sport — and, once again, Grandpa Fred had come through for me.
As a child of the Seventies, I was already well aware that baseball men were not necessarily squeaky-clean role models to be looked up to — after all, I had just seen a livid Billy Martin try to punch out Reggie Jackson on national TV — and I'd already heard that Ball Four was supposed to be "controversial". But by "controversial," I was expecting a gritty, hard-bitten exposé, something along the lines of Serpico or All The President's Men, to name two other books that my grandfather probably had no business lending to a grandson who had just graduated fifth grade. What I found instead, much to my surprise and delight, was a riotously funny account of life in the major (and minor) leagues that, if anything, reminded me most of an adult American version of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Down With Skool series. Like Nigel Molesworth, DWS's intrepid schoolboy narrator, Jim Bouton took me into a world full of bizarre rituals, arcane slang, side-splitting pranks, and unforgettable characters. Ball Four's detractors complained that Bouton trashed baseball's heroes; but in my eyes, he not only (further) humanized them, but also made me wish (even more than I already did) that I could be part of their gang.
As these things will do, the sad news about Bouton's death brought back vivid memories of that summer in Alabama, and reminded me of just how much Ball Four — and its sequel, the almost-as-great I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally — formed my understanding of (and attitude toward) major league baseball. With the possible exception of Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff (which I wouldn't read until over a decade later), I can't think of another player memoir that so beautifully captures the joy of playing baseball, yet so unsentimentally delineates the punishing stupidity and cold-blooded venality that permeate the game's executive and administrative sectors... and which have only become more pervasive in the decades since Ball Four's original publication. (As a friend of mine pointed out, the timing of Bouton's death was one final Fuck You to the baseball establishment, since it all but obliterated the buzz around the release of Bud Selig's new autobiography.)
Most of Bouton's on-field heroics were accomplished well before I became interested in baseball, and I wouldn't learn about his social activist side (he protested the apartheid rule of South Africa in 1968, long before that was on the radar of your average American) until many years after I first read Ball Four. But he became a hero of mine that summer, and even more the following year, when — armed with only a knuckleball and an insouciant smirk — he made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. In interviews, he always came across as warm, witty, and maybe even a little bit silly... and I always hoped that I'd get a chance to talk with him someday.
That chance finally came three years ago, when I was writing a story for VICE Sports on the 40th anniversary of the short-lived Ball Four sitcom, which ran on CBS for only five weeks before being unceremoniously sent to the showers. I had become friends with Michael Bouton, Jim's son, via Facebook, and I approached him about setting up an interview with his dad. Unfortunately, Jim had suffered a stroke by then, and Michael explained to me that his dad preferred to do our interview via email, because he was self-conscious about not being able to "retrieve" certain words. So I sent Michael a list of questions... which Jim apparently enjoyed so much that he decided he wanted to get on the phone with me, after all.
The Jim Bouton I spoke with in 2016 turned out to be just as kind and funny as I'd always imagined, and — except for stumbling over maybe two or three words — was just as articulate, as well. It remains one of my all-time favorite interviews that I've ever done, and this seems like as good a time as any to share the whole thing with the world. I am forever indebted to Michael for making it happen, and forever grateful to the old "Bulldog" for taking the time to go down memory lane with me, even if some of the memories we discussed weren't exactly sweet. May he rest in peace and power...
Jim Bouton: The Big Hair & Plastic Grass Interview
DAN EPSTEIN: With the 40thanniversary of the Ball Four TV series coming up, it needs to be —
JIM BOUTON: Forgotten? [Laughs]
No chance of that, at least on my watch. So, whose idea was it to turn it into a TV series?
It was such a long time ago, I don’t remember if it came down to one person. There was a group of friends that would hang out at the Lion’s Head bar in [Greenwich] Village — Vic Ziegel, Marvin Kitman and myself, and others. We just thought this might be a good thing to do. Little did we know! [Laughs]
When Ball Four was first published, nobody was knocking on your door to make a TV show or movie out of it?
Well, this was just within a year of when the book came out; we weren’t sitting around for years waiting for this “golden opportunity” — we just thought, “Well, this will be fun!” And it certainly was fun to be part of Ball Four, and to listen to all those wonderful characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys? It was certainly fun to think about the possibilities of transferring that to the TV screen.
Though obviously, you faced some challenges in doing so…
Standards and Practices, I think was the name of the division — we were not allowed to capture the grittiness and the language, that kind of stuff. We weren’t able to put it on the screen. [Laughs]
You certainly couldn’t have anyone saying “Ah Shitfuck,” a la Joe Schultz.
Yeah, and you couldn’t say “Horseshit” — you could have “Horse!” maybe, or “Horse dot-dot-dot”. There were all sorts of ways they had to neuterize it. When we would sit around at night… our plan was to sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took us so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at 2 in the morning. The funniest part about the whole sitcom was writing aboutthe sitcom, and we had some great fun with that. A sitcom about a sitcom would have been better than the actual sitcom, itself. That should have been the show! [Laughs]
The CBS people would come into the writing room, which is a dark place, in many respects. [Laughs] There were many vice presidents — none of whom could write, but they could “help.” So they’d say something like, “Maybe this guy could be a jerk!” So we’d listen to their ideas, and then they’d leave the room and we’d start laughing about what they were saying. We’d do the best we could with it. They would say things like, “Why can’t you write like Gone With The Windor The Old Man and the Sea? That would be good!”
I’ve been in writing rooms with network vice presidents. It can be a pretty soul-crushingly awful experience.
Well, when I think about it, I never think about it as a negative in my life; it’s not like, “Oh boy, we really screwed that up,” or, “That was terrible!” It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level. [Laughs] We were having a good time; we were enjoying ourselves. But the censor wasn’t enjoying it, and the vice presidents weren’t enjoying it. And apparently, right off the bat, the audiences didn’t like it very much, either! [Laughs]
Was the shooting of the show fun for you, as well?
Oh, absolutely. We accidentally did some really wonderful things, but we weren’t allowed to do much of them.
For example?
Ben Davidson played Rhino, the catcher. He was a professional football player, from that same era of characters [as in Ball Four] — guys who made it to the big time but barely made it through college to get there. Ben Davidson was the only "real" person on the set, because everyone else was an actor. [There was one scene where] Ben improvised and lifted up one of the coaches, then hung him on a hook in the locker room by the back of his shirt. The guys from CBS saw that and were like, “What are you doing?!? That’s not a good idea! We’ve got a liability here!”
Were you always supposed to play the lead character in the show?
I don’t remember whether anyone thought that would be a good idea or not, but they probably thought it would be inexpensive, because I was not a real actor. And who knew what a difficult chore that would be! Oh god…
Ball Four debuted on CBS in September 1976, and only lasted five episodes before being cancelled. Did you have the sense that it would get a quick axe, or did the cancellation take you by surprise?
Well, shooting an episode would last, you know, a week, and we were always feeling like we were behind — we always had that feeling of, “Uh-oh, this is not any better than the one we did yesterday!” [Laughs] We would watch other sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter, and there would be a put-down line like, ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’ And we would start laughing, and thinking, “Maybe we need a line like that? How about, ‘Stick it in your doo-dah?’” [Laughs] It was four amateurs trying to do something that we’d never done before.
Plus, it’s 2 in the morning, and you’re all punchy…
Oh, exactly. We didn’t even know what day it was! Jesus… Finally, about three episodes in, they told us, “We’re going to have to cancel this show.” We said, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives — we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people!”
Was that when you decided to rededicate yourself to your baseball comeback?
Well, I needed to get out of the TV business by then, for my own safety. [Laughs] I was playing semi-pro baseball in New Jersey, amateur baseball, and I was pitching pretty good for a guy who was in his late-thirties; I was having a good time, and my knuckleball started to move around, and I thought it might be a good idea to go down to spring training, and see if I could work out with some minor league team. And Bill Veeck ended up offering me a minor league contract with the White Sox.
Your brief return to the majors in September 1978 remains one of my favorite childhood baseball memories. It all seemed so improbable — you were thirty-nine, and you hadn't pitched in the majors since 1970 — but you actually pitched pretty well in three out of five appearances!
I did pretty well. This was with the Atlanta Braves organization, and Ted Turner — well, he was agreeable to those kind of things. I said to him, “Give me a shot, and if I don’t embarrass myself, let’s see what happens!” Only a real nut, like a Bill Veeck or a Ted Turner, would say, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” It was kind of like a sitcom, only you had more control over it — and I was not humiliating myself on national television!
So I went to spring training with their minor league Triple-A team, I think it was, and I got better and better. The last game of spring training, they were going to have the Triple-A guys play against the major league Braves. And the idea was, “Let Bouton pitch for the minor league guys against the big leaguers!” I thought, “Well, this sounds better than a sitcom, but not that much different.” I actually pitched a very good game, and I think we won the game. I did so well that they sent me to the minors, and said, “See what you can do!” I did really well there, and they eventually invited me to the big leagues. I beat the San Francisco Giants, and they were not goofing around — they were in a pennant race! But I beat those guys. And then I pitched the next game against the Astros and James Rodney Richard. [Bouton threw seven innings at the Astrodome, giving up only five hits and two earned runs, but didn’t get the decision.] So that was fun!
More fun than sitting in the writers’ room at CBS?
Oh, yeah. It was like, “God, please don’t let me write any more scripts!”
Back to the TV series, though — the episodes covered some controversial topics for the time, such as gay players, female sportswriters in the locker room, and the use of pep pills...
I thought those subjects would be interesting — and I thought that people would be interested in them. But we couldn’t get most of what we wanted to do past Standards and Practices.
Do you think the show was actually a few decades ahead of its time?
It might have been — and it might get there yet, by another route. Who knows?
But a reboot of a Ball FourTV series isn’t something you’d like to be involved with?
Uh, not in an important role. [Laughs]
Harry Chapin wrote and sang the show’s theme song. How did that come about? Were you a fan of his music?
Yeah, Harry Chapin was a nice guy. I was friends with a handball player named Jimmy Jacobs, and Jimmy Jacobs had a great film library. I happened to run into Harry Chapin through him, and I was telling him and Jimmy Jacobs about the sitcom. Harry’s song opened the show — and then it all went right downhill after the song. I think the best part of the show was Harry’s song.
It's the only part of the show that you can currently find on YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, too! [Laughs]
Do episodes of the show still exist?
I’m hoping they don’t exist anymore, just for mercy purposes!
Before I let you go... do you have any thoughts on the enduring appeal of Ball Four, the book? It has long outlived the controversy that surrounded its original release…
When I think of Ball Four, I don’t think of my writing — I think basically of keeping notes. Those players were the funny guys; you can’t make up those guys. They were all characters. Doug Rader, Gary Bell, Don Mincher… One of the great things about baseball players back then was, they were not sophisticated guys. They were not college guys; they were guys outta the mines or off of the farm, guys trying to make a living. And that’s why it took so long [for MLB players] to get real money, because the guys just wanted to play ball.
Sure, they realized, “Maybe we oughta be getting a little more money.” But if they’d said to those guys back in the 1950s or even 60s, “Okay, we’re not going to pay anybody anymore, there’s no money whatsoever,” the players would have still said, “Well, we’ve got two teams here — why don’t we just play and see who can win this game?” You know what I mean? They wanted to play ball. They were very, very interesting people. They came from mostly small towns, and they just wanted to play ball.
And your book immortalized them.
The best thing I ever did was to keep notes and write all that stuff down. I’d keep notes all day long; and when I’d run out of paper, I’d write on a popcorn box or an air-sickness bag, whatever was handy. And then, at the end of the day, I needed to look at my notes because there were so many funny things going on. Wonderful characters; I love them all now, even the ones I hated! Now I was listening to the players, now that I was writing things down, they were now fodder for great material. So I began to think about them in a positive way. They were not competitors for playing opportunities in games; no, these guys were funny! And that’s why Ball Four is so funny — it’s not me, it’s the players.
And because the minor leagues have kind of been replaced by college ball, the players are much more savvy now, much more sophisticated. They’re wiser, and all of that stuff — but I don’t get the sense that the crazy guys, the wacky guys, the funny guys are there anymore.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Jim. It’s been a real pleasure.
Well, it was fun remembering those things. And now I have to go lie down for a while. [Laughs]
Though it only ran from September 1976 to March 1977, I still have fond and vivid memories of the Captain and Tennille's ABC variety show — especially the recurring "Bionic Watermelon" skit, which always had my sister and I rolling on the floor in fits of laughter.
The Captain & Tennille definitely soundtracked our childhood — 1977's Come In From The Rain was one of the first LPs my sister ever owned — and they certainly made some classic contributions to the AM pop canon, most notably their version of Neil Sedaka's "Love Will Keep Us Together," which is pretty much a perfect pop record. But in the sad wake of the Captain's passing, I'd like to salute him by replaying this particularly "juicy" Bionic Watermelon adventure. RIP, Captain!
I probably spent more time staring at Singles Going Steady than at any other album cover in my slim pre-college collection, combined.
It wasn't because the photo made the band look particularly cool; with the possible exception of bassist Steve Garvey, it didn't. Sure, they were all wearing black, but lead singer Pete Shelley wore an unflattering haircut, and he looked tired and somewhat annoyed at having to have his picture taken. And was lead guitarist Steve Diggle wearing (gasp) flares, or something perilously close to them?
No, the reason I was so fascinated by this cover image was that it allowed me to enter what was then a completely unfamiliar world. Back in the early 80s, when I first became enamored with the music of the Buzzcocks, the rock stars I worshipped all still seemed shrouded in mystery. They worked their magic on stage and in the studio, but the hard work that went into it was largely hidden (intentionally or otherwise) from view. Only just beginning to struggle with the guitar myself, and not having any friends who played in bands, I had no real understanding of rehearsals or recording sessions. I just figured that the gods of music transmitted songs directly to the artist, who then — by virtue of their sheer awesomeness — transmitted them directly to vinyl.
But the cover photo of Singles Going Steady completely disabused me of such naive notions. The serpentine tangle of guitar cables; the precariously angled microphone booms; the quartet of dour, exhausted gentlemen who were all quite possibly well overdue for a shower. This, it seemed to say, is how you do it. No wizardry, no divine intervention, no star trips. Just sweat, electricity and the mutual will to make it work.
This message might have resonated less with me if I hadn't loved the music so much. But I was completely enamored with everything about the songs of Singles Going Steady: the adrenaline-pumping roar of the twin guitars, the tempos that seemed ready to run off the rails at any moment, the instantaneously indelible melodies, and of course Pete Shelley's witty, sardonic and fiercely gender-nonspecific love songs. It might have been too much of a stretch to call Pete Shelley "The Oscar Wilde of Punk," but I could easily picture Wilde enjoying the hell out of the lyrics of "Orgasm Addict," "Every Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" or "Everybody's Happy Nowadays".
Buzzcocks songs seemed like they would be relatively simple to play, but — as I would come to find out — they were actually rather difficult to pull off in a convincing fashion. My first college band, Voodoo Sex Party, was heavily influenced by their piquant melodies and candy-coated chord progressions, but only once did we ever attempt to cover an actual Buzzcocks song. It was "You Say You Don't Love Me," from 1979's A Different Kind of Tension, and to say we didn't do it justice would woefully understate the case. Of course, it would have helped if we'd had a second guitarist, and if I hadn't gotten angrily drunk on (yecch) Southern Comfort right before our set; but even sober and fully-guitared, it's no easy feat to pair that kind of blistering romantic angst with a brilliantly Kinks-y melody and harness it to a breathless punk rock roar, or to deliver it all in a manner that doesn't shortchange any of the elements. (Yes, I still have the recording of that show; no, you can't hear it.)
But for all the brilliance of their songs and performances, the band remained as beautifully down-to-earth as they appeared on the cover of Singles Going Steady. Since Pete Shelley's unexpected passing last week, I've heard and read one testament after another as to how funny, charming, kind and unpretentious he was in real life. Not that this surprised me at all, since I once had the pleasure of experiencing this firsthand. It was in the summer of 1996, when the band was touring in support of their album All Set. I had been assigned to interview Pete for BAM magazine, and we did our Q&A in the dressing room of the Hollywood Palace before their show. (I only saw two Buzzcocks shows, that one and one at Chicago's Cabaret Metro in 1992; both were absolutely amazing, not to mention loud as fuck.)
I was still pretty new to interviewing at this point, and this would, sadly, not be one of my better interviews. Expecting to talk to Pete for half an hour, I was completely thrown when the tour manager sat us down together and announced, "Right, you have 15 minutes!" Rather than just letting the conversation flow, I nervously hurried through my list of questions, all of which Pete obligingly and amusingly answered. (Sample question: "What do you do to keep yourself sane on the road?" Pete: "As little as possible!") In fact, I burned through them so fast that I'd completely run out of questions by the ten-minute mark, and the remaining five minutes of our conversation was spent idly chatting about the recent Sex Pistols reunion as Pete signed the records I'd brought with me. Though our encounter surely wasn't the highlight of his day, he was much kinder and far more patient with this inexperienced interviewer than a legend of British punk could have been expected to be, and I have always been grateful to him for that.
My favorite moment of the interview actually came as we were wrapping things up. The tour manager returned with an all-access pass for Pete, telling him, "You can wear this wherever you like." Pete's eyes lit up. "Oh," he grinned. "I'll wear it on my cock, then!"
Three weeks ago, I called up legendary whiskey distiller Dave Pickerell, to interview him for Revolver magazine about his role in creating Metallica's new Blackened whiskey. While I didn't really know what to expect, the voice on the other end was far more youthful- and enthusiastic-sounding than I would have expected from someone who'd been a major player in the adult beverage business for decades. He was also incredibly humble about his success, and full of positive perspective about his life and career
"It wasn’t all me," he told me. "It was a lot of people giving me things I didn’t deserve. So the best I can do is live a life that glorifies those people. Because without them, I’d be a burger flipper at McDonald’s. But somehow it happened. Somebody asked me just the other day, 'Hey, you’re getting up there — have you thought about retirement?' And I said, 'Well, the concept of retirement is that you have to go to work first. And I’m not sure I’m gonna do that! [laughs] In a perfect world, I’d die in the saddle.'"
Alas, and indeed, Dave did just that — he passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 70, while attending the annual WhiskyFest in San Francisco. Revolver ran our chat today in his honor, which you can read HERE. Rest in Peace, Dave — I'll raise a glass in your honor.
I am incredibly thrilled to accept The Baseball Reliquary's invitation to deliver the Keynote Address for their 20th annual Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day, which will be held Sunday, July 22nd at the Pasadena Central Library. This year's inductees include legendary White Sox organist Nancy Faust and White Sox/Dodgers/Yankees/Angels pitcher Tommy John, both of whom will be in attendance.
The Baseball Reliquary is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history — so it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has read my baseball books that I've a big fan of the organization and its mission for a long time. (I mean, their collections include Dock Ellis's infamous CURLERS, people!)
Previous inductees to the Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals include such personal heroes as Dock Ellis, Dick Allen, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Luis Tiant and Jim "Mudcat" Grant, so it will be a huge honor for me to speak at this year's induction ceremonies, especially since Nancy Faust, Tommy John and fellow 2018 inductee Rusty Staub all played such formative roles in my early baseball fandom.
The induction (which is free and open to all) will be held almost three years to the day since Katie and I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I can think of no better excuse to return to Southern California for a few days. If you love baseball and live in SoCal, please mark your calendars for this fantastic event!
So sad to hear about the passing of Rusty Staub. I know he was much beloved by Mets and Expos fans, but for me he'll always be an All-Star outfielder on the 1976 Detroit Tigers, the first MLB team I ever fell in love with. He was also, by all accounts, a warm and lovely person, which ultimately counts way more than his considerable accomplishments on the field. Rest in Funky Peace, Le Grand Orange.
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.