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:
There's a new Reggie Jackson documentary on Amazon Prime, and lotsa folks have been asking if I've seen it and what I thought of it.
I have indeed seen it, and I do have thoughts — which, given the time of year and the way my mind works, also turned to thoughts of Phil Lynott and the first Thin Lizzy album. And you can read 'em all here at my Substack, Jagged Time Lapse. And I hope you will, and maybe even subscribe while you're there!
“I’m the only guy in the world who could throw a ball through a car wash and never get it wet," James Rodney Richard used to say in jest, though more than a few hitters who faced him would probably tell you it was the truth. As my pal Lenny Randle, who was a teammate of J.R.'s at ASU and faced him 19 times in the majors (hitting only .167, but only striking out once, which I suppose was something of a moral victory) once said of him, "He starts out throwing Alka Seltzers, and ends up throwing Anacins."
(1978 photo by George Porcari)
It's kind of strange, considering how ubiquitous the Cars became on the AM and FM dials, that I somehow went the entire summer of 1978 without having any idea of what they actually sounded like. I saw the cover of their first album everywhere that summer — on billboards, in magazine ads, at Tower Records on Sunset Blvd — but both the cover image and the band's name were simply too generic to give me any real idea of what they were about. And even though Wikipedia now tells me that "Just What I Needed" was released as a single at the end of May '78, I swear I never heard it played on any of the AM stations (mostly KRLA and KHJ) I was glued to.
My first exposure to the song finally came that September, after I got back to Ann Arbor — during a junior high assembly, of all things. My fellow seventh graders and I had been herded into the gym to watch a performance by a guy calling himself "Crazy George," who in retrospect was kind of a cross between a motivational speaker and a watermelon-less Gallagher. Crazy George's first order of business that morning was to dribble a gigantic basketball (we're talking, like, five feet in diameter) up and down the basketball court as his cassette player blared out what sounded like the coolest song I'd ever heard. I turned to the girl next to me, and asked her if she knew what it was. "DUHHHH," she sneered, severely annoyed at having to be seen speaking to me in public. "It's 'Just What I Needed' by the Cars!"
Though that "DUHHHH" was clearly intended to sting, I was too busy connecting the dots in my head — and grooving to the song — to care. "So that's what The Cars sound like!" I thought, as I began mentally calculating when the next convergence of free time and my weekly allowance would enable me to stroll down to Discount Records and purchase a copy of the single. I remember very little else of Crazy George's performance, but I will never forget that moment.
The timing, as is so often the case with such musical epiphanies, was perfect. I would change schools four times between the ages of twelve and fifteen, but the transition from sixth grade to seventh was the toughest. I had gone from the liberal and progressive Burns Park Elementary, where the teachers seemed to actually care about their students — and where it was actually considered cool to be one of the smart kids — to Tappan Junior High School, a cold and indifferent institution where the teachers all seemed burned out and the jocks ruled the social roost. Tappan was less than a mile from Burns Park, but it seemed like an entirely different world, a dumbed-down linoleum jungle which I was woefully ill-prepared to deal with. While my more athletically-talented friends gravitated smoothly into the popular cliques, I found myself consigned to "brain" status, which basically meant that I had to keep my head down in class and in the hallways, or risk being the target of verbal (and occasionally physical) abuse from the popular kids. (To their credit, my now-popular Burns Park friends didn't disown me, and we still shared tables in the cafeteria and hung out on the weekends; on the other hand, they didn't exactly step in whenever one of their new pals decided to make fun of my adolescent croak, or my 80-pound weakling physique.)
As if the situation wasn't already alienating enough, I'd undergone an intensive musical self-education course during the summer that resulted in isolating me even further. I'd left Ann Arbor that June as just another AM radio kid who was heavy into the Bee Gees, ABBA and ELO; and while I still dug (and still dig) that stuff, the combination of KRLA's oldies-heavy programming and a screening of The Buddy Holly Story had opened up a whole new world of music to me while I was staying with my mom and aunt that summer. I returned to Ann Arbor that fall completely besotted with Buddy, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon and Elvis Presley, only to find that my schoolmates had all spent their summers deeply immersed in the Grease soundtrack. No school field trip would now be complete without everyone on the bus singing "You're the One That I Want" or "Greased Lightning" or some other shitty faux-Fifties song from the film; everyone except me, that is — I just sat there quietly and fumed, wondering how I'd ended up in this hell.
But when I heard "Just What I Needed" in the gym that morning, something immediately clicked for me. So much about the song sounded "state of the art" — the playful synthesizers, the detached lead vocal, the massed harmonies, the clockwork propulsiveness of the instruments — but there was also something about it that seemed to hearken directly back to the straightforward, guitar-driven pop of Buddy Holly and the early Beach Boys. I would learn much, much later that Cars leader Ric Ocasek — who wrote the song but did not sing it — had been a major Buddy Holly fan in his youth, but my ears and gut had already picked up on the connection. The song seemed smart, too; not that the lyrics were particularly complicated, but I perceived an unabashed intelligence behind their construction which was immediately appealing... and, amid the aggressively anti-intellectual atmosphere of my junior high, remarkably comforting.
In retrospect, I believe "Just What I Needed" was probably the first New Wave song I ever heard; it would be another month before I saw Devo perform on Saturday Night Live, and another couple of months after that before I heard Blondie's "Heart of Glass". I would go all-in on New Wave in 1979, but the Cars definitely opened that door for me. Still, as much as I loved "Just What I Needed," the Cars would never really become my band, in the way that Blondie or the Kinks or the Who or Graham Parker and the Rumour or Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band would all become in the next few years. I've always responded to emotion in music, that visceral sense of commitment, that palpable feeling of "I'm singing this song because I have to," and the Cars were way too emotionally distant to resonate with me on that level. But I always liked them, always admired their hook-filled mini-masterpieces, and always rooted for their success, even when Mutt Lange's over-production of Heartbeat City threatened to drain their music of its geeky charm.
Much has already been written in the last 24 hours about Ric Ocasek's brilliance as a songwriter, his innate ability to distill such edgy influences as the Velvets, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Suicide into something you could crank at a Midwestern keg party without risk of being beaten up, and his willingness to use his fame and fortune to lift up deserving but lesser-known artists. (Suicide, for instance, whom I'd never heard of until he talked them up in this 1980 Rolling Stone cover story.) That the Cars were a quintet of enormously talented (and enormously diverse) individuals is also well-known, so I won't bother going into that here. But one thing rarely mentioned about Ric Ocasek was his impeccable style.
Six-four, rail-thin, New Wave mulleted, cheeks pointed inward like he'd just finished sucking the juice from a particularly tart lime, Ric was one unique-looking dude, and definitely not your boiler-plate version of a Seventies rock star. But thanks in part to Cars drummer David Robinson, who also served as the band's stylist in their early years, Ric found a way to make that unique look work for him. I spent high school completely obsessed by his photo on the back of Candy-O, that combination of futuristic sunglasses, two-tone James Dean jacket (with padded shoulders?!?) and loosely-knotted black-and-silver necktie. Sometime in the early Eighties, I read an article on the Cars (I unfortunately forget the author or publication) that described them as an "Art Deco rock band," a description which I absolutely loved. It made perfect sense: Not only was the band's music sleek and shiny, with sumptuous curves and a limited-but-choice chromatic palette, but their look (especially Ric's) was similarly elegant. And, unlike most rockers of the day, you knew that Ric and the boys actually knew what "Art Deco" meant...
While I never wanted to look like Ric Ocasek (which, given my rounded Jewish-Italian features and considerably shorter height, would have been an impossibility to begin with), I was definitely inspired by his style. I spent countless teenage hours combing through Amvets and other Chicago-area thrift stores, trying in vain to find a tie that looked like Ric's on Candy-O, to no avail; but in doing so, I found a lot of other cool clothes, and developed my own sense of style in the process. Much as I loved and admired the Jam's mod revival look, Elvis Costello's Oxfam chic, and Bryan Ferry's tux jackets, it was Ric who showed me that you could blend fashion eras and design elements to create something of your own.
I only interviewed Ric once, about twenty years ago, when I was doing the liner notes for a Cars collection that Rhino put out. (Or may not have ever put out, since I can't find it on Discogs. They did pay me, though!) I really wanted to tell him how much "Just What I Needed" had comforted me during a lonely moment of my adolescence, or how much his unique sartorial blend gave me something to grab for (to quote one of his best solo tracks) when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present myself to the world, but I kept it professional and Cars-centric. I did find, however, that he was incredibly friendly and kind, and also immensely self-effacing about the Cars' recorded legacy. At one point, when I asked whether it was he or bassist Ben Orr singing lead vocals on a particular song, he replied, "The songs with the good singing? That's always Ben."
And now both Ric and Ben are gone. But they were indeed just what I needed, just when I needed them. RIP, RIC
"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!
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.
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.
This Saturday, March 4, my friend Joe Bonomo — one of my favorite writers — and I will be doing a reading at The Book Cellar in Chicago's Lincoln Square. Joe's got an excellent new book of essays out called Field Recordings From The Inside, which he'll be reading from; I'll be reading from a new work in progress — a chapter from what I hope will be my next book project. Unlike Big Hair and Plastic Grass and Stars and Strikes (both of which will be available for purchase at the Book Cellar), this one will be more personal, as well as more music-oriented... and the chapter I'll be reading from involves the elegant gentleman pictured above.
Two great writers + one great independent bookstore (where you can also buy wine and beer by the glass, btw) = a swell time. The event starts at 6 p.m., and the Book Cellar is located at 4736 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. For more info, call the store at 773-293-2665. Hope to see some of youse there!
Also, as long as I've got your attention, here's a few of my favorite pieces from the last couple of months...
From Rolling Stone: Why Slap Shot is the Greatest Sports Movie of the 1970s.
From Guitar Aficionado: My interview with the great Ricky Gervais about music, guitars, and his new Netflix film, David Brent: Life on the Road.
From October: The Soul Battles of 70s Macrobrew.
And from The Hardball Times (you didn't think I could stay away from baseball forever, did you?): The World Series of Love - The Rolling Stones at Shea Stadium.
And finally, I'm still very much in the market for a full-time editorial or digital content job. If you're reading this and know of any available position in Chicago that requires a great editor, writer or content manager, please give me a shout...
Rock on,
Dan