Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Happenin' Thangs

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:

 

Get Yer Signed Copies of The Captain & Me!!!

Well, it's certainly been a long time coming. The COVID-19 pandemic washed out all the book-signing events Ron Blomberg and I were supposed to do last year for The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson, and various other challenges have prevented Ron and I from getting together since then — with the upshot being that the opportunities to purchase copies of the book signed by the both of us have been pretty much non-existent.

UNTIL NOW...

Yes, folks, that's right — for a limited time only (that is, until I run out of copies), I will be selling first-edition hardcovers of "The Captain & Me" signed by both Ron and myself. The cost is $50 per copy, shipping and handling included. (That offer is for customers in the US only; if you want me to ship the book to you in Canada or overseas, let me know and I'll try and figure out what your additional cost will be.)

You can purchase the copies from me via Venmo (@Dan-Epstein-15) or PayPal ([email protected]). Please include your shipping address in the transaction info, as well as the name of whomever you would like the book to be signed to. Makes a great gift for any Yankees fan, or any 70s baseball fan in general!

Act now while supplies last! All sales proceeds will go to the HELP DAN MOVE TO NEW YORK FUND, which I hope you all will agree is a worthy cause...

Thanks as always for your support!

What They Say

Hey, folks — long time. 

Sorry for the lack of updates; there's been a lot going on in these parts. The biggest (and saddest) news is that my wife and I are splitting up, and I'll likely be moving from North Carolina to New York's Hudson Valley (where I'll be much closer to my folks) in the next few months. It's an amicable split, and for the best, but it's been a heavy and emotional time for us. Please send good vibes.

Thankfully, I've had plenty of work to keep me distracted, including this FLOOD magazine interview with Steven McDonald of Redd Kross, which I conducted in honor of the new 35th Anniversary edition of Neurotica, which drops June 24 via Merge Records. Neurotica was an absolute revelation to me when I first heard it in the fall of 1987, so it was a real treat to be able to speak with Steven about the making of the album, as well as get the lowdown on the bonus disc of 1986 demos included in the 35th Anniversary reissue — which includes a (to me at least) vastly superior version of "What They Say," which is not only much rawer than the one that made it onto the finished album, but also features a completely unhinged vocal by Robert Hecker in full-blown Paul Stanley mode. If you're a Redd Kross fan, you definitely need to grab a copy; and if you're not a Redd Kross fan, well, I weep for your eternal soul.

I also recently did a preview writeup for the Forward on the new Lou Reed exhibition that has opened up at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This looks absolutely fantastic — the friends of mine who have already seen it assure me that it is, indeed — and I can't wait to get back to NYC to spend some serious time with "Uncle Lou".

And speaking of major cultural figures — the new George Carlin documentary inspired this piece for the Forward, in which I look back on the impact that his 1972 album Class Clown had upon the fragile eggshell minds of myself and my grade school classmates, even though we didn't actually discover the album until a good five years after its release. (For the record, his "Teenage Masturbation" and "Baseball-Football" bits also had a profound influence on us, but since those were both on 1975's An Evening With Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, I didn't get into 'em here.)

Though Rolling Stone left my name off the byline because of... reasons, I still massively enjoyed writing a feature for them in which six artists of varying ages, backgrounds and musical styles talk about the first time they ever heard The Sex Pistols. My absolute favorite part of it was getting to talk to Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order fame about how seeing the Pistols in Manchester back in 1976 quite literally changed his life forever. I'd never spoken with Hooky before, and the 20 minutes or so we spent on the phone together had me laughing so hard I thought I was gonna cough up a lung. Check out the piece and see why!

The Dan Epstein Trilogy sounds like the name of my next power trio (and it might well be!) — but it's actually what That Seventies Card Show host John Keating has dubbed my three baseball books. I could argue that The Captain & Me doesn't actually qualify as the third installment of what began with Big Hair & Plastic Grass and Stars & Strikes, since I co-authored it and it thus has a different voice and feel than the other two, but I'm really just happy to have published enough baseball books to qualify for a trilogy. In any case, John and I recently had a really fun (and occasionally emotional) conversation about 70s baseball and music, and if you're in the mood to hear me gab at length on those topics with someone who definitely knows their shit, I highly recommend clicking the above video.

And finally, speaking of The Captain & Me — folks have been asking me since before the book was even released if they could buy copies signed by both Ron and myself. Unfortunately, the pandemic washed out our book tour before it could even begin, and various other issues have prevented Ron and I from meeting up to sign a stack of them together. However, we may have finally breached that hurdle; so if you're interested in buying a copy signed by both co-authors, check back here in a week or two for more info!

 

 

 

 

Laying It On the Line in the New Year

 

Yes, 2021 was a challenging shitshow in so many respects, filled with stress and loss and portents of doom... But as I rang in the New Year watching old music videos with Mrs. Epstein and the above-pictured Otis and Angus, I had the opportunity to reflect upon all the good stuff that happened to me this past year.

 

Thanks to the Covid vaccines, I was able to see my parents, sister, aunts and cousins for the first time in nearly two years, and I was able to go back to LA for the first time since 2018 to spend some precious hours with my beloved uncle John Padgett before he left this earthly realm. As 2020 came to a close, I wasn't sure I would be able to see any of these folks in the coming year, so 2021 was a real winner in that respect. Thank you, science...

 

Additionally, I got to hang out with some really dear friends during my visits to LA and NYC, as well as a few here in NC — like over at Ziggy's Refuge — something that was likewise pretty much out of the question in 2020. Here's to seeing all y'all (and many more of my wonderful pals) again in 2022...

 

Oh yeah — The Captain & Me, my collaboration with Ron Blomberg about his beautiful friendship with Thurman Munson, came out in April and made it all the way to the #1 spot on Amazon's Baseball Books chart at one point. Huge thanks to everyone who read it, reviewed it, bought it and enjoyed it. Yes, it was disappointing and frustrating to not be able to promote it with a real book tour and in-person signing events; but hey, the book's coming out in paperback this May via Triumph Books, so maybe we'll have a chance to "do it right" this time.

 

 

I'd also like to thank all my editors and colleagues who assigned or hooked me up with work this past year. Freelancing is always a rollercoaster ride, but I got to do some really fun and satisfying stuff in 2021, ranging from writing three episodes of AXS-TV's "If These Walls Could Rock" to interviewing the great Sérgio Mendes for FLOOD magazine to having a marathon three-hour chat with the ever-voluble Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet for Revolver. Special thanks to Adam Langer, who has been my editor in various incarnations going back to my freshman year in college, and who trusted me to write about everything from the Marx Brothers to T.Rex to Jaws for him at the Forward this past year.

 

I made it through the painful horror of a kidney stone and dodged a bullet on a prostate cancer scare — both of which caused me to change my diet for the better. Speaking of food, Mrs. Epstein says I really took it to the next level with my cooking this past year, and I'm hoping to expand my repertoire even further this next one, beginning with today's shrimp-and-veggie sausage gumbo.

 

I got back — gingerly dipping a toe at first, and then diving in headlong — into making, writing and recording music in 2021, finally laying waste to a creativity/confidence block that had dogged me for the entire 21st century. I even formed a one-man "band," dubbed The Corinthian Columns in a nod to my four-decade fascination with classical architecture, and put several tracks up on Bandcamp with more to come. (And thanks again to everyone who dug and downloaded "Jingle Jangle Christmas"!)

 

Speaking of music... while watching old favorites last night from The Records to The Jam to Dave Edmunds to KISS to Iron Maiden to, well, Triumph, I started thinking about who I was back in the late 70s/early 80s when I first saw those videos. I don't think I could have even imagined then what my life would be like in my mid-50s, but if you'd told 14 year-old me that I'd be living in a cute little house with a beautiful and hilarious wife and three adorable cats, and that my work would revolve around writing, music and baseball... well, I would have had plenty of questions for you, but I'd ultimately be pretty stoked about the prospect.

 

So yeah, I'm pretty stoked on the prospect of being able to spend another year in this existence, even with all the massive challenges we face as a people and a planet. As my friend Jeremy Scott (whose band The Toy Trucks delivered my favorite track of 2021, a cover of The Corvettes’ appropriately-titled "Beware of Time") sagely noted this morning, this next year can be better than the last one, "but you gotta want it, not hope for it. Work is required." But I'm making room for hope, too — as my father told me in an email last night, "Hope is the only viable option and love the only route to finding hope. Laughter is good too."

 

Wishing all of you fine folks unlimited hope, love and laughter in 2022. Don't waste it.