October is here, and with it comes all sortsa baseball madness — especially this year, it would seem. My latest High and Tight column for Rolling Stone Online
takes a look at the sublime craziness of the first week of the
postseason — and it was written before Raul Ibanez belted his way into
the history books, or the Oakland A's burnished their "team of destiny"
credentials by pulling off a come-from-behind victory to stay alive
against the increasingly frustrating Detroit Tigers.
The St.
Louis Cardinals are in the mix as well; even if they no longer have Tony
Scott and Garry Templeton (pictured above in a wonderful 1979 Walter
Iooss photo) and no longer play on Astroturf, they're still pretty fun
to watch right now, especially if you have less-than-positive feelings
for the Washington Nationals. (Yeah yeah, I know, they're descendents of
the Montreal Exposl but gimme Ellis Valentine over Bryce Harper, any
day.) St. Louis has to be rocking with playoff fever at this point, and
I'm heading right into the thick of it — or, at least, the outskirts...
Thanks to the friendly folks at the Steelville Arts Council, I will be doing a reading and signing event for Big Hair and Plastic Grass
tomorrow night (that's Friday, October 12) in Steelville, MO. The
shindig will be held at the newly-opened Gallery Zeke on 106 East Main
Street (next to MO Hick BBQ) in Steelville, and starts at 7:30 pm.
Junction 19 will kick off the good times with an acoustic set — the
first time I've ever had an opening band for one of my readings — and
then I'll take the stage around 8 to preach the 70s baseball gospel,
followed by a Q&A session. The new paperback edition of the book
will be on sale, and beer, wine and appetizers will be served — click HERE for more details. Oh yeah: The event is FREE and open to the public.
It's the only event I'm doing in the St. Louis area, and the last
reading I'll be doing this year. And need I mention that an autographed
copy of Big Hair & Plastic Grass would make a great gift for that baseball fan on your Christmas list? Hope to see ya there...
Back in the spring of 1999, when I interviewed Eddie Money for the long-gone BAM Magazine, I didn't even know what a "blog" was — and I certainly couldn't have guessed that one day it would result in the most popular thing I've ever published online. A snippet from that interview, posted here on La Vie en Robe in 2007 as "Eddie Money — Best Intervew EVER" has been picked up or passed along by several music and pop culture blogs over the years. And now, thanks to the Money Man's cringe-inducing new Geico ad, that post is once again getting a ridiculous amount of hits.
Which is truly awesome, and I'm quite relieved that it's finally supplanted "Is Gary Fencik Gay?" as the most popular post on "The Robe". But anyone who digs that snippet REALLY needs to read the whole mind-blowing interview, which was finally published in its entirety by Jake Austen at the great Roctober fanzine a few years later. While it's not available on the Roctober site, I scanned the whole thing and posted a PDF file of it about two years ago; and in the interest of public service/spreading the Money Man gospel, I'm posting it again here. Click the link below to read all about his "stroke," his days of drug-fueled debauchery (incl. doing blow with the late Andy Gibb and John Belushi), his brief tenure as a bell-bottoms salesman, fighting with his wife, why he doesn't think he'll get into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, why he's got the right to sing the blues, and so much more. Whatever you think of the man's music, I guarantee you will come away with a greater appreciation for the Überschlub himself, Mr. Eddie Money — as I wrote in the intro, the man "keeps it real" in ways that the Wu-Tang Clan never even imagined...
Joe South died this past week at the age of 72. Songwriter, producer, session man, pop star, Grammy winner — the man born Joseph Souter in Atlanta, Georgia was all of those things, though his greatness was long obscured by decades of self-imposed solitude.
I knew the songs of Joe South long before I ever knew who Joe South was. I heard Lynn Anderson sing "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" countless times during car rides to and from nursery school and kindergarten, when my mom would have the local country music radio station dialed in. I remember hearing Billy Joe Royal sing "Down in the Boondocks" on LA oldies station KRLA, shortly before beginning my first day of 7th grade at John Burroughs Junior High, the song's twin messages of alienation and perserverance somehow meshing perfectly with the dread I felt about starting a new life at a new school in a new city. There was "Hush," the hard-grooving Hammond workout that put Deep Purple on the charts for the first time in 1968, but which confused me in my youth because it sounded nothing like "Smoke On the Water." And I'm sure I heard "Games People Play" at least dozens of times as a kid, though I never connected it to the aforementioned songs — and, at the time, I didn't connect much with the song itself; the tune was catchy enough, but the lyrics and production were too subtle, too adult to resonate with me.
It wasn't until my senior year of college, when I stumbled across a thrift store 45 of Billy Joe Royal's rendition of "Hush," that I became curious about who this Joe South cat — who got both the songwriting and production credit on the 45 — actually was. Digging through the stacks at WVKR before my Friday evening radio show, I came across a copy of Joe South's Greatest Hits, which (along with "Games People Play" and "Down in the Boondocks") contained his version of "Hush". I played it on my show that night, and it completely blew me away... Still does, in fact.
A year or two later, I picked up Rhino's Best of Joe South CD compilation. The CD booklet featured wonderfully informative liner notes by Ben Vaughn, which shed plenty of new light (for me, at least) on this enigmatic gentleman. A budding guitarist and electronics whiz, South had scored a minor novelty hit with the vari-speeded goof "The Purple People Eater Meets The Witch Doctor" in 1958, when he was just 18. In 1962, Georgia R&B group The Tams enjoyed their first hit with the South-penned "Untie Me," and South further bolstered his resume in the years that followed by recording with Eddy Arnold, Tommy Roe, Solomon Burke, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, to name a few. Hell, the guy played bass on Blonde On Blonde's "Visions of Johanna" and came up with the shuddering down-tuned guitar intro for "Chain of Fools" — that's some serious record geek cred, right there!
But what struck me most — both in Vaughn's liners and the music itself — was the sense that South was a troubled soul, a talented musician who could have made a lucrative career as a full-time session cat, but who could only find spiritual solace in the songs he wrote and recorded himself. The title of Introspect, South's brilliant first LP, pretty much sums up its contents. A largely homebrew affair, soaked in slapback echo, hard-earned wisdom and the tangled twang of fuzz guitars and electric sitars, Introspect is a country-psych-soul masterpiece. It's the work of a guy who has seen some bad shit, experienced some serious pain on the personal and professional fronts, and possibly dropped a tab or three of Sandoz LSD-25 while trying to sort it all out. He wants to turn humanity's attention to some harsh truths (see "Games People Play"), but he doesn't spare the self-scrutiny, either; as South sings in "All My Hard Times" (a song which would practically become my mantra during a particularly lousy stretch in my own life), "I blamed the whole world for the shape I was in/I was too blind to see/My worst enemy was under my skin/It was me."
As the fates would have it, "Games People Play," the opening track of Introspect's second side — and a song which may or may not have been inspired by psychiatrist Eric Berne's best-selling 1964 book about transactional analysis — only compounded South's inner struggles by making him a star. "God grant me the serenity/To just remember who I am," he prayed in the song's penultimate verse, and the surprise success of "Games People Play" would give him ample cause to repeat that entreaty. "The Grammy Awards are a very nice gesture by the record industry, but they can really mess up your head," South told the L.A. Times in 1970, months after "Games People Play" won him Grammys for Song Of The Year and Best Contemporary Song. "The Grammy is a little like a crown. After you win it, you feel like you have to defend it. In a sense, I froze. I found it hard to go back in to the recording studio because I was afraid the next song wouldn't be perfect."
As other artists — including King Curtis ("Games People Play"), Paul Revere & The Raiders ("Birds of a Feather") and Elvis Presley ("Walk a Mile in My Shoes) — flocked to cover his songs, South seemed to struggle to find his own voice again. He numbed his anxiety with booze and drugs, retreating even further into himself after the 1971 suicide of his brother Tommy, who'd played drums on South's albums. After several years of self-imposed exile from the music business, he made a brief comeback attempt in the mid-70s, before the demons and drugs pulled him back down again. South reportedly got clean for good in the 80s, and continued to perform on occasion well into the last decade; but like Tony Joe White, another soulful Southern cat who emerged in the late 60s with a similar (if funkier and bluesier) brand of cosmic backwoods ruminations, he was largely forgotten in his homeland. Which is a damn shame, of course; on the other hand, it's probably a good thing that his substantial song royalties allowed him to step away from the toxic environment of the music business, and take refuge in the relative safety of anonymity.
I take comfort in that thought because, while I certainly didn't know the man, the overriding impressions I've always taken away from Joe South's songs are ones of a man capable of extreme decency and empathy, qualities that — much like electric sitars — are in woefully short supply these days. Even on "These Are Not My People," a song where he parts ways with a hard-partying girl in the interests of self-preservation, his attitude is one of reluctant detachment ("It's been a gas/But I'm gonna have to pass") rather than Stonesy misogyny. Ditto for "I Knew You When," later covered by Linda Ronstadt, which has the opportunity to take some brutal pot-shots at a past love, but respectfully chooses to take the high road instead. And as unflinchingly clear-eyed as songs like "Games People Play" and "Mirror of Your Mind" could be about the foibles of humanity, South was always happy to make room for the listener in his idyllic reveries like "Shelter" and "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home," the country lullaby that provided the title for his third album. Since the clip of him singing the latter track on The Johnny Cash Show is about the best live non-"Games" Joe South footage I can find on the interwebs these days, I think we'll end there...
Rest in peace, Joe. Now the grass don't grow and the rivers don't flow like they did in our childhood days... but may your journey home be an easy one.
Sorry, my fellow Dictators fans, this isn't a post about the shredular genius of Ross Friedman, aka Ross "The Boss" Funicello. Rather, it's another musing on the way a song can suddenly dislodge a stray memory from the silt of time...
This afternoon, Miss Howerton and I were on the way back from getting the oil changed in "The Thermos" (aka my '05 Honda Element), when "The Boss" by Diana Ross popped up on XM Radio's Studio 54 channel. I can't remember the last time I'd heard it... but hearing it again immediately took me back to the late spring of 1979, when Miss Ross's Ashford & Simpson-penned disco jam was initially released, and somebody brought a copy of the 45 in to my Seventh Grade music appreciation class at John Burroughs Junior High in Los Angeles.
I can't remember who brought the record in, but I do recall the reaction of this kid who sat in the row across from me, a black kid named Chuckie. Chuckie had a huge, extremely nappy Afro, heavily-lidded eyes, a raspy speaking voice, and a gigantic grin which revealed a broken front tooth. Judging by the state of his dental health, and the generally ragged condition of his clothes, Chuckie's family evidently didn't have much money, but the kid had some serious swagger and groove; on more than one occasion, he interrupted the class by hopping out from behind his desk to shout "I said FREAK!" a la Chic's "Le Freak," and bust a brief move or two. Looking back, he was kind of like a sixty-year-old chitlin' circuit comedian (or maybe Rufus Thomas) trapped in the body of an inner-city adolescent.
So anyway, on this particular day, the students were allowed to bring in a record they liked and play it for the rest of the class. I brought in Electric Light Orchestra's Out of the Blue, both because I loved it, and because I thought ELO's classical music elements would score me some brownie points with the teacher. Somebody brought in Sister Sledge's "He's the Greatest Dancer," which the class enjoyed a helluva lot more than ELO's "Sweet Talkin' Woman," and I remember someone else brought in Switch's "There'll Never Be," which to this day remains one of my favorite late 70s smooth soul jams.
(I also remember being totally unconvinced by our teacher's clearly made-up-on-the-spot explanation of the group's name: "They're called Switch because they switch to falsetto when they sing," she said. Later on, I found out that it actually had to do with the DeBarge Brothers' impressive ability to switch instruments onstage.)
Chuckie tapped his foot and nodded to Switch and Sister Sledge, but generally seemed disinterested in the entire exercise — at least until another kid brought that brand-new picture sleeve of "The Boss" up to the record player at the front of the class.
"Aw yeah, Diana Ross," Chuckie rasped to no one in particular, while breaking into that broken-toothed smile. "She an' I used to ball ALL the time!"
Tthe first two months of the 2012 baseball season are currently up for discussion in this week's "High and Tight," the weekly rock n' roll baseball column I pen for Rolling Stone. Our esteemed panel — which now includes Vinnie Paul of Pantera/Hellyeah fame — weighs in on the year's biggest surprises and disappointments. And believe me, speaking as a Cubs and Tigers fan, there have been many...
Not that I'm remotely surprised by the Cubs' overall performance; at this point, Theo Epstein and Dale Sveum seem to be the only ones caught off guard by the unrelenting suckitude. Before the season started, I told my girlfriend that I thought the Cubs had a chance to win the NL Central... so long as all the players on all the rest of the teams in the division died. And even I'm not a hardcore-enough Cubs fan to hope for that outcome...
So let's flash back to a happier time in the Friendly Confines, eh? Dig this great minute-and-a-half of silent 8mm home movie footage taken before a Cubs home game against the Mets in 1971; considering that you can catch a glimpse of Tom Seaver warming up, I'm gonna guess that it's from July 22. Great sideburns abound, most notably those of Joe Pepitone, who can be spotted engaging in deep conversation with Jesse Jackson — probably about the best places in Chicago to pick up chicks.
For me, that would have to be 1976's The Bad News Bears — and I explain why in the latest edition of High and Tight, my weekly baseball column for Rolling Stone Online. Our esteemed rock n' roll panelists — now including George Thorogood and ALICE FRIGGIN' COOPER!!! — come up with some interesting choices of their own, ranging from Eight Men Out (which I clearly need to give another viewing, though the "Say it ain't so, Joe" newsie bit made me want to hurl my mitt at the screen) to such old-school faves as The Pride of the Yankees, It Happens Every Spring and Fear Strikes Out. Check it out!
With the news breaking that Levon Helm may not be long for this world, this afternoon kinda came to a screeching halt for me. The Band's music has been a presence in my life since childhood; and while I would in time come to appreciate the brilliance and beauty of Richard Manuel's and Rick Danko's vocals, it was Levon's voice that I responded to first, and which really summed up the magic of The Band to me from the get-go. The guys might have all looked like Civil War vets in a Matthew Brady photo, but Levon was the only Band member who actually SOUNDED like one. Throw in an idiosyncratic-but-authoritative drumming style, and the ability to totally get down on mandolin and guitar, and you had pretty much the real-deal complete bad-ass package.
I'm so sad that I never got to see one of his Midnight Rambles; I never did get to see Levon perform live, in fact. But I've watched The Last Waltz countless times, as well as the great Band footage of Festival Express, and absorbed as many other clips of him in action as I've been able to dig up on YouTube over the years. (As bitter as it is in some parts — notably the sections pertaining to Robbie Robertson — his autobiography This Wheel's On Fireis still a must-read for any Band fan.) The four-song clip below, from Pittsburgh's Syria Mosque in late 1970, is new to me, but it's another beautiful example of Levon doing his thing, especially on such signature numbers as "The Weight" and "Up On Cripple Creek".
We never met, Levon, but I thank you for filling my life with your wonderful music, and wish you a peaceful and painless journey into the next world. I (and a whole lot of other folks) may not be ready to let you go yet; but if it is indeed time, you can go with the knowledge that you brought considerable joy to a whole lotta people in this lifetime...
This is Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of Baseball from 1969 to 1984. He was kind of a tool, though to be fair he was woefully unprepared for the changes (social and otherwise) that shook the sport during the 1970s. And at least he wasn't a total puppet of the owners, a la Bud Selig...
Which brings us to the second installment of "High and Tight," the new weekly baseball column I'm doing for Rolling Stone Online. This time out, I consider the current (ineffectual) state of the Commissioner's Office, and ask our panel of rockers the burning question, "What are up to three things YOU would change about baseball if you were Commish for a day?" Read their answers HERE.
In other news, a tip of the Monsanto Toupee goes out to Trevor Seigler, who made a nice mention of Big Hair and Plastic Grass (which comes out this June in paperback, btw) in his Paste Magazine look back at Jim Bouton's Ball Four. Any time your work is mentioned positively in the same breath as one of the greatest baseball memoirs of all time, you've just gotta say, in the immortal words of Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz, "Aw, Shitfuck!" Now to go pound some celebratory Budweiser...
Just wanted to hip you all to the fact that I'll be penning a weekly rock n' roll baseball column for Rolling Stone Online, called "High and Tight" — which will also feature such musically-inclined seamheads as Anthrax's Scott Ian, The Baseball Project's Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and the great Handsome Dick Manitoba weighing in on a new topic of discussion each week.
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.