The 1970s Ended in April of 1983

When Dave Edmunds had the metronomic sins of Jeff Lynne visited upon him.

Where Have You Gone, Nurse Goodbody?

We're tryin'.

The 1990s were not kind to Hee Haw. A 1992 WRCB (Chattanooga, Tennessee) news report on the show's radical redesign is a fascinating time-capsule of Clinton-era political correctness, futile trend chasing, country-pop crossover anxieties, baffled old-timers, laughably blunt sexism/agism, and Beverly Hills 90210 hair-and-costume ethos. In the face of rapidly declining ratings, the show jettisoned the venerable if corny farm set and rural milieu and replaced it with a contemporary, neon-lit, "urban" decor, introducing new, younger cast members, as well.

Original Hee Haw performer Gordie Tapp—70 at the time of this report—comments on the ushering out of aging female cast members: "They're now 45 and 48, and ladies that age are beginning to show their age, and it's very difficult for women." He adds, "I don't know what it is about television, it seems to enhance men, but it's deathly on women. Some of our gals had reached that stage." Accurate, sure, Tapp's observations are culturally tone-deaf in 21st Century terms, all the more telling for Tapp's willingness to speak the truth as he sees it.

Poor Sam Lovullo, longtime Hee Haw producer. He looks the picture of dubious confidence as he speaks; he doesn't really believe the change is gonna work, but what can you do? Watch him at the end: "Our replacements are...fresh. They're...good." Pause. "And certainly they're ideal for what we need in our new show."

Hard swallow.

The overhaul didn't take. The Hee Haw Show was cancelled within a year.

Hank Thompson's At The Bar. Last Call.

But those rough and rowdy ways are tough to give up. The new records on the juebox are singing old songs.

From 1969's Smoky The Bar.

#SpringTraining #NoWaiting

Observers often comment on the nature of time in baseball: there's no game clock; a contest is theoretically infinite; a half-inning may last one minute or thirty; plate appearances are endless games-within-the-game. Time is collapsing in on baseball in many ways, it seems to me, as the clock is being rendered obsolete (or at least a nuisance) in much of contemporary culture. Take Spring Training. Pitchers and catchers are arriving as I write—the frisson of delight that brings me renewed easily—and soon full squads will assemble, split up, stretch in the sun, take infield and batting practice, and slowly resume playing games, suspended since October. When I was a kid, this March assemblage felt virtually mythic with a capital "M," as if out of some imagined master narrative—I knew that teams were gathering somewhere in the South, Southwest, and the West, but the only proof I had was the infrequent grainy black-and-white photographs in the Washington Post or Star. Baseball didn't really begin until Opening Day, when the bunting and sunshine and the bright white uniforms (of the Orioles, my home-team-by-default) heralded the return of the game and, soon but never soon enough, summer. Baseball felt bound by the calendar in very real and irrevocable ways. The season schedule was only printed on paper, and not always easy to find. March was black and white. April was green. The boundary between the two was thick. (For some terrific photos of those old March days, look here.)

In 2015, Spring Training is a 24/7 event, duly previewed, speculated about, followed and remarked upon by baseball websites, official and otherwise, and on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram. This is nothing new, really, but each winter, as Spring Training continues its unsentimental move from the reserves of my fading memory to today's bright blanket media coverage, I can't help but feel loss. This may be the predictable and precious misgivings of someone growing older, or it may be something more. At the risk of sounding pious, I'm not sure that we wouldn't benefit from a dialing back of the megawatt coverage of the exhibition season: I loved coming across the odd box score from a meaningless Grapefruit (hilarious!) League game in the middle of March as snow was thawing outside and birds were building nests in the ash trees in my backyard; the wait for Opening Day, complicated as it was by other more pressing desires of my twelve-year-old self, was a long, delicious wait. That suspension in time has been virtually banished: within a couple weeks, and then within seconds, I'll find online dozens of photos of ballplayers arriving to multi-million dollar camps, emerging from their expensive cars, buffed or doughy, blinking in the sunlight—not to mention streaming games and live stats. When I cared to, which wasn't all that often, I had to picture all of that when I was a kid, an exercise in imagination that both elongated and hastened the wait for Opening Day and Spring in the D.C. suburbs. With that wait having vanished, soothed by more multi-media coverage than anyone really needs, a certain imaginative muscle has gone limp, or threatens to, anyway.

Well, I can always imagine #October.

Toronto Blue Jays at their inaugural Spring Training in Dunedin, Florida, 1977. Just as I would've imagined. (Photo via Torontoist.)

Hank Thompson's At The Bar, Again

And it sounds familiar: reveling, regrets, redemption. Repeat.

From 1966's A Six-Pack To Go.

Lydia Fakundiny on the Art of the Essay

A triptych from The Art Of The Essay (1991):

Say you are wandering—without a map, because no satisfactory one comes to hand—in what you believe to be a neighborhood. Wandering about, you come to know it and locate yourself in it only as you keep on traversing it. Here is a fire station, a corner drugstore, a spot of green space, a row of turreted Victorian homes, a canal. As you pass and repass any one of these landmarks, you see where you are in relation to all the others; you map the place out as a neighborhood. Note: it is your own movement that brings into being the map that tells you what kind terrain you are in. Your orientation is of your own making. You know where you are by having gone there.
         So it is with coming to understand the essay as a genre, a way of writing prose…; so it is, too, with any solitary effort to work through some particular essay, whether your own or someone else’s. Essays discover themselves in the writing. (I am not the first to remark that even when you try, in any concentrated fashion, to talk about the essay, you will more than likely find yourself composing one; essay, it seems, insist on being thought about only in essays.)

…

Essay writing becomes a means for training one’s capacity to be in two places at once: both doing and watching. You attend to your worldly business, its deadlines and disorders, while absorbed in the peculiarly human work of speculating—observing, reflecting, seeing how it is and could be. The essay claims no authority but that of life lived under such scrutiny, meaning, in the long run, self-scrutiny.

…

The essay is “personal” because it is in my every movement on paper that “I” come into being and, thereby, exist for my reader. I can’t, as I said before, describe, let alone prescribe, where we’re going; your own eyes will tell you. The reader, too, must get the habit of responsiveness. A reader of essays learns to listen for “the first person…speaking,” to hear the “I” pushing to become “we”—pushing toward something like a mutuality of personhood, a conversation between friends, equals. Reading an essay is not a feat of information—gathering; it is not like running down to the corner store for a quart of milk. It is following the motions and paces of another mind, alert and open to whatever they reveal. Reading essays and writing them have this in common: either way you must “know how to take a walk.” The art of it is one of the great pleasures a person can cultivate.

Hank Thompson's At The Bar

In the second half of the 1960s, country singer Hank Thompson recorded a series of drinking/bar albums—among them A Six-Pack To Go, On Tap, In The Can, Or In The Bottle, and Smoky The Bar—great honky tonk, Western swing, and country boogie collections that sing of the temptations and tragedies of alcohol, and yet are couched in upbeat arrangements and smiling melodies. As critic Thom Jurek puts it in Allmusic, "These songs are sad, dark, and fermented in heartbreak and tragedy, yet...darkness never sounded so bright and as a result so pathological." Yep.

Here are three from 1968's On Tap, In The Can, Or In The Bottle: "I could drink to the times when I was happy / But here's a toast to my misery." That old story. More comin', so stay tuned.

“There is no such thing...

...as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others." William Faulkner, who also contributed the name of this blog.

The Fleshtones @ 9:30 Club, 1983/84

A loud Super Rock cheers to photographer Jimmy Cohrssen who's unearthed these terrific photos he snapped of The Fleshtones' Peter Zaremba, Keith Streng, co-founding member Marek Pakulski, and the late great Gordon Spaeth, hanging out downstairs, and then playing onstage, at 9:30 Club in Washington D.C..

I was quite likely at this show; it could have been the first time I saw the band. The year's 1983 or '84: Washington's "old downtown" was still old, and the rat-infested, crack-harmed neighborhood around the 9:30 Club was still rough and tough. President Reagan was at home in bed a few blocks away. Have you heard the American Sound?

Peter Zaremba

Keith Streng

Streng's Mustang

Streng and Zaremba, downstairs

Gordon Spaeth

Spaeth

Marek Pakulski

Pakulski in Recovery Mode (or: If That Couch Could Talk)

Zaremba

Abandoned, Ctd.

The Polo Grounds, New York, NY. Spring 1964. Photographer(s) unknown.

There's A Game On

Nothing cast the differences between baseball and football in starker relief than the spectacle that was last night's Super Bowl Halftime Show. Katy Perry delivered—she's a fun, appealing performer who harnessed herself onto a crane that held her aloft over thousands as sparks flew around her, whose songs convey terrific sentiments for young girls. The always-fun, always-funky Missy Eliot was cool, and Lenny Kravitz was competent. But the cultural requirement for over-the-top spectacle, for a loud, absurd, mega-watt diversion from the game—a parallel universe to the game—is anathema to baseball. Even when baseball was the so-called America's Pastime, when television ratings were, well, super, and the game had more cachet among the water-cooler set, the game itself resisted such spectacle, save the odd Charley Finley or Bill Veeck lo-fi promotional splurges. The Halftime Show is, of course, an event in itself, and nothing underlines football's limitations as a sport more than that. I can't imagine a World Series game bearing such enormous cultural expectations to deliver  corresponding entertainment, a show-within-a-show that promotes celebrities and an industry only tangentially related to the game itself. Poor Fox TV: they'd love it. Halftime is obviously a necessary break for winded players and an often-baffled coach and his assistants, but somewhere along the line that surcease evolved into a million-dollar requirement that television viewers be entertained in a way that assured them what they're watching is an Event. Baseball doesn't work that way; its quiet(er) ebb-and-flow and narrative progression would be bruised by such distractions. Baseball doesn't need someone to fly over the park, reminding us that what we really came for isn't the game but a movie trailer promoting X's new album. Baseball park's are too loud, literally and figuratively, as is.

I'll take only a tense and satisfyingly-resolved match-up between a hot slugger and a kid just up from AAA, an anxious conference on the mound in the eighth inning among the infielders, alert to the changes in the situation with the guy now on second, a refined pitcher's duel, a loud bases-clearing triple in the sixth that changes everything. I don't need a half-hour, real-time promotional kit. I know, I know, how boring.