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Highway to Hell

February 15, 2012

I.
A few days ago I finished a great book by Joe Bonomo on Highway to Hell, the AC/DC album that debuted in America five days before I saw my first concert. I put down the book, put on some headphones, and turned up some AC/DC so loud that for a few moments I couldn’t hear anything else. Bonomo tells the whole story of Highway to Hell, unearthing details of its creation, illuminating its magic, and revealing the absences and needs of both adolescence and adulthood that might keep bringing a deteriorating, searching mind back to that loud sound again and again. You should check it out. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something eternal about adolescence, about its promises and deceits; and about the adolescence, blinking into light so bright that the horizon is obliterated. A teenager is pulled in many directions at once: between sensation and substance; between impulse and responsibility; between innocence and guilt; between shallowness and depth. Highway to Hell and the panting scenarios therein are sensational, impulsive, and shallow, and no less human because of it. When I listen to the songs now, my brain can go into sleep mode, and my body can listen and move, and that’s a great pleasure—one of the great pleasures that rock & roll gives us—and it’s a different thing altogether from pining for lost youth or regretting moves not made, girls not chased, drinks not downed. That Bon Scott was thirty-two when he wrote the lyrics suggests that he was an eternal adolescent, but the longer I live with the songs, the more I felt that he was blessed by this state more often than he was burdened by it. He allowed himself access to a youthful pulse that beat into a future lifting with fun, not collapsing under regret.

II.
Somewhere in this giant expanding dumpheap of memories and obfuscations I’ve talked about the first concert I ever went to. I went back to that story in my book, in a chapter on, among other things, the 1980 card of White Sox pitcher Fred Howard and Disco Demolition night and my brother and my father and regret and disconnection and stupidity. I used to think my life was one story, some form locked within stone, and once I chipped away at the stone long enough and skillfully enough I’d have it, the truth, but now I understand that I’ll never be done telling what happened, and what happened will change each time I tell it, and each time I tell it new absences will form, and the absences will call me back for yet another return, and so, for example, I’ll always be 11 years old tagging along with my big brother with our father—his ears wadded with cotton—as chaperone to Madison Square Garden to see Ted Nugent only to find out afterward that we never saw Ted Nugent at all but only saw the warm-up band before our father led a ferocious charge toward the exits, all of us under the impression that the concert was over despite the lack of any other fellow attendees leaving. My brother was the first to put the story of that night in writing, for a ninth-grade English essay, and he was the first to alter it in the telling, still too ashamed at that point about missing Ted Nugent to admit our fuckup in the essay; the teacher praised the level of detail in the first part of the essay, which described the warm-up act, and critiqued the strange vagueness of the essay’s concluding sections. “More details needed,” she wrote in the margins next to my brother’s fraudulent Nugent bloviations. In a different age, time would have made every part of the story vague. Everything becomes vague anyway, but I think my generation, perhaps the most backward-looking generation yet to walk the earth, is the first blessed with ample concrete evidence and artifacts of what, in earlier times, would have been the utterly transient particulars of fleeting youthful experiences. Whenever the story starts to feel vague, more details can be found instantly, in video and audio and print form. The borders of my mind have deteriorated and merged with Google. I am constantly searching.

III.
I can locate the exact date of my first concert. According to multiple sources, it was August 4, 1979, at Madison Square Garden. I have not been able to find the exact setlist of my first concert, but the band I saw appears to have played the same setlist throughout their summer tour, and so it is reasonable to assume that the setlist below corresponds to the sonic assault that terrified me and made me feel awful and regretful about my father’s suffering presence beside us. It was his worst nightmare come to life. The sheer piercing force of the sound—I couldn’t even understand it as music, and in some ways it was an experience so forceful as to be beyond memory, like the whiteout moment I experienced some years later after careening off the side of a cliff while mountain-biking. But I do remember a few things about the sound: 1) it’s loudness; 2) the older teenage and early 20s burnouts all around us nodding to one another approvingly about what they saw as the undeniable high quality of the warmup band (I could not hear what they were hearing but I distinctly remember witnessing this approval); 3) the presence of the repeatedly screamed lyric “Sin City.” This last detail was what allowed my brother and me to confirm the following day at Crazy Eddies on Sixth Avenue that we had officially not seen Ted Nugent but had seen the band who had a song called “Sin City” on one of their albums. All three of these memories may have become suspect, as all my memories are, but I am able to find corroboration for all three with my deteriorated searching co-opted mind. Taking the memories one at a time: Yes, they were fucking loud. This is corroborated in an explanation from the Ten Most site for the ranking of AC/DC as the second loudest band of all time:

No question regarding it these guys are systematically the loudest indoor arena rock band from the Bon Scott years all the way through the Brian Johnson era Angus and Malcolm Young are the loudest guitar combo running through their marshall stacks both sides of the stage running them clean & overdriven getting that pure marshall sound – you can’t top that.

And yes, they fucking rocked surprisingly hard as a warm-up act. The Ten Most appreciation of AC/DC continues:

I saw AC/DC with Bon Scott open for Ted Nugent at Madison Square Garden in 1979 and they altogether stole Ted’s thunder (altho Ted was very loud too)

And yes, in all likelihood they played “Sin City” when I saw them on August 4, 1979. Yes, I can even go back and watch a performance of every single one of the songs they performed that night, not from that night, exactly, but from that era.

Live Wire
Problem Child
Sin City
Bad Boy Boogie
The Jack
Rocker
Dog Eat Dog

One other thing I recall from that night is that the guitarist got up onto the shoulders of the singer. This memory was cast into some doubt when someone else who’d seen them back then recalled that when he saw them a roadie was the one giving Angus a piggy-back ride. But the photo at the top of this page, taken from the 1979 tour, suggests that what I thought I saw actually did occur. Bon Scott was not averse to carrying some weight in the name of rock & roll.

IV.
I can’t say I hated AC/DC the night of August 4, 1979, but it was something like that. I was not ready for it, and it hit me like violence. Our little trio of me and my brother and my father, it was fragile. We only saw our dad every so often and only saw him for an extended period once a year, a two-week visit every summer. We were in the middle of one of those visits, the first such visit where one of us, my brother, had edged over the border from childhood into something stranger and estranging. I liked the feeling, fragile as it was, of the three of us all being in something together, but that concert, that violent assault of sound in a huge arena of lidded-eye cool guys, disallowed any closeness between us. None of us understood what was happening, and none of us were happy, and nobody could say anything to anyone and nobody could be heard.

I don’t know why I soon gravitated to AC/DC. Within a year or two I had almost every record they’d produced. I’d been moving toward them anyway in my own musical tastes. I already owned several KISS records and was gradually commandeering my brother’s soon-to-fade interest in “hard rock” as my own, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc. He never did become an AC/DC fan, branching off instead into bands more clearly marketed as punk and New Wave, so AC/DC became “my” band. I liked everything about them. I liked the simplicity, the loudness, the hooks. I blasted the songs in loneliness and confusion and they blasted loneliness and confusion, blew it away. I liked that the center of the band was an older brother and a younger brother. I still like that. It’s my favorite part of a band I still love. Two brothers putting down a twin riff so tight and together it is like an artery rushing beats of rich blood from one heart.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker, Unsortable Prayers | 10 Comments »

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Robert Hegyes

January 28, 2012

Welcome Back, Kotter debuted in 1975 and ran through 1979, the sweet spot of my childhood. It was my favorite show. I loved all the Sweathogs, Epstein most of all. He had a funny swagger, a giant afro, a maniacal look in his eyes, a (Chico) Marxian air of absurd careening pomposity-leveling chaos. He was half-Jewish, just like me, but unlike me he was proud of whatever parts made up all of him. I’ll stop there—I don’t want this to become some kind of serious sensitive self-exploration. Welcome Back, Kotter was no more and no less than exactly my idea of fun back when I was just becoming a member of the human race, and Juan Epstein was the heart and soul of the fun.

The man behind Juan Epstein, Robert Hegyes, died this past Thursday. I spent some hours yesterday and today poking around his website, where he has written several thoughtful and interesting notes about his life and about the show that made him famous. The site is organized in a somewhat unorthodox way, but be sure to check out the Kotter show section (start at this link and then click through to other pages with the “next” button at the bottom of the page). The highlight of that series of pages, at least for this constant searcher on the seas of memorabilia, is a scanned version of the feature on Hegyes, in its entirety, from Dynamite magazine. The only magazine that eclipsed Dynamite for me back in those days was Mad Magazine. On another page on Hegyes’ site I discovered that he, like me, had been raised on Mad:

I grew up reading Mad Magazine and laughing my ass off. Alfred E. Neuman for President, was my motto. I still think he could beat George W. Bush to this day. One day someone walked in and said, “Hey look, you guys are on the cover of Mad Magazine.” Forget TV Guide, People, and the National Enquirer. I knew I had made it.

In another section of the site, Hegyes writes with great warmth and humility of a chance meeting with George Harrison. If anyone has ever met a hero, they’ll recognize Hegyes’ internal monologue as he walked away from his brief moment with the Beatle. If I’d ever met the man behind Juan Epstein, I would have been reeling in the exact same way:

“I thought of a hundred things I wanted to say, but nothing I could have said was more important than, thank you.”

***

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker, Unsortable Prayers | 3 Comments »

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1976 wrapper

January 12, 2012

Here’s a little prayer to a wrapper. There was a moment a long time ago when this wrapper was fastened around a stack of brand new cards and a rectangular shard of gum. The cards were unknown. They could be any cards. Most likely the moment of possibilities was sped past, the wrapper torn open at the first touch.

Here’s a little prayer to the idea of slowing down, of waiting and listening and wondering. Days are marked inconsequentially with short bursts of shared babble. Most of this babble makes no impact before dissolving in thin air. Other babble has a narcotic hook that catches and tears at the attention momentarily. My mind is full of babble. The days go by.

Here’s a little prayer to the life behind all the babble. Here’s a little prayer to the hope that a wrapper torn open long ago might somehow enclose itself once again around a world of possibilities.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Loose in the Shoebox, Unsortable Prayers | 8 Comments »

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Carmen Ronzonni

August 17, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Carmen Ronzonni

Ever since my air conditioner died a few weeks ago I don’t trust any of the things humming and groaning in my home—the dishwasher, the fridge, the microwave, the computer: each seems on the brink of having some small, cheap, vitally important cog snap and cause the whole mechanism to seize up and go silent. I’ve lived a meandering life, awake only in stories, never forging any kind of direct, pragmatic connection to actual events, and my tendency for anxiety feeds into my literary dreaminess so that every possible setback seems not simply one problem to solve but an omen foreboding the inevitable unraveling of daily life into a tragedy, as if a broken toaster will lead, eventually, to me freezing to death on an ice chunk in Antarctica or gagging fatally on Elizabethan poison. More than once in the last few days I’ve thought of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the horrifying novel in which the whole of human civilization as we know it is shown in smoldering irrevocable cinders, in a state of tragic fall, and a father and a son walk through it together, barely surviving. I am a father now and I have a son. I am nervous; everything seems provisional; at the core of it all as always I feel fake.

I turn and have always turned to stories. Yesterday various stories travelled alongside me by chance or design. I read a book about how to calm unhappy babies, the story there being that several methods must be mastered and executed perfectly or there will be a house full of suffering. My son is too young still, just a couple weeks into his life, to have hit the period when some babies start wailing for hours on end, but he has had his fussy moments, and I’ve tried to bring the story of the book to life and have felt like I wasn’t quite doing it right, and my own son felt awkward in my hands and in the gap between the ideal story and the real fakery of life. I read that book on the bus but kept getting my attention coaxed away by two guys talking nearby, trading stories of things gone wrong to the point that litigation ensued. The story one of them told that I can recall now involved a man with cancer in one eye who went in for surgery to get the eye removed and the surgeon removed the other eye by mistake. Later, at lunch, I read a couple articles sent to me by my father and a friend, respectively, both articles concerned with identifying the narrative embedded behind certain current events. In the column my dad sent, the author traced the roots of the London riots to a sense of profound desperation, the riots a grab for power by the powerless. In the column my friend sent, the author criticized President Obama for failing to tell a pointed story in his words and actions, instead attempting to placate both sides and in doing so satisfying no one. My thought when I read the former article was that the roots of riot are everywhere now, and my thought when I read the second was that even the President is faking it, and not even that well. On the long, bumpy bus ride home I stared out the window at what seemed like imminent ruins.

In my mind, the specter of Carmen Ronzonni presides over the anxious flimsiness of all things. He is, as his teammates in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training quickly realize, a fake. That he is friends with Kelly Leak buys him a lot of time and credit with the team, but once he actually has to start pitching in game conditions, the ineptitude beneath his fakery becomes apparent, and it begins to dawn on the Bears that he and they are all doomed. He’s supposed to be their pitcher, the center of their hopes, but he is only a collection of imitations and bluster. He is insubstantial, a scarecrow stuffed only with stories.

Still, maybe there’s a place for guys like Carmen Ronzonni. When I first saw the movie back in 1977, I was drawn first and most strongly to Kelly, Ogilvie, and Tanner, and I think I sided with the general feelings of the team regarding Carmen. Even though I hadn’t even seen the first Bears movie yet, I understood that Carmen was an outsider, and though (or maybe because) I saw some of myself in his tendency to use imitation in place of anything real, I kept Carmen at arm’s length. He wasn’t quite one of us. But as I’ve watched the movie more recently and repeatedly, I’ve come to think of Carmen as a deeply important member of the team in terms of the sequel. I see him this way not only because the team needs a pitcher and not even because his persona of recycled bullshit is a crystalline microcosm of that deeply American genre, the sequel. It’s this: maybe a guy saturated in stories can help things feel more like a story and not just part of some mundane conveyer belt toward the bone yard.

This is not just an abstract thing, either. There are a couple of cases in which Carmen livens things up in a concrete way, such as when he swipes a couple of Playboys and brings them back to the guys in the hotel room. More importantly, he’s a key figure, along with Kelly, in procuring the van that takes the boys to Houston. Kelly is the driver of the van and we assume he was the driving force in the ballsy move to take possession of the van, but it seems there would be no van without Carmen’s mysterious connections (I believe Carmen’s explanation about where they got the van is an uncharacteristically terse statement along the lines of “From a guy I know”). Carmen, albeit a bullshitter, has bullshitted his way into the darker, more grown-up world that Kelly rides through. Though he comes off as a fake as a baseball-playing boy among the other boys, he seems, at least according to Kelly’s estimation of him as “cool,” as if he has been more successful at finding a legitimate place among the older hoodlums that we assume Kelly hangs out with when not smashing home runs with the Bears.

Carmen’s legitimacy as an experienced outlaw reaches its apex in one of the film’s best scenes. The Bears have made their getaway from their parents, but they still need to pass through one more barrier before truly embarking upon the Open Road, that barrier being a police car that starts to follow the van (this scene starts at about 6:30 in the clip below). When this police car is noticed by the team, almost everyone begins to panic. Kelly will become the hero of the moment, acting quickly and coolly, lighting a cigarette and putting on his hat and shades to make himself look older. (This transformation worked on me as a kid—back then, he really did suddenly look like an adult—but when I watch the film now Kelly’s stoned, acned leer as he salutes the cops marks him hilariously as the single most suspicious-looking driver in history). But while Kelly is leaping into action, Carmen is encouraging everyone to “stay cool.” It could read like another blowhard moment from the imitating interloper, but something about it rings true, as if Carmen, the boy made up entirely of stories, has been through moments like this before, charged moments, the heartbeats of a storied life. When the police move on without pulling the boys over, Kelly slumps and exhales, betraying a nervousness he had kept hidden, the boys exult, and Carmen smiles and nods in the center of it all like a happy maestro who knew how the song would go all along.

And speaking of songs, the makers of the sequel chose this happy moment (about 7:30 in the clip below) to unleash what they surely hoped (in vain, it turned out) would be a runaway hit song, James Rolleston’s “Life Is Looking Good.” Soaring, cheesy freedom! I chase that sweet lie through all disintegrations.

***

Special thanks to nunyer for creating Carmen’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Carmen Ronzonni | 1 Comment »

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Kelly Leak

August 5, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Kelly Leak

Giving Kelly Leak a player of the week award is kind of like handing Jesse Owens a “participant” ribbon at the end of the 1936 Summer Olympics. But this has been the happiest week of my life, so the player of this week could only go to Kelly Leak. I don’t have many words or much time to say them at the moment, but you can read some of my thoughts about Kelly Leak over at Deadspin, in a chapter from my book on The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training called “The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived.”

The back of Kelly’s baseball card would be mind-boggling, judging from the glimpses of his performances seen in The Bad News Bears and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Here’s what we know from those glimpses: in the seven plate appearances shown in those films, Kelly homered three times, tripled, doubled, singled, and was intentionally walked. These results suggest that he may have actually been underselling himself when he tried to hit on a woman in Amanda’s dance class by saying that he was hitting .841. Player of the week, player of the year, player of all recorded time. 

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Kelly’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Kelly Leak | 5 Comments »

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Ahmad Abdul Rahim

July 14, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Ahmad Abdul Rahim

“Don’t give me none of your honky bullshit, Buttermaker.” –Ahmad Abdul Rahim

Every once in a while over the last few months I’ve read to my wife’s belly. A friend suggested this would be a way to familiarize the kid in there with the sound of my voice. I recite from On the Road, at random, a page or so at a time. It is either my favorite book or one of my favorite books, depending on whether I’m in the thrall of one of my other bibles at a given time. When I first read it, as a seventeen-year-old freshly ejected from high school and with no marketable skills or college plans, it gave me some hope for the possibility of a joyous life. But I can’t really argue with anyone who would say that it is, as Ahmad Abdul Rahim might put it, at least if he was a grown-up extension of the incarnation of his character in the first Bears movie, honky bullshit. I would argue back that no matter how the book hits you, it’s at least a sincere attempt by the author to write what felt true, and taken in the context of the times it was a great leap forward in the pursuit of honest art, but it’s hard to miss now that it can also easily be summarized as a story of a bunch of white dudes with the privilege of that great but selective American power, mobility, careening around the country as tourists gawking at and romanticizing classes of people locked into societal positions that don’t allow mobility: south of the border or in the ghetto Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty “dig” the fellaheen masses. To their credit, Jack Kerouac and the protagonists in his book are pioneers of mainstream American culture in their championing—or even noticing—of people outside the margins of the prevailing popular conception of “real” America, that Leave It to Beaver fever dream. But the book entered that mainstream not on the strength of any reformative tendencies but because it tapped into and even defined a myth at the very heart of America, the road tale, breathing new life into the Whitmanesque lyricism of taking to the open highway just when the highway system was literally opening up the entire country, and just as the baby boom generation was on the cusp of reaching driving age. The book had great timing in proclaiming this message: the world is yours to explore. This message is why I read the book to the wriggling bulge inside my wife’s belly. The world should be open to everyone to explore.

Of course, the world is not open to everyone to explore, or rather there are varying degrees of openness, depending on who you are and where you are. If you’re a white guy, yes, certainly, have at it, explore. Who’s going to stop you? However, if you’re not white, certain restrictions may apply. You can try to explore, but at some point you’re probably going to be stopped, questioned, and in various other ways, some merely annoying and others terrible, reminded of the limitations of your mobility.

One of the reasons the Bears sequel resonated with me when I was a kid and still moves me now, despite its many flaws, is that it taps into that myth of the open road. More than that, it even could be seen to expand that myth to some extent, showing new protagonists at the wheel: children. This was more of a case of a film reflecting society than shaping it, however, as the movie was made primarily to continue cashing in on the success of the first movie, hence the decision to shape the plot to please the target audience: 9-year-old boys like I was at the time of the film’s release. Besides this profit-driven novelty of unsupervised youth loose on the road, the road narrative element of the movie was more or less inherited honky bullshit, a little white boy’s dream of unfettered, junk-food-glutted freedom. Unfortunately, Ahmad Abdul Rahim is no longer aware enough in his dumbed-down sequelized incarnation to make any kinds of cultural critiques of the going’s-on around him. In fact, practically the only moments in which his character is able to rise above the boisterous noise of the team chorus is when he squawks at various times that the Bears are about to get caught and will be “goin’ to the joint.”

There’s some aptness to his character, the only black player on the team, being the most aware that unauthorized mobility around America would seem destined to end up not in beatnick-style “kicks” but in the lockstep progression of suspicion, apprehension, and incarceration. Unfortunately, the “real” Ahmad Abdul Rahim—a sensitive and ebullient individual—is replaced in the sequel by a facsimile whose range of emotions has been diminished in most cases to a couple of broad strokes: wide-eyed enthusiasm and wide-eyed fear.

Underneath the limiting script, he’s still Ahmad. There are echoes of the liveliness of his character from the first film here and there, such as in his last at-bat of the Astrodome game when he smacks a triple, recites a Muhammad Ali rhyme at third base, and slaps five with probably the most awkward low-five slapper in history, third base coach Rudi Stein. An even better glimpse of Ahmad, perhaps the only true glimpse of the real three-dimensional Ahmad from the first movie, comes in the very beginning of the movie, when the new, militaristic coach of the team tells him that instead of bothering with Ahmad he’s going to be calling him Andy. Ahmad mouths the name to himself. Andy? You can see him thinking, wondering, worrying. It’s not easy to live in a world of honky bullshit.

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Ahmad’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Ahmad Abdul Rahim, Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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Toby Whitewood

June 22, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Toby Whitewood

[My ode to the 1977 movie The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is now available. To celebrate, I’ll be shining a weekly spotlight on the boys in the customized van.]

The first two Bears to appear on screen in the 1976 film The Bad News Bears have strong connections to the adult world. The first of these boys shown, Kelly, is even taken for an adult, perhaps sardonically, by Buttermaker, who mutters “thanks, mister” to Kelly after the latter lights his cigarette for him. Kelly operates a motorized vehicle like an adult, smokes cigarettes like an adult, and even seems to be as freighted in his scowling silence with adult world troubles and history as the wrinkled, morning-boozing Buttermaker. After lighting his future coach’s cigarette, he rides off on his motorcycle, leaving the sunny little league field, the little boy world, to go back to his adult world burdens and mysteries.

The next Bear to appear, and the first to utter a line of dialogue, is Toby Whitewood, who arrives at the field with his shifty, unctuous politician father and so is the first of the Bears to witness that his new coach is an alcoholic mercenary rather than the altruistic caretaker that most children assume the adults in their lives to be. It’s unclear whether this information registers with Toby, who is sent away by his father from the decidedly adult conversation between coach and councilman, but later moments featuring Toby in both the first film and the sequel reveal that Toby absorbs at least some of the things he overhears while in the proximity of adult goings-on. For example, in the first Bears movie, he explains to Buttermaker (going on something that he overheard his father saying) that Jose and Miguel don’t speak English. For another example, in the sequel Toby arrives at the field with sole knowledge of the identity of the team’s new coach.

The Bears don’t have a team captain, but if they did you could make a case that it would be Toby. Of the Bears who lead in various ways, Kelly (the team’s superstar) is too much of a lone wolf to man that role, Ogilvie (the de facto assistant coach and, in the sequel, the team’s sober-minded co-parent, along with the stoic, worldly Kelly) not enough of an on-field presence, Tanner (the inspirational leader) too fiery and volatile. This leaves Toby, who knows things about the adult world without losing his essential identity as a boy, and who is able to speak for the boys to adults. He’s the one who informs Buttermaker that the guys took a vote and decided they don’t want to play anymore, and in the sequel he’s the one who tells Kelly’s dad that while they need him to pose as a coach they don’t really need him to coach. (Interestingly, in both cases these Toby-voiced team decisions to separate from the adult in charge lead very quickly to coaches Buttermaker and Leak finally and fully taking the reins and leading the boys.)

Not much is shown of Toby’s playing abilities in the first film, but in Breaking Training he blossoms into arguably the team’s second-best player, after Kelly. In the game in the Astrodome, he singles in both of his at-bats, the second of those hits sparking the big last-inning comeback. He also scores a run, and he records the most rousing put-out of the game, tagging out a Toro who falls for the ol’ hidden ball trick. (This trick, which is denigrated by the Toros’ coach as a “cheap cotton-picking faggot trick,” is predicated on one of the more noticeable of sequel’s many departures from standard little league rules, which don’t allow for runners to lead off, but then again with decidedly elongating and pubescent figures such as the sequelized versions of Kelly, Ogilvie, and Rudi, perhaps the Bears have somehow moved en masse and without explanation out of little league to Babe Ruth league.) The whole trick plays out like an illustration of Toby’s connection to the adult world, the ball that Coach Leak slips into Toby’s glove like an objectification of all the many bits of esoteric knowledge adults have passed along to Toby. Toby, unsurprisingly, handles this new adult-given secret like a pro, poker-facing the Toros runner into taking a lead.

But Toby’s true nature comes out not during the ruse but just after it has been revealed. If Kelly, a Bear you could easily imagine also donning a poker face, had been the one to tag the fooled runner out, he would have likely reacted afterward coolly, as if it was no big thing, but Toby is still a boy, and he roars and cheers and laughs as he shows that he had the ball the whole time. Throughout the sequel, Toby is one of the team’s most exuberant enthusiasts, a leader of what I have come to think of as the “wow, cool” chorus, the boys amazed by the van and the open road and motel rooms and nudie magazines and the Astrodome and the Astros and by simply having the chance to play. He knows things about the adult world, but he has not yet slipped into that dim, weary realm.

***

I found out this past weekend that I’m one hug removed from David Stambaugh, who played Toby Whitewood. Some years ago Stambaugh was a member of a touring acting company that also included my cousin Andrea, who had glowing things to say about her fellow actor’s good heart and warm personality. Stambaugh seems to have eventually given up acting for a life as a minister. In a Hollywood Interview feature from just a few months ago, the reverend reflected on his life as a Bear.

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And speaking of Bears and interviews, Alex Belth at Bronx Banter was kind enough to lob a few questions my way about the new book.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Toby Whitewood | 16 Comments »

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When Bears Walked With Angels

June 7, 2011

My book on the 1977 film The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is officially out today. In honor of those sequelized Bears, I thought I’d share one of my favorite pictures ever, apparently from a publicity photo shoot around the time of the film’s release. Seeing Ogilvie with an angel on each arm makes me think there might yet be hope for the world.

 

Posted in Bad News Bears, Books, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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Rudi Stein

June 6, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Rudi Stein

[My ode to the 1977 movie The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is due out June 7. To celebrate, I’ll be shining a weekly spotlight on the boys in the customized van.]

Have you ever stood on a pitcher’s mound and taken an endless beating? I have. I was 12, the same age that I would guess the character Rudy Stein is supposed to be in The Bad News Bears. I was in my final year of little league and to that point had never done any pitching and wasn’t a strong kid and couldn’t throw hard, but we weren’t a very good team, either, so I got three chances to pitch. The first appearance went misleadingly well, as I pitched the final inning of a lopsided win against the worst team in the league and struck out three bottom-of-the-order nine-year-olds. The next day in school a tough kid in my grade who had seen the performance cornered me.

“That was just luck yesterday,” he said. The kid didn’t even play little league, but my improbable success, brief and inconsequential as it was, seemed to offend his sensibilities.

“You got lucky,” he said, scowling.

My next performance was another short appearance but a bad one, a brief hemorrhaging of hits and walks mixed in with the occasional out. In my third and final time on a pitcher’s mound I did not record a single out and, eventually, during a mound conference with the coach, wept. Between sobs, I begged to be taken out of the game. The coach complied, and that was that for pitching.

In the 1976 film The Bad News Bears, Rudi Stein, patron saint of endless mound beatings, never crumbled as I had but instead just kept hurling for however long his team needed him to. Midway through the film, his utter ineptitude, central as it is to the team’s hopelessness, prompts the team’s coach, Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), to bring in a ringer, Amanda (Tatum O’Neal). After she rides to the rescue, Rudi is needed only for two more ineffective appearances on the mound, once when Amanda has a bad cold and again, in the last inning of the championship game, when Amanda’s sore arm causes Buttermaker to replace her. Within moments of Rudi’s entrance into the tightly contested championship, several line drives have been rocketed all over the field, puncturing the tension of the game. Rudi Stein exists independently of the possibility of winning. He doesn’t weep or quit. He keeps throwing his powerless pitches.

***

By the outset of the 1977 sequel The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, Rudi Stein, suddenly appearing to be an at-bat or two from leaping straight out of childhood altogether and into stooped, paunchy middle-age, seems to have surrendered his deepest hopes and dreams. In the first movie, he had been the very first Bear player to announce both his name and his wishes: he wanted to pitch. He wanted it so much, in fact, that he pitched and pitched despite having absolutely no knack for it. But at the start of the second movie, there’s no sign at all that the Bears have a pitcher on their roster at all (Amanda’s absence is never mentioned), only that they desperately need a pitcher, which is how the swaggering, vulnerable bullshitter Carmen Ronzonni enters the fray.

Throughout the sequel, Rudi Stein is a marginal character, a member of the wow, cool chorus in the back of the customized van as it sails across the West. We are left to make up for ourselves what might be going on in his mind now that his original dream to move from the sidelines to the middle of the diamond has faded, sending him back to the sidelines again, now without any hope, really, of ever reentering the game in a meaningful way.

Rudi’s most memorable moment in the movie is when he wanders over to the bleachers at the outset of the Bears’ first practice in Houston. He takes his place near Kelly Leak’s father, Mike, who has been told that beyond posing as a coach he doesn’t really need to do anything else since the Bears don’t need a coach. Without a word to Mike Leak, who is reading a paper, Rudi lies down and puts his hat over his face to take a nap. It’s a funny thing for a kid to do, especially one who went so far as to trick his parents into letting him ride with the other boys unchaperoned across several state lines, this familial betrayal ostensibly launched because everyone involved in the ruse wanted badly to keep playing baseball. But Rudi Stein, given the chance to play some baseball on the practice diamond, chooses instead to take a nap like he’s a retiree winded from his morning mall-walk. He rises from the nap only when the practice devolves into a brawl. He takes the cap from over his face, sits up a little, and looks at the bodies flying.

“Oh my,” he says, mournfully, his pubescent voice cracking.

With that, he is out of his slumber and back in the world of the Bears. If things ever went smoothly, he’d be left out entirely, but there will always be a need for someone to rise and endure the meaningless innings. Rudi Stein leaves the sidelines and moves without hesitation toward his fate, our fate, garbage time.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Rudi Stein | 12 Comments »

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Free Beer Tour begins tonight

June 1, 2011

 

If you’re in the neighborhood of Naperville, Illinois, this evening, come on out to Anderson’s Bookshop, where Lagunitas will be provide the beer, Pete Nelson will read from his hilarious and moving novel I Thought You Were Dead, David Anthony will read from his blistering Sal-Bando-haunted page-turner Something for Nothing, and I’ll read from Cardboard Gods.

 

For more info, please see Anderson’s Bookshop’s event page.

 

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, Books, by Josh Wilker | 2 Comments »

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Jimmy Feldman

May 27, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Jimmy Feldman

[My ode to the 1977 movie The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training is due out June 7. To celebrate, I’ll be shining a weekly spotlight on the boys in the customized van.]

Several members of the Bears get to take a turn being a hero in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. On first glance, Jimmy Feldman doesn’t appear to be one of them. However, when I think of the powerful pull the film had on me as a kid from its opening moments, when Jimmy and Toby are shown rolling down the sidewalk toward the little league field on cheap skateboards, I think of a team—and, by extension, an entire irresistible fantasy of baseball and parentless adventure—that seemed as if it could easily have included me among its members, and somehow Jimmy epitomizes that feeling of collectivity and openness. Kelly Leak might have been the mythically cool longhair at the wheel of the customized van that carried the Bears toward the Astrodome, but when I picture my childhood self joining this team, I see Jimmy Feldman holding open the back door and waving me in.

Jimmy Feldman was played by Brett Marx, grandson of Gummo and great nephew of Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and—most obviously and pleasingly—his fellow Jewy blond good-hearted mophead Harpo. How could you not love a team that had among its roiling mass of boys an echo, in miniature, of everyone’s favorite harp-playing hobo-ragged agent of anarchy? In the first Bears movie, Jimmy Feldman’s Marxist presence in the background helped signify the team as an absurd and colorful melting pot of pint-sized clowns and misfits. In the sequel, as the Bears ventured out on the road, Jimmy Feldman’s ability to convey a sense of open-hearted wonder helped define the key element of the 1977 sequel: The Bad News Bears were loose on the world and glad about it, laughing, amazed.

The wide-eyed Jimmy Feldman is only shown having one at-bat during the game in the Astrodome. He pops out. His spot in the order is right after Kelly, suggesting that he’s the second or third best power-hitter hitter on the team, after Kelly and possibly the third-place hitter, Engelberg. As the game goes on, the Bears lineup—out of directorial laziness or dramatic expediency or both—collapses into an inexplicable jumble. After Kelly’s second at-bat, a one-out two-run home run, no more Bears batters are shown in the inning; instead, the action cuts straight to the Toros batting. The next time the Bears bat, Toby is shown leading off the inning, and since the first glimpse of the batting order had established that Toby directly followed Jimmy, in the second time through the order Jimmy must have batted after Kelly’s homer and must have somehow and against all logic and rules of the game made two outs all by himself in one time at the plate. By the final inning, Jimmy disappears altogether from the lineup, Jose batting after Kelly, apparently in Jimmy’s place, though by then the lineup is such a shambles that it seems the makers of the movie believed that at-bats in baseball were scattered around randomly, like candy from a shattered piñata.

But Jimmy Feldman does contribute to the win, albeit only via some appropriately Feldmanesque marginalia. In his biggest on-field moment, he is shown pumping his fist—and, presumably, firing up his teammates—after fielding a grounder and throwing out a guy at first. (Not for nothing: Unlike some of the other actors employed in the movie, Brett Marx appears to have been a kid who knew how to play baseball; this is clear not only from his fielding and his good throwing motion but from the fist pump, an athletic kid’s motion.) In his other key moment he is a spectator, in the dugout next to Coach Leak, watching Tanner elude the men who want to remove him from the field and end the game. Jimmy marvels at Tanner and cheers him on. All the guys do, but for some reason when I think of the Bears cheering for Tanner I think of the curly-haired third baseman played by a boy channeling his ancestral gift for broad, warm pantomime. Really, he had no more or less influence on the game than I did, and I guess that’s the point. He was like me, like all the baseball-crazy boys who fell in love with the slapped-together sequel, a kid who cared, who didn’t want the game to end.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Jimmy Feldman | 3 Comments »

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Book Cellar reading tonight (5/5)

May 5, 2011

The image at left, from one of the great live albums, has little to do with the day I have ahead of me, except that I’ll spend some of it reading Keith Richards’ excellent recent autobiography Life and listening to the Stones, and then tonight I’ll be “live, in concert.” I don’t think any Ya-Ya’s will be involved, but I’ll be reading from Cardboard Gods tonight at the Book Cellar, a great independent bookstore here in Chicago (see full listing for the event below or on my “book tour” page). The event will also feature Billy Lombardo, Jonathan Eig, and  James Finn Garner, and is sponsored by Goose Island Brewery. Admission is free, but please note the following from the Book Cellar’s page for the event: “You WILL need to RSVP if you want to attend. E-mail us (words@bookcellarinc.com) or call (773-293-2665) to put your name on the list. (It’s free!)”

THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2011
7 PM CST
The Book Cellar, 4736-38 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago IL 60625
“Dudes Night” (Josh Wilker, Jonathan Eig, Billy Lombardo, and James Finn Garner)   
Free and open to the public

***

Here’s an early clip of the Stones chugging through a Chuck Berry number and then “Tell Me.” There are glimpses of some members of the rising global army of screaming, weeping teenage girls that, when amassed in large numbers, terrified Richards, according to his account of those years in his autobiography. (Three of the these girls are brought onstage at the end of the clip.) At one point around this time, after a concert, Richards was set upon by a battalion from this army that in communal blind ecstasy battered him unconscious.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, Books, by Josh Wilker | 4 Comments »

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Danny

April 27, 2011

No actual post today but not from lack of trying. For some reason, I can’t get the comments function enabled on a post I have been trying to do on a 1976 Ed Halicki card. The automatic check in the “Allow comments” box on the “new post” page disappears whenever I go to publish or update the post. Frustrating.

So, until that problem gets solved, this blog is fucking broken.

I do have some other writing available elsewhere, namely a short story titled “Danny.” It’s got some stuff about baseball, memorabilia, and brothers, and you can read it in the latest issue of the online magazine Stymie.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, by Josh Wilker | Comments Off

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Bullpen Cart

April 22, 2011

It’s gray and rainy today, and I wish I could spend the day riding around as a passenger in a baseball-headed bullpen cart. Maybe a baseball-headed bullpen cart version of Neal Cassady, much less frenzied and wild-eyed than the original, prone not to blazing 100 mph down rural roads shivering with hunger and amphetamines and roaring about Nietzsche but instead to puttering around slowly and aimlessly while gazing off into the middle distance, will pull up outside my window in a bullpen cart and bleat the little horn, and I’ll go out and join him for a day of mild, pointless bullpen cart meandering.  

Probably this won’t occur, as the era of the bullpen cart has come and gone. Still, I can at least ponder the bullpen cart, as I am wont to do. Along those lines, I have an article on Baseball Prospectus today that (among other things) touches glancingly on my love of the long lost on-field conveyance shown here, apparently on the brink of failing to save a couple Mets from the indignity and strain of walking.

For more on the history of the bullpen cart, see Paul Lukas’ 2007 article on the subject. And while you’re meandering bullpen-cart-style around the Internet, you could also check out a couple of nice reviews of my book that have just been posted, at Baseball Reflections and Batter Chatter, respectively. Also, last week, Joe Bonomo (author of a book on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell that is very high on my “must read” list) posted an interview with me and Dan Epstein (Big Hair and Plastic Grass) at his site No Such Thing As Was.

Finally, I have updated my “Book Tour Page” with info on upcoming events, most of which will feature FREE BEER. (Has there ever been a better use of ALL CAPS than the one used at the end of the preceding sentence? Please allow me the pleasure of using it once again: FREE BEER.) No word yet on whether this FREE BEER will cause the literary gatherings to devolve into chaotic homages to 10-Cent Beer Night. I also have yet to figure out if I’ll be able to travel from Chicago to Naperville to Milwaukee to Oakland to Boston to Austin and back to Chicago in a baseball-headed bullpen cart.

Posted in Beyond the Shoebox, Books, by Josh Wilker | 9 Comments »

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Carl Crawford

April 8, 2011

According to the Gods: a 2011 Team-By-Team Preview

Tampa Bay Rays

I intended to finish these oblique predictions by Opening Day, but my persistent failure to ably navigate the technological complexity of the modern world kicked that intention in the nuts a while ago, dropping it to the sidewalk in some pain, and so this project drags on into the first days of the 2011 season, carrying with it, inevitably, an unavoidable sense on my part of how the season is actually proceeding. When, before the season started, I first blindly pulled this shiny 2008 Carl Crawford card from a “miscellaneous” rubber-band packet in my shoebox that includes puny clumps of Diamondbacks, Rockies, Marlins, Nationals (who I keep separated from my Expos), and Devil Rays/Rays, I figured that to write about the card and about the poor bereft Rays I’d have to wrestle a partial muzzle onto my own insufferable smugness as a Red Sox fan on the brink of Without A Single Doubt What Will Be The Most Dominant Season In Red Sox History, this vision of omnipotence most concentrated in thoughts of the new left fielder, surely (so the vision went) the greatest combination of speed, competitiveness, and extra-base-smashing batsmanship to rip a gaping swath through the major leagues since Ty Cobb. On the morning of Opening Day, I predicted to my fellow Red Sox fan friend Matt that the first inning of this season of can’t-miss glory for the Red Sox would be highlighted by a sizzling Carl Crawford RBI triple. That night, I ended my periodic day-long back and forth with Matt by saying “Ah god damn it.” The Red Sox lost the next game, too, and the next and the next and the next and the next and now stand 0-6, and Carl Crawford is batting .174 with 1 run scored and no extra-base hits. Carl Crawford’s former team isn’t doing any better. They’re 0-6, too, the only other major league team besides the Red Sox without a win. The Rays’ pitching has been better than that of the generally run-hemorrhaging Red Sox’ staff, but the Rays can’t score. Two aging former Red Sox stars, Johnny Damon and Manny Ramirez, are at the epicenter of the ineptitude, sporting batting averages, respectively, of .053 and .059. One has to wonder if Damon and Ramirez are nearing the end, and also if the brief golden age of the Rays, forced to scavenge for fading sluggers to prop up their offense, really did vanish into thin air with the exit of the greatest player in their short history. This latter musing is roughly the gist of the prediction I’d originally intended to suggest by way of this card, but now that the season has begun with a long skein of losing for both the team Carl Crawford left and the team Carl Crawford joined, I don’t know what to say beyond the general prediction that everybody is in motion and everybody will decline and everybody can and most likely will fall more or less short.

***

How to enjoy the 2011 baseball season, part of 23 of 30: Read Russel Banks’ 1985 novel Continental Drift, which features a New Englander in a severe downward spiral toward rock bottom in Florida; though the book is not at all a baseball novel, it features one of the greatest “baseball cameo” scenes in literary history when the novel’s unraveling protagonist, a lifelong Red Sox fan, has an awkward and fleetingly holy chance encounter in a bait shop with Florida resident Ted Williams.

***

2011 previews so far: St. Louis Cardinals; New York Mets; Philadelphia Phillies; Washington Nationals; Pittsburgh Pirates; Arizona Diamondbacks; Colorado Rockies; New York Yankees; Cleveland Indians; Detroit Tigers; Milwaukee Brewers; Minnesota Twins; Atlanta Braves; Cincinnati Reds; Oakland A’s; Seattle Mariners; Chicago Cubs; Baltimore Orioles; [California] Angels; Texas Rangers; Boston Red Sox; San Diego Padres

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Carl Crawford, Loose in the Shoebox | 4 Comments »

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