Vic Correll
January 20, 2011
What Is the Meaning of the 1978 Atlanta Braves? (card 19 of 25)
(continued from Pat Rockett)
Lately my mind is dry and brittle, like a Christmas tree kept around much too long into a new year. The last few days, a perfect pop song called “Let Her Dance” by the Bobby Fuller Four has been looping in and around the dead branches like a long strand of blinking colored lights. Around and around it goes, pulsing with light, as I work at my job where I check documents for errors, or go to and from work on bus and train, or slouch on the couch and eat too much with the TV on, or sit at my desk to try to write with fingers of cement. Life seems thin sometimes, most of all when I’m between the writing of books. All my halting adult life I’ve worked on books, the majority of them never making it out of my notebooks in one piece but at least pulling me along through the days for a while. It’s my way of loving life.
“Well, I’ll find me a new love,” the narrator in “Let Her Dance” vows, but within the context of the song, within the freezing of a specific moment forever that’s the trademark of a perfect pop song, the singer is forever between loves. The love he thought he had is dancing with someone else “like she don’t even care . . . to our favorite song.” What can you do in these moments? What’s the solution? You were connected, and now you’re back on your own.
***
(Love versus Hate update: Vic Correll’s back-of-the-card “Play Ball” result has been added to the ongoing contest. The “Play Ball” game on the back of the 1978 Topps baseball cards was designed to be “played by two.” Every 1978 card reiterates this necessity. I ignored it in 1978 and have ignored it during the prolonged experiment with the game on this site. A long time ago I learned to diminish the gnawing passage of time by myself. I find solitary ways to connect until I can’t find these connections.)
***
What’s the solution? No solution. Let her dance.
Cardboard Gods 
One of the greatest songs ever. Marshall Crenshaw does a killer version on his “Good Evening” record.
You’ll find something soon I’m sure.
Keep dancing, yourself! That’s a great song, by the way, and you do great work – the work you love and we love back.
Vic Correll is the first player in this series I can’t remember for the life of me. Could it be I didn’t have a card from that series? Could it be there was some insignificant player I didn’t track and add to my Strat-o-Matic league composed primarily of scrubs?
Vic Correll was not without worth in Start-O-Matic terms–I know I’ve at least considered using him in the Back to the 70s online game. He hit lefties pretty well, and with some power. (Both of these things are noted on the back of the baseball card at the top of this page.)
He never played for the ’78 Braves–they released him in March and he moved on to the Reds bench to caddy for Johnny Bench for three years. That’s one of the things I learned while not-writing this post, along with the following other nuggets:
1. Bobby Fuller was a Buddy Holly acolyte, as everyone who writes pop songs should be, and he died very young under mysterious circumstances.
2. Teri Garr started out as a Shivaree dancer. From wandering through the hearsay of internet comment threads and from guesswork, I believe she is the second from the left in the line of four dancers in the video at the end of the post above.
3. I am in love with the Shivaree dancers.
Josh, I thank you for cluttering some of my few remaining brain cells with one of the more useless bits of trivia I have yet encountered i.e. Teri Garr was once a Shivaree dancer. I’ll be sure to store that one right next to my present favorite i.e. Bruce Dern’s grandfather was once captain of the Nebraska football team (and former governor of Utah as I recall). The unoccupied mind can certainly wander down strange corridors at times.
Josh – I’m a major Bobby Fuller fan and Let Her Dance is one of my favorite tunes ever, really.
His death is officially a suicide, but when one looks at the facts of the case, it seems pretty clear he was the victim of foul play. On a live album, Marshall Crenshaw introduces a cover of Fuller’s “Julie” by saying “Here’s a song by my favorite rock star ever to be murdered by gangsters.” That pretty much says it all.