Repost: Don’t know about where you live, but in these parts it’s time to get back to school. Not me, of course (hahahaha) but my kids are getting ready to wake up early, do homework, etc. Well, wake up early anyway.
When you’re packing lunches you may want to throw in a tune or two.
The original "Wild Thing," from the movie Major League ... and last year, in real life.
This week, we begin another baseball season. Aside from the winter holidays of Christmas and Thanksgiving, this is the time of year when you hear the most cliches. Bullshit springs eternal in baseball, and with that in mind here are some of our favorite baseball quotes:
“Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” ~Ted Williams
“Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” ~Yogi Berra
“Strikeouts are boring – besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. More democratic.” ~From the movie Bull Durham
“You don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.” ~Leo Durocher in the New York Times, May 1965
“Just a reminder, fans, comin’ up is our ‘die-hard night’ here at the stadium. Free admission to anyone who was actually alive the last time the Indians won a pennant.” ~From the movie Major League
“Hey, I want to be a Cardinal forever.” ~Albert Pujols, now a California Angel
And our all-time favorite: “I’ll tell you one f**kin’ thing, I hope we get f**kin’ hotter than sh*t, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f**kin’ people that show up every f**kin’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f**kin’ fans, they can kiss my f**kin’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.” ~Lee Elia, News Conference Tirade 1983
Well, there is not much else to say. Except: play ball!
Long past the half-century mark, rock and roll is now nearing senior citizen status. Yesterday we marked the 53rd anniversary of the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens, and we’ve had some tragic losses in the past couple weeks (Etta James, Johnny Otis, etc.).
But one of our greatest original rockers is still with us – Chuck Berry, still rockin’ (sometimes) at age 85. He has some health issues, but he apparently still performs at the Blueberry Hill restaurant in St. Louis, where he lives.
Berry, of course, is the wellspring of some of rock’s greatest songs: “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and many more. Rockers following in his giant footsteps have all burned through a Chuck Berry song or two, so today let’s celebrate the legacy of this great performer with a handful of Berrys – by himself and by others.
We are taking a few days off to celebrate our country’s birthday and if you are an astute reader, you will know this is simply last year’s July 4 post with a few extra songs tossed in.
Wherever you are, take a few moments to appreciate your freedom – and remember there are still places in the world where armed thugs can kick down your door and drag you away just for reading this blog. Celebrate freedom this weekend, and let it ring around the world.
You are welcome to enjoy the enclosed music at your summer party. See ya!
NOTE: Tomorrow is apparently Major League Baseball’s official Opening Day, although they have some games today.The logo clearly says April 2011, although elsewhere on the MLB site it says March 31. Jeez. Just celebrate both days!
Today is opening day and, aside from the winter holidays of Christmas and Thanksgiving, the time of year when you hear the most cliches. You know, spring and new hopes and new expectations, life begins anew, blah blah.
Instead of that, why don’t we share some of our favorite baseball quotes:
“Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” ~Ted Williams
“Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” ~Yogi Berra
“Strikeouts are boring – besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. More democratic.” ~From the movie Bull Durham
“You don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.” ~Leo Durocher in the New York Times, May 1965
And our all-time favorite: “I’ll tell you one f**kin’ thing, I hope we get f**kin’ hotter than sh*t, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f**kin’ people that show up every f**kin’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f**kin’ fans, they can kiss my f**kin’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.” ~Lee Elia, News Conference Tirade 1983
Well, there is not much else to say. Except: play ball!
We all know Chuck Berry as that duck-walking, guitar-slinging rocker from the late 1950s-early 1960s, the guy who wrote and recorded classics like “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and many, many more. Berry did all of these for Chess Records, the seminal Chicago blues and rock label that was also home to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
But many people know little about Berry’s excursion away from Chess in the late 1960s: by 1966 Chuck wasn’t cranking out top-selling records any more. Berry thought if he left the small Chess label and signed with a bigger label, more money would be spent on getting his records onto the radio and back atop the charts. So in ’66 he signed with Mercury Records, much to Berry’s disappointment.
The more corporate label had ideas about making Chuck Berry more “relevant” to audiences starting to dig the crazy sounds coming out of San Francisco. Berry, on the other hand, wanted to make records like he did in the early 1960s. So it was a constant battle for Chuck Berry – with producers, with label bigwigs – and the four years he spent at Mercury were mostly aimless.
In 1967, Berry released a couple of live albums for Mercury, the second of which was Live at the Fillmore Auditorium. He was backed by the Steve Miller Blues Band, which would later become the Steve Miller Band and earn a number of its own hits in the 1970s. Looking back, this album isn’t bad – it focuses on the slow blues that was popular at the time and which Chuck Berry played in the first place.
Lenny Bruce once said, the one machine made only for fun is the jukebox. It doesn’t cut anything, or mash anything, or staple anything together, it just plays music. When I was a kid we used to go over to visit my grandmother in Louisiana, and she operated a small pool hall in Catahoula, deep in the swamps. I was fascinated with the jukebox – how it found the record you selected, placed it just so on the turntable and guided that needle with precision right to the first notes of the music. When the record man came every once in a while to change out the 45 rpm platters, she gave the old ones to me and my brothers. My musical tastes for the rest of my life were influenced by that handful of records from a forgotten jukebox in swampland Louisiana.
If you see a jukebox nowadays, it’s usually a relic stuck away in some corner of a bar. It could play CDs or it could be one of those new digital models stocked with thousands of downloads (like my laptop). Or you might find one in the rec room or basement bar of some guy’s house that you’re only going to visit once. Jukeboxes seem to be disappearing, or at least morphing into something other than the machine that Lenny Bruce romanticized or the motherlode of forbidden music from my childhood. Let’s drop a coin in the slot and celebrate the jukebox today.
Day 17 – Christmas music in the 1950s might have been about Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and the vocal groups, and singin’ dames like Brenda Lee, Julie London and Peggy Lee. But it was also about novelty crap like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” which was a monster hit in 1952 for a funny-looking kid named Jimmy Boyd. We’re not gonna play that one here – instead we have the lesser-known followup where he caught his horny mom doing the mambo with Santa in 1954. Another kid, presumably Spanish, offered “Donde Esta Santa Claus? (Where Is Santa Claus?)” in 1953 and it’s way more entertaining than you-know-what by that other kid.
30 Days Out 