"a lackluster Hollywood dud"

It is an unfortunate truth that oftentimes the ones we need the most in this life are the most cruel, and the things we love most are the things that turn on us, sometimes hurting us – yea, sometimes even deceiving us – leading us to believe that life is one glorious way, when in fact it is another, wholly dreadful way.

I direct you to Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, the iconic monster magazine that ran from 1958 to 1983, a veritable bible for so many of us who grew up under the absolutely overpowering influence of horror and sci-fi movies in the far-off days of the 60s and 70s.

This was a monthly ritual, finding FM at our local drugstore, learning about new movies and being taught about old ones, and for those of us growing up in small towns long before the Internet or even home video, the pulpy pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, overflowing with crisp, black and white photos of mind-blowing creatures and thingies were like some crazy door opening into another dimension, a lifeline to a far more exciting world, with Forry as the teacher, we as the students, learning about movies that we’d perhaps distantly heard about from a friend of a relative, but had never seen, and weren’t convinced were actually real; that is, until we saw it in the pages of FM, and then our life’s ambition became, simply: SEEING THE MOVIE. This was far more difficult than it is today, what with our streaming video, Netflix, and all. No, back then, in the days of antiquity, before instant gratification, when you had to hunt your prey for weeks, sometimes months or years, when cable finally made its way to our backwater berg, we consulted our weekly TV Guide, flipping immediately to Friday and Saturday, checking the New York and Chicago stations that faithfully served up at least one old monster movie mid-day, or midnight.

And it is here that the Famous Monsters Paradox manifests itself, that this hallowed magazine, whilst teaching us the names of Chaney, Katzman, Arkoff/Nicholson, Karloff, Lugosi, Atwill, Lee, Cushing, Arnold, Lewton, et al, brought into our bedrooms in glorious black and white so much information about the men and women behind these movies, and so many photographs that drove our imaginations into the stratosphere, that there was no way – no WAY – when we finally saw the movies some time down the road, that they ever had any prayer of living up to the mythical work of art we’d already constructed in our heads.

***

It always seemed like Forry and the FM contributors rarely met a movie they didn’t like. Or perhaps they were so determined to finally unearth these old movies for a new generation of youngins – movies deserving at least a little better than what they got in their own time – that hyperbolic, overblown text making even the worst movies sound like the best kept secret in history was entirely justified. (FM #89: “DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN is a must-see for FM readers and it is packed full of unusual horror oddities.” This is, of course, a movie Forry appeared in and served as “technical consultant,” but Forry also helped out with Steve Barkett’s The Aftermath, which doesn’t make that particular train wreck any better, either.)

At any rate, these movies FM brought home to you became as intimately familiar as your favorite t-shirt or Beatles record, even though you hadn’t seen ten seconds of them yet. Sam Raimi once wrote, “When I read (Famous Monsters), it was like watching all the best parts of the film all over again.”  That’s all well and good if you’re reading about a film you’ve seen before, but oftentimes I hadn’t even heard about the damn film yet, so I sat down and created, in my head, the greatest film ever: endless monsters, relentless action and not two seconds of boring exposition, all based on a couple of photographs from FM. A half-page shot of the alien from It Came from Outer Space mesmerized me; no way any movie with that thing in it is anything but balls-out action. How could it be anything but over-the-top crazed?

Here’s an example: Eric Ashton’s article Invaders From Outer Space ran in FM #139 from late 1977. Nothing at all to it – just Ashton ruminating if life beyond our solar system might look exactly like what we’ve been watching all along in our favorite sci-fi pictures. He runs through a couple dozen movies, writing ALL THEIR TITLES IN CAPS (an FM trademark), barely touching on each movie with the briefest of plot synopses. A whopping nine pages of silly, gratuitous filler with no discernible purpose from the latter days of FM, when Forry Ackerman often never even made it into the office, and publisher James Warren, in failing health, still reprinted articles from years ago whenever he needed to fill space.

But never did we mind, we devotees of FM, the very reason for our soft, middle-American existence, because the photographs were the thing. It never got old, running home from school, staring at the same pictures we’d already looked at for months, the magazine dog-eared by now. Here, in particular, Ashton’s article began with a picture of the alien from The Beast with a Million Eyes. And not just any token picture taking up one-fifth of the page; this was a splash, taking up two full pages, this crazy, evil-looking thing, with huge cat-eyes, antennae, fangs, a gruesome, oversized head not unlike Marvel Comics’ The Leader, and some funky outfit made of exotic space-age materials. (Curiously, he was also handcuffed.) Ashton’s text gave no indication of what the movie was actually about, instead simply name-dropping it, along with The Astounding She-Monster, Night of the Blood Beast, and Phantom From Space, all in one very long sentence.

But never did we mind. The movie's plot? A superfluous thing, at best. A mere distraction. We didn’t need to be sold on some high-concept sci-fi premise; we just wanted to watch the movie and SEE THE DAMN MONSTER. You already knew it had to be the most mind-blowing movie anywhere by virtue of the fact that it was in the damn magazine to begin with. And whenever you hit the jackpot, whenever a New York or Chicago station was showing old sci-fi movies, for two hours the horrible pain of being brought back down to reality commenced. It was painful discovering that in fact the first 45 minutes of many of these films were plodding (at least to a ten year-old), full of unsolved murders and endlessly blathering scientists before finally, finally, the monster made an appearance, the one thing you'd been waiting for, for days, weeks, months, sometimes years: that treasured photograph from FM coming to life and doing its thing.

In the event, the wait for The Beast with a Million Eyes was, sadly, not justified. It is a sadly amateurish movie, poorly written and slow-moving. The stock footage at the beginning and the end is grainy and obvious. The scenes of animals running amok and attacking people were clearly shot in a different location, probably on a different day from the rest of the cast, and spliced in during post-production with unpersuasive reaction shots from the actors, trying to make you believe they were somehow in mortal danger. The performances are painfully stilted. The space ship is wildly unimpressive. (American International Pictures producer Alex Gordon said it was made from a customized teakettle; AIP vice-president Samuel Z. Arkoff said it was a coffee percolator.) The last scene makes no sense whatsoever. And the Beast, who only appears briefly – and unconvincingly – with three minutes and 34 seconds to go before the end credits roll, has but two eyes.

Why, then, is Roger Corman’s The Beast with a Million Eyes worthy of your attention? Why should you, an upstanding citizen who already has enough to worry about, raising a family and working a job, earning money to barely pay the bills, take 75 minutes out of an evening and watch this movie?

Because Lorna Thayer, who will be remembered as long as humans walk this earth for tormenting Jack Nicholson and his sandwich order in Five Easy Pieces, appears here as Paul Birch’s long-suffering wife, exactly where you wouldn't expect to find her. Because even though he was well beyond his prime in 1955, former Keystone Kop Chester Conklin, a legend who worked with Chaplin and W.C. Fields, takes a final bow in one of the last movies he ever made, a little low-budget monster movie that never had any historic pretenses.

Because the name of Leonard Tarver, who only appeared in this and one other movie his whole life, would have been forgotten by history but is now remembered as “Him,” the mute WWII vet-cum-farmhand. Because the scene where Him leers out of the darkness of Deputy Brewster’s back seat is genuinely creepy. Because even the worst films are still fascinating as time capsules, capturing actors and locations at a point in their existence that we’ll never see again, like Dick Sargent, appearing here as Deputy Brewster, a pointless character if there ever was one, preserved for posterity at a ridiculously young and skinny 25 years of age, fourteen years before his turn as Darrin Stephens on Bewitched. Because even though producer David Kramarsky is credited as director, Roger Corman gave an invaluable assist, only the second time in the director’s seat for the man who went on to give us Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Hill and It Conquered the World.

Because the phantasmagorical-looking monster on the movie poster was the product of AIP co-founder James H. Nicholson’s fevered imagination, certainly not of anything in the real world in which AIP and everyone else operated, and he ordered it onto the poster before the actual monster had been designed – before, even, the movie began shooting – in an effort to lure potential exhibitors, which was extremely ballsy, or totally insane, or a little bit of both. Because this is where the brilliant Paul Blaisdell got his start, called in at the 11^th hour, the 12^th hour, really, directly after distributors who eagerly settled in to their seats for an advance screening of The Beast with a Million Eyes sat dumbfounded through the closing credits, jaws agape, having seen no monster at all, because there was no monster, feeling had by AIP’s aforementioned poster, screaming at Arkoff and Nicholson that the people paying to see this movie would openly revolt if there were no monster in the final reel, so Blaisdell constructed an 18” hand puppet of the Beast’s slave (the actual beast “was a mind with no substance, a being composed of pure energy”) that appeared in the final couple of minutes, the aforementioned alien with cat eyes and a funky space-age outfit, and it appeared with a huge eyeball superimposed over it and then dropped inexplicably dead for no apparent reason, but what the fuck, it was Blaisdell’s first paying job in the industry, and he went on to better things with Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The She Creature.

Because these men and women, most of whom had no chits to play in Hollywood to begin with, threw the dice. They drove through the desert to Indio, California in crazy heat and almost no budget to make a movie. They could have played it safe and gotten jobs in the straight world, but instead they gambled. Maybe it was a rush, maybe they had no other choice. I don't know. I know, however, that it should be enough to earn your undying respect.

Because even though it may have been ineffectual in the movie, Blaisdell’s eighteen inch hand puppet crashed into my brain through the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland #139 like a tidal wave, leaving an impression that has lingered for a lifetime. Because a single image in FM could fire the imagination so. And in the final analysis, in a life where ignorance is championed and conformity encouraged, it’s enough to carry me through.

all our times have come

It was fucking awful; we'd all just gone through this dreadful thing. It was 2004. What would come to pass in March of 2012 would've been a loser joke. I mean, if you'd told me about it back then.

     I picked up the phone and called Robert. "It's too much," I told him. "I don't even know what to fucking think."
     "This is a rough one," he said.
     "I don't think I can do it," I said, with a dramatic flourish. I really felt it, though. "Really no reason to carry on with these losers."
     "Oh no, you don't," he said. "Guys like you and me have to get each other's backs."

Well Robert, that was eight years ago, and it meant something. Truly. You had my back, I realized, and so I redoubled my efforts to get yours. And now there's no one to cover. The most frustrating thing is, there's no understanding what happened. I'm sure if I was able to talk to you about it, you'd have your typical cerebral explanation. But no, just questions, lots of questions. Endless questions. And no answers. No way to ask the fucking questions. Just the Ides of March, as you wanted it, your last artistic statement. I never had the guts to tell you while you were still here:

I'm not impressed.

ten second buzz

We walked out of the bank, into the light and the dryness. It had been a dry, mild winter, and summer stepped right in. Spring simply didn't happen. Warm all the time. This all pointed in a bad direction: fires, low reservoir levels, municipalities instructing their citizens on how to save water. And then the water runs out: rioting in the streets, murder, devastation...

I hope to be gone by then.

All the papers were signed. I was now the Personal Representative. The lawyer and I said our goodbyes. "You are Robert now," he said. I watched him walk through the parking lot. He didn't stop, and I thought, where the hell did he park? I briefly thought about offering him a ride, then walked to the car, got inside, put the keys in, got it started, drove out of the parking lot. At the stop light I noticed how dry my hands were, the hands of an 80 year-old.

There were a lot of lessons over the years, Robert. Most of them intentional, some by accident. In the beginning, because of the wide-eyed awe you inspired in me, they were all-consuming, laying the foundation for my own aesthetic. I went back later and questioned them, realizing a lot of them were truth, and a lot of them had to be taken with a large grain of salt. At any rate, they all made me think, which isn't a bad thing by any stretch. In fact, pretty damn important, I reckon. But, my friend, this one I don't need just now. This is one that could have waited: how to open a probate.

I could have waited another 20 years before figuring the ins and outs of settling an estate. If only
you were here
so I could
tell you
how pissed off
I am
about this
one.

goodbye, goodbye...

My grandfather was dead at 76, he died on the table while they tried getting the cancer out. It was the first real funeral I ever attended. We stood in line with the rest of the family at the funeral home, waiting to view the body. My mother walked my brother and me past the casket,

and there was this strange moment: they’d done such a perfect job with the body, my grandfather lay there, serene, looking just as I remembered him a month ago. He looked so normal, so much like Grandpa, that ever so briefly – two seconds, maybe – I imagined his eyes squinting, his brow furrowing momentarily, his hand coming up and rubbing his face, turning to us, happy to see us: “Hello…!” As the image played out I knew it wasn’t happening, yet it was happening, I watched it happen, it was so real, and was so happy to get him out of there and back home. But two seconds later it was over, he was just lying there, the three of us bawling. It seemed so real, I wanted it to be real, but I knew it wasn’t, and we went outside.

After they searched the house, the officer told me they’d look outside with the dog. “Is there anywhere you think he’d go?” “The park, or the arroyo. There’s a path down to the arroyo…” I told them I’d already been to the park and was sure Robert wasn’t there, but it was so overgrown and dark near the arroyo, and my flashlight was so tiny, I couldn't be sure about the arroyo. “We’ll start there,” the officer said. “Wait here, and I’ll talk to you when we’re back…”

I stood in his study, looking at the Segovia poster I’d looked at a million times before in the last 28 years. Files, computer, music stand, Ramos picture, chair, desk, everything was there. It all looked so incongruously normal, like he'd walk in momentarily and we'd listen to Beethoven. I didn’t know what to do. The phone rang; who the fuck was calling? I picked it up. “Hello…?”

I was outside and saw the officer and the dog come up from the arroyo. I took a step towards them. “Wait there until I get him back in the vehicle.” The dog was worked up, but he got it back in the truck, and walked over to me. “He’s down there,” he said. “He’s still breathing." I was aware of the sobbing, the hysterical questions coming one after another. “The ambulance is on the way, but please stay back. They need room to get down here and bring him up.” I heard the sirens getting closer, and two vehicles came down the hill. Red lights were flashing everywhere. They got the stretcher out, rolled it to the trailhead and realized they couldn’t get it down the narrow path, so they removed the top and took it down the path. I kept thinking: hurry up, boys. The quicker you get him to the hospital, the quicker you can pump his stomach. Come on, come on… Less than ten minutes later I saw flashlights coming up the path and they had him there and attached him to the rest of the stretcher and there was this strange moment: they wheeled the body past and Robert’s left arm was bent and sticking up in the air and his head was turned towards me and ever so briefly – two seconds maybe – as the whole area was bathed in flashing red lights I imagined his eyes were open and he saw me and smiled embarrassedly and his arm was sticking up because he was trying to wave at me somehow as if to tell me “everything’s ok you got me in time I’ll see you in a few…” but two seconds later it was over I realized there was blood on his face and his eyes were not open and his arm hung in the air in this horrible manner as though rigor mortis had set in and one of the neighbors came out having not seen Robert and walked over to me:

            “What’s going on?”

            There's not much to say at such a time. “Robert attempted suicide again…”

His mouth opened in shock and he watched for a moment and the rest of the officers came up the trail and I heard one walk over to the neighbor: “Did you hear a gunshot?” and everything sort of fell apart around me and seemed incomprehensible and the officer who had been so nice with the dog came back over: “He shot himself, but he’s still breathing…” and I wanted to get my car the fuck out of there and over to the hospital but I couldn’t because of all the police cars and an ambulance and I realized that it was pointless anyway; what did it matter how quickly I got to the hospital now? I wanted to be anywhere but there, anytime but then, doing anything else but this, and the air was a lot thinner than usual and so heavy now, so unbearably heavy, and I wondered if maybe there was a way to rewind the tape now, please, can we rewind the tape, just this once, I don’t ask for riches or fame and fortune, just to rewind the tape this one time, and do this over again.

turn of the screw

Rain - rain where there should have been snow, but we need it, so you accept it. Shouldn't be drinking so much, but the car turns over, and the music plays on the way to the liquor store. It's just enough rain that the low setting doesn't get it off quickly enough, but the high setting is too fast, and the wipers make a horrible noise. A small parking space, but mercifully there's no one else inside.
     "You want a bag for that?"
     "No thanks," I say.
     A ten dollar bill, and 27 cents change.
     "You're all set..."
On Anna Jean, a dog runs in front of the next car up. It looks like about two inches saves it from death. The owner wears a wife-beater, looks unconcerned. Annoyed, even. The whole thing is too ugly to even think about. The wipers make a horrible noise.

Pull up in the drive way, get out, go in, find the corkscrew. Dinner, TV. There's no point in it, but there's no point not in it. All in all, a normal string of events. Forgettably normal, even, but for the horror of the last three weeks.

Robert, I thought of 100 questions to ask you today. Nothing about what happened, nothing like that. Just run of the mill stuff, the stuff we used to bounce around when we hung out. Some were old, going back months, even years. Some came to me just hours ago. Everything from Keith's rhythm track on Live With Me, to appropriating Beethoven for The Black Cat, to hair on the ears, to concentric circles, to flying over Alaska in a prop plane, to the nature of evil. The sound of your voice still comes easily, but I can't answer the questions for you. The clock stubbornly refuses to tick if I stop and wait for an answer, everything just hangs in the air, so I orient myself back to reality, back to a rainy day in spring of 2012, with you gone, with no answers. And the awful weight of it all hits me again: for 28 years, the questions were always answered, even when I didn't like what I heard. Now there's nothing. Just the questions themselves, with no closure, with this jigsaw puzzle in front of me; there are supposed to be 150 pieces, but over 40 are missing, all in crucial spots, and I can sit here at the table, cursing the fates for selfishly keeping these pieces out of reach, or I can get up and walk away, content that I was able to piece together what I did. How fucked up can you get? This one's a no-brainer.

high or low

Did you ever have a moment like this?: I stood up, looked down in the toilet and thought, holy shit, I've got to start taking better care of myself. It was because of all the drink; we'd gone over to the neighbors' for dinner, and drank all manner of stuff. Way too much, so much that I can't remember if I said anything totally inappropriate. They're good people, the best I know, and their daughter is one of those you can see already has endless potential. The son is a hoot, but the daughter is so sharp - she's like a confident 24 year-old in a 10 year-old body, ready for anything, just waiting to take the reins... Here I am in a 42 year-old body, hung over, already feeling somewhat burned out, wondering if I ever had any potential, barely able to make it to 10pm on any given night.

Robert said: "What'll really be something is your 50s. That's when you're firing on all cylinders..." He was 65 when he said this. A week later he was gone. I was certain all his cylinders still had plenty of miles left in them, and told him as much, but he felt there was nothing left; no potential, no meaning, the reins in tatters, the narrative played out. There had been chaos and tumult for over two years, and he never breathed a word of it. We'd listen to Beethoven's 9th and talk for the bazillionth time about Taylor's Sympathy solo, and all the while little pieces of him secretly fell off into the darkness, and he turned onto a dead-end, reached the end of the road, and stopped there, obdurately refusing to turn around and look for something else. And I wake up at 5am, dogs already restless, lying in the dark, wondering why he couldn't just turn around. I tried to bring him back. Many of us did. I turn it over and over in my mind, hour after hour: why couldn't he turn around? And there's the awful kicker: I'll never know. I'm left with this terrible emptiness, this wound that may scab up in a few years, but may just remain open forever. And five days a week I drive to work, playing nice to the losers of the world, the dregs, the tirelessly bitter who offload their empty, meaningless rancor on perfect strangers, deflecting their vitriol while remembering a hike on Tsankawi, a lunch in Playa del Rey, a Redwood in the desert, an annoying prank call, an egg over easy, a turkey enchilada with red chile, a lesson in tone, a picture of Robert Johnson, a shelf of frogs, a handshake with Lily Tomlin, and 28 years of laughter, trying to make sense out of what's left, this impossible emptiness.

chalk faces smile

Sitting in bed tonight with the light turned out, the enormity of it washed over me like a tidal wave of concrete, like being buried alive: for the first time in 28 years, I can’t reach Robert. He is nowhere. There’s no cell number to call, no hotel that can put me through to his room, no flight landing in two hours carrying him safely back home. I can wait at The Shed all day and he won’t show up. 28 years. There should have been 20 more.

I wonder if he ever guessed that the same pain that drove him to do this would simply pull up stakes and move in with me?

3/18/12, 7pm

Death is in all faces; shape in one history
Rung bone and blade (the ventricles of Adam)
And manned by Midnight, my friend to the stars.
To the night, look up:
A new one shines there.

                        -Leonard Graves Phillips

From the Vaults (2007)


I had five beers tonight and listened to The Damned. What a glorious, glorious thing. How sublime life can be at times.

 I wish there was some way I could repay the service these men have done for me. I wish there was anything I could say to impress upon them how their music changed me, turned my brain around, made me think differently about music, then art, and then, logically, life itself. I wish I could tell each one of them, without sounding like some goddamned lunatic, how they helped saved me as a young man.

 I reckon it would sound really, really bad. Psychotic, probably.

There’s no way you can explain to people how the most profound art stirs your soul and acts, as Bukowski once said, like a vast bridge across the things that claw and tear. But The Damned have been that bridge for me, and they’ve stirred the deepest depths of my soul for over 23 years now. It was a revelation for me in the summer of ’84, innocently discovering punk rock with my friends, grabbing Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk on vinyl at a record store in Coronado Mall in Albuquerque that no longer exists. Amongst the abundance of gems on that double-LP (The Buzzcocks’ Boredom, The Stranglers’ [Get a] Grip On [Yourself], The Heartbreakers’ Chinese Rocks) was a song by The Damned called Love Song. I’d seen pictures of these guys – the singer who looked like Dracula, the guitarist who dressed in furry Okapi outfits, women's dresses, or nothing at all, and their red-headed drummer, eyes bugged out, looking like he was coked up.

 It sounded pretty damn good. 

Before having my jaw operated on, resulting in my jaw being wired shut for six weeks, my father caved in to my shameless begging and bought me The Best of The Damned. Shit friends, there’s no way to describe how sublime it was, hearing New Rose, Smash it Up, Wait for the Blackout, and Rabid for the first time. Explosive bar chords, absolutely soaring melodies and harmonies. Proof positive that you could be a drunken, insane punk band and still be bona fide musicians – these guys could PLAY. They were fucking GOOD.

 On a trip to San Francisco to visit my grandparents later that year I picked up Machine Gun Etiquette and The Damned Live at Shepperton. This was as good as life got. Etiquette is one of the greatest albums of all time; that I discovered it at a time on my life when my thoughts and feelings were so out of control and needed it so badly… Sometimes you just get lucky. I Just Can’t Be Happy Today, Liar, Anti-Pope, Melody Lee – holy shit. Dave Vanian's voice was like a balm for my psyche. Just hearing him improved life's odds. You could be down five runs in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and an 0-2 count. Then you put Smash it Up on the turntable, crank up the volume, and suddenly the bases were juiced and your clean-up hitter was digging in at the plate. What was boring was suddenly exciting. Where there was abyss there was suddenly gamble. The Damned became my soundtrack while learning about girls, getting through high school, dealing with the shit that we all deal with trying to escape that volatile time in our lives.

 

I remember once sitting in Chemistry class with Mrs. Najjar, a dumbass kid who simply COULD NOT FOCUS on school work because there were girls to pursue, and records to listen to. That’s ALL I wanted to do, ALL I was interested in – girls and rock’n’roll. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I always sat in the back, doing my best to get my Ds and Fs anonymously. I had a feeling this afternoon that she was going to call on me and try to humiliate me. I could feel it. She knew I was a loser and enjoyed calling me out in front of the GOOD students. She worked a problem on the board, and I knew it was coming. “Russell, can you walk us through this…?” I didn’t care. I was ready for anything. I had bought The Damned Live at Newcastle at Merlin’s Records in Albuquerque the weekend before, which contained an incendiary version of Ignite from The Damned’s Strawberries LP. It was this particular version of Ignite that blared through all the corridors of my brain at this moment, ricocheting hither and thither through my neurons and conciousness, electrifying me as I sat there. Captain Sensible's guitar solo was like a power cable charging me with a million watts of energy. I was 100 feet tall, I was a fuckin’ monster ready to tear the roof off the chemistry building. I was a one-man army with state-of-the-art incendiary devices, hell bent on obliterating anything stupid enough to get in my path. I had The Damned kicking almighty ass in my head, and I wasn't taking shit from anyone. Life couldn’t have been better. Nothing scared me right then, nothing mattered; bring it on, world. Give me your best. Sure enough, Najjar called on me 30 seconds later.



Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album, Friday the 13th EP, Strawberries, Live at Newcastle… Thank you, boys. God bless you. You’re the very best the species has to offer.

MAILBAG

                                                      Dear John from Conway, AR:

Thank you for your email of 2/29. Yes, we have read Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie book, and are also amazed that someone who gets paid to write about music can be so bottomlessly clueless, and not even employ a fact checker. In addition to writing, as you point out, that “the extremely rowdy and obnoxious” Henry Rollins sings Black Flag’s version of Louie Louie – despite the fact that singer Dez Cadena is on the cover of the single, and is credited on the inner label (one senses that Marsh isn’t even aware of the three Flag vocalists who preceded Rollins) – Marsh also writes that “Black Flag are the first and only band ever to scare the producers of ‘Saturday Night Live’ into using censorious tape delay, to preserve NBC’s federal license.” Although Black Flag was at one point booked to play on SNL, Marsh was undoubtedly referring to Fear’s infamous appearance on SNL, since Black Flag never appeared on the show. Which just goes to prove that even arrogant, pedantic blowhards like Dave Marsh are wrong sometimes.

Thank you for your query! We hope to hear from you again soon.

Book Of Lists I

The 10 Greatest TV Movies of All Time

1) Don’t be Afraid of the Dark

2) Disaster on the Coastliner

3) Trilogy of Terror

4) Pray for the Wildcats

5) Ants

6) Dark Night of the Scarecrow

7) The Last Dinosaur

8) Wine, Women and War

9) The Dreamer of Oz

10) Titanic

A Career in Any League

“Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience… the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative.”

-Susan Stewart

“There was a time. That time is gone.”

-Jay Farrar

Naïve as I was back in 2006, I found myself hoping Alex Rodriguez would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. I was not an A-Rod fan. His stint in Arlington only confirmed what I already suspected, that this was a young man with enormous talent, and a mind utterly devoid of any interesting or challenging thought to go along with it. Bill Lee A-Rod definitely ain’t. Like so many people thrust into the limelight who aren’t terribly bright, Rodriguez quickly became all about Rodriguez, a boring, annoying amalgamation of ego and image that, as such, was tailor-made for the New York Yankees. Rodriguez’ trade to the Yankees in February 2004 quickly seemed almost inevitable: one of the league’s most unlikable players now starting for the league’s most unlikable team.

Still, there I was in 2006, calling my best friend, naïvely telling him I hoped A-Rod would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. Standing front and center in this incongruous change in attitude stood the 6’1” lefty from Riverside, CA: Barry Bonds. The fatigue from what we now call the Steroid Era, from watching men like Bonds, McGuire and Sosa, who came up as skinny kids and then retired as bloated, alien-looking hulks, demolishing all the mythical baseball numbers in the span of nine years, had finally broken me. Bonds disposed of McGuire’s single-season home run record in 2001 with 73, and by 2006 was well on his way to breaking Aaron’s career record. Both Bonds and McGuire used steroids to accomplish these feats. It was too much to take: the humble, intelligent Aaron endures death threats on his way to well-deserved immortality, and the ignorant, exceedingly unpleasant Bonds uses performance-enhancing drugs to break that mythical record. Aaron, the apex of strength; Bonds, the nadir or self-obsession.

So even though Rodriguez makes me want to vomit, I figured it would be a hoot for Bonds, his shriveled testicles and gruesome, oversized head to break the record, strut around for a few years thinking he was the shit, only to have it broken very quickly by this other dumbass he hadn’t seen in his rearview mirror. Then 2009 rolled around, and Selena Roberts and David Epstein broke the news of A-Rod’s steroid use.

***

Here’s what happened in 1980: I got home with a couple packages of Topps baseball cards, rifled through the cards, looked at the pictures and the stats, and went to bed that night. And the next night. And then got up on Saturday, did my chores, and had this nagging in my head, a number that kept appearing in daydreams, the feeling that I had to confirm I really saw what didn’t seem possible.

So back I went to George Foster’s card, flipped it over and for the first time seriously fixed my eyes on his 1977 stats: 52 HR, 149 RBI. Fifty-two. Deficient as I was in all things sports, I knew enough about what constituted a good hitter, and what constituted a power hitter. 52 in the HR column wasn’t the sort of thing that went on very often. Once every 10 or 15 years, in fact; no one had hit over 50 since Mays in’65, and no one would do so again until Cecil Fielder in ’90. This stat went beyond mere power. If you hit 20 homers a year, you had some power. 40+ home runs? You were truly one of the elite, one of the veritable gods that kids like me looked up to in wondrous awe. Here was something transcending a good season, something historic that happened in my own lifetime, not some ancient statistic from the fabled days of the Babe or Christy Mathewson: 52.

There’s no more awe in the post-Steroid Era when numbers like 52 HR wind up in a stats column. After living through the sham perpetrated by McGuire, Sosa and Bonds, I imagine lots of kids look at the kinds of numbers put up by someone like José Bautista in 2011 and shrug their shoulders; put him in the clean-up slot. He’ll drive in some runs.

But there was a time, kids. There was a time when Bautista’s 41 home runs would have stirred the playground chatter before school in 6^th grade, because it meant something. There was a time when I went back to school on Monday with my George Foster card in hand, excitedly talking to anyone who’d listen about this man who put up god-like numbers in 1977, who was a major BADASS even without 52 home runs, what with those chops and piercing eyes – the kind of guy who actually seemed scary to me as I looked at his card (what is Foster thinking, I thought, looking at the card? What does a guy who hits 52 fucking home runs need to think? If I were a pitcher I’d just walk him. Fuck it.) – and who looked like a NORMAL HUMAN BEING. Dig it. No freakishly-huge forehead, no un-humanly mammoth arms that at once looked muscular and flabby. Now 63, Foster let himself go and packed on some pounds recently, but as a twenty-something slugger, he was a regular, healthy looking ballplayer: lean and athletic.

George Foster never hit 50 home runs in a season again. In ’78 he crushed 40, and then averaged 21 dingers a season for the rest of his career. He was never elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. There are those who would point to the power drop-off as proof that Foster was only ever an average ballplayer with one aberrant season. These are the snobs that think you’ve failed unless you single-handedly alter the trajectory of human existence. Here, then, is the crux of the steroid era: individual players aiming not for a ring or some good numbers, but for universe-defying, mind-blowing, world-altering numbers, for the season and then their careers. It’s not enough to be the kind of power hitter kids like me used to admire 35 years ago. You have to change history itself, and command the kind of allegiance that God himself demands of his abject, groveling subjects.

Those who look at 1977 as a baseball footnote for George Foster are the kinds of pea-brained idiots who cannot even dimly comprehend the significance of that critical exchange towards the end of Bull Durham:

“Nuke, you know who this is? This is Sandy Grimes. Sandy Grimes hit .371 in Louisville in 1965.”

“.376.”

“I’m sorry. He hit .376. That’s a career, man. In any league.”

It’s a precious memory for me, talking to my brother, a Cincinnati Reds fan from birth, about the mighty George Foster and his fifty-two home runs. The kind of precious, once-in-a-lifetime memory kids growing up in the 2000s will never have, used – as they are – to numbers like 70 and 65 (McGuire), 66, 63 and 64 (Sosa), 73 and 762 (Bonds). They’ll never know what it was like growing up with the real numbers, what it was like when 52 in the HR column – not a steroids-fueled 65 – was a source of wonderment.

And precious memories, finally, are exactly what fuel the falsehoods, the empty facade of nostalgia. Yes indeedy, there’s nothing worse than some curmudgeonly geezer starting in on the clichéd “When I was your age…” spiel. I know, I know; kids nowadays shouldn't even be expected to grow up with my awe of Foster. That was 30 years ago. And of course anyone who grew up fifty years ago would feed me the same line: You think 1977 and Foster were cool? Hell, when I was your age… On and on it goes, with each new generation.

I agree: there are no Good Old Days. There are just days. And if you had a good childhood – loving family, great friends – then you reach your 40s and things from 30 years ago seem lovely indeed, better than all the bullshit you’re putting up with now. You can find men and women from every generation going back 200 years thinking this way.

Allow me to take the low road, though, and point out that I’m right on this one. There really was a time when a guy who hadn’t been shooting steroids into his veins hit 52 home runs over the course of a season. And it was amazing. It was the kind of thing that made headlines. So it’ll never really be the same, will it? As it was in 1980, I mean. Because no matter what we do with their numbers – assign asterisks to them, remove them altogether, or define them as legit – the dark shadows of Bonds, McGuire and Sosa will forever chill baseball’s history and numbers like a late blast of arctic wind on a mid-April day.

It’s fucked up. Sometimes I wonder if my memories of 1980 are all I’ve got left with this damn game.

Let's Waste Some Money

The U.S. Mails was kind enough to deliver my latest order today.  From somewhere 100s of miles away in the vast nether regions of the USA comes a flimsy cardboard envelope containing The Damned – The Chiswick Singles… And Another Thing on CD. 24 songs, all of which I already own in innumerable permutations. Vinyl, cassette, CD, what have you. Had ‘em all for years. Decades, really. Nothing new here. No rarities, no demos, no live cuts, just the same old versions of The Damned’s Chiswick catalog we’ve all had for somewhere on the order of 30 years now.

Did I hesitate two weeks ago, even momentarily, placing The Chiswick Singles in my cart, and then clicking “Proceed to Check Out?” Fuck no. $13.67 for 24 songs I own two, three, five times over? Why the fuck not? Look at this description: “The package comes with brand new high-end transfers from the original master tapes.” Gotta hear that, for damn sure. How can any good Damned fan resist? “The booklet features a lavishly illustrated package including rare photographs and tons of memorabilia.” Well shit, sign me up, Chiswick Records. It’s one thing to, once again, for about the bazillionth time, dress up The Damned catalog and release yet another goddamn compilation, but “tons of memorabilia?” Now you’re cooking with gas, my friend. Liner notes by former Damned producer Roger Armstrong? Please rush me one (1) copy. Hell, rush me two. THREE. I already own all the goddamn songs, right? Might as well have a copy for the bedroom, one for the living room, and one suitable for hanging as a fucking conversation piece.

Love Song? I own three copies of the single (all with different picture sleeves, natch’), have it on The Best of The Damned twice (Vinyl, CD), and Machine Gun Etiquette three times (vinyl, original CD release, 25^th anniversary CD release). Ditto for Smash It Up, except, additionally, I also own the 25^th anniversary CD single reissue. The Friday the 13^th EP? Got the original EP, have it on The Long Lost Weekend, and the Tales From The Damned CD. Hell yes, I’ll take it one more time. What have I got to lose? Maybe the new digital remaster will reveal some hitherto unheard single, half-second guitar note I missed the last five thousand times I listened to Disco Man. Why the fuck not?

Some years back a friend of mine explained why he downloaded all his music from illegitimate pirate sites. “They release it in a different medium every few years, and you have to re-purchase it to keep up with the technology,” he pointed out. “They trot out the ‘intellectual property’ argument, but you already paid for the intellectual property when you first bought the record back in 1978. Why do you have to keep paying for the same album over and over again? Something is fucked up here.”

And yet, all The Damned have to do with their pre-Phantasmagoria catalog is release it every few years in a new cover with new liner notes, and off I go, like some slobbering mutt sniffing a bacon treat in my master’s pocket, pulling out whatever cash is handy, or whatever credit card isn’t overdrawn, so I can buy the CD, listen to it once, read the liner notes, and place it triumphantly on the shelf with my other Damned CDs.

Such is the power of this band over me. Such is the nature of The Damned’s recorded output between 1979 and 1984: the planet’s greatest band recording their best-ever songs. Not Phantasmagoria, or Not of This Earth, or even Grave Disorder. No, the golden years, the proverbial halcyon days. The days when Dave, Rat, and the Captain were all in the band, when Algy Ward bragged about how he could play totally hammered (“without batting an eyelid”), when Paul Grey made out his will in the back of the van in Italy, certain he wouldn’t make it back to England alive after a month of relentless chaos. When they were all too young to know any better, to think about or even be aware of rules or limitations. When they calmed down every now and again from the endless barrage of drugs and drink, repaired to the studio and recorded some of the most glorious music ever visited upon human ears. There is none better in my estimation, and so The Chiswick Singles finds a permanent home within my collection.

I could get mad. I could ask why the countless number of Damned demos – Don’t Trouble Trouble, Blind Leading the Blind, Frantic, etc – have never been officially released. But what the shit; I’ve got time. Maybe it’s a test. Maybe the band is seeing how many asinine comps their fans will keep shelling out for before finally throwing in the towel and spending their money on something productive like anti-depressants. Fuck it. I’m not completely without willpower, you know. All it takes is a little discipline, a little… which reminds me, isn’t Music for Pleasure about due for some remastering? Maybe punching up those highs is all that’s needed to neutralize Nick Mason’s production. Let’s see what we can find out on the interweb...