Shuffle play Friday-The October stage edition

Baseball and rock and roll are interchangeable in my way of thinking. Many an athlete wishes he was a rock star, and many a rock star would love to swap his axe for a bat and wield it with the ability of a hitter like Manny, or ARod.

Over the course of 162 games, there are classic duels and battles, some of them epic in scope, much like songs in an artist's catalog, at least back when albums ruled the rock and roll world, pre iPod. Some of these songs are classic and something you can listen to over and over. There are also those songs, like a 12-0 stinker by your favorite team that you'd prefer to skip over, but true fans battle through.

Summer's gone, and the lingering fragrance of it's bloom is kept alive for those fortunate enough to have a baseball team headed to the postseason. New England's team, the Boston Red Sox, got in via the Wild Card once more. They'll do battle with the Halos from Southern California. Fans in New York, Philly, Colorado, Los Angeles (California is doubly blessed), St. Louis, and either Detroit or Minnesota will have their summers extended by the league championship series and their hopes of making it to the Fall Classic, aka the World Series.

In the spirit of playoff baseball, I bring you this week's baseball playoff version of Shuffle Play Friday.

The Baseball Project (Steve Wynn)-Ted Fucking Williams/Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails


If Steve Wynn was a baseball player, he’d be the cagey veteran that keeps reinventing himself. As a young player, he might have been a combination of power and speed. As his career progressed, and his wheels no longer allowed him to swipe bases at will, like in his 20s, he would have learned to adapt, gravitate to a new position, and still help his team onward, often displaying his best during October’s trip to the big stage.

From his early days as an influential member of LA’s Paisley Underground in the 80s, leading The Dream Syndicate, through various incarnations, Wynn’s music has always maintained an integrity that was about the music, rather than merely cashing in, commercially.

In 2008, Wynn formed The Baseball Project, with REM’s Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, formerly of Seattle’s The Young Fresh Fellows, as well as serving as REM’s fifth member for the past decade, or more, and Linda Pitmon, Wynn’s wife.

The group’s first outing, Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, besides its great baseball-related title, weaves its way through baseball's past with songs about the game’s great players (like Teddy Ballgame and Willie Mays), as well as obscure players like Harvey Haddix. Do you know Haddix’s baseball claim to fame, besides once serving as a Red Sox pitching coach?

Here's a great interview with Wynn and McCaughey talking about baseball, and songs about baseball.

Bruce Springsteen-Glory Days/Born in the U.S.A.

While my rock and roll tastes run to the alternative side of the fence, Springsteen’s “Glory Days” will always evoke special personal memories for me.

The lyrics about the washed up baseball player that can’t quite get beyond his moment in the sun years ago was me for far too long. The song also stirs up memories of Mark’s senior year, particularly of the College World Series in Appleton, Wisconsin, when Springsteen seemed to be blasting from the speakers on a regular basis.

Plus, could there a more iconic American popular music figure than Bruce Springteen?



Warren Zevon-Bill Lee/Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School

Both Bill Lee and Warren Zevon epitomize the bad boy, renegade figure in their respective fields. It’s only fitting that it would be Zevon that paid homage to Lee in a song.

Back in high school, my friend Dave picked up Zevon’s “Exciteable Boy” and the album became our soundtrack during the summer of 1978, between our sophomore and junior years of high school. I was coming off a breakout season as Lisbon High’s ace pitcher, going 6-0 that spring. That summer, Bill Lee would struggle to win 10 games during his final season in Boston, before being exiled north of the border to toil for Montreal’s Expos. In ’79, he’d win 16 games, but Lee’s freethinking ways, and regular marching to his own beat wore thin and by ’82, “The Spaceman” was out of organized baseball for good, blackballed by its conservative establishment.

Barbara Manning/SF Seals-Dock Ellis/Baseball Trilogy (EP)

Keeping the pitching theme going, particularly left-of-center hurlers, Dock Ellis proved that you don’t need to be left-handed, to hold views, and exhibit behaviors that didn’t exactly ingratiate him to baseball’s powerbrokers.

Ellis was certainly one of baseball's more flamboyant and interesting figures during the seventies. In 1971, he helped lead the Pittsburgh Pirates past the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, back when both cities were in the throes of their own baseball glory days. Both cities have fallen on hard times, both baseball-wise, and economically, particularly Pittsburgh, with the Pirates last winning season coming 17 years ago, in 1992, a record for professional sports futility.

Interestingly, that 1971 club that Ellis was a member of had the first all black starting lineup in MLB history with him on the mound.

Manning, a fine singer-songwriter in her own right, named her band after a legendary minor league team that was the pride of San Francisco, before the Giants abandoned New York’s Polo Grounds for the greener pastures of the west coast.

Neil Diamond-Sweet Caroline/Sweet Caroline

I know this is a bit of a stretch for baseball-related songsmithing, but there are few songs that have become attached to a team, like this one is to the Red Sox. A few years back, The Standells "Dirty Water" might have made the cut, but it's a rare occurance at any wedding where this song doesn't get played and a Sox-style sing-a-long doesn't break out, with the requisite refrain, "so good! so good! so good!" emanating from the dance floor.

The song has no connection to the Red Sox, Diamond is not a Boston native, or even a Sox fan for that matter, but come the eighth inning at Fenway, you'll hear this blasting from the Fenway speakers like clockwork.

The regular season is winding down, and the new heroes will step forth on the postseason stage, some unexpected, like an Al Weis, or Gene Tenace, others, like Mr. October, Reggie Jackson will be no surprise.

Go Red Sox!

Biking is life

I’ve been thinking about a number of things this week. One of the advantages that attend biking is its capacity to slow your world down. In my opinion, this slower pace puts you in a positive place more conducive to thought and rumination.

About 15 years ago, I would bike to work in Brunswick. My commute was about 15 miles from home. Two days per week, I’d make the trek on my bike. It involved some effort, mainly making sure my backpack had my work clothes, a towel to shower, deodorant, and other supplies necessary to prepare for my work day. My employer had a locker room with a shower, so that was a plus. One time I forgot clean underwear, so I spent the day free and easy inside my work jeans. Other than that, I enjoyed this interlude in my life, one that was too brief.

Rather than zipping to Brunswick by car in 20 minutes, the ride took about an hour on my bike. Slowing down from 50 miles per hour to 15 helped me to notice trees, markers along the road—a stone wall erected many years ago, a small family cemetery—things that are just a blur whizzing by in your car. Instead of rock music blaring from my speakers, I was alone with the sounds of the morning—birds chirping—and my thoughts.

Over the past 15 weeks, I’ve reconnected with my physical self. I’ve come to notice how my previous neglect put me on a path that might have resulted in negative health consequences. Granted, flying over my handlebars two weeks ago left me scraped, bruised, and scabbed over in a few places, but I survived, possibly because I had been training for three months. I weathered the incident with a few Band-Aids®, and being sore for a few days. I started a soul patch on my chin that I think I’ll keep. It covers up some of the new pink skin that forms after an abrasion. When I shave in the spring, I’ll be none the worse for my chin plant.

I’ve been wondering what would happen if Americans adopted a lifestyle like the Danes, and other countries that choose alternatives to the automobile. What if we embraced a way of living that was actually sustainable? It’s possible if we recognize that having fewer things is preferable to having stuff, but being increasingly unhappy.

My friend Anne moved to Portland, Oregon a few months ago. She just wrote to tell me that she is heading up a cool organization called the Community Cycling Center, where they dedicated to bikes as tools of empowerment. She’s in a great city that has worked diligently to make the bicycle an important part of their overall transportation policy.

In Maine, despite efforts by groups like the Bicycle Coalition of Maine, resistance to bikes is widespread, with many drivers viewing us bicyclists as adversaries, standing in their way. Rather than slowing down, and waiting, or deferring to bicyclists, these idiots swerve into the path of oncoming cars, drive too close to cyclists (Maine law requires three feet clearance between cars and a cyclist at the edge of the roadway, btw), and generally exhibit the mindset of a 10-year-old, while yielding an instrument of death that is in excess of 3,000 pounds, and an SUV might exceed 4,000. My bike and I weight about 250, so there’s not much competition should the driver clip me—I’m dead, or seriously injured.

Still, every night, at least one driver insists on boorish behavior, all because they’re too selfish to tack on a potential 15 seconds to their commute by courteously sharing the road with me. I’m sure it’s even worse in Maine’s larger communities, like Portland.

All in all, it’s been a great 15 weeks, and as the days grow shorter and darkness descends earlier and earlier on the roads I’ve grown fond of during summer’s longer days, I know this portends that my biking season is coming to a close sooner than I would like.

It looks like a membership at a local gym is in order for me to maintain my progress. My hours on the Lifecycle® and Stairmaster® all winter will be tolerated, only because I know I’ll be hopping back on my Diamondback as soon as the roads are cleared come springtime.

Ken Burns-Race and space in America

Noted documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, is on C-SPAN's Book TV talking about The National Parks: America's Best Idea, with best friend and collaborator, Dayton Duncan, discussing the new documentary.

On how he and Duncan came to take on this project, which took 10 years to complete:

It's right in our wheelhouse, and I want to stress "our." In the formal sense, [writer and longtime collaborator Duncan] came to me 10 years ago and said, "Let's do the national parks," and it took me a nanosecond to say, "Of course." About that same time, 10 years ago, we were in the middle of producing our film together on Mark Twain, and we were talking to the novelist Russell Banks about Huckleberry Finn. Banks was saying—and we certainly agreed ourselves—that this was Twain's greatest work. And then he said, "It's our Illiad and our Odyssey." He went on, "Though most of us share a common European ancestry with those who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, we Americans were grappling with two new themes that Twain alone, among writers—but also among politicians and philosophers and artists of the 19th century—was willing to deal with honestly and openly. And those twin themes were race and space." Those are all I've been focused on for the last 30-plus years.

The six part series begins today on local PBS stations and will continue for five additional nights. Don't miss it!

Rush weighs in with Leno

I missed the Rush Limbaugh interview with Leno, Thursday night. Apparently, Rush has lost a great deal of weight, 82 pounds in fact, over the past five months. He's not revealing many details, however, since he says it's much too complicated and even someone with "talent on loan from God" doesn't quite understand it.

Since I've been on my own quest for a healthier lifestyle for the past 14 weeks, having lost 39 pounds, I'm always interested in the success of others in their own journey to shed pounds and embrace a better way. Given that Limbaugh is a celebrity magnifies the effort and attention being given to it.

Being overweight is not healthy, so given that he's shed weight, I'm pleased for his own longterm health. I am concerned, however that he's not doing this by combining healthy eating with exercise and a focus on fitness.

I know that Limbaugh has an aversion to exercise. I've heard him speak about it, saying that he hates to walk from the car to enter a building. Granted, this was several years back, but I doubt that he's running, walking, or even biking as part of his new weight loss routine.

He did mention he's using Quick Weight Loss Centers to shed pounds. Limbaugh has lost large amounts of weight in the past. I remember that he mentioned he had his own personal chef preparing healthy, low-fat meals for him. I think he was married to Marta at the time, who apparently couldn't cook. This was the longest of his three marriages.

I wish him success in keeping the weight off. It is a fact (since he insists on being fact-based on his show) that losing weight and keeping it off isn't about diets, or special programs, particularly complicated programs like the one that he's not sure of the details about. It involves burning fewer calories than you consume. This requires attention to what you eat, and a regular program of exercise.

That's why I'm a proponent of the weight loss occuring with this gentleman in Texas, and continue to concentrate on my own routine of healthy eating, combined with exercise.

Losing weight is easy. There are a plethora of fad programs available, particularly if you have the money to pay for them. Success in keeping the pounds off are much harder and require daily, if not hourly vigilance.

Shuffle play Friday-Workout mixtape (or songs to shake your ass to @ 5:30 a.m.)

I’ve detailed my reconnection with the physical, completing the body, soul spirit continuum in several posts over the past 14 weeks. This isn’t yet another post about me and my new body shape. No, it’s time to rock out for this week’s Shuffle Play Friday. I am loosely tying it to working out, however. It's what I do now.

With the days growing increasingly shorter, light to bike is becoming precious. It’s hard to get a ride in each morning before work, now that the sun comes up around 6:30. As a result, I’m back on the treadmill, ramping up my minutes from 15-20, to 35 to 40 several mornings per week, spending most of the time alternating between running/walking.

I hate the treadmill, and the fact that it’s located in my dark basement doesn’t help things. What gets me through my period of torture? You guessed it—rawk!!

Here are a list of five songs that can make any workout pass by with minimal discomfort.

The Smiths-How Soon Is Now? (12-inch)/The Sound of The Smiths

The Smiths are being rediscovered by a new generation of music fans as result of the vapid summer movie hit, 500 Days of Summer. Haven’t seen it and don’t plan to.

I’ve been a Smiths fan since I scored The Queen Is Dead from Columbia (on cassette) as part of one of their “6 tapes for a penny” offer. It was just after my fundamentalist crash and burn.

This particular track’s propulsive nature and atmospheric guitar riffing by Johnny Marr makes it a good track to lock in and turn up the speed control to.


Joe Satriani-Surfing With The Alien/Surfing With The Alien

Satriani is a guitar shredder extraordinaire. This was his best selling disc, solid from start to finish. The title track, however, is a classic for those that like kick ass rock with frenetic fretwork.
I’ve had this on cassette for years, and somehow, it ended up in the bottom of a box that nearly got discarded at last Saturday’s Durham Trash Disposal Day. Fortunately for me, Miss Mary saw it before handing over the box to the guy that dumps things into the trash compactor.

Monday morning, guess who was in the tape player of my basement boom box, propelling me onward?

Stereolab-Metronomic Underground/Emperor Tomato Ketchup

This song is a departure from the other more straight-ahead rock tracks in this week’s SPF.

Stereolab is a band I first got turned onto during my ‘BOR years. Eclectic

This particular track has a hypnotic groove, locked in by synthesizer, rather than guitar and a repeating bass line. That and the lyrics sung in French by Laetitia Sadier creates an ambience where picking up and putting down my New Balance 720s sync with the beat, and running in place is no longer difficult.

Interestingly, my father’s best friend in high school knows Stereolab’s Tim Gane’s dad, Reuben, and as a result, I scored a personally signed photo courtesy of Tim.

Prisonshake-Bedtime Beats You Senseless/I’m Really Fucked Now

I drove to Princeton in 1994, to catch Guided by Voices. That’s the kind of thing I once was willing to do in order to connect with music that had meaning for me. Label mates at the time, Prisonshake were on tour with GbV, and I met Robert Griffen, guitar player, and Scat Records maestro.

The show was at one of the houses (think frats) on the Princeton campus. I was early and Prisonshake was loading in their gear before playing. I introduced myself. I learned later that Griffen could be a tough guy to get next to, but he was great to me. I guess he figured that if I was crazy enough to drive six hours to catch a show, he could at least be cordial. We had a beer.

The Shake have always done things their own way. Scat was based in Cleveland before Griffen, tired of the post-industrial dreariness, drunks, and crack whores for neighbors, relocated to St. Louis, where the label is now based.

I just found out this weekend, listening to Mike Lupica’s show via the archives on WFMU that Prisonshake has just released a new album, a double one at that, their first one in eons. If its as good as any of the old stuff (which Lupica say that it is), then it should be one hell of an album (it’s available in vinyl only).

Caspian-Moksha (track 1)/The Four Trees

In my day job with the workforce investment board, I meet new people all the time. Much of my work involves putting together partnerships, leveraging resources, and piecing together a variety of funding sources to offer training programs, primarily to help job seekers gain new skills, upgrade their skills (if they've been laid off), and on a personal level, possibly help some find the path to do what they were meant to do with their lives.

In the course of my efforts, occasionally, I connect on a more personal level with individuals doing similar work in the community. I happened to have a chance to have lunch a year ago with a young man involved with the Caleb Foundation. Caleb is an interfaith organization that develops, preserves and manages rental communities so as to provide safe, decent housing to low and moderate income residents.

We got talking about books, writing, and ultimately music. Long story short, he gave me a CD of a band that his girlfriend's brother plays in. The CD I have was an original, but the jewel case was a generic Maxell one, sans song titles, and without band name, with just the disc title, "The Four Trees." I just knew the songs as track 1, track 2, etc.

The band is Caspian, from Beverly, Mass. They might be characterized as post-rock, and their music is instrumental. Think church of sound, with waves ebbing and flowing in intensity, inducing a sort of spiritual state.

Track 1, which I learned is titled "Moksha." Most of this CD, including this track is loud, angular, with anthemic dual guitar structures, and mostly muscular drumming. As a band, Caspian doesn't create mere sounds, they create sonic landscapes that you get lost in.

Well, please forgive me, but I've got to wrap this up as I'm due for my morning appointment with Mr. Treadmill.