Who Asked Me?

What’s the deal with San Francisco? Such an undeniably beautiful place yet it can get on top of you in a big hurry. Perhaps as Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins remarked about the “authorities'” take on the mysterious death of his group’s drummer, it’s one of those things ‘best left unsolved.’ The place is an enigma to be certain; Tony Bennett left his heart there yet didn’t see fit to explain why he had to get out in the first place. Carmen McCrae sang about being drunk there – out of her mind, in fact – despite her total abstinence from alcohol. Perhaps it was best summed up in the words of a USC fraternity brother of mine (yes that’s ‘USC’ and ‘fraternity’, two factual points to be included in my biography no less puzzling than being blotto in the absence of drink.) We were sitting in a bar having come up for the Cal game and he looked outside to a passing cable car and remarked “Dude, this place is like one big Disneyland.” And as anyone who has ever been to Disneyland can attest, even the Happiest Place on Earth can wear a little thin at the edges after encountering your umpteenth obese visitor in mouse ears munching on a cheeseburger at the Tommorowland Plaza.

Anyway, I was there and now I’m back. Returning east, I did the only reasonable thing one looking to decompress can do –  I went to see ZZ Top at the Beacon Theater. ZZ Top are from Texas, as was my Uncle Marvin. Marvin visited San Francisco once in the late sixties after starting a family with my mom’s sister. When my dad drove him through Haight-Ashbury, then the free-love center of the universe, Marvin looked around and commented “Dick, these people are fucking insane.” I miss the guy. ZZ Top are much like Marvin was; you get what you expect with very little ambiguity. This held true for their show at the Beacon. They had the beards and wore the hats and the shades. They brought out the furry guitars. They did the simultaneous ‘turn to the left, turn to the right’ move and once, during ‘Sharp Dressed Man’, crossed their legs and touched their knees. And they played the shit out of every lick they’ve been playing the same way for forty years. Free-love my ass. After the show I found myself at 72nd and Broadway munching on a chili dog and noting that I was officially back in New York City, imperfectly perfect as it’s been for me since 2003.

I was thinking about Tim Lincecum recently, the Giants’ two time Cy Young winner, all-star, and World Series champion. He’s been struggling in spectacular fashion for the first half of this season and has the worst earned run average in baseball. He’s getting his first start of the second half tonight, and depending on how he does could be sent down to the minors to regroup. He isn’t injured and is still only twenty-eight years old, so the speculation regarding his precipitous decline has been rampant. Some have pointed to a dramatic drop in his weight, but he’s never been a big guy and has pitched well in the past regardless of how he filled out his uniform. Adding to the frustration is the fact that he’s looked like his old self in parts of most games he’s pitched, having shut-down innings with untouchable stuff. But these have typically alternated with equally abysmal innings where he can’t find the plate, walks batters, and leaves pitches up in the strike zone.

Lincecum himself has been forthright about his struggles and attributed them on more than one occasion to over-thinking. Having some early experience with pitching myself, I tend to favor this theory over most others. I was no Tim Lincecum to be certain, and wasn’t an elite athlete, but there were stretches when I definitely possessed more ability than I brought to the mound. It was frustrating for those who watched me pitch outside of game situations. One kid from my block who was an exceptional player asked “how come you didn’t throw like this before?” when I smoked fastballs by him during a pickup game at a local high school. I couldn’t really answer, though I suspected (and still suspect) it had something to do with what I was thinking when I went out to pitch; who, specifically, I was pitching for. They drill in to you from an early age that baseball is about the team, but the truth is, when you’re standing out there on the mound all alone, it’s about you. Once the ball is put in play the other eight guys come in to the picture, but they’re really just a supporting cast. You can be concerned about letting your teammates down, but on another level it helps to not give a shit and allow yourself to just do what comes naturally.

The photo above is of my brother’s kid Peyton, playing for his San Francisco team in a recent all-star tournament in Marin County. You can’t determine everything from one photograph, but having followed the game all my life certain things are apparent. He’s got a decent swing, keeps the bat head level, and probably most importantly, has his eye on the ball. Three simple-sounding concepts that elude most kids when it comes to putting them in to practice. Peyton’s a decent athlete, with his number one sport being soccer. My brother plays down whatever personal satisfaction he derives from having a son who is good at sports, but it is implicit in his every comment and action. ( It’s hard to fault him when considering the case of Tim Lincecum’s dad, who hovers over the career of his own $18 million a year adult son like a typically over-involved Little League father.) Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that at this early stage Peyton seems innately capable of playing for himself and having fun with the game. There is, after all, a reason they call it that. Whether he’s able to maintain this perspective and successfully extend his athletic career remains to be seen. But for now he’s a kid with a good cut, and for that there’s something to be said.

No man is an island, but some are pretty darn fat – R. Monaco

There are many decent songs for commemorating tomorrow’s national holiday, some of them uniquely American and others simply noting the idea of independence. For patriotic pride I’ve always been partial to Ray Charles’ America The Beautiful, which gets it right without laying the bullshit on too thick. He uses the original line “may God thy gold refine” which really gets to the point; we aren’t going to do it ourselves, but on the other hand we did produce Ray Charles. Springsteen’s “Independence Day” isn’t a July 4th tune per se, but it gets to the heart of a fact to which many can attest – you don’t need a tyrannical English king to know the chains of oppression .. sometimes a family will do just fine. But if I had to pick one tune it would be the young Van Morrison’s Almost Independence Day  from 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview, a transfixing meditative rant starting in Oregon and working its way down the coast to San Francisco and the Russian River. Personally, I can think of nothing more distinctly American than an acoustic guitar picking the syllables staccato-style to seeing the fireworks “up-and-down the San-Fran-cis-co Bay.” Sometimes it takes a disgruntled Irishman to remind us what this country’s all about.

Getting independence is the easy part, whether it’s as an individual or a group. There’s always that energized push that comes with having made the decision to separate. It’s the space on either side of the push that’s tricky. No matter how appealing the idea of “going it alone” may seem, there’s a reason most wait a long while before pulling the trigger. As much as ‘independent spirit’ is celebrated or idealized, it also carries the risk that you’ll end up like Van Morrison, with your back turned to the crowd, mumbling to yourself over by the microphone stand. And in this idea lies the two prevailing impressions that outsiders have of this country: free-thinking trailblazers or child-like idiots. When I was twenty-four I sat next to a middle-aged Greek guy riding a train to Paris. He shared his bread and wine along with his ideas on what my country was all about. “This is what we like about America .. you are like children .. but filled with spirit.” I guess he thought he was sharing some worldly European insight, but it was kind of insulting. And looking at the state of affairs today, the rest of Europe probably wouldn’t object to Greece declaring its independence.

July Fourth is also marked by Nathan’s hot dog eating contest at Coney Island. I use the word “contest” loosely, as it’s been dominated since 2006 by the Michael Jordan of competitive eating, Northern California’s Joey Chesnut. Chesnut is from San Jose, a place in which I’ve spent little time outside of making deliveries in our company truck when I was a young man. But I like to remind people that Chesnut is from Northern California because I am too, and it’s good to see a homeboy dominate an annual event at perhaps the most iconic of Brooklyn locations. Coney Island is no Monte Carlo, and the contest is no Euro Cup.  Nobody is ever going to tag hot dog eating The Beautiful Game.  It’s remarkably predictable every year, particularly with Chesnut dominating. A skinny guy rules a test of gluttony on a  hot day in New York City. The story is then immediately transferred to the news wires and internet outlets, drawing the same predictable comments: “Only in America could such a reprehensible display be labeled ‘sport‘.” … “Everything that is wrong with this country .. we stuff our faces to the point of self-endangerment while the rest of the world goes hungry.” Personally, I find those making the observations to represent a bigger flaw in our national makeup. The contest is a mercifully short ten minutes and really no more abhorrent than the bulk of the campaigns for our two dominating political parties, the difference being that it’s intentionally tongue in cheek. And it isn’t as though we were going to be shipping crates of Nathan’s hot dogs to Somalia in the first place. I like it because it represents an homage to the dying and increasingly taboo American practice of showing we don’t give a fuck. Sure it’s moderately distasteful, but at least it’s honest. And despite global impressions, historically speaking we haven’t even been gloating that long. Our relative success and dominance occurred so quickly that the shift to self-conscious shame happened almost overnight. If you ask me, I say long live Joey Chesnut. And pass the mustard.

This is the now-retro 60’s style Preway fireplace in our family cabin in Lake Tahoe, California. Apparently these things are all the rage and can fetch in excess of $1000 in decent refurbished condition. If you look at ads from the era, they often depict a classy-looking woman in form-hugging evening wear, standing beside the contraption with a cocktail and look that says ‘Don Draper’s late getting home for dinner.’ My parents got theirs around ’69 when they built the cabin, and it’s served well ever since. I didn’t appreciate my fireplace-endowed youth. We had two at home including one in the room my father built downstairs. He himself had a fireplace in nearly every room growing up. They weren’t wealthy and like everyone else lost all they had during the Depression, but his father did manage to salvage the family Victorian on Russian Hill in San Francisco by cashing in a life insurance policy.That was how they built the Victorians – stacked with fireplaces. Many years (and some financial good fortune) later, my folks bought a place above the Russian River in Geyserville, California, and it too had a great stone fireplace and a wood-burning stove. But for pure evocative worth and nostalgic impact, nothing comes close to the funky red wonder still smoking away at the cabin in Tahoe.

I’ve always told people that it was a Sears job, but I’m not certain that this is correct. The freestanding design allows for superior heating with that radiating from the back of the enclosure. A fireplace’s worth is only ever in relation to the outside temperatures, which can get notably chilly during Tahoe winters. We used to roast hot dogs and marshmallows as kids – something that would probably not be allowed by anyone forking over the big bucks to have one of these things fixed up these days. When I was a little older and up there with a girlfriend, she sat too close on the hearth with the Guild D-35 guitar I’d just acquired and sizzled the finish right off the back of it. I still have the guitar, too, and have grown fond of the break in the lacquer where I had it repaired.

My buddy Spears told me something a long time ago that stuck with me – “Nostalgia will be the next big thing.” He may have been about twenty years off, but his vision appears realized these days with the success of Mad Men, Instagram photo settings for iPhones, Polaroid film and cameras making a party comeback, and big bucks being fetched for these modular fireplaces. It’s somewhat ironic that in an era of exponential technological advancement, people long for old inventions. And it isn’t the Baby Boomers wanting to connect with way back when shelling out for this stuff either, but young tech-savvy sorts who never sent a roll of film away for developing. I could speculate on the reasons, including a theory or two on how the faster things move, the closer the end comes in to vision. But accurate or not, it would likely come off as the grumblings of a bitter old man, so I’ll save it for another time when I’m not reflecting on pleasant, heat-emitting memories of another place.

Tom Thumb, Tom Cushman, or Tom Foolery
I date women on TV with the help of Chuck Woolery 

I was genuinely bummed upon hearing about Adam Yauch’s death last Friday afternoon, and as the feeling stuck with me I wondered why. Yauch, equally well known as MCA of the Beastie Boys, died at 47 after a three year struggle with cancer. I’m a big fan, yet this didn’t explain the strange persistence of my melancholy. My Brooklyn buddy Mark knew him, and confirmed what I’d read elsewhere about his uniquely benevolent nature. “He was a gentle, sweet guy,” he told me, “but had enough mojo to keep him interesting.” Seemed like a more succinct version of what so many were saying, but I’d never met the man. As the weekend stretched out, I noted the unusual number of major news outlets and capable writers churning out thoughtful essays on Yauch and the Beasties. These weren’t just pre-scripted obits on file for a celebrity with a potentially fatal condition, but spontaneously thoughtful tributes causing many of the respective authors to reflect on their own lives. The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, countless bloggers and Twitter users .. everywhere one looked, laudatory sentiment abounded.

Fight For Your Right is probably, and ironically, the song for which the Beastie Boys are still best known. “A joke that went too far,” Yauch once recalled. “The song began as a goof on all the ‘Smokin in the Boys Room‘ / ‘I Wanna Rock‘ type songs in the world.”  Then Rick Rubin re-mixed the cut while the Beasties hit the road opening for RUN-DMC, and by the time they headed out again on their own tour, the single exploded. “We were drinking Budweiser on stage and playing the role of these snotty kids,” Yauch said. “No one expected us to act that way so it seemed funny. But as the record began to explode things changed. People did begin to expect us to act that way. We found ourselves playing the same arenas we’d opened for Madonna and RUN-DMC, but now they were filled with our new fan base – frat kids. I remember looking out at our concerts and seeing these huge drunken football jocks screaming the lyrics to our songs, and thinking ‘what the hell is going on here?’ But it was too late to turn in any other direction; we were caught up in the frenzy.”

Crossover appeal I think you could call it. This is what was ‘going on’ there back in 1986. The Beastie Boys were clever enough to attract both the rockheaded football jocks focusing only on the catchy chorus, and the kids sharp enough to get the joke. Though Yauch called the song ‘a goof’ it was vintage Beasties, playing on the hilarity of their self-manufactured tongue in cheek image, but still catchy as hell. “Living at home is such a drag,” they rhymed, “your mom took away your best porno mag.” (Followed by a solemn, deadpanned “busted,” completely selling the line.) The album, as you could still legitimately call it back in those days, was Licensed To Ill, and it eventually sold more than nine million copies. Packed with enough knucklehead teen bravado to choke an elephant, its real appeal was in the underlying dichotomy. It obviously took some real smarts to make something this stupid fly. “Three Idiots Create a Masterpiece,” Rolling Stone shouted, and it kind of summed it up well. Melody Maker was on the money too, noting “an unshakably glorious celebration of being alive.” If all these guys had ever done was put out the single “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” it would have made a mark. “Like a lemon to a lime, a lime to a lemon / I sip the def ale with all the fine women.” But what they’d do next was truly inspired.

It’s hard to get an exact read on how the talent was distributed among the three Beastie Boys, but Adam Yauch’s touch was all over “Paul’s Boutique.”  The follow up to License to Ill, released in 1989, was about as good as it gets and eventually ended any argument that these guys were just a phase, relying more on attitude than ability. The qualification ‘eventually’ is necessary only because it wasn’t an immediate commercial success, but it would come to be revered as a brilliant hip hop record with no less than Miles Davis noting that he never got tired of listening to it. It was difficult to process the idea that guys this young could make something this good, and from here they would only expand and mature, with Yauch leading the way on the latter charge. It’s a real trick, being able to atone for youthful missteps without becoming, well, lame. But the hooks and rhymes never abandoned the trio, and by ’94 when Yauch famously addressed their early misogyny by rapping “this disrespect to women has got to be through” on Sure Shot, it rang as true as his band mate Adam Horovitz in ’86, bragging in punked-up style about doing the sheriff’s daughter “with a Wiffle ball bat.” By the time they rolled out “Intergalactic” in ’98, Yauch was putting it even more succinctly: “On this tough guy style I’m not too keen.”

Anyway, I meant this more as a curious reflection on why Yauch’s death touched me more than I did an overview of his group’s impressive career and influence. And when I sifted through the volumes of tributes on the Internet, I rapidly came to the conclusion that 1) I wasn’t alone and 2) I probably couldn’t add anything that hadn’t already been said. I suppose this is both disheartening and comforting, and keeps in line with that dichotomous appeal. What was particularly great about the Beasties was seeing them get older along with me, yet managing to retain both their relevance and spirit. I had a close friend once who chastised me when I was in my thirties for “being in to the young thing.” The remark stuck with me for a while and caused some probably unwarranted shame. Then this morning I read a piece on Yauch by a guy named Jack Hamilton writing for the Atlantic online:

“It’s a cliché to remark that a celebrity death makes one feel old, but it’s hard to think of another artist who spent so long making us feel so young. … The outpouring of consensus grief was deeply sad, insanely moving, and totally deserved. On Friday we all lost someone in common, something we should continue to reflect on by spending a little more time intentionally being young. No sleep til.”

Not my words, but I wish they were.