I wondered how Neil Young would have responded when I read these words by Dave Marsh many years ago in the 1980 edition of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (p. 404): “Young has mastered Dylan’s greatest trick, the art of self mythology… Neil Young has scripted his own myth boldly, in the song selection and liner notes to a succession of retrospective albums. The most important of these, the three-record anthology called Decade, represents nothing less than his claim to be considered the preeminent American rock performer of his generation.”
Thirty-two years later, Young has responded in this year’s Waging Heavy Peace (pp. 222-223): “A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don’t believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It’s my life, and I am a collector… The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years.”
Kendell Kardt has posted a disarming children’s story with a Thanksgiving theme on his blog. It’s called The Pearl, and let’s hope that by this time next year, some wise publisher or animator will have gotten to know William the Bell Buoy, Sally the Seagull and Freddy the Fish and given their story its due.
When I dropped by the Austin Central Library last Wednesday to check out a copy of Jon Savage’s Teenage, it wasn’t on the shelf. Right in front of where it should have been, though, was a freshly written call number slip (bottom, upward optimistic scrawl) that matched mine (top, downward pessimistic scrawl).
“The stop was walking distance from Elvis’s home on Audubon Drive. Anxious to get there, he would save an hour by skipping the ride to the main terminal in Memphis and taking a taxi back to the suburbs. He asked directions from a passerby. He turned to wave good-bye. He set off for home. It would be among the last uncomplicated stops on Elvis’s journey into stardom.”
I started following the English Premiership habitually in the early 2000s for precisely the opposite reason why US sportswriter Chuck Culpepper did, as chronicled in his Bloody Confused. I needed a break from partisanship. A diehard Utah Jazz fan then as now, I was still smarting from our two championship losses in a row at the hands of Captain Underpants. Having played a good bit of soccer in my day and already a tad anglophilic, the Premiership offered a wide expanse of history and drama that I could take in dispassionately and enjoy from afar, stress-free.
Have you ever watched an entire soccer game on, say, the Fox Soccer Network? It’s positively soothing – two separate 45 minute-plus segments of uninterrupted action. Here in the US it’s all about stops and starts and jarring, noisy commercial breaks that jackhammer themselves into our brains during every TV viewing of any of our big 3 sports. It ought to give you a headache and I worry about you if it doesn’t. (Face it, Super Bowl hypemeisters – even the greatest, most expensive and inventive commercials imaginable are best when nonexistent. Because they’re commercials.)
Culpepper, on the contrary, a burned out American sportswriter, sick of all the canned and cliché-ridden interviews, big money corruption at the lowest of levels, steroid millionaires attributing touchdowns and home runs to the Almighty, and, yes, the ice-cold impartiality that sportswriters are expected to develop, is yearning to rediscover the heartbeat in good old fashioned, devoted sports spectatorship. So he moves to England, where thick-skinned fan loyalty runs rampant and where sports culture has gotten a centuries-long head start.
He then launches a season-long quest for a team to support, by the end of which he’s become a true-blue “Up Pompey” fan of Porstmouth FC (bless his heart – have you seen the tables lately?). In so doing, he’s able to talk about all kinds of little details that American followers of the Premiership will likely appreciate most. (Just about any other book you’ll read about Euro soccer, including Nick Hornby’s seminal Fever Pitch, takes cultural familiarity with the sport and its historical checkpoints for granted.)
These details include: fan behavior (focused reticence alternating with song bursts, as well as a wholehearted willingness to hug total strangers); the profanity-laden group sings; the train rides; the fan rivalries (hardly the hooligan horror show, nowadays, we’re led to believe over here); the inability to get a ticket for key matches if you don’t have a “buying history”; what it’s like to visit Old Trafford — England’s Yankee stadium and home of Manchester United — as well as Plainmoor, home of League Two’s Torquay United (League Two is actually the name of the fourth-tiered league); and what drives fans in a league with no NFL-style parity and where the same four teams usually win it all over and over again (answers: the relegation system and DNA, among other things).
Speaking of DNA, Culpepper’s willingness to openly shop for a team in a land where team loyalty is involuntarily inscribed at birth in said DNA is amusing. In one scene he tells some Newcastle supporters, who are essentially England’s long-suffering Cub fans, how he’d once been on the verge of “picking” their team for his own. Their words upon parting: “It’s not a choice.” Being a Jazz fan who’d likely change team support, if I only could, to some perennial championship contender like the odious Lakers, but knows it’s impossible, this resonated with me.
His reasons for going along with Portsmouth, though, are believable, and I, for one, didn’t find myself second guessing his eventual allegiance. His reasons: A certain indefinable charm and personal attraction, along with good rapport with Porstmouth fans he found himself crossing paths with often, including a likeable guy who dresses up in a blue bear outfit before every game. Now what’s not to like about that? And Culpepper’s description of the euphoria and agony true fans are supposed to feel are convincing. He’s associated himself with the club in a way that will have readers wondering how Culpepper felt about the team’s highly improbable FA Cup victory in 2008 (you can find out here, actually) as well as their current financial traumas and residence in last place.
Portsmouth, in fact, if things don’t change soon, are looking at relegation at the end of this season. This is an aggravating but wonderful system in British soccer (and pretty much everywhere else but here) where teams that finish the season in the last three slots get dumped to a lower league while the three top teams from that lower league get promoted. It adds a whole new dramatic “playing for safety” element to a season that’s an altogether foreign concept to Americans. I can testify of the relegation system’s power because it’s responsible for bringing me down from my once-blissful state of Premiership impartiality.
I’d started keeping my eye on the small London club Fulham FC when they promoted to the Premiership in 2001 – the first time ever since their formation in 1879. They were a long time favorite of a European friend of mine and their every success made me think of how much I knew it pleased him. Then I found myself taking an irresistible shine to this relatively humble and easily ignored team that plays at a charming stadium on the River Thames called Craven Cottage, in honor of the centuries-old hunting lodge that’s a stadium fixture. The team’s nickname, thus, is the “Cottagers,” one rivaled only by Everton’s “Toffees” in instant charm.
Anyway, I started getting that unmistakeable feeling of personal investment during the turbulent 2007-08 season, when, by season’s end, it looked like Fulham’s basement habit would be bringing their Premiership run to a close. With three games left, they faced certain relegation barring a rare surge of good fortune. Incredibly, they won the first two of those last three games, including a dramatic come-from-behind victory at Manchester City. On the last day of the season, though, they still had big trouble, with Reading and Birmingham City, their two basement rivals, having already won. If they lost their last game against, ahem, Portsmouth, or even drew, they were going down. If they won, they’d barely – I mean barely – survive.
Well, they won that final away game with a Danny Murphy header in the 76th minute, and I’ve never come down from that now-legendary “Great Escape.” Fulham may have escaped relegation, but I did not, having de-evolutionized to the type of person who mutters expletives during moments like the present when Fulham struggles with key soccer concepts like scoring goals, and who nonetheless plans inevitable pilgrimages to Craven Cottage, even if the club were to someday find itself in League Two. And while my high-minded, dispassionate era was kinda pleasant while it lasted, my response to Bloody Confused and Culpepper’s immersion in fandom was ultimately one of envy, and although he writes that it’s “hard being a fan,” my own experience tells me that it’s harder, apparently, not to be one.
Fulham’s “Great Escape,” featuring Jimmy Bullard, Danny Murphy, Brian McBride and Roy Hodgson as The Magic Manager.
This chubby alphabet book is out of print but well worth the effort to dig up. It’s a classic. Some sample entries:
“Airplane: in his airplane Santa Claus seems happy. But how many people really know if they are happy?
…
Artichoke: artichokes have no connection at all with Santa Claus. They do not make good presents, and you cannot make a Santa out of an artichoke.
…
Bottom: in Africa there are nasty monkeys who display their bottoms to Santa. This is neither very nice nor very polite. That’s why they never get presents.
…
Confuse: sometimes Santa’s elves disguise themselves as red-and-white toadstools. It is important not to get the two things confused and, above all, not to eat either one, because you could die.
…
Fortunate: it is fortunate that Santa Claus doesn’t have a daughter. It is obvious how he would dress her, and she would run the risk of being eaten by a wolf.”
That previous Beatles post comes from my having just discovered a stack of vintage 1964 Beatles cards that a friend’s mom had given me back in the ’70s, which got me thinking about Wacky Packs. I just got my hands on last year’s Wacky Packages book, which presents all those crude and hilarious bubblegum stickers that parodied store brands (Chips Ahoy is depicted as “Chimps Ahoy – real insects in every bite,” for example) in full coffee-table splendor. The first series of stickers came out in ’67 and have been in circulation off and on until today.
What I especially love about the book, though, is that it focuses only on the mid-70s series that I remember best. Along with Mad magazine, these served as my introduction to the irreverent, grossout world of older preteens, and the image of these stickers all plastered and curling up across my friends’ big brothers’ windows, bedroom doors, and banana skateboards is also plastered across my own memory. Why did these come out as stickers, I wonder? This seemed to ensure their ephemerality – peeling up and crumbling away like dead leaves – almost as much as it did their visibility. Will need to ask fellow KOOP DJ Len Brown, who was creative director for Topps at the time, all about this. (Update: Len says Topps wanted them to be stuck indefinitely all over the world. Affixed ephemerality.)
Well, the book’s been a big hit with my own two boys – they especially appreciated the “Slaytex gloves” one, which makes me wonder what kind of dad I am anyway. I can’t think of my own father introducing me to anything like this when I was my own boys’ age. And no, I wasn’t necessarily showing this stuff to them out of any self-conscious effort to be a “buddy parent”… Like I’ve said on this blog before, it must be a generational thing.
You can have yourself a big time at the Wacky Packs website, which demonstrates an obsessive thoroughness that every collectable card/sticker website would do well to mimic.
One of the distinct pleasures of grade school malingering, I remember, had to do with watching Sesame Street, the show I’d supposedly outgrown, and keeping it my little secret.
Read my review of Michael Davis’s Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street at Pop Matters.
I came across this anecdote when I was reading Alice Cooper’s Golf Monster last summer, and I guess it will now accompany every Liberace encounter I’ll ever have. Take it away, Alice:
Liberace had two dressing rooms. He had his meet-and-greet dressing room and another private area for his closest friends. We went back to the meet-and-greet room, and he told us, “Look, if you guys could just wait in the other room, that would be great.”
Inside the meet-and-greet room were all these little old ladies filing in and out. Liberace was showing off his jewels. He had a couple of little dogs yapping around him.
Now, this is the weird part.
As soon as everybody leaves, Liberace kicks the dogs away. “Get these freakin’ mutts outta here. They’re drivin’ me nuts.”
It was Liberace speaking in a voice I’d never heard him speak in before. It wasn’t the lazy-tongued effeminate Liberace voice. It was a regular, straight-guy voice.
“Where’s my beer?” he shouted.
No kidding. Then Liberace comes out wearing a pair of Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and cowboy boots. “Hey, guys, let’s go grab a beer someplace. Don’t worry. Nobody’ll recognize me”. . . If he was messing with us, he was really good at it.
I wondered how Neil Young would have responded when I read these words by Dave Marsh many years ago in the 1980 edition of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (p. 404): “Young has mastered Dylan’s greatest trick, the art of self mythology… Neil Young has scripted his own myth boldly, in the song selection and liner notes to a succession of retrospective albums. The most important of these, the three-record anthology called Decade, represents nothing less than his claim to be considered the preeminent American rock performer of his generation.”
