Pop music paleontology, soda pop culture, new concoctions, dancing skeletons, joint articulation, artichoke studies, sport coats and leisure suits, more
Roberta Flack’s “The Closer I Get to You,” a duet with Donny Hathaway which came out in 1977, is one of the creamiest and most irresistible of all seventies soul ballads. I have a hunch, though, that songwriters Reggie Lucas and James Mtume got some of their musical inspiration from a short scene in It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, which came out in 1974. See what you think.
Birdhouse lounge scene in It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974)
I was at Fry’s in North Austin when I walked by a guy who looked so very familiar. He was thin, wore a moustache, hunting cap and vest, and was talking on a cell phone. The bit of conversation I overheard: “Well, just tell him that next time he shows up I’m gonna grab a baseball bat and beat the h’yell out of him.” After wracking my brains and taking multiple glances (from a safe distance) I realized I didn’t know him at all but that he was just a dead ringer for Hee Haw’s decidedly less threatening Archie Campbell. So I went home and dug up this single Campbell put out pre-Hee Haw - a 1965 version of Jack Ross’s 1962 minor cabaret hit “Cinderella,” featuring a mess of jumbled consonants and another mess of guffaws for each one.
Archie Campbell - “Rindercella”
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Congrats to Jamie Mac, the new Daytona Demon. Take away the red flags and we had a real humdinger with Junior almost pulling a Senior there at the end. Your turn, singer-songwriter/author Suzi Q.
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 bit 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 ininterrupted 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 still suck because they’re still 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 for 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.
Cowsill mom Barbara passed away 24 years ago today, so it’s a good opportunity for me to revel a bit in my favorite Cowsills YouTube clip which, in the opening number, features her and daughter Susan along with son Bob. (PS: That blonde, Nanci Roberts, was Bob’s real wife at the time.) The Cowsills, in case you don’t know, were a family group with a handful of big late sixties hits and even more handfuls of Tiger Beat features. They were actually supposed to be the TV family we now know as the Partridges, but when they objected to the intended replacement of real mom Barbara with fake mom Shirley Jones, the whole thing fell through. Enter Shirley’s fake offspring.
Anyway, this clip from a Cowsills appearance on Playboy After Dark really sticks in my mind for a few other reasons:
–This family group with considerable preteen market appeal - labelmates with the Osmonds during “wholesome entertainment” advocate Mike Curb’s tenure at MGM - happen to be performing on Playboy After Dark. (Then again, they’d already sung the opening theme for the first season of Love, American Style, the kind of saucy prime time show parents didn’t let their kids watch.)
–Little Susan is uber adorable, and brother Barry (RIP), taking lead vocals on “II x II,” is uber cool and has rock star written all over him.
–“II x II” is the gospel-tinged title track of their gospel-tinged 1970 album (which is also their best). So not only is the family band playing the Playboy Mansion, but they’re also gracing it with gospel music. When the Playboy Mansion crowd is shown clapping along and occasionally holding up two fingers, then, they’re flashing the familiar hippie peace sign that, in this case, also doubles up as a token of gospel solidarity. Take us up Lord, two by two, to Thy Playboy Mansion in the sky, sayeth they. Must be the early 1970s, sayeth we.
Dave Bixby’s moody and fascinating Jesus folk album, Ode to Quetzalcoatl, which I wrote about here, is now available on CD via the Guerssen label in Spain. The record continues to generate a good bit of online chatter, and I’ve since gathered a few more tidbits about it along with the cult group that spawned it thanks to the reissue itself, an email conversation with a former movement member named Dave Henrickson (who commented on that earlier post), and a reading of Al Perrin’s Many False Prophets Shall Rise:
– The cult Bixby belonged to originated in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was simply called “The Movement” or “The Group,” led by an extraordinarily charismatic and manipulative guy named Don DeGraaf. Any Don or Donald DeGraafs you dig up on Google are probably not him. David H. had heard that the real one died in a helicopter accident.
– The movement arose out of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ, a Mormon offshoot, and Bixby’s title reference has to do with Mormon beliefs that Quetzalcoatl is a manifestation, through legend, of Jesus Christ’s Book of Mormon visit to the Americas.
– Bixby is still making music, and currently stages war reenactments in Arizona. This makes sense after reading Perrin’s book, which depicts Bixby not as the docile and depressed introvert we hear in Ode to Quetzalcoatl, but a lively, war game dynamo dressed in Army fatigues who served as one of the group’s higher-ups. The group’s most ardent members, it turns out, engaged in militaristic “campouts” as part of the brainwashing process.
– The group, which believed DeGraaf to be an onmiscient, modern incarnation of the Biblical prophet Elijah, initially raised money by selling combs for a dollar a pop for the sake of their “youth group fighting drugs.”
– Probably because group maintenance became too much of a chore for DeGraaf, the group devolved, circa the mid-seventies, into an Amway-selling army that traded in Jesus for est (Erhard Seminars Training). This likely jibed more cozily with DeGraaf’s private airplane lifestyle, and it’s also the point where Bixby, to his credit, finally bailed.
– As David H. said in his comment from the previous post, the album was definitely out by May 1970, when he remembers trying to sell copies at a Grand Valley State University flea market. He also remembers hearing Bixby sing those songs at meetings as far back as early summer ‘69. His memory is that while none sold at the fleamarket, he was able to sell one to his uncle, an elder in the RLDS church.
– I like Al Perrin’s assessment regarding the positive appeal Bixby and his music had on the group: he sounded “like Burl Ives.”
Next to the ‘76 Chicago White Sox, the ‘78 “Caribous of Colorado,” who lasted for only one season in the North American Soccer League, might have had the funniest uniforms in pro sports. Take it away Wikipedia: “The lasting legacy of the Caribous is one of the most unusual, infamous uniforms in soccer history. Going with a western-style motif, the players wore brown and tan jerseys that included a strip of leather fringe across the chest.” Have a nice wallow over here.
