Yo peeps. Take some time out of your workday and listen to the third ALDLAND podcast. Yeah, we’re still talking about soccer and baseball, but really there’s not much more else to talk about because a) the NBA is a myth and b) if you say you are interested in the NFL draft beyond who your team drafted then Chris Cunico and I both believe that you are lying. However I do promise that a future podcast will feature discussion of hockey, the least popular sport on the planet.
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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:
When I found the first selection for our Silent Film Series, I knew that I’d stumbled onto something special that could be the beginning of something even more special. I thought then that it would be easy to find other entries of similar quality, but after a while, I reached a point where I thought it might prove too difficult to ever find a suitable sequel. I remain happy with the second selection because I really like it and it showed me that the series could be broad in scope, encompassing different styles.
There is a certain energy in the first video, though, and I hope to recapture that in the future. While we wait (and I catch up on the past week in sports-on-the-internet), here’s an intermission in the form of a still photograph that immediately reminded me of some of the energy in the first entry.
In case you can’t tell, that’s thirty-onetwenty-three year old and new Seattle Seahawk Russell Wilson and his wife.
Many people are familiar with the show James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party. Until recently, however, very few knew about the CBS spinoff, Jim Nantz’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party. Here’s a clip from the first episode, featuring members of the 1985 Utah Jazz:
While I was generally unplugged last week, bdoyk forwarded me this article from ESPN New York, which reports:
Detroit Tigers left fielder Delmon Young apologized to his team and fans Friday, just before getting arraigned on a hate crime harassment charge for a fight at his hotel during which police say he yelled anti-Semitic epithets.
Young posted a $5,000 bond at a brief hearing in Manhattan court and was released less than an hour before the Tigers’ game against the Yankees. He faces a misdemeanor aggravated harassment charge that entails targeting someone for his or her religious beliefs. If convicted, he could face up to a year in jail.
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The Tigers arrived in New York at 10:30 p.m. Thursday after their plane sat on the tarmac for 2 hours, 15 minutes in Detroit, according to Leyland.
Around 2:30 a.m., Young was standing outside of the Hilton New York. Nearby, a group of about four Chicago tourists staying at the hotel were approached by a panhandler wearing a yarmulke and a Star of David around his neck, according to police. After, as the group walked up to the hotel doors, Young started yelling anti-Semitic epithets, police said.
It was not clear whom Young was yelling at, but he got into a tussle with the Chicago group, and a 32-year-old man was tackled and sustained scratches to his elbows, according to police and the criminal complaint.
Not good. Since their hot start, the Tigers have been in a free fall, dropping eight of their last ten games in series against Texas, Seattle, and the Yankees. Perhaps even more concerning has been the lack of offensive production widely expected and on display in the season-opening series against Boston and Tampa Bay. Young is a starter because of his bat. He’s a defensive liability and now a mental and legal liability going forward, whatever “going forward” means for Young vis-a-vis the Tigers. Simply put, this was not the type of offensive production Jim Leyland and Tigers fans were looking for out of the streaky Young this year.
Aldland’s weekly podcast is back. Yours truly, along with astronaut-hating Chris Cunico, are back to discuss more Champions League soccer and some of the goings on in the MLB this past weekend. So tell your boss not to bother you for 25 minutes and put this bad boy on your computer/iPod/whatever.
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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:
When Fear of Music was released, the group was on the verge of outgrowing local New York success and moving toward the arena-filling, ten piece musical funkanauts they would be circa 1984’s concert doc Stop Making Sense. The success of their cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” and appearances on Saturday Night Live and American Bandstand had gained the group a wider audience, yet made them wary of selling out. This gave rise to a set of contradictions that would manifest even on Fear of Music‘s jacket: all black with raised worm-like shapes reminiscent of tire tread or, in Lethem’s view, a steel door that evokes both a “chilly authority” and “desire to be stroked.”
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[Author Jonathan Lethem’s] slow approach [to the album] yields big, as it reveals a record composed not of disparate songs, like, say, a short-story collection, but a “concept album” in the most abstract yet perhaps truest sense. Fear of Music tells no narrative, but weaves together its bleak motifs in such a way that a resonance chamber forms, the pop music equivalent of the postmodern, fractured books of Italo Calvino. Parts that at first seem only distantly related start to feel of a piece the further one goes and the closer one looks. The majority of the song titles act as a table of contents of sort—”Mind,” “Paper,” “Cities,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Animals,” “Electric Guitar,” “Drugs”—all riffing on themes of restlessness, dissolution, and instability. Crackpots, conspiracy theorists, criminals, and druggies emerge as characters, and a bleak landscape forms. Make no mistakes, it’s the apocalypse. … Read More
The news came out of Woodstock on Tuesday, from his wife and daughter, that Levon Helm was in the final stages of his battle with cancer. When I first read it, I had to close the door to my office for a few minutes. I couldn’t quite figure out why it shook me up so. It’s not like I ever met the guy. I saw him perform live only once. But he’s unique among my musical icons, if you can call them that, insofar as I feel like we’d relate to one another. That we’d have something to talk about, that he wouldn’t be too uppity to say a few words, and that it wouldn’t just be polite conversation. That a man who grew up in a town called Turkey Scratch would be all that you’d expect – easy going enough to sit down and have a beer with you and tell stories for hours, no matter who you were. By all accounts, he was. I’d conned myself into thinking we’d been old friends.
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At that moment when you realize that The Band sings The Weight and Up On Cripple Creek, it occurs to you that you’ve been a fan a lot longer than you’ve known. But my first experience with The Band, the moment that I had a realization that the band I was loving was none other than The Band, occurred in my sophomore year of college (So late – for shame!). My roommate at the time had “discovered” them recently, and honored his discovery by playing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Over and over again, at top volume, for a couple weeks. No exaggeration. I’d say he played it ad nauseum, but I can’t recall it even getting old.
And it didn’t get old when, each year, AD would call us together at Thanksgiving to celebrate and fellowship in a law school classroom, of all places, to watch the Last Waltz. Ironically, Levon hated that movie. But for me, and probably a lot of other folks, it’s the first glimpse you have of this man, and the spectacle of him crooning as he bangs the hell out of those drums.
When I finally saw him play live, at the Ramble at the Ryman in 2010, I was two weeks away from graduating law school. It was one of those late April days – sunny, not too cool, not too hot, air heavy with the fragrance of blooms and electric with life – that is the truest blessing of a southern Spring. A group of us grabbed dinner and headed downtown to worship. A perfect storm of circumstances that set it up to be a magical night, no matter which guests he brought on stage. The voice wasn’t what it had been before his surgeries, but it was still beautiful. As AD said to me on Tuesday afternoon, even afterwards, he never lost his inflection, that sound that makes it so immediately clear who is singing up there. But the voice sometimes faltered, so singing duties shifted throughout the evening. Still, he was grinning from ear to ear the entire night. Truly, I can’t recall a moment when he wasn’t singing or grinning. Or as this reviewer put it, looking like a proverbial pig in the shit. They closed the night with a cover of I Shall Be Released, and then I walked out and down onto Broadway with a crowd full of people who were quiet with the recognition that the night had been a special one, even by Nashville standards. For me, it still makes The List.
He left us yesterday, so we’ll honor him with today’s jam. We picked The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, but if you are satisfied with one song right now, you’re a better man than me. To that end, here’s a great spotify playlist from Rolling Stone to keep you listening for a while longer.
I’m sort of cheating with the second featured film in ALDLAND’s Silent Film Series, because a) it already is a silent film and b) its selection largely has to do with the music indirectly associated with it. Still, I’m guessing most artists would be willing to cheat a little if it meant avoiding a sophomore slump, so I don’t feel bad at all.
And this short (7:23) movie really is kind of beautiful. It’s amateur footage shot on 8 millimeter film by members of the Capurso family depicting an outing to see the Yankees play the Tigers on a sunny summer afternoon at old Tigers Stadium on August 4, 1956. It opens with scenes of downtown Detroit as the family heads to the ballpark, where the Tigers would win a game that featured home runs by both Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline.
Of greater interest to me is the Tigers’ pitcher that day, Virgil “Fire” Trucks. He’s the great uncle of guitarist Derek Trucks and was no slouch on the mound. From a Peter Gammons profile piece:
Virgil Oliver Trucks was born on April 26, 1917. He won 177 Major League games from 1941 until he retired in 1958. Ted Williams once said he might have been “the hardest throwing right-hander I ever faced.”
He is one of four pitchers who threw two no-nos in a single season and he finished fifth in the American league MVP race in 1953 for the White Sox (he started that season with the Browns). And back when the Tigers won the 1945 World Series, Detroit’s great staff was called “TNT” — Dizzy Trout, (MVP) Hal Newhouser and Trucks were three of the best in the game.
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Go back to the beginning. Andalusia of the Alabama-Florida League. 1938. Including the playoffs[, he] struck out 448 batters.
448. That, Sweet Melissa, is the most strikeouts ever recorded in an organized professional baseball season.
And for the full season, he was 25-6, with a 1.25 ERA and two no-hitters.
After a strong 1939 split between Alexandria and Beaumont, in 1940 he pitched for Beaumont in the Texas League and threw another no-hitter, in 1941 threw another no-no for Buffalo in the International League and by the time he made his debut on Sept. 27, 1941, he had four Minor League no-hitters on his resume.
Somewhere along the way, they tried to figure out how hard he threw. “They found an old Army gun,” says Trucks. “It read 105 miles an hour.”
Gammons’ piece is full of stories about Virgil, including how he helped the Tigers win the World Series after taking two years off to join the war effort, how he nearly became the only pitcher ever to throw three no-hitters in one season, how he’d add two more World Series rings to his total, and how he decided, after meeting with Derek– who keeps one of Virgil’s baseball cards on his Gibson– and learning that his great nephew is considered one of the best guitarists who ever lived, that maybe he ought to start listening to the Allman Brothers Band (the 95-year-old former pitcher’s nephew, Butch Trucks, was a founding member of that band, with which Derek now plays).
The younger member of the Capurso family who uploaded this added some generic classical music from the London Metropolitan Orchestra, but I maintain that it’s best experienced silently, the original audio being lost to technology, and the music of Virgil’s descendants yet to be born.
Levon Helm passed peacefully this afternoon. He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul.
This was healing music, but it was in no way peaceful. Levon’s voice made sure of that. It was tough and sound and brooked no easy answers. (When, an album later, he voiced the story of Virgil Kane, a grunt in the Confederate army, he managed to push the story beyond politics. You swear by the mud below your feet and you make a pact with the land that nothing can break.) It was a Southern voice, certainly, but there was in it that universal sense that we are all in this great experiment together, that we hold a number of truths to be self-evident and the ones that Mr. Jefferson listed were only the very beginning of them. That there is a commonwealth that binds us, through the worst of what we can do to each other, and the worst of what we can make of our promise. For all the wild rhetoric and the political posturing, and for all the horror that extended from My Lai to the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and back again, that we all had an America to come back to, no matter how long we were away, no matter even if we were half-past dead. Because that America was the America of the tall tale, the underground history, the renegade, buccaneer country that belongs to all of us. Levon Helm told those stories. He gave that history a voice that we could all hear over the din of the times.
He was the true Voice of America, as far as I’m concerned. … Read More
I’ve praised and criticized Charles Pierce here before. I’ve never criticized his ability to write, though, and he posted the excellent textual snapshot excerpted above this morning, as Levon’s health currently and precipitously fades.
ALDLAND 