March 4, 2010

Those striking young gentlemen in their purple Astros finery are me and my older brother, Jim...and, in a nifty coincidence, you can see my sisters, Christine and Dianne, in the framed photo on the wall behind us. This was taken in 1971, during my first season of organized sports. That's also, if I’m not mistaken, my very first baseball cap.

I’ve always been a stickler for wearing the proper cap in the proper manner - my wife can’t believe the amount of effort I take to add just the right curve to the bill when I get a new one - so it bugs me to this day that the tag is sticking out of my cap in the picture. It's hard to see it when the photo’s this size, but it’s there, right by my ear. I can’t even describe the shame.

We probably lost that day, by the way. The Astros were pretty lousy. I’d have to wait until ’73, when I was an outfielder for the Giants, before I’d taste the sweet nectar of a championship. You callin’ me a liar?

There’s the trophy. Who’s a liar now, wise ass? Not me, that’s who.

                                                ***

So I’ve worn baseball caps, off and on - that’s a joke - for a long time now. Well, I call them baseball caps, anyway. In fact, what I’ve worn is a style of cap indigenous to America’s baseball fields, but mine are often decorated with the logos of non-baseball playing entities, like Shell Oil or the Beatles or the Cleveland Cavaliers. My Cavaliers cap, though, is a new and very recent development, and I’m hot-damn happy about it. It may well be the finest lid to have ever adorned my imperious noggin.

For several long seasons, the Cavaliers had perhaps the worst logo in all of sports.

Look at that shit. It’s like something a high school drafting student would cook up for extra credit. Remember also that the team’s predominant uniform color at the time was powder blue, aka “sissy blue.” I’d show you this noxious creation right now, but I’d rather keep it from touching my other Wall of Paul articles, the same way I keep beets from touching neighboring vegetables if somebody happens to plop some on my plate. You had to have a special bond with ineptitude, of both the sports and fashion varieties, to wear any Cavs paraphernalia during what I like to call their Blue Period.

But that suddenly changed. The Cavaliers received a complete sartorial makeover upon the arrival of one LeBron James, and I can live with their current logo and threads. Still, I’ve been regularly scanning the Internet for a genuine old-school Cavaliers cap that would signify my long-standing allegiance, lest anyone think I hopped on the bandwagon once they started winning, a horse-shit form of “fandom” that drives me crazy. Back in the 70s, the Cavs only occasionally had a respectable team, but they always had rockin’-cool wine and gold uniforms that featured a first-rate logo.

This graceful design effortlessly conveyed all that was heroic and swashbuckling about living in a city where the river caught fire and masses of people died every year from over-ingesting sausage and stuffed cabbage. I just couldn’t find a nice, slouch-style cap that featured it. Until just a few weeks ago, that is, when I basically stumbled across one while surfing the Internet.

You’re lookin’ at it, baby! This thing is surface of Neptune cool, and I will have it affixed to my cranium should the Cavaliers actually pull it off this year and win the whole thing…which, even with Jesus at power forward, they almost certainly won’t do. The only thing that could possibly match the grooviness of this particular cap would be if I could finally find a similarly styled Browns cap featuring the old-school Brownie logo that the team toyed with in the early 1960s, although it never appeared on their still logo-free helmet.

Whatta ya know! Got that one, too! Just two weeks ago.

In Paul World, then, an old-school head is a happy head. I also have a buzz cut, and you should have one, too. Hippie.

Paul Tatara

March 1, 2010

I’ve written about Iggy Pop and the Stooges a couple of times since Wall of Paul’s inception back in September of 2007, and I’ve made it clear on those occasions that, in my book, their 1970 album, “Fun House,” is the single most incendiary collection of tunes since Thomas Edison tossed back a couple of sarsaparillas, rolled up his sleeves, and recited “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” So I won’t go on about “Fun House” this time, outside of saying you’re a goddamned moron if you don’t own it yet. I mean, really. I hate to get shitty, but that’s about the size of it.

If you’re still in need, I’ll pause now while you scan the outlying regions for a store that’s anachronistic enough to actually sell cd’s. Or, in lieu of that, you can head over to iTunes and download it. (Throw on the demo version of “Loose,” too, if you know what’s good for you.)

                                                ***

Okay. The reason I’m bringing all this up again is because Iggy Pop was once attacked by a gorilla during a live performance. But the gorilla turned out to be Elton John.

This is possibly my favorite sex, drugs, and rock & roll anecdote involving any performer, even though there’s not really any sex in it. Iggy was never at a deficit when it came to willing partners, though, so let’s just assume that he had been doing something outrageous, penis-wise, no less than 24 hours before the gorilla attack. And, whatever he was doing, he probably didn’t remember doing it by the time his pants were back on. If, in fact, he could find his pants.

Iggy, you see, took drugs, and not the happy-pretty drugs that Donovan or that hippie-dippy with the autoharp from the Lovin’ Spoonful used to take. No, Iggy was more into exotic cocktails like a hit of acid, a quart of bourbon, a bag of weed, and a tainted animal tranquilizer. He should have died 50 times over before the Stooges finally broke up, and they only recorded three albums. There’s a story about him walking down the street in Detroit and screaming that he could see through the buildings, even when the shades were drawn and the doors were shut.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, or a cool thing. I’m just saying it’s a thing. And if you’re contemplating the Stooges trip, you have to accept that Iggy - who began life as Jim Osterberg, and was, by all accounts, a frighteningly brilliant student when he was in high school - recognized that he was parading his id for public consumption when he hit the stage, or the recording studio, totally zonked out of his noggin. Interested listeners who had jobs or self-respect or wanted to go on living were simply invited to climb onboard the Good Ship Iggy Pop. It was seldom smooth sailing.

There wasn’t a period during the Stooges short time together that Iggy was on the straight and narrow. He was basically a raving lunatic with a non-existent pain threshold from day one, and the other band members, who were hardly choir boys, found themselves wondering if he would permanently check out on stage, in the gutter, or in a hotel room. It seemed like only a matter of time, but, somehow, he kept on going, like a boxer who gets hit in the face so much he eventually drops his guard, dispenses with any concept of “winning,” and becomes a monument to sheer, brutal punishment.

To illustrate, this is where Iggy started…

…and this was where he ended up.

Not that it bothered him all that much. You have to end up somewhere, so why not on the floor with visions of sugar demons dancing in your head? At least he got to bang Nico and ride around in limos with David Bowie.

                                                ***

Anyway, not long after the 1973 release of the Stooges’ quickly and inappropriately disrespected swan song, “Raw Power,” Iggy and the boys were playing at a small club in Atlanta. Small clubs were really all they could get at the time, and not because of poor management. As Paul Trynka notes in his fantastically readable biography, “Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed,” by this point, people who spied Iggy backstage before a show would often wonder out loud whether he could actually manage to perform. But, of course, he always made it, not that he was particularly coherent once he hit the stage.

During this time, the other supposed legitimately insane people on the pop music scene were Bowie, who was so coked-up he once became convinced that witches were trying to steal his semen (they weren’t), and Elton John, who was bitchy-silly-goofy and just happened to be the most famous rock & roller on the face of the earth. Remember, this wasn’t the snooze-fest Elton that we’ve all come to know and endure for the past 30 years. In ’73, he could rock like end times were nigh, albeit with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and he was so rich and pampered he even had his own record label, Rocket Records.

So, during the Atlanta stopover of the Stooges’ tour, John decided that he wanted to give a much-needed ego boost to his old, bedraggled pal, Iggy, by joining him onstage and maybe even inviting him to sign to Rocket. Unfortunately, in what must have been a misguided bid to (if you’ll pardon the pun) ape Marlene Dietrich’s monkey-suited routine in “Blonde Venus,” Elton also decided that he wouldn’t tell Iggy he was there, and would walk on stage in the middle of the Stooges’ set. Dressed in a gorilla suit. After the initial shock of it, he’d take his gorilla head off and everyone would laugh uproariously at his inherent Elton John-ness.

I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. The very extreme catch, however, was that, the night before the show, Iggy had gobbled up a groupie’s entire supply of Quaaludes, which is the equivalent of chugging several cases of beer, and the Stooges’ drummer, Scotty Asheton, thought it was funny to leave him sleeping over a prickly Mediterranean bush in front of the hotel where they were staying.

By the time the show rolled around that evening, Iggy still hardly knew where he was, so somebody had the great idea of injecting him with a dose of methamphetamine sulphate. Which they just happened to have on them. That got Iggy walking, as it would pretty much anybody. But it was debatable whether he was actually awake.

At any rate, the Stooges were roaring through their set when Elton the Ape suddenly made his guest appearance. Surely, members of the audience were wondering who this idiot was interrupting the flow of the show in a gorilla suit, but Iggy didn’t perceive it quite like that. What he thought was more on the order of, “JESUS CHRIST! I’M BEING ATTACKED BY A FUCKING GORILLA!!”

That’s right— Iggy was singing onstage in Atlanta, GA, and thought a gorilla had somehow made it into the club and was now intent on ripping his heart out. As he described it years later, “I was unusually stoned to the point of being barely ambulatory, so it scared the hell out of me.”

Iggy initially went into full fighting mode and was ready to rumble, as was the Stooges’ James Williamson, who knew he wasn’t suddenly appearing in an episode of “Wild Kingdom,” but had no idea the person he was preparing to clock in the head with his electric guitar was Elton John! Luckily, Sir Elton yanked his “head” off quickly enough and got his laugh before the gorilla was killed, skinned, and turned into a really cool jacket that could eventually be traded for a handful of bennies.

But think about it— was that really lucky? How great a story would it have been if Elton John had been slaughtered, at the peak of his career, before a live audience? It would have been the first ritual sacrifice in rock & roll history, which is pretty cool, and, God knows, Iggy would have made a fortune off of it somehow. Plus, it would have spared us several hundred lame, wildly overplayed Elton John ballads, as well as the pain of looking at those god-awful hair plugs.

I guess sometimes the only thing that keeps history on course is the speedy removal of a fake gorilla head.

Paul Tatara

Feb. 26, 2010

Today would have been Johnny Cash’s 78th birthday, and, even though he died in 2003, it still seems strange to refer to him in the past tense. If ever a person seemed like he could live forever, it was Johnny Cash. He might not have managed it in pristine condition, and he had already created enough pointless turmoil in his time to sidestep having to do it gracefully. But his bearing was such that it seemed as if you could walk up and carve your initials in him and he would just keep on strumming on that acoustic guitar, oblivious to both the blade and the pain.

Even if he had his fallow periods as a creative artist, I’ve never heard a live Cash recording that didn’t sound like he had every bit of his heart and muscle in the music. He often sang about lost souls who yearned to hop a train, both literally and figuratively. But after enough years of standing up for the downtrodden, he had pretty much become the train itself, and the listener could either get onboard or wave as it steamed by. Either way, he was bound to keep on going.

Cash’s final album, “American VI: Ain’t No Grave” was released this past Tuesday, and it’s a fitting farewell to one of the more powerful figures in 20th century music. This, as the title suggests, is the sixth entry in the series of “American Recordings” helmed by producer Rick Rubin, who deserves to be applauded for recognizing just how much Cash had left to offer in the latter part of his career. Unfortunately, although Cash was a venerable self-mythologizer, I've always felt the “American” albums were uncomfortably on-the-nose in their conception.

Each release contained startling individual performances, and it’s a great gift that Cash was given songs that he could sink his teeth into when most of his peers were either retired or had surrendered to the oldies circuit. But Rubin, who made his name as the founder of the legendary hip-hop label, Def Jam Records, seemed far too intent on casting Cash as the Original Badass, and the “dry wind blowing through the cornstalks” routine starts to sink virtually every title in the series.

Not so with “American VI: Ain’t No Grave.” Cash recorded the album in fits and starts when he knew full-well he was dying, and there’s little time for shtick when the light is truly fading. In turns touching, heartbreaking, and inspiring, “Ain’t No Grave” reveals a man who’s come to terms with his own mortality, and is pushing deep and hard to leave a final testament. It’s a brave, if not monumental, piece of work. Cash is feeling no self-pity. He simply wants to say goodbye, and does so with tremendous grit and dignity.

All the tracks have their strengths, with special mention going to readings of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” Tom Paxton’s “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” and the old Sons of the Pioneers chestnut, “Cool, Cool Water.” But the kicker, without a doubt, is “Brother” Claude Ely’s title track, which Cash delivers with the stark determination of a man who will be living, not dying, until the final breath passes his lips. Buckle down for this one.

Surely, St. Peter knew he was in for a tussle if he hesitated at that gate. And, just as surely, the gate was opened quickly.

Paul Tatara