Fantasy Park revisited

Fantasy Park was a 48-hour theatre-of-the-mind music festival, an imaginary rock concert aired by nearly 200 radio stations over the Independence Day weekend in 1975. Cooked up by a Dallas radio station, it used a mix of cuts from live and studio albums backed with crowd noises, complete with stage announcements, backstage interview and sound effects.

I caught bits and pieces of it when it originally aired and then again this past Labor Day weekend when the program streamed online. The slate of artists was a mid-seventies wish list; today it’s “classic vinyl”:

Friday: Chicago, Elton John, Joe Walsh, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton.

Saturday: Cream, Shawn Phillips, Pink Floyd, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Poco, Alvin Lee, Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Dave Mason, Steve Miller Band, BB King, Stevie Wonder, John Denver, Beach Boys, War, Grand Funk, Yes.

Sunday: Deep Purple, Steely Dan, Jesse Colin Young, Cat Stevens, The Who, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, Van Morrison.

Monday: Harry Chapin, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Bee Gees, Paul Simon, Seals and Croft, America, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Brothers, Loggins and Messina, CSN&Y, Bob Dylan, Beatles.

Looking back, it’s a little odd. John Denver, Seals and Croft, and Carly Simon? Shawn Phillips, whose highest charting U.S. album reached #57? No Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane (Starship at this point), The Band, Jethro Tull, ELP.

In two years, nearly half the Fantasy Park performers would begin losing traction artistically and in album sales, replaced by performers who had yet to work out their sound or were still toiling in the minor leagues, like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Wings, Heart, Bob Segar, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

But for now, and as befitting a concert of the mind taking place during the smiley face decade, it’s nothing but good vibes all around. During the Beach Boys set, we’re told by the program’s roving reporter that the band was “really getting into it.” “It’s 1965 all over again,” he added after I Get Around, forgetting that the record came out in 1964.

Fireworks follow the Moody Blues, a Frisbee competition is held “over by the lake” and some dweeb talks kite-flying. During Joni Mitchell’s performance, a nurse who helped with the medical tent delivery of a baby is interviewed (a girl, 7 lbs., 10 oz., no name yet, but Joni would’ve been nice). No mention of any ODs or bad trips.

All 48 hours played over a looped bed of crowd noise that included a woman shrieking every couple of minutes, a Woodstockian Wilhelm scream that makes one wonder if the Ohio Players weren’t on the bill.

Fantasy Park naturally ends with the great white hoped-for, a Beatles reunion, a what-if played out repeatedly at the time in the rock press and during stoned conversations among fans. With between-song patter taken from Let It Be and other sources, their relatively brief set ends with John’s “We’d like to do something that we don’t normally get the chance to do,” – well, yeah – then A Day in the Life.

As the song ends, we can assume that the 750,000 concert goers have dropped through a trap door and the program ends abruptly with the sound of crickets chirping.

When it aired in 1975, listeners supposedly flooded radio station phone lines looking for tickets and directions. The IRS showed up at one station following up on gate receipts to ensure the government got its cut. Not quite as extreme a reaction that the War of the Worlds broadcast received in 1938, but maybe that’s an idea for a future special: Martians invade Woodstock.

Wings for wheels

In September 1975, I bought two albums at Korvette’s: David Crosby and Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water and Born to Run.

During the first half of the 1970s, anything bearing the Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young, especially Young) brand was an automatic buy for me. Wind on the Water didn’t disappoint; it’s easily the duo’s best album despite its front cover yacht rock vibe (and Nash looking alarmingly emaciated). Carry Me, Crosby’s song about loss, was one of his strongest. Their eco-prog To the Last Whale was properly elegiac, the perfect soundtrack for a Jacques Costeau documentary. 

But finding turntable time for Wind on the Water was difficult given how obsessively I played Born to Run. 

It’s one of the great rock records (ironically, it’s not the best record of 1975; that honor goes to Blood on the Tracks; honestly, Born to Run may not even be Springsteen’s best album). Yeah, his lyrics can be purplish at times, Jungleland is a tad overwrought and most of its songs have been long over-exposed. (If you listened to WNEW-FM between 1975 and 1985 you heard the song Born to Run nearly as many times as Springsteen has played it live – 1,875 times). 

But with fifty years perspective, it becomes more obvious than ever that Born to Run is the sound of an artist pouring everything into his personal vision. 

By 1975, more "traditional" rock and roll and soul music were beginning to fall by the wayside as the kids clamored for Kashmir and Wish You Were Here, but Springsteen unapologetically took bits and pieces from the 25-year history of rock – Bo Diddley, Phil Spector, The Locomotion, Duane Eddy, the urban vibe of West Side Story – and customized into a contemporary street racer. 

He made Clarence Clemons’ saxophone the centerpiece at a time when, aside from the occasional Stones record, it wasn’t a popular instrument. And this wasn’t that wimpy soprano sax sound popularized by the Saturday Night Live opening theme, Clemons played it with balls and urgency. His solo in Jungleland still raises the hair on the back of one’s neck, a mini-epic itself, like Clare Torry’s vocalizing on Pink Floyd 's The Great Gig in the Sky. 

I always had some problems squaring with Born to Run’s characters. They hung around parking lots and deserted beaches, seemed preoccupied with their cars and had limited prospects for the future. Unlike them, I didn’t feel trapped in my hometown, for which I’d always had a corny civic appreciation. 

It took a while to realize it, but in 1975 I was like them. I was ready for . . . something. Frustrated with still living at home and going to school, navigating a confused personal life, often feeling inarticulate, unsure and unstuck. 

Under those emotional conditions, you could listen to Crosby and Nash and still feel the same way when the record hit that final runout groove. Listening to Born to Run brought a different reaction, a shared common ground of hope.

Help!

Absent the happy glow of Beatlemania, Help! has not aged well.

Help! premiered sixty years ago this summer, an anniversary that has allowed the internet to resurface all that stuff about it being a James Bond spoof (aside from some incidental music that comes close to the 007 theme, it’s not) or that the band were the new Marx Brothers (no, but taking that premise further, John = Groucho, George = Chico, Ringo = Harpo, leaving poor Paul as Zeppo).

The breathless enthusiasm and charm – especially the charm – that made A Hard Day’s Night such fun has, just one year later, vanished in the haze, leaving the band seemingly disinterested in their own movie, vacantly working their way through a live-action Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Maybe the most memorable scene in Help! is the Beatles’ groovy pop art pad, four outside entrances that lead into one room, the perfect metaphor for this brotherhood – four individuals so close that at one point they investigated buying an island off Greece and building four separate compounds on it for their family and friends.

Paul waves hello from his door

But one scene, one word really, undermines that groovy feeling. A cage falls from a ceiling to trap Ringo. George says, “I’m off,” and runs out the door. Someone (it sounds like Paul) says, “Typical.” Kind of a cutting comment and typical of what exactly? Was George always running off in real life whenever a religious cult trapped Ringo? Stupid scriptwriting that betrays the band’s entire ethos.

I’m guessing the band was too stoned or tired to fix it. Or that they even noticed.

Filling the gaps and moving things along is a veteran supporting cast: Leo McKern before he became a household name (at least in the homes that favor PBS), Eleanor Bron, and Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear as mad scientists, forerunners of Dr. Forrester and Frank on Mystery Science Theatre.

The musical sequences hold Help! together. The threatening outdoor weather during I Need You and The Night Before. The dramatic backlighting on You’re Going to Lose That Girl, Ringo’s cigarette smoke giving it a noirish atmosphere. The band looking miserable “romping” in the snow during Ticket to Ride (a sequence that could have served as a pitch for entire Monkees TV series). An added plus is seeing them perform in cool mod clothes and not their usual suits.

You're Going to Lose That Girl

The rain falls on Salisbury Plain

Two other scenes have taken on a kind of prescient eeriness over the years. The fight in the Beatles’ home with the cult members and mad scientists feels a little disturbing today given all the knife flashing and gun wielding, then remembering what lies ahead for George and John.

Second, when the band disguise themselves with fake beards and glasses, we get a glimpse into the near future, George looking disturbingly as he would on the Sgt. Pepper album and John circa his Abbey Road look.

A look into the future?

With the release of the Help! soundtrack, Rubber Soul, We Can Work It Out, Day Tripper and Yesterday, 1965 marked the point where the Beatles’ uncanny musical maturation spun into orbit. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep a similar pace when it came to video. Which is all right. That would be asking a lot of any four performers.

Exit strategy

The black-topped spine of New Jersey is the Garden State Parkway, 172 miles of roadway connecting the border of New York State to Cape May across the bay from Delaware, with some 86 local exits in-between, leading to this oft-repeated line: 

PHIL: I’m from New Jersey.

LIL: Really? What exit? 

If it’s possible for any highway in New Jersey to feel more like a golden road paved with promise and freedom, it is the Parkway, as it’s known to the locals, the route taken to the Jersey Shore, where the light and the pace were different than anywhere else in the state. Hot fun in the summertime. 

Driving down the Parkway to the Shore always felt like an event, WABC on the car radio – the only station with a signal strong enough to stretch across the entire trip, as landmarks flew by. The Union Water Tower, billed today as the World's Tallest Water Sphere. The giant beer bottle overlooking the Pabst brewery in Newark. The Driscoll Bridge spanning the Raritan River, a Mason-Dixon line separating the Shore communities from the rest of the state. 

During the night ride home there was the Sayreville drive-in movie visible from the highway, a glimpse of Paul Newman or Lee Marvin silently mouthing dialogue. The families sitting on their front porches in East Orange, homes facing the Parkway, like living on a NASCAR racetrack infield. 

And the exit signs. Coming home, evocatively named shore towns like Spring Lake and Ocean Grove fell behind, their places taken by grey and gritty Freehold and Perth Amboy, a changeover reminiscent of the last days of summer giving way to school. Belmar, another shore town, sharing an exit with its ugly sister Trenton. 

I’ve been making the trip down the Parkway a lot lately, visiting a parent who has suddenly become vulnerable and diminished, driving while getting my mind wrapped around what seems like a slowly unfolding situation that potentially could change overnight. 

The drive-in and the beer bottle were demolished long ago, WABC as we knew it is gone. What endures are the exits, the on and off ramps. The Parkway is dark at night. I can only hope that I get off at the right exit.

Yesterday once more

The ‘50s revivalism in the 1970s felt insincere, almost a parody. Pompadours, poodle skirts, Thunderbird convertibles and carhops on roller skates. Grease. Sha Na Na. Happy Days. Lame pastiches like Loggins and Messina’s Your Mama Don’t Dance and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock. The Carpenters’ maudlin doo-wop tribute Yesterday Once More.

But trends come and go and as the sun began to rise over Reagan’s America came the inevitable ‘60s revival.

Tie-dye came back into fashion. The improbable return of Monkeemania. Soap operas about photogenic upwardly mobile ‘60s survivors like The Big Chill (and its subsequent two-volume soundtrack), Thirtysomething and Almost Grown (and the much more realistic Return of the Secaucus 7). Career encores for John Fogerty and Dennis Hopper.

One aspect of the revival that’s relevant this month was the introduction of Nick at Nite. Older TV shows could always be found on television, mostly on independent stations and scattered throughout the morning or afternoon – I always associated I Love Lucy with sick days from school since it aired weekdays at 9 a.m. In July 1984, Nickelodeon borrowed the oldies radio strategy and launched Nick at Nite: block programming of old television programs, focused mostly on sitcoms.

Watching Hazel or Mister Ed from an adult’s perspective didn’t improve them much and your attention was bound to wander during the hour-long Route 66 but having all these old shows bundled together without having to change the channel was a novel concept for its time. If My Three Sons wasn’t your thing, stick around for Car 54 Where Are You. Or the occasional obscurity like Camp Runamuck or Lancelot Link.

As cable TV gained footing, and in desperate need of 

content, WTBS and the USA Network went the same route and programmed Saturday afternoon marathons of ‘60s adventure programs, like The Wild, Wild West, I Spy, Outer Limits and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., often with commentary from the shows’ original casts.

You could fall asleep watching the marathons, dreams narrated by the jazzy banter of Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott, James West fighting off ants with human faces, Ilya Kuryakin morphing into the scientist with six fingers and the overgrown cranium.

Today, of course, all this stuff is readily available online. What’s missing is the kick of nostalgia and the thrill of rediscovery that was a big part of the ‘60s revival.

Ragtime

Fifty years this summer, E.L. Doctorow’s turn-of-the-century historical novel Ragtime was published.

An interwoven narrative revolving around a WASP family, a black pianist and an Eastern European immigrant, their lives, like organisms seen under a microscope, collide and intersect each other, along with those of some of the era’s most famous and notorious, including Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit and Booker T. Washington.

Ragtime occurs during America’s Gilded Age (aka The Progressive Era), years of economic growth, industrialization and technologic advances as the country transitioned from an agrarian society.

With its selective view of history and zero sense of irony, the current White House has expressed romantic admiration for the era because of its tariff acts, ignoring the tremendous influence the rich held over politicians who helped boost their financial empires, while the gap between the haves and have-nots grew wider and violent: armed militias were called in to bust heads when workers – mostly immigrants – held work stoppages or tried forming unions. Casual racism was universal.

Coming as it did in 1975, Ragtime was part of the run-up to the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, an affirmation of two centuries of opportunities and anxieties. Burning through the book are lit fuses timed to explode over the coming years: feminism, celebrity culture, domestic terrorism, mental health issues, the rise of the munitions industry, mistrust of immigrants.

Ragtime also acknowledged that what lies at the heart of the American Dream is the spirit of DEI: acceptance and opportunity. An artistic immigrant lifts himself and his daughter from an airless ghetto hovel to a career making movies. Only a few decades after the end of slavery, the black musician makes a good enough living playing ragtime piano to afford a new automobile. A young man who today would be considered on the spectrum designs advanced war weaponry.

The family in Ragtime made its fortune in the fireworks business. As we near next year’s 250^th anniversary celebration, fireworks displays will likely burst over every corner of America’s skies. Expect them to illuminate only what we want to remember, while keeping what we’ve chosen to forget in the dark.

Calling on the Cobra

In 1980, Dave Parker hired a public relations agency to test the waters of celebrity and make him more of a household name. The agency reached out to The Aquarian Weekly, a metropolitan area entertainment weekly that I was freelancing for and I was assigned to write a profile of Parker.

I called him at his home in Bradenton, Florida where the Pittsburgh Pirates trained each spring, and the interview went well. I pictured him in an oceanfront condo, tastefully furnished, while I sat on the floor of my bedroom. Reading it over today, it was a pretty safe article, mostly vanilla answers to mostly vanilla questions.

(Aside from the fact that I was speaking with Parker, who at the time looked like he might someday rank among the game’s all-time greats, I remember that I’d bought a Radio Shack device to tape our phone conversation, a wire with a suction cup at one end for the phone receiver and a jack at the other end to be plugged into a tape recorder. Imagine the terror when I played back the interview and our voices sounded as distant and tinny as if they’d been recorded from Pluto. Thankfully, I took notes).

Parker was one of the coolest major leaguers of the era. He wore an earring and warmed up in the on-deck circle swinging a sledgehammer. He had swagger and presence. And as a black player making significant money, he drew frequent insults and threats from some fans.

A Pirates radio announcer nicknamed Parker the Cobra, thinking a quick-strike predator. (Which is what you want, having someone invent a nickname for you. Unlike Kobe Bryant, who famously gave himself the nickname Black Mamba).

Some of Parker’s quotes from our interview that were a little more vanilla fudge than vanilla:

“I have no trouble whatsoever in getting up for every ballgame. I could play baseball in the middle of December in the snow.”

“I’ve been doing some p.r. for myself. I’ve always thought of myself as being just a ballplayer, not really needing the hype. I haven’t been much of a public figure, but I think it’s time people got to know Dave Parker.”

Dave, be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, part of Parker’s legacy lies with his role in the Pittsburgh drug trials following the 1985 season. He was among several players who testified against a drug dealer and was suspended for the following season before their sentences were lifted in exchange for community service, drug testing and fines. Age, weight problems and injuries began to catch up with Parker and he called it quits in 1991, a 19-year career.

Parker died yesterday; he’d been suffering with Parkinson’s disease for several years. Timing, which he had as a batter, sometimes doesn’t translate into real life. Parker died 29 days before he was to be inducted in the Hall of Fame.