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.

Gimme shelter

Fifty years tonight I saw the Rolling Stones, and in a roundabout way began making my way into the rest of my life.

The Stones announced their 1975 summer tour by playing Brown Sugar on a flatbed truck rolling down Fifth Avenue in New York City, shows that included six nights at Madison Square Garden. For me, discovering pot and holding my youthful belief that rock music was a signpost on the road to illumination, seeing the Stones live was a necessity.

With 120,000 tickets available over six evenings, I drove into a deserted Manhattan around dinnertime, parked a block away from the Garden and bought seats for the June 24 show.

I chose June 24 purposely. What better way to celebrate the third anniversary of the first date with my then-girlfriend? Uh no. She seemed less than thrilled about the prospects of spending this special evening listening to songs about the Boston Strangler (Midnight Rambler), inter-racial sex (Brown Sugar) and groupie sex (Star Star).

1975 Rolling Stones live

If she’d managed any enthusiasm at all for the show, it likely began to slip away as we navigated through the scary flood of humanity that washed up on the sidewalks around the Garden on a concert night: kids out of their gourds stoned and/or drunk, guys selling drugs and bootleg t-shirts, ticket scalpers, wild-eyed city people, vendors selling their diarrhea-inducing gyros.

After fifty years, I’ve forgotten a lot about the show – how could I’ve not remembered that Billy Preston was part of the band for the tour? What I remember best was the spectacle. The giant lotus flower that opened to reveal the stage. The stupid inflatable phallus that rose up from the stage (her enthusiasm now vanished). Jagger swinging on a rope over the stage. Steel drummers accompanying the band on Sympathy for the Devil – they played Sympathy for the Devil! And for some reason, the haze of cigarette smoke around Keith Richards and Ron Wood.

The Stones, man!

(An audience tape of the concert can be found on YouTube. The band sounded a little chaotic, but it was the Stones).

While I’m fuzzy about the show’s details, what occurred afterwards remains clear. Back at her house The Tonight Show was on; Kenny Rankin was singing. Rankin was a popular singer/songwriter with a jazz influence, laid-back music perfect for Sunday brunch programming on an FM rock station. As we watched, she told me how stupid the concert had been and that she’d rather go see Kenny Rankin.

She may as well as admitted to being a Republican.

We had friends who got married out of high school and converted to Christianity. How much of an influence were they? Was I ready to take eternal vows or submit to some mysterious conversion? Or give in to a lifetime of nodding out to James Taylor? Four months later, we agreed to move on. 

In 1975, life seemed full of endless possibilities; I just needed to make the right choices and be true to myself. No crystal ball could have predicted it any better.

Surf's Up

I found the Beach Boys in 1964 when I Get Around hit the charts. It had an instant appeal and didn’t sound like anything else on the radio in that summer of the British Invasion; it wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d realize how complex I Get Around is, seemingly all chorus, no bridge, almost an endless circular loop. It was the first notice that Brian Wilson thought about music, and heard it in his head, differently than anyone else.

Three years later, already a candidate for canonization by having written and recorded God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Caroline No and Good Vibrations, Wilson sang the quietly elegiac Surf’s Up alone at the piano for Leonard Bernstein’s prime time rock music blessing “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” It was to be the centerpiece of Brian’s “teenage symphony to God,” Smile. He struggled to complete the album before his growing paranoia, drug issues and man-child excesses eventually sank it.

Brian in 1965

For decades Smile remained one of the great “what ifs” of popular culture. In his 1993 sci-fi novel Glimpses, Lewis Shiner’s central character time travels back to 1966 to encourage Wilson to finish the record. For those who read the book, it only added to Smile’s myth.

Brian’s trials over the next few decades are well-documented; in 1999 he publicly re-emerged and began touring again, backed now by younger, like-minded musicians. At the Beacon Theatre in New York City, he looked at times a bit startled, as if he’d just woken up to find himself on stage leading a band again. His stage movements were awkward. But the worshipful audience was behind him right from the start when we booed Mike Love’s talking head during a brief Beach Boys history video that kicked off the show.

During his summer 2000 tour performing the emotional powerhouse Pet Sounds, the audience knew every note – we cheered Brian’s brilliant production details, from the bicycle bell and horn in You Still Believe in Me to the bass harmonica solo in I Know There’s An Answer. The train whistle and barking dogs that end the album, sounds that always sent a chill on record, heard live and loud pinned me back on my seat. Wilson's stage moves were still non-existent, although he got out from behind his security blanket keyboard to play bass for a few numbers. I checked back at the setlist from that show. Thirty-four songs.

Encouraged by his band, in 2004 Brian finally completed and released Smile. I had mixed feelings about the record, a suite of interconnected pieces that were sometimes thrilling and at other times corny Americana. We’ll never know how the public would have reacted to the record had it been finished and released in 1967, whether it would have been seen as a masterpiece or interesting novelty. Hearing it in its entirety at Carnegie Hall gave a vibe outside of the usual concert experience, a spectacle that even attracted Lou Reed, who walked past me on the aisle.

What strikes me about those three concerts was the adoration that came off the audience.

Smile wasn’t Wilson’s only what if moment. If he’d been diagnosed early on and treated by real therapists instead of entrusting charlatans, had his supportive and talented younger brothers Carl and Dennis lived longer, his road may not have been so difficult. Even so, a Mount Rushmore of 1960s pop composers would offer up Wilson, along with Lennon and McCartney and Burt Bacharach. To label his music simply as being about “surfing” and “California,” does Brian a disservice. His brilliance was universal.