I’m sure you know by now that Stooges drummer Scott Asheton has died at 64. Damn, from the perspective of a guy my age, that’s young!
What can I say about the guy other than his intro to “No Fun” is up there with Charlie Watts’ intro to “Get Off My Cloud”? If that wasn’t enough, Scott played those blazing roundhouse fills at the beginning of “Loose.” Fantastic! What I loved most about Scott (and Ron) Asheton (as well as original Stooges bassist Dave Alexander) was his commitment to each song’s animalistic beat. The guy was never showy, never sloppy, yet never predictable. The Stooges’ rhythm section approach even holds my attention through “Dirt,” the kind of long blooz workout I typically skip on most artist’s records.
Few songs have been more fun for me and my bandmates to cover through the years than “No Fun” and “1969.” Unambitious cover guys that we are, we never bothered learning another. What did it matter? We spent countless nights gathered around the turntable, blasting the first 2 Stooges albums (the real ones, with Ron on guitar), soaking up the raw power those records delivered. Now Iggy is all that’s left: Iggy; occasional sax player Steve Mackay; and human hot licks replacement guitarist James Williamson, who was actually kind of great in his own right, just not a personal inspiration to me, as Ron was. The records will long survive all those guys.
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/01-Are-You-Ready-To-Rapture_.mp3|titles=Andy Shernoff, “Are You Ready To Rapture”]
One day last year I was paging through an issue of Entertainment Weekly when I arrived at a spread they run every few issues, containing about 4 pages of gift ideas. It’s the sort of seemingly paid marketing/alluring editorial hybrid feature that typically bugs me, but EW does it so well. It’s rare that I don’t read that section without briefly considering purchasing some fancy electronics item that feeds into my deep sense of nostalgia. The people who put together that section have a remarkable knack for knowing what feeds the emptiness of a middle-aged, middle-class man’s consumer life. How I miss the days of being so excited over the release of a new Elvis Costello record that I was once willing to follow my friend’s idea of breaking into his friend’s parents’ extremely permissive house to listen to our new purchase over a bone, I think to myself. Next thing I know I’m seeing if I can justify dropping $299 on an mp3 player/clock radio that’s in the form of a Close ‘N Play phonograph.
One day a book recommendation caught my eye, an actual, affordable hardcover book. Maybe it was part of one of these marketing-driven spreads or maybe it was part of the book reviews section—after you’ve read EW for a while it’s easy to lose all distinctions between marketing and editorial. Whatever. The book was called Cardboard Gods, by someone named Josh Wilker. The review read, in part:
A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker’s book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. [Grade:] A —Entertainment Weekly
There was no need for excruciating self-analysis and consideration of this item’s ability to fill The Void. I put a big lower corner dog ear on that page of the magazine (ie, my “important point to revisit” dog ear rather than the smaller placeholder one at the upper corner of where I left off reading) preparation for my next trip to the “library.” I re-read the review a few more times, each time getting more excited at the prospect of revisiting my own life as a baseball card collector, solitary baseball board-game player (and more importantly, manager and league commissioner), and generally desperate kid who was in need of the power provided by the sport’s over-arching history and frequent periods of anticipation (ie, what non-baseball lovers call “all the boring parts”). A couple of days later, without hesitation, I picked up a copy of Cardboard Gods and proceeded to tear through it, cover to cover, in the course of a weekend.
The book was everything I could have imagined, with color reproductions of a mid-’70s–era baseball card kicking off each chapter’s meditation on what that player’s card meant in the lovingly dysfunctional childhood world of its author. It was so much fun to tap into another kid’s relationship and chew on life’s inner meanings while contemplating baseball cards of the likes of Rudy Meoli, Mike Kekich, and Mike Cosgrove (no, not that one). This wasn’t some thumbsucking attempt by Wilker to explain away his life according to an in-vogue branch of pop psychology or the agenda of a “special interests” group, as is too-often the case these days. This book was nice and messy—and truly personal, the way we were more comfortable being in the Do Your Own Thing 1970s. In the words of fully satisfied moviegoers of my youth, I laughed and I cried.
Soon after reading the book I found Wilker’s Cardboard Gods blog and became a regular visitor there. I wrote him a gushing e-mail and over the course of a few e-mail exchanges learned that he was also a music obsessive. Baseball: check. Music: check. Good egg? Highly likely! A few weeks ago I read that Cardboard Gods was being released in paperback. I wrote Wilker and asked if he’d consent to a Rock Town Hall interview that would attempt to further bridge the relationship between baseball and music and their roles in the predominantly male means of sharing personal information. Good egg that he is, Wilker was all for this chat. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend checking out Carboard Gods, both in book and blog form. Batter up!
RTH: The Cardboard Gods blog preceded your book, right? (I was late to the party, learning of your book before being directed to the blog.) Was there a turning point in writing the blog that you realized you actually could organize a full-blown memoir through the prism of your card collection?
Josh Wilker: For most of my adult life I have been on the lookout for things that might develop into a book, a habit that has almost always crushed the life out of whatever it is that might have otherwise developed organically if I just gave it some space to grow. And I started the blog as an anti-book in a way, since I’d just finished several years working on a novel that I wasn’t able to sell and I was a little discouraged and just trying to have some fun. That said, I think I had the feeling almost immediately, like a tug on the end of a line, that there was something going on with the baseball cards, but I consciously tried to put thoughts of a book aside for a while and just have fun and go wherever the cards wanted to go.
RTH: Baseball in the mid- to late-’70s, like the world of your childhood, experienced a latent period of counterculture-rooted self-awareness. As a boy were there certain players who best represented your family’s new world? Were there other players you felt represented the “square” world your family was leaving?
This thread won’t apply to everybody. For younger record nerds who have come of age in an era when downloads of just about any obscure album can be found for free on the web if you search long enough, there’s little risk in accumulating all the mp3s your heart desires. The anxieties that older rock nerds have experienced may not ring true. It must be nice.
Some of you have already walked down the endless path of the hardcore record collector. There’s no stopping you now, and if that’s the case, more power to you! A part of me wishes I hadn’t been scared off this path, but I was, by two once hard-to-find purchases I made when I was 18: a bootleg of the Sex Pistols‘ last show at San Francisco’s Winterland and Iggy Pop and The Stooges‘ semi-bootleg document of that band’s last show, Metallic K.O. As I said, today you could probably download these albums in the comfort of your home in less than 20 minutes. In 1981, a teenage boy without much cash to spare had to make a great investment of time and money to locate these albums and bring them home, with no opportunity to sample selected tracks for free on some blog. What if this bootleg I’m tempted to spend $20 on sucks? What if I hear more of the dude who illegally taped the show hooting and hollering for his favorite songs than I do the band?
Worse yet: What if the bootleg was a dreaded, DOA board mix, with little more than vocals and kick drum? Continue reading »
Coincidentally The Back Office was just working on this and we can’t think of a better individual to launch this new tradition for than Mr. Ron Asheton. Hat tip to Oats for clueing us in.
This is a simple one. What fantasy show would you make every effort to go see no matter the cost and location? The only rule is that it has to be feasible. So a Beatles reunion is out. But you can get creative like a Syd Barrett tribute featuring Robyn Hitchcock, Gilmour and The Soft Machine guys that played on Madcap. I’d consider that but probably wouldn’t go to the end of the Earth for it.
When the Velvet Underground reunited in London in ’93, I went so far as to look in to acquiring tickets and airfares and such. Didn’t pull the trigger but that was close. I only had to drive down to Long Beach to see The Stooges reunion. I went by myself which I think might be the only time that I’ve gone to a show by myself. So I’ll never know how far I would’ve gone for that.
The only show that I can think of that I would go to the end of the Earth for is The Dukes of Stratosphear, if and only if, they did it in full character and with a full blown psychedelic extravaganza.
What say you? Is it a reunion show? A super group? A reunion show of a super group?