My Brother

 

 

Wednesday was the first day in 15,498 days where the sun rose and my brother, Jason Magrane, wasn’t around to see it. He passed away on Tuesday November 10, 2020 at 12:42 pm at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in Portsmouth, NH surrounded by his mother, father and me.

 

That last sentence is the type of “just the facts” information that I would throw down when I was a reporter writing obituaries. It’s not very personal and it doesn’t give much of a picture of who the deceased was, it was more of a record that this person existed for a time and then departed the world.

 

Like you, I’ve experienced death before, but the passing of Jason has hit me hard. He was much more than a range of dates, he was a father, a son, a husband, a friend, an employee, a boss, but most importantly to me, he was a brother. As I’m writing this blog post on November 12, I can only think of the future and the past. Jay is going to be laid to rest two days from right now but three years ago to the day, I gave the best man’s speech at Jason’s wedding. Below is a portion of what I wrote, this was supposed to be a toast to Jason’s nuptials, never did I envision it becoming part of a eulogy:  

 

“According to Magrane lore, when my mother came home and told me that she was going to have another baby and it was going to be a boy, I was inconsolable. I wanted a sister and the thought of having a brother muscling in on my territory and sharing my toys was too much.

 

Despite my best wishes, Jay never turned into a girl, so I was stuck with a brother for my childhood. And it turned out to be pretty awesome. Growing up, Jay and I were pretty much alone at any extended family gathering—and we used to see our family a lot. I would think about friends who had dozens of cousins and how they’d talk about hanging out with them at family gatherings and it sounded pretty great.

 

But with Jay and I growing up together, we had to be each other’s best friends. Whether it was at my grandmother’s house or Aunty Rita’s or at Cousin Kathy’s in New York, it was just him and me. That meant he and I would play He-Man and GI Joe, read comics, or draw or play Wiffle Ball. It was always Jay and By or By and Jay. With us being together that much, it could have gone a few different ways, but we became close.

 

A few years later, as I got into high school and had my own group of friends; I began to notice that my friends—all of them—took a liking to Jay. Was I happy about this turn of events? No, I was not. It used to drive me crazy that my friends always invited Jay to come with us whenever we did something, whether it was hoops or pond hockey, Indian ball or football, Jay was always a part of the crew. And not only that, but my friends genuinely liked him and respected him.

 

It wasn’t until a few years later that it dawned on me: some of my friends had younger siblings and they were never invited to do stuff with us. Jay was included because he was funny and smart, athletic and loyal; he was included because he was one of us.”

 

It’s funny, when you grow up with a brother, you’re inundated with a lot of media about how close brothers have to be: from Wally and the Beav to Greg, Peter and Bobby to Willis and Arnold, all of those brothers were the best of friends.

 

But real life isn’t like that. Life isn’t scripted, each person doesn’t know exactly what the other person is always thinking and problems aren’t solved in 30 minutes (minus time for commercials). The idea that two people could be complete and total best friends forever and ever and ever without any disagreements is a silly, unrealistic myth.  

 

As we grew into adulthood, Jay and I were close-ish. We were both independent men who had their own life and their own life’s philosophies. Mine was a bit more conservative in regard to risk and rewards. Jay was the opposite. Jay lived his life the way he wanted to live his life, which I found admirable and a little concerning, but that wasn’t how my brain worked. Jay could talk to literally anyone—he had no fear in that department, made everyone feel comfortable—which is an awkward endeavor was for his older brother, was fun, constantly laughing and wondering when the next good time was going to happen.

 

As we grew up we worked through our differences and over the last few years, we began to get closer. While we didn’t agree on everything, I could at least understand why Jay was doing what he was doing. And I think he could see things from my point of view too. Even though we were closer, Jay still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tell me what was bothering him when asked. And it wasn’t just me, Jay didn’t want to burden anyone with what he considered his “trivial problems”.

 

“By, you have a family, focus on them,” he’d always say. But what I don’t think that Jay got was that even though I have a wife and two children, Jay was my family and I did want to focus on him. But his carefree persona or his pride or whatever he felt at the time wouldn’t allow him to tell me what was really going on. Would I have helped him? Would Jay be here today? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a question that I’ll have to live with.

 

The thing is, Jason was 42-years-old and you could ask him what’s wrong, I could ask him what’s wrong, Bo Jackson could ask him what’s wrong and Jay wasn’t obliged to give us an answer. Jay’s stubbornness knew no bounds. He was the Michael Jordan of stubborn. Things were easier when we were kids and if I wanted to really know what his problem was, I could jump on him (I always weighed more than him), sit on his chest, put my knees on his biceps and tickle him until he told me his deal. I wish I thought of doing that a few months ago, but that approach seems sort of weird now that I think about.

 

You’re never going to get a straight answer out of tickle torturing someone and just because you ask someone to do something, doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it. For example, Jay went into the hospital last Monday and that prognosis looked grim even back then. While I was putting away that evening’s dishes, I decided to try and honor my brother by playing the Grateful Dead Pandora station. The Dead were Jay’s favorite band (he saw them at the old Boston Garden in 1994) and he was always trying to get me to listen to them. Aside from a few albums and a couple of singles, the Dead and jam bands never appealed to me. But last Monday night, I was going to listen to the Dead in honor of my brother.

 

I made it three minutes. I’m sorry Jay, and I know that you understand, but I just couldn’t do it.

 

Alas.

 

There’s a lot of things that suck about my brother’s untimely passing, but I think that the biggest one is that he and I are never going to get the chance to be as close as we were when we were kids and that truly makes me sad. I was looking forward to the day when Jay and I take our kids to a Sox game. Or he could ask me for the millionth time why I don’t like Bill Simmons anymore. Or when we could have a moment and remember long-passed relatives who seem to exist in the fogs of our minds. Or he could recommend a podcast to me. Or when a tragedy happens and I need someone beside my wife to talk to, so that I can get through the latest malady without losing my mind.

 

All of that has been taken from me and it makes me very sad.

 

Earlier this morning I was thinking about a random memory of Jay and me. It had to be during the spring of 1990 and I was in my room probably obsessing over my baseball cards or reading a magazine while listening to Public Enemy’s newest tape “Fear of a Black Planet”. There’s a song on that album called “Welcome to the Terrordome” and if you know anything about PE—and especially that album—you know that it’s a wall of sound. It’s literally a pastiche of samples and cuts laid upon one another to make new beats.

 

At 1:47 into the song there is a horn that wails unsettingly loud and shrill. That day in 1990, I thought it was my brother calling, “Byyyyyyyyron!” from downstairs. And it wasn’t just that day, for like the first 10 or 15 times I listened to that song, hear that sound, amble over to my stereo, shut off my tape and yell, “WHAT DO YOU WANT JAY?” And he’d always say that he never called me, I’d press play and grumble to myself about Jay being a pain in the ass.

 

Today I listened to that song and in particular that shrill horn and it made me smile and cry. Jay may be gone, but he’ll never be forgotten.

Top 19 -- Ice-T: OG

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

One of the best things about being 17-years-old is that if you don't have your license yet, undoubtedly, you know someone that does. That means freedom. Freedom to go where you want to go. Freedom not to walk anymore. Freedom from asking your parents to drop you off somewhere. 

One of the best freedoms of an automobile free from parental control is the ability to play whatever you want whenever you want on the car stereo. I don't go down this road a lot, because while the Walkman was ubiquitous (I wrote all about it in my Public Enemy entry) it wasn't like today where every toddler has an iPad and headphones allowing them to crank whatever they want in their own bubble. Back in the day, you're listening to what your parents want to listen to and that was going to be powerfully lame*.

* There's one exception, is that is when my kids forget their devices at home and have to listen to my music. That's just ME giving THEM an education in awesomeness. 

I was one of the youngest of my group of friends and the laziest. I wasn't in any particular hurry to get my license; I finally got it when I was 17-and-a-half, more than a year after I was legally allowed to drive in Massachusetts. My thought process was, why bother? I wasn't going to get a car of my own. At parties, I didn't have to be the designated driver. Most of the time, at least one of my friends was more than up for picking me up and going somewhere together. So when I talk about listening to music in a car while driving, 90% of these remembrances are going to be about me as a passenger. 

When we were bored, we'd just drive anywhere. Sometimes, when we had a little money, we'd go to the malls in New Hampshire. Sometimes, when we were looking for things to do, we'd drive around our small town and see if anyone was hanging out at usual teenage haunts. In this case that was the Millyard, a parking lot across the street from the pizza place (Pizza Factory) where everyone congregated. But most times, if we were really bored we'd drive to Salisbury Beach. We'd park at our friend's grandparents house and waste time and money at the batting cages, playing pool, bubble hockey and video games while eating beach pizza. 

In the summer, we'd add Hampton Beach, which was two or three miles down the road, to the mix and add in trying to pick up girls too. We usually didn't get too far with the latter*.

* I remember myself and all of my friends being steamed that girls our age would barely look at us. They only seemed to be attracted to older guys walking the strip. "When we get out of college, we need to come back here and scoop some high school chicks," one of us said. And we all agreed. Thinking about that statement now? Ugh. 

While the passengers changed from night-to-night, the one thing that was consistent was the music. We all loved hip-hop, especially the hard stuff: Geto Boys, N.W.A. and Public Enemy. But the two cassettes that got the most action were the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" and Ice-T's "OG". 

In the early 90s, the view of Ice-T is much more different than it is today. The media made it seem like Ice-T was one of the most dangerous people on the planet. His raps were self-described true-life stories of his neighborhood and his history as a street hustler. I'm not sure how exaggerated his stories are, but it didn't matter. To us, they were exactly how things went down in South Central Los Angeles. 

Ice-T looked the part; jacked up, black hat, locs and a sneer. He didn't rap his lyrics, he spit them out syllable by syllable*. To us, he was another in a long line of people telling it how it really is. And we listened to "O.G." over and over and over again. 

* I think it's comedian Paul F. Tompkins who talks about this in his act, but Ice-T has a very profound lisp. I never noticed it before when I listened to his stuff, but that's all I can hear now. I think that if I had heard it back then, this might be a different blog entry. 

Not only did Ice-T rap, but he fronted a hardcore band called Body Count that had its single in the middle of the album. It was preambled by Ice-T talking about how rock n' roll isn't just white people music, it was pioneered by people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and that he "happened to like rock n' roll." In a flourish he continued (and I'm doing this from memory, so forgive me if I mess up a word or two), "As far as I'm concerned music is music. And if anyone said that I sold out, they can basically suck my dick."

That song was pretty fucking great mostly because they sounded a lot like Black Sabbath. But this song really reached all of us. It showed that hip hop doesn't have to be its own thing, hip hop can be fused with rock and that can lead to some good stuff. Faith No More also did that in the early 1990s and lead to the Anthrax and Public Enemy collaboration, Rage Against the Machine before completely bottoming out with Nü Metal. That last thing wasn't great, but the inclusion vibe that these bands gave off wasn't too bad. 

Ice-T went on to make more albums, including a controversial one with Body Count which featured the single "Cop Killer" which made Ice-T a pariah for a summer, but this was the only one that I really loved ("Power" and "Freedom of Speech" were also good, but never got into the rotation like "O.G" did). When I hear songs like "Original Gangter" or "Midnight" or "New Jack Hustler", I'm instantly brought back to my senior year in high school. A year that I had some of the swagger of Ice-T because we were finally the top dogs of the school and because things were looking pretty good because we were ending one chapter and going to start a new one. 

It's ironic--especially in the light of recent events--that Ice-T's music represents a sense of freedom for me. Everything that Ice-T talked about was about how the government is keeping everyone down and that one has to take action to get power. But when I hear these songs and close my eyes, I think of a bright blue sky, plenty of sunshine and beaches  with my future as vast as the horizon. 

I am positive that's not what Ice-T had in mind when he recorded this album, but I also doubt that he thought that in 30 years people would know him for playing a cop on a "Law and Order" spinoff. Once a person enters the public conscious, things tend to change. 

Top 19 -- Living Colour: Vivid

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: I loved this album when it came out. L-O-V-E-D this album. I know that I've said this about every single album that I've written about in the last ten day, but I must've listened to this album, bare mins, 130,000 times. I was obsessed with this album and this band. One day at my house, my friend turned on "Cult of Personality" and I started headbanging (and with the size of my noggin, you shouldn't do that) and I literally put a portion of my bed through the floor. After being blown away by the video on MTV, I remember going to the Liberty Tree Mall, marching into a Record Town and demanding "Vivid". When the clerk said he had no idea what Vivid was or who Living Colour was, I got really indignant and said, "Some day you will!" That was the type of fire that this band inspired in a meek, socially awkward 14-year-old. This band. This was MY band. I knew no one else who liked them as much as I did."

Pretty much from the first time I saw the video for "Cult of Personality", I knew that Living Colour was fucking awesome. There was something so different about this song, it rocked like crazy, but at the same time they weren't singing about looking for nothing but a good time or girls, girls, girls. This band was singing about something important? Smart? Philosophical? All that, really. And that's what hit me. I had no idea what a cult of personality was. It seemed interesting though, there are images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Josef Stalin and Gandhi. 

The more I found out about it, the more I was like, yes, this is smart. And listening to this song makes me feel smarter. This album must be amazing. And once I finally got it, I was right, it was fucking amazing. I loved each song. From the heart of "Open Letter to a Landlord" to the poignant "Funny Vibe" (which was my first introduction to Chuck D and Flavor Flav or Public Enemy) to the Talking Heads cover of "Broken Hearts", this was something that I wasn't used to hearing. 

I saw this band twice--once they play "Vivid" from start to finish--and they were some of the best shows that I have ever seen. I remember the first time and I couldn't believe that I was at the Paradise in Boston, so close to the band. It was like a dream come true. Really. 

The one thing that I remember about Living Colour is that on the day that the Red Sox won Game 4 in the 2004 ALCS, I was supposed to go the Pats/Seahawks game in the afternoon and then haul ass to the House of Blues across the street from Fenway to watch a Living Colour/Public Enemy show. My plan was to watch the rest of the baseball game at one of the Landsdowne Street bars before heading back to Aly's place in Brookline. 

The night before the Sox got bombed by the Yanks, 19-8 putting them in a 3-0 hole. I was so depressed I disavowed my Sox fandom,I cancelled on the Patriots game, never went to the PE/LC show (a double bill that would have broken my brain in 1990) and didn't watch the Red Sox (out of protest) until the eighth inning. After the Sox won that game, I was back on the trolley and watched them roll through New York and then St. Louis as they won their first World Series since 1918. 

I'm bummed that I didn't go to the Pats-Seahawks game but I really sad that I never saw the Public Enemy/Living Colour show. That sucked. 

There were some great things about growing up when I did, but one of the shitty things was an absence of information. With the internet, we take this for granted that if we want to read something about a thing that we like all we have to do is pull out our phones and go to Google. Boom. Instant information. And a lot of it is true!

In the 80s, you had to really search for stuff. With the other things that I was into (comics and baseball--sports in general), it was easy. There was sports new every day on TV or in the paper, plus I had subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News. Comics were a little tougher, but there were tons of magazines devoted to comics. And since I liked Marvel Comics, it was easy to keep up with the latest news. 

But if you lived in Amesbury, MA; you weren't going to get a lot of information on your favorite band. Maybe there'd be a story in the Globe or the Herald if the band was going on tour or had just released a new album. Maybe you could find a blurb in a Rolling Stone. But that was about it. The metal magazines didn't cover Living Colour and neither did the pop mags. There were no zines anywhere I lived. 

When you look through the rose-colored glass of nostalgia, you might be tempted to say that this was "magical". You had to work for your information and it made it so much better. But that's bullshit. I like being able to check stuff out when I want, wherever I want. 

I doubt that I'd love Living Colour any more than I did when I didn't know much about them. And maybe it was cooler that there was a little mystery about Corey, Vernon, Muzz and Will; but I don't know. 

One last thing about this album, and it's very embarrassing to me, is the art work. It was obvious that this was some sort of free-flowing abstract-y kind of painting. But it didn't hit me until many, many, MANY years later that the green shape in the middle of the album cover is NOT Africa. It's a man's head.  And the black shape in the top left hand corner are not fingers. They're just weird shapes. 

My thought when looking at this picture with the red lines emanating from the green shape, was that Living Color was making a statement that all of culture comes from Africa. And that the black fingers were showing how that culture touches us all. 

I know. I know. 

Top 19 -- Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

When I was younger, I was adrift. I don't mean physically or emotionally--though there were times when I felt as if I was--but I mean in terms of popular culture. I didn't really stray from the normal likes of my classmates and would pretty much listen to or watch what most of them listened to or watched. 

That began to change in the spring of 1990 when I went to visit my cousin in Mount Vernon, NY. "Big Earnin'" Mount Vernon is the polar opposite of the small, northern Massachusetts town that I was from. Heavy D made his bones here, Puff Daddy's (do we still call him that?) kid went to the school that my cousin worked at (she proud to say that she called him Sean), it's as close to New York City as you're going to get without being one of the five boroughs. 

I was sort of into rap and hip-hop at this point in my life. I had a DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince tape that I listened to a lot, I wore out "License to Ill", Tone Loc and Young MC were favorites and "It Takes Two" was my jam. This wasn't the hard stuff, but I dipped my toe in it. 

I recall that my cousin Kathy (who was more like an aunt, she was a few years older than my mother), my brother and I walked to the corner drug store Genovese. Kathy, who didn't have children of her own and would spoil the hell out of Jay and me, told me to pick anything we wanted. I'm not sure what my brother got, but I picked up 3rd Bass' "The Cactus Album" and Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions". 

I listened to the 3rd Bass tape first, only because "That Gas Face" was in heavy rotation on MTV and I thought it was cool as hell. The PE tape took me a little while to get into. I hadn't seen their videos on "Yo! MTV Raps" and I don't recall a lot of kids in school talking about them the way that they talked about LL Cool J or Big Daddy Kane. The only thing that I knew about Public Enemy is that their two frontmen, Chuck D and Flavor Flav, made a guest appearance on my all-time favorite album: Living Colour's "Vivid". 

I liked the way their voices played off each other, Chuck's rich, deep baritone compared to Flav's high-pitched, almost whine. But other than that, I knew nothing else about the group. 

I was unprepared for what I was about to hear. 

I loaded the tape into my yellow Sony Sport walkman, placed the headphones into my ears and it felt like a bomb went off in my head. What Chuck and Flavor rapped about (intelligent pro-black rights) and how they spoke was a revelation. Up until this point I was listening to brain-dead, party-all-the-time heavy metal guys singing about looking for nothing but a good time. But Chuck sounded smart and talked about real things that effect real people. He was pulling the cover back from what was really going on. 

And he made it all sound so cool. 

But PE isn't PE without the Bomb Squad, the production team that gave their beats and music depth and texture and weight and volume. The beats that the group rapped over were BIG. No they weren't. They were MASSIVE. No. That's not the word either. They were FUCKING ENORMOUS. It was a pastiche of sound, just layers and layers of cuts and clips, zaps and zips, things you thought you heard, unconscious sound worms that dig deep into your brain. It was like pointillism but for sound. 

Nothing sounded like this to me ever. After a few days we drove the four-and-a-half hours home and I listened to that tape over and over and over and over again. I knew every lyric, every squeal, every kick of bass. I couldn't wait to go home and tell my friends about this band that I heard when I left our small town and made my way to the (outskirts of) big city. 

I wrote this to my friend Ryan on Facebook while discussing this album. We were in a conversation as to what this sounded like when we first heard it and he said that it was akin to hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time or Coltrane. I agreed and continued:

"One of the more underrated aspect of ITANOMTHUB is that it opens in England, almost as if it's a reverse British Invasion. And while neither of us are English, I think that that first *boof* of the speaker was like a starter's pistol or the first shot of a revolution. And it's even more interesting that the first voice you hear is not Chuck D's or Flavor Flav's but Professor Griff. This album is so big, so huge, you may have pressed play on your radio, but you need to be warmed up before you hear the voice of God, the new voice of truth. It really is an astounding piece of work."

This April 1990 day began my complete and total obsession with Public Enemy. Within two or three weeks of my purchase, the group released the seminal "Fear of a Black Planet" tape, which I think I bought on the first day. These two tapes became my soundtrack for that summer. Throughout the next year or more, I'd draw the logo anywhere I could. I'd get deeper and deeper into rap and hip hop culture and I learned that it wasn't uncool to be smart or understand history or realize that some get the short end of the stick and it's worth it to stand up for what you believe in and fight for those people. 

Aside from Seattle Mariner Brian Holman almost no-hitting the seemingly unstoppable Oakland Athletics, I can't remember much from that trip aside from finding Public Enemy. And that's okay. Through out your life, you don't take too many trips where your whole world view changes in an instant. 

This jaunt to a Mount Vernon drug store did just that. 

Bruce Hurst 1989 Topps Traded

        

On June 25, 2016, I received the above card, I took to Facebook and wrote the following:

“Once again back is the incredible, baseball card animal, the unhittable BCB. 

Dropping off Bruce Hurst as a Padre! The former Sox lefty was nails in 86 Postseason and was a solid number two behind Clemens. No thanks to all time jackass who almost ran the Morman lefty out of Spring Training back when Hurst was a rookie. 

Zimmer was a nincompoop who never understood pitching (only that he couldn't hit it).”

I’m not sure why I started this post with a Public Enemy quote because if there was one person in all of Major League Baseball who was un-PElike, it would be Bruce Hurst.

Bruce Vee (that is his real middle name and I swear to Joseph Smith I did not look this up) Hurst was a Mormon left handed pitcher out of St. George, Utah. He kinda looked like a gym teacher or a banker or a dude that spent every weekend in his backyard barbecuing. He just seemed to be a really nice guy.

Too bad that Don Zimmer, who was his manager his rookie year, hated him. According to Peter Gammons’ phenomenal book, “Beyond the Sixth Game” (if you haven’t read it, you should) Zimmer used to give Hurst a lot of crap because he wasn’t a “real ballplayer”. Because he was a Mormon, Hurst didn’t drink, smoke or cuss; so Zimmer thought that he was a pussy. Zimmer used to give Hurst so much crap, that Hurst almost quit baseball.

Don Zimmer seems like a hell of a guy. Fuck him.

In any event, Zimmer was canned by the end of the 1980 season and Bruce Hurst worked his way to a stable major league career. In 1983, I bought a scorecard magazine at the first Red Sox game that I went to and there was an article titled, “The Sox Southpaws are HOT!” It was about the trio of young Sox lefties: Hurst, (Bob) Ojeda and (John) Tudor. The article was correct, because during the next five or so years, this trio would be amongst the best pitchers in the league.

In fact, of the eight teams that played in the World Series from 1985 through 1988, these players pitched on five of them. Of course, Hurst with the Sox in 1986, Ojeda with the Mets in 1986 and the Peabody, MA-native Tudor with the Cardinals in 1985, 1987 and the Dodgers in 1988. The strange thing about Tudor is that the team that he contributed the least to, the 1988 Dodgers, is the one team that he won the Series with. Of the three, only Hurst was picked for an All-Star team (1987), though I thought for sure that Tudor would have been a lock in 1985 when he was 21-8 and Ojeda in 1986 when he was 18-5. But they weren’t.

Tudor was traded from Boston to Pittsburgh for Mike Easler. Easler spent a season in Boston (Tudor spent a year as a Pirate) before being flipped to the Yankees for Don Baylor. Ojeda was sent to the Mets in 1985 for a package of prospects that included Calvin Schiraldi, Wes Gardner and Laschelle Tarver. 

Hurst was a vital cog in the Red Sox rotation and was the perfect number two guy behind Roger Clemens. He never struck out a ton of batters, but he had this big looping curveball that he could get over for a strike anytime he wanted to. It must have been something for a batter to see Clemens pumping fastballs by you one night and then facing this crafty lefty and his weirdo curveball the next. And on the follow through after one of those curves, Hurst always had his right leg up in a weird angle. He was a real joy to watch.

While you could argue that either 1987 or 1988 was his best year, his absolute peak performance came in the 1986 World Series. Hurst absolutely stymied the Mets for two games and was cruising along in the seventh until he just ran out of gas. Had Boston got that final out in Game 6, it was Hurst who would have been the Series MVP.

The Sox had a pretty good front three in 1988 with Clemens, Hurst and new pitcher Mike Boddicker. They just got overwhelmed by an awesome Oakland Athletics team. If they could have kept that front three together for a couple of more years, I think that they would have made some noise in the American League. 

People really liked Bruce Hurst and when he left, I don’t recall too many fans being pissed off that he took a lot of money and moved to San Diego. Everyone said that he wanted to be closer to his family in Utah, that he had a West Coast mentality and that the money that Padres were offering was too good to turn down.

Funny enough, the only person that people seemed to be pissed off at after Hurst bolted was Roger Clemens. I think. I did very minimal research on this, but I could have sworn that Clemens’ “Luggage Interview” occurred immediately after Hurst left. Clemens went on TV with Channel 5’s Mike Dowling and started jabbering on and on about why players leave Boston. He mentioned something about how the team does nothing for them and that “they have to carry their own luggage” when they go on the road.

People flipped out. Seriously. People lost their god damn minds about this. If you look at it, all Clemens is saying is that other teams do things for their players; get their luggage to and from the airport, sets their family up when they get to town, things like that. Things, that teams do now. But New Englanders went into hissy fit mode and accused Clemens of being a prima donna baby whose too good to carry his own bags. Clemens didn’t mean that, only he’s too damn inarticulate to say what he meant.

Anyway, according to the site I just checked, this interview was given on August 12, 1988. Maybe he was responding to a “what if” question from Dowling. Like, “If Hurst leaves, what would be the reason?” or something like that.

In any event, Hurst went to the West Coast and teamed up with slugger Jack Clark (another prized free agent that the Padres signed that winter) and Tony Gwynn and proceeded to lead the Padres to an 89-73 record which was good for second place behind the Giants. He pitched well for the Pads (55-38) record, but wasn’t ever outstanding. Kind of like how he was in Boston. All of his pitching stats (aside from strikeouts) were a tick or two better in San Diego than when he was a Red Sox, though I bet that had more to do with playing half of your games in Jack Murphy Stadium rather than Fenway Park.

He finished his career with stints with the Colorado Rockies (he was an original Rocky) and the Texas Rangers where he finished his career at 36-years-old.

All-in-all, not a bad career for a guy who almost quit the sport because Don Zimmer wasn’t able to size him up right. I bet no one cheered louder than Hurst when Pedro Martinez put that douchebag on his ass—though I bet he cheered in the most polite, Mormonly way possible.

Good Songs XXV

Stop! – Jane’s Addiction

Closer – Nine Inch Nails

Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie

Down With Disease – Phish

South of the Border – The Simpsons

The Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra

The Choice is Yours – Black Sheep

Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy

I Stay Away – Alice In Chains

Drive In, Drive Out – Dave Matthews Band

Egg Man – The Beastie Boys

Rocket – Smashing Pumpkin

Never Tear Us Apart – INXS

Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad

The Reflex – Duran Duran

Let’s Stay Together – Al Green

Heart Shaped Box – Nirvana

Crush With Eyeliner – REM

Love Fool – The Cardigans

Crazy – Seal

NOTE: When I typed the words "Dave Matthews Band and Phish" into the Google machine, the second picture came up before the first picture. The first picture, if you don't know, is Dave Matthews and Phish lead singer Tre Anastasio. Infer what you will from that.  

This is part two of a two-cassette tape set that I created in the spring of 1997. You read about the first half in Tuesday’s mammoth entry. I don’t think that this Blog post is going to come anywhere near 3,000 words, so let’s dive right in.

This tape has two bands that I don’t like very much anymore: the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Add the Grateful Dead from last entry’s mix and you have an unholy trinity of jam bands that love nothing more than to waste their audience’s time. That’s my biggest issue with jam bands as a whole, I don’t like being at a concert and waiting 20 minutes to hear the next song.

And this goes double for bands that I do like, I have a Led Zeppelin live CD and there is a 33-minute version of “Dazed and Confused”. You know how many times I’ve listened to that track? Never. Not once. You know why? Because I have better things to do with my time than listen to Jimmy Page act as if he’s never seen a guitar before. Moby Dick is on that album too. Who wants to listen to a 20-minute drum solo? TWENTY MINUTES of John Bonham banging on the drums. You’re right Slater, you do need strong acid to handle that shit.

Actually my problems aren’t entirely with the bands—I likea bunch of the Dead’s studio stuff*, there are a handful of Phish songs I can tolerate and DMB, ugh—but it’s the fans of these bands who, for the most part, drive me crazy. Dead fans are the most benign of this lot, as they get high, trade tapes and stay smiling in the corner. Though there are some exceptions. When I was in college, nothing was worse than the newly minted Dead fan, the guy (and it usually was a guy) who “just found the Dead”. Ugh. There’s not a more annoying person alive than the person who was recently baptized in lake Jerry. And they’re all so eager to convert you. No, I do not want to hear the Dead live in Munich from 1973, Larry—especially if the band is going to jam on a “Box of Rain” for 37 minutes. 

* Do I think it takes talent to jam on a song for more than 10 minutes? Sure. But lots of things take talent and there are a lot of things that I don’t have the patience to watch. Much less spend $100 for a ticket. The Dead have some good music, some nice harmonies and wrap songs up in less than five minutes on most studio albums. I enjoy that. Music isn’t like baseball, I don’t want it to go on forever. Like David Spade once said, “Play the song like it is on the record. NO TRICKS!” Ugh. I can’t believe I quoted David Spade. See what you’ve done to me, Grateful Dead fans?

On a personal note, I had to live through that very sad day in August of 1995 when Jerry Garcia died. That was a truly troubling day. Not because Garcia died, but because I had to listen to every two-bit Dead fan cry about how “Jerry” and how his death was “really going to affect them”. No. You got over it, just like people got over the death of Kurt Cobain, John Bonham and Shannon Hoon. You just got extra high that night, because “that’s what Jerry would have wanted”. The same Jerry Garcia who died of a drug overdose, yup that’s exactly what he would have wanted.

I was working in the Merrimack College library that summer and my friend came in all dejected. I lived with this guy for a year and he knew about my musical taste and he solemnly said, “Dude. Dude, did you hear? Dude, did you hear about Jerry? What a bad day. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t sit in class.” Ugh. You just started liking this band six months ago, which was a year after your Saigon Kick phase. You’re going to be fine.

The one interesting aspect of the day Jerry Garcia died was that Dead member Bob Weir was at the Hampton (NH) Beach Casino that night performing with his band. Since I lived six miles from the venue at the time, I took a drive to see what the scene was like.

I wasn’t a big fan (obviously) but the scene was sad as hundreds of people from around the area came to sit outside the small theater to pay their respects to the man that they loved so much. That was amazing because Hampton Beach is about as far away from the Dead’s stomping grounds as you could get. But people were sad and didn’t know what else to do with their grief but they collectively thought to go to a place where they knew that there would be a collective of their people. And that was nice. There were tons of television crews outside, interviewing Deadheads and talking to them about Garcia and his impact on their lives. That was therapeutic too, I imagine.

I did try hard to be a jam-band guy when I was in college. I did. I tried my best to grow my hair out*, not care about my appearance, and really get into the music, man. But I couldn’t. I just don’t have the patience. And no band tested my patience more than Phish.

* This was a disaster. When my hair gets long, it gets incredibly bushy. I already have a long head, I don’t also need a house plant sitting on the top of it.

The first few dozen times I heard Phish, they were okay. They had some interesting melodies, clever-ish lyrics and a nice mythology. “Dude. They’re from Vermont and they love their fans because they let them tape their shows for free and someone I know knows someone who knows them and he says they are really good people.” But my college roommate was really into Phish and he got my other roommates really into Phish and he got some of my hallmates really into Phish. After a while, it was wall-to-wall Phish, around the clock. And when they weren’t playing Phish, they were talking about Phish. “Do you know that Phish drummer John Fishman plays the vacuum cleaner on stage?” That makes sense, because they both suck.

After a few months of listening to Phish and the endless supply of bootlegs* that my roommates procured, I couldn’t take it any more. The interesting melodies had become ponderous, plodding guitar solos that had become boring and masturbatory. The clever-ish lyrics had devolved into a bunch of random words thrown on a page and sung quickly to masquerade the fact that they held zero meaning. By 1995, the sight of the Phish logo made me want to gut some neo-hippies.

* I will say this, Phish fans were one of the first to understand the power of the internet. One of my roommates used to logon to Usenet (a prehistoric Reddit) and scour alt.music.phish for people trading tapes. He’d contact them, they send a tape (often for free) and my buddy would have two hours of new music to listen to. That was Jetsons-like in 1995.

This leads me to the question: if I hated a band so much in 1995, why did I constantly add them to a mix tape over and over and over again? I can’t answer that question. Maybe I just liked these particular songs. Maybe on some level I enjoyed being the only anti-Phish outsider* and listening to the songs reminded me of my college friends. I don’t know why I did it then, but listening to Phish now, maybe I took my hate for the band a little too far.

* To be truthful, I did enjoy being the Big Bastard on this one. I remember one night where my frustration got the most of me and ripping into Phish in front of my roommates, deriding the bands’ entire catalog as a “four assholes mindlessly noodling on their instruments”. I had to leave the room because I thought that they were going to hit me. And looking back, they had every right to. I was being the asshole that night, not Tre Anastasio.

I’ve seem to have made my peace with Phish and the Dead in the last few years, but I can’t do it with Dave Matthews. I don’t know whether I just outgrew them or what, but listening to a DMB song now is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Like the Phish phungus, DMB was brought into my life by the same college roommate – he also was fond of Blues Traveller (before they went commercial), Rusted Root (I still can’t believe they nabbed a national commercial), God Street Wine, New Riders of the Purple Sage and another band whom I can see the cover of their CD but can’t remember the name. Each band was terrible, aside from Dave Matthews.

We played “Under the Table and Dreaming” a lot in my room during the spring of 1995 and I liked it. In fact, I liked Dave Matthews quite a bit; eagerly anticipating their follow-up to UtTaD, “Crash”, watching their videos on MTV and seeing them in concert in the fall of 1996 (which was really good—though the next day I saw Pearl Jam in concert and that was wayyyyyy better). Yeah, DMB were a jam band, but they were an interesting jam band – they had a saxophone AND a violin! That made for some totally different music.

I don’t consider myself a hipster—and if you look back at these Good Songs entries, I’m sure you don’t either—but as DMB got more and more popular, I liked them less and less. Which is dumb, I know, but I couldn’t stand to be lumped in with the same people who I saw at the second Dave Matthews Band show I went to. I stood behind one girl who screamed for “Satellite” for the entire show. By the end, she was losing her damn mind pleading and yelling for “Satellite” over and over and over and over again. Side note, the group did not play “Satellite” that night and the wailing banshee went home very sad.

It was at the very moment that I decided, “I don’t want to become part of this” and started to distance myself from the band. I bought the group’s third album and half-heartedly gave it a listen, but I was done. My friend was a super Dave fan at the time and he got a bunch of tickets to a show in Foxboro* which I went to. But I only stayed for the opening acts (Ben Fold Five and Beck) and then I went back to the party bus that he rented to transport us to the gig. I’m a notorious cheapskate, if I paid money to see a movie that turns out to suck, I’ll stick with it, but I didn’t feel bad about leaving that show early on that night.

* The Dave Matthews Band is the first band I’ve ever seen in concert where the shows moved to progressively larger arenas. First one was at the TD Garden, second was at GreatWoods and the last one was at the old Foxboro Stadium.

I am all done with Dave.

The rest of this tape is still really good. Some quick hits:

The Simpsons – they actually didn’t sing “South of the Border”, Gene Merlino did, but I first heard it on the “Kamp Krusty” episode and it blew me away. Maybe it was because that episode was one of my favorite episode endings of all time, “Get ready for two weeks in the happiest place on Earth! TIAJUANA!” and then the drum hits. What a song.

Beastie Boys – this song reminds me of a lip sync my friends did in high school, but aside from the high school nostalgia the song itself is pretty awesome. This whole album (Paul’s Boutique) was the beginning of a long stay at the top for those guys—even though no one knew it at the time.

Duran Duran – “The Reflex” is the best pop song of the 1980s. I believed it when I was in fifth grade and I continue to believe it now. DD may have bottomed out in the 90s (find their album of covers) but they knew what they were doing when they were famous.