Steve Lyons 1990 Upper Deck

On October 7, 2016 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: Another card from the BCB. This time with a taunting message, "Why can't we get players like this?" Not from the left coast but from the heartland of this great county, Milwaukee, WI. 

2019 Notes: The quote above comes from long-time Boston sports TV reporter Bob Lobel. Whenever someone who once played in Boston did well for another team, Lobel would look into the camera and sigh, "Why can't we get players like that?" It's actually a pretty decent line. 

Steve "Psycho" Lyons was a terrible ball player and is currently a terrible announcer. He's lucky that he pulled down his pants in Tiger Stadium because I don't think anyone would remember him because although he played a lot of positions, he didn't play any particularly well. Fun fact: once traded straight up for Tom Seaver. 

My list of suspects grows:

Alice Cooper (knows a lot about Milwaukee)
Anthony Perkins (he's dead but he was Psycho)
Arthur Lee Allen (also dead but may have written taunting letters if he was the Zodiac)Paul Herman (spends a lot of time in Milwaukee now)Tim O'Neill (went to school in Milwaukee)
Donnie Most (put Milwaukee on the map as funny man Ralph Malph on TV's Happy Days and doesn't like me taking his name in vain.)

Who knows? It could be YOU!

2019: Again, I spent a lot of time wondering who could be the BCB and not too much on the player. Two of those names are friends of mine who spent time in Wisconsin, one is a suspect's name of the Zodiac Killer, the other are famous people -- one of which is dead. 

There isn't much to say about Lyons other than he was a backup infielder who got a lot of mileage out of talking a lot and accidentally pulling down his pants in Detroit during the 1990 season. 

He was a member of the 1986 Red Sox team until he was on second base in the ninth inning of a game that the Sox were losing by one run with Wade Boggs up and he attempted to steal third. He was thrown out by a mile. Sox manager John McNamara buried him (rightly) on the bench and before long he traded in one pair of socks for another, going to Chicago for Tom Seaver. 

The Red Sox didn't hold any grudges and he came back to the team three other times, after spending time in Atlanta, Montreal and in Spring Training with Cubs. 

He currently works for the Red Sox cable company NESN and wasn't fired after he was arrested for domestic batter in January 2017. He also got canned from Fox Sports in 2006 for making some derogatory remarks about Spanish-speaking people.

Steve Lyons is a bit of a dipshit. 

Good Songs IX

Murder Rap – Above the Law

We Want Eazy – Eazy-E

Radio – Eazy-E

Around the Way Girl – LL Cool J

Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J

Straight Outta Compton – NWA

Fuck tha Police – NWA

8-Ball – NWA

100 Miles and Runnin’ – NWA

Sa Prize (Part 2) – NWA

Bring the Noise – Public Enemy

Don’t Believe the Hype – Public Enemy

Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy

Caught Can We Get A Witness – Public Enemy

Night of the Living Baseheads – Public Enemy

Brothers Gonna Work It Out – Public Enemy

Welcome to the Terrordome – Public Enemy

Fight the Power – Public Enemy

Burn Hollywood, Burn – Public Enemy

When I tell people, “I really used to be into rap and hip hop when I was younger”, that’s not entirely true. What I should say is, “I was really into Public Enemy and NWA when I was younger” because looking at these track lists, that’s the only hip-hop I was really into.

Up until now, I thought that I was REALLY into hip-hop. I considered my late teens as my hip-hop phase. I thought that I was the hip-hop vanguard of Amesbury High School. But I wasn’t. At all. And this realization is like finding out that your mom was Santa Claus because she liked wearing men’s clothes. The image I had of myself as a youth has been shattered.

Shattered illusions aside, when I was listening to this playlist this morning, I closed my eyes for a couple of minutes to remember where in my life I was when I created this mix. And it came to me, I created this mix (as well as the one that I wrote about yesterday and the one that I will write about next Tuesday) because my baseball team was going to Cooperstown to play a game in the Spring of 1991.

What I remember most from that trip was that my team, the junior varsity Amesbury High Fighting Indians, had a perfect game thrown against us by a team from Heightstown, NJ. I don’t know why we played them, but they kicked our butts pretty good. Other than that humiliation, the trip was excellent. It was my first experience on an out-of-state school trip since the unexplained eighth grade Spanish class sojourn to Montreal. Four of my best friends and I were crammed into a tiny, run-down, no-tell motel called the Glimmer Glass Inn, which has been the basis of many jokes since we stayed there. Aside from the shabby rooms, we did everything 30 teenage boys without girls would do: someone snuck a bottle of booze into the motel, we ate like assholes, we ran amuck, we pulled pranks, we didn’t sleep.  

My dad was one of the drivers to the New York hamlet, but I don’t recall seeing him too much. He hung around with the other fathers and gave me my space to act like a fool with the rest of my buddies. In retrospect, that was a pretty cool move on his part.

The Cooperstown trip was a part of a hectic three weekends in a row for me where I made my Confirmation (no big deal, but I got a lot of cash), Cooperstown (where I spent a majority of that cash) and then the Junior Prom (which was an incredibly awful experience and where I spent the rest of that cash). The prom was a perfect encapsulation of my life at that particular time: awkward, mismanaged and disappointing. I asked a girl who I barely know, she agreed, weeks later I discovered this was a mistake (as did she) and we spent the better part of the evening avoiding each other. I did get hammered on a bottle of Super Schnapps, so I had that going for me.

Returning to my original premise of this blog, when I look at this list of songs, I again find that I’m just basically rerecording “Straight Outta Compton” and two Public Enemy tapes. There’s nothing really interesting about this mix. The only songs on this tape that don’t share the same DNA with NWA or Public Enemy are the LL Cool J tracks.

“Around the Way Girl” was the typical song that made Ladies Love Cool James. There’s the typical machismo fronting mixed with the sweet, “baby I’m gonna treat you right” flavor that LL was so fond of dishing – and that women ate up with a spoon.

I haven’t listened to this song in years (aside from the two pair of bamboo earrings, it’s held up well) but when I heard it today there is something in the background that’s hard for me to ever unhear. While LL raps there is a synth sample that stays constant through out his just lyrics. It’s hard to describe, but it sounds like it’s the beginning of run that just stops on one note. And that note is held for a minute, maybe two minutes under the bass. Once the hook kicks in, it stops. Then it starts again. This pattern is repeated through the entirety of the song.

It’s a strange sound texture because once I picked up on, I stopped listening to what LL was saying and I was just waiting for this synth run to pick up or finally end. It became quite, unnerving is the wrong word, but I became anxious for it to stop. I don’t think that LL or his producers had that in mind when they chose the beats for this song, but it was an interesting side effect.

Three quick things before I get into the meat of this extremely long post:

I have Eazy-E’s “Radio” slotted before getting to the LL Cool J stuff. I’m sure that I did that on purpose. I’m quite the Easter egg comedian.

Above the Law is a pale imitation of NWA, but “Murder Rap” is a legitimately good song. It sounds like a combination of Public Enemy (the layer of beats, especially the horn) and NWA (the lyrics).

I have no idea why I didn’t match the two-for-Tuesday format that the rock Good Songs mix follows. I think it would have made for a stronger tape.

I’ve written enough about NWA to fill three books, so I’m not about to write more about the group here other than “Fuck tha Police” gets all the attention (and rightly so), but for my money, “Straight Outta Compton” is a better overall song. The imagery that Ice Cube uses, the beats that Dre and Yella chose, the way the entire group conveys the message, the first time I heard it, I didn’t have goosebumps, my stomach doubled over. It was that type of feeling you get when something important or cool is about to happen.

After 25 years, this song is still on my iPhone and if I haven’t heard it in awhile and it comes on during shuffle, I still get a hint of that excitement. And that brings me back to riding home in my friend’s Honda from the Fox Run Mall in Newington, NH, frantically ripping off the plastic shrink-wrap from the cassette and jamming it into the car’s tape deck, not knowing what we’d hear. It didn’t disappoint.

Speaking of remembering where you were the first time you heard a band, there’s a lot of Public Enemy on this tape. And that’s because Public Enemy was one of the first groups that shaped my world perception. The first time I was aware of Chuck D and Flavor Flav is when they showed up on Living Colour’s track “Funny Vibe”. I had no idea who they were and after reading the linear notes I figured out their names at least.

It was April vacation of 1990* when I first spotted a Public Enemy tape, specifically “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” at a Genovese drug store near my cousin’s apartment in Mt. Vernon, NY. I remember thinking that if Chuck D was good enough for Living Colour, he’s probably good enough for me so I bought that and 3^rd Bass’ “Cactus Cassette” to listen to on the long ride back to Massachusetts.

* The only other thing that I remember about this visit was that I woke up early on Saturday April 21 and was shocked that Seattle Mariner pitcher Brian Holman came within one out of throwing a perfect game against the mighty Oakland Athletics – in Oakland! As much as I’ve always loved the Red Sox, during this time in my life, I loved this A’s team. It seemed that every position was stacked, so for Holman to almost throw a perfect game, that was insane. Holman was part of the trade that sent Mark Langston from the M’s to the Expos the year prior. Also included in that trade was Randy Johnson, he wasn’t a bad pitcher at all. And the guy who ended it was a cult hero and former Mariner, Ken Phelps who crushed a first-pitch fastball into the bleachers. At the time Phelps was famous among statheads as the best baseball player who despite his OBP and HR per AB never got a chance to play regularly. He became more famous a few years later when George Steinbrenner (as played by Larry David) defended the Jay Buhner for Phelps swap that Frank Costanza complains about. “Ken Phelps! Ken Phelps! Ken Phelps! That’s all my scouts kept saying,” said Steinbrenner. In any event, I think that I watched those highlights all morning.

I popped Public Enemy’s tape into my second Sony water resistant (and kids, there’s a difference between water proof and water resistant, which is why I was on number two) yellow Walkman somewhere in Connecticut. I forgot about 3^rd Bass and listened to PE over and over and over again, studying the lyrics and notes that came with the tape.

I would love to say that I had some sort of political awaking with this tape, but I had no idea who three-quarters of the people Chuck D was talking about (Garvey? There was a kid named Derek Garvey in my school, but Chuck couldn’t be talking about him, he was the worst. BTW, Chuck D was talking about Marcus Garvey) and there was no internet so the names stuck in my head as questions without answers. No, it was the way Chuck delivered his lines with such purpose, such strength that got me. And add the Bomb Squad’s deft weaving of a loud sonic tapestry and this was like ear crack. I literally couldn’t get enough. I had read somewhere that the follow-up to ITANOMTHUB was recently released (according to Wikipedia, it was April 10, 1990) and within a week of that vacation to New York*, I had purchased that tape too.

* Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t play up that I bought the PE tape in Mt. Vernon, NY to my friends. My cousin lived in a nice enough area, but I made it sound as if I was dodging bullets to buy these tunes. I had an overactive imagination.

For the remainder of that summer, for the remainder of that year, for the remainder of my high school career; I listened to one of these two tapes at least once a day. “Fear of a Black Planet” is the only tape I ever broke from listening to it too much. And I know these songs front and back. I knew the words, I knew the beats, the layers upon layers of different sounds*.  When I was in my room listening to Public Enemy, I didn’t feel like a detached outsider, I felt like I was part of something. I’m not sure what, but it felt different than when I listened to Ice Cube or NWA or Dokken or Motely Crue.

* Well, maybe I didn’t know ALL the sounds. The one thing that I remember most about “Welcome to the Terrordome”, and it’s not the the line “Tell the Rab to get off the rag” which got Chuck D in a lot of trouble, is that at 1:47 into the track there is a high-pitched squeal. The first dozen times I listened to it, I thought that it was my brother calling, “Byron!” So I’d press pause on the tape, scream out “WHAT?” and wait for an answer. After listening to the song over a bunch of times I asked him why does he always call me in the middle of WTTT and he had no idea what I was talking about. I don’t know who this story reflects poorly on: my inability to recognize a sound on a tape from my brother’s voice or just how high and pitchy Jay’s voice was when he was 12-years-old.

From then on, everything in my life revolved around Public Enemy.

I drew the B-Boy in a gun scope logo over all of my book covers (so much so that my parents suspected that I was the Zodiac killer). I painstakingly drew the cover to “Fear of a Black Planet” on the duffle bag that I carried my books in. Every picture of Chuck D., Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, Terminator X or S1Ws (which were pretty dumb, to be honest) were cut from my school library’s copy of Rolling Stone and taped to the inside of my locker.

I bought a black Oakland A’s Starter-esque jacket because I thought Chuck D might wear this. I bought a pinstriped Chicago Bulls Starter jersey because Flavor Flav DID wear it. I was beyond pissed that my mom wouldn’t let me go to a Gang of Four, Sisters of Mercy, Public Enemy show with some college kids that I worked with. I ate, breathed and slept this group – it’s of no wonder that a vast majority of their songs were on my Good Songs mix tape.

A few years ago, I finally saw Public Enemy in concert and it was great, for a hip hop show. The problem with hip hop shows is that when you see your favorite rapper in concert the stage is just too big. Even with dancers (or in PE’s case the S1W’s) and TV screens and other crap littering the stage, it really boils down to the DJ, the MC(s) and that’s it. There’s not much going on. Despite the intrinsic problems, Public Enemy did a good job live. Sixteen-year-old me would have been happy.

But the thing that 16-year-old me would have lost his mind over was that once I had an honest-to-god interaction with Chuck D over Twitter. I follow him (old habits die hard) and one night I asked him a question. On “Louder Than A Bomb” Flavor says, “The Fed-derals are trying to pull a 226 on you, G.” what is a 226. Chuck explained it and then started following me on Twitter—I’m sure he’s learning so much. I think that I gushed about seeing them in Boston but I went to sleep next to my wife, in the same house that my kids were sleeping in, thinking that was pretty much one of the coolest things that ever happened to me.

You can turn 30. You can turn 40. You can even turn 100, but the heroes that you had when you are 16-years-old will always matter. I wonder what Brian Holman is up to?

This Man Could Be Your Father

Last week in a California prison, one of the cult members enraptured with a short, hippie psychotic named Charles Manson died of brain cancer. Her name was Susan Atkins and she was 61-years-old. In recent years, Atkins has become publicly contrite for what she did—she was part of the Helter Skelter bloodbath crew that freaked out much of the nation in August of 1969. After becoming a born-again Christian while incarcerated her last words were, “My God is a great God.” Despite her conversion and attempts at reconciliation with the families of the people that she mutilated, I doubt that there were a lot of tears shed for Atkins—she did repeatedly stab a woman who was eight-months pregnant just to “shut her up” and wrote the word “PIGS” in her blood on a wall—but there is some sort of public feeling towards her.

But I'm not sure what they are.

A few years ago I went through a phase when I was really interested in true crime stories and the more outlandish, the better. I read everything I could about the Maffia and serial killers and strange people who did strange things. There were two subjects that I always came back to: Helter Skelter and the Zodiac killings. I'm not going to talk too much about the Zodiac stuff because there's no need to right now, but there is something about Helter Skelter that I find truly bizarre and even after all of these years, I can't quite put my finger on it.*

* One of the things I find odd is that I have a two degrees of separation with this case as my mother went to high school with one of Manson's girls, Linda Kasabian. She was with the rest of the gang when they pulled up to the house on Cielo Drive, but she didn't kill anyone. Eventually, she testified against them in court. I asked my mom what she was like and she said, “She was sorta weird.” Thanks a lot mom, you're a wealth of knowledge.

I've read Manson prosecutor Victor Bugliosi's book “Helter Skelter” and Ed Saunder's “The Family”* a few times, I've seen a couple of documentaries, so I get what happened. But I guess what I don't understand is why it all went down. And maybe that's the point. It's difficult to find a reason why Manson and his cronies did what they did, maybe it was because he was truly a crazy man with a messiah complex. These people are normally a bit difficult to gauge.

I have no idea, but it got me thinking about the crimes again.

* “The Family” is a very, very good book. If you are interested in any of this stuff—even remotely—I can not recommend this book enough. Some of his writing is a little weird; he writes like a burnt-out hippie—probably because he was—and uses a lot onomatopoeia that takes some getting used to, but it's definitely worth the read. Hippie or not, you have to respect a man who goes camping in the desert with some of the Manson family so that he can gather research for his book.

When I read the books, the things that bothered me the most weren't the killings or even the sheer brutality of the killings, it was the little stuff that made me check my closets and look under my bed at night. In Bugliosi's book, he mentions something called “creepy crawlies” where in the middle of the night some of the Manson clan would dress from head to toe in black, go into the homes of people and rearrange their furniture while the home owners slept. These were essentially dry runs for the Helter Skelter mission and the were told to run if they saw the owners of the house.

Regardless of whether any violent acts were being done that night, how completely freaked out would you be if you woke up one morning, went to the bathroom like any normal day and then went down stairs and all of your stuff was rearranged? I would probably lose my mind. It's the death knell of any sort of any sort of illusion of safety that you may have in your home. When you are in YOUR home and you're asleep, nothing is supposed to get you—your guard is up (locked doors and windows) but at the same time your guard is down (you're asleep).

And what if you stumbled upon these people while getting a late-night snack? Supposedly they were told to scatter, but even still how can you get that thought out of your mind? How many sleepless nights would one have and how far would you jump if a floor board creaked at 2 am?

And these creepy crawlies were supposedly random too, that's what makes these exercises more scary. The home owner obstensively did nothing wrong. Their house was just at the wrong place and looked inviting, I suppose. The murders were supposed to be random or were meant to start a race war (that was foretold by the Beatles), but there's a lot of evidence that states that these weren't true.*

* The only bit of “random” murder that night was of 17-year-old Stephen Parent. He went to visit his an acquaintance who was living in the caretaker's house on the Helter Skelter property, hoping to sell him a clock radio. The guy didn't want it and when Parent hopped in his car and attempted to back out, it was at the same time that Manson's soldiers were beginning their seige. They shot and killed the kid.

These are the things that make one wonder whether life isn't just a set of random coincidences.

Bugliosi hung a conviction on Manson and his woman that said that the race war was the reasoning (he had to connect the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” found at one of the crime scenes to Manson somehow) behind the murders, though it's hard to believe that that was the true motive. Saunders has a few theories on the reasons for the murders including revenge—Terry Melcher was the son of Doris Day and a record producer. He was friends with the Beach Boys who were friends with Manson. Manson hung out with some of the Beach Boys (one of the Wilson brothers, I believe) and he played them some of their songs. They liked the tunes enough to bring them to Melcher, who passed. Melcher once lived at the home where Sharon Tate and her friends were massacred, perhaps Manson was sending a message.

Another of Saunders' theories was that Manson had some non-hippie associates (whom he met in jail) that were known to socialize with the mob as well as some highly powerful Hollywood executives. The reason why the LaBiancas were killed was because of alleged mob ties and the reason why Tate and her Hollywood friends were killed were because of some bizarro sex tapes and secrets that these high-powered people were worried about getting out in the public. Supposedly one movie starred Telly Savalas and someone else (I can't remember who—I don't have my book here) having a three-way with Mama Cass. That last sentence, BTW, is no joke. And to be honest, if someone taped me having sex with Mama Cass, I'd want them dead too. Who loves ya, baby indeed?

The third theory was that Manson was part of some larger Los Angeles devil/death cult and they simply told him to do it for an unknown reason. Supposedly this devil/death cult is one that the Zodiac killer belonged too and they told him to strike terror in Northern California during the same time. There is a book that says that the Zodiac Killer was a member of Manson's family, but I haven't read it. It's out of print and copies on Amazon and eBay are going for hundreds of dollars.

Do any of these motivations make any more sense than the other? No and I think that's why people are absolutely fascinated about these cases and these people 40 years later. I can think of no other crime, other than those of Jack the Ripper, that has people so interested almost a half-century later.

The other thing that I find intriguing, and was the title inspiration for the title of this entry, is that there were a couple of babies born on Spahn Ranch. Quick background: back in the late 60s people that didn't want to conform to society lived together in what is known as a commune. Basically, they threw away all of their possessions and tried to live the simple life. Most of the time, that didn't stick because “the simple life” is really code for “I'm lazy and don't feel like doing shit”, so with a bunch of lazy people lying around doing nothing; nothing got done. Communes folded.

Manson's commune was like that but since Charlie was the king and he saw women as subhuman, he made them do all of the work and their commune thrived for a while (until the cops came and busted them for dune buggy theft and then murder). This commune was also a bit different than the others in that drugs and sex held it together very tightly. Manson gave out LSD like candy and would often pair people up to have sex during orgy time. And accidents happen.

According to her obituary Susan Atkins gave birth to a baby named Zezozoze Zadfrack. He (I guess it's a he, though I wonder if it's a boy's or a girl's name – it's so pretty, it could be either) was born and lived on the commune until it was busted up by the cops and he and a few other kids were taken in as wards of the state. Not surprisingly, the New York Times Obit states that his whereabouts are unknown.

What would it be like to be this person? I assume that you already have a chip on your shoulder because you're in an orphanage and don't know who your real parents are, but to one day do a little research and find that your parents are Charles Manson (or one of his disciples) and Susan Atkins and that you were born in a glorified garbage dump? That has to do a number on you and there is not enough Newcastle Ale in the world to make those self-doubting crazy thoughts go away.

Is this information that you would even want to know?

As the cliché goes, the day that the cops fingered Manson and his hippie crew as the prime suspects for the killings of Tate and LaBianca “were the day the 60s died”. But that's horseshit, I didn't live during that era, but I've watched enough and read enough about it to know that the whole “Free Love” feeling was a crock. For three months during the summer of 1967, people tried to get together and love each other, but it didn't work. Thousands of kids were flooding into San Francisco weekly hoping to find some sort of new consciousness* and utopian way of living.

But the predators realized this too and they moved in with harder drugs, prostituiton and crime—taking advantage of these naive kids and screwing them up royally. Of course, the word didn't spread for awhile and more kids came out and tried to live these ideals and they were taken advantage of too leaving even more broken people.

* If I grew up in the 50s and 60s, had a war raging on that I was going to have to fight and was completely miserable, I'd try to find some way to change my view point too. But the problem with ex-hippies isn't that they tried and failed; it's that they tried and believe that they succeeded. They didn't succeed, they made everything worse.


Manson was one of these predators. He had been locked away in various reformatories since he was 12-years-old and went away for a couple of years during the early 1960s. When he was released, it must have been like walking into a paradise of fools for him. He was obviously charming and quick witted, so lots of women got with him. Where ever there are lots of women, that means that there's going to be some dudes trying to get some action, so Manson had them too. And he had plenty of drugs and had complete control of every aspect of their lives, which turned these middle-class, white bread kids into mini Manchurian Candidates.

For his whole life he had been beaten down and destroyed, now was his chance to lead with the children of the people who put him away. What is surprising is not that it happened, what's surprising is that it only happened once.