Baseball, Tuneage

Lost Classics of the Stadium Riot Genre

The tweeting of JohnU alerted me to a blog post over at Mandatory Mustache which details a lost Mets-related punk rock classic from 1985 by a band called The Nightmares. I’m sorry it took me almost a month to discover it (the post debuted on April 14), but I’m glad I did, because it is awesome.

I’ll let the post speak for itself, but the gist is this: The Nightmares, a New York garage-y band, wrote a tune called “Baseball Altamont”, which detailed a riot that occurred in the Shea Stadium stands in 1984. They even had a record release party for the single in the Shea luxury suites, which is pretty friggin rad.

The song namechecks Keith Hernandez and Dr. K, and talks about “sitting up in the sky” in the cheap seats. I found that image particularly evocative, since I spent so much time in those cheap seats, which really did make you feel like you were 10,000 feet in the air. Especially if you sat in the very last section on either the left or right field side, hanging out over nothing. It was both exhilirating and terrifying. Oh, and you couldn’t see the game for nothin’.

I don’t have much info on The Nightmares, other than they were on Coyote, the same outfit that put out Yo La Tengo’s early stuff (fitting that they would share a label with another Met-inspired band). As you might imagine, a Google search yields a million other bands called The Nightmares who are clearly not this one. But the record sleeve shows them posing next to the historical marker in Hoboken where the first organized baseball game was (probably) played. Which is, again, pretty rad.

I also tried to look up some info on the riot in question. Not much luck, except for this remiscence about Opening Day at Shea by Eric Silverstadt, which appeared in The New York Times in 2004:

Twenty years to the day after the first pitch was thrown at Shea, I
returned for the home opener in 1984. Ron Darling was the starter, and again it was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. I slipped away from my job as an NBC page on ”Late Night With David Letterman,” expecting the Doc and Darryl Mets to bring life back to the ballpark. Although the 1984 team won 90 games, what happened that April afternoon could only happen in New York, and perhaps, only at Shea.

The Mets were losing, 10-0, to Pete Rose and the Expos in the seventh inning. Most fans had already bolted. This must have included some members of the New York Police Department because during the seventh-inning stretch, a riot broke out in the left-field bleachers. Tire irons, broken beer bottles, fists flying, bodies tumbling. The culprits? Passive Met and Expo fans? No. Ranger and Islander fanatics, still fighting a week after a brutal playoff series ended with an Islander overtime goal in the fifth and deciding game of the Patrick Division semifinals.

Not sure if this is the event which inspired the tune. Although if it is, ‘hockey Altamont’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.

In any case, give it a whirl and enjoy.

Media Morons

You Failed the Trials for the Human Race: Howie Carr

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I never thought I’d write these words, but I’m a big enough man to admit it: I owe Wallace Matthews an apology.

Mind you, I still think he’s one of the worst writers on the planet. But I also thought he was one of the worst human beings on the planet. I stand corrected. He has been dwarfed in hideousness by Howie Carr, a “writer” for the Boston Herald.

Matthews is cranky and joyless and seems to take pleasure in raining on parades. But he has not, to the best of my knowledge, actually caused anyone harm–or really wished harm on others. Howie Carr, on the other hand, wants people to starve.

Carr is a reprehensible right-wing talk radio windbag on Boston’s WRKO (against his will, apparently). He lies somewhere in the Venn intersection of Bob Grant, Morton Downey Jr., and a playground bully, filling his shows with Code Word Bigotry and seething anti-gay invective.

He also writes columns for the Boston Herald. You’ve probably never read the Herald unless you’ve had to line a birdcage in the greater New England area. It’s basically an angrier, more overtly racist version of the NY Post, aimed squarely at the Tommy from Quinzee set.

In this latter capacity, he authored a piece that appeared in Sunday’s Herald, “Shed no tears as Boston Globe fat gets Pinched”. I was alerted to its poisonous existence by the justifiably angry tweeting of BP’s Will Carroll.

As you may know, there’s a very good chance the Boston Globe will close down very soon. I’m ambivalent about the future of newspapers myself. And I have to cop to a snotty tweet I tapped out on Monday about how no more Globe would (hopefully) mean no more Dan Shaughnessy.

But I think we can all agree that the shuttering of the Globe would be sad. Not only because it’s a storied daily with a long history, but because it would put a lot of people out of work–very few of whom are responsible for the paper’s financial woes. It would also leave Boston with only one newspaper: the reprehensible Herald.

So again, I think we can all agree that the Globe’s imminent closing is a very bad, very sad thing.

Wait, we can’t all agree with that? Apparently not, according to Carr. He’s dancing on a grave that hasn’t even been dug yet. Why? Because the Globe is a liberal newspaper, owned by the NY Times Corp., and therefore is worse than Hitler in his book.

Keep in mind as you read these excerpts that Carr writes for the Globe‘s rival paper, and that no newspapers are doing well right now. So his insane, petty, vindictive Schadenfreude makes about as much karmic sense as the head of GM crowing about Chrysler’s bankruptcy.

Continue reading You Failed the Trials for the Human Race: Howie Carr →

Politics Schmolitics

Joe Biden’s Swine Flu Tips

biden.jpgHello, Americans, it’s your veep. After my ground-breaking announcement on swine flu last week, President Obama decided he wanted me right in the thick of the fight against pandemics. That’s why I’m here in North Dakota, counting buffalo herds.

Actually, now that I say those words out loud, it doesn’t make too much sense. Shouldn’t I be in some Mexican bordertown? Or maybe in Arkansas inspecting pigs, instead of buffalo? This assignment seemed a lot less ridiculous when Barry told me about it a couple of days ago. If nothing else, I could be back in Washington, giving the president some more of my valuable advice.

Anyways, now that I finally found a spot where my Blackberry works, I wanna give the people my take on this whole swine flu thing. Because there’s a lot of misinformation going around, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to calm down hysterical masses.

First off, you cannot get swine flu from eating bacon. That’s just preposterous. Unless the bacon was prepared by someone who had swine flu. Then it’s a distinct possibility. Especially if the guy cut his finger while slicing it up. In that case, swine flu is the least of your problems, believe me!

Of course, FDA regulations would require such meat to be discarded, so it’s not likely that bacon would ever make it to market. Unless it came from some slipshod operation whose owner bribed local authorities to look the other way. Then yeah, that could totally happen.

I know what you’re thinking: How many meat processing plants are actually like that, really? I mean, this is America, right? The answer is, hundreds. Maybe thousands. You don’t even want to know.

I’ve seen some people wearing surgical masks in the street, and I want to assure you that these are completely unnecessary. Do you know how tiny a flu virus is? You might as well try to catch a bumblebee with a fishnet. If that little germ wants to get in your mouth, a mess of cloth and a rubber band ain’t gonna stop it, believe me. No point in catching a debilitating illness and looking ridiculous at the same time.

The important thing is, if you suspect you have swine flu–even the slightest bit, based on the slimmest piece of evidence–get yourself to a hospital ER immediately. Just get in the car and floor it. Do not obey any traffic signs. Run red lights. If you come to a police barricade, plow right through it.

Once you get to the ER, if you can’t see a doctor right away, just scream a lot. That should speed you towards the front of the line.

I want to assure the American people that we will get through this. Our best scientists are working around the clock on a flu vaccine, and once they find it, we’ll all be out of the woods.

That is, until the flu virus evolves an immunity to this vaccine and comes back stronger and deadlier six months from now. Which will totally happen. Because a virus’ life cycle is so tiny that they can go through a million generations in just a few short months. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if those little bastards were making crude hand-tools and wielding fire in a few years. Then we’re all in some serious trouble!

But at least six months gives us all enough time to accept our fates and make our peace with our respective gods.

A potentially explosive collection of verbal irritants