Crosby, Stills, Nash & Tiant
"Just a Song Before I Go" (1977)
Wait, two Jagged Time Lapse entries about baseball in a row? What in Biff Pocoroba is going on here?
Today’s entry has actually been cooking in my head for a while, inspired by all the sadness and anger I saw from Oakland A’s fans leading up to the team’s final home game at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on September 26. And it was just about to go up last week when its posting was pre-empted by the sudden death of Pete Rose…
What happened to the A’s in Oakland — a billionaire owner who doesn’t give a shit about his team’s legacy intentionally running the team into the ground and engaging in bad-faith negotiations with the city while planning to uproot it for ostensibly greener pastures, while the commissioner and other team owners simply shrug their collective shoulders — represents everything I hate about MLB right now. I’m not here to rant, however, but remember…
I visited the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum exactly once — August 5, 1977, for a night game between the A’s and the Boston Red Sox. The recent outpouring of Coliseum memories triggered my own vivid recollections of that chilly evening; and as said recollections are (surprise!) soundtracked by a certain hit song from that summer, a new chapter for my musical-memoir-in-progress suddenly and unexpectedly appeared… just in time, unfortunately, to mark this week’s passing of the legendary Luis Tiant. (That’s two major figures from the 1975 World Series gone in the same week; someone should really check to make sure that Carlton Fisk is doing okay.)
As mentioned back when I first launched Jagged Time Lapse, one of my original intentions with this Substack was to motivate me to get cracking on said memoir — and to share bits of it with my paid subscribers whenever a new chapter feels ready for an audience.
I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, as well as some of the absolute worst.
The chapters I’ve completed for the book (like the one about why Nigel Olsson’s “Dancing Shoes” makes me think of Mormons and Chief Dan George, or the one about or the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high, or the one about how a Bee Gees B-side helped me nab a starting position on my Little League baseball team) can all be found in the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which also contains a ton of free reads on a wide variety of music-related subjects. If that sounds like your kind of jam, five bucks a month or fifty bucks a year for a paid JTL subscription will get you full access to the JTL archive, the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast and basically all the Dan Epstein writing you can handle — none of which, I should add, is ever generated by ChatGPT or in any way assisted by AI bullshit. It’s the real deal here, baby, and always will be…
And now, on to the latest chapter…
“I’ve got bad news for you,” Bill informed me that Friday afternoon. “The Giants are actually playing in New York tonight.”
This was bad news, indeed. Since falling in love with baseball the previous summer, I’d become obsessed with the idea of seeing games in as many major league ballparks as possible. So far, I’d been to Tiger Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Anaheim Stadium and San Diego Stadium — and now that we were spending the weekend in San Francisco with Bill, my mom’s long-distance boyfriend — I was dead-set on making Candlestick Park my fifth big league ballpark experience.
My mom had informed Bill of my desire before our visit, and — wanting to score points with both her and me — he’d promised to have his secretary take care of getting us tickets for that Friday night’s Mets-Giants game. Intent on showing us a classic San Francisco good time, Bill had taken us out to dinner at a fancy Italian joint in Fisherman’s Wharf the night before, taken us out for a dim sum lunch in Chinatown, and taken us for a ride on a cable car. But right as we returned to his small North Beach walk-up, just down the street from the Carol Doda sign with the light-up nipples, his secretary called to let him know that the Giants were out of town for the weekend.
I was crestfallen. Of course, I should have thought to doublecheck my Smooth as Silk Kessler 1977 Baseball Fan Guide, which contained all of the teams’ schedules for the season, along with lists of players on their Opening Day rosters and diagrams of their stadiums (and which I often studied like a Rabbi studies the Talmud), but I figured the adults would have the situation covered. Nope.
But Bill, to his credit, wasn’t about to let this go. “Would you like to go see the Oakland A’s?” he asked. “They’re playing the Boston Red Sox tonight.”