Enter the Dragon, Exit the Cobra
A funky farewell to Lalo Schifrin and Dave Parker
Lalo Schifrin and Dave Parker both left this earthly realm last week. The former was an Argentine composer, arranger and conductor best known for his TV and film soundtrack work, who won five Grammy Awards over the course of his career and received a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018. The latter was a Mississippi-born, Ohio-raised All Star outfielder who won two National League batting titles, was named the NL MVP in 1978, played on two World Series-winning squads, and is scheduled to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY later this month.
As far as I can tell, the two men never crossed paths or were connected by any pop-cultural threads. But both Schifrin and Parker were giants in their respective fields, and both played significant roles in cementing my early love of music and baseball. And while the deaths of childhood heroes obviously become more and more of a regular occurrence as you get older, their respective passings last week really made the 1970s I grew up in feel like they’re receding at an ever-faster pace in my rear-view mirror.
Last September, I wrote one of my most-read and commented-upon Jagged Time Lapse pieces — a list of my ten favorite television theme songs from the 1970s, which was truly a golden age for such things. None of Lalo Schifrin’s work made the cut, but in retrospect it really should have. At the time I wrote the post, I remember thinking that my favorite TV themes of his (Mission: Impossible and Mannix) were too “sixties” to qualify, even if my inclusion of the late-sixties-penned themes for Hawaii Five-O and The Odd Couple kind of muddied my self-imposed historical parameters. (And Schifrin’s Starsky and Hutch theme would have certainly made the cut if I’d had the room or time to include 20 selections.)
Looking back, Mission: Impossible and Mannix themes were the first adult-oriented TV shows whose music really grabbed me. I first remember watching Mannix with my grandfather at the age of four; I was far too young to know about James Bond films or John Barry’s scores for them… but Schifrin’s Mannix theme seemed to embody fist-fighting action and worldly sophistication all at once in a way that really dazzled my pre-kindergarten brain.
And then, of course, there was Schifrin’s kinetic theme for Mission: Impossible, which paired a wonderfully sassy Morse code-inspired rhythm with a melody so catchy that even a first grader could instantly learn it and then run around singing it on the school playground, which is exactly what I did during the recess periods of my first year in elementary school. In fact, the theme was so immediate that it didn’t even occur to me until many, many years later that Schifrin wrote it in 5/4 time, a fairly unusual time signature for a TV theme tune. “I always say that things are in 2/4 or 4/4 because people dance with two legs,” Schifrin told Entertainment Weekly in 1996, when Danny Elfman and U2 reworked his Mission: Impossible theme for the first installment of the Tom Cruise film series. “I [wrote the Mission: Impossible theme] for people from outer space who have five legs.”
Schifrin also enjoyed a long and illustrious career in the jazz field, working with the likes of Astor Piazzolla, Dizzy Gillespie and Xavier Cugat before embarking upon his own very fruitful journey as a composer and bandleader. And then, of course, there was his prolific film soundtrack work, which included such stellar outings as Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force and that ultimate example of silver-screen badassery, 1973’s Enter The Dragon. If Bruce Lee, Jim Kelly and John Saxon were the film’s main attractions, Schifrin’s fabulously funky score surely deserved equal billing. I wouldn’t actually see the film until the late seventies, but both its music and its chop-socky left an indelible impression upon me…
And speaking of all things funky and badass… Dave Parker embodied those qualities more fully than just about any other Major League Baseball player of the 1970s — which, given the Everest-like standards of funkiness and badassery set by ballplayers during that decade, was no mean feat. If you don’t believe me, check out this incredible 1976 photo…
Nicknamed “The Cobra” (ostensibly for his speed, agility, and the deadliness of his bat and throwing arm, though some have claimed that other physical attributes were being referenced), Parker figures prominently in my 1970s baseball histories Big Hair & Plastic Grass and Stars & Strikes, and not just because he once wore a t-shirt custom-emblazoned with P-Funk lyrics into the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse in an attempt to inspire his slumping teammates to start “boppin” again. During the second half of the 1970s, Parker was one of the best and most dangerous players in MLB; he could hit for average and power, run like hell, play Gold Glove-worthy defense in the outfield, and he had a veritable cannon for a throwing arm — the man cut down 26 base runners in 1977 alone.
Parker was also one of the most quotable players of his era, once predicting that “When the leaves turn brown, I’ll be wearing the batting crown,” a boast he handily backed up in both 1977 and 1978, when he led the National League with .338 and .334 batting averages, respectively. When asked why he wore a gold Star of David pendant on the field, he famously replied, “My name is David, and I’m a star!” — and a star he most certainly was. Along with being voted into the All Star Game seven times, Parker was named the National League MVP for 1978 (when he also led the league with a .585 slugging percentage and 340 total bases), and he also nabbed the '79 All Star Game MVP award for cutting down Jim Rice at third and Brian Downing at home with two jaw-dropping throws.
Parker was an integral part of that year’s World Champion “We Are Family” Pirates, and went on to enjoy several great seasons with his hometown Cincinnati Reds (including 1985, when he came in second in that year’s NL MVP voting), as well as win a second World Series ring in 1989 with the Oakland A’s. He finally ran out of gas in 1991, retiring at the age of 40 after playing 19 years in the big leagues.
Dave Parker was one of my favorite players as a kid, not just because of his talent, humor and charisma, but because of the all-out way he played the game. (Hell, just watching him strike out with that long swing of his was exciting as hell!) 47 years ago yesterday, in fact, Parker broke his cheekbone in a home plate collision with John Stearns of the Mets. That injury caused him to miss two weeks of the season — but he returned to action wearing a customized hockey mask, something which made him look like a particularly fearsome cross between the Baseball Furies from The Warriors and Jason Voorhies from Friday the 13th, though of course his mask predated both of those films. I remember seeing pics of him like the one below (he soon switched to a football-style face guard for improved peripheral vision) at the time, and thinking that if I ever saw a six-foot-six, 235 pound guy barreling towards me on the base paths looking like this, I would simply drop the ball and run screaming for my life.
I imitated many players of the era while playing ball in Little League, after school and on weekend afternoons with my friends, or by myself in the backyard with my trusty Hank Aaron Pitchback. I would painstakingly ape the windups and mound mannerisms of Luis Tiant and Mark Fidrych, the funky batting stances of Mickey Rivers and Joe Morgan, etc. But I never attempted to model even a single aspect of my game on Parker’s. There was simply no point; “The Cobra” was clearly a superhero, and I was just a mere mortal.
Of course, Dave Parker was mortal, as three uncharacteristically unproductive seasons in the middle of his career — which were at least partly the result of his cocaine abuse — sadly demonstrated. (To get the straight dope on that period, as well as everything else about his life and playing days, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood, which Parker wrote with the help of my friend and colleague Dave Jordan. It’s a fantastic read, and one of my all-time favorite ballplayer autobiographies.)
That cocaine-fueled mid-career slump was often cited as the primary reason that Dave Parker was kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame for so long. As I wrote back in December, when Parker was finally elected for induction, I find HOF arguments incredibly tiresome, and and a big part of my distaste for the “institution” stems from many worthy players being denied their place in the shrine by voters with personal axes to grind. Like the late, great Dick Allen — who will be belatedly inducted this summer along with Parker — “The Cobra” was a proud Black man whose proud Blackness rubbed a lot of uptight white sportswriters the wrong way, and whose personal struggles gave said writers a handy cudgel to wield against them at HOF voting time (“Bad attitude… drug user… squandered potential…” etc.), regardless of how well-respected they were by their teammates and how feared they were by their opponents.
Both Allen and Parker will receive long-overdue Cooperstown plaques this month, though sadly neither man lived long enough to take the stand and speak at their induction. I am very grateful, however, that Parker was still alive when the news of his election broke, and that he could experience the massive outpouring of love that followed — just as I am grateful that Lalo Schifrin lived long enough to see his music rediscovered by a whole new generation of fans, and to be recognized by the Academy for his incredible body of film soundtrack work. And I am likewise grateful that, as with all my other since-departed heroes, I got to exist at the same time (or at least near enough) that they were doing their best work.
Rest in funky peace, gentlemen. Your exits leave massive holes where my childhood once stood — but then again, my childhood was so much richer for your presence in it. Long may you bop.
I remember that Star of David necklace. I actually thought Parker was Jewish.
Dammit, *weekS*