Magic Carpet Ride
Celebrating two years of Jagged Time Lapse
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
Today marks two years since the official start of this Substack (or Sleestak, as I’ve taken to calling it on social media in an attempt to dodge Meta’s algorithmic obstacles), and thus I wanted to take some time to express my profound gratitude to everyone who has supported JTL during this stretch — whether it’s been as a Founding Member (big shoutout to Irwin Epstein, Carole Roth, Bill Darnell, Jessie Ewing, Jason Walker and Jeff Garlin!), a paid subscriber from the get-go, a recent free subscriber, or some who has signed on (free or paid) at any point in between.
“Music has impacted, shaped and enriched my life more than any other art form,” I wrote in my first official JTL post, which went up on August 31, 2022. “It has given me a kaleidoscopic lens through which to see the world. It has been a crucial bonding agent in most of my important friendships and relationships. It’s my livelihood, my obsession, my medicine, my bottomless well of joy and discovery, my comfort blanket in times of darkness and despair.”
Words I still stand by to this day — and in fact, at the time when I wrote those sentences, I was sunk into the deepest pit of despair I’d ever known. My marriage of eight years was breaking up, and I was preparing to leave North Carolina — a place I’d moved to four years earlier, full of optimism and excitement after my return to Chicago from LA hadn’t panned out at all like I’d hoped — for another attempted re-start, this time in the far more expensive realms of New York’s Hudson Valley. The impending move would at least put me in a beautiful setting near my mom and within a two-hour bus ride of my dad, but offered no real guarantees beyond that.
The rest of my life was a mess, as well. I was fending off bill collectors left and right, I had no real job prospects up in New York, and most of my regular freelance outlets were shutting down, drying up, or paying far less well than they once did. And to add further insult to injury, my plans to bid farewell to the South with one final Sherman-like swing through Georgia to see some friends had just been poleaxed by my first bout of Covid. I was absolutely convinced at this point that the best years of my life were firmly behind me, and that all that remained for me was to try and achieve some semblance of peace and healing while playing out the string.
During my final months in North Carolina, my nightly ritual — and just about the only thing that could soothe my soul and salve my heartache, at least temporarily — was to put on my vintage pair of early-seventies Panasonic headphones, slap a favorite album on the turntable, lie back on my living room rug, close my eyes, and get completely lost in the music.
At some point, it occurred to me that none of my other long-term interests were affording me anywhere near the same degree of comfort: Not books or films, which I couldn’t concentrate on for long enough to fully absorb, and certainly not Major League Baseball, which had undergone so many crass, abhorrent, money-driven changes in recent years that any resemblance to the game I’d lovingly chronicled in my books Big Hair & Plastic Grass, Stars & Strikes and The Captain and Me seemed perversely coincidental at best. If anything was going to help me climb out of the hole I’d found myself in, it would be the magic of music — and not just absorbing it, but also writing about it.
For years, I’d been toying with the idea of creating an online repository where I could stockpile some of my favorite stories and adventures from my three decades as a professional music journalist, and re-run some of the most mind-boggling interviews I’ve done over the years. I also wanted to further explore the innate “Time Machine” aspects of music — as I wrote in my JTL manifesto, I was endlessly fascinated by the way “a song or album has the power to instantly transport me to the time and place in which it was originally recorded, or to the time and place that it initially blew my mind, or to an indelible moment in my life that it memorably soundtracked.”
Along those lines, I’d long been thinking about writing a musical memoir of my adolescence, one that paid tribute to the records and artists who soundtracked (and in some ways saved my life during) those turbulent years between ages 12 and 15. But after initial attempts to interest agents and publishers in that project fell flat, I’d seriously lost momentum, and I figured launching a new, music-related blog might give me the kick in the ass I needed to rev the memoir up again. And while Covid thankfully didn’t put me in the hospital, it did give me way too much time to think about the fact that I didn’t really have a whole lotta time left in the grand scheme of things — and that if I wanted to put all these stories and memories that were in my head out there for others to read, I had best get crackin’.
And lo, Jagged Time Lapse was born…
Since officially launching JTL two years ago, I have been continually gratified — and, a few times, quite literally kept afloat — by the support and good vibes of my subscribers. I’m proud to say that there are now over two thousand of you, and enough of you have shelled out for paid subscriptions to turn this Substack into a viable “freelance outlet” for me, which is both an amazing and wonderfully helpful development in an age when the number of quality (not to mention decent-paying) outlets for music journalism are steadily shrinking. Also, unlike with certain magazines I write for, I can actually count on the money from JTL paid subscriptions to arrive in a timely manner.
There is sweet freedom in that, as well as in the fact that I can write here about whatever music happens to be inspiring me at the moment — whether it’s the “disco years” of Easy Listening maestro Percy Faith, or my favorite Aerosmith songs, or memories of my run-ins with the late, great, and agonizingly complex Arthur Lee, or my soft spot for Scottish rock from the eighties and beyond— without having to convince an editor of the topic’s validity, contemporary relevance or click-worthiness. And as your support, comments, shares and messages continue to demonstrate, there are plenty of folks who are totally down to ride on this magic carpet with me.
(I’ll just add here that if you dig what any writer does — or any musician, artist or other creative type who brightens your day with their work — the best way to help them keep doing what they’re doing in the current landscape is to support them directly.)
While I knew from the start that penning regular Jagged Time Lapse posts would give me something positive to focus on during a particularly dark stretch, doing it also produced some other unexpectedly sunny results. For one thing, CROSSED CHANNELS, the Substack-based podcast that I’ve been co-hosting for nine months now with my fellow scribe
, has been a total joy to record and has also forged a delightful friendship in the process. For another, JTL has put me back in touch with a number of dear pals and acquaintances from various earlier chapters of my life, who have now become subscribers. Having a regular forum (and an engaged audience) for my musical enthusiasms also put me in the proper state of mind to take on what became the most hilarious and joy-filled book project I’ve ever been a part of — Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, which will be coming out this October 29 in the US (and three weeks earlier in the UK) via Omnibus Press.
I’m still picking up the pieces of my life in some ways, and (as I learned the hard way last week) I can still be knocked off my stride when painful reminders of the last few years come unexpectedly a-calling. But at the same time, I’m honestly feeling happier than ever these days, which is something I never could/would have predicted two years ago.
Living somewhere astonishingly beautiful hasn’t hurt, of course, and neither has falling in love — something I definitely thought I’d never do again — with a truly wonderful person. But having come through those rough times with the help and encouragement of so many righteous folks, I also now feel a pervasive sense of contentment and cosmic acceptance that’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I’m so grateful that I’m still here, and grateful that you are here with me, too.
There a lot of things in the works for Year Three of Jagged Time Lapse, including a recurring video feature that I’m still playing around with but hope to launch in the next month or two. I hope you’ll continue to stick around for it all — and, if you’re a free subscriber, that you’ll be motivated at some point to upgrade your subscription to paid status and take advantage of everything that JTL has to offer.
But for now, let me show my appreciation for your continued support by making my first-ever “paid” post — about my encounters with legendary soul man Bobby Womack — free for all to read, though let me also recommend that you not read it while eating…
And speaking of soul jams, let me close this post with a spin of one of my all-time favorite funky 45s: Billy Paul’s 1971 cover of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride”. I remember pulling this single out of the dollar bin at L.A.’s Rockaway Records around 1997, right when I was just starting to get into collecting old soul 45s. I had never heard Paul’s version before that day (nor, at the time, had I heard much of his work at all beyond “Me and Mrs. Jones” and “Am I Black Enough For You?”), but I figured it had to be worth taking a chance on for a mere buck.
It was and then some, as Paul blew my mind by taking the reds-and-Ripple haze of Steppenwolf’s original and transforming it into a sweetly propulsive soul-jazz mantra, complete with a flute break that could have escaped from either a seventies cop show or a Jethro Tull album. Let your soul take you away, indeed… Bless the late, great Billy Paul, and bless you all, too!
Sweet words, my friend. Though our trajectories have been very different, they've both involved a low patch in recent years, and a re-shift in living set-up that brought us together as friends. I love doing Crossed Channels with you, and I love that you've found love. Occasionally, when I am putting in yet more hours on an impending Substack post, I remember you helped talk me into making that commitment in the first place, and before I curse you for it (good-naturedly of course), I look at the community we are all building up around ourselves here, see the advances you've made in readership and paid support, and know that this is a good place to be. And though I have not lived in as much of the US as you, I've certainly traveled it - and beyond - and you know what? The Hudson Valley is about as lovely as this nation gets. Here's to more Crossed Channels, a successful book for you, and at least another 50 great posts over the next year.
Why do I subscribe to JTL? (I ask myself unprompted …)
My gateway to Dan’s writing was hearing about BH&PG around the time of its publication. It hit the sweet spot of my discovery of baseball in my early tweens in the mid-late seventies. I’m not a fan letter writer … but I wrote one (well, okay, an email) to Dan, who kindly replied and pointed me in the direction of his blog promoting the book. Oooooh! More stuff! And I kept coming back … loving and then lamenting the debut and later discontinuation of the rock and baseball themed column in Rolling Stone (ooooh … he writes about music, too!), being the first kid on my block to pick up Stars & Strikes … and there are very few writers who could have motivated this lifelong Sawx fan to purchase a book about not one but two Yankees. (And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but please let’s just keep that our little secret lest I get exiled from Sawx Nation.).
Oh but the music! What makes JTL worth the price of admission are the new discoveries … even if said *new* discoveries are decades old. (My favorite new album of 2023? Television’s Marquee Moon … somehow I missed it over the course of forty five years. But that came through a different Substack … back to the topic at hand …). I also missed the boat on the MC5. JTL to the rescue. Did my life really need the knowledge that Billy Paul did an awesome cover of Magic Carpet Ride? Why, yes it did. JTL to the rescue! And of course the Arthur Lee interviews … and Lemmy … and Eddie … and Grease … and all the rest.
I was a little concerned when I subscribed that I was committing to a guy I thought of as a baseball writer to talk about music (and clearly I had that exactly backwards) … but the new discoveries and great stories are just what a lot of Saturdays have needed.
Here’s to a great Year Three!