Posts Tagged ‘John Fogerty’

Soundtrack Saturday: “Bull Durham”

“I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.” —Walt Whitman

Bull Durham

With the All-Star Game right around the corner, I suggested to Kelly Stitzel that she feature Bull Durham for this week’s Soundtrack Saturday. I was shocked — shocked, I tell ya! — to find out she’s never seen writer-director Ron Shelton’s 1988 summer hit, one of the best sports movies of all time, if not the best movie about baseball. It’s also one of the finest romantic comedies of the past 25 years.

First-time director Shelton drew from his own experiences as a minor-league ball player for Bull Durham’s screenplay, and he was blessed with a stellar cast that brought his richly drawn characters to life. It’s a movie full of smart dialogue and character-based comedy that celebrates the lunacy, hijinks, and joy of America’s two favorite pastimes — baseball and sex.

Susan Sarandon, radiant as ever, flew on her own dime from Italy to audition and win the role of Annie Savoy, a part-time teacher in Durham, North Carolina. Annie dedicates each summer of her life to tutoring a player on the Durham Bulls, the local minor-league team, that she believes has the best potential to get a call up to the majors. However, Annie isn’t interested in improving the players’ reading and writing. And she isn’t a coach, although she knows as much about baseball as any manager. No, she’s more of a spiritual and sexual adviser: “You know how to make love, then you’ll know how to pitch.” She reads Walt Whitman to her lover-players and puts on Edith Piaf records in the hopes of making them well-rounded human beings and therefore better ball players. At the top of the film she chooses as her new student Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, the Bulls’ latest gifted pitcher, who has a million-dollar arm but a five-cent head on his shoulders.

The role of Nuke went to Tim Robbins in a career-breakthrough performance. Shelton had to fight to get Robbins cast in the part; up to that point he’d been in Howard the Duck, an infamous flop, and mostly blink-and-you-missed-him bit parts (raise your hand if you recall him in Top Gun). In addition to his lack of experience onscreen, executives at Orion Pictures felt that a woman as classy as Sarandon would never fall for a guy like Robbins. Luckily, Shelton prevailed, and the two actors not only worked wonderfully on the set but fell in love and remain a devoted couple to this day. Shows you how smart those movie execs can be.

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The Popdose Interview: Doug Clifford

doug04[1]When you talk about classic rhythm sections, you probably think about John Bonham and John Paul Jones or Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. But Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, drummer and bass player, respectively, for Creedence Clearwater Revival, were responsible for recording some of the most driving and potent rhythm tracks ever laid down on tape. Clifford was a very simple drummer, but had a feel that perfectly complemented the songs of John Fogerty. For years, “Cosmo,” as he was affectionately known to friends, backed the guitarist/singer on a number of hits including “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and a host of others. But egos and politics came into the picture and a band that had sold millions of records, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, appeared at Woodstock, and developed a sound that would live on for decades, was broken apart.

For years, Doug Clifford has toured as part of Creedence Clearwater Revisited, a group that performs all the CCR songs in a type of greatest hits package. Stu Cook is on bass, of course, and the group is rounded out by Fogerty soundalike John Tristao on vocals, Steve Gunner on keyboards and guitars, and Tal Morris on lead guitar. The songs sound uncannily like the originals, driven in huge part by the presence of the original CCR rhythm section.

When you play all of these Creedence songs on tour, what feelings to they bring back? Are they good memories? Bad memories?

Well, it wouldn’t be bad memories, or otherwise I wouldn’t be out there flogging it, because traveling is not easy these days and you’ve got to have something to look forward to. The songs are great; they always have been. Anything that happened in between and after the fact really doesn’t matter to me — and certainly not when I’m playing the songs. (more…)

Basement Songs: John Fogerty, “Centerfield”

basementsongs

fogerty1The other night I let Sophie stay up past her bedtime to listen to the last inning of the game between the Red Sox and Indians. One of the things I love about the Internet is the ability to listen to every Indians game with the Cleveland radio play-by-play announcers making the calls — it’s really kept me in touch with my hometown. Ironically, baseball was not a huge part of childhood in northeast Ohio; during the ’80s, there was little to root for when the Indians took the field. Oh, each year there was a glimmer of hope for the home team that lasted until the end of April, by which time the Tribe was usually in the basement of their division. In addition to the woes of the Indians, baseball was just never a presence in our house, which is strange, because if you ask my dad about the ’48 and ’54 championship Indians teams, he can rattle off players and some of their accomplishments. The radio was always tuned to music in our house, though, and I found televised games a bore. I took in the occasional game, but the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a dungeon: cold, damp and cavernous. It wasn’t a lot of fun to sit in the stands.

The only Indians game I recall vividly occurred in the mid ’80s. It was actually a doubleheader, and my cousin Dave and I rode the rapid transit downtown, to take in both games and then hear Crosby, Stills and Nash give a full-length concert afterward. It was a perfect day: Sun shining; women roaming around in bikini tops; hippies singing out of tune at the top of their lungs; and the Tribe won both games. It was unbelievable. Dave and I returned home around 11 PM and man, was my dad pissed. Turned out he didn’t realize it was a doubleheader and a rock concert. I think he was just worried.

I credit the movies for stirring my interest in baseball. I cried my eyes out each time I saw Gary Cooper gave the Lou Gehrig farewell speech in The Pride of the Yankees; I cheered each time I watched Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs shatter the stadium lights in The Natural. However, it was the release of Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham in 1988 that made me appreciate the nature of the game. I don’t believe any other baseball film has ever captured the essence of life on the field and off as well as Bull Durham — plus, Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and the late Trey Wilson are a dream cast. Almost a year later, David S. Ward’s comedy about the hapless Cleveland Indians, Major League, hit theaters. The film, starring Tom Berenger, Rene Russo, Charlie Sheen and the incomparable Bob Uecker, is a love letter to the city of Cleveland, a town with a self-confidence problem ever since the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969. While both films are very funny, they are also hopeful, which is what I love about the game. One day, your team can lose by 10 runs and look like complete incompetents; the next night, those same players can be in sync and look like champions. (more…)

Bottom Feeders: The Ass End of the ’80s, Part 32

I know I said I’d be quitting the intros for a while, but I had to put this all into perspective. I hadn’t thought about the scope of this series since I first agreed to do it, but the other night it kind of hit me and put me into shock.

This is post #32. Usually I get about 20 songs in each post. Which means over the course of this series so far I’ve posted somewhere around 640 songs. 640! That’s a good 50-disc box set there.

Then it hit me that we’re only on the letter F. Take out letters like X and Z and we’re still only about a quarter of the way through the entire series at this point. Again, this is the 32nd week; at this pace we’re looking at 120-plus weeks, total. So by the end we’re talking two years and a few months and probably around 2,500 songs. But the good news is that I still enjoy putting each week’s post together even after eight months of them. Whew.

Well, here’s another disc and a half’s worth of the eventual ultimate Bottom Feeders box set, as we continue looking at songs that charted from 41 to 100 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1980s.

Fleetwood Mac
“Sisters of the Moon” — 1980, #86 (download)
“Fireflies” — 1981, #60 (download)
“Family Man” — 1988, #90 (download)
“As Long as You Follow” — 1988, #43 (download)

“Sisters of the Moon” was the last of the four singles released in the U.S. off of Tusk (1979). Someone needs to introduce Kanye West to this one. The beat seems right up his alley for a sample.

“Fireflies” is from Fleetwood Mac Live (1980), written by Stevie Nicks and one of the three tracks recorded in Santa Monica for friends of the band.

“As Long as You Follow” is the only one of the four tracks here that’s still heard on the radio today. It was one of the two new songs on their Greatest Hits album (1988), which is widely thought to be the last album released on eight-track.

I know Lindsey Buckingham is a Popdose favorite, so I’ll let you guys talk about the Buckingham-penned “Family Man,” from 1987’s Tango in the Night, in the comments section.

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Hall of Fame Week: Don Everly, John Fogerty, and “Balls”

Sometime in 1985, a new label-wide policy was instituted regarding all new signings. There were to be none. Nada. The staff was called into a departmental meeting to receive the news, which, to my mind, might as well have been notice that the oxygen supply to the building was being abruptly cut off. Success at the major label level involves constant evolution. Like the care and feeding of a miniature bonsai tree, sculpting, shaping, and pruning the roster is a delicate and subtle business that eventually yields strong roots and fine blossoms. To withhold basic nutrients is to doom the entire undertaking to a slow and withering death, and not one I cared to be a party to.

But this new edict, however strange it seems, actually led me straight to my next signing.

That morning I had gone through the previous day’s mail, sorting promising looking demos into one stack, and depositing the rest in the trash. Exactly what a “promising demo” looks like is anyone’s guess, and tossing the others is not flattering behavior for an A&R man, but the company also had one of those “no unsolicited tapes” policies so I suppose any route out of the building for these offerings was more or less the correct one.

On this particular day I received a twelve-inch vinyl record in a white sleeve with a picture of three large bowling balls in triangular formation. These bowling balls bore the inscriptions “Steve,” “Bob&,” “Rich.” I took one look, declared the item preposterous, and threw it away. Two hours later, fuming from the meeting which ended all further A&R activity, I returned to my office and declared out loud to no one in particular, “Well, if I’m going to waste my time, I might as well waste it on this!” With that, I fished Steve, Bob, & Rich out of the wastebasket and slapped in onto the turntable. I cranked the stereo’s volume way up, figuring to disturb just about everybody within earshot with this complete rubbish. What emerged from the speakers, however, was not the misguided and amateurish attempt at immortality that I had imagined but rather an incredible piece of writing and performance called “Let My People Go-Go” (download). Even the track’s count off, not “1-2-3-4″ but rather “Father, Son, and Holy Cow!” had me going wild. The lyrics were sublime:

Moses went up to the mountain high
To find out from God, “Why did you make us? Why?”
Secret words in a secret room…
He said, “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!

What a hoot! Still, there was a moratorium to be observed, so I simply made a cassette copy of the record and threw it in the bottom of my tape bag to enjoy again at my leisure. (more…)