Ramblin' with Roger

This Will Be The Last Time

I tend not to be the jealous kind. We all have our different experiences that enrich our lives.

Still, there’s a woman in my office that I’m at least mildly jealous of. She got to see the Beatles LIVE. She got tickets through a local Catholic church group, and went with her friend, with their mothers as chaperones, on a bus to Atlantic City on August 30, 1964. Check those ticket prices!

From Jackie DeShannon’s website:
BEATLES FIRST AMERICAN TOUR (August 19 – September 20, 1964)

This was the first real Beatles concert tour of America. Consisting of 32 shows in 34 days, The Beatles wound up breaking attendance records as they appeared at major arenas throughout the U.S. and Canada. On the bill with The Beatles was the Bill Black Combo, the Righteous Brothers (backed by The Exciters), and Jackie DeShannon.

The Beatles song list for this 1964 tour:
Twist and Shout**
You Can’t Do That
All My Loving
She Loves You**
Things We Said Today
Roll Over Beethoven
Can’t Buy Me Love
If I Fell
I Want To Hold Your Hand
Boys
A Hard Day’s Night
Long Tall Sally
(**-For some shows, The Beatles would open with I Saw Her Standing There, delete She Loves You, and close with Twist And Shout).

August 30: Convention Hall Atlantic City, New Jersey: Three days after the Democratic National Convention was held here, The Beatles played one concert here. Over 19,000 Beatles fans attended the concert which started at 8:30 p.m. After the show, the Beatles left the hall in a laundry truck, as leaving by limousine would have been impossible.

Sure, the Beatles were far away and difficult to hear over the screams, but still…

What put me in mind about that is the fact that TODAY is the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ gig at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which turned out to be their last concert performance. The opening act line-up included The Remains, Bobby Hebb, The Cyrkle and The Ronettes, without Ronnie Spector. The set list was:
Rock and Roll Music
She’s A Woman
If I Needed Someone
Day Tripper
Baby’s In Black
I Feel Fine
Yesterday
I Wanna Be Your Man
Nowhere Man
Paperback Writer
Long Tall Sally

And, of course, after that concert, they were pretty much finished as musicians.

The Fantasy Company

I recently spent $12.95 for Comics Journal #277, the 30th anniversary issue, initially because an old FantaCo bud, Tom the Mayor (not to be confused with Tom, the owner) sent me this e-mail:
I do not know if you keep in touch with the comic biz, but in the latest issue of “The Comics Journal”, they have an article on the black and white comics boom of the 1980’s, and they show the cover to “Sold Out” #1, where a character named Roger Green is hunted down by the color police. Poor fellow is probably still in the color concentration camp. Wasn’t Steve McQueen in the “Great Escape”, based on that Green Fellow?

Gee, I co-wrote that story, yet I don’t remember THAT aspect of the plot, but it HAS been 20 years. The artist, BTW, was John Hebert, not John Herbert, as indicated in TCJ.

As it turns out, there are other very interesting things in the magazine, including a piece on the late direct comics distribution guru Phil Seuling that will be VERY useful in the future.

Then, last week, I had breakfast one morning with Mitch Cohn. I worked with Mitch at FantaCo from 1980 until 1983 – he started there a year earlier – and later worked for him at his Midnight Comics store in Albany in the early 1990s. For FantaCo, Mitch edited the excellent Deja Vu and Gates of Eden as well as the Chronicles magazines dealing with Daredevil and the Avengers. (I did the ones for X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.)

Mitch is a middle school English teacher in New York City, and he looks remarkable similar to the guy I last saw about a decade ago. He was in town visiting folks, including our old FantaCo colleague Rocco. Right after I saw Mitch, I happened to walk past 21 Central Avenue, which had been a music store, a couple other things, then some sort of religious center after FantaCo, but had been most recently boarded up. The boards were down, the door was open, and it appears that some new retailer was cleaning up the place in anticipation of yet another venture.

So, it’s been a FantaCo kind of week. FantaCo was started on August 28, 1978, and closed 20 years later, but given the fact that I worked there for 8.5 years, it remains in the DNA.

Please Come to Boston

This post was inspired by GP’s Boston glasses.

My now ex, Zoe, and I were in Boston on Flag Day, 1991, when, pretty much at the last minute, around 5:30 p.m., we decided to go to Fenway Park and see if we could score a couple tickets to the game starting about an hour and a half later. We held little hope, for the game featured the pitching duel of Red Sox’s ace Roger Clemens (whatever happened to him?) and the California Angels’ one-handed wonder Jim Abbott. Surprisingly, not only did we get seats, we got GREAT seats right behind home plate. I’m thinking that someone must have turned in tickets at the last moment.

What I remember about the game is that California was ahead early, Clemens spent too much time keeping Dave Winfield on first base, and that the Red Sox came back to win. The box score of the game is here.

Afterwards, we went to the Howard Johnson nearby, where we stayed. We decided to go down to the hotel bar to get a couple drinks. It was fairly busy, with several people trying to gain the bartender’s attention. At some point, he acknowledged that he saw me and stuck up his index finger in the “just a minute” fashion. But what eventually became apparent is that people who came after me were being served, but I was not. And people who came after them were being served, and I, standing in the front, still was not, only being given “just a minute”. The “interesting” thing about this that only he, I and someone carefully observing the scene would be aware of what was going on. Also, he never didn’t serve me, he only hadn’t “gotten around” to serving me. Any claim of discrimination would have been very difficult to prove.

What I felt was a deep volcano of rage, the kind of furor that if I had had a baseball bat, I would have been sorely tempted to smash all of the glasses hanging over the bar. Of course, I really wouldn’t because 1)I could have hurt an innocent, and 2)I would have been arrested, a black man gone crazy for “no reason”. Or I could have started yelling, demanding service, but that, too, would have likely make me look as though I had wanted preferential treatment.

Zoe and I left the bar, and I complained to the night manager of the hotel, who recommended I write to the day manager. I did write him, and also my credit card company, but never got any satisfaction.

I’ve been to Boston subsequently, had a good time, didn’t have any difficulties. But GP, the Boston form of racism, indeed, the Northern form of racism, tends to be far more subtle, more clever than in there was in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, from what I can gather from folks I know in the South, folks with racist attitudes have adopted the more subtle forms of discrimination from their Northern brethren (and sisterern). So, GP, keep that gray filter on those rose-colored glasses.
***
Jim Abbott, motivational speaker.

The Lydster, Part 29 Girlfriends

From the pictures I’ve shown, you’d think Lydia was a bit of a loner. Untrue.

One of the benefits of three trips to Binghamton is that Lydia got to see her friend Kay, twice there and actually once in Albany. Their mothers are great friends, in each other’s weddings (as was I), and the girls are only a couple months apart, so I think the mothers really wanted the girls to bond, and it appears that they have.

Of course, that only goes so far. When we were at our house, I was reading stories to them when Kay got on my lap. Lydia sulked. So I had to put Kay down, put Lydia on one lap, THEN put Kay on the other. And occasionally, there were sharing issues. But they seemto really adore one another.

I’ve never been sure: is this a hug or a chokehold?

Lydia with three of her five-year-old cousins at the Olin family reunion.

This picture in response to those who claim that I only show my daughter smiling. (But the picture at the top happened soon after this one.)

Don’t mess with this child.

Love you, daughter of mine.
***
Before we had Lydia, the Kix cereal registered trademark used to bug me. But now, “Kid-tested, Mother-approved” is starting to really offend. It maintains the stereotype of the caring mother and absent father. Feh.

Another Pleasant Valley weekend, featuring Ms. Julie Hembeck

The first weekend in August, Carol, Lydia and I trekked down to Pleasant Valley, NY, not far from Poughkeepsie (where one picks one’s toes, but that’s for another day). What was interesting about this particular edition of this annual gathering was that there were far more children than usual. Generally, there are one or two, including Lydia, but this time there were over a half dozen. Which made the fact that the adults shooed the kids off the badmitton court even more humorous. They wanted to play a “serious” game. The three-on-three match was competitive, and for reasons not even known to me, I started doing a play-by-play commentary: “Ooh, Klonfas lost that one in the sun”, stuff like that. And it’s not like a network announcer in a booth some distance away; these players were as little as 10 feet away.

The next day, we went to visit Fred, Lynn and Julie. Well, we tried. How does Dutchess County have two such oddly named streets, with one a Road and the other a Drive? Anyway we eventually got there, talked, and ate and swam. Fred and I blathered about obscure television shows and even more obscure music. He played for me a great cover of the entire Revolver album that he had gotten from MOJO magazine, performed by various artists that were unfamiliar to me.

Self-portrait of Julie, stolen from her father’s blog of August 25, 2005

Julie goes through music phases; currently, she is listening to Elton John and especially David Bowie. The most notable thing about Julie’s language is her use of language. She has a near-constant use of “emo”, as in “that’s so emo.” Emo I know what that is, but don’t quite understand it in context. I managed to have totally missed the term 420, but Julie assured me it, at least with her and her friends, does not refer to drugs, even though the original meaning did, but rather something that’s sort of funny. I do recognize that the language is fluid.
Julie did a very good caricature of me, which I should scan one of these days.
Anyway, it’s Julie’s 16th birthday today. Happy birthday; it was great to see you. Oh, and your parents, too. Glad we didn’t get to see the bat.
***
I was playing The Best of Elvis Costello this week, in honor of his 52nd birthday today, and I was thinking:
*I wonder how Diana Krall, one of my wife’s favorite singers, is feeling these days?
*Some days, the last line in the chorus of Oliver’s Army reflects how I feel about work.
*Lots of his early songs could be done in different styles and would work. For a long time, I have thought (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding could/should be done as a doowop song. Really.