Al Kooper and Stephen Stills – "Season of the Witch" (1968)

When I look over my shoulder,

What do you think I see?

Some other cat looking over

His shoulder at me

[NOTE: Most eleven-minute-long rock records could be improved by cutting them in half.  But the Al Kooper-Stephen Stills cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” – which clocks in at 11:07 – is a Goldilocks track: it’s not too long, it’s not too short, it’s just right . . . which is one of the reasons I’m including it in this year’s class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.  I originally wrote about “Season of the Witch” on October 29, 2010 . . . and then again (inadvertently) on February 8 of the following year.  What follows is an edited version of my original 2010 post.]

*     *     *     *     *

“Season of the Witch,” which was written and originally recorded by Donovan Leitch  in 1966, is a perfect song for paranoiacs.  Donovan had good reason to be paranoid – just a few months before his Sunshine Superman album was released, he became the first big British rock star to be busted for marijuana possession.  

Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger covered the song in 1967.  (I only recently became familiar with their version, which is very good.)  

Vanilla Fudge's version of the song was released as a single in 1968 and made it to #65 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.  

The legendary supergroup, the Masked Marauders, included it on their one and only LP in 1969.  (You’ve never heard of the Masked Marauders?  Really?)

Others to record the song included Sam Gopal, Pesky Gee!, Suck, Hole, Luna, Dr. John, Joan Jett, Richard Thompson (his version is on the “Crossing Jordan” soundtrack album), and . . . Lou Rawls? 

Al Kooper (circa 1968)

But the version of “Season of the Witch” I remember best is the Al Kooper-Stephen Stills version that was included on the 1968 Super Session album. 

*     *     *     *     *

Super Session was Al Kooper’s brainchild.  

Kooper was sort of a rock music Renaissance man – he did everything and did everything well.  

When he was 14, he was playing guitar for the band that recorded “Short Shorts.”  

When he was 16, he co-wrote “This Diamond Ring” for Gary Lewis & the Playboys.  (I believe this puts Kooper within two degrees of Leon Russell, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a one-degree connection somewhere down the road.)  

And when he was 21, Kooper famously talked his way into playing the organ on Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone.”

A few years later, Kooper formed Blood, Sweat & Tears, but left after their first album, Child Is Father to the Man (which is an absolutely brilliant piece of work).  

He discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd, and produced their first three albums.  He produced the first Tubes album.  He was the musical director for the mid-1980s Michael Mann television series, “Crime Story,” which starred one of my favorite character actors, Dennis Farina.  And this barely scratches the surface of Kooper's musical accomplishments.  

*     *     *     *     *

Super Session features Kooper and guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills, but Bloomfield and Stills never play together on the record.  (It's Bloomfield on side one, and Stills on side two.)   Here's the story behind that.

Kooper decided to do Super Session shortly after leaving Blood, Sweat & Tears.  He was working as an A&R man for Columbia Records at the time.  (A&R stands for "artists and repertoire" – in essence, Kooper was a talent scout).  Bloomfield was about to leave Electric Flag, so Kooper called to see if he was free to come down to the studio and jam.

Kooper booked two days of studio time and recruited keyboardist Barry Goldberg and bassist Harvey Brooks (both were old pals of Bloomfield's from the Electric Flag), along with session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh, who by coincidence had played drums on Donovan's recording of "Season of the Witch."  The first day, the group recorded mostly blues-based instrumental tracks.

When Kooper returned to the studio for a second day of recording, Bloomfield was nowhere to be found.  The desperate Kooper was able to reach Stephen Stills, who was in the process of leaving Buffalo Springfield and who agreed to drop by the studio and help out.

That day, Kooper's merry little band recorded mostly vocal tracks, including Bob Dylan's “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry” and a leisurely, eleven-minutes-and-seven-seconds long version of “Season of the Witch.”

The album, which eventually went gold, cost just $13,000 to make.  It was The Blair Witch Project of rock albums, and helped inspire a whole series of “supergroup” collaborations — including Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills & Nash.  

Kooper forgave Bloomfield for bailing out on Super Session, and the two of them made several concert appearances after the album was released.  A three-night gig at the Fillmore in the fall of 1968 was turned into a two-record album titled The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper.   (The cover of that album was a painting of Kooper and Bloomfield by . . . are you sitting down? . . . Norman Rockwell.)

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to the Kooper/Stills version of “Season of the Witch.”

Beatles – "I Am the Walrus" (1967)

I am he 

As you are he 

As you are me

And we are all together

[NOTE:  What follows is an edited version of the original 2 or 3 lines post featuring "I Am the Walrus," which appeared on September 14, 2014.  "I Am the Walrus" is the ultimate John Lennon song, while "Helter Skelter" is the ultimate Paul McCartney song – the difference between them is that it comes as no surprise that "I Am the Walrus" was a Lennon song, while it is shocking that McCartney wrote "Helter Skelter," which could not be less characteristic of his overall body of work.  In any event, both records are now in the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – which is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, Amen.]

*     *     *     *     *

Ever hear of a "Shepard scale"?  I didn't think so.

You've probably never heard of "Penrose stairs" either.

Penrose stairs

Click here to watch a video that features both a Shepard scale and a Penrose staircase.

Note now the ball keeps bouncing up the steps – never down.  And notice how the scale keeps ascending but never actually gets any higher.

The last 70 seconds or so of "I Am the Walrus" feature a Shepard scale, which has been called a "sonic barber's pole."  

Click here to watch a video that tells you everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about a Shepard scale (also known as a "Shepard tone").

There are Youtube recordings of Shepard scales that last for hours -- each note seemingly higher in pitch than the one before.  Click here for a TEN-HOUR-LONG recording of a rising Shepard tone.

(Who are the people who create such recordings and post them to Youtube?  Henry David Thoreau might have been thinking about them when he wrote in Walden of those men "who lead lives of quiet desperation.")

*     *     *     *     *

In 1980, John Lennon told Playboy magazine that the opening lines to today's featured song, "I Am the Walrus," were written during an acid trip.

Click here to read the entire interview.  (John Lennon was definitely so full of sh*t that his eyes were brown.  So was his charming wife, Yoko Ono.)

The very brown-eyed couple

One commentator speculates that the lines quoted above were inspired by these lines from the traditional British song, "Marching to Pretoria":

You sing with me

I'll sing with you

And so we will sing together

It's certainly possible that Lennon heard that song as a child, and that he remembered its lyrics when he sat down to write "I Am the Walrus."  But I would give most of the credit for the song's opening lines to the drugs Lennon was consuming in gynormous quantities in 1967.

*     *     *     *     *

Don't get me wrong.  I've always loved the lyrics to "I Am the Walrus," which is one of the songs that Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions used in his mashup, "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)," which was recently featured on 2 or 3 lines.  (You can click here to read about that mashup if you haven't already.)

Those lyrics make even less sense than most rock lyrics of that era.  They make even less sense than most of John Lennon's other lyrics, which is saying something. 

Lennon wrote a song about a walrus because he was a fan of Lewis Carroll's poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter," which is famous for these lines:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

      "To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings."

"The Walrus and the Carpenter"

Years later, Lennon had an epiphany: he realized that Carroll's poem was about the evils of capitalism.  (John Lennon was reportedly worth about $150 million at the time, so he knew all about the evils of capitalism.)

To me, ["The Walrus and the Carpenter"] was a beautiful poem.  It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system.  I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work.  Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy.  I thought, "Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.'"  But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?  "I am the carpenter . . . "

When John was right, he was right: "I Am the Carpenter" most definitely wouldn't have been the same.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to watch the official music video for "I Am the Walrus." 

Click on the link below to buy "I Am a Walrus" from Amazon:

Hollies – "King Midas in Reverse" (1967)

He's King Midas with a curse

He's King Midas in reverse

[The Hollies released a lot of great singles, but I think "King Midas in Reverse" is hands down the best of them.  Since it went nowhere on the Billboard "Hot 100," so I'm putting it in the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – not the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME. Here's a very lightly edited version of my original post about "King Midas in Reverse," which appeared on September 24, 2013.]

*     *     *     *     *

I'm not sure Graham Nash fully appreciates the implications of King Midas having a "golden touch."

"King Midas in Reverse" was released by the Hollies as a single in September 1967.  Like virtually all original Hollies songs, Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks, and Graham Nash all got writing credits.  But it was really written by Nash.

Graham Nash

The song barely cracked the top 20 in the UK, and peaked at #51 on the U.S. charts.  (That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that 12 of the 13 previous Hollies singles had made it into the top ten in the UK, and nine of those singles cracked the top five.)  The song's failure to sell better led indirectly to Graham Nash's leaving the Hollies.

Nash had pushed the other Hollies to record more ambitious music, but the ho-hum reaction of the public to "King Midas in Reverse" and the album it appeared on led Clarke and Hicks to insist on going back to more pop-type material.  When the rest of the band refused to record Nash's "Marrakesh Express," he packed up and moved to Los Angeles, where he hooked up with Stephen Stills and David Crosby.

*     *     *     *     *

The moral of the myth of King Midas is "Be careful what you ask for."  But a lot of people – including Graham Nash – seem to view King Midas's golden touch as a good thing when it was actually a terrible curse.

Midas, who ruled a kingdom in Asia Minor before the time of the Trojan War, was given his golden touch by Dionysius, the Greek god of the life force (i.e., the god of wine, sex, etc.).  When one of the satyrs who followed Dionysius got hammered and passed out in Midas's famous rose garden, the king treated him kindly, earning the gratitude of the god.

When Dionysius rewarded Midas by granting him a wish, Midas foolishly asked that everything he touch be turned into gold.

The first clue that this was not a wise decision came when Midas touched one of his beloved roses.  It was instantly transformed from a living thing of beauty into a lifeless, solid-gold rose – lifeless, although worth a pretty penny.

But when Midas's lunch turned into indigestible precious metal when he started to partake of it, he began to realize that he might have made a serious mistake.

The light bulb really went on over his head when he touched his beloved daughter, instantly turning her into a statue.

King Midas with his daughter

*     *     *     *     *

I was thinking about the practical implications of having a golden touch today.  Let's say you eat some bad Chinese food and have to run to the bathroom to do #2 – does the water in the toilet turn to solid gold when the you-know-what hits it?  That would be most inconvenient.

And what about having sex with Mrs. Midas?  You don't want to turn her to gold, obviously.  At first I was thinking King Midas could wear a condom to defeat the golden touch.  But the condom would turn to gold, and that would sort defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?

In any event, after turning his daughter into gold, a horrified Midas begged Dionysius to take his golden touch away.  The god took pity on the king, telling him to bathe himself in the Pactolus River.  The river washed away the golden touch, but the sands on the river bottom turned to gold and eventually washed down to Lydia.  According to the Greek historian, Herodotus, the Lydians invented gold coinage in the 7th century B.C.

Ancient Lydian gold coin

*     *     *     *     *

The man who is the subject of "King Midas in Reverse" is cursed because everything he touches turns to dust.  That's bad, of course, but Graham Nash is missing the point.  It's really no better when everything you touch turns to gold – you're cursed either way.  

By the way, there's another myth about King Midas.  Once upon a time, the half-man, half-goat god Pan – the god of forests and hunting and shepherd and their flocks – challenged Apollo to a music contest.  Pan played his pipes, and Apollo his lyre, and the mountain-god Tmolus judged Apollo the winner.

Midas, who was a devotee of Pan, questioned the fairness of Apollo's victory.  Apollo punished him for his lack of musical taste by giving him big donkey ears.  Midas concealed his ears under a big hat, but eventually had to go to the barber, who saw the donkey ears.

Statue of King Midas with donkey ears

The barber just had to share the secret with someone.  There was no TMZ back in those days, so he dug a hole, whispered the secret into the hole, and then filled it up with dirt.  The reeds that later grew on that spot whispered "Midas has donkey ears!" every time the wind blew, and Midas was so embarrassed when word got out that he moved away from his kingdom, never to be seen again.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "King Midas in Reverse."

Click below to buy the record from Amazon: 

Moby Grape – "Omaha" (1967)

Listen, my love

Get under the covers

Squeeze me real tight

All of your lovin'!

[The following post about Moby Grape's "Omaha" – a member of the 2022 class of the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE' ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – originally appeared on November 30, 2012.]

*     *     *     *     *

You remember the old grade school joke that asked "What's big and purple and lives in the ocean?"  The punchline was "Moby Grape."  And that's how this band got its name.

Jeff Tamarkin has been a pop music journalist for some 25 years.  In his book, Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane, he wrote this about Moby Grape:

The Grape's saga is one of squandered potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad luck, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever to emerge from San Francisco.  Moby Grape could have had it all, but they ended up with nothing, and less.  

In other words, if it wasn't for bad luck, Moby Grape wouldn't have had no luck at all (to quote "Born Under a Bad Sign").  

For example, the band appeared at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but their appearance was not included in the famous documentary movie about the festival because of legal squabbles.  (The Moby Grape footage filmed for the Monterey Pop movie was finally shown publicly in 2007.)

*     *     *     *     *

You may wonder why Tamarkin was commenting on Moby Grape in a book about the Jefferson Airplane.  For one thing, one of Moby Grape's guitarists was Skip Spence, who played drums on the Jefferson Airplane's first album. 

Spence formed Moby Grape at the behest of Matthew Katz, who had been the Airplane's first manager.  The members of that group had a falling out with Katz, and it's hard to explain why Spence decided that he should be Moby Grape's manager.

Matthew Katz in 1967

Katz paid Moby Grape's rent and living expenses when they were trying to the group off the ground.  In exchange, he added a provision to his management contract giving him ownership of the band's name.  

This turned out not to be such a good idea – the group's members litigated with Katz off and on until 2006, when a California appeals court brought the unhappy saga to an end by upholding a lower court's decision that the band owned the Moby Grape name and its songs and recordings.  (One of the band members told Jeff Tamarkin that he "wouldn't piss in [Katz's] face if his eyebrows were on fire.")

*     *     *     *     *

That court decision came far too late for Skip Spence, who had died of lung cancer in 1999, just two days before his 53rd birthday.

Spence, a charismatic and energetic performer who has been described as "one of psychedelic rock's brightest lights," wrote "Omaha" for Moby Grape's eponymous debut album.  

"Omaha" is two and a half minutes of country-folk-psychedelic pop perfection.  

Rolling Stone summed the song up as follows:

Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence compete in a three-way guitar battle for two and a quarter red-hot minutes, each of them charging at Spence's song from different angles, no one yielding to anyone else.

"Omaha" was the one of five singles that Columbia Records released simultaneously when the Moby Grape album was issued.  It was the only one to chart, but only made it to the #88 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100."

Moby Grape concert poster

Why did Columbia release five singles from the same album simultaneously?  Moby Grape's debut album was hyped like crazy, and maybe some brainiac at that record company decided that releasing five singles all at once would get lots of attention and capitalize on that hype.  

In reality, the release of five singles at the same time guaranteed that none of the five would get the kind of attention a pop record needs to thrive.  Moby Grape wasn't the Beatles, after all.

*     *     *     *     *

When the group went to New York to record its second album, Skip Spence fell in with a bad crowd.  (My mother always warned me about that, and I bet Skip's mother did the same.)

Under the influence of LSD, he took a fire axe to the hotel-room door of Don Stevenson, who was one of his bandmates – he apparently thought he needed to kill Stevenson to save him.

Skip and Don Stevenson
before the axe attack

Spence ended up in the notorious Manhattan jail, the Tombs.  From there, he was transferred to Bellevue, New York City's famous public psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. 

While he was in Bellevue, Spence wrote a bunch of songs.  When he was released in 1969, he headed to Nashville and recorded a solo album titled Oar.  

When I call Oar a "solo" album, I mean that literally – Spence did everything on the record himself.  (Apparently he thought he was doing a demo record, but the producer decided to release it as is.) 

One critic described Oar as "[c]ombining the ramblings of a man on the brink of mental collapse with some real moments of flippancy and laughter – a genuinely strange record."

Another critic had this to say about the album: "The majority of the sounds on this long-player remain teetering near the precipice of sanity."

According to one source, Oar was the lowest-selling album in Columbia Records history when it was deleted from the company's catalogue a year later. 

Spence moved back to California, where he lived for another 30 years, but there was no there there for most of that time.

The other band members helped support him after his breakdown.  Spence consumed mass quantities of heroin and cocaine, and was once involuntarily committed to a California mental hospital.  Another one of the Grape's guitarists, Peter Lewis, later described what was Spence was like during those years:

Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn't been all there for years, because he'd been into heroin all that time.  In fact, he actually OD'ed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe.  All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water.  

Now he was snortin' big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him.  We couldn't have him around because he'd be pacing the room, describing axe murders.  So we got him a little place of his own.  He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke, too.  

He'd never washed his dishes, and he'd try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him.  He was real bad.  One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz.  Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women's ward.

Skip Spence -- nearing the end

Much of Spence's later life was spent in institutions or transient accommodations or simply homeless.  Spence's fate is even sadder than that of Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, whose drug use led to his being institutionalized and given electroshock treatment.  

Erickson eventually found doctors who could help him, and he is now performing and recording again.  But Spence never turned things around.  He didn't make a record in the 30 years that he lived following the release of Oar.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to "Omaha."

Click here to see Moby Grape perform "Omaha" on The Mike Douglas Show – Douglas introduced them as the "Moby Grapes."

Click on the link below to buy "Omaha" from Amazon:

Bob Dylan – "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965)

Twenty years of schooling

And they put you on the day shift

[Strictly speaking, this record is not eligible for the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.  Membership in that hall of fame is limited to records that were not hit singles.  “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was technically a top-40 record because it was listed at #39 on the Billboard “Hot 100” for exactly one week.  That’s hardly what anyone would consider to be a hit single, of course – and since it clearly doesn’t belong in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, I’m including it in the album tracks hall of fame instead.  It’s just too good a song to disqualify on the basis of a technicality.  What follows is an edited version of my original October 5, 2021, post about “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which includes Bob Dylan’s most often quoted lines” “You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows.”]

*     *     *     *     *

“Like a Rolling Stone” is the best record Bob Dylan ever recorded – it’s arguably the best record made in the sixties – but “Subterranean Homesick Blues” has the best lyrics Dylan ever wrote.  

That’s saying something, because Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his song lyrics.  That was a ridiculous decision, of course – song lyrics need to be sung along with their accompanying music, not put on a printed page and read like poetry – but there’s no doubt Dylan wrote some amazing lyrics.

Of course, Dylan’s lyrics would have been even better if he had run them by me before finalizing them – they could have used a bit of editing.

*     *     *     *     *

To wit: consider these lines from “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” which are spoken to the singer of the song by a shady young woman named “Ruthie”:

Your debutante knows what you need

But I know what you want

Dylan is clearly saying that Ruthie is offering the singer something more satisfying than his prissy little debutante girlfriend if offering.

(Not the same Ruthie.)

But instead of saying that the debutante know what he needs while Ruthie knows what he wants, shouldn’t it be the other way around?  

I’m guessing that the debutante may know what the singer wants – or at least what he thinks he wants, and has told her he wants – but she can’t provide what he really needs deep down inside.  After all, he may not know himself what he really needs.

Ruthie can fulfill his needs because she has a much deeper understanding of him than he has of himself – and a much deeper understanding of him than the debutante.

So shouldn’t the line read as follows?

Your debutante knows what you want

But I know what you need

*     *     *     *     *

Today’s featured song contains another example of a Dylan lyric gone awry.

Think about the lines quoted at the beginning of this post:

Twenty years of schooling

And they put you on the day shift 

Dylan is making the point that the world is F.U.B.A.R. – after all, it makes no sense for someone to be sent to school for twenty years and then given a factory job.

But Dylan should have used night shift in those lyrics – not day shift.  

The day shift is almost always preferable to the night shift.  Working the night shift will play havoc with your body clock, making it difficult for to sleep well.  And it will likely also play havoc with your relationships because most people work during the day, not at night.

It’s bad enough to go to school for twenty years and end up working the day shift at a factory, but it adds insult to injury to end up working the night shift – that’s a real kick in the pants, especially for someone with that much edumacation.

*     *     *     *     *

I think Bob Dylan’s a little overrated – he did write a lot of bad songs, after all – but the genius of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” can’t be denied.  The lyrics are insane in the membrane, and I love the irregularity of the lines – the record’s herky-jerky line structure is something that differentiates it from every other record of that era.

Click here to listen to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which was released in 1965 on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s fifth studio album.

Click below to buy the record from Amazon:

Led Zeppelin – "Good Times Bad Times" (1969)

Good times, bad times

You know I’ve had my share

I’m pretty sure the New York Yankees were in a foul mood when they flew out of St. Louis last Sunday after dropping three close games to the Cardinals.

I’m absolutely sure that I was in just as foul a mood after watching those games.

*     *     *     *     *

In 1978, Bucky Dent – a woeful hitter who was batting ninth that day – shocked the world by hitting a three-run home run that gave the Yankees the lead in their one-game playoff with the Boston Red Sox after both teams had finished the regular season tied for first place in the American League’s Eastern Division.

The Yankees held on to that lead, completing their unprecedented comeback from what was once a 14-game deficit.  Ever since, the fans of the choking-dog Red Sox have referred to the Yankee hero as “Bucky F*cking Dent.”

Last Sunday I witnessed a shocking home run by a major-league shortstop whose hitting was even more pitiful than Dent’s.  

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out 

That home run – by the man I will hereinafter think of as “Paul F*cking DeJong” – was the absolute nadir of my trip to St. Louis last weekend to see the Yankees-Cardinals series.  It may have been the absolute nadir of my entire life. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Yankees and Cardinals played three games last weekend.   The Friday and Saturday games were pretty bad.  But Sunday’s game was absolutely horrific.

I’m prone to hyperbole in my 2 or 3 lines posts – to put in another way, I lie a lot – but “absolutely horrific” is no exaggeration.

For one thing, there was the weather.  I checked the temperature about an hour after the game began, and it was 95 degrees – but thanks to the humidity and lack of a breeze, my weather app said that it felt like a mind-boggling 108 degrees.:

I was sitting a few rows behind the first-base dugout, which meant that I was completely exposed to the sun for most of the game.  By the 3rd inning, every single square inch of my shorts and shirt was wet with perspiration – you would have thought I had gotten caught in a sudden summer shower sans umbrella if you had seen me.

*     *     *     *     *

Every one of the three Yankees-Cardinals confrontations last weekend was a sellout – the attendance figures for each game easily exceeded the stadium’s official seating capacity.

In fact, the Saturday night game broke the stadium’s all-time attendance mark.  The new Busch Stadium opened in 2006, and has hosted an All-Star Game and several dozen postseason games – including ten World Series games – but last Saturday night’s contest attracted more fans than any of those games.  (Such is the magnetic attraction exerted by the greatest professional sports franchise the world has ever seen.)

The Sunday game drew almost as many spectators, which ensured that there would be l-o-n-g lines at the concession stands and bathrooms – and also guaranteed that there would be no vacant seats next to you.  

Sure enough, my section was stuffed with people – most of whom were not only sweaty and smelly, but also packed enough extra pounds that I had even less elbow room than I had had on my sold-out Southwest Airlines flight from Washington, DC to St. Louis last Friday.

*     *     *     *     *

Other than Paul F*cking DeJong’s home run and the beastly weather conditions, the worst thing about the Sunday game was that it lasted four hours and 25 minutes – making it the longest nine-inning MLB game of the 1600-plus contests played so far this year.   

If the Yankees had won, I wouldn't be complaining about the heat and the interminable length of the contest.  Hell, if the Bombers had fallen behind by a sufficiently large margin that I could have abandoned the game early without worrying about missing something, I would have been OK.

But my boys hung close throughout the excruciatingly tedious game, never falling behind by more than a run or two until the very end, when DeJong broke open the game with a three-run roundtripper in the bottom of the 8th.

I suppose I should be grateful to him.  In the top of the 9th inning, Yankee leadoff hitter D. J. LeMahieu knocked one out of the park.  If DeJong had not homered, LeMahieu’s blast would have tied the game, and we would likely have been subjected to an hour or two of extra-inning torture.

*     *     *     *     *

Serious baseball fans will know that Paul F*cking DeJong has been the Cardinals’ primary shortstop since 2017.

He was an above-average hitter in 2017 and 2018, an average hitter in 2019, and a below-average hitter in 2020 and 2021.  

But DeJong really stunk up the joint this season.  His batting average as of May 8 was .130, which I’m guessing was the worst batting average of any everyday player in either league.  Not surprisingly, the Cardinals exiled him to their Memphis minor-league team at that point, and kept him there for most of May, June, and July.  

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out again

He was only 3-for-16 with seven strikeouts in his first week back with the Redbirds.  But then the Yankees – who had the best record in baseball at the time – came to St. Louis.  Suddenly Paul F*cking DeJong became Babe F*cking Ruth.

I was at the first game of the Yankees-Cardinals series last Friday.  After striking out in his first two at-bats, DeJong came to the plate in the 8th inning to face the Yankees previously unhittable All-Star closer, Clay Holmes, with two outs and two men on base and the New Yorkers clinging to a 3-2 lead.  

DeJong swung late on the first pitch he saw from Holmes, slicing a seeing-eye liner to right field that landed barely fair.  Suddenly, the Cardinals led 4-3 – which was how the game ended.

That double raised DeJong’s batting average from .137 to a gaudy .146.  He went 0-for-3 on Saturday, but on Sunday, he walked twice and hit a double before crushing the three-run home run in the penultimate inning and turning a 9-8 nail biter into a 12-8 laugher.

If I had had a fifth of gin and a bottle of Ambien handy, I might have shuffled myself off this mortal coil for once and for all at that point.  Fortunately for all you fans of 2 or 3 lines – who wouldn’t know what to do without my wildly popular little blog – I didn’t have access to said gin and Ambien.

*     *     *     *     *

The extraordinarily slow pace of the Sunday game was largely due to the fact that no fewer than 11 pitchers pitched in it – most of them entering in the middle of an inning, which necessitated leisurely mound conferences, long saunters in from the bullpen, and lots of warmup pitches.

Those 11 pitchers threw a mind-boggling total of 380 pitches — of which 144 were balls.  (Watch the box scores for the next few weeks, and let me know when you see a nine-inning  game with 144 or more balls.  I have a feeling I won’t be hearing from you.)

The Cardinals’ starting pitcher, a wily (and whiny) veteran named Adam Wainwright, lasted only four innings.  He threw 111 pitches in those four innings – enough pitches to get a really good pitcher through an entire game – and yielded eight hits, four walks, and six runs.  It was a terrible performance . . . but the Yankees starter was even worse. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Yankees outhit their opponents 16 to 11 on Sunday, but left 12 men on.  Despite their inefficiency with runners on base, they might still have won if not for the home plate umpire, who had no clue what was a ball and what was a strike.  

Click here to read an article from USA Today that says that the umpire missed 20 calls in the first six innings alone – the worst of which was calling a ball that was over four inches off the plate a strike.  (If he had called it what it was – a ball – it would have resulted in a bases-loaded walk instead of a strikeout.  So it clearly cost the Yankees at least one run, and might have cost them more.)

According to UmpScorecards.com, that umpire’s inaccuracy cost the Yankees 3.01 runs – and the Cardinals won by three.  Imagine that . . .

*     *     *     *     *

Getting swept by the Cardinals was particularly upsetting because they aren’t a very good team.

Sure, they will likely make it to the playoffs this year – largely because they play in the weakest division in baseball.  (Three of the four other teams in their division – the Pirates, Reds, and Cubs – are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th worst teams in the entire National League.  Each is 20 games or more below .500.)

The Cardinals have two outstanding hitters, Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt.  And their rookie DH, Brendan Donovan, is pretty good at getting on base – although he has no power at all.  (He’s hit only two homers in 81 games.)

But the rest of their hitters range from pretty bad to absolutely terrible.  The batting averages of the remaining players in the Sunday lineup were .256, .244, .230, .225, .208, and .157 – and none of them had more than seven home runs.  (Yankees slugger Aaron Judge had twice as many home runs single-handedly as those six players plus Donovan had combined.)

Aaron Judge is a very large man

“If the Yankees are so good and the Cardinals are so bad, how did the Cardinals sweep the series?” you ask.

Baseball teams are usually quite streaky – they get hot for a while, and then they go cold.  

A wise man once pointed out that a team is never as good as it looks during a winning streak, and never as bad as it looks during a losing streak.  The Yankees weren’t as good as they looked in the first half of the year, when they were winning at a pace that would have broken records if they had been able to maintain it for a full season.  And they’re not as bad as they looked over the past two weeks – including last weekend’s series in St. Louis.

It didn’t help that the Yankee lineup was missing two of their most dangerous batsmen, Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo, who had combined for 51 homers and 127 RBIs so far this season.  But even without those two bats, the New York hitters were actually superior to their opponents – the sweep was more the result of bad luck than underperformance.  (The Yankees outhit the Cardinals 28 to 21 over the weekend.)

*     *     *     *     *

Enough whining about the games.  Let me shift gears and talk about the non-baseball aspects of my St. Louis trip for a bit.

I’ve never flown anywhere just to watch a baseball game before, and I wouldn’t have flown to St. Louis just to see the Yankees take on the Cardinals.  

But when my sister (who is a huge Cardinals fan) and I were together in June for my late mother’s memorial service, she mentioned that the Yankees were coming to St. Louis to play the Redbirds.  

That doesn’t happen often.  (Because the two teams play in different leagues, the Yankees come to St. Louis only once every six years.)  So I said – less than half seriously – that maybe we should meet in St. Louis for the weekend and see the games together.  She thought that was a great idea. 

I’m fortunate to have the time and the means to make a trip like this, but it’s not the kind of thing I usually do – I’m not really a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy.

Also, there have been a lot of horror stories about flight delays and cancellations recently.  It would have been awful if we had bought tickets to these games – which weren’t cheap – and then not be able to attend all of them because one of our flights got delayed or cancelled.

I was still on the fence a couple of weeks before the games were scheduled to be played.  But my two best high-school friends, who I hadn’t seen in years, both live in St. Louis.  I called them, and both were amenable to a get-together if I did decide to make the trip.  

I made plane reservations the next day.

*     *     *     *     *

One of my friends invited all of us to come to his home Saturday afternoon for lunch.  I figured we’d have time for a nice visit before my sister and I had to leave for the Saturday night game.  (We didn’t purchase tickets to that game in advance, figuring we could either get them online at the last minute, or just watch the game on the oversize TV monitors at Ballpark Village, a large outdoor restaurant and entertainment complex adjacent to the stadium.)

We ended up hanging around with my friends so long that we almost missed the game entirely.  We made it to a nearby sports bar just in time to watch the last couple of innings.  (The Yankees lost 1-0, so we hadn’t missed much.)

Paul F*cking DeJong striking out yet again

Why didn't we leave earlier as we had planned?  This will sound odd, but it was almost as if there was some force field preventing us from leaving my friend’s house that evening.  Even after we finally got up from his dining-room table and headed outside to our cars, we all ended up standing around in the driveway and talking for another half an hour or longer.

I often have trouble ending a conversation.  I sometimes keep one going single-handedly – or, more accurately, single-mouthedly.  

But it wasn’t just me doing the talking that evening – my friends also seemed reluctant for the gathering to end.  We kept dredging up names from our high school days, and retelling stories we had told each other multiple times in the past.

I have a lot of friends from high school, from law school, from my various jobs, and from other contexts that I have neglected to keep in regular touch with.  When I do finally get together with these people, it’s always a delight.  So why do I repeatedly let five years, or ten years, or even longer pass before belatedly making contact, and then try to catch up for years of lost time in the course of a single lunch or dinner?

It's partly because I’m a creature of inertia.  I follow my daily routine – which is mostly a solitary one – and all too rarely remember to yank myself out of my rut by the scruff of my neck.

*     *     *     *     *

What’s true of friends is truer of family, of course.

My sister (and only sibling) is seven years younger, so she was just a kid when I left home to go to college.  Since then, we’ve never lived in the same city – currently I live in the Washington, DC area, while her home is in Texas.

Our visits over the years were mostly limited to a few days around Christmas, trips to one-off events (like weddings), or brief get-togethers at our parents’ home.  Now that both of our parents have died, we need to work a little harder to make time to see each other. 

When I drove my sister to the St. Louis airport after that horrible Sunday game for her flight back to Texas, I was half-thinking to myself that I wished I had just stayed home rather than spending all that time and money just to watch my team lose three ugly games.

But then my sister told me how much she had enjoyed our weekend.  “How long has it been since you and I have done something together – just the two of us?” she asked.

I was touched by that – as I was touched by how complimentary she was of me as a big brother when we were talking with my friends.

*     *     *     *     *

On the drive back to my hotel after dropping her off for her flight, I realized that the outcome of the games really didn’t matter – what counted was spending time with two of my oldest and closest friends and my only sibling.

I really had no business being in a foul mood that Sunday evening.  My sister saw the big picture much more clearly – she had the right attitude.

Of course, it's easy to have the right attitude when your team hadn’t just lost three games to PAUL F*CKING DEJONG.

*     *     *     *     *

I may live to regret some of my selections for the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HALLS OF FAME, but I will never regret choosing “Good Times Bad Times.”  (Or “MacArthur Park.”)

Led Zeppelin couldn’t have picked a better song as the first track of their first album – everything about it is perfect.  As I said when I wrote about it a year ago,

I can’t imagine how “Good Times Bad Times” could have been improved – Robert Plant’s vocals are great, John Paul Jones’s bass guitar is great, Jimmy Page’s lead guitar (which was fed through a Leslie speaker) is great, and John Bonham’s drumming is especially great.  

 

Click here to listen to “Good Times Bad Times.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: