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wondering why I skipped a week, I'll tell you why I skipped a week: I don't know why I skipped a week I just did.
Throat clearing
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Come on out
I'm planning to play a couple open mics this week.
Zog's is mostly a comedy open mic but there are always some musicians, and I always have fun there. I expect to play around 8:30.
The Common Market has quickly become a favorite of mine, and it would be even if it weren't in my neighborhood. It's where the video for this week's Song of the Newsletter was made.
Song of the Newsletter:
She Likes Baseball and Plays in a Band
I'm finally breaking the streak of old songs as Song of the Newsletter. This is the first one in a while that I didn't make up in The Smokejumpers days. This little seasonal number was finished just in time for me to play it out while the 2023 baseball season was going, which allowed me to use the in-season lyric:
She plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and violin
And knows who leads the league in runs batted in
When it's not baseball season, that second line is "led the league."
It's all in the details. Whatever "it" is. The video includes all of the lyrics — you can sing along
with King!
So, finally, a song that doesn't come from the '90s. But I can't tell a lie. It has its roots in the '80s. I wasn't joking about this in 2012:
She Likes Baseball and Plays in a Band was already about a quarter century old when I tweeted that, but it was only a title. I was never able to come up with a song to go with that title. This is similar to what happened with Birthplace of the Blues, which
was the song of the newsletter a few weeks ago.
The title was inspired by indie rock legend Barbara Manning, though I can't emphasize this enough: The "she" in the song isn't her and the song isn't about her. The "she" of the song is fictional.
I met Barbara through a bandmate, who was either briefly dating her or they were just friends. She wasn't yet
the musician's musician who select hipsters in like 100 different countries know about.
We quickly discovered about each other that we both liked baseball. This was the mid-'80s and it Just Wasn't Done for any self-respecting punk rocker or indie music scenester to like sports. I'm guessing my bandmate clued her in to my fandom and we had a chat about it.
The next time the
band got together, my bandmate asked me what I thought of Barbara. I said "She likes baseball and plays in a band. What's not to like?" and, just as would happen a few years later with "them pretty boys are all the same but us ugly
guys got style," as soon as I said it I knew I had a song title.
This probably isn't really how it happened but it's how I remember it and I doubt you can prove me wrong. Take it away Carleton Young as Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:
I remember walking down the street with Barbara one day — we must have run into each other — and her telling me she'd long planned to do a concept album about baseball and she was going to call it Green but now she had to think of a new name because R.E.M. had just released an album called Green.
She did eventually release an album called One Perfect Green Blanket, and while it wasn't a concept album about baseball, it did have a painting of a baseball game as its cover. You can see the painting and listen to
the whole album on YouTube.
She later formed a band called SF Seals, named after the minor league baseball team that played in San Francisco before the Giants moved out from New York in 1958. I bought a T-shirt from her at a
show. It said SF Seals and had a tiger on it. I asked why there was a tiger on the shirt when they were the SF Seals. She said "Because we're fierce."
And later than that she put out a baseball concept EP, The Baseball Trilogy, which included a song about Dock
Ellis, who of course threw a no-hitter on acid.
But as great as she was and is — I promise that if you don't know who she is, you'll be rewarded by listening to pretty much anything you can find by her — I didn't want to make up a song about Barbara Manning, who, even though I've just written about 10 paragraphs about her, I didn't know very well.
I can confidently say that if we ran into each other at, oh let's say a playground in a city park where we each had taken a small child to play, we wouldn't recognize each other. I can say that because it happened about 15 years ago.
Somehow, as with Birthplace of the Blues, when I started percolating on the title after we moved to North Carolina, the song just presented itself. The words fell into place pretty
quickly once I hit on the idea that as the narrator I was, as the kids say, simping. I go to her shows, drive her around, and she brushes me off. I might be her "number 1 fan," but she's not bringing me along as she lives the high life in the luxury boxes.
It just needed time, I guess. The line "I'm her number 1 fanboy groupie stan" wasn't available to me for the first couple of decades after I had the idea. The Eminem song the word
stan came from was released in 2000.
I have a new single dropping April
11. It'll be the Song of the Newsletter that week.
In the meantime, it would help me a lot if you would follow me on Spotify. If you have a Spotify account, even a free one, just click the "follow" button. It
won't cost you anything and not much will happen but when the single drops you'll know about it. And then it would also help me a lot if you clicked on it and listened to it. Hopefully you'll like it and listen to it some more and tell your friends!
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