Labor Pains

            Two different sports leagues are working on putting together a new collective bargaining agreement between the owners and the players. The NFL is in the midst of a long lockout as negotiations drag on, while the NBA may do the same thing Friday if a deal or an extension cannot be reached. While these items seem similar, the two leagues are actually in completely different situations.

First, the Good News

We’ll start with the NFL. I have always been interested in the business side of sports almost as much as the action on the field. I’m one of the few fascinated by bargaining agreements, sponsorship deals and stories of teams finding alternate revenue streams. Seriously, I’m into that. So I read with great interest the reports stating the sides are working closer to a deal.

            If you’re bored with the details, skip the rest of this paragraph and move on to the next one, I won’t be offended. Reports say the current negotiations show a 52/48 split in favor of the owners, teams having to bring payroll within 10% of the salary cap, Thursday night games all season coming in two years, a longer season possible but not mandated, a rookie wage scale, unrestricted free agency after four full seasons and more money going to the pension fund for retired players (which is much needed as many older players suffer severe health problems directly caused by their time in football). Things are getting tense because the deal will have to be wrapped up by July 15 or so to avoid missing games, starting with preseason contests. I feel this is little but a big game of chicken being played by the owners and the NFL Players Association, and a deal will get done before any games are lost.

            I feel confident of this for a very simple reason: everyone is making money. The league is profitable. The owners are raking it in. The players are well paid. No one is suffering here. Both sides just wanted a little more of the windfall. Since everyone is making money, losing games would cost them that profitability. The owners may be blowhards, but they aren’t going to risk losing the parking, concession and souvenir revenue they bring in on game days. Sure they wanted more, but they will settle. The players want their checks too. Since football players don’t make as much as NBA or Major League Baseball players (and thus can’t hold out as long without seriously crimping their lifestyle), nor are their contracts as long, nor are they guaranteed, there will be an agreement. 

            I have one other thought regarding this lockout. Since the offseason has been free of the constant off-season camps, minicamps, micro-minicamps, mini-cooper camps and perhaps a shortened preseason training camp, I think this has the potential to be the best regular season in a long time. My logic? Training camp was designed and implemented back when football players didn’t make a whole lot of money. Most of them, with the exception of a few stars, had regular jobs in the offseason. That seems strange now but it was true all the way up to the 1970s, actually. Training camp was needed for players to work themselves back into shape.

This is no longer remotely needed. Players keep themselves in excellent shape in the offseason for the most part and have the money to work with personal trainers and strength coaches. The offseason camps are more of an exercise in the teams controlling the players’ lives than anything else. They worry about injuries, but then drive their players in contact drills when they are months and months away from playing a meaningful game.

A season where the players are not coming into camp with bruises, muscle pulls and sprains from contact drills in the spring and summer will see those players come back strong, fit and most importantly fresh. I think it would lead to a more exciting, athletic year with fewer injuries since everyone isn’t banged up by the time first coin is tossed.

          

  On the Other Hand…

Unfortunately, I am not nearly as enthusiastic about the NBA’s chances. The list of issues is shorter than the NFL’s, but it’s a whopper anyway. This league has a broken economic model. Despite a spectacularly good season with TV ratings soaring, teams are losing money. Players currently get 57% of the league’s revenue. Plus the NBA currently has a ceiling on how much a player can earn in a year and a salary cap on team payroll. Since there is a limit on how much teams can pay their stars each year, the teams end up signing them to longer-term contracts to make up for it. The obvious danger to this is a player who does not live up to his billing then becomes an albatross, weighing his team down by having to pay a guaranteed contract to a player for many years when he isn’t worth the money. That contract also makes him virtually untradeable until the final year of the deal.

            I certainly don’t blame the players for wanting longer-term contracts. They play a physical sport that tears up joints and backs. They want security. This is obviously the owners’ fault for signing these deals, although many felt they had to in order to stay competitive because no one could convince star players to come to their team for a three-year deal for instance when other teams were offering the same money for six years.  

            Actually, the stars’ contracts aren’t even the real problem. In the effort to build winning teams, owners overestimated mediocre players, convincing themselves the player’s talents would compliment a bigger star and be that “last piece of the puzzle” teams dream of finding. It’s those contracts that are really hurting teams. So what do the owners want? Simple. They want a sharp reduction in the 57% cut for the players and they want to shorten the length of guaranteed contracts.

             In brief, they want to pay the players a lot less money and for a lot shorter time. Good luck getting them to agree to that. So why will this one drag out while the NFL’s wont? Because of the critical point made that the owners are in fact losing money. Overall they will lose less money giving up the game day revenue and not paying out the salaries than they will lose if they have the season and pay the players. That’s how out of whack the NBA has allowed its situation to become.

            The players obviously do not want to give up long, guaranteed contracts for a sport where you could tear a knee at any second to finish your career. You can’t blame them for that. You also can’t blame the owners for taking the road of losing less money. It’s a difficult stand-off, and one that could drag on and on, and perhaps even eat up the entire 2011-2012 season. It happened in hockey, and it could happen here.  

            My prediction is the players will cave, but only after at least half and perhaps all of next season is lost. The big contracts will allow players to hold out longer, but again, not having that paycheck will grind away at their solidarity. These guys are not going to like a lockout putting a dent in their lifestyles, especially if it goes on for six months or more. The union will try to keep them together, saying it is for the good of not only them but the players who will come in the future. That will keep the players together for a while, but not forever. When your boss is better off financially by not paying you, it’s you that has to bend. I only hope it happens before this wonderfully talent-rich league loses its momentum.

My First Dream Fading Further Away

            An article caught my attention this past week as I surfed the interwebs for a while before heading in to work. The story talked of over sixty more layoffs at the Indianapolis Star newspaper, part of hundreds more layoffs from the paper’s parent company, Gannett. It was yet another step in the slow but inevitable death of the daily newspaper.    It made me think about a little kid with an old typewriter, and how things can turn around.         

            I received my first typewriter when I was in grade school. To this day it was the best gift I have ever been given. I knew early on I loved to write and the adults in my life from parents to my grandmother encouraged me. I had my ream of paper and the typewriter set on a box of comic books in my room. I’d sit on the floor in front of the box like it was a desk and with my index fingers I’d hammer out a newspaper that covered the events in our house. It came and went. As a kid that young, I’d do it for a while then lose interest and get into something else for a while, like playing baseball or riding bikes, but I’d always come back to it. Once I even tried to make it like a magazine, cutting up pictures to run with stories and dabbling in paginating.

            I enjoyed writing fiction too (my first full story was about a boy with a talking fish, written in second grade and yes - mom still has it), my dream job was actually to work for a newspaper. Well, it was more specific than that. I wanted to cover the Cubs for the Chicago Tribune, a job currently handled very capably by Paul Sullivan. It seemed perfect to me, go to the games, interview the players, managers and coaches and write what happened as a season unfolds. With that in mind I went to Indiana University, studied journalism and wrote sports for the Daily Student.

            I took a job in Jacksonville, Illinois and set about my plan of climbing the journalistic ladder from small paper, to medium-sized paper to the big-time. But funny things happen to plans like that.

            First, it turned out I couldn’t stand small-town living. Jacksonville had a population of 18,000, far smaller than even South Bend, where I’d grown up. While South Bend isn’t a metropolis, it was certainly a far cry some a town with one real main drag surrounded by seemingly endless farmland. There were only two sit-down restaurants in Jacksonville and one was a hole-in-the-wall diner designed for passing truckers. There was one video store, and two gas stations. The claustrophobia wore on me quickly. Also, I missed my girlfriend terribly, and she lived in Indianapolis. Plus, while I knew only a select few really make much money in journalism, I was struggling to pay the bills.

            With all that in mind, I decided to move to Indianapolis. It was a proper city, my girlfriend lived there so I wasn’t so lonely, and I found a job that paid a lot better than the Jacksonville Journal Courier. I figured I’d work some savings up and get back into writing in a year or two. But funny things happen to plans like that.

            As those years went on, I began to see from the outside how the daily newspaper as an institution was beginning to falter. First came consolidation. Papers began merging or shutting down. Very few cities have more than one daily anymore and most of them are the largest makets such as Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. In Indianapolis, the Star and the News were combined, and some jobs were lost. My chances of landing a writing job again got a little smaller.

            Then the internet as well as 24-hour cable TV news kept growing and growing, and newspapers took way too long to take any real notice. They continued to do the same things they always did, even though the climate had completely changed. No one really got their news from the paper anymore. Almost anything in the papers had already been reported on TV or on the internet. Papers were becoming extraneous, or even irrelevant, yet they did little to change with the times.

            Sadly, once they did change, they went the wrong direction. There are certain things a newspaper can do that the internet and 24-hour cable news can’t.

      First, it can be more local than the web. Internet sites are broad, and few have the resources or the interest to cover local events well.

Newspapers can be more in-depth. The internet and cable news are like an ocean that’s only two-feet deep. It is enormous. There are thousands of sites that claim to report the news, but virtually none do more than scream out a loud headline with a few paragraphs of shallow detail. They could care less if a local politician is getting a kickback, but they'll happily embed a link showing the latest drunken brawl at an IHOP. Cable news outlets only give short bursts to any one story and are more interested in sound bites and propaganda-style rhetoric than going in depth. They can cover a lot, but they don’t cover it very deeply.

Unfortunately, newspapers almost immediately tried to become more like the internet rather than focusing on the things that set itself apart. They cut back on local coverage and disbanded investigative reporting teams. They began cluttering the pages with more celebrity gossip and mistook it for news coverage (this bombed too as they were still unable to understand what they put in was hopelessly outdated by the time the paper was printed and distributed).

Circulation dropped, advertising fell away and newspapers started making cuts. My guess has been for years that print newspapers will slowly die off, although skeletal versions of them will putter along online or on new technologies such as tablet devices. I see nothing that’s making me question that.

 As for me, I found other avenues for writing as I realized that going back to newspapers would be like hopping aboard the Titanic. Sadly, there are hundreds now who have to find other avenues as well. Maybe they had typewriters as grade-schoolers too. Maybe they wanted to write about their favorite team, or be the next Woodward and Bernstein to shine the light on things those in power selfishly wanted kept in the dark. Others were working in circulation, sales, editing, or doing the hundreds of other jobs needed to keep a paper going. They had career ambitions, retirement plans, insurance for their families.

But funny things happen to plans like that.  

(Not) Keeping Us In Suspense

            NETFLIX UPDATE: My uphill struggle with my Netflix queue continued through this week. I was close to knocking a couple of things off on a quiet Sunday, but I ended up getting sidetracked watching the first season of “Deadliest Warrior,” show that aired on Spike TV that used a computer program and weapons tests to see who would win in a fight between a samurai and a viking, or a spartan and a ninja (sue me, I’m a guy). So the queue count is currently 380 movies now.

            SUSPENSE: Recently the film “Super 8” was released in theatres. It’s directed by J.J. Abrams and stars Kyle Chandler (the outstanding star of “Friday Night Lights”) among others, but what caught my eye about this movie was its trailer. It was different than most in that it contained an air of mystery. We know from the trailer that strange things are happening to a small town, and it has to do with a nearby train wreck that seems to have unleashed…well…something that had been locked up in one of the train cars. That description is vague because I’m only going by what the trailer tells us. We don’t know what is causing these strange events, nor does it ever show what was inside the train car.            Within the movie industry, this trailer was criticized because it didn’t show enough. Other studios’ advertising departments said: You have to give tell the audience more. You have to give a glimpse of what’s in the train. How else can people decide whether or not they want to see it? That struck me as odd. But it led me to think about a problem in Hollywood movies, and that is the studios’ fading ability to understand one of the most important things to making a good film: the concept of suspense.

The “Super 8” trailer leads the viewer through a series of questions: What are these strange events? What is making them happen? What’s in the train car, which seems to be fighting mightily to get out? All of these make me curious to see the movie. Isn’t that what a trailer is supposed to do? Shouldn’t it make you want to see the movie?

Strange as it sounds, the “Super 8” trailer actually bucks a trend in this area. Trailers frequently spell out every single plot point in a movie, including the ending. Romantic comedies in particular will walk you through the entire story, start to finish. They include the “meet-cute”moment, the initial attraction, the break up and often end with the couple kissing in some picturesque setting, a shot usually taken from the ending of the movie (the trailer for the wretched “Charlie St. Cloud” was particularly egregious in this). In other words, you’ve seen the two-minute Cliff’s Notes version of the film right there already as you get settled into your seat to watch the feature. While romantic comedies spell it all out for you most often, other genres including action and horror movies to the same thing, showing a clip of almost every explosion or attack in the film.

I guess the Hollywood studios just assume we’re too stupid or too lazy to see an interesting movie. They believe we have to be spoon fed each plot point or we’ll be too confused to bother to see it (in fact if we the public were as dumb as they seem to think we are, we’d never find our way to the theatre in the first place). What they are missing is that the unknown, or the suspense of wondering what will happen next, is the single best part of seeing a good movie.

One of the best things about Steven Spielberg’s classic “Jaws” is that you don’t get a really good look at the shark for a while. It lets your imagination run away with you, building tension the whole time.  “The Ring” kept you guessing about what happened when your seven days was up after watching the cursed videotape. We knew it was something awful, but the mystery wasn’t revealed until the end, and it led to a thrilling scene. The movie forced us to wait, and stew in our own imagination, and the results were exhilarating.

“The Blair Witch Project” took that a step even further. In the movie about three young filmmakers lost in the woods being terrorized by something they didn’t understand, they never showed the antagonist(s) at all. Throughout the movie you were straining to see anything in the darkness, but you never could. That movie understood a fundamental point: The sound you hear in the woods at night is almost always scarier than what makes the sound. Why? Because while that sound may have come from a squirrel walking over a dry twig, in your mind it’s the boogeyman laying in wait for you, so they let you imagine what this boogeyman looked like. It’s also why psychological thrillers are far scarier than the seen-it-a-thousand-times slasher movies they churn out constantly, or even worse the insulting torture-porn movies like “Hostel.” They miss the entire point. It’s the wondering what will happen that’s scary, not the death scene itself.

Here’s the perfect example: “Silence of the Lambs” was far better than its sequel, “Hannibal” because in the first movie you had all these ideas in your head of how frightening it would be to have that deranged man on the loose again. Those thoughts bounced through your head as the super-intelligent cannibal serial killer escaped from prison and disappeared into a crowd. In the second, he was on the loose and killing people, and it simply wasn’t as good because it wasn’t as interesting as anything you had imagined. It became a run-of-the-mill slasher flick, and Hannibal Lecter, one of the most frightening characters in the movies, became just another movie monster that jumped out from behind things at people with a knife. That’s why the first is a classic and the second is a bomb.

There is hope of course. As it turns out, the rival ad departments were wrong as the trailers didn’t hurt “Super 8” at all, and the movie had a big opening weekend. I’m rooting for the film and I plan on seeing it soon. I hope the studios start copying that formula, realizing we don’t want everything spoon-fed to us. Using your brain – and your imagination – along with the filmmaker makes for a much better experience.

NOTE: I didn’t write about movie spoilers in this, or movies with huge plot twists and how the current environment effects them, although I considered it. I’m glad I didn’t though, as it turns out Chuck Klosterman wrote a solid piece about that topic that appeared on the Grantland.com site the exact day I wrote this post. Go figure. You can read Klosterman's essay here.

Savoring the Season

            I haven’t written about sports in a while on this blog, mostly because there have been other things on my mind, partly because I try not to think about the Cubs too much. Today however I can’t ignore the end of the 2010-2011 NBA season, which happened last night when the Dallas Mavericks raised the trophy. It was an exciting end to a season that took my love of the game to a whole new level. It was simply the best season I can remember.

            Back in October, I decided to spring for the NBA’s online package so I could catch the Chicago Bulls games. I had a feeling the Bulls, built around its core of Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and Luol Deng, would be a force this season. I liked the off-season signings and looked forward to seeing how things developed. Meanwhile, the buzz was all about LeBron James and Chris Bosh leaving Cleveland and Toronto respectively to join the Miami Heat. Everyone seemed to hate the Heat for these moves, although I’m really not sure why (after all, in baseball Cliff Lee joined an already-loaded Phillies staff in the offseason and received almost no criticism whatsoever), I guess it was because people were under the impression James was leaving his hometown. He wasn’t, by the way. James isn’t from Cleveland, he’s from Akron. There is a big difference. Still, the NBA had its biggest villains since the Detroit Bad Boys teams. Boston and Orlando also seemed strong in the East, while the West looked like a showdown was looming between the Lakers, Mavericks, Spurs and the up and coming Thunder.

            I bought the NBA package so I could watch the Bulls games online, but as the season progressed some wonderful things started happening. There were more really good teams and usual. It wasn’t long before you realized there were a full eight teams, four in each conference, that had an honest shot at winning the title without it being termed an huge upset. Eight teams that were legit contenders? That’s rare in any professional sport, yet that’s what was happening. The matchups were tremendous. Any combination of Boston, Orlando, Chicago, Miami, L.A., San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Dallas was exciting, and it seemed there was a game among them every night to watch. Atlanta and Memphis were scrappy and fun to watch too, and even the trainwreck that was the New York Knicks piqued the fans’ interest. Denver traded away its biggest star and got better, making a late-season run. In Utah the longest-tenured coach in American pro sports quit and the team jettisoned its star guard, shockingly bottoming out after almost two decades of being in the mix. Phil Jackson, winner of more championships than anyone else, suffered his first playoff sweep in his retirement season.

            Even bad teams were intriguing. Blake Griffin’s dunks became youtube sensations and Stephon Curry’s shooting for the Warriors lit up highlight reels, while Kevin Love became a rebounding force not seen in years in Minnesota. We entered an absolute golden age of point guards. Rose (eventually the league’s MVP), Rajon Rondo, Deron Williams, John Wall and Russell Westbrook were all young players who could take the ball upcourt and make things happen, making the NBA a wide-open game the likes of which hasn’t been seen in years. I believe there are more good young players in the league now than at any time in the past.

Plus, Steve Nash and Jason Kidd, the elder statesmen of the league’s point guards still showed moments of brilliance. Even Manu Ginobili took the Spurs from a low post grinding team to a perimeter-shooting bomb squad and won the West. It was fascinating all year long. The fans recognized it too as ratings were up nearly 30% on ABC, with ESPN and TNT showing double-digit increases as well, even when Miami wasn’t on the bill.

            The Heat had its ups and downs, but when they were good, they were amazing. They were athletic, fast, yet still tough on defense. They got past Boston and Chicago to get to the Finals, and there they met the Mavericks, who had come out of a wild Western Conference playoff picture where the Memphis Grizzlies of all teams almost managed to upset everyone’s apple cart.

            It led to a Finals series in which game after game came down to the final minutes, with more than one coming to the very last shot. Dallas was deeper, Miami more athletic but top heavy. After the big three, there wasn’t that much there. The defensive toughness that stopped the Celtics and confused Rose and the Bulls fought hard but had no answer for the brilliant Dirk Nowitzki, who solidified his spot as one of the 25 greatest players in league history.  The Mavericks even countered Miami’s toughness. The one knock against Dallas had been that they were soft. But in a terrific move the Mavs dumped the albatross of Erick Dampier for Tyson Chandler, a huge center willing to do the dirty work and do it with a flat-out mean streak. Chandler took Miami out of its game, making slashers like Dwyane Wade and James think twice about going to the basket (not that they never did, but they were careful when Chandler was in) and keeping Bash outside where he did less damage. The main difference was that Bosh will never be a member of the Charles Oakley All-Tough-Guy team, while right now Chandler might be the team’s captain.

            Combine that with James’ reluctance to step up and deliver in the Finals (he seemed to defer to Wade despite him crushing Boston and Chicago earlier in the playoffs) and the Mavericks began to chip away and the Heat’s confidence. By the end of game six, it was gone. The key possession came with four minutes to go. Wade had the ball and drove inside, where he ran into Chandler. He passed outside where his teammates took turns swinging it around the perimeter, passing up open shots before Wade got it back and sent it to Mario Chalmers in the lane. Chalmers dribbled, jumped in the air, and passed up another open shot to dump it off to Bosh under the basket, where it was picked off by Dallas for a turnover. Almost every member of Miami shied away from the big moment. Dallas smelled the blood in the water and finished the Heat off with good shooting down the stretch.

            A combination of lack of depth and lack of guts in the Finals doomed Miami, where people will now spend months making fun of their pre-season "Big Three Party," which now smacks of pure hubris. As Wade, Bosh and James wandered stunned off their home court in defeat, the Mavericks celebrated their first championship. So many members of the Mavs had been to the Finals and lost, and the postgame celebration showed they knew just how important the moment was.

            Speaking of moments, it gave us one more, one every NBA fan was curious about, as David Stern was forced to congratulate his very own problem child, Dallas owner Mark Cuban. The usually bombastic Cuban was uncharacteristically quiet, brushing off a postgame interview and pushing the spotlight back to his players. He even had Stern give the Larry O’Brien trophy to the team’s original founder.

            The NBA had delivered some of its highest quality basketball in decades, and it started from opening night (Boston defeating the Heat in a playoff-type atmosphere) all the way through a thrilling regular season and playoffs. There were main plots, subplots, surprises, great coaching, falls of old contenders, the rise of new one and a talent level that may be the best in league history.

            Sadly, the momentum may not carry over into next year. Like the NFL, the league is headed for labor strife in the form of an impending lockout, and it could be a long one. I’m hoping they work it out, although I think there’s a far greater chance of a shortened or missed season for the NBA than for the NFL, but that’s another post. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the teams will be ready to take the court for another amazing run in the fall.

For now, I just want to be grateful to the NBA for renewing my love of basketball, and for a season I’ll never forget.

Documented

            I am happy to report I’ve made progress in my effort to corral my runaway Netflix queue. It is now down to 383 items from its peak of over 400. I credit the almost endless rain we experienced down here in Hell the Ohio Valley area over the last month.

            There are many things I enjoy about the Netflix service, and one of the top ones is it gives me an opportunity to watch more documentaries. Since I have no cable or satellite service at all these days, it is about the only chance I have to see them since they rarely play in commercial movie theatres, and when they do it’s usually a short run. It’s a shame because a well-made documentary can come in just as many forms as fictional films, and often have an even greater emotional impact since it’s discussing actual events. Some are political, some just follow interesting people and others are investigative (one of the best falls into the latter category, a harrowing film entitled "The Thin Blue Line” that tore apart a murder conviction in Texas that included a virtual recorded confession from the real killer).

            As a sports fan, HBO has aired some wonderful documentaries over the years, and recently ESPN put together an outstanding series called “30 for 30.” One of the ESPN entries, “The Two Escobars,” a feature about the Columbian national soccer team and its relationship to the cocaine cartels was as good as any I’ve seen about any subject. In fact, it even relates to my first recommendation coming up.

I have seen good ones that span all varieties of documentaries lately and I wanted to single out a few you should see when you get a chance.

Cocaine Cowboys: This is the most mainstream one as it’s been airing on Showtime lately, and it deserves the exposure. It’s a riveting look at cocaine trafficking in Miami during the 70s and 80s. It is very well researched and has some terrific sources as many of the main dealers from that time are just getting out of prison and are willing to talk. There’s even a prison interview with a cartel enforcer who shares frightening stories of just how far the Columbian cartels were willing to go to get there hands on the billions and billions of drug dollars flowing through Miami. The sheer volume of money and drugs that moved through the ports by land, air and sea will astound you, and several stories will amuse you as well (my favorite being a guy with such a cavalier attitude he towed a broken-down police boat back to shore while in the process of smuggling kilos of coke into the country from a water drop).

            It also talks about Griselda Blanco, a high level drug kingpin (queenpin?) from the Medellin cartel who made Scarface look like someone you’d want to take to a church picnic. If anything, Miami Vice may have been an toned-down version of the city in those days.

Crazy Love: This was a strange one. The first 15 minutes or so is devoted a New York attorney who was in love with a girl and how he pursued her. In fact, for a couple of minutes I thought to myself, “This guy is a good storyteller and all, but why exactly are we making a movie out of this?” Well, I certainly found out. The story takes a weird turn and becomes a bit darker as he’s not the sweet lovelorn guy we thought at first.

So the movie changes direction and rolls along for a while before it takes an even more ridiculous turn. I won’t spoil it for you but I will tell you I began to see where it was all headed. “No way,” I said to myself. “There’s no way…” But it was. In fact, the foreshadowing actually added to it, since the development was so bizarre it kept me glued to see how it could have happened. It’s easily one of the strangest real-people stories I’m come across. 

Edgeplay: This one falls into the retrospective area, and its subject is the late 70’s all-female punk band, The Runaways. Vicki Blue, a bassist for the band directed this and conducted most of the interviews.

            Everything about the band is strange. It was put together pretty much out of thin air by a record producer named Kim Fowley, whose grand plan for forming an all-girl punk band (a market he thought was being under-represented apparently), was to basically walk around clubs, find girls he thought would look good in a punk band and ask them if they can play any instruments. Incredibly, during this process the guy managed to run into Joan Jett and Lita Ford, two women who could in fact play instruments and play them quite well. Jett of course later formed Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and had monster hits such as “I Love Rock-n-Roll” and a cover of “Wild Thing.” Ford had a huge hit in a duet with Ozzy Osborn called “If I Close My Eyes Forever.” Still, when Fowley found them they were barely old enough to have a learner’s permit.

            The strangeness doesn’t end there. Fowley’s “training” of the band for the rigors of the road and the wild punk audiences they would encounter didn’t just toe the line, it leapt across it into abuse, especially when most band members were only about 15 or 16 when they joined. They were kept broke and demoralized, and really only experienced the trappings of success when they became huge stars in Japan out of nowhere just as they were beginning to disintegrate.

To say there was drama is a severe understatement, but it makes for an interesting tale. There are drawbacks to the film. Jett did not participate, and Blue could not get the rights to play any of the Runaways original material, most of which were written by Jett. That list includes their biggest song, “Cherry Bomb,” which was written on the spot as an audition piece for singer Cherie Currie. There are some clips of the band performing on youtube. They left me with mixed feelings, the first being they aren't a bad punk band at all considering their age and inexperience. The second is due to that same age and inexperience, I wondered how the hell all this was allowed to happen, but I guess the idea of stardom can seduce parents as well as kids.

Even without Jett, the rest of the band combines for an interesting snapshot of one of rock-n-roll’s stranger chapters. It’s worth a look.

How Satellite Radio Led Me To A Moving Evening With James McMurtry

             I’m no music critic by any stretch, but like anyone else I enjoy a good concert. I’ve seen a bunch, certainly not as much as other music lovers I know, but enough to have enjoyed some wonderful live music experiences. I had the privilege of seeing James McMurtry in concert in Louisville Friday, and I left with a reaction to a live show I hadn’t had before. I was moved, deeply moved by one of the best songwriters out there today.

            Most people have not heard of him. I’m sure most reading this blog will have missed out on him so far as well. More have heard of his father, novelist Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment," "The Last Picture Show.") James plays a type of music that is difficult to categorize. Some call it Americana, some call it alt-country, some say roots rock. It’s a genre with a lot of great artists who don’t recycle the same three love song verses or sing about how they are proud to be a half-educated redneck, so country radio has nothing to do with them. They aren’t really country anyway, mostly, and don’t really want to be. After all, no Nashville artist would pen lyrics like this from McMurtry:

Ruby said "You're gettin' us in a world of hurt.
Down below the Mason-Dumbass line the food gets worse.
I can't go back to Tennessee
that NASCAR country's not for me.
Go on, if you think you must."

Wilco, Sun Volt, the Bottle Rockets (and their brilliant mothership, Uncle Tupelo) along with the Old 97’s, the Gourds and Lucinda Williams fall into this category. Thank goodness for satellite radio.

            James McMurtry’s songs tell stories. He has a lot of his father’s gift for writing, and he’s combined that with fine guitar playing as well. The lyrics of his songs weave tales of the working class of America, and carry an impact that can make you stop in your tracks. He has an ability to create full characters in songs, people you can picture, whose struggles you can feel and with which you can empathize. One of his best is "Choctaw Bingo," an epic song McMurtry says he sings in his church, which jokingly referred to as the “First Crystal Methodist.” It has no chorus but contains brilliant story of a trip to a family reunion. By the end, you know of his uncle who married an Asian girl and cooks meth and moonshine while scamming people in real estate deals, a football coach with a declining team and an interest in weapons, another who was involved a serious traffic accident with details down to describing the town and intersection where it happened. This isn’t a short story remember, it’s one song.

            His slower tempo songs contain heart-wrenching lyrics that can easily double as true poetry. It was interesting to hear the hall come to a hush as the crowd stopped jawing, checking their cell phones and downing their bottles of beer so they could concentrate on the story being told. “Ruby and Carlos,” a tune about a May-December romance was one of these, and in the pauses you could hear a pin drop as McMurtry sang about the travails of two people damaged by hard living and war. As he sang “Ruby and Carlos, with just him on guitar while his backup band took a break, I saw a woman standing nearby. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted slightly up, taking in the story like you take in a warm breeze that smells like a welcome rain is coming.

The aspen trees were turning gold up top
The talk was buzzin 'round the beauty shop
"Wasn't he barely half her age.
Well that's just how they do now days.
We should all had been so lucky."

By spring she'd had the run of the free born men
Ruby turned 50 in a sheep camp tent
her body still could rock all night
but her heart was closed and locked up tight

Potato fields all muddy and brown
the gossip long since quieted down

And after one more Coggins test
Pouring coffee for the county vet
Pictures on the ice box door
of Carlos in the first Gulf War
Black-eyed brown and youthful face
smiling back from a Saudi base

He looks out the window and it starts to sleet
Laying on a friend's couch on Nevada Street
Lately he's been staying high
Sick all winter and they don't know why
They don't know why or they just won't say
They don't talk much down at the V.A.

And Ruby's in his thoughts sometimes
What thoughts can get out past the wine
He feels her fingers on his brow
And right then he misses how
She looked in that gray morning light
She never behaved like they all do now
He sees it all behind his eyes
and his hands go searching but they come up dry

And half way in that wakin' dream
Carlos lets the land line ring
He never guessed it was Ruby calling

            Other songs cried out against the loss of jobs and the growing gap between the rich and poor. Some of these songs were more political, like the angry “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore.” Others make their point more subtly, such as the sublime "Lights of Cheyenne," a song of an older married couple falling apart due to a lack of work and an abundance of worries. It’s another one that makes you stop short, and I saw several audience members literally wiping tears from their eyes as he reached the end of this song sung from the perspective of a woman working extra to make up for her husband’s unemployment, and his inability to deal with it.

And you've kept all that
meanness inside you so long
You'd fight with a fence post
if it looked at you wrong
Well the post won't hit back,
and it won't call the law
I look at you right,
or I don't look at all

Now take a crumpled up
soft pack and give it a shake
Out by the dumpster on a cigarette break
With one eye swelled up from
the back of your hand
And the other eye fixed
on the lights of Cheyenne

And it's warming up nicely
for this time of year
The creeks are still frozen but
the roads are all clear
And I don't have it in me
to make one more stand
You know I never much cared
for the lights of Cheyenne

I’m aware a lot of this sounds depressing. I suppose I highlighted some of the darker parts so far. Still, there were up tempo songs as well, like "Just us kids," about going to California with a dream and ending up with something good even if it’s not what you thought it would be originally. If that’s not real life I don’t know what is.

After the show McMurtry came to his small merchandise table and signed CDs and posed for pictures. While plenty of the fans smiled and some of the women giggled when talking to him, many times I heard something rare for situations like that. People thanked him for writing those songs. They thanked him for putting down in writing something they had lived. Country music on the radio pretneds to sing about real life, but in truth Nashville country isn’t realistic at all. It is at best trite and frequently flat-out artificial. These fans wanted to thank a songwriter who got it.  That kind of feel for real life is rare, and it is appreciated.