"Do They Know It's Christmas?" Wonder and Woe

"I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS" was one fucked up piece of pop music. A bouncy 1979 ditty inspired by the true story of a teen-aged girl who opened fire on a San Diego school yard, killing two people and wounding nine just 'cause, its off-kilter sentiments have not aged well.

But a shot at redemption for its co-author, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats, came just five years later in the form of perhaps the most impactful holiday song since Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas in 1942.

The sleeve for the Columbia Records single

As with Geldof's prior hit, Do They Know It's Christmas was inspired by a tragic situation with deadly consequences: famine in war-torn Ethiopia. Geldof's response to that disaster was epic, misguided, wonderful and misunderstood.

Recorded by some of the biggest stars of the era in U.K. and Irish pop under the moniker Band Aid and carried to the world by MTV at the peak of its influence, Do They Know It's Christmas reverberates to this day.

In their three-minute and fifty-second tune, Geldof and co-author Midge Ure of Ultravox shamed the Euro-American world for living in relative safety, security and plenty while those on the horn of Africa were starving to death, then urged people to open their hearts and their wallets to help.

Among those belting out their trenchant message were Sting, Bono, Phil Collins, Culture Club's Boy George, George Michael, Bananarama, Paul Young, Jody Watley, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In artfully pieced together solos, duets, trios and quartets they sang:

... But say a prayer, pray for the other ones... At Christmastime it's hard, but when you're having fun... There's a world outside your window, and it's a world of dread and fear... Where the only water flowing, is the bitter sting of tears... And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom... Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you!

Then, pivoting to the thesis question:

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime... The greatest gift they'll get this year is life... Where nothing ever grows... No rain nor rivers flow... Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

The obvious answer was yes, yes they knew it was Christmastime. Christianity had come to Ethiopia 1,600 years earlier, making it one of the oldest Christian nations on earth. Africa as a whole, was and is heavily -- even if not predominantly -- Christian. That didn't stop critics from calling the sentiment Eurocentric and condescending.

A side/B side

Whether it felt like Christmas time was the issue. Yuletide greetings and neatly wrapped gifts all seem rather beside the point when there's nothing to eat at all, which lead to the point carried home by the ensemble chorus:

Feed the world! Let them know it's Christmas time again... Feed the world! Let them know it's Christmas time again... Feed the World! Let them know it's Christmas time again...

But that's where the real problems began. 

Do They Know It's Christmas was released on Dec. 3, 1984. Almost immediately it zoomed to the top of the U.K. charts where it perched on Christmas Day and selling more than three million copies there before the year was out. It sold another 2.5 million in the U.S. and 12 million worldwide. It also made money, perhaps as much as $28 million, intended for Ethiopian famine relief.

We Are the World, an American counterpart single was recorded in 1985 by Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie and other big stars who wrapped it in an LP's worth of material under the banner USA for Africa. Then came the trans-Atlantic benefit concert, Live Aid. Surely all of that frenetic activity could contribute something positive.

Foreign aid at 45 rpm

And that's been a subject of some dispute.

While all this was going on, Ethiopia was ruled by a Soviet-backed dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam.  The famine, which killed an estimated 1.2 million people, happened on his watch and -- according to Human Rights Watch -- as a result of his policies, while the government he led fended off an insurgency.

Much of the money raised through all these efforts went not for food, but for weapons, according to a 1986 Spin Magazine expose. Over the ensuing four decades, Geldof has vehemently disputed this was the case.

While the cloud over his efforts and those of Ure and the performing artists has never truly dissipated, the song has endured, being remade in 1989, 2004 and yet again in 2014, the last time in service of raising money to combat an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus.

Still, there was no time like that first time, 35 years ago this month.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

The Jets, the Pats and Death from the Sky at Halftime

FOR 60 YEARS, the New York Jets and New England Patriots have regarded one another with a wariness befitting Cold War superpowers, using whatever treacherous means necessary to gain competitive advantage. Executives have been pirated, head coaches coaxed away, star players persuaded to defect.

December 9, 1979, at
Shea Stadium in NYC

Largely led by Bill Belichick, New England has dominated on the field of play, rolling up a 67-54-1 all-time record with six Super Bowl championships to the Jets' measly one. Two times Belichick was named head coach of the Jets, only to be demoted in 1997 after the Bill Parcells ploy backfired and only to resign in evident disgust when tabbed again in 2000, all without ever actually coaching a game for them.

There's been the evil of Spygate, the embarrassment of The Butt Fumble.

Twice the Patriots/Jets convergence has had near fatal consequences and once, 40 years ago this weekend, it was actually, literally, deadly.

In 1969, just days after designing the offensive scheme for the Jets' Super Bowl III victory, Clive Rush was hired by the Patriots as their head coach. On Feb. 12, he was given the honor of introducing the team's new general manager, George Sauer Sr. (father of the champion Jets receiver George Jr.).

Rush stepped up to the podium, gripped the microphone and began screaming as electricity from a short circuit coursed through his body, according to the Boston Globe. Were it not for a Patriots board member ripping out the wires running to a wall socket, Rush's coaching career -- and indeed his life -- might have ended right there.

Then, on Sept. 23, 2001, early in Belichick's second season as the Pats' head honcho, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis slammed into New England quarterback Drew Bledsoe as he sought to escape New York's pass rush. Bledsoe suffered a torn blood vessel in his chest. Only a team doctor's prompt decision to rush him to the Mass General emergency room kept the quarterback from dying.

While the quick thinking saved his life, it couldn't save his job as backup QB Tom Brady stepped in to the starting role and hasn't relinquished it to this day.

But in between the Rush Electrocution and the Bledsoe Bleed there was a third incident, during halftime of a game at New York's Shea Stadium, that took the life of not a player or coach but of a Patriots fan. It was an accident so improbable, so tragically bizarre, that even the urban legend detectives at Snopes.com felt compelled to confirm it really did happen.

It happened on Dec. 9, 1979. I was there with my pal, Eddie, my dad and more than 45,000 other people.

Game day souvenir

It was the last home game of the season at the gusty multipurpose stadium near the shore of Flushing Bay, perhaps two miles southeast of LaGuardia Airport. The 6-8 Jets had gone into the locker room with a 17-12 lead over the 8-6 Pats.

Mid-game entertainment would be provided by the Electronic Eagles of The Radio Control Association of New York, an organization of gas-powered remote-controlled model plane enthusiasts. Only these weren't ordinary planes or even the hobby drones now popular across the U.S. They were flying contraptions, one of which was configured to look like a lawnmower.

As the innocent, if ill-conceived stunt flying exhibition got underway, my pal and I had headed off to the souvenir stand in search of swag, leaving my dad holding a pair of high-powered Bushnell binoculars I'd received as a bar-mitzvah gift a year earlier. Our seats were in the upper deck on what would be Shea's first-base side during baseball season.

Dad, now nearly 87, picks it up from there:

"The lawnmower plane was flying clockwise around the playing field at about the height of the top of the grandstand, with an occasional swoop downward and over the seating area. I was standing, following the show with the binoculars. 

After a swoop or two at the seating area across the field the plane swooped in and failed to swoop out again, as was expected. Instead, it crashed into several spectators, who went down. The crowd started to chant "Sue! Sue! Sue! It stopped when the injured party (or parties) didn't get up, when the crowd realized that the injury was more serious than originally thought. 

I don't think anyone anticipated a fatality."

The lawnmower plane crashed into field level seats behind the Patriots' bench, along what would be the third-base side of the stadium, and into a crowd of New England fans who'd made the trip to Queens for the game.

Game day program

Kevin Rourke, 25, of Lynn, Massachusetts sustained a concussion, according to a New York Times report. Another fan, John Bowen, 20, of Nashua, New Hampshire, died from his injuries four days later at a hospital in New York City.

The Queens County District Attorney's Office ruled the incident an accident and declined to bring charges against the pilot of the wayward craft, Brooklyn auto body repairman Philip Cushman.  Bowen's father later filed a $10 million federal lawsuit against the Jets, the Electronic Eagles and Cushman.

But from there the trail goes cold. I could find no official record of the case or how it ended.

In the third quarter, New England rallied for a brief 19-17 lead before the Jets added 10 more points. A late Patriots touchdown brought them to within one but New York held on to win, 27-26.

Just grown men playing a game.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Padres and Tigers and Cubs, Oh My!!!

IT WAS THE MEAL NO ONE ORDERED, a freakish mix up in fate's kitchen that swapped the expected meat and potatoes for a Big Mac and Domino's Pizza.

It was Major League Baseball's 1984 post-season, which appeared destined to feature two storied franchises, the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, in a rematch of the immediately post-World War II 1945 World Series.

But destiny had other plans, turning a bull into a goat and momentarily making a guy best known for his bubble gum blowing prowess into a hero.

The Cubs had been absent from the Fall Classic for four decades, biding their time playing day games only at their antique ballpark at the corner of Clark and Addison. The boys from Michigan and Trumbull hadn't fared much better, appearing only in the 1968 series where they upset the favored St. Louis Cardinals and ace Bob Gibson.

Their aggregate 78 prior seasons had yielded a grand total of two first-place finishes, one pennant and one championship, all by the Tigers.

But this was 1984. War was peace, ignorance was strength, slavery was freedom and the Cubs were contenders. Actually that last part wasn't Orwellian doublespeak, but literal truth. They were, in fact, National League East champs.

Led by budding superstar second-baseman Ryne Sandberg and pitcher Rick Sutcliffe, who reeled off a 16-1 record after being acquired in mid-June, the Cubs were for real, winning their division by 6.5 games over the second-place New York Mets.

Sandberg, 24, won the NL Most Valuable Player, Silver Slugger and Gold Glove awards. The Cubs won 96 games, their most since '45.

From Sport Magazine's April '81 baseball preview

Impressive as Chicago was, the Tigers were better. Detroit broke from the gate with a 35-5 record -- the best 40-game start in baseball history -- and led the American League East from wire to wire,  one of just five big league clubs to ever do such a thing. They finished 104-58.

Their top player was former Cubs reliever Willie Hernandez, who had compiled a 1-9 record and 4.42 ERA hurling for the northsiders in 1980. Sport Magazine's '81 baseball preview warned "it was time to get the married Cubs off the field" when he came on to pitch. The article threw Sutcliffe under the bus too.

Four seasons later, nobody was making fun of Rick or Willie anymore. Sutcliffe won the NL Cy Young award based on his virtually unbeatable two-thirds of a season. Hernandez, with nine wins and 32 saves -- more than in his previous seven seasons combined -- copped the AL's Cy Young and its MVP award too.

Detroit was also bolstered by local hero Kirk Gibson, who'd starred in football and baseball for Michigan State. Drafted in both sports, he chose the Tigers over football's St. Louis Cardinals.

But the Tigers/Cubs betrothal wasn't assured. There was the formality of league championship play, pitting Detroit against the Kansas City Royals and Chicago against the San Diego Padres making their first ever post-season appearance.

Willie Hernandez and Kirk Gibson

The Royals, who won just 84 games in '84, provided no obstacle. A mere speed bump on the Tigers' expressway, they were outscored by an aggregate 14-4, and swept 3 games to none.

The Padres proved to be more problematic.

After years of languishing as also-rans, they'd hired former A's skipper Dick Williams, acquired a handful of veterans cast off by winning teams -- ex-Yankees Graig Nettles and Goose Gossage, plus former Los Angeles Dodger Steve Garvey -- and developed a nucleus of young, talented pitchers plus one superlative hitter, '84 NL batting champ Tony Gwynn.

Chicago countered with Garvey's ex-Dodgers teammate Ron Cey, spark plug Bob Dernier and veteran Gary Matthews, whose acquisition near the end of spring training pushed left fielder Leon "Bull" Durham to first base and Bill Buckner out of town.

The Cubs won the first two games of the still best-of-five NL Championship series at Wrigley, sending the Padres back to San Diego on the brink of elimination.

There, Chicago took a 1-0 lead in game 3. After that it was all Padres. The friars scored seven unanswered runs for their first ever post-season victory, extending the series.

A back-and-forth affair, game 4 was knotted at 5 in the bottom of the 9th when Garvey stunned the visitors with a walk-off two-run homer off future Hall of Fame reliever Lee Smith, tying the series at two games a piece.

An answered prayer: playing for a pennant

Chicago's date with Detroit and destiny suddenly seemed less assured.

The next day in San Diego. Bull Durham and Cubs catcher Jody Davis homered early, staking Chicago and Sutcliffe to a 3-0 lead. The Padres tallied twice in the 6th to pull within a run, 3-2.

Then San Diego's Carmelo Martinez opened the bottom of the 7th with a walk. A sacrifice moved him to second, bring lefty-hitting Tim Flannery to the plate with one out.

Chicago was eight outs away from the World Series. What happened next is etched in Cubs lore between Leo Durocher's black cat of 1969 and the unlucky fan who reached for a foul ball at the 2003 NLCS and opened the gates of hell.

Flannery hammered a ground ball toward the Bull that shot under his glove, through his legs and into right field. Martinez scored, tying the game. Then second-baseman Alan Wiggins singled. Gwynn followed with a bad-hop hit past Sandburg scoring Flannery and Wiggins. A Garvey rap plated Gwynn.

When the dust settled San Diego held a 6-3 lead. Six Cubs outs later, the Padres were NL pennant winners headed for a showdown with Motown.

The visual contrast between the clubs couldn't have been greater. Detroit, with its olde English "D" logo, classic uniforms and pre-war rust-belt city ballpark vs. San Diego, with their contemporary brown and white uniforms trimmed with orange and yellow. Hailing from sunny southern California, they didn't even exist the last time the Tigers won a pennant.

The Padres and Tigers had two things in common. Each had a Hall-bound manager -- the Padres' Williams and the Tigers' Sparky Anderson -- and each had a tie to fast food. Detroit's owner was Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza. San Diego's owner for a decade was Ray Kroc, the man who made McDonald's famous.

Kroc died in January of '84 and in tribute, the team added his initials RAK to the left sleeves of their jerseys.

The official program had a fold-out cover
evoking that other fall classic, Election Day.

In game 1, Tigers ace Jack Morris surrendered two runs in the bottom of the first inning, but muffled the Big Mac attack the rest of the way as Detroit clawed back a 3-2 victory.

Game 2, however, belonged to the Padres, who won 5-3, and one man in particular, utility player Kurt Bevacqua, who in 80 regular season at bats hit just .200 with one homer and nine RBIs.

Playing for six teams over 14 seasons, his greatest claim to fame had been winning the 1975 Topps/ Bazooka bubble gum blowing contest, his feat immortalized on cardboard.

Now, the journeyman turned superman, slamming a decisive three-run homer in the bottom of the 5th, one of two he'd hit while leading San Diego with a .412 average in the series. Tied at 1 game apiece, the series shifted to Detroit

It wouldn't return to San Diego for 14 years. The Tigers pounced on Padres starters in each of the three games at the ballpark formerly known as Navin Field and Briggs Stadium, never trailing in any one of them.

Gibson slugged a pair of homers in game 5, Detroit catcher Lance Parrish added one too. San Diego had briefly tied the game, 3-3, in the fourth But Detroit gradually pulled away for an 8-4 win, making official what had been apparent since April, they were the best team in baseball, at least in 1984.

The Tigers' future Hall of Fame shortstop, Alan Trammell, was the series MVP. He'd led all hitters with a .450 average, drilled two home runs and had six RBI.

But, for all their heroics, neither the Padres, Tigers or Cubs returned to the post-season in 1985. Kansas City's Royals did, advancing from an afterthought to World Champions, downing the cross-state St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.

Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

It Was a Styx Concert. You Got a Problem With That?

"DON'T LOOK NOW, but here come the '80's!"

Reaganomics, big hair, tight jeans and MTV. We'd been warned. By Styx. Driving home their point in a minute and a half, the arena rockers and power ballad pioneers committed a half-dozen rock and roll cliches on side 2, track 1 of their ninth studio album, Cornerstone.

Prog-rock synthesizer intro? Check! Portentous power chords? Check! Segue into Steve Miller-like rhythmic guitar beat?  Check! Check! Shouts of "Yeah! Yeah!"? Double check! And then... that notice of the imminent arrival of a new decade.

80s artifact -- Styx' Cornerstone

Songs that date-drop invariably don't age well. They can't. Think of the line "Now you find yourself in '82," from Asia's Heat of the Moment, or the atypically upbeat Joe Jackson telling us, "It's not so easy. It's '84 now" in Happy Ending.

Date-stamping a song is the ultimate guarantee that the song in years hence will sound... well, dated. And so it is that Styx' song Borrowed Time is rooted in 1979.

By the time Cornerstone was released 40 years ago this month, Chicago-based Styx had already embarked on a tour they'd dubbed The Grand Decathlon. On Oct. 25, the quintet of Dennis DeYoung, Tommy Shaw,  James Young and brothers John and Chuck Panozzo arrived at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island for a two-night stand.

They'd have an opening act called The Good Rats and in the audience on their second night me and my best bud. I was 14, about seven miles from home and seeing my first ever rock concert.

Rock concerts. The very idea seemed dangerous. Would there be sex? Drugs? Violence? Woodstock? Altamont? These reference points were still reasonably current, all within the past 10 years. Of course, this was a Styx concert and at least two sets of suburban parents saw it as safe enough to let their kids go alone.

Alas, they were right. These were Styx, not Stones, although I recall DeYoung wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey.

40 years ago this week, at the Nassau Coliseum

Cornerstone was still so new, so untested that it's possible none of its nine songs even made the set list if the previous night's version --which drew heavily from the band's past two albums -- is any indication. That one included Styx' first hit, Lady, but not their biggest one, Cornerstone's Babe.

Ah, Babe, the schmaltzy, syrupy granddaddy of power ballads, written by DeYoung for his wife Suzanne, recorded as a demo and -- according to legend -- included on the album at the insistence of his bandmates. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 on Dec. 8, 1979 and perched there for two of its 19 weeks on the charts.

And they didn't even play it.

They did work in other crowd pleasers, including Never Say Never, a pop song with a French chorus, ne dites jamais jamais, and the future Eric Cartman tour-de-force, Come Sail Away.

We rocked. We rolled. We waited for a ride home from our parents. Cornerstone soared to number 2 on Billboard's Hot 100 album chart, charted two more singles -- Borrowed Time and  Why Me? -- and ultimately went triple platinum. It even got nominated for a Grammy!

But about Babe...

Babe would almost come to define the band, and not for the better, even as it was typical radio fodder in an era that saw Air Supply score five top five singles in the next year and a half and spawn imitators like Sneaker. Babe wasn't even the only power ballad on Cornerstone.

Five out of Chicago, but bound for where?

But, Styx's prior album, Pieces of Eight, featured a pair of genuine arena rockers, Blue Collar Man and Renegade. Styx wasn't likely to inspire anyone to don a leather jacket, grow their hair long and jump on a Harley, but they were approaching respectability. Borrowed Time was made in that vein.

Babe, the band's only chart-topper ever, overwhelmed all of that, blowing whatever hard rock cred they had and becoming a point of introduction to a different kind of band, one that became increasingly, fatally, theatrical and thematic.

To be sure, Cornerstone's intricate packaging indicated the band harbored deeper, as yet unrealized ambitions, The album cover, suggesting the discovery of a buried artifact, wrapped around another album cover appearing to be that same artifact. Oh so meta.

It was silvery. It was spacey. It showed five beings emanating from North America and headed for the sky. Where were they going? In subsequent albums we'd find out for better and then worse: back to Chicago, for Paradise Theatre and then to the future!

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Shoot the Moon -- The 1969 National League Playoffs

EVERYONE WAS SHOOTING FOR THE MOON in 1969, the Americans, the Russians and even the Atlanta Braves, at least metaphorically.

 The team from The Launching Pad

Fifty years ago this weekend, Major League Baseball's first franchise based in the American southeast fought for the National League pennant. They did it while claiming the entire region as their own, just four seasons after moving from Milwaukee.

It wasn't the first time relocation had rejuvenated the peripatetic Braves, one of the N.L.'s founding franchises.

Sixteen years earlier, as attendance tanked in Boston, the moribund 64-win team relocated to the good land, won 28 more games in their 1953 debut and then, four years later, a championship.

The 1969 edition won 93 games, finishing first in the newly-created NL Western Division. Their roster was studded with stars: future home run king Hank Aaron, his fellow future Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda plus slugger Rico Carty and former New York Yankees' mainstay Clete Boyer. Leading their pitching staff was a 23-game winner, knuckleballer Phil Niekro.

Stoked to plant their pennant, they produced a gorgeous 80-page playoff program -- full of articles, photos, rosters and stats -- wrapped by a moon landing-themed cover that declared, "One step for the Braves. One giant leap for the Southeast."

The first ever NL West champions (from the Braves' 1969 NLCS program).

But to reach their figurative moon, they needed to step past the New York Mets.

After languishing in last or next-to-last place for the first seven years of their existence and merely a .500 ball club as late as June 2, New York's NL franchise caught fire in the summer, overtaking the first place Chicago Cubs on Sept. 10 and then winning the Eastern Division by eight games. They finished at 100-62.

Leading their charge was brash power pitcher Tom Seaver, a 25-game winner who would have been Braves property had they not violated the rules for signing college players in 1966.

Three years after his Braves contract was voided, Seaver was not merely the best pitcher in baseball, but leading a staff that included 17-game-winner Jerry Koosman, rookie Gary Gentry and down the depth chart, a young fireballer named Nolan Ryan.

The Mets' NLCS program, an adaptive reuse of their
regular season scorecard with minimal new content,
offered for just a single home game for 25 cents.

Their lineup was a mashup of platoon players expertly deployed by Manager Gil Hodges, but led by left-fielder Cleon Jones, who'd hit .340, sterling center-fielder Tommie Agee and hard-hitting first-baseman Donn Clendenon.

"Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice versa," baseball sage Casey Stengel reportedly once said. The best-of-five Mets/Braves NLCS was a vice versa kind of series, where good pitching largely took a back seat to good hitting and somehow, the Mets had more of that too.

On Oct. 4, the series opened in Atlanta, in a bullring of a ballpark that came to be known as The Launching Pad. Seaver vs. Niekro. They traded punches until the eight inning when, with the Braves nursing a 5-4 lead, the Mets' erupted for five runs, helped by a pair of Atlanta errors. Game 1 to the New Yorkers, 9-5.

Game 2 the next day saw the Mets jump out to a 8-0 lead en route to an 11-6 romp. The Braves headed to New York, their moon landing in jeopardy.

Foreshadowing from the Braves program

There, Atlanta rapped out five hits and a walk in the first three innings off New York's starter, Gentry, one of them a two run homer by Aaron, his third blast of the series.

With two on and no outs in third, Hodges pulled Gentry in favor of Ryan, who sandwiched an intentional walk around two strikeouts and ended the inning on Braves catcher Bob Didier's fly out.

Atlanta would never seriously threaten again, while the Mets got homers from Agee and infielders Ken Boswell and Wayne Garrett.

Ryan pitched seven innings, striking out seven while allowing two runs to earn the win, one of just two post-season victories in his 27 year Hall of Fame career. Aaron wouldn't appear in the playoffs again. He retired as a Milwaukee Brewer after the 1976 season with the most homers in major league history: 755.

On Oct. 6, 1969, the Mets captured the NL pennant before a raucous crowd at Shea Stadium in Queens. Ten days later, they'd stun the Baltimore Orioles and the world by taking the World Series 4 games to 1. The moon belonged to them.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

No place for MAD in a World Gone Ever Madder

FOR THE SNOB, THE HIGHBROW and those who feigned ignorance, it was easy to dismiss MAD Magazine as silly, sophomoric trash, supermarket checkout line fodder a harried mom might quickly yank from her kid's grubby hands and stuff right back into the rack where it came from.

The end of the line, styled as a throw-back,
and, at $5.99, no longer really "cheap."

As one of those grubby kids, I knew better.

MAD was the key to unlocking the truth about the adult universe, the hypocrisy, the vanity and inherent cynicism of every day life. Each issue was a cleverly disguised instruction manual, teaching kids how to see through, if not actually defeat, the bullshit being shoveled their way every day.

Every goddamned day.

MAD was dynamite. Now it's done.

After 64 years, America's greatest purveyor of subversive satirical shtick has published its final issue of new material. From here on in, it'll be all re-packaged greatest hits collections not unlike the quarterly Super Specials MAD churned out when I was a kid, only more so. Immortality through re-runs.

The cause of death: Obsolescence.

MAD outlived its usefulness, done in by a world crazier than the one it lampooned, superseded by TV bridezillas, bachelors and bachelorettes, by real housewives and teen moms, by Survivor, The Apprentice and by a social media landscape more shameless and self-referential than its editors ever imagined.

A Super Special reprint

MAD was born in the ultra-self-congratulatory, self-serious 1950s, a time of sock hops and the red menace, of Disneyland and fall-out shelters, of American chest-thumping over beating the Axis powers and making the world safe for suburbia and shopping malls.

It sprung from the skull of publisher William M. Gaines and legendary artist Harvey Kurtzman as a full color comic book, something I only ever glimpsed as reprints packaged with those Super Specials.

That incarnation lasted just 23 issues before being transformed into the glossy-cover black and white illustrated magazine we came to know and love.

My dad got that first issue of the new MAD while serving in the U.S. Army and kept it long enough to give it to me together with a half dozen more issues of similar vintage, proving this type of MADness too could be hereditary.

Where it began: dad's July '55 issue

There was a lot of mocking of Madison Avenue (those other Mad Men) in that first outing, their gray flannel-suited false earnestness, plus jibes at mid-century modernity, television, professional wrestling (as if it needed to be mocked) and America's as-yet-unrealized space program.

In time, the magazine would turn its sights on Elvis Presley, Walt Disney and, unavoidably, politics, producing for its December 1956 issue a cover both timeless and iconic.

About 25 years later, I started reading MAD and, in 1976, became a subscriber.

I was 11 years old and wouldn't miss an issue for the next four years, spending lots of time with the so-called "usual gang of idiots" -- Al Jaffee, the father of the fold-in, purveyor of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions; Dave Berg's The Lighter Side...; Antonio Prohias' Cold War-inspired Spy vs. Spy and Don Martin's epic onomatopoetic sound effects.

December '56, October '80

SHTOINK!!!

They repeatedly spoofed Star Trek and Star Wars which meant a great deal to an unrepentant geek like me. I remain forever grateful.

MAD was great fun.

Behind the humor, there were serious messages from the editors: they hated hypocrisy and war, drugs, poverty, bigotry, pollution and politicians.

Their send-up of The French Connection was titled What's the Connection? In it, Gene Hackman's "Cockeye" Doyle is an unabashed bigot telling every minority he's encounters -- real or imagined -- to go back to where they came from. That lesson stayed with me. Even as a kid, I got the point that that was wrong.

MAD taught generations of kids to think critically about what they were being told and sold by the establishment. Its writers' unsubtle message: People are generally full of crap.

They were of course right. For a time the formula worked and MAD had a little media empire going, one filled with paperback books, phonograph records and even a TV show.

Peak geek -- October 1976

In 2013, they published Inside MAD, full-color, hard cover coffee table book -- not even its first! -- a gorgeous 256-page collection of its creators' favorite entries -- much which came from the sweet spot of my era, MAD's golden age  -- plus encomiums from Judd Apatow, Whoopi Goldberg, Ken Burns, Todd McFarlane, Ice-T, Tony Hawk, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and others.

MAD influenced all of them too.

Nine issues ago, its publishers attempted a re-launch, resetting the counter to issue 1 from 550, to no avail. The insanity of every day life had rendered MAD passably sane. Now, the magazine has wrapped up its role in educating America's youth, leaving disciples everywhere.

We're still out there, and we can see right through you.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

A Baptism in Springsteen's Church of Rock & Roll

I'D HEARD ABOUT EVENTS LIKE THIS, the fanaticism, the ecstasy, the rapture and delirium brought on by four hours of pure joy. Yet I still wasn't ready for what I witnessed that night.

Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, live on stage at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He was midway through a 10-night stand somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, in the middle of the epic Born in the USA Tour, at the peak of his career.

The official tour program.

And then, right in front of everybody, the biggest star in rock and roll -- still a bachelor at age 34 -- danced with his mother.

Just like that.

It was August 12, 1984 and I was seeing Springsteen live for the very first time. Me, Richie, Wayne and Big Ed had driven across New York City from Long Island to the arena New Jersey's favorite son christened with a concert on its opening night just three years before.

Big Ed remembers: Rich Fields was also a big Springsteen fan. He and I became close one winter when he missed a semester at school recovering from a tumor. Born in the USA was out and a huge success on radio and this new thing called MTV. I had just gotten home from a Mets game, crawled into bed, and then my phone rang at around midnight.

It was Rich, with the news that Springsteen tickets were going on sale in the morning. He suggested I pick him up and we go camp out in front of the ticket store. This was before Ticketmaster and the Internet. We got there, and there were only 25 to 30 people in front of us. I thought that was great, but the process was also excruciatingly slow. I could write a whole article about just the ticket experience. We bonded with lot of people, I even went on a lunch date with a hot blonde from North Woodmere with a Datsun 280ZX, whom I never saw again. Finally around 4 p.m., Rich and I had the tickets.

Eddie and Rich slept outside our local Ticketron outlet. There, for $16 a piece they nabbed four seats in the front row of section 211, the upper level near what would be center ice.

Four hours of jubilation for $16.

The stage was to our left. Though we had seats, I don't recall sitting very much. I do recall the entire tier bouncing to the beat, not just the people, mind you, but the stands themselves.

The dance song was, of course, Dancing in the Dark, a smash hit by a guy who wasn't about dance songs. But this was a new Bruce -- Megastar Bruce, MTV star Bruce -- and he could get away with doing pretty much whatever the hell he damned wanted to do.

"That's my mom!" he shouted.

Big Ed: It was more than a decade before Friends premiered on TV, but half the male Springsteen fans were already in love with Courteney Cox, Bruce's dance partner in the DitD video. Well, I was expecting there to be some hot chick that would come up on stage and dance with Bruce. Instead he pulled his mother Adele on stage for that song.

In June Springsteen released Born in the USA, his seventh LP. Though the name evoked his breakthrough album Born to Run, issued nine years earlier, this was no sequel. The nation had changed and so had The Boss.

The Interval

Between those recordings, Springsteen had an all-out legal war with his original manager that kept him out of the studio and on the road for more than a year. He'd written a surfeit of songs out of which emerged Darkness on the Edge of Town, a searing blue collar crie-de-coeur.

This was a bitter album for post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America, a time of double-digit inflation, gasoline shortages and the national malaise President Jimmy Carter later labeled "a crisis of confidence."

Two years later, Bruce and the E Street Band released The River, a two-disc mix of rock-and-roll rowdiness and melancholy story songs about accidental pregnancy, metaphorical adultery and despair. Among those 20 tracks was a song about a man who'd walked out on his wife and kids, set to a party beat.

Clocking in at a radio-friendly 3:19, the song -- Hungry Heart -- spent 18 weeks on Billboard Hot 100. Topping out at number five, it was Springsteen's first bona fide radio hit. The River LP went to number one on the Billboard 200. [Ridiculously, improbably, 14-year-old me had been offered a ticket to a River tour concert and turned it down, a mistake I'd not make again.]

The original vinyl release.

Most artists would have looked at that hard won success and ordered up more of the same. Bruce Springsteen isn't most artists. What carried over into the next album wasn't the hootenanny of Hungry Heart, Sherry Darling or Cadillac Ranch, but the loneliness of Stolen Car, Drive All Night and the album closer, Wreck on the Highway.

Titled Nebraska, Bruce's 1982 release was bleak, stark and spare, a collection of vinyl-pressed demo tapes featuring The Boss alone on acoustic guitar and harmonica.

The title track was based on the 1958 midwestern killing spree of 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate. Her parents were his first victims.

What to expect after that?

The Boss Goes Boom

The answer came in the stadium scale heartland rock of Born in the USA, an LP containing a dozen songs. Seven of them reached the Top 10, including Dancing..., Glory Days, I'm on Fire and My Home Town.

Ronald Reagan was president, the national mood was different, and crowding into Springsteen's genre were rockers John Mellencamp and Bob Seger plus Canadian counterpart Bryan Adams.

The Boss's sound was now bigger and bolder, right from the opening title track.

If one ignores the lyrics, Born in the USA the song can easily be mistaken for a patriotic anthem. It's really an indictment of a nation indifferent to a generation of people it sent to fight an ultimately pointless foreign war. It was precursor to the more overtly political music Springsteen would make in the ensuing decades.

Glory Days -- Me and college friend Laura K.
circa 1985. I still have that shirt somewhere.

It opened his show on that August night, a four-hour marathon punctuated by The Boss's trademark stage stories and banter. There were three songs from Nebraska, though not the one about Starkweather, five from the double-album River, four from the first Born and eight from the new Born.

Among the most memorable: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, the Hungry Heart sing-along and show closing covers Twist and Shout and Do You Love Me?

Big Ed: I am finally at a Springsteen concert and my first event at this new arena named after the former Governor of New Jersey in what Springsteen would refer to as The swamps of Jersey. My memories of the set list are fuzzy, partially because it was a lifetime ago and partially because I would go on to see Springsteen another 13 times over the years.

To me, it was the equivalent of a Jew's Birthright trip to the Holy Land or a Muslim's Hajj to Mecca. I never saw a more enthusiastic crowd in an arena as I did when the band played Born in the USA.

The four of us -- really the 20,000 of us -- danced and sang all night. I've no idea how Bruce and company did that night in and night out. I was exhausted well before he introduced his bandmates during the rousing Rosalita (Come Out Tonight). Little did we know (and who knows if he did) that the newly-added Patti Scialfa would one day be his wife.

Big Ed: It was also our first sighting of Nils Lofgren, who'd replaced Miami Steve Van Zandt. He'd appeared on the Born in the USA album, then left to reinvent himself as Little Steven, fronting a band called The Disciples of Soul. Later he'd return to the E Street Band before reinventing himself again as Silvo on HBO's The Sopranos.

Thirty-five years and a couple of dozen concerts later, some starring The Boss and some not, this first time seeing him live on that summer night remains the best time. It made me a believer in Bruce almighty and the power of his music.
________________________

Thanks to Eddie and Wayne for helping to reconstruct our memories. This entry is dedicated to our friend and fellow concert-goer Richard Fields, who died on Aug. 22 of last year. He was just 54.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Jim Bouton's Seattle Pilots: a Tale of Two Yearbooks

THE SEATTLE PILOTS published a yearbook in 1969. It's a handsome document with a navy blue cover wrapped around 40 glossy pages of standard fare biographies and statistics punctuated by color and black and white photos.

But that's not how most people came to know or why they remember Major League Baseball's one year wonders and why they'll never be forgotten.

The incendiary unofficial yearbook

The Pilots, an oddball collection of players and coaches stationed in a decrepit minor league ballpark, gained inadvertent immortality courtesy of Jim Bouton, a one-time New York Yankees phenom who lived through and chronicled the team's lone season in Ball Four the greatest baseball tell-all ever written.

Bouton died last month from a brain hemorrhage at the age of 80. He'd suffered from cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which causes blood vessels to burst. It also causes a dementia and long before it killed him, the disease -- and a 2012 stroke -- robbed Bouton of random words, facts and correlations.

That had to be a particular type of hell for a man best known by recent generations for what he said about baseball rather than what he did with one.

A young flamethrower, Bouton won 21 games for the 1963 American League champions. He won 18 the next year, plus two more in a World Series he, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford lost to the St. Louis Cardinals.

It was the end of an incredible 18-year run for the Bronx Bombers during which they won 15 pennants and 10 championships. It also capped a flicker of time when Bouton was among the game's best pitchers before arm trouble reduced him to a knuckle-baller barely hanging on to his career.

Despite sunshine and great promise...
(from the 1969 Seattle Pilots yearbook)

It was in that debilitated state that the former standout hurler for a legendary team came to be acquired by the American League expansion Pilots, who lasted just the 1969 season, before failing as a business and moving to Milwaukee.

An iconoclast who never missed a chance to clash with authority, Bouton chose that year to keep a diary. The resultant book, Ball Four, blew the lid off baseball's wholesome image, revealing that Mantle drank heavily, amphetamine use was rampant, players chased girls and spied on them whenever and wherever they could, owners were petty and management was often hidebound and stupid.

It was a literary yearbook and highlight film the likes of which had never been seen, a personal memoir and log book from a doomed voyage.

The less well-read official yearbook

With an ear for dialogue and an eye for human foibles, Bouton immortalized men like Gene Brabender, the Pilots' gentle giant of a pitcher. A 13-game winner, Brabender hailed from a place called Black Earth, Wisconsin, and once ended an argument with the author by telling him he was lucky it was just that. "Where I come from, we just talk for a little while. After that we start to hit," he said.

And men like pervy shortstop Ray Oyler, who sprung an erection on the team bus and offered to buy it from the driver, outfielder Steve Hovley, whose eccentricity earned him the nickname "Orbit," and pitcher Gary Bell, whose best advice for confronting any batter was simply "smoke 'em inside."

Bouton had a special affection for the Pilots' beleaguered skipper, Joe Schultz, whose favorite profanities were "shitfuck" and "fuckshit." His best advice for dealing with any situation was "pound that old Budweiser."

Bouton's ex-Yankee status gave his book gravitas and credibility. People had to take it seriously, whether they liked it or not, and many inside baseball's crumbling old order did not.

Pilots pitcher, author, idol smasher.
(from the 1969 Pilots' yearbook)

He was denounced as a Judas, a man who broke a raft of unwritten rules, an apostate unwelcome for decades at Old Timer's Day.

Ball Four also revealed something more about human nature, something that transcended baseball and applied more universally to anyone capable of independent thought but trapped in an organization ruled by group think and conventional wisdom.

Bouton was an outside-the-box thinker. Baseball wasn't ready for him, but late 1960s-early 1970s America was and remains so to this day. So Ball Four remains a testament to one man's struggles against the establishment. The New York Public library deemed it one of greatest books of the 20th Century.

Just as importantly though -- within the realm of baseball -- Ball Four was a testament to the Pilots' travails, a history of people and events that surely would have been forgotten but for Bouton's decision to make their year the year the faded former fireballer recorded for posterity.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Michael Collins Drops Off Two Guys at the Moon...

"WAIT IN THE CAR, MIKE," Neil and Buzz said, hopping out after their four day, 238,900-mile road trip. "Gonna take a walk, talk to some folks, grab some rocks. You drive around the block, we'll be right back."

Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong conquer the Moon
Life Magazine photo.

With that, Michael Collins, a dutiful, low key sort of guy listened to the radio, sipped coffee, circled and waited for his cohorts to return from their errand.

Or not.

The actual details likely differed, perhaps substantially, but just in dialog, not in result.

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first to human beings to set foot on the Moon, Earth's orbital companion for the past 4.5 billion years or so, previously an unreachable place in the sky.

Armstrong, the commander of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, arrived preloaded with matchless lines that would echo down through history: "The Eagle has landed," "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" and "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."

Apollo 11 blasted off
on July 16, 1969.
Life Magazine photo

Aldrin, the second man off the lunar lander, helped plant a U.S. flag on the dusty surface and posed for pictures taken by his boss with a Hasselblad camera. And, during their relatively brief 2 1/2-hour lunar romp, the men collected roughly 13 pounds of rocks.

Fulfilling a fundamental dream of human existence, Armstrong and Aldrin spent more than 21 hours at Tranquility Base (another Armstrong-ism) etching their names in history.

Meanwhile, Collins flew around the Moon alone in a spaceship called Columbia -- glimpsing the dark, far side we can't see from Earth -- waiting for the others to fly up from the surface aboard top half of the lunar lander Eagle and rejoin him for the long ride back home.

Eventually they did, leaving behind a wire-stiffened flag, a solar wind experiment and the lunar module's descent stage. Affixed to one leg of that landing craft, a stainless steel plaque bearing the signatures of all three travelers and President Richard Nixon, stating, "We came in peace for all mankind. July 1969 A.D."

The facsimile signature was as close as Michael Collins would get.

Imagine flying nearly half a million miles to ferry two companions to a place where no man had gone before, while your assignment is simply to wait for them to return.

Michael Collins did that, without evident rancor, bitterness or disappointment. He was a pilot flying his mission.

"I didn't feel lonely or left out," Collins wrote in his recently republished memoir, Flying to the Moon. "I knew my job was very important and that Neil and Buzz could never get home without me." So he flew, and waited, and listened to pre-recorded music including, he said without irony, the 1965 Jonathan King song, Everyone's Gone to the Moon.

Collins actually had another destination in mind, he said: Mars. "It, not the Moon, is where I wanted to go as a child."

The Collins-designed mission patch.

That said, after the travelers returned, they were kept in quarantine for nearly three weeks, until scientists were sure they'd not returned with Moon bugs. Then the now-world famous trio was released to the public for a trip around the world good will tour that included a ticker tape parade down New York City's lower Broadway, a thoroughfare nicknamed the Canyon of Heroes.

And then Collins walked away from the space program, returning to his Earthbound life as a husband and father.

Armstrong, famously reclusive, gave few interviews and died in 2012 at age 82. Two years later, Congress renamed NASA's primary flight research center in his honor, adding to a veritable mountain of accolades he'd received in his lifetime, including a Presidential Gold Medal bestowed by Richard Nixon. His name also adorns a museum, an airport, public schools and an engineering center at his alma mater, Purdue University.

Aldrin, 89, too received those medals, had schools named in his honor, a lunar crater and this toy.

At 88, Collins legacy is less distinct as he shares his name with a noted Irish independence leader about whom a movie was made starring Liam Neesen. Born in Rome, Italy, the son of a career Army officer, spaceman Collins wrote that he had no home town to honor him with a parade after his first spaceflight, Gemini X, in 1966.

Special edition.

He graduated West Point but opted to join the Air Force, rather than the Army, becoming first a fighter pilot, then a test pilot and then an astronaut. Upon leaving NASA, he briefly served as U.S. Secretary of State for Public Affairs. Like his crewmates, he was honored by the president, Congress and other distinguished groups.

Collins retired from the Air Force with the rank of Major General in 1982.

Today he dreams of mankind traveling into the solar system, perhaps establishing a permanent town in space called Libra at the solar system's libration point where the gravities of the Sun, Earth and Moon cancel each other out. He's still willing to go to Mars, just to find out what's there.

"And Mars is just the beginning," Collins said.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive