Larry Crotser - jawjawjaw

Back in 1977, I was starting 9th grade in Champaign, Illinois. One day, a kid in my class told me that if you wrote a letter to a pro sports team and told them you were a fan, they would send you free stuff.

The Seattle Seahawks were a brand new NFL franchise back then. Unlike the other expansion team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were one of the worst teams in NFL history, the Hawks had been reasonably competitive in their first season.

I thought the Seahawks helmets were super cool. They also had a left-handed quarterback: Jim Zorn. I thought that was cool too, as I was left-handed.

With the help of my mom, I wrote the Seahawks a letter saying that I was a big fan of their team. A few weeks later, I got an envelope back from them. Inside, was a decal that looked a lot like the picture above. I put that decal on the window in my bedroom.

Fast forward to 1992. My brother and I are driving across the country from Boston to Seattle, where he had lived since 1989. I am in the process of moving out there too.

We drive through Champaign on the way there and spend the night hanging out with my old friend Larry Crotser, who happens to be in town from Chicago that weekend visiting his parents.

The next day, Ben and I drive by our old house to take a look at it. There’s a guy out in front of the house next door, and we strike up a conversation with him. He indicates that if we knock on the door at our old house, the teenage son of the owner is there and he suspects that the son will let us see the inside of the house.

We go over and knock on the door. Sure enough, the son is home and after we explain who we are, he invites us into the house for a tour. They’ve done a lot of nice renovations on the inside. But while some things are definitely different, a lot of it is just as we remembered it.

When we head upstairs, we walk into my old bedroom. That’s when I see it: The Seahawks decal is still on the window there.

Later that day, after driving around town some more, we got in the car and continued the trip west to Seattle, where I’ve lived ever since.

In 2005, my parents moved to Seattle too. Now, the whole family is living here.

But long before any of us got to Seattle, the universe apparently knew that we would all end up here one day rooting for the Seahawks.

***

A year ago next Sunday (Jan 26), my dad passed away here in Seattle. Since my folks moved out here, Sunday football has been one of our family rituals.

I’m really happy I got to watch so many games with my dad in the years before he passed. Parkinsons took a lot of stuff away from him. But it never took away watching football, which was one of the last things he had left, and something he enjoyed to the very end.

I watched the NFC championship game with him last Jan 20, six days before he died. If he’d held on another week or two, we undoubtedly would have watched the Super Bowl together as well.

In a little while, Antonia and I will be heading up north to get my mom. Then, we’re going to my brother’s to watch today’s game with Ben and his family. Although my dad won’t be there, I know he’ll be with us in spirit for sure.

UPDATE 1:

Well, the Hawks played hard, got a few home team breaks, and managed to pull out a 23-17 victory. So we live to play another day.

Early in the season, my nephew developed a special celebration he’d do when something good happened for the Seahawks (a score, interception, sack, etc). It was also a tribute to my dad. He called it the “Conductor” (among other things, my dad was an orchestral conductor).

First, Max would tap the an imaginary podium with his imaginary baton. Then, he’d raise his hands up in the air and start conducting his imaginary orchestra. In my mind, they’re always playing a beautiful celebration song.

Let’s just say we were all doing the Conductor today at the end of the game after Richard Sherman tipped Colin Kaepernick’s pass in the end zone and Malcolm Smith grabbed it for an interception.

Next stop: Super Bowl. No sleep till Jersey!

Here’s hoping our imaginary orchestra is playing another celebratory song on Feb 2.

Go Hawks!

UPDATE 2 (2/2/2014):

Seahawks beat Broncos in the Super Bowl 43-8!

The Universe did have a plan.

[I wrote this years ago, mostly just to try and understand some stuff that was bouncing around in my head. Moving it over from the Myspace page, so it’s here with other stuff I’ve written. The piece was never formally published. It’s just been bouncing around the web. But the people who’ve read it, seem to like it.

For example, in his book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson called it “a 1996 lost classic of rock criticism…”

David Cantwell, author of Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, this great New Yorker piece on Sam Cook’s “A Change is Gonna Come”, and co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles called it “one of the best, smartest, most insightful music pieces I’ve ever read. Period.”

Have look. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.]

A while back, my local “alternative” radio station began playing a cover version of the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” by the U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. The first time I heard it, I didn’t think about changing the station, even though the Rollers were one of the most critically unhip bands of the 1970s. Instead, I sat back and listened, slightly amused, but mostly taking the whole experience for granted. Such is the state of things now that the practice of “alternative” bands covering “bad” songs from the 1970s has become so commonplace. If it isn’t Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, it’s Seaweed or Smashing Pumpkins doing some Fleetwood Mac song like “Go Your Own Way” or “Landslide.”

Few question the full-on embrace of 1970s popular culture anymore. It’s even got it’s own “American Graffiti” film in Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.” Linklater’s take on the past is a little more self-conscious and cynical than George Lucas’s vision of the early 1960s in “American Graffiti.” But Linklater’s remembrance of teen life in 1976 remains a warm one, especially in its unselfconsciously reverent use of the period’s music. It pushes all the same buttons as Lucas’s film, although neither Linklater nor his audience would ever completely admit it. For even as the residue of 1970s has reasserted itself in the American cultural life of the 1990s, a lingering tinge of reticence remains, as people continue to adjust to the idea that openly embracing the mainstream culture of the 1970s no longer entails being instantly labeled a loser or a philistine.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was starting college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, things were a lot different. There was plenty of risk involved in embracing the mainstream music of the 1970s, at least among the community of rock and roll hipsters I hung out with. A friend later summarized the stakes very well in a different context: “There’s a lot on the line when you tell other people what kind of music you like; people know they’ll be judged based on what they say. If they give the right answer they’ll be accepted. If they don’t, people may look down on them.” This was true in Ann Arbor during that time–as it has been everywhere I’ve lived since. The rules determining inside and outside were generally unwritten, but they weren’t hard to figure out.

Punk rock was cool. Some New Wave was cool. David Bowie, he was pretty cool (his glam rock was sort of New Wave and Punk before they were invented). Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who, Motown, and the other classics of 1960s rock, that was cool too, as long as you weren’t too much of a hippie about it. But the mainstream music of the 1970s was not cool. Disco sucked, including George Clinton and his P-Funk allies. Foreigner was not cool. Lynyrd Skynyrd was not cool. Neither were Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Peter Frampton, Foghat, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, or Alice Cooper. Black Oak Arkansas was not cool. Neither were Head East, R.E.O. Speedwagon, the Michael Stanley Band, the Eagles, Kansas, Styx, nor any of the other music Richard Linklater put in his movie.

In this environment, it is no surprise that my good friend Larry felt compelled to show his allegiance to the clan of the rock and roll hipster by throwing his copy of Led Zeppelin IV against the wall of the University of Illinois dorm room where he was staying during the summer of 1983. I seem to remember trying half-heartedly to convince him not to do it as he raised the record to hurl it.

“You sure you want to do that man,” I said. “A record is a record. You might regret it later.”

“No way man, I’m gonna throw it,” he said, cocking it behind his ear. “I’m ashamed I own this; it sucks. If I hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ one more time I’m gonna lose my shit. It sucks. ‘Black Dog’ sucks too. It all sucks.” And with that, he whipped the thing at the wall and it shattered into numerous pieces around the room (he told me recently he bought it again on CD a few years ago). We put something like “Armed Forces” by Elvis Costello on the turntable, opened up some cans of Stroh’s beer, and cracked up for a while, completely confident that justice had been done.

Then in the fall of 1984 something happened in Ann Arbor that turned the well ordered world of our little sub-culture upside-down. The Replacements came to town and played “Black Diamond” by Kiss. Undoubtedly, it was not the first such incident nationwide. Nor were the Replacements necessarily the only band at that time playing covers like “Black Diamond.” Nonetheless, in hindsight, Paul Westerberg and his cohorts were perhaps the most important purveyors of this practice.
Continue reading “Sucking in the Seventies: Paul Westerberg, the Replacements, and the Onset of the Ironic Cover Aesthetic in Rock and Roll (It’s Only Rock and Roll But I Like It)”