This blog post is not, at first, going to
seem like it is on baseball, but bear with me. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
I have always been in love with Steve Perry’s
voice, since the moment I first heard him on the radio in about 1978-9.
Journey was one of those bands that seemed, to the uninitiated eye, to suddenly
appear, fully formed, springing from the head of the Radio Masters, like
Aphrodite from the head of Zeus. I have
no memory of their “early years,” or seeing them as an opening act for someone
else, or anything like that. They were just suddenly there, on the radio, polished
and perfect. Fantastic melodies,
incredibly searing guitar solos, and that inimitable voice of Steve’s. Whew. It
was love-at-first-hear for me.
However, this blog post is not devoted—really—to
Steve, to express my undying devotion to him, to his voice, to his band, or to
how much that music meant to me—all those silly clichés we have all come to
know too well. No. this blog post is to explain that I now have a whole new
appreciation of Steve Perry for one reason only:
He is a baseball fan.
It
all began a few nights ago, at dinner with some friends here on the Big Island
of Hawaii. The conversation turned to
music, especially the music that meant so much to us during our formative
years. The Elder of our tribe that evening is 67 years old, so her music was a completely
different group of names and tunes. Two of us are in our 50s, so we mentioned
everything from Elvis, to the Beatles, to The Spinners, to Elton John. The
Younger of us is 42. One of the first
names she offered as “influential” was Journey. All of us agreed: outstanding
example. The conversation then turned to
the whatever-happened-to-Steve-Perry, to the casts of “Glee” and “Rock of Ages”
doing Journey covers. Then the
conversation moved on to other topics.
The next morning, there, on my Yahoo homepage
sideways scroll of Top News Stories, was a story about Steve Perry and a
reporter’s announcement that he had “found” the girl from the “Oh, Sherrie”
video, who declined to be interviewed but wished everyone well, citing her
preference for the private life. That led me to a few more web pages, following
links, and then, this story popped up:
Holy cow. Talk about an
improbable circumstance! Can you imagine being an Average Joe, thinking you are
incredibly lucky to have scored tickets to a World Series game, but then,
-boom- : You suddenly realize that you
are at that game with one of the Greatest Voices of All Time, leading the crowd
in one of the Greatest Rock Anthems of All Time? I love how you can hear the entire crowd
singing along. I love how easily he leads the crowd, as he has done hundreds of times, at hundreds of concerts. I
love how his enthusiasm for the Giants never flags, joyfully singing the positive,
encouraging “Don’t Stop Believin’ ,” as if the sheer exuberance of that
positive message could will the
Giants to a World Championship. (And it did!)
And this brings up the point I
want to make. (See? Told ya I could bring it back around to baseball.) There is
some mysterious, inexplicable bond between baseball and the arts, especially
music and literature. How many songs can you name with a baseball theme? I can
think of three, right off the top of my head. How many novels, short stories
and/or poems have a baseball theme? How many have been made into wonderfully
magical, lyrical films? The Natural
and Fields of Dreams are just the
most recent examples.
When I first came to work at
Arizona State, there was an English professor in the department who had published
a book about baseball: Her name is
Cordelia Candelaria, and her book is called, Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature. I realized that she had already written the
book that I had wanted to write for years; she beat me to it. Here’s a short
version of the critical review on the Amazon page for this book:
Candelaria offers a probing analysis of the progression from
allegory and romanticism in the earliest baseball fiction to the realism,
irony, and solipism of contemporary narrative.
I know that
sounds impossibly stuffy, and I suspect that the book is more readable than that
sounds.
The
point is that the connection I see between baseball and music and other
artistic endeavors is well documented.
The question is, why is this case? We could speculate about how the game
is divided into mystical groups of threes and nines. We could mention that the
game has been over-romanticized by
popular press. We could point out that although the death of baseball as a
viable sport in America has been predicted, the game has persisted, garnering huge
crowds, especially for Big Events, like the World Series. I like to say that baseball is a game for
players who can keep track of the game (the number of outs, especially if you
play the outfield; the count to each individual batter, for each at-bat; the
play for the situation—where do you throw the ball if there’s only 1 out, there’s
a runner on first? vs. where do you throw it if there’s already two outs?—what kind
of pitch is appropriate for a 1-2 count, as opposed to the appropriate pitch
for a 3-0, or 2-1 count).
If
the player cannot keep all of those things in his head, he is unlikely to be
successful at the game. Therefore, a
certain level of memory and intelligence is required to play—and to watch and
enjoy—the game. And everybody knows that there is HIGH correlation between higher
intelligence and memory levels and participation in and enjoyment of the arts.
So,
I draw this conclusion: Baseball is not just a Game for Thinkers. It is also a
game for Thinkers, Singers and Musicians, and Artists.
I
offer Steve Perry at the 2010 World Series game as my evidence, so it must be
true. J
