Firebirds fly; Phoenix changes guard

Baseball writers like to wax poetic about the way the game and its thoughtful pace connect us to a bucolic past. That past supposedly plays music soothing to breasts savaged by the hell-bent pace of modern living. Yet, it seems the writers are out of step. Major League Baseball, attempting to market its way back into favor after the strike of '94 when the lords of the realm nearly bumbled away the national pastime, says that today's fans want major realignment and a faster-paced game. They want more teams involved in the playoffs. (Nobody seems quite sure whether fans want the designated hitter, though.) Firebirds out, Diamondbacks in It's a sign of the times and of growth that Phoenix is losing its Triple A baseball club, the Firebirds, for the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion National League team. (The Firebirds will play their final home game at Phoenix Municipal Stadium on Thursday, August 28.) It's doubtful that going to Bank One Ballpark, or BOB as some wags immediately dubbed it, in downtown Phoenix will be anywhere near as relaxing (bucolic?) as going to take in a Firebirds game at Scottsdale Stadium or Phoenix Municipal Stadium. The 40,000-plus seating at BOB is considered relatively intimate in the majors. Still, a capacity game is going to seat twice as many people as can cram Desert Sky Pavilion and more than four times as many people than can fit into Scottsdale Stadium, where the Firebirds have been playing their last few seasons. The end of intimacy The intimacy of a minor-league game is never in question. Even the worst seats are pretty close to the action. That intimacy helps create the relaxing pace that baseball writers glorify. If it's a hassle to get in and out of the park and if crowds swamp the concession stands and the bathrooms, I think the pace of the game changes from "relaxing" to "slow." The fact is, though, that the Diamondbacks have already done more business than the Firebirds could ever hope to do here. Even though Triple A ball is just a phone call away from the majors, baseball fans are sending the message that big-league ball -- with its salary disputes, pampered players and mostly clueless owners -- is the only ball worth buying, and they'll pay for it through the nose. Don't get me wrong. I'm looking forward to big-league competition right here in town, but it's too bad we always have to subsitute big-ticket items for the little things that make life bearable. Big-ticket items always take more maintenance, and I wonder whether we're getting good value for the dollar. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Elvis has wrecked the building

"I haven't seen anything like it since Eleanor Roosevelt died." Bemused, Don Rubincam, entetainment editor of The Courier-News, snuffed out another cigarette, and with a very little help from me, set about the task of piecing together the small-town daily's package on the death of rock and roll icon Elvis Presley. The newsroom was in quite a furor, although many of the reporters were my age, leaned toward the Eagles and just didn't get Elvis. I was what they call a "news clerk," trying to write my way out of obituary, weather and police-report duties and into full-time work on the entertainment desk. Just a few months before, Rubincam had read some reviews and previews I'd written and asked our managing editor if he could use me part time. I was supposed to help Rubincam with clerical duties, filing and the like, but Don had me writing more than he had me filing. I wasn't about to argue. I was by no means savvy about the entertainment business or how to find out information. I spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out where Elvis Presley would be playing. Not nostalgia for the old folks It wasn't nostalgia that was driving me exactly. Sure, I had strummed my air guitar in the back yard at age four and shouted the lines: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog!" I did it for what seems like hours (but was probably just a few minutes in adult time). I still remember the white Elvis t-shirt with the king caught in mid-swivel before a big black record. However, I wasn't pining for these things. I'd been getting deeper into the roots of the music that interested me, and from reading some other writers' reflections on the early days of rock and roll, and some things John Lennon had said about Elvis, I wanted to see if Presley held up. It hadn't been that long since National Lampoon had spoofed him with a cover that portrayed the one-time rocking Adonis as a big, button-popping, washed-up lounge lizard. So I had picked up The Sun Sessions in the early summer of '77. What a thunderclap of raw energy! The Sun Sessions was everything that the emerging punk-rock scene wanted to be but wasn't. From top to bottom That's when I hit on the idea of doing a feature for Rubincam that compared Presley's first album with what was then his most recent one, Moody Blue -- his first and last album. (Hey! I was young!) I was in the middle of writing that up when Presley died, and Moody Blue truly became his last album. What a dung heap of misplaced energy! Moody Blue with its insincere, by-the-numbers parodies of rock and roll and its heavy emphasis on overly histrionic ballads, was everything the punks never wanted to be -- but were in their own way. (There were some good numbers here, but the stench of death was about the project from the beginning.) Rubincam didn't outlive Elvis by much, and when he died I got my first promotion. (If it wasn't such an understatement, I'd say that life is very weird sometimes.) Anyway, the Presley piece was the first high-profile article I wrote in my pro career. People seemed to like it, and I felt like I'd arrived. Who would have thought that 20 years later the news media would be full of pro forma coverage of the anniversary of the guy's death? Forgotten in the coverage of the disciples who think that Elvis is God or, at least, the Silver Surfer, is that it all started with records and a guy trying to sing something a little different from what anybody else was singing. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Out of the loop and de-pressurized

Owing to my involuntary "early retirement" from covering the Valley's music scene, I missed Lollapalooza for the first time this year. I've never had any particular urge to have my body pierced or to get a tattoo, but I always enjoyed taking in the spectrum of edgy acts that the "alternative" festival offered. It was a big deal to me because I took some pride in having covered the very first show of the festival's first tour. I had to convince my editors that the show was going to be as big a deal as, say, a Garth Brooks concert. Not just a geek show I was right. The Lollapalooza festival became one of the '90s few "sure things" in summer pop-concert programming. Fortunately, that first year I got the conservative old Arizona Republic to cover it the same way. In subsequent years, unfortunately, the coverage was dominated more by the geek-show aspects than the musical aspect. (That's a major gripe with most mainstream media here. Popular music, however powerful its hold is on large groups of people, is treated as an aside.) Lollapalooza filled a need in an era of unadventurous radio programming by getting any number of "outsider" acts out of the clubs and onto the big stages. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but it always was an adventure, which is not something you can say about most amphitheater concerts. Smaller is better Now, I get new music in smaller doses. Covering concerts for local newspapers is out of the question, and I have little or no budget for the shows. I've got to admit, I miss them. On the other hand, after all the pressure of covering shows for a living (usually in addition to a 40-hour work week and trying to have an outside life with my family) I've got to admit I enjoy just checking out the local scene in a casual way even more. Whether I'm acting as a judge at the Arizona Amateur Blues Showdown or walking in on an act at a local festival or nightclub, life is better on a smaller stage. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo