The Doors obviously would not have been the special band they became without Jim Morrison, but it’s equally valid to say that, without keyboardist and musical director Ray Manzarek, the Doors would have been little more than Big Brother and the Holding Company to Morrison’s Janis Joplin (which is in no way to disparage that still-underrated band). Manzarek gave the Doors a distinguishing sound as a keyboard-led group, rather than a guitar-first group, and he brought and integrated jazz and blues influences more directly than most in his field. Manzarek died this week, and we remember him with this Jam (the genesis of which the group explains here):
R.I.P. Dick Trickle. He wasn’t Cole’s biological father, but it makes no difference, and he certainly wasn’t any kind of new school driver. As sure as rubbin’ is racin’, the hammer had to drop one final time for Trickle, but this isn’t how we expected it to happen. To the best of the Midwest:
Aldland is back with another podcast, talking about all of the hottest issues in the sports world. On tap this week is discussion of a possible new football league to rival the NCAA and a discussion on what impact David Beckham has made on soccer in the United States. Get at it, and tweet at us with ideas for discussions for future podcasts so I can stop browsing Reddit more than I already do.
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As briefly mentioned at the end of the last post, ALDLAND will have a presence in Detroit this weekend, where the Tigers will host the Atlanta Braves for three games, beginning tonight.
After twenty games, the Tigers can’t seem to get themselves above .500, and the early ride has been bumpy.
RT @STATS_MLB#Tigers are batting .198 with 16 total runs in their last seven games.— Chris Iott (@Chris_Iott) April 25, 2013
Yesterday afternoon’s game was particularly rough. After allowing just one earned run, starter Justin Verlander left the game with a lead on the scoreboard and a sore throwing-hand thumb. Rookie reliever Bruce Rondon, making his first major-league appearance, promptly gave up that lead, and then the ball. Phil Coke entered and, through a series of walks of varying intentionalities, put Detroit behind. Darin Downs relieved Coke and immediately gave up a grand slam. The supposedly hard-hitting Tigers, who have a way of not scoring late, plated no runs from the fifth inning on through the tenth, when they lost.
As anyone reading Upton Abbey knows, the Braves are red-hot. The consensus best team in baseball, Atlanta is off to a 15-6 start, and they’re hitting home runs like crazy. I haven’t taken a close look at their runs/inning distribution, but it sure seems like they can hit for power both early and late. Keep reading…
Earlier this week, great American folk singer Richie Havens died at the age of seventy-two. I saw him perform a few years ago, and while he had a few more rings on his fingers then than he did when he opened Woodstock with a three-hour set in 1969, his vibrance did not seem diminished in any way.
Airships are away in the Detroit Tigers empire as I write. After a crash landing at the final destination of the team’s only West Coast trip, the Tigers limped back to the Motor City, and promptly (indeed, retroactively) placed Octavio Dotel, who has been pitching without a functioning elbow since Oakland, on the disabled list. In immediate need of bullpen reinforcements, GM Dave Dombrowski & Co., air traffic controller furloughs be damned, revved up the sky fleet. The first move was to bring the franchise’s top relief prospect, Bruce Rondon, in from Toledo, something that admittedly is unlikely to require the services of a jet airliner. But then! Wheels up! Jose Valverde is on a flight to Detroit RIGHT NOW! The town and team turned on the once-perfect (49-0!) reliever after a down year last season, but now, in their need, redemption? The front office is mum for now, but the implication from Valverde’s comments this evening is that, at the end of his short-term minor league contract, he will sign a one-year contract with the club in Detroit.
What does all of this mean for a should-be frontrunner floundering in third place in the weak AL Central with a .500 record? Even though it’s early, and fans of baseball teams that struggle early love to rail against “small sample sizes,” we can set aside results and other numbers and acknowledge that the bullpen was working way too hard this month, and two fresh, if unsteady, arms are sure to provide at least temporary relief for a staff that seems like it could use a collective deep breath. For Rondon, my hope is that he’s ready for the big leagues. For Valverde, I just hope he has enough left to allow the coaches to use him in a way that helps the team. That may be ending this jet-set flourish with something of a sigh, but let it be, in part, a sigh of relief as you remind yourself that at least it wasn’t Brennan Boesch’s birthday flight that landed at DTW this evening.
We’re a dozen games into the season and the Tigers, with a few hiccups, are off to a respectable 7-5 start. Despite the day/Pacific time starts and my living outside the Tigers Radio Network, I’ve been able to keep decent track of these first few series and, while mindful of small sample size they represent, I was beginning to notice something concerning.
USA Today reports that TNT is experimenting with an “all analyst” approach to its NBA broadcasts. On Thursday, former NBA players Steve Kerr, Chris Webber, and Reggie Miller will broadcast the Thunder-Warriors game without a play-by-play announcer. Although all three have national broadcasting experience, Kerr has been tabbed (by the network?) to “act as ‘point man leading us to breaks. Maybe a little bit of a traffic cop if the game calls for it. It is more like three former players having a round table (discussion) almost during the game.’”
The concept intrigues me, and I am glad TNT is willing to experiment with the traditional broadcast formula, but I was wondering why Kerr was designated as the one to steer the broadcast, until I remembered his role in anchoring another all-star trio.
The first half of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s octofinals is tonight. Marquette-Miami. Arizona-Ohio State. Syracuse-Indiana. La Salle-Wichita State. Tournament darlings Florida Gulf Coast don’t play until tomorrow, but the number of profiles of their team already is growing at an exponential rate. I’ve criticized Jonathan Mahler before, but his latest for the still-mysterious Bloomberg View is fun:
If you’re wondering how Florida Gulf Coast University became the first 15th seed in the history of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to advance to the Sweet 16, look no further than the ur-text of the school’s economics department: “Atlas Shrugged.”
Embedded in this long, ponderous novel — required reading for all undergraduate economics and finance majors at FGCU — is the formula for transforming your college from a bunch of trailers on a swamp into the most talked-about school in the country. It’s simple, really. All you need to do is practice what Ayn Rand called “rational self-interest.”
Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly. It might have happened sooner, were it not for that great bane of Rand and her acolytes: regulators. The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association — at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.
For two nights in 1973, frequent musical partners Merl Saunders and Jerry Garcia met for their regular gig at the Keystone in Berkeley, CA and really locked it in. The full recordings of both nights now are available for the first time in a four-disc box set.
What do we call it when two top musicians– one an icon, one underrated– come together outside the brightest lights and get down to just performing music? As an initial, analytical matter, one can’t help but mention the Traveling Wilburys, but the feel’s all different here. This isn’t a tongue-in-cheek supergroup experiment shrouded in quasi mystery; rather, it’s two professional musicians doing work as such in a Bay-Area coffeeshop. Top-tier talent playing almost nothing but popular and classic tunes: The world’s best cover band.
