baseball, politics, rockandroll and ford pickup trucks
By Oklahoma Writer Mark Bransdorfer
Narration By Roger Netzer
Around a gazillion years ago, meaning the autumn after we got out of college, brock and i were in beverly hills watching the red sox try to clinch a playoff bid. The game was going well for the red sox and then brock surprised me and said we had to go to bed early because we were getting up early – this was years before he would say the same thing on golf trips. We left the girls watching the game, which the red sox easily won and shockingly the red sox made it to the world series and were ahead in game 7 of the final world series game 3-1 in the seventh inning – that is the closest the red sox came to winning a world series since they ditched babe ruth and shipped him to the ny yankees around 1919 for 125k cuz the red sox owner had a broadway “star” girlfriend in nyc and her floundering show needed a small cash infusion – bye bye,babe.
The next morning in beverly hills, where brock and i happened to be since somehow the white house at the time yanked what we thought were our certain job offers to write speeches for the president which we thought meant riding around the world in planes with names like air force one, anyway, the next morning in the early autumn of 1975 in beverly hills so early in fact the rest of the house was still asleep brock and i walked out to a car, i can’t remember the car but maybe he can, and brock said, i have somewhere to take you. I might be dumber than i look, and for sure i am, but my heart jumped and i sort of had a distant faint clue where we might be going – not really, but it was one of those mornings or days, when things change forever and never go back. Of course, for me and for sure some or all of you, meeting bpw the first time was also one of those things.
I remember not being able to hear what brock was saying while we drove towards hollywood and brock saying when i kept asking, where are we going, you’ll see. He might have a different version of this but the core story is true and the best thing i have ever seen and i’ve seen the yankees win the last game of a world series in front of my own eyes three separate times and this tops this by a wide margin. When we got to sunset boulevard or maybe it was hollywood boulevard but it was sunset brock parked somewhere i no longer remember and took me inside this enormous building with glass ceilings so high above our heads palm trees were growing in the long corridors. It looked like an airplane hangar, or a series of airplane hangars, with lots of heavy windowless doors coming off the cement or stone floor corridor with all those windows above our head letting the early morning light hit all those palm trees. Oh, the places you will go if you find the right friends. Whether biden wins or loses, you guys are the right friends for me. I think there was an adjacent normal sized door next to the airplane hangar door in the “room” Brock took me into.
When we got inside that room Brock introduced me quietly to a guy who came up to us, who I also no longer remember but he was sweet and kind and I think of him, other than Johnny Angel who was a roadie on Brock’s tours and Wayne Jon Jon who went by the name of Johnny Starbuck and was Keith’s roadie for the stones, the person Brock introduced me to was and remains the best roadie I ever met. Brock left me with him and went to the stage, if there was a stage, I was kind of floating like the three times the yankees won the world series in front of my eyes, and the roadie quietly explained my role for the next two or three days. Like a lot of things as we get older, especially for me cuz i wasn’t really paying attention, the precise details come and go. We went home to beverly hills after the first day there and had a happy meal cuz the red sox, call them the joe biden of baseball, had somehow made the playoffs. The next morning i could see and hear better and brock explained to me the whole story, which he can tell at his own leisure, of how at the tender age of 22 he had been hired to play in linda ronstadt’s band and that they were getting ready to go on tour and linda did not usually show up at rehearsals and the place where we were going in the morning was where bands got ready to go on tours of the united states and throughout the world. If the white house had in fact given brock and mr. r and me our speech writing jobs nothing that happened the way it really happened would have happened the same way – no linda, no kids and grandkids the same way, nothing, all different in the, as my son describes it, the unrelenting math of life, change one thing along the way and everything changes. It is beyond improbable that Joe Biden is about to become president – i’m sure he is going to be elected but I’m not sure he will be inaugurated, i don’t know why i feel that way or what it means. Either way it is beyond improbable, the guy couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag in other runs for the presidency and only started doing well when he stopped appearing in public – i have already voted for him two or more weeks ago but i can’t wait for a younger person to become president again, whenever that is.
On the second morning, or maybe the third, at the rehearsal studios whose name i can never remember even though brock reminds me all the time, i think of the place as SHR, but that is wrong, the sweet roadie took me gently into the corridor and walked me to the end, we could hear other bands rehearsing behind the soundproof windowless airplane hangar doors. He said, no photos, no talking, no anything, just watch, this is something you have to see. When he opened the little normal door and we slid inside what I heard was a wall of sound and these young guys onstage except they were older than us so i thought they were geers, what we heard was Whole Lotta Love, it was such a startling stunning thing to see and we were there for a whole lotta more songs and the wheeling out of a cut glass cart with cut glass bowls holding, um, pickmeups and soothmedowns powders and pills, what i am trying to say about Biden and baseball is this, you never know and it is all amazingly remarkable.