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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (April 7, 2011)
music BY RICK LEVIN Play It, They Will Come The Baseball Project brings high heat to Sam Bond’s L eisurely, explosive, sun-drenched, history obsessed, epic, eccentric and full of odd rituals and larger-than- life characters, baseball by its very nature feeds on legend and myth — it’s as much a metaphor as it is a sport, a game continually telling the story of itself. From movies like Field of Dreams and Eight Men Out to Casey at the Bat and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, our national pastime is rich in folklore and resounding with hymns to this very American way of life. Veteran Northwest singer/songwriter Scott McCaughey, founder of the Young Fresh Fellows and all-purpose member of REM, is a baseball fan through and through. And as someone who understands the tragicomic poetry of the sport, McCaughey possesses the talent, wit and chutzpa to turn what happens on the diamond into gems of pop rock. McCaughey, who lives in Portland, told me over the phone last week that he’d always dreamed of writing baseball songs — maybe even an album’s worth — but it wasn’t until he started talking with former Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn that the idea really began to take shape. “It was just something a few years ago that Steve and I started jawing about in drunken conversation,” he says. “Once we started to join forces, it had the chance of happening. I probably would have just put it off forever.” Add to this lineup REM guitarist Peter Buck on bass (Buck and McCaughey are also in the Minus 5) and drummer Linda Pitmon, and McCaughey’s long-standing UO School of Music World Music Series presents -#46+-5'5*#&4+5KVCT rockers about the game’s cult of personality dream became reality in the form of The (“The Straw That Stirs the Drink,” which is Baseball Project, a superstar band of what Reggie Jackson once dubbed himself). baseball fans that came to the fork in the The centerpiece of the album, however, road and took it. is McCaughey’s bittersweet “Buckner’s Volume 2: High and Inside, the Bolero,” a brilliant, hilarious and strangely Project’s follow-up to their 2008 debut touching speculative lament on what is Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, is arguably the most infamously botched play anything but a sophomore slump. In fact, in the history of baseball, if not all sports; it’s more like what the late, great Seattle the song — which asks the question, “If one Mariner’s announcer Dave Niehaus called play killed the Sox, can you please tell me “the Grand Salami,” an out-of-the-park which?” — turns Bill Buckner’s notorious moonshot that hits for the cycle, with a tip blown grounder into a universal of the hat to the peanut gallery. Containing guest appearances The Baseball Project meditation on fate, circumstance by such rock luminaries as plays at 9 pm Friday, and the wages of immortality. April 8, at Sam Don’t get me wrong: The the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, Bond’s; $12 Baseball Project isn’t some Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and minor league answer to Pink Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, this Floyd, all heavy and portentous and full rotation of knuckleball ballads, fastball of mock-wisdom. It’s just a game, man, anthems, sidearm slayers and jangle-pop and it’s only rock and roll. But you’ll change-ups is riotously funny, but it’s no like it, because this is something special joke. “Somehow we tapped into a way to indeed. Athletic non-supporters, don’t let do it that seemed to work and not be too the surface subject matter fool you; you frivolous,” McCaughey explains of the didn’t read Moby Dick to learn about the Project’s process. “Of course, I made a technique of 19th-century whaling, right? career of being frivolous, and have nothing In the fi nal tally, High and Inside is all against that,” he adds, laughing. about the music, and the talent and love Most impressive is the balance the and years of experience that make it zip music fi nds among the disparate elements and snap like a perfect slider. The Baseball that comprise the complicated appeal of Project is an indie-rock dream team of baseball and the love its loyal fans feel for seasoned musicians who are having way the game. High and Inside runs the bases more fun than any four people have a right from the defi ant and proud (“Please Don’t to, and it shows. I’d give anything just to Call Them Twinkies” and “Fair Weather sit on the end of this team’s bench, handing Fans”), to the nostalgic and elegiac (“1976” them their corked bats and bags of Big and “Chin Music”), to songs of super-heroic League chew. absurdity (“Ichiro Goes to the Moon”) and ew C STRING QUARTETS hamber Music@Beall SOXV 2010 - 2011 SERIES #472%*#6612#&*;#;6CDNC Classical Music of Northern India Friday, April 15 • 8 pm, Beall Concert Hall FREE Lecture-Demo, Friday, April 15 2 pm, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art TICKETS: $12 Gen. Admission; $8 students / seniors, available in advance from UO Ticket Office, 541-346-4363; tickets.uoregon.edu Call 541-346-2852 for information. D E H S PO LI NG I T I C X E AN D EO/AA/ADA institution committed to cultural diversity. Cottage Theatre presents C The Demon Barber of Fleet Street A Musical Thriller Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Book by Hugh Wheeler Pavel Haas Quartet SUNDAY APRIL 10 3 PM BEALL CONCERT HALL “One of the most polished and musically exciting young string quartets in the world today.” —The Washington Post From an Adaptation by Christopher Bond Directed by Tony Rust April 8, 9, 10* ● 15, 16, 17* ● 22, 23 ● 28, 29, 30, May 1* SERIES SPONSORS: *matinee (541) 682-5000 700 Village Drive • Cottage Grove • www.cottagetheatre.org • 541-942-8001 music.uoregon.edu/cmb 24 APRIL 7, 2011 EUGENE WEEKLY WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
