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
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