J.D.'s (AND BOSTON'S) BLUES


Months after I bitched about J.D. Drew lying to the media before opting out of his contract with the Dodgers, I received the following comment:

Anonymous said...
You're a jerk. JD is awesome. The Dodgers suck, and I'm glad he got out of LA. This is Major League Baseball. You really need to learn to deal with the business aspect of the game. Also, it doesn't look like your prediction came true. It is June 9, 2007, and JD drove in seven runs.

Must be a Red Sox fan. Drew must have had one good game this season, because these are his stats, as of June 23, 2007. .243 average, 6 homers, 30 RBI. In 61 games he drove in 23 runs. In one game he drove in seven. And for what? Five years, $70 million. Such a deal. I still think his groin will fall off in August and he'll miss the rest of the season. Glad he's not the Dodgers' problem anymore.

WANKER

Not too long ago, I was asked to conduct a question and answer session with guitarist Andy Summers at the L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. Summers was flogging his memoir and I figured it would be a fun way to pass an hour (I wasn't paid, but I did receive a Festival of Books coffee mug, which, of course, you can't put a price on).

I dilligently plowed through the book (whose name I will not promote for reasons that will be explained in a bit) so I could be prepared for an audience that was sure to contain more than a handful of Police aficionados. But when I get there, Summers couldn't have been more unpleasant. I asked questions that required a "deep cut" sort of answer, to provide a little more depth than the standard "this is the guitar player for the Police" sort of thing. Maybe I misjudged. Maybe the audience just wanted to hear the hits.

Certainly, Summers played it that way. He was a consummate shill for his then-upcoming money-grabbing Police reunion shows, and he reacted to my questions with incredulous disdain. He basically used me as a verbal punching back to keep the shine upon him. His answers were always, "let me read from the book."

Basically, it turned into one of the longest 60-minute periods of my life. It's not fun being humiliated by a person with an ego the size of the UCLA campus. When it was over, there was not thanks. no nothing. Only "that went well, don't you think?" Well, fuck you too. It's my own fault. I volunteered for the humiliation.

It's weird because I've interviewed scores of folks far more famous and talented than Summers, and, for the most part, the subjects have been universally gracious. But with this guy, there was no connection. I was nothing more than an instrument to sell more books, to put more cash in his tiny little hands.

I don't know what I expected (respect? tix to see the Police?). But I got little, other than the taste of shit I was forced to eat on that stage.

WATCH THIS, PLEASE

CHARLIE IN HOLLYWOOD

In the fall of 1974, I moved into a condominium with my mother in Chatsworth, California. It was a hop and a skip from lovely Chatsworth Park, but I soon became enamored with a more dubious landmark of the northwest San Fernando Valley town: the Spahn Ranch, once the hideout for the Manson Family. I was 10, but strangely obsessed the the murders masterminded by Charles Manson. I wrote fifth-grade book reports about Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter and plowed through Ed Sanders' The Family before the onset of puberty. I guess I wasn't much different from other curious post-sixties kids.

I was alive and living in Venice when the murders took place, but I have no memory of them. (The first real "event" I remember consciously was the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, largely because they shut my elementary school for several days in its wake). To me, the 1969 Manson killings were amorphous drama that I couldn't get enough of. I never had a real concept of the utter fear that gripped the city in the wake of the murders.

The seventies were kind of a golden age for grisly murder in L.A. There was the freeway killer, and I believe Richard Ramierez got going back then. My only real connection was knowing a girl in junior high school whose sister was murdered by the Hillside Strangler, but I never spoke with her about it. What could you say?

As I've gotten older my obsession with serial killers has (luckily) abated, but I recently interviewed someone who was at the center of the world that was shattered when Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten burst into the home on Cielo Drive in August of 1969. She told me she had been with the eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate three days before her murder -- shopping for wallpaper for Tate's baby's room. She said Tate snuck a cigarette, though she knew husband Roman Polanski would be mad. She said she knew everybody inside that house. For months after the murders, she told me, she carried a gun in her purse.

I can't even begin to imagine experiencing something like that -- the fear that so many endured in the aftermath of those murders. Even now, nearly four decades later, the mere mention of it provokes a shower of tears. My heart goes out to her.

More than Altamont, more than Chicago in '68, the Manson killings put an end to the sixties, to whatever hippie idealism existed. And it seems like it's a story that will likely never be fully uncovered. There seems to be an unspoken verbal blackout when it comes to this topic. People who knew the victims, who lived in that gilded world of the young hip Hollywood aristocracy, those in the straight rock and roll world who were exposed to Manson the musician. They've been mum for nearly 40 years. Some, like Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson, took their stories -- and their fear -- to their graves. I wonder if we'll ever know the truth about the extent to which Manson infiltrated Hollywood.