Your staff needs to understand that getting-it-first and getting-it-right are not conflicting choices but essential dual priorities. If you don’t have it right, you don’t have it first – you don’t have it at all.
Steve Buttry, in his latest advice for new senior editors at Digital First Media.
This is for Jon Ross, my summer camp counselor, master of a killer BSA chopper. And a Gibson guitar.
I’d been playing guitar since I was 7, when my mom, in a moment of brilliance, decided I would not play the piano or the violin or the accordion, which were the only instruments 7-year-olds learned to play at the time.
My mom decided I would play the guitar. Young Elvis. She took me to a fellow named Lou Stallman for lessons. Lou was a fairly well known musician/composer whose claim to fame at the time was that he wrote “Round and Round,” a big hit by Perry Como.
Lou showed me how to play a G chord and a C chord and an F chord and a D and an A and an E, covering only the bottom four strings because my hands were too small to cover all six. But it was a start. My first song was I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. G.C.D.
I learned to play all the hits — Michael Row the Boat Ashore, This Land Is Your Land. And I went to my guitar lessons, but (of course) I never practiced. Because I. Just. Wasn’t. Into. It. It was a chore.
But then came the first epiphany. I was in summer camp, playing a few chords, when I figured out — I FIGURED OUT!!!! — the chords to a song all by myself. Palisades Park, by Freddie Cannon. C, A minor, F, G. Nobody had to show me how. There was no sheet music to follow. I FIGURED IT OUT!!!
And so it went for another few years until Jon Ross turned my music world upside down. The second epiphany. We were at a summer camp winter reunion when Jon pulled me into a room, put a record on the turntable, and said listen to this. YOU CAN PLAY THIS.
And he put the needle down on the first track of the Butterfield Blues Band.
And that was all it took. Woke up this mornin’, looked around for my shoes. I had those mean-ol’ walkin’ blues.
The Blues is simple, Jon said. E, A, B7. Twelve bars. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It can go on for hours.
Simple? Hardly. But perfect.
It’s gone on for almost half a century. We’ve moved on from Butterfield and Bloomfield to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and Hubert Sumlin and Albert King and the Allmans and Ray Charles and Bonnie Raitt and Robert Cray and Janis Joplin and the king of all kings, Mister B.B. King.
Tip of the hat to Jon Ross.
Baseball, as Bart Giamatti so famously noted, is designed to break your heart. It broke mine from the start.
The year is 1957, and I’m a 6-year-old kid riding shotgun in the car, my dad behind the wheel. We’re cruising in a Ford station wagon, green, with phony wood siding.
My dad gestures to the right. “That’s Ebbets Field,” he says. “Where the Dodgers play. Next year I’ll take you to a ballgame.”
And so the heartbreak begins. Because there will be no next year. The Dodgers will slink off to Los Angeles, as will the Giants to San Francisco, and I will have to wait for much longer than “next year,” which is the prescribed waiting period for any Brooklynite.
I will have to wait three more years, until 1960, when my dad will finally get over HIS heartbreak and take me to a place where Brooklynites don’t belong, but I’m too young to understand — a place called Yankee Stadium, home of Mickey and Roger and Whitey and Yogi. Former home of the Babe and the Iron Man and DiMag. A palace.
The highlight of the game came when a fan, who evidently had one too many Ballantine’s, decided to climb the protective screen behind home plate and haul in a ball that had been hit foul and got stuck up there. Like a kid navigating a jungle gym, he walked by hand to the center of the screen, above the field-level seats, and tried pulling the ball through the mesh. Then he pulled out a cigarette lighter and tried to burn the mesh. And then security started pulling at his feet to bring him down, and he held on to that ball for dear life. And then they yanked off his shoes, and my dad was in hysterics because the guy was wearing bright red socks. And this was 1960, when socks came in black or white. And they finally pulled the guy down — without the ball — and the game resumed and all I remember a half century later is a guy in red socks trying to burn a hole in a mesh fence to take home a foul ball.
I remember one other thing — walking onto the field after the game, en route to the subway behind the outfield stands. The grass under my sneakers. Heaven.
I would be a Yankee fan for life — or until they broke my heart, which wouldn’t take long.
My dad told me some 50 years ago that Willie Mays was the greatest all-around ballplayer ever. I’m not one to argue with my dad. Today is Willie’s 82nd birthday. Now starting in centerfield . . . No. 24 . . .
This woman came thisclose to being vice president of the United States. Think about that as you watch this video.
2 Killings, 2 Guns, Unattended
Worth reading today, by Joe Nocera.
Utah soccer referee in coma from player’s punch
Was sports ever fun?
I remember once when I had to explain to Little League parents that the umpire (me) was the good guy . . . the guy who sacrificed his time because he loved the game and he loved seeing children learn to play it right. The pay sucked, the mosquitoes sucked worse, it was hot and humid and I was out there umpiring. And, no matter if I called it a ball or a strike, safe or out, half the parents would boo.
Ultimately, it can lead to this. Awful.
Baseball, the blues and what's in the news
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Baseball. Baseball. And then a bit more baseball.
Woke up this morning ... 