A P-Town Tom Bomb, with Musical Accompaniment from Ray Peters

Yesterday was Ray Peters's birthday -- so everyone comment below and wish him a happy birthday! For those who do not know Ray, take a few moments to read my "Meet the Brewers" post about him as well as the update post I wrote after I had the pleasure of speaking with him on the telephone. 

Ray is a multifaceted modern-day Renaissance man, well versed in history, in literature, and as a professional athlete too. It's his Harvard background -- shared by current Brewer Brent Suter, whom I'm pleased to have put Ray in touch with through Twitter -- and his innate curiosity that causes him to be such an interesting person.

Last month, Ray was taken with one of my music posts. I'm guessing it was my prog-rock timeline post from Strawberry Bricks. He undertook to send me a massive list of music that he enjoys. With it being Ray's birthday and with having received a bunch of cards from P-Town Tom of Eamus Catuli, I thought, "what a great way to post about both!" 

And away we go!

First out of the box is Jonathan King. King came to Ray's mind when he saw the first Genesis record hit my blog in that Prog-Rock post. King's song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" was released four full years before the U.S. actually got to the moon and while King was still an undergraduate at Cambridge University. It was a big hit -- making it to #4 in the UK and to #17 on the Billboard Hot 100 -- and it has been covered by everyone from Marlene Dietrich to The Flaming Lips.

King went on to discover Genesis and be their first producer. All of the members of Genesis were between the ages of 15 to 17 at the time he first produced them. Perhaps that is what drew King to the band -- I hope not, though, because King was convicted in 2001 of four counts of indecent assault, one count of buggery, and one count of attempted buggery committed between 1983 and 1987 against five boys aged 14 and 15. There were other charges as well relating to hundreds of Polaroid photos of teenage boys that were found in King's house as well. For that conviction, he served 7 years in jail.

In May of 2017, he was arrested again. This time, he has been charged by Surrey Police with 18 sexual offences relating to nine boys between the ages of 14 and 16 as part of an investigation into sexual abuse at the Walton Hop disco in the 1970s. He's free on bail right now, and his trial date is currently set for June 11, 2018.

To get away from talk of buggery, let's talk about police. Police cards, in particular, that Tom sent. He sent a bunch of different police department's cards, and as my post from Saturday made clear, that puts a smile on my face. These two came from Cudahy (pronounced Cud - uh - hay), which is found south of downtown Milwaukee and due east from the Milwaukee airport.

So, let's talk about Jaime (pronounced "hi-may" or "hi-me") Cocanower, a/k/a James Stanley Cocanower (so, is that pronounced "ha-mace" like the soccer player James Rodriguez?) -- a native Puerto Rican. Cocanower was a smart man like Ray, attending Baylor University and majoring in accounting.  Cocanower rose to fame through his pitching in the College World Series for the Bears in 1977 and 1978, famously dualling 1977 National Player of the Year Randy Martz to a 1-1 tie through 9 innings in the 1977 series (Baylor lost 3-2 in 10 innings). 

Cocanower was then signed as an amateur free agent by the Brewers in 1978 and made it to the majors in 1983. He never struck out more than he walked in any of his four major league seasons spanning 79 appearances (47 starts and 365-2/3 innings worth of pitching), mainly because his strikeouts per 9 innings never went higher than 4.4/9, which came in his final 44-2/3 innings in 1986. After his retirement and even during the offseason, he worked as an accountant. He eventually settled in Arkansas and has worked for years for Acxiom Corporation, a public company, for whom he is the "Functional Leader in Corporate Tax." I found his wife's Facebook page too, but I'm not going to post that.

"Ghost Riders in the Sky" is a very famous song, having been recorded in covers during every decade since 1948 -- the first version being the one on 78 RPM record in the YouTube video above. To me, the most famous version is Johnny Cash's take on the song in 1979, which hit #2 on the Billboard Country chart that year. 

Some other versions include ones by Burl Ives (Billboard's #1 song for 1949), Duane Eddy, The Ramrods, The Shadows (with their Brit-Disco version), Elvis Presley, Dick Dale, Debbie Harry (whose version sounds like it was produced by Moby), Concrete Blonde, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, and Buckethead. In addition, versions of the song have been recorded in Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and Spanish (Ray, if you're reading, here's "Jinetes En El Cielo"...and I have to say, it's terrible).

By the late 1980s, the Brewers Police Card sets had taken on a life of their own, complete with corporate sponsorship from Sargento, a cheese manufacturer that is located in Plymouth, Wisconsin, and is one of the largest retail cheese companies in the country. It's still privately held and owned by the Gentine family. 

Bryan Clutterbuck. The name just sounds weird, right? Clutterbuck was a Michigander who grew up in Milford, Michigan. He attended Eastern Michigan University, and the Brewers drafted him from there in the seventh round of the 1981 draft. He made his way to the Brewers in 1986 and provided 20 games of about league-average pitching out of the bullpen. He got sent back down to the minors, and came back to the team in 1989, making 11 starts. The Brewers shipped him out to El Paso that year, and that was the end of his professional career other than two years of independent ball in 1994 and 1995. Clutterbuck passed away a year ago last week (August 23, 2016) at the age of 56 from colon cancer. 

As a child of the 1980s, this song is always associated with Soft Cell's electronic version of course. Yet, when you hear it here, it makes complete musical sense as a 1960s Motown-sound song. DJ Richard Searling took the song to the UK in the early 1970s and recorded it without making any impact on the charts. 

Soft Cell heard Searling's version, changed the arrangement, slowed the tempo, and changed the key to record their version in a day and a half. If you know that version, you might remember that Soft Cell spliced in a cover of "Where Did Our Love Go" with "Tainted Love." Clearly, that decision makes much more sense now to me, since I had never heard of Gloria Jones's version. The song took a slow trip into the US charts -- starting on January 16, 1982 at number 90, moving up to #64, dropping to #100 for two weeks, then climbing again all the way to #8 in the summer of 1982. In all, it spent 43 weeks on the Hot 100 -- then a record. Goth/electronica/weirdo rocker Marilyn Manson also recorded the song in 2001, and it made a dent on the charts as well.

I call the 1990 police cards the "Big Blues" thanks to their blue borders. I decided to highlight at least one of the randoms, again, rather than focusing on the Younts and Molitors.

Billy Bates, for instance. Bates was tiny -- 5'7" tall, 155 pounds -- and went to the University of Texas in its 1980s heydays. He must have made the team out of spring training in 1990, because otherwise there is no way that he would have a baseball card in the police set. His Brewers career consisted of 21 totals games of 49 plate appearances with a .140/.208/.163 slash line (that is an OPS+ of 6 according to Baseball Reference). 

Bates then was traded with Glenn Braggs to the Cincinnati Reds on June 9, 1990 in exchange for Ron "No I am not Timothy Busfield" Robinson and Bob Sebra. Bates got in 8 games for the Reds and went 0-for-5, yet he made the postseason roster and got a hit in his only at bat in the 1990 World Series -- which the Reds won -- and he scored the winning run in Game 2. 

In addition, he also raced and beat a cheetah in a race. Trust me, I'd sure as hell run my ass off too if I were being chased by a cheetah in a baseball stadium. 

Here's another song that became associated with a later act. Tiny Bradshaw recorded this version of the song in 1951 as a jump blues song. It really rips, too -- great sax solo in it by Red Prysock wailing and honking away.

Johnny Burnette updated the song in 1956 in a style that reminds me of Jerry Lee Lewis, and he brought an upbeat tempo to the song that the blues version lacked.

My mind immediately associates this song with metal, though -- Aerosmith. Their version  helps show the tie between classic rock and the blues, certainly, with the bass line driving the song forward in the way that the back-beat drum did in the Tiny Bradshaw original. Yes, my apologies to those of you who thought of Led Zeppelin or the Yardbirds first -- my brain said Aerosmith.

Tom outdid himself finding all of these different police departments for the Brewers sets. Thanks to him, I am going to have to get my butt in gear and update my want lists for police sets so that I know what I have. Otherwise, I'll end up on eBay buying a third set from the 1986 Winneconne Police or something. And, that just won't do.

By the way, who else remembers Paul Householder being a decent Reds prospect in the early 1980s?

Cozy Powell was a drumming legend in the 1970s and 1980s. This song is "Dance With the Devil," which was based on Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun." On the studio version of this song, Suzi Quatro -- who appeared in the 1970s as "Leather Tuscadero" on Happy Days (though, to be quite fair, that was hardly her career highlight but it's what I remember) -- played bass.

Powell is revered in rock drumming circles for his playing style -- which you can hear on this song up front as very progressive and incorporating various musical influences within it. He played with everyone from The Jeff Beck Group, Whitesnake, Emerson Lake & Powell (he was . . . oh, I bet you don't need an explanation here), Michael Schenker Group, Black Sabbath, and Yngwie Malmsteen, among others. He died in a car wreck on April 5, 1998 -- driving too fast while drunk, talking to his married girlfriend on his mobile phone, not wearing his seatbelt, and having an underinflated rear tire.

I don't think he should have been driving.

This trio of awesome oddballs helped inspire my most recent post on my 1980s Oddball Blog about the 1981 Topps Scratch Offs. I think that the scratch off set is an underappreciated oddball, probably because it is sized weirdly no matter how you display it and it was a one-and-done set. Kellogg's get love everywhere (deservedly).  

The Duracell card? Maybe if Panini could make cards like this rather than being forced into discoloration, they could make a card that looks this good. But I doubt it.

It's odd how one song can be taken in so many directions. The original "Walk Don't Run" is the top video -- a jazz piece by Johnny Smith that meanders over 10 minutes. Chet Atkins -- the important country singer -- created a 2-minute version that drew on his own influences from Merle Travis, Django Reinhardt and George Barnes. The John Barry Seven and The Ventures both recorded the song in 1960.

As an interesting side note, this song was recorded by the Ventures with George T. Babbitt, Jr. as the drummer. He had to drop out from the band because he was not old enough to play with the rest of the band in clubs. Thankfully for him, Babbitt did not miss out on life as a result. He went to the University of Washington on an Air Force ROTC scholarship to get his mechanical engineering degree. He stuck with the Air Force and retired in 2000 as a four-star general who served as Commander, Air Force Materiel Command (COMAFMC) from 1997 to 2000. He even got to reunite with his band in 1998 and play "Walk Don't Run" in full military uniform.

Nothing like a couple of awesome autographs to help push a package to be almost perfect. That's my first autograph for Trebelhorn. The big thing I always remembered about Treb was that he was dating the then-director of Summerfest, Bo Black. Bo was quite the hottie, having appeared on the cover of Playboy in the late 1960s. 

Trebelhorn managed the Brewers from 1986 through 1991, and then managed the Cubs in 1994. After that, he worked for the Orioles for many years in the minors and the majors before being fired after the 2007 season from his job as bench coach. He went back to the minors to Oregon (where he lives today) and managed the Class A Salem-Keizer Volcanoes until 2012. He's probably retired now, at the age of 69, unless another team comes calling wanting his advice.

Perhaps Ray wanted to prove to me that he, too, has strange tastes in music. Okay, let me quote his email to me: "Needless to say I have eclectic musical tastes. Love it all."

You do indeed, Ray -- "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" played by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain can only be described as eclectic. I'll admit that I did not know that there was such a thing as a ukulele orchestra. But these musicians can play incredibly well. As a result, I feel compelled to include one of their covers of a 1990s song.

Holy crap that's really awesome!

I would have never thought that it could be good. Well, until the guy starts singing. He sucks. He sounds like a lounge singer on quaaludes.

Or, as one commenter on YouTube said, "This is the whitest thing I've ever seen."

Yes, I know it's intended to be humorous. And it is. But it's still the whitest thing ever. 

To redeem myself, let's close with a card of one of Ray's Brewers teammates: Tommy Harper on his 1971 Topps Super. I was absolutely blown away when this showed up in the envelope from Tom. I don't think I've really ever seen a 1971 Topps Super before, and it's awesome. I didn't scan the back, but it looks like the 1971 cards.

Ray -- you should get one of these made for you! Happy birthday to you, sir!

Tom -- thank you very much for the fantastic cards (most of which I did not show here)!