RobKirkpatrick.com

It’s taken me a while to do this, but here it is finally – the official playlist for 1969: The Year Everything Changed:

“Whipping Post,” The Allman Brothers, Beginnings

“Come Together”/ “Something”, The Beatles, Abbey Road

“Can’t Find My Way Home,” Blind Faith, Blind Faith

“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline

“Ballad of Easy Rider,” The Byrds, The Byrds: 20 Essential Tracks…

“Hair,” “Love American Style,” The Cowsills, 20^th Century Masters

“Lodi,” Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash

“Space Oddity,” David Bowie, Best of Bowie

“Son of a Preacher Man,” Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis

“Suspicious Minds,” Elvis Presley, From Elvis in Memphis

“St. Stephen,” Grateful Dead, Aoxomoxoa

“Work Me, Lord,” Janis Joplin, The Woodstock Experience

“We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers

“Star Spangled Banner”/ “Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock

“With a Little Help from My Friends,” Joe Cocker, Woodstock—40 Years On (box set)

“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin

“Whole Lotta Love,” Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II

“Kick Out the Jams,” MC5, The Big Band – The Best of MC5

“Down by the River,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

“Gimme Shelter,” The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed

“Soul Sacrifice,” Santana, The Woodstock Experience: Santana

“Stand!”, Sly and the Family Stone, Stand!

“I Want to Take You Higher,” Sly and the Family Stone, The Woodstock Experience

“Monster/Suicide/America,” Steppenwolf, Monster

“1969,” The Stooges, The Stooges

“I’m Going Home,” Ten Years After, The Best of Woodstock

 “Easy to Be Hard,” Three Dog Night, Three Dog Night: The Complete Singles

“Something in the Air,” Thunderclap Newman, Easy Rider (Deluxe Edition)

“We’re Not Gonna Take It,” The Who, Woodstock—40 Years On (box set)

 “In the Year 2525,” Zager and Evans, Radio Hits of the ‘60s

“Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” The Fifth Dimension, The Ultimate 5^th Dimension

Here are the rules:

1. Assign a team/franchise to the position where it’s placed stars (HOFers, MVPs, All-Stars & Cy Youngs) throughout its history.

2. Use each team/franchise just once.

3. Arrange the franchise positions into a batting order based on each’s composite offensive skills.

1. SS Pittsburgh Pirates (Vaughn, Wagner, Groat)

2. 2B St. Louis Cardinals (Hornsby, Schoendienst, Herr)

3. LF Boston Red Sox (Williams, Yaz, Rice, Ramirez)

4. CF New York Yankees (Combs, DiMaggio, Mantle)

5. 1B NY/San Francisco Giants (Terry, Mize, McCovey, Clark)

6. 3B Boston/Milw./Atl. Braves (Matthews, Pendleton, Jones)

7. RF Detroit Tigers (Heilmann, Kaline, Gibson)

8. C Cincinnati Reds (Lombardi, Bench)

9. SP Brooklyn/LA Dodgers (Roe, Drysdale, Koufax, Sutton, Valenzuela, Hershiser)

RP Phila./Oakland A’s (Fingers, Eckersley, Street)

Have a better lineup?  Send it to me!

While grateful for all the attention I’ve gotten for my “other” two books from last year, I think my Cecil Travis book (published in a new Bison Books edition in ‘09 by the University of Nebraska Press) has somewhat gotten lost in the shuffle.  So check out the mini bio for this Washington Senators All-Star from the 1930s and ’40s that I contributed to the SABR Baseball Biography Project:  

http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&bid=597&pid=14327

…Then, if you’d like to know more, click on the BOOKS link at the top of my site and pick your online vendor of choice.

- Rob

If you’re looking for a good book about the late ’60s – one that I didn’t even write – check out Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by O.C. journalist Nick Schou:

http://us.macmillan.com/orangesunshine

Schou’s book just received a “four cannabis review” from High Times, author Mike Davis says this true story reads “like classic Thomas Pynchon,” and yours truly blurbed it by saying it’s a “wild ride of a story that seems straight out of Easy Rider or Zabriskie Point.”

Orange Sunshine is available now for pre-order on Amazon.

Valleys of Neptune, an album of a dozen previously unreleased studio tracks from Jimi Hendrix, is set for release in March from Sony/Legacy. Here’s Edna Gundersen’s piece for USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2010-01-11-jimialbum11_ST_N.htm?csp=34

I spoke to Gundersen in October 2008 for an article she did on Mark Oliver Everett’s memoir, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, which I published at my day job:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-10-20-mark-everett_N.htm

Magic in the Night got a mention in a blog called Madmen, Drummers, Bummers and Indians in the Summer.  As far as back-handed compliments go, it’s one of the best ones you can get:

I have finished Rob Kirkpatrick’s “Magic in the Night”, which is one of the better Springsteen related books I’ve yet read. Kirkpatrick is about 97% less full of crap than most music critics, so kudos to him. 

Here’s the link: http://coxrox.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/three-more-that-snuck-into-2009/

(…with apologies to Public Enemy.)

I intended this to be a letter appearing in the Washington Post, but it doesn’t appear that they’ll be printing it, so I’m posting it here…

1969 vs. 1968?

In response to Carlos Lozada’s comments on my book in his article “2009 is over. But is it history?”, I want to clarify that I did not say I “might have called the book ‘1969: The Year After the Important Year.’” As I explain in my introduction, this was a joke made by a colleague, which I recalled to note the glut of books on 1968 and the gap that I sought to fill with mine.

Mr. Lozada argued that I “must outdo 1968” and incidents such as the Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon. I take it, then, he does not see the significance of a year that witnessed People’s Park, the Stonewall Riots, the Manson Family killings, the War Moratorium, the Days of Rage, the occupation of Alcatraz, the public’s discovery of the My Lai massacre, and the killing of Fred Hampton? Or the importance of Nixon’s inaugural year, in which he escalated the war in Southeast Asia with covert bombings in Cambodia and drew lines in the sand with his famous “Silent Majority” address to the nation?

“When you need the Miracle Mets and the first modern ATM to boost your case, you know you’re in trouble,” writes Mr. Lozada. If he disagrees that the Miracle Mets (which he can reference 40 years later without needing to explain who they were) transcended the sports world, would he also question the importance of another event from baseball that year: Curt Flood’s announcement that he was challenging baseball’s reserve clause, thus signaling the onset of free agency?

If Mr. Lozada isn’t impressed with how the invention of the ATM changed the ways in which he conducts his financial transactions today, does he not believe that the maiden Boeing 747 flight, the first artificial heart implant, and the first computer network connection introduced major changes into modern life?  (Without that last item, I would not have found myself 40 years later reading Mr. Lozada’s article at home on my laptop.)  And, of course, there was a small technological achievement called Apollo 11.

While Mr. Lozada maintains I was applying the “Groundwork Argument” to substitute for a supposed lack of “historical moments,” I would suggest that recent History channel documentaries such as Woodstock: Now & Then and Sex in ’69: The Sexual Revolution in America (for which I was interviewed), as well as NPR’s humor piece on 40th anniversary “burnout,” seem to indicate others agree with my opinion that 1969 was indeed an important year with a unique legacy in America society.

Rob Kirkpatrick
Author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed

Here’s the article to which I’m responding:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html

 1. Hair – The Original Broadway Cast Recording

2. The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) - The Beatles

3. Abbey Road – The Beatles

4. Blood, Sweat & Tears – Blood Sweat & Tears

5. Wichita Lineman – Glen Campbell

6. Green River – Creedence Clearwater Revival

7. Johnny Cash at San Quentin – Johnny Cash

8. Blind Faith – Blind Faith

9. Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin

10. TCB – Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations

Wow, I just found this great page on a musical called The Dream Engine, which Jim Steinman (later of Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler, and Celine Dion fame) wrote and starred in at Amherst College and then Mount Holyoke in the spring of 1969. The story centers around a Manson-like character named Baal, the revolutionary poet and leader of a tribe of wild boys on the California coast.  

http://www.jimsteinman.com/comeinthenight.html

American Revolution, 1969. The beast lives forever. The creatures are behind you! The universe is in a state of triumph. I am meat. I am muscled space. I am electrified nerve ends! I am colored light! I am chemical blood! I am the meat of the universe! I am the muscles of space! I am the colored light of a god! I am the nerve end of a star. I am the chemical blood of the future.

Dig it.

Here’s the Amherst Student review from April 28, 1969:

http://www.jimsteinman.com/dreamengine/defckcum.htm 

A piece from Steinman himself for the paper on “Nudity in Theater – A Metaphor for Revolution”:

http://www.jimsteinman.com/dreamengine/deltr.htm

And great description of Joe Papp’s aborted New York production, from cast member Bob Sather:

http://www.jimsteinman.com/dreamengine/dereaction.htm

Last week I posted a link to a theologian’s blog, in which he listed 1969: The Year Everything Changed among his best books of the year.  Today, I just came across this posting on An Atheist’s Answer, where the book is listed as one of five nonfiction books to buy instead of the Bible:

http://atheistsanswer.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/good-books/ 

Wow.  No pressure there.

It had me wondering: If I made like John Lennon and declared myself “bigger than Jesus,” would the ensuing book burnings help drive sales?  Whatever helps move stock…