Boy Ray

Man Ray was an American Dada and Surrealist artist. Boy Ray, on the other hand, was an English realist and pop artist, a singer and songwriter with the Kinks, the band that invented the clangy riff, perfected the power chord, and unlike its native contemporaries, thoroughly used British vernacular, accents and subject matter in their early bittersweet, romantic, and homely compositions. (By homely, I mean both the American and British definitions.)

But Ray Davies in 1965 was only a boy chronologically. The young man looked and sounded old, like he was born standing up, but hunched over. His crooked, gapped teeth mocked his Carnaby Street fringe, and his smiling eyes betrayed premature wisdom. There was nothing graceful about him – he was really kind of an oaf – but he was cool nonetheless.

"I Gotta Move" was the b-side of "All Day and All of the Night", the Kinks' fourth single, released in October 1964 on Pye. The record reached Number Two in the UK chart. Sounding a bit more like the Yardbrids than the Kinks' own previous records, with its continuous maraca-shaking up-tempo groove, it contains one of Boy Ray's most memorable throwaway lines, if that makes sense, in the last line of Verse Three. When the vagrant dandy protagonist worries that his girlfriend won't be at home waiting for him ("And if my baby isn't there..."), his Plan B is simply to get back out there and play the field ("...I'm gonna brush my boots and comb my hair").

Rose of Sharon

The Steinbeck “Exodus story of Okies”, the Grapes of Wrath, features a rich assortment of characters which, transcribed in John Ford’s film treatment, are portrayed by “actors … submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film.” But before that Hollywood treatment, and even before Steinbeck wrote his epic novel, Horace Bristol took this and other compelling documentary images of American migrants in the 1930s. Steinbeck was engaged as essayist for a book based on these photographs that never came to light. Instead, the pictures helped inspire his fictional story, and it is not difficult to see how. The Rose of Sharon, Ma Joad, and Tom Joad shots, along with Retarded Man with Fanatic Sister, express immediate drama, with shadows, wind, grime, and a strange fixation on hands and arms conveying a highly visible kind of stoic tension.

Angel Pagan

In what is likely the ugliest Cubs season since 1966, there’s been little in the way of baseball to appreciate. On their way to an ungodly 100-loss season, watching the parade of rookies and minor league journeymen going back and forth on the I-80 shuttle from Des Moines to Chicago has been an often wearisome, sometimes interesting distraction.

From among this crowd of unconsummated heroes, fans found more than one to like in name, if not in gameplay. Ever since Duke Justice showed me his Drungo Larue Hazewood baseball card in 1981, I knew there was a thing called “great baseball names”, applied usually to obscure bench players with Dickensian surnames who barely stayed in the majors long enough to get their “cup of coffee” in The Show. This wretched Cubs season produced at least two, and Buck Coats, who received many votes from fans, fit the criteria extremely well (he was sent down to Iowa today after getting into only four games and going 0-3, striking out twice). When asked about it, he said it was his real name, explaining that he grew up “in the country.”

But as good as Buck Coats is as a baseball name, my vote goes to outfielder Angel Pagan, acquired from the Mets' minor league system in spring training, and, amazingly, sticking with the big club since opening day. Humiliated manager Dusty Baker liked him so much that he made him one of “his guys” during his trip to the disabled list in June, blaming that month's traditional "Swoon" on the absence of Our Angel.

Collins Kids

Rock Boppin' Baby - 11/1/1958


It's 25 years since I heard this incredible record. Even then, the performance seemed long lost in the mists of time. To see it performed now is like a trick. This was impossible before, never to be realized. Here it is, well worth the wait - but it's extra special because I never knew I was waiting in the first place.

Imagine this song sung by a 30-year old vamp backed by Gene Vincent's aging Blue Caps in the mid-1960s and this would be cheesy, forgettable. But prim teen Lorrie Collins' full-throated vocal in 1958 paired incongruously with goofy kid brother Larry balances the equation, completes the logic, and creates a one-of-a-kind beauty.