This Film Should Be Played Loud!

On Thanksgiving night thirty three years ago, the focus of the music world was on the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Luminaries from throughout the industry - Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Van Morrison, and others - joined The Band as they gave their final concert - The Last Waltz. It was a diverse collection of friends, mentors, and influences assembled to give a great group a proper sendoff.

Earlier that year, The Band - or more specifically The Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson - decided it was time to leave the road. So they decided to give one final concert, and invite Robertson's new buddy Martin Scorsese to film the whole deal. The result is one of the most legendary concerts of all time, and a film that is all at once the gold standard of concert films, a lasting - if disturbing - monument to Robertson's massive ego, and insight perhaps into just why The Band broke up. After Leo the Lion roared, signaling the opening of the MGM film, the sentence "This Film Should Be Played Loud!" appears on the screen.

Watching the film at some point over the weekend and listening to the CDs on my Thanksgiving morning drive to New Jersey has become a personal Thanksgiving Day tradition. So, in the event that anyone is looking to kill time this Thanksgiving, here are some performances from the film:



"Up On Cripple Creek", the concert's opening performance and one of The Band's most recognizable tunes




"It Makes No Difference", a beautiful song featuring the vocals of the late Rick Danko




"The Weight", easily The Band's most well-known and most widely-covered song. The concert performance didn't make the cut for the film. But a post-production performance was cut on a soundstage shortly after the concert. It features the fabulous Staples Singers, and Pops and Mavis really steal the spotlight on this one.




"Mannish Boy", with the legendary Muddy Waters. Just prior to the start of the song Scorsese had ordered all his cameramen to change film. One cameraman, fed up with Scorsese's incessant instructions, had long since removed his headphones. His was the only camera rolling during the performance and is the reason why the entire performance is a single shot.




"Further On Up the Road", with Eric Clapton. The strap on Slowhand's Strat gives out during his opening solo. Robertson astutely swoops in to grab the lead and keep things moving.




"Helpless", with Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell providing background vocals off stage. Drummer Levon Helm was the only non-Canadian involved in this performance. I imagine he was wondering why they didn't hold the concert on Canadian Thanksgiving the month before. Legend has it that Young had a huge clump of coke hanging in his nostril during this performance and that it was edited out during post-production.




"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", my favorite Band song, written about the war that was taking place when President Lincoln issued the proclamation that began an annual observance of Thanksgiving. This is easily the most powerful performance of the song that I've heard.




"Forever Young", with Bob Dylan. "The Band" existed as a band before they linked up with Bob Dylan, but they didn't become "The Band" until they met Dylan. They were with him for his foray into electric music, and it was Dylan who brought them to the hamlet of Woodstock, where Danko lived until his death and Helm still calls home.




"Don't Do It", the opening performance of the film was in fact the final performance of the night, and the final performance of "The Band" consisting of this line up. It's a Marvin Gaye song that The Band often covered, and covered well.

You Can Get Anything You Want...

Good morning Fackers. And once again, Happy Thanksgiving. Here's a classic to listen to while stuffing the bird:

Torre, Turnpikes, And Taverns

As Joe Torre exited town two years ago, one of the lessons learned - or at least a memorable message he conveyed on his way out the door - was that the greater the expectation became to win year after year, and the greater the desperation became with each successive championshipless season, the less people appreciated the good things that did happen.

It's something I've tried to stay mindful of since Torre left. As badly as we as fans want our team to win, it's not a birthright, and it's not going to happen every year. Way back when, we began following baseball because we loved the game, because it entertained and amused us. It's easy to lose sight of that when the hunger to win becomes insatiable. But even a season like 2008 has something to take away from it. I suppose it's much easier to bang that drum in the aftermath of a World Series victory, but even without that 2009 was an extremely enjoyable year of Yankee baseball. I know I have my list of favorite moments, and I'm sure you have yours too.

While our health, and our families and friends are ceratinly the most important things to be thankful for this holiday, what brings us together here is Yankee baseball. And we have a lot to be thankful for in that regard too. Let's keep that in mind next time we're ready to go over the edge due to something Yankee related.

-----

Today is simultaneously regarded as both the worst travel day of the year and the best bar night of the year. All the folks traveling home for the holidays clog up the highways and skyways, but they also load up the local watering holes. You never know who you're going to bump into on Thanksgiving eve. I'll be passing up both the parkways and the pubs tonight, electing instead to host a little party tonight and hit the road for Jersey in the morning.

Whichever your choice for tonight, driving or drinking, be safe. And please don't do both. We'll send you off into the night with this one. Chances are you'll be encountering either Traffic or John Barleycorn later on.

Happy Thanksgiving

Good morning Fackers. And Happy Thanksgiving to you. Of course, Thanksgiving isn't until tomorrow technically, but let's face it, you've already checked out mentally. If you're not off from work/school already, today is your last day before that sweet, sweet four day weekend. At worst you're completely non-functional this morning. At best you'll be counting the minutes until the whistle blows.

Though perhaps not as often as we do with music or vulgarity, we like to pepper our posts here with some American History. And the history of Thanksgiving is distinctively American. It's a tradition stemming from the earliest European settlers of our continent, who despite fleeing their homeland in search of religious freedom, spending months upon the Atlantic Ocean, landing hundreds of miles from their intended destination, surviving a harsh northern winter, and suffering the indignity of inhabiting what would become Red Sox Nation, took the time give thanks for a bountiful harvest, celebrating with their Native American neighbors - a situation that was far too rare in the nation's history.

The tradition was observed, sporadically at least, throughout the colonial days and into the early years of nationhood. Though it didn't become an official holiday until it was signed into law just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it had been unofficially celebrated anually since a proclamation from President Lincoln at the height of the Civil War. That the unofficial and official births of the holiday came during such dire times in American History speaks volumes as to how important it is to pause and be thankful for the good things, no matter how bad everything else may be.

Thanksgiving is easily, absolutely, positively, without doubt, indisputably, hands down my favorite holiday. There's no debate between religious and secular societies as to what the "true meaning" is. There's no pressure to find "the perfect gift". It hasn't been commandeered by furniture stores or car dealerships as an excuse to have a sale. It isn't something that can be claimed as holiday specifically for a particular nationality or culture. It isn't a holiday whose original intent has been obscured by becoming the "official" start of the summer, or the middle of the summer, or the end of the summer. It wasn't concocted by the greeting card, candy, floral, or jewelry industry. It's not a celebration of simply flipping the calendar or an excuse for those who can't handle their alcohol to binge drink.

It's so simple that its name says it all. It's a day to pause and reflect, put aside all the garbage that we bitch about and let bog us down all the other days of the year and just give thanks - to God, to Allah, to Buddha, to Ganesh, to random chance, to whatever - for all the good things that we do have in our lives. I know that's not something I do nearly often enough. A friend of mine is fond of saying "If everyone threw all their problems into one big pile, chances are everyone would want to take their own back". I think that's true, and I'm thankful we have this holiday to remind us of that. If that's not enough, we get to smother copious amounts of food in gravy, cap it off with pie, and nap off the tryptophan coma while watching football. It doesn't get much better than that.

So Happy Thanksgiving Fackers. We're thankful that you choose to visit this little corner of the internet and we hope that you and your families have a great holiday. I'll step down from my soap box now.

Happy Veterans' Day

When I first started watching baseball in the late eighties and the announcers would refer to someone as a "veteran player" I thought that meant the guy was an actual war veteran. At seven or eight years old I didn't have a full grasp on recent American history, but I knew from repeated watchings of First Blood and First Blood Part II that it had been been awhile since the Vietnam War had ended. I kept thinking, "how old are these guys"?

Childhood misconceptions aside, there's a big difference between a veteran ballplayer and actual veteran. While the former get the attention and the adulation, today is a day to honor latter, a group that makes far bigger sacrifices and gets far less credit for what they do.

Veterans Day falls on November 11th because of Armistice Day, which initially commemorated the cessation of fighting on the Western front in the first World War "on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" - hence our 11:00 AM post this morning.

We all know someone who is or was in the military: family, friends, former classmates. I'm sure we have some military personnel amongst our readership here as well. So from Fack Youk to all military past and present, thank you.

Back Where It All Begins

Shortly before Christmas last year - on December 23rd to be exact - I was sitting down for lunch/dinner at my company's holiday party at the 21 Club, cutting into a piece of prime rib when I felt my phone vibrate. I didn't want to be rude but I fished my phone out of my pocket with my non-fork hand and stole a glance at the incoming text message. It was from my friend Joe: "Yankees close to signing Teixeira".

My face must have betrayed something when I read the message because my co-worker Greg nodded his head towards me and went, "What's up?".

I replied, "Holy shit, I think the Yankees are going to sign Mark Teixeira".

I put down my knife and fork and stared at the middle of the table shaking my head. I honestly couldn't believe it. Maybe it was just a rumor. They had already locked up CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. Did Brian Cashman and the Yanks really have the balls to orchestrate an eleventh hour coup for the most coveted position player on the market? Over the next hour or so, the texts kept flowing in from friends and cousins and college roommates, each one more certain than the last.

After the party, the other big Yankees fans from my office and I huddled up at the bar downstairs, having drinks on the company tab as groups of people would stand up and take turns belting out Christmas carols printed on a Salvation Army pamphlet they must have been handing out in exchange for donations outside. Between the renditions of Frosty the Snowman and sips of Macallan 18, we tried to get our heads around the fact that, amidst the faltering economy, the Yankees had just sent a message to their fans and to the rest of baseball: "We want to win a World Series that badly"

I got up early the next morning to head back upstate for Christmas with the family. I loaded up my car in the near-freezing rain, drove up the Westside Highway and crossed the George Washington Bridge, thinking I was going to beat the traffic upstate. I turned onto the Palisades Parkway and was met with a sea of taillights which bluntly informed me that this wasn't going to be a smooth getaway I had envisioned. The highway was a sheet of ice.

After 15 minutes of not moving one inch, I put the car in park, unbuckled my seatbelt and took out my iPhone to thumb through my Google Reader. At that point I needed something - anything - to keep my mind off the fact that I was hungover and stuck in standstill traffic in New Jersey to which there was no end in sight.

One of the first posts I came across this one from Shysterball and suffice it to say, it sort of blew my mind. An incredibly poignant blockquote from Will Leitch about Dock Ellis' no-hitter on acid and two beautifully dovetailed paragraphs from Craig summing up what writing about sports should really be about. It couldn't have been more up my alley.

And that's when I decided that I was going to start a blog. Well, I had technically already started one. I reserved a domain name wrote one post about trying to decide who to root for when the Red Sox played the Rays in the ALCS a little while back but that was the only thing on there.

Then on Christmas Day, after our visiting relatives had departed, I sat down and pounded out 1000 words on the Yankees most recent acquisition on my laptop. I drafted an email entitled "The Fack Youk Manifesto" to five or six of my friends informing them of my intentions, and said:

I realize that there is like an 85% chance that this never really goes anywhere, then dies a slow death from neglect, but there's that 15% that we can carve out this little space for our thoughts, all contribute and make it interesting/entertaining enough for some other people to check it out. I talk enough sports with you guys and hear interesting stuff worthy of a blog post and it makes me think that we could put that stuff to use and concentrate it here.

A lot has changed since then. Joe and Will don't really contribute much anymore because of the demands of studying for the bar exam and fascist corporate internet policies. I got unimaginably lucky to find Matt in the comments section, who, is not only a talented writer with a great sense of the history of the Yankees, but a great dude with similar musical tastes.

On the shortest of notice, I handed him the reigns to the blog for almost a full week back in May when I left for a road trip, which coincided nicely with a 9 game winning steak by the Yanks. He didn't miss a beat - which was far more than I had any right to expect - and the site has been markedly better ever since.

In the months since then, we've previewed and recapped every game (except for the three against the Blue Jays 4th of July weekend) and churned out almost 800 posts between us, which is very nearly 5 per day, including weekends.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a huge sense of personal validation involved in the Yankees winning the World Series for me. Since the playoffs began, our work has been recognized by a lot of people and we've more than doubled our average daily traffic. We've received even more kind emails and insightful comments from you guys than usual, which makes this all seem worthwhile. We've got some other recognition from well-respected baseball writers that I really couldn't have imagined when I wrote that first post on the signing of Mark Teixeira.

I've devoted what can only be described as an unhealthy and perhaps inadvisable amount of time reading about baseball in order to make my writing for this site as good as possible.

Unfortunately, that not-so-indirectly led to me getting laid off from my last job - the one that brought me to that company party in the beginning of this post. I wasn't going to regret the decision either way because I've spent the last six months doing something that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning as opposed to smothering myself to death with my pillow like my last job.

I highly doubt I have a career ahead of me as a writer, but seeing someone like Craig, whose work I have a lot of respect for, make that jump just two days ago is quite inspiring. Regardless of where it goes from here, I'm incredibly proud of what we've managed to do with this site in terms of traffic and recognition but mostly in terms of content. 105,000+ unique visitors and 270,000+ pageviews later (and counting), here we are.

When I first moved down to New York City, I didn't have a real job. I played online poker compulsively until the point that I was consistently profitable at it; enough so that I could afford to live in a sick apartment on the Upper West Side with my lifelong best friend. Eventually the slimy legislative tactics involved with the SAFE Port Act dried up the new money flowing into the online poker sites and the games got harder. A lot harder. Eventually I had to get a real job.

Now I'm back in Albany, not far from where I grew up, living with two of my good friends from high school, doing something that's barely profitable at all which in no way shape or form is a real job, despite the fact that I treat it like one. In some ways, it has come full circle.

Tomorrow, Matt, a few of my buddies and I are going down to the parade, so if you are going to be there and want to meet up, use my email address on the left side of the site.

After that, I don't know. This blog isn't going to disappear regardless of what happens, but we're going to have to scale back the content here if I ever want to get my shit together. There will be still be posts - probably much more off-topic material - but they won't be going up at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00 & 5:00 all offseason, obviously.

If you've made it this far, I'd suggest you subscribe to our RSS Feed via Google Reader (164 people can't be wrong!). It will tell you when there is a new post so you don't have to come to the site to check. It will hurt our pageviews but help your sanity.

So thanks for reading this year. Thanks for your great comments and signed baseballs and for filling in the gaps where our knowledge is lacking. Thanks to those other bloggers who were kind enough to link, especially Joe from River Ave. Blues, Craig, Jason from IIATMS, Kevin Kaduk from Big League Stew, Ross from New Stadium Insider, Pete Abe, Rob Neyer (once), and even A.J. Daulerio, you know, back when Deadspin used to link to other blogs. A big thanks to Cliff who helped me a lot behind the scenes and Boston Bren who is mostly responsible for the site layout. There are others I'm forgetting, so I apologize for the omissions.

So, before we all disperse, there of course has to be a song. And it's only fitting that what is probably the de facto band of Fack Youk provides the soundtrack to this post.

See you around.

Jay

Say you want to be a rolling stone,
Get your sail out in the wind,
Get out on the highway and let 'er roll on,
Roll on back to someplace you ain't never been.

When I was younger I was hard to hold,
Seem like I was always goin',
Whichever way the wind would blow,
Now that travelin' spirit calls me again.

Callin' me back to where it all begins.

Fack Youk [Year In Review]

Gentlemen, we should be proud of ourselves (semi-dramatic pause) because it's been a great year (week). We increased our readership 1000% (from 1 to 10), although I don't have Google Analytics set up yet, so I might be overstating that. Over that same time period, we were acknowledged by some, ignored by others, and went unnoticed by basically the rest of the world. Fear not, friends, at the rate we're going, this time next year we will have attracted approximately 100 readers, roughly 107 pageviews and possibly one member of the opposite sex.

A special thanks to our reader(s). This blog wouldn't be the same without you. (Actually, it would).

In any event, before we actually develop a readership, I thought I would post a letter from my company, sent out just before Christmas, with my FJM-style comments in blue. Happy New Years.

To All Employees:

The partners would like to thank you for helping [Company Name Withheld Just In Case] achieve one of its best years ever in 2008.

[Great! So this means we are going to get some of our best bonuses ever, right?]

We recognize that this achievement has required a strong commitment throughout the company as well as many long days (and we know some long nights).

[You bet. Well, it's a good thing we are going to be handsomely rewarded with some of our BEST BONUSES EVER!]

Recent economic news has given us a clear signal that we will face much tougher times in the coming year.

[Well that's nice, but we've been in a recession for quite a while and we just had one of our best years EVAR!!!!1!!!!]

I'm sure all of you know or have heard of someone who has been laid off or of companies making other drastic spending cuts.

[Yes, they work for financial companies who had their WORST years ever. Sucks for them.]

Due to this reality, we have decided to cut and in some cases eliminate bonuses for the end of this year.

[Oh. Let me see if I follow here... Due to the reality facing other companies who had their worst years ever, we (a company who had one of their best years ever) are going to cut bonuses. Yes?]

This decision was very difficult because of the contribution you have made to the success of the company.

[Doesn't sound like it was that difficult. Words I would have chosen before "difficult", in no particular order: inexplicable, profitable, greedy, inconsiderate...]

We feel, however, that it is extremely important during these uncertain times to maintain flexibility in the business so we are not forced to make much worse cuts in 2009.

[So, not only was this a great year for the company, we are moving to Jersey and thereby cutting costs, but we still need to cut down on bonuses? How about we wait until we actually have a bad year you cut the bonuses? So if we have a good 2009, do we get the money that you took out of our bonuses back?]

We are doing everything we can to make the company more competitive, more efficient, and more enjoyable to work at.

[Except giving you guys bonuses.]

With your help and commitment we expect to be one of the companies that make it through these difficult times.

[DIFFICULT TIMES FOR WHO? Surely not a company who just had "one of its [fucking] best [fucking] years [fucking] ever in [fucking] 2008"]

Thank you for your understanding.

[I don't understand]

We truly appreciate your efforts.

[Just not enough to give you bonuses]

The Partners

[You probably shouldn't have started the email where you tell everyone that their bonuses are being cut with the sentence "The partners would like to thank you for helping [Our Company] achieve one of its best years ever in 2008."]