Editor’s note: I hope it’s cool with paid subscribers that I’m publishing this podcast episode without a paywall. The idea is to allow everyone a shot at witnessing the recent changes to our pod. So that y’all don’t feel cheated, know that the upcoming Q&A with Seattle Erotic Art Festival Executive Director Sophia Sky is fire and will indeed start out living behind the line.)
Both well traveled, Dan Epstein and I were Ann Arbor, Michigan 11-year-olds in 1977, the spring after the storybook rookie season of Detroit pitcher Mark Fidrych. Dan and I did not know each other, but I am 100 percent sure we shared the exact same thrilled expectation as Opening Day approached.
Lev Anderson and I talked to the author, 58, on the day before a differently relevant Major League Baseball opened its season—in Tokyo. Action in and around this chat with an aughts LA CityBeat crony has thrown me into what I can only now describe as a… jagged time lapse.
Epstein regards the meaning of his Substack’s title—a reference to the rowdy and pretty fuckin’ obscure John’s Children—as a specifically musical phenomenon.
“‘Jagged Time Lapse’ isn’t really even like one of [John’s Childen’s] better songs. Not one of my favorites, but I just love what that title represents to me, which is the sudden sense of nonlinearity in time. I feel like music does that. It has this amazing power to, not only transport you to when said song or album was made, but also back to when you first experienced it. Or some intense memory you have around it or association with it. You have these like various moments in time happening, replaying simultaneously in your brain while you're listening.”
I’m operating on the idenitical definition, but the author of 2024’s Now You’re One of Us had me in a jag before we even spoke. Researching Epstein’s Substack I came across his writing on “Wonderland,” a rangy slapper from The Commodores—
—and I am in my Ann Arbor bedroom, just a few bars in. Second floor of a corner townhouse, summer of 77. THC won’t enter my life for another year, and the Michigan State freshman point guard called Magic will provide the year’s biggest highs in my life.
A Commodores poster is on my wall and the idea that Lionel Richie might one day go solo has not entered my innocent mind.
Music works miracles in time.
Long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus
Come on, lose your mind. Now you're one of us
My version of the time lapse is a break from the endless information a continent aflame, subbing in, say, the furnished basement of my sixth-grade best friend Michael Cheng. A “rugged time lapse,” perhaps? My immigrant buddy throws on “Flashlight” and “Detroit Rock City” in the same basement listening sesh and my life won’t ever be the same. (RIP to Mike, a rare dude who died unexpectedly last fall.)
Dan, Lev and I talk about baseball until the 15:20 mark, for those of you with allergies.
I’m slightly bummed to say that there’s so much fun stuff that had to be excised for time. Because it’s not about me, or so I’m told, today’s iteration is missing a mildly humorous anecdote about freestyle rapping with a Bard classical music class. Also, we don’t go as far into parallels between Fishbone—subject of Anderson’s 2010 documentary—and Redd Kross as we could have, and that’s entirely on me.
Not cheated are Redd Kross fans and listeners who are curious about Jeff and Steven McDonald.
Now You’re One of Us, Epstein’s 2024 literary collaboration with the band, tells the story of a minor SoCal hardcore duo that evolved over decades to become a beautiful rock success story. The McDonald brothers’ eponymous album from last year is uniquely accomplished, so far from the thrashers my ears encountered through 80s college radio.
Talk about the three-byline nature of Epstein’s collaboration is an episode highlight. And the story behind the title says as much about the author as does his Substack’s moniker.
To me though? Writing a book with one person is drama enough. Our guest makes tangible what it’s like to pull narrative from a brother pair of veteran rockers. That’s the most fascinating thing and, again, my apologies that there’s not more of it. (I’m being anal about keeping these pod eps to an hour’s length.) Dan Epstein said enough about our political moment to bring a glimmer of hope, at the end.
In case you missed it…
WCS 78: Vestigial revenge as political cancer
Obviously, I have skin in the game, but it feels objective to say that journalism being in the public opinion toilet—at the dawn of America’s White nationalist bottle episode—sucks. One might even go as far as to say there’s a relationship between the decline of proven reporting techniques and the rise of totalitarianism.
Fun fact: Dan was among the last WeedWeek podcast guests, when that cool thing was dying a Covid death. We talked about Dock Ellis.
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