Cokes and Hot Dogs

May 26, 2024 by Steve Myers 14 Comments

To say he was dumbfounded would be untrue because no word other than Shabazingdam could describe how Jimmy Lightning felt when Bob Dylan plugged a chord into an amp and went electric. And to make it even more wondrous to Jimmy was that in the span of 15 months, Dylan recorded three albums that upset fans of folk music who had it in their minds that Dylan owed them something. Jimmy Lightning made no stink about Dylan’s change, figuring he just wanted to try something new or felt the calling or some other unknown reason that maybe Dylan himself didn’t know, the same way Jimmy once decided to not eat until after sunset and not because he became a Muslim and was celebrating Ramadan. He just decided to do it. One thing’s for sure….Dylan’s entire body of work, both acoustic and electric recently became available on you tube and that gave Jimmy a feeling of home made apple pie and to think Dylan recently turned 83 and is still on tour, an ode to his own anthem – “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Jimmy Lightning was born in the back of a bar and he knew about Dylan as early as 1958. He remembered the year well because the Milwaukee Braves enjoyed a second trip to the grandest of events – The World Series. Jimmy never played guitar or piano, but he experimented with a tamborine and a triangle and this caught the attention of a local band called The Nuclear Mind. They loved how Jimmy skipped all formalities and slipped into an idea for a song about the same person hopping trains across North and South America for five consecutive years and then in a blink he or she is in a basement dungeon writing a manifesto. And so they asked Jimmy Lightning to join the band and Jimmy had never felt so desired so he joined. He tapped a triangle, shook the tambourine and wrote lyrics, his first song about a prison outside Gary, Indiana and how its impossible to endure smog smells and two inmates, one a blackjack dealer and flute player who entertained inmates with card tricks and song, a veritable one man minstrel always searching for ways to escape and the other inmate a locksmith who believed in dropping anchor and sedentary ways and so, to him, prison served his soul with shelter and predictability. The two prisoners used to stay up late at night and tell each other stories and the days and years passed and their sentences ended and the slump of prison life turned to streaks of freedom to walk around and to drink and be merry.

Jimmy Lightning had turned to books for friendship all those years in prison and they never disappointed so he kept on reading once the shackles were removed and thanks to meeting third baseman of the Braves, Mr. Eddie Mathews at a baseball card show, he began to read baseball books, from John Thorn’s early history to the four book fiction series by Mark Harris. The first book – THE SOUTHPAW discussed baseball slumps and this felt like the soundtrack to Jimmy’s life, to everyone’s life, all the ups and downs and no way of knowing how low we could go and so he jotted down a paragraph written by Mark Harris from that book THE SOUTHPAW and folded the paper with the following words into a small square and stuffed it into a medallion and he wore it everywhere he roamed and it went like this….

“Boston copped 2 out of 3 in St. Louis and our cushion was only one and a half now, and I knowed, and most everybody knowed, that it was due to shrink some more , and there was not much left to shrink, and somehow we was in a terrible spin, and even if you pull out of a spin, it takes a little time, and there was not much time left neither, and nobody knowed exactly when or where or why the spin begun, nor how much more downwards there was to go before the spin would stop and the tide would change.”

Jimmy Lightning wondered over and over how much a baseball player failed and yet, can still be considered a success. It felt like an ode to bi-polarism and Jimmy told his bandmates and together, they wrote a song, a tribute to Moose Stubing, a song called “The Patron Saint of Failure.” The logic behind the song upset statheads in that the reasons were just a small sample size, but still so exciting to the band, that Stubing had appeared in five Major League games, five at-bats, a pinch-hitter all five times and he never got a hit and then in 1988, Stubing took over as interim manager at the closing curtains of the season and the Angels lost all eight games so Stubing became and remains the only former Major League player and Major League manager who never registered a hit or a win and yet….

it’s this will to carry on, to persevere no matter what the results, even if one is stuck in a firing squad, a victim to a sadistic soldier, even then, to laugh as the barrel of a shotgun is aimed at their brain, to be grateful of the gift, this short time on earth and this Moose Stubing must have laughed at himself, at life, at baseball’s never ending steamroller, squashing heroes into sad day facts of failure and yet some of them defy the bluesy reality board and thrive anyways.

And Jimmy Lightning closed his eyes and smiled about the year before he discovered Dylan, in 1957 and the Braves winning the World Series and he couldn’t hold in the joy over a Milwaukee World Series win so he bought cokes and hot dogs for the band every Saturday afternoon and in doing so, the band never succumbed to ego and jealousy.