They Call Me Baba Booey (17 page)
Read They Call Me Baba Booey Online
Authors: Gary Dell'Abate
In 1980, the Mets were in the midst of a particularly bad run. They won the World Series in 1969. But during a stint from the mid-to late seventies, they finished above .500 just twice. And in 1980 they were in the middle of seven straight seasons with fewer than seventy wins. They were easily the worst team in baseball.
Meanwhile, those damn Yankees were the best. In 1980 they had won 103 games. But the good news for me was that right before my interview with Cerone, the Yankees had lost the pennant to the Royals. In fact they didn’t just lose, they were swept by a team that had won six fewer games. By all accounts their season was a failure, no matter how many games the team won during the regular season. Now their catcher was signing autographs and our news director asked me if I wanted to go
talk to him.
Hell yeah
, I wanted to talk to him! The Met fan in me couldn’t wait to rub his nose in it.
At first I thought it would be an easy gig. I figured since Steve asked me it had all been set up and I would just arrive, interview Cerone, and then come back with the tape. Cerone was famous, and the Yankees were important. He wouldn’t leave something like this to chance with an intern. Actually, he would. Steve told me to find out who was in charge when I arrived at the mall, show them the tape recorder, explain that I worked with WLIR, and ask if Cerone would talk to me. It would be just that easy.
As I approached the autograph stand I saw, of course, that Cerone was surrounded by hundreds of people. I fought my way through the crowd with a microphone in one hand and the tape recorder dangling from a strap that hung around my neck. It was mid-October and the equipment, paired with my fledgling mustache and John Oates hair, made me look like someone who was trying out a Halloween costume as an early ’80s rocker.
As I was pleading my case with the woman running the event, Cerone caught a couple of sentences of our exchange and said, “Sure, I’ll talk to you. As soon as this is over.”
So I stepped off to the side to wait my turn. I started testing my tape recorder to make sure it worked. I did it half a dozen times, “Testing one-two-three, testing one-two-three.” Then I’d stop, rewind, play it back, and do it again. I didn’t want to blow this opportunity. I wasn’t going to ask yes-or-no questions and I wasn’t going to let a technical snafu get in the way, either.
I did, however, miss Cerone.
After all the triple-checking and psyching myself up, I looked over to the autograph stand and Cerone was gone. The crowd was gone. The person running the event was gone, too. What the fuck? The only guy still there was a security guard. “Excuse me,” I asked him, panicked. “Do you know where Rick
Cerone is? I’m with WLIR and we are supposed to do an interview.”
“He left,” the guard said.
“I know. But he agreed to do an interview with me ten minutes ago and now he’s not here. Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, look at me. I need to get this interview. He said he would do it!”
Maybe he pitied me. Maybe he was already bored with the conversation. Maybe he was a Hall and Oates fan. In any case, he told me, “Check the mall office.”
I sprinted up an escalator to the mall offices and banged on the door. It opened about an inch. The guy behind it put his face in the crack and said, “What do you want?”
“I want to interview Rick,” I said. “He agreed to talk to me after the autograph session.”
“He’s busy,” the guy answered and started to shut the door. But before he could close it, I wedged my foot in the crack. I literally had my foot in the door.
To this day, where on earth I got the balls to do that I have no idea. It was Rick Cerone, not Rick James.
“What are you doing?” he asked me. He was not happy.
“I was supposed to interview Rick Cerone,” I answered.
Before it escalated I heard a voice from behind the door. It was Cerone. “It’s okay, let him in, let’s do it.”
I turned on my tape recorder—it worked—and then fired out this question: “Do you guys see it as a failure that you lost the pennant?”
His eyes burned with anger, and not because it was a yes-or-no question. “We won a hundred and three games this year. How is that a failure?”
The interview ended shortly after that. But I got it done. And it aired all weekend long. I considered it a victory for Met fans everywhere.
BABA BOOEY’S TOP 7 CONCERTS
(You Don’t Sully a List Like This Just to Get to 10)
1.
Led Zeppelin
,
Physical Graffiti
tour, 1975, Nassau Coliseum:
I went with a friend and we paid four dollars a piece for scalped tickets. This was the first concert I ever went to. Zeppelin opened with “Rock and Roll.” For the final encore Robert Plant said, “This is a song we recorded that has become popular beyond our wildest dreams.” Then they did “Stairway to Heaven.”
2.
Bruce Springsteen
,
The River
tour, 1980, Nassau Coliseum:
My buddy Steve and I were in the second to last row directly across from the stage, but Springsteen made us feel like we were in his living room.
3.
Clash, 1981, Bonds:
The Clash were supposed to play ten shows in an old Times Square men’s clothing store that had been converted into a club. But the first night the fire marshal shut them down. Since they were, after all, the band of the people, Mick Jones said they would honor every ticket that was bought. So they played for twenty-seven straight nights. I saw them on night twenty-five. They were losing their voices, but their energy was amazing.
4.
Talking Heads
,
Speaking in Tongues
tour, 1983, West Side Tennis Club Stadium, Forest Hills, Queens:
This concert took place in the old stadium that was home to the U.S. Open in the late ’70s. It was the middle of summer, hot and humid. The show progressed chronologically, starting
with David Byrne alone, carrying a boom box and singing “Psycho Killer.” By “Burning Down the House” the stage was full of band members, percussionists, and dancers.
5.
U2
,
The Joshua Tree
tour, 1987, Madison Square Garden:
I had never seen this band live before. It’s the only other time I had that feeling I got when I saw Bruce: They turned a giant arena into an intimate room.
6.
Frank Sinatra, 1983, Nassau Coliseum:
I took my parents to see him. I was not a huge fan but realized he was a legend and wanted to catch his show before he died. Nothing better than watching sixty-year-old women act like twenty-year-olds. Before he’d start to sing you’d hear a woman yell, “We love you, Frankie!” He’d say, “I love you too, baby.”
7.
Bruce Springsteen, 2005, Two River Theater, Red Bank, New Jersey:
It was just me and four hundred other people for a VH1
Storytellers
performance. There was Bruce, a piano, an acoustic guitar, and his stories about every song he played. Unreal.
THE INTERNSHIP WITH WLIR
went so well, they asked me back for a second semester. I was working nearly every day with Steve, doing grunt work like sledding, and he kept rewarding me with more assignments. This was when the New York Islanders started their run of winning four straight Stanley Cups. Steve sent me out to the victory parades, where I interviewed all the players, talked to people along the route, and then brought back a mess of tape for him to decipher, edit, and graciously credit me for on air. It ran for days.
I even got to cover some hard news. When John Lennon was killed in December 1980, grieving fans held vigils all over New York. All the good reporters were sent to Central Park. But I did get to cover the one at Eisenhower Park and file live reports from the scene.
The same thing happened after Ronald Reagan made some federal budget cuts almost as soon as he took office in January
1981, including taking out a huge slice of student aid. There were protests at colleges all over the country and, eventually, there was a march on Washington during my spring break. So what if it wasn’t for peace or equal rights, my brother Anthony’s issues. It was a cause I could get behind: I needed cash to go to school.
