I remember when it wasn't cool to play baseball anymore. That's why I stopped, and there have been many times in my early adult life when I have regretted that decision. If anyone asked me to play on a team at this point in my life, I would most likely jump at the opportunity.
John Albert's Wrecking Crew is the story of the Griffith Park Pirates, a team of down-and-out musicians, writers, and actors who did just that. Well, maybe not all exactly "jumped", but definitely said yes. The book is a unique true story about a bunch of guys who were looking for an escape from from thier vices and inner demons, and they found one out on the diamond. I spoke with
John over the phone one December morning from (of all places) my job at a minor league baseball stadium.
interview by Paul Cardone
John: It’s a story about a baseball team made up of people who are sort of going no where. Well, let me restart. In movie terms, I guess they would say it’s sort of Bad News Bears meets Trainspotting. It’s a story about a bunch of people, I don’t know if I want to say losers, but a lot of us that had not much going on in our lives, had been struggling with a lot of things, and on a whim formed a baseball team that actually sort of saved a lot of us in a strange, strange way.
FE: I know that the story started out as an article in LA Weekly, were you writing for them regularly at the time?
John: No, actually, I submitted it to, they have every year what they call a “Best Of” issue, which is like, you know, Best Sushi Restaurant or whatever, and for whatever reason I just submitted a paragraph on my baseball team. I hadn’t been writing anything like that, not for magazines or anything, and it didn’t really fit with that issue but they came back, sort of out of the blue, and said “Do you want to do this as a feature?” and I sort of lied my way through, saying that I had the credentials. So my first story was like a cover story and it won a sports writing award and all sorts of things, and they started getting calls from move studios, so I just ended up being a journalist.
FE: How did it evolve from the article into to the book?
John: It was sort of very Hollywood, and kind of sickening to real writers, and I always feel bad about telling them this story, but what happened was it became a movie deal first. That movie deal eventually fell apart, because the director who was involved snorted cocaine and played basketball and dropped dead, who was a guy named Ted Demme. Because of the movie deal, I had an agent, literally what happened was the agent contacted me and said “I’m going to put you in touch with a book agent who thinks he can sell this as a book”. By that time I was so sick of the story, hearing about it, talking about it, and also I was sort of sick of my friends, we had been playing baseball for a while, and it wasn’t this great new thing anymore, we were fighting and bickering, so I saw it like “Well, I should probably take this opportunity”, and started writing the book, and I had to learn to love the story again and learn to love my friends again. At that time I was thinking there were a lot of books I would have perhaps rather written, but that was the one that was in front of me, so…
FE: How long did the actually writing process take?
John: Well, I think they gave me something like a year, so I just fucked off for like 8 months, and wrote stories on bands and stuff. Then when I realized my deadline was fast approaching, I ended up staying up all night drinking various sports drinks and just writing and writing and writing. The actual writing process, with the interviewing and the writing, probably took 5 months. It’s a story that I know pretty well, but I had to go back and interview my friends and sort of pry them for their most personal, you know…I was sort of surprised, you know I went back, and I thought I knew these people, and then you find out like “Whoa, wait a minute, no”. It was an interesting process. I think one of the great things was they were my friends so they trusted me and they would easily relax and start talking about everything, and quickly forget the reason we were talking. I would have to remind them “Wait a minute, this is for a book”, because they’d sort of be confessing their deepest sins. Then I had the draft of the book, and I had to go back and remind them, “Are you sure about this?”, but they were all pretty good about wanting their names used and everything out there.
FE: I know you have screenwriting experience, a lot of which is fiction. Did you find writing the book to be harder than you originally anticipated?
John: The thing with screenwriting is, and the one reason I never think I was that good at it, is you’re always wondering or trying to figure out what they, and who are they, want to hear. With the book I made a deal with myself that I was going to write it and not think about whether it was going to get published or if people would like it or hate it. I actually sincerely believed to the very last moment that the publisher was going to send it back to me and give me what they owed me and say “No thanks.” I didn’t really think about it, and that was the best part, because I didn’t sit there and think about it and edit myself, and because I didn’t have much time I just sort of forged forward really quickly. That was really helpful because I could’ve easily gotten into second guessing myself. In terms of it being difficult, it really wasn’t and one of the reasons for that was I joined a writers group. Every week I would sit in a house with these sort of elderly women and read this stuff to them. At first I thought,’ They’re gonna hate me”, because there’s all this sort of sex and the drugs and everything, but they had been around, so they liked it. They were able to give me feedback and keep me on course which was nice.
FE: When you first heard the idea about the team from Mike, did you expect it to grow into what it did?
John: Not at all. I really thought that it would last a couple of weeks, that it was just another weird idea that somebody I knew had, and that it wasn’t anything serious. I didn’t think it would be a real team, let alone a book or a potential movie. One of the things is that for me I never think of anything that’s happening in my life as that interesting, it’s only when you tell other people and they think “Oh wow, that’s unusual.” All of my friends have always been total freaks and sort of getting in trouble, so it never occurred to me, you know, I’ve always had drug addict, cross-dressing, delinquent friends, so it didn’t seem exceptional. But I guess other people don’t, or they do and they relate to it. I never thought it would be this. It’s funny because I’d be playing on the team and all of this tragedy would be happening around me and I’d be trying to come up with good ideas to write about something and it was just there sort of.
FE: I know you have a musical background with Bad Religion and Christian Death and other people on the team seemed to be involved in the same scene. Do you think that relation through music was sort of a binding force on the team?
John: Yeah, I mean it’s probably the same where you grew up, it’s not so much the music, it’s that like minded people sort of move towards certain scenes and certain types of music. We had all come out, to a certain extent, the So Cal punk rock scene of our time, and we’re old codgers now, it was like the early 80’s, which was actually a sort of exciting time. I think what that scene did was it bonded everyone that sort of felt alienated and fucked up. So we all sort of had that in our past, except for people who had come from other places like Japan or the Appalachian mountains, they had their own thing.
FE: But even Musashi got into, no?
John: Strangely enough Musashi, he had his own weird demons, and they didn’t come out in such an obvious way as the rest of us, because he had been living in another culture, but when he got here he blossomed in that respect. We had all had sort of troubled lives and music was just one unifying part of that.
FE: What kept you going back every Sunday?
John: I’ve always been an alienated person, and that doesn’t mean that externally I haven’t had friends or girlfriends or anything like that, but I’ve never sort of felt that connected to the world. I think I talk about it a little bit in the book, but it made me fell like apart of the world which was a great feeling for me, and that might be strange for some people that have always had that feeling, but it just felt like I was part of something. I’m sure it’s the same reason people join gangs or lodges or whatever. It just centered me, at the time, even though I wasn’t using drugs or anything, I was sort of lost. I didn’t know where I was going in life, I wasn’t making any money, relationships were crumbling. I didn’t know what it meant to be in my 30’s and still feeling like I was 19. It just helped. Also there’s just something great about playing baseball on a Sunday, a lot of the time it was the summer time, and it sort of grounded me in the present. I didn’t think about “I really screwed up my life and it’s really gonna go nowhere”, when we were playing baseball we were just playing baseball. That was the great escape, and not one that was going to kill anybody.
FE: Is the team still going now?
John: Yeah some of the people are playing, there’s a core of us that are still playing. Dave Huffman, who in the book overdosed and almost lost his leg, he just went to India to try and repair his leg in some new operation, so he hasn’t been playing but he’s hoping to. A core of us has been playing all year, every year since the book. Some people have dropped out for various reasons, whether they started using drugs and stopped using drugs, went away for work or something, but yeah, it’s sort of this continuous thing.
FE: The book is being made into a movie, by Anonymous Pictures I believe, are they still involved?
John: Actually what happened with Anonymous is they’re still the producers but it got bought by Paramount, so it’s supposedly a big studio picture.
FE: And the screenplay is being done by Scott Kosar, whom you know already?
John: Yeah, it’s interesting, I’ve known him, he was an acquaintance when we were kids in the punk rock scene, I remember him and we had mutual friends. Then he sort of went off and traveled around and did his own thing, and we sort of reconnected a couple of years ago. Then just by chance he was the guy who got involved and the studio really wanted him to do it. It’s kind of great because there’s a lot of successful, really talented writers in Hollywood I’m sure, but Scott can relate, I mean he’s had his own experiences with drugs and bad relationships and the sex industry. He’s kind of the perfect guy for it, he’s sort of one of us.
FE: Is there a director yet?
John: No, that’s the next step. If everyone likes the script that Scott writes, then they’ll attach a director. Anonymous has a whole roster of great directors like David Fincher and people like that. Whether they’ll want to be involved, who knows? We’ve talked to certain people and it seems to be an interesting project for people in Hollywood. Whether that means it will end up being a really inane broad comedy in the end, who knows? I’m sort of cynical about the end result because I think in Hollywood there’s so much money involved that in the end they tend to smooth everything out so that it will appeal to the lowest common denominator. It will have to play in malls and stuff, so you can’t have all of the grizzly sex and drugs.
FE: I think you should suggest that they use the part of you all going to the minor league baseball game. (Note: if you haven’t read the book, I don’t want to give it all away. Let’s just say mascot violation is involved.)
John: [Laughs] Yeah I’ll have to ask about that, that’s funny yeah.
FE: I work at a minor league stadium, I’m actually calling you from there right now, and when I read that I just imagined it happening to our mascot, and just…
John: What kind of people end up being mascots?
FE: You’d be surprised, it’s not always who you’d expect. Sometimes it’s a normal guy and sometimes it’s a complete clown.
John: To me it seemed like the guy had probably been like drinking all day and at that point was good to go for any sort of conflict. That was a really…it’s funny because I’ve heard people talk about the book like it was fiction, and there’s not one thing in that book that isn’t true. At the time it was just one of those things where you laugh about it and that’s it, but now when I think about it, it’s such a strange scene.
FE: I’m telling you, if it happened here, people would be horrified, I would think it was hysterical.
John: The difference in the crowd at a minor league game, at least here, I mean the Dodgers are sort of an urban team and there’s an urban feel to the stadium, but the minor league game was suburban in the worst of ways. It was fun to watch the game, I would probably go back, but yeah, that was a great sort of metaphor for growing up in the suburbs, if you don’t quite fit.
FE: One last quick thing on the movie: Do you have any idea of a release yet?
John: It all goes in steps, so he’s finishing the screenplay right now, but it’s too long, of course, so I’m going to go through it as a friend and consultant, then the producers will go through it, then he’ll turn it into the studio. Then it’s about how quickly a director can be attached and how quickly they can cast it. The further along in the process it goes the less I’m involved, other than hopefully I make some money, you know. Basically now they just want to keep me happy but they don’t really ask me too many questions. In a strange way they now own that particular story in my life, so I don’t really have a say in it. If they wanted to make it a total comedy without any of that stuff they could do that. Which is very strange, but at least, as opposed to just writing a screenplay, at least I have a book that I wrote, and that’s what happened. But Scott, so far, from what I’ve read, is writing it really faithful to the book. It’s been a very weird experience for sure, and it’s even strange for the people in the book, because I wrote about them and used their names, so it’s been weird for them too. When I do readings I always bring them along and have them answer questions about themselves and their sex lives and stuff.
FE: What are you up to now?
John: Well, I write for LA Weekly out here, so I’m doing various stories, and I’m about midway thorough a book proposal now for my next book, which, needless to say, is a harrowing experience. Second books seem to be like second albums for bands. You get the deal because you have this great idea, but the second one, you might be talented or not talented, but a lot of people don’t have the great idea. I want to come up with something that just isn’t being put just because I need to put something out there. I’m going to look at stuff that I’ve experienced and been though and know.
FE: Do you still play at all?
John: I don’t. I haven’t played din a while. The last thing I did, strangely enough, was this thing out here we did for a little bit called Punk Rock Karaoke, where me and some guys from other bands would get up there and play the greatest punk rock hits and drunken people from the audience would get up and sing along, we had big charts with the lyrics, that was pretty fun. I had a drum set that was in my garage, then that got stolen and I just never replaced it. I go visit the guys in Bad Religion and go see them play when they come into town. I think it’s great that they’re still plugging along, I don’t know if I’d want to be in Yugoslavia playing or, well Yugoslavia doesn’t exist but, I wouldn’t want to be on the road at this point in my life, but good for them. It’s strange, I write about music sometimes but I fell pretty disconnected from it, from what's really going on out there.
FE: What are you listening to, are you into anything new?
John: Yeah I mean contrary to most of my friends, I’m not somebody who goes and listens to what I listened to when I was a teenager, because I’m not like this angry delinquent anymore, I’m actually fairly happy. So putting on an old Black Flag just seems…it doesn’t really connect. I tend to listen to stuff that I’ve always liked but makes more sense, I’ve always been a big Brian Eno, David Bowie guy. I really try to listen to new interesting stuff out there, I just wrote about this guy Ariel Pink who’s sort of part of that whole Animal Collective thing, and I thought what he was doing was really interesting. I get in trouble for this a lot with people around here, but it always a little hypocritical, like, punk rock nostalgia never made sense to me. It was always sort of about pushing boundaries and then it just came about nostalgia. So I’m always trying to find something new. Do you have any recommendations?
FE: Shit man, there’s a lot. I’ve been listening to Wolf Parade, the Arcade Fire, whom I’m sure you’ve heard of.
John: Yeah I think they’re really good. And the other one is Wolf Parade?
FE: Yeah I mean there are bands around here, like our friends Rahim they’re doing some interesting stuff. The Joggers, you know, I could go on all day.
John: Yeah I’m always interested, it’s sort of the same way I read books, it’s just all on recommendations and then going from one band to the next. I think there’s interesting stuff going on out there; it’s just about access to it.
FE: That’s the thing. I think it’s much easier nowadays to just go on the internet and look around then it is to go into a record store and find new music.
John: I have people that I sort of trust, whose tastes I trust that are out there sort of exploring that stuff and are turning me on to stuff. So the site you do, it’s a music site or…
FE: Yeah, we started it about 7 years ago, and we’ve varied in commitment to it, updating the site anywhere from everyday to 3 times a year, but now everyone is out of college and no one really likes what they’re doing yet, so we’re going to push forward with this. It’s been mostly music in the past, but now we’re covering books, some art stuff, humor, really just independent culture and all that.
John: That sounds great. Well, when you went to school, what were you gearing towards, in terms of studying?
FE: Well I think my biggest problem is that I was really only geared towards graduating and not really using what I went to school for. But I wound up concentrating on business, and we started a small label based on the site, which is another thing that we are going back to at this point. We’ve had some bad luck, with on band breaking up on their supporting tour and another asshole taking off with a recording advance, but we’re ready to give it another shot.
John: My friend Brett runs a record company, Anti and Epitaph, and its interesting watching him, he signed a few bands right off the internet, like from Myspace or wherever and has had a lot of luck. There is access, like, if you’re a new label you don’t have to just find what’s in your local area. A record label, if you can make it work, is a great thing. I don’t know if it’s any more difficult now with the way it’s all sort of structured, but the major label’s are just so awful now. It’s sort of like the movie studios, they pump out shit non-stop, but I know people who are studio executives and they actually have great taste. They all like cool underground films and stuff but that’s just not what they’re making. In the record companies there are a lot of people that have good taste but they’re all looking for the next Gwen Stefani. It’s just amazing, I mean you used to be able to sell 50,000 records and still have a deal. Now they drop them. I think there are a lot of bands out there that are looking for a label that can just sort of provide distribution and stuff. If you put out good music, it’s a noble pursuit for sure.
FE: Yeah I hope so. Well, thanks a lot man, that’s about all I’ve got.
John: Yeah, thank you so much.