Donnie Iris

Literally last week, I was chatting with author Bradley Morgan about underrated Pittsburgh rocker Donnie Iris, whom Bradley described aptly as a "patron saint of normie sex machines." Donnie had just announced his retirement at 83, which hinted that something was up, as it had with Ozzy last year. No less of a music lifer than Dominic Ierace would ever give it up if it wasn't something serious. He played when he could no longer stand, and when cancer treatments took his distinctive mop, and by all accounts maintained the voice and energy that carried "The Rapper" to the charts 54 years ago, when Donnie was still in the Jaggerz.

I'd been holding out hope that Donnie Iris and the Cruisers would make it to the tri-state area for a show ever since reading D.X. Ferris' book The Story of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers, an excellent example for writing a book about a lesser-known artist, comprehensive enough for any fan to learn something new while turning us newcomers into fans. It didn't hurt that around the same time, after Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo entertained their Pittsburgh crowd by playing some of Donnie's "Ah! Leah!", Donnie responded (at 75!) by covering "Enter Sandman." But he almost seemed like a Steel City exclusive, known and loved by everyone within the zip codes and a secret among the rest of us. The only album he has on most streaming services is his entry in the sometimes confounding, sometimes laughable, sometimes lovable 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection series, which perhaps inevitably looks like a relic from an innocent times. That's probably too much of a long-winded way to say that the Donnie Iris 20th Century Masters album is well worth your time. Every song is a gem, "Love Is Like a Rock" is my favorite.

Pitching my upcoming book last year, I cited Donnie and Ferris' book as an influence in the proposal:

"I’ve been thinking of writing a Local H book ever since reading D.X. Ferris’ 2017 book The Story of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers, an in-depth look at a cult band best known for a couple of radio hits, beloved by their fanbase and revered for exhilarating live performances. It was the kind of book I wish Local H had, a thorough, immaculately-researched look at the Cruisers packed with interviews from the band members, told with the underdog charm of a film like Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! or Jacob Slichter’s book So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star. That vision of a Local H book was enhanced by reading Hanif Abdurriqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, his 2019 tribute to A Tribe Called Quest. Unlike that book, Local H will not be part-memoir, but the even-handed exploration of a band Abdurriqib loved since his adolescence gave me a sense of the kind of analysis I plan on giving Local H, one that shows their place as a singular, game-changing band."

Years earlier, I wrote about Donnie for a Gotham Writers "Feature Articles" exercise. My instructor encouraged me to pursue it for publication. I thought (and still think) she was being too kind, but I still wish I had worked more on it and pitched it. The original, unedited submission, with follow-up questions, is below.

 Donnie Iris Slams into 75 with Birthday Shows and New Bio

With his modest, everyman demeanor, it’d be easy to assume that the curly-haired, bespectacled guy in a t-shirt coming to the Palace Theatre this February is a bar trivia regular, or someone you’d see at your dad’s Super Bowl party. But for city natives he’s the instantly recognizable “King Cool”, the lead Cruiser, a touring and recording sensation known to some fans as “the Bruce Springsteen of Pittsburgh.”

Sure, Donnie Iris and the Cruisers haven’t seen the international commercial success of someone like Springsteen, but radio hits like “Ah! Leah!” and “Love is Like a Rock” helped earn the band a now four-decade music career, with high energy live performances and albums like King Cool and Back on the Streets entrenching Iris’ reputation as a local icon. The band is celebrating Iris’ 75th birthday and an upcoming band bio by author D.X. Ferris with three shows at the Palace Theatre, with the first two already sold out and a third added by popular demand.

“This worked out a lot better than I thought it might”, says Iris, a retired mortgage broker, father of two and grandfather of six whose spirited delivery belies his senior citizen status. “After we started going down after the first couple albums, who knew what was gonna happen? But we keep going back to these clubs, we still pack ‘em in.” Iris smiles. “I’m pretty satisfied where I am.”

“I’m a lifelong fan of Donnie and the Cruisers”, says Ferris, who will be accompanying Iris for a signing of The Story of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers, the band’s first official book, this Saturday, January 20 at Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe in Beaver County. “Everybody knows what happens to big rock bands on tour at two in the morning, and those are colorful stories. But they’re pretty much the same. I prefer stories like Donnie and the movie That Thing You Do!”, he continues. “What happens when you have moderate success? How do you handle yourself? What do you do after your ride around the carousel? What are your favorite bands doing 20 years later, on a Wednesday afternoon? And what really constitutes success in the arts? Those are stories with a lot more nuance and variety.”

Areas to explore:

• Iris has a long, prolific career with only a few major hits. Does he ever tire of playing songs like “Ah! Leah!” or “The Rapper”?

• Iris has been on a major label with MTV hits, and released music independently with a small team. What are some of the biggest differences he’s noticed? Does he have more artistic freedom now?

• What have fan reactions to the band’s recent shows been like?

• Generally everyone in the band is a family man, with children and grandchildren. Has that ever conflicted with the band at all?

• What advice, if any, does Iris have for aspiring musicians?

• How have the band’s performances changed over the years?

• Iris has been playing in successful bands since the 1960s, including the Jaggerz, Wild Cherry and the Cruisers. The Story of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers is the first book to chronicle his story, over 50 years after his debut with the Jaggerz. Why now?

• The Cruisers’ story is unusually drama-free for a 40+-year rock n’ roll career, with barely any drugs, debauchery or break-ups. How has the band managed this, and what kind of conflicts has Ferris drawn on to shape the band’s story into an interesting book?

• What, musically and personally, makes Iris distinctly a Pittsburgh artist?

Dolly Parton

"9 TO 5 (1980). The greatest audience movie ever made. I saw this when it was released in 1980 in a theater in Zion - at the dusky dawn of the Reagan era. Of course, we all loved it. Singing and clapping along to Dolly’s theme song. Cheering and bursting into applause everytime one of the ladies would reach the end of their rope with Dabney Coleman. It was like a rock concert. The last time I saw it was during a Dolly Parton film festival at the @musicboxchicago in flaming liberal Chicago - and the reaction was exactly the same. As great as Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were (and are) in the movie, I have to think this universal adoration is mostly due to Dolly - the woman the New York Times once named the only thing ‘we can all agree on’. A person of endless positivity and good cheer - but cut with street smart awareness and a winking sex appeal. She knew who she was and she could see a jerk-off asshole coming a mile away. And I’m sure she saw a LOT of them - but l’d also wager that she never wasted a whole lot of time worrying about any of them. What’s the point? And besides — nobody’s perfect. Someone sent me a text today that read ‘This country no longer deserved her anyway’. That may be true - even though a truer sentiment would be that maybe we need her now more than ever- but Dolly never would’ve tolerated that kind of cynicism and defeatism. It wasn’t in her. Or her music. And it shouldn’t be in us. R.I.P., Dolly. We will always love you."

Local H's Scott Lucas remembering Dolly Parton. There's a lovely tribute to her on the Local H podcast Lifers this week.

Dave Marsh

“Rap, I think, is the voice of a group of disenfranchised Americans; people who don’t appear in The Washington Post, people who don’t appear on CBS television, and generally, who don’t appear even in The Village Voice in any other guise except as rappers. And I think the issue is, you know, the ‘F the Police’ song, the Straight Outta Compton video that we saw, the issue is police violence against Black youth for no other reason than the fact that they’re Black and young and dressed a certain way…the fact is that rap does not set the agenda between the police and the Black community, and it’s absurd to pretend it does, which is exactly what your article in response to my article did pretend, and exactly what you’re sitting and pretending right now, and that’s absurd. The police set the agenda of the police attitude toward the Black community, and what they get back is something they’ve gotta deal with.” 

The late Dave Marsh on CBS News Nightwatch, 1989. Wrote a little about his influence.

Herman Melville

20 years ago this week, after some unexpected delays, I moved all my stuff from Westchester to Brooklyn, over two trips on the Metro-North and MTA. I don't think I was pondering the significance of starting my New York City life on Herman Melville's birthday—I was more concerned with finding my first paying job (Kim's Video) and and the movie listing at the now-defunct Pavilion Theater (I saw Jackass Number Two opening weekend). But let's give Melville his due today.

I'd read Moby-Dick for my beloved Ilja Wachs' literature course at Sarah Lawrence the previous year. I felt awestruck by the book and the class discussions, if not quite bold enough to give my own takes (when we were assigned to pick a chapter to talk about in class, I chose "The Cassock." Before you look up what it's about, I'll direct you to John Waters reading it in The Moby-Dick Big Read.) But I kept meaning to reread it, even if not as frequently as Ilja's suggested every five years.

13 years later, I had enjoyed Billy Budd (sorry, Carmela Soprano), Benito Cereno (beautifully honored in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), The Confidence-Man (cheers, Simon) and Bartleby, the Scrivener (thank you, Dad). I had also paid respects to Melville and his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Shaw at their Woodlawn Cemetery grave. But I hadn't revisited the Pequod since Ilja's classes, or was really giving it much thought in 2019, when I was feverishly concerned my biggest project, a book about Metallica for the (also now-defunct) publishers Rowman & Littlefield.

It had seemed like a good idea to pitch. I loved Metallica, and hadn't found the book I wanted to write about them—one that explored their cultural significance, emphasizing why this band really mattered. I had thrown my heart into a Metallica book proposal for the prestigious 33 1/3 series, submitted it hours before the deadline on New Year's Eve 2008, and felt crushed when it was rejected six weeks later. I adapted some of those ideas from the proposal into a successful Metallica class for the Morbid Anatomy Museum by 2016, and was inspired to try pitching it one more time. The next year, I had a book deal. 

The book was due December 31, 2018. By summer 2019, it looked further from being done than ever. The editors were, understandably, breathing down my neck and threatening to rescind the book deal and advance. But it wasn't the book I wanted it to be. I'd been saying, again and again, that this wasn't going to be a fact book. How could it be? There were already fact books and biographies about Metallica. Also, people could already find just about any Metallica fact on the internet.

If I was going to do Metallica justice with this book, it needed to be different. It would be like my author hero Rob Sheffield's book Dreaming the Beatles, taking on the biggest subject in its field and somehow coming up with something thoughtful, unique, vibrant, essential. How could I justify the existence of Metallica FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Metal Band of All Time if it were just another fact book?

But here I was. I'm a nerd, and I like facts. I liked knowing that Metallica used the word "hella" in the Master of Puppets liner notes years before it entered the Oxford English Dictionary, or that Jeffrey "the Dude" Lebowski roadied for Metallica on the apocryphal Speed of Sound tour. The more fact-ridden my book got, the further it went from being the book I wanted it to be. The culmination of 30+ years of writing and thinking about music, and 20+ years of loving Metallica, the most complete statement of my life, was going to be a boring fact book.

For August 1, 2019, Herman Melville's bicentennial birthday, I gave Moby-Dick another read. It went by faster this time, on my two-hour work commute, with one copy on my phone's e-reader, an audiobook in my library app (read by Anthony Heald), and a hard copy in my backpack. I loved it even more this time and didn't want it to end. I was taking pictures of passages and sending them to my friends. Almost directly after I finished, I reread and re-listened, this time with the audiobook by William Hootkins. I'd been counting it in my top five books since college, but I think 2019 was the first year I started calling it my favorite.

Moby-Dick also showed me a path forward. My book would be a fact book, sure. But there would also be a religion chapter, a fashion chapter, a performance chapter, chapters on each character and album (again inspired by Dreaming the Beatles, but further empowered by Moby-Dick), and so much more. I set to make Metallica: The $24.95 Book, with its new title and cover, the Moby-Dick of Metallica books. That's probably not what it ended up being, but trying to do so helped me write and complete the book. 

"God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Ilja Wachs died in 2022. At his memorial service on campus, his books were organized across a few tables for his friends, peers, and students to take with us. Some of us had traveled over continents to pay our respects. There were a few of Ilja's copies of Moby-Dick, which were going quickly (he definitely reread it more than once every five years), but I found a well-worn, hardbound Library of America edition that included two lesser-read Melvilles (Redburn and White-Jacket), filled with Ilja's notes and underlines. I took it home among five or so of Ilja's books.

I read Ilja's copy over the next few months, enjoying his notations (such as his monosyllabic Edna Krabappel laugh, a staple of our class that I was delighted to see in his notes), and mailed it to a former classmate in Alaska when I was finished. 

At the time, I was also working on my next book. I'd signed a book deal in 2021 to write a 33 1/3 volume on Body Count, accepted 13 years after my first pitch. I ended the acknowledgments of Body Count (33 1/3) with a message for Ilja, adapted from Melville's dedication of Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

I'm currently writing my third book, and once again returning to Melville. I don't think I'll ever write another book without rereading Moby-Dick in the process.

America 250

“Don’t these politicians realize the country was founded on the kind of revolutionary political thought expressed in my song? I mean, haven’t they ever listened to the national anthem? Anybody knows that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is really just a song about a shoot-out between us and the police. Have they forgotten that Paul Revere became a Revolutionary War hero for warning everybody, ‘The police are coming, the police are coming?'”

Ice-T in the Los Angeles Times, 1992. Photo by Mark Seliger for Rolling Stone.

The Giraffes

21 years ago this month, on summer break between junior and senior year of college, I drove solo to the Black Cat in Washington DC to see one of my favorite bands since 6th grade, Local H. The openers were a rowdy, sketchy-looking quartet that seemed like they could be fun. Before I knew what was happening, the lead singer's hand was in my hair. They started a beer fight with the crowd, had at least half the band in the audience while the rest was on stage, and got us screaming along with hooks like "You're going home in a fuckin' ambulance" and "Having fun with assholes" seconds after we learned them. I bought their newest CD after the show and was a little surprised by how nice the band members I spoke with were. My ticket was $12 and there wasn't a phone in sight. I had just met the Giraffes.

Luckily, they were from New York, a short Metro-North ride from school, and I tried to see them as much as I could over the next several years. I booked them to play my college (it took a lot of work convincing student senate to sponsor something that wasn't indie rock or folk) and watched them turn our cafeteria space into Mad Max. I wrote about them for whichever publications would let me (thank you Beyond Race and Metal Injection) and interviewed them on my college radio show (thank you WSLC). Their manager Chris gave me a high standard of music business professionalism, and the Giraffes gave me a high standard of everything—performances, albums, and just showing that a bunch of deviant, weirdo artists can still be cool to their fans. The music industry is more overrun with creeps than any of us will ever know, and the older I get the more I realize that (Aaron voice) "you have no ideaaaaa" how rare folks like the Giraffes are.

I often think of Mishka Shubaly in Ted Manitatakos' fabulous Giraffes movie, pulling out Meet Me in the Bathroom and pointing out the glaring omission in the "G" section of the index. The Giraffes have never gotten the bank or the audience they deserve, despite having more crossover appeal than your average punk/metal/surf/garage/indie/I still don't know what to call it trailblazers. They've also never phoned it on, on stage or on record, in any instance I've experienced them. At their possibly final show last Friday before Aaron escapes to Italy, they were still full of surprises. I usually avoid looking at people's phone footage of shows, but this time I keep thinking "Did that really happen?" before going back to check the Giraffes' stories to confirm yes, it did. Yeah, they do it. That's how they do it. And they do it so good.

Thank you Damien, Drew, Aaron, Hannah, Josh, Jens, John, Tim and everybody else who's been a part of this incredible story so far.

Mile End Kicks

My review of Mile End Kicks, the new film about an aspiring 33 1/3 book author, is up at 333Sound.