RIFF MARKET

---

Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

---

YEAR IN RIFFS: JORDAN DAVIS
The Year in Walk-On Music

In 2006 I finally spent time with London Calling. Somewhere I got the idea the Clash were for people too earnest to admit they like pop music but who aren’t quite punk. What changed me was Aaron Heilman. Aaron Heilman is the pitcher Willie Randolph had an idea about, a competent right handed starter forced into the role of set-up man. The set-up man is the reliever they bring in the seventh or eighth inning after the early reliever stops throwing strikes. Not the closer, the reliever who comes in top of the ninth to help the other team keep it interesting. Historically the closers are the guys who sell antacids, wear expensive mustaches, beget country singers. Aaron Heilman is not one of them. Nevermind what happened in the NLCS, he is competent. He wants to pitch. He throws strikes. His walk-on music: “London Calling.” And because he’s walking from right field, you get to hear a lot of the song.

One foregone game in August we moved from under the overhang down to the mezzanine box. Around the seventh, two guys came and sat down behind us. Guillermo Mota came in, the reliever the Mets picked up mid-year, who would go on to blow game two against the Cardinals, be suspended for the first 50 games of 2007 for testing positive for ‘roids. He just got $5 million for two years. That all hadn’t happened yet. The bigger of the guys behind us says “Who’s this guy, and what does Willie have against Heilman?” I defend Mota, Mota gets them out of a jam, we get to talking. “Girl, to be with you is my favorite thing,” comes blasting from the juiced PA, Paul LoDuca’s walk-on music. Involuntarily I turn and cheer for Captain Red Ass, a philandering gambler with a teenage bookie in every city. What, he’s the most consistent hitter on the team. The guy behind us says, “You know, he really ought to say something to management about that song. He can totally have it changed.” I wait a beat. “I thought the players chose their songs.” Guy Behind Us says some do. He waits a beat. “I used to work the scoreboard.”

If the story’s good, I’m a credulous guy. Ask the pirate I met at Rudy’s. Anyway, this information threw me. No idea what to make of the possibility that the disastrous Kaz Matsui’s disastrous choice of tinkly pentatonic JAPANESE-SOUNDING-MUSIC-GET-IT might not be his own, or that every time he comes to the plate, Cliff Floyd might not actually be psyched to hear Quincy Jones’s “The Street Beater” aka the Sanford and Son theme. Reggaeton for Carlos Delgado and Jose Valentin, Beltran’s salsa, even Chris Woodward’s brokebat Dire Straits and Shawn Green’s spacey guitar solo – those choices all make a basic marketing kind of sense whether they were chosen by the front office or the player. David Wright’s song, the Beasties’ “Brass Monkey,” came out when he was four; given that the 3B’s typical fan wears a misses’ size 6 “Mrs. Wright” shirt, though, I get the group choice to go white party-boy. These are good stories for the twelve to twenty seconds it takes the batter to get to the box. They’re mainly not risky choices. Speaking of which, very little current music makes the walk-on playlist. I have the idea that somebody used “Bring ‘Em Out,” Reyes maybe? couldn’t hear over the cheering, or the spontaneous “Jose, Jose Jose Jose, Jose, Jose” chants that the repulsive Cardinals mocked when they took game seven. Xavier Nady had “Ridin’” and they unloaded him to Pittsburgh when reliever Duaner Sanchez separated his shoulder in a Miami cab accident.

So, this being a riff, it’s time to wind it up. Did you know the Mets’ bullpen phone rings loud enough to reach the upper deck behind home plate? Or that only two Mets pitchers get their own music for the walk from the pen. One is Heilman, the other is Billy Wagner, the very expensive closer the Mets picked up from Philadelphia. Wagner doesn’t just get walk in music, he gets a special cartoon on the scoreboard with a long haired metal singer and spinning flaming baseballs (potential Desenex sponsorship?). They CRANK the PA, film the dude in scratchy sepia, and 47,352 drunk 41-year-olds all chant “Enter Sandman.” Apparently it helps everyone forget how terrifying it was the last time Wagner pitched. When Heilman comes in, the line about “phony Beatlemania” always seems to echo the longest.

Long story short, now every time we get in the car, Kool and the Gang, the White Stripes, even Fall Out Boy – they’re all dead to my son. Now the playlist is strictly “Rudy Can’t Fail” through “Lost in the Supermarket.” I don’t hold that home run to Yadier Molina against Heilman.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006