When first learning that the Overton Park Shell will soon host a band wholly dedicated to songs about America’s favorite pastime, as The Baseball Project is, the casual listener might write them off as a novelty group. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Steve Wynn, who helped found the group 15 years ago, thinks that’s partly due to The Baseball Project competing with its own members’ past bands, some of which are ongoing concerns to this day.
“When we started out there was sometimes a feeling of, ‘Well, this must be some kind of joke band. It’s a silly thing. I’ll just take a pass on that and show up at the next Minus 5 or Dream Syndicate or Filthy Friends tour instead,’” he says. “But I think over time people realize we’re not just singing jokey songs or clowning around. We’re finding the emotional nuggets of truth in these baseball incidents. The songs are still about loss or surprising success or mortality or all these things that you think about anyway. We just use the history of baseball as a jumping-off point to get to the same place.”
Indeed, drawing on the lore of a game so peppered with renegade characters, triumphant underdogs, and tragic twists of history gives a songwriter considerable raw material, and the band’s scribes rise to the occasion. “I’m a lonely drifter, I go from town to town,” sings Wynn on “Journeyman,” written with bandmate Peter Buck for The Baseball Project’s new release, Grand Salami Time! (Omnivore Recordings). “You can call me Lefty, it’s my stock in trade. I’m a specialist, it’s how I get paid. Always keep my bags packed, never get to close to anyone. Long as there’s someone who needs me, down the road I’ll go …”
Listening along, this writer, who hasn’t followed sports since his teens, is suddenly invested in the life of the classic journeyman player, drifting from team to team. It doesn’t hurt that the players, the parts, and the delivery are a pitch-perfect blend of grit and imaginative production, with an overall sound ranging from folk rock to full-on power pop. On the album, part of that credit goes to producer Mitch Easter, but live it will all be on the quintet — who are not unlike some kind of fantasy baseball dream team. Wynn founded the seminal post-punk psych-rock outfit Dream Syndicate and is wed to drummer Linda Pitmon, also of the Filthy Friends. Buck and bassist Mike Mills were founding members of onetime mega-band R.E.M., and guitarist/keyboardist Scott McCaughey was in that group from 1994 onward, after years of fronting the Young Fresh Fellows.
This lineup also brings some stellar harmonies to the proceedings. As Wynn says, “To be in a band with four really good singers who can all harmonize is something I’m not used to — and it’s exciting. We do a lot of four-part harmonies in this band, on record and on stage, and sometimes we hear that blend and we’re like, ‘Check us out, we’re the Byrds!’”
A final revelation of The Baseball Project is how well baseball is suited to rock-and-roll. “Uncle Charlie,” for example, could apply to sports, music, or any realm where the punk meets The Godfather: “Every kid thinks they’re the smartest guy to walk on two hind legs/Every kid thinks they can take the codgers down by a few pegs. … Oh, you don’t look so pretty now! Uncle Charlie’s gonna get you.”
Yet, as Wynn notes, pro sports and rock have not traditionally been bedfellows. “Peter is our lone non-baseball fan, who pretty much plays in the band because he likes all of us and enjoys the music. He gets exasperated with all our baseball talk sometimes. And Peter has said, ‘You know, when I was young, there were either people who liked sports or people who liked cool rock-and-roll, and they were not the same thing at all. There were jocks on one side and rockers on the other.’
“But Linda, Mike, Scott, and I have always been huge baseball fans, so we know that’s not totally true. We’ve made it safe for indie rockers to love baseball! And there’s a bunch of us out there.”
The Baseball Project, with openers The Sonny Wilsons, headlines the Memphis PowerPop Festival at the Overton Park Shell, Saturday, September 2nd, 5:30 p.m.
