I’m pleased today to be able to share an interview with Dan Epstein, who’s written for Rolling Stone, MOJO and the LA Times, to name a few, and who’s currently touring the country to promote his newest book: Big Hair & Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, which does just what it says on the cover.

You can buy Epstein’s book via Amazon or your favorite indie bookseller. Do it!

Behind the jump, Epstein talks all-time favorites, Bill Veeck, and which team’s ’70s style jerseys still pass the test of time, and I give you details on his NC events and my own favorite ’70s baseball moment.

To start off on an easy note: who’s your MLB team? Favorite player of all time? Favorite currently active player?

I think everyone should be allowed to have an NL team and an AL team to root for — and I’ve been a Detroit Tigers fan since the mid-’70s, when I first got into baseball, and a Cubs fan since 1980, when my family moved to Chicago. My favorite player of all time? I’d have to say Mark Fidrych. He only had that one magical season, but if I could go back in time and watch anyone play, it would be him — my eyes well up with tears of joy just watching the few clips of him that are available on YouTube. These days, my favorite player to watch is Ichiro Suzuki; he often seems like he’s playing the game on an higher level than anyone else. And when he’s locked in at the plate, his swing gives me the same chills I got as a kid when I watched Rod Carew hit.

Big Hair and Plastic Grass isn’t just a “baseball book”; you look at the decade that surrounded baseball, and the culture (and cultural revolution) of the ’70s, as well. I know you feel that it was worth examining because of how the decade informed and influenced baseball, but do you think that baseball informed the culture at large, as well? How symbiotic was that relationship?

I think ’70s baseball did leave its mark on the culture at large, but in a much subtler way — for the most part — than ’70s culture influenced the game. If you were around during the ’70s, chances are you probably remember Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s career home run mark, the Reggie Bar, Jim Palmer’s Jockey ads, or the way Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was inextricably linked with the 1979 Pirates, even if you weren’t much of a baseball fan at the time. The most obvious example, though, would be “Disco Demolition Night” in 1979, an event which many cultural commentators (both at the time and today) look upon as the moment where the disco fad reached its saturation point. Disco’s popularity would have waned anyway, just as with all musical trends; but the carnage at Comiskey really brought the anti-disco movement into the living rooms of mainstream America, and helped hasten the music’s fall from the pop charts.

Do you think that baseball still has that cultural influence in the United States — does the era of steroids say as much about how we’re living as baseball did in the ’70s? Does baseball now reflect the times as much as baseball then did?

Yeah, it does, but not in nearly as cool a way, I’m afraid. MLB’s aggressive marketing and merchandising campaigns are certainly a reflection of how intensely we’re being marketed to in virtually every aspect of our lives. And the spread of steroids (and its subsequent fallout) definitely reflect a culture where it’s okay to break the rules as long as you don’t get caught — and where a large percentage of the populace would rather “get theirs” and risk getting busted than be a “sucker” who plays by the rules. And maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but I definitely felt a disturbing similarity in the arguments of those who continued to support Barry Bonds in the wake of his PED scandal and those who continued to support the invasion of Iraq even after it was revealed that the Bush administration had led us to war under false pretenses. It was like, “Yeah, he/we cheated and lied, but so what? Everybody else does. Shut up and get over it.” No, fuck you — I will not get over it.

If you had been in Comiskey in July 1979, would you have stormed the field during Disco Demolition Night?

Absolutely. I was thirteen at the time, and even though I loved and owned a lot of disco records at the time, I was quite conscious of and annoyed by how everyone (even my beloved Electric Light Orchestra) were jumping on the disco bandwagon, and how it seemed like every other single had to have the word “dance” in the title in order to get airplay. So the “disco sucks” movement definitely spoke to me. But aside from being down with any anti-disco cause, what thirteen year-old boy wouldn’t have relished the chance to a) run out onto a major league diamond, and b) participate in some mob mayhem?

Related to the White Sox of that era; Bill Veeck is noted as one of the more interesting, controversial, clever characters in the history of MLB owners, though his promotions seemed to often devolve into trouble and embarrassment (as Disco Demolition Night did), and obviously the ’70s were one of his great decades. What are your feelings on Veeck? How many of his outlandish decisions regarding the White Sox were genuine, and how many do you think were intended to get a rise out of fans, his team, or the press? Was he genuinely that off-beat, or was he, perhaps, simply trolling Major League Baseball at the time?

I think Bill Veeck was one of baseball’s all-time great characters. I believe he genuinely loved baseball and the city of Chicago — and his many “ethnic night” promotions reflected both that love for the city and his understanding of it as a multi-cultural melting pot. The man certainly wasn’t averse to making money, but if that had been all Veeck was about, he could have found easier ways of making it than running a major league ballclub on a shoestring. The man had the soul of a benevolent carny — he loved to hear the turnstiles turning, but he also loved the challenge of coming up with and implementing outlandish promotions that no one had ever thought of before, and he preferred to watch the games from the bleachers with Sox fans than sit sequestered in a private owner’s box. Ultimately, Veeck’s problem was that he lacked the funds to field a winning team in the free agency era — and, in the long run, no amount of amusing promotions can ever truly make up for a losing team. But contemporary baseball sure could use a few owners with Veeck’s warmth, sense of humor, lack of pretension and infectious love for the game.

Throw-back jersey nights: enjoyable now that you don’t have to see the horror of those Padres’ jerseys every game, or live and let those uniforms die? Which team had the best ’70s jersey?

As aesthetically appalling as even the ’78 Padres jerseys were, I still prefer them to a lot of the bland or ugly-ass uniforms worn today. I like the throwback nights, but I hate seeing ’70s-style unis worn in the loose-fitting, pajama-style way that so many players favor today. (Show some sock, dammit!) As far as the best ’70s jersey goes, while nothing says “70s” quite like the Houston Astros’ “Tequila Sunrise” jerseys, I’ve gotta give it up for the Oakland A’s gold V-necks, which accomplished the impressive feat of looking both classy and outlandish at the same time. In fact, I’m thinking of wearing my gold A’s v-neck to the Regulator reading in tribute to the late, great North Carolina native Catfish Hunter.

Any lost favorites in the music of the ’70s? Is there a genre or a band you think speaks to your book particularly? Any band that spoke to what was happening in baseball at the time?

Lost favorites of the ’70s? I’m a rock critic by trade, so I could write you a whole dissertation on that topic. I would say that you can definitely connect the dots between the black empowerment themes that run through early ’70s records by Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and the rise of self-actualized black players like Dock Ellis, Dick Allen, Vida Blue and Reggie Jackson. I have to say, though, that I listened to a lot of ’70s AM radio gold while writing and researching the book; much as I love, say, Funkadelic and Black Sabbath, nothing took me back to the era quite like listening to “The Groove Line” by Heatwave, “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney and Wings, or “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright. In fact, I still have a very vivid memory of “rocking out” to “Dream Weaver” at a classmate’s fifth grade birthday party, and then my dad picking me up in time to catch the final outs of the ’77 NLCS.

And lastly, the kitsch question: any favorite songs about baseball?

I’ve gotta go with “Bill Lee” by Warren Zevon. “You’re supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things/Man that’s hard to do/And if you don’t they’ll screw you/And if you do they’ll screw you too.” Perfectly sums up the maddening conundrum faced by Bill “The Spaceman” Lee and all the other hip and intelligent players of the era who found themselves dealing on a daily basis with uptight managers, front office guys and beat reporters who acted like the ’60s never happened, much less the ’70s…

Epstein will be at Slim’s in Raleigh tonight, reading and signing from 7-9pm, followed by a great ’70s style party with bands the Infamous Sugar, the Royal Nites, and big hair-themed supergroup The Oscar Gambles. The reading is free and starts at 7pm; get there after 9pm for the music, and it’s $5. Tomorrow he’ll be in Durham at the Regulator, where the reading starts at 2pm and which is likely to be a more sedate party but a party nonetheless, as I’m pretty sure you can’t talk about baseball in the 1970s without it being a party of some variety.

As for my own personal favorite ’70s baseball moment? (Understand that I did not exist in the ’70s. But I still have a favorite moment, because I am a baseball nerd.) The great 1971 Orioles rotation — Mike Cuellar, Pat Dobson, Jim Palmer, and Dave McNally — the last pitching rotation to have four 20-game winners in one season. (And that was a 4 man rotation, too, none of this pansy 5 man modern stuff.) Epstein even gave it a nod on the Big Hair blog in April, when Cuellar passed away. That rotation was one of a kind.