June 2009

The reason for Jeff's odes to baseball: "I became very embittered"

Photo by Julie Wiatt

For Jeff Campbell, baseball is a touchstone that has helped him raise money to buy musical instruments for children who perhaps would never have the chance to learn to play music otherwise.

When Jeff Campbell told his board directors he planned to produce a CD of baseball songs as a way to fund his do-gooder organization, Hungry for Music, they were more than a tad skeptical. Songs they could understand, but baseball songs? “Yeah, they thought it was a little nuts,” Jeff said the other day at his Takoma Park office, reflecting on the release of his twelfth baseball CD.

All twelve have raised a surprising amount of money and scored hits with the critics, but for Jeff they have also been an affair of the heart.

He grew up in a corner of northern Louisiana, a boy in love with the game of summer. He played Little League and collected baseball cards and caught Houston Astro games on the radio. Over time, though, a slow disillusioning seeped in, and then came the summer of 1994. The big leaguers went on strike for 232 days. The season ended without a World Series.

Jeff took it personally. “I became very embittered. It wasn’t a game anymore. It was all about business.”

Three years later, trying to raise dollars to buy musical instruments for District of Columbia children whose family budgets are consumed by food and rent, he came up with the crazy idea of the CD, which he called “Diamond Cuts.” Now he had an excuse to scout the romanticized side of baseball.

He found dozens of warbling and rollicking tunes that paid fanciful tribute to the game during long-ago musical eras. “Listening to them, you can imagine the mustard on the hot dog and a breeze on a hot Sunday afternoon.” Songs old enough to be in the public domain were free for the asking, but Jeff also hired songwriters and musicians to create new compositions.

He commissioned a swinging retro tune that he dedicated to the Veeck family. The late Bill Veeck was a legendary showman of baseball who once had a midget jump out of a giant birthday cake before a game and later had the midget pinch-hit in order to draw a walk. Bill’s son, Mike, who inherited the concept that baseball ought to involve absurd fun, was effectively banished from the Majors because of a stunt that went wrong in 1979. A small bomb rigged to blow up a crate of disco records tore a hole in the outfield grass and incited fans to storm onto the field. Mike endured 20 years of redemption in the minors, and just when he appeared to be one step away from a return to the bigs he took a year off to show his daughter Rebecca the world. She had been diagnosed with a disease that was inexorably stealing her eyesight.

“To me,” said Jeff, “that’s a sad but wonderful baseball story. The Veecks have the right perspective. Put fun and family first, and the business side will take care of itself.”

Whether or not that philosophy would work in a modern primetime sports sphere it somehow seems to have panned out for Jeff. “I’ve been lucky. Not just the success of the CDs, but I’ve gotten to know George Winston and Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, who are big fans. Mike Veeck sent a really nice thank-you card. A lot of things have clicked.”

It is his intention to put out 27 “Diamond Cuts” CDs to reflect the arc of a 27-out, nine-inning game. On each of the first eleven CDs, Jeff included a version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Last year, on the hundredth anniversary of that most classic of baseball songs, he decided it make it exclusive to CD Number 12. Altogether he assembled 31 versions. There is the original version that Ed Meeker put on the charts in 1908. There is a bluegrass version that Jeff persuaded Sam Bush to record. There is also an ear-catching version recorded with a saw.

The saw version started as another of Jeff’s whimsies. He sent an e-mail to Christine Lavin, asking the New York singer-songwriter if she knew of anyone who played the saw. “I don’t know why I thought she would know – it was impulse.” Jeff got an immediate reply from her. Minutes earlier she had been in a subway station where a saw musician was performing, and she had – who knows why? – been struck with her own impulse to pick up the saw-man’s business card, which she relayed to Jeff.

“Yeah, when I think about, a whole lot has clicked,” he said.