It's good to have goals

It's cold outside. The top leaves on the skinniest trees are starting to twinge orange. The wind, though not yet icy, brings with it the scent of cold fronts to come. Schools are in session, and summer resort towns up and down Michigan's coasts are rolling up the sidewalks, lining beaches with winter fences, and repricing hotel rooms with off-season rates (supposedly. I'm pretty sure most of them keep the prices up for the fall-foliage tours). The Red Wings are back on Joe Louis Arena ice, and training camp is right around the corner. I'd say, if you asked me, that summer is over.

"This summer, we're going to set the lofty goal of at least 15 [posts]"

Bahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Counting this one, the one where I announced that we had a goal, and assuming that I'm not updating again until well into preseason, this blog has tied last summer's post-count. Which I actually consider a huge success.

The Hockey Music thing was only supposed to be summer filler, but (and I don't know whether this is good or bad news for you) I've decided to continue it until I run out of music to post about, mostly because I already had at least another five posts partially written. Also because I refuse to have tracked down Guy Lafleur's disco album for nothing.

You can expect all that - as well as the usual bitching, erratic posting, gross humiliation of plastic figurines, and speculations as to whether Jimmy Howard ever had a set of Spiderman footie pajamas that you've probably come to expect from this blog - within the next month, as Lindsay and I crawl out of our air-conditioned, hockey-deprived cocoons to rediscover the endless cycle of joy and heartbreak that comes with being a Red Wings fan.

Say hello to your newest Red Wing

His name is Mike. He likes dogs



big hair



Willa Ford



crying



And possibly Marty Turco



which could get a little complicated next season, what with him being a Blackhawk now.

A lot of people seem to have mixed feelings about his coming to Detroit, but it's been my experience that the more sad-eyed, hockey-scarred old men the Red Wings have on the team, the further they get in the playoffs, so you can tentatively throw my name on the list of local family members, old friends, and kids who spent their afternoons at his ice rink that comprise his ready-made Detroit-area fanbase.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part III: Dionne and The Puck-Tones

I love Marcel Dionne's story because it's the kind of tragedy that you don't feel completely awful finding hilarious. Probably the saddest part of it is that despite still ranking 4th in all-time goals scored and 5th in all-time points, becoming the third player to reach 700 goals, and remaining the highest scoring French Canadian player in the history of the leauge (no, really. Look it up.), he remains largely unmentioned in discussions of "the greatest players of all time". He's one of the NHL's forgotten superstars.



He's better remembered by Red Wings fans as the guy who wanted out. In 1975, after three years of on and off bickering with coaching staff and management, Dionne moved to the Los Angeles Kings as a restricted free agent. Because during the 1974-75 season he had set a club record of 121 points (on a team which held a winning record for a whopping ten games), the Detroit fans were a little upset. The Kings fan was, understandably, very excited.







Alas, life in Los Angeles wasn't all Dionne had hoped it would be - local interest in hockey, to this day tenuous at best, was still in its infancy, and, as he himself put it, "we didn't have the supporting cast". The Kings were perennial early-round knock-offs, and Dionne became another name in a long list of hockey players to be quoted about wishing they'd never left Detroit. In a last-ditch attempt to motivate his team to a championship, Dionne hatched an elaborate scheme which involved pretending to demand a trade. Then Kings GM Rogie Vachon called his bluff and sent him off the the New York Rangers, who were also in the midst of a long-term Cup drought.

aw man, this shit sucks.

So it's my hope that if he's not going to be remembered for being one of the top scorers in league history, maybe he'll be remembered for Dionne and the Puck-Tones' "Please Forgive my Misconduct Last night".


Recorded by Dionne and his Triple Crown Linemates Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor, "Please Forgive My Misconduct Last Night" was part of a record produced to help benefit juvenile diabetes research, so I guess it can be somewhat excused that the boys needed professional background singers and probably a little 70s-era auto-tuning to keep them sort of on-key. And we're still not talking "hey these guys are pretty good" on-key, just "well I guess at least this is for a good cause" on-key.

But as much as I love listening to hockey players butcher music, the real beauty of "Please Forgive my Misconduct" is in the lyrics. If you've ever found yourself in a position where you've been too frisky with a lady-friend and needed a creative way to apologize for your forwardness the next day to save the relationship, this is your song. Unless of course she's not a big fan of hockey, or wordplay. I'd quote from them, but I don't even know where to begin. Please just listen for yourselves - this is a song that needs to be experienced.

And actually, it wasn't even released as its own single. It was the B-side to "Hockey Sock Rock" by Phil Esposito and the Ranger Rockers!!! (the triple exclamation points are actually on the album cover) which you can read about here. Unfortunately, the crown jewel of that post, the 1979 Rangers Sasson Jeans commercial, was taken off Youtube recently, so here you go:



Funny story about the Rangers Sasson Jeans commercial - there were two of them. And what the second lacks in Ron Duguay's hair, it makes up for in prancing. Or maybe the right word is mincing.



I hope that if those didn't destroy your world, they made your day.

Whoa, where did June go?

I said we were aiming for fifteen posts this summer. I didn't say they wouldn't all be the last fifteen days before the season opener.


Today is the day before the draft, the day after the NHL awards, and one nerve-wracking week away from free agent frenzy. This is like a sad island of hockey in the middle of a long, hot, hockeyless sea. And yet, I feel as though I have nothing useful to say.

Except that HOLY CRAP NHL AWARDS WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH SPONSORSHIP AND PRODUCT PLACEMENT? The ads were so deeply woven into the fabric of the show itself (they actually had the Gieco caveman running around, antagonizing Mike Green, and they actually had the United States Army present Shane Doan with the King Clancy Memorial Trophy, which sort of seemed strange) that the giant flashing Verizon logo during the first musical number seemed like a sad and desperate cry for attention. Come on, Verizon, you can shell out an extra 500 bucks for a custom graphic of like a cell phone playing hockey or something. But I don't know, maybe they just pasted that onto the Versus feed, since they don't even have Verizon in Canada.

I was expecting Ron McLean to come out with sponsored eyebrows again.

All I know is that after watching the NHL Awards, I don't want to join the army or buy insurance. I just want hockey to be back.

Expect another music post to be up in the next day or so. You might want to start airing the mothball scent off your Marcel Dionne jerseys in anticipation of this one.

Lidstrom's not retiring yet

I got the best email in the world today. It linked to this.

This is jumping around the house in celebration-worthy for three reasons:

1. NICK LIDSTROM IS COMING BACK NEXT YEAR

2. I get to stop having to listen to the analysts on CBC segue from Blackhawks goals to their opinions that Nick Lidstrom is retiring

3. Lindsay is done crying emo tears of sadness on the couch and actually becomes a functioning member of society once more.

If you're not sure how to react to this kind of news, The Triple Deke has suggestions. I'm going to celebrate by blowdrying the tears out of the couch cushions.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part II: We Counted on the Captain

To be honest, I wanted to save this song for later in the summer when I hadn't posted for two months and was sick with heat and tired of Lindsay yelling at me to write something, because I knew it was going to be an easy song to write about - but given recent developments, I felt that the timing was appropriate.

After spending a day and a half in stunned partial-mourning at the news that Steve Yzerman had taken the gm job in Tampa Bay, I began coming to terms and decided that he deserves to be happy, even if happy means opening a chain of Denver sports themed sports bars in Denver (oh god, please no). And while being ok with it doesn't mean I won't fight the urge to vomit every time I see him in another team's colors, his leaving for Florida isn't nearly as emotionally traumatic for me as it was when he retired four years ago. Four years ago, I felt like Yzerman needed more than a banner-raising and a goodbye celebration from the fanbase.

He needed a song.

Which brings us to Dick Fidge's 'We Counted On The Captain'.

Written in commemoration of Yzerman's 22 seasons with the organization, 'We Counted On The Captain' is 3 minutes and 25 seconds of your life that you cannot afford to spend doing anything else.

A lot of the music I went through to pick the songs I wanted to use this summer sort of killed my soul to have to listen to multiple times, but 'We Counted On The Captain' was not one of them. This song has been in my music library for two years now, and I can highly recommend it for blaring out your open windows in parking lots to get funny looks from people and secretly rocking on your iPod earphones when you're surrounded by a bunch of dirty Blackhawks fans. Granted, I come from a belief that any song which opens "In 1983 he was a rookie sensation / Stevie Y was all-star bound" can do absolutely nothing wrong from then on out, so your enjoyment may vary.

One of the real highlights of this tune (aside from the fact that IT WAS WRITTEN ABOUT STEVE YZERMAN) is the synth solo at 1:12 (which is, to my knowledge, the only synthesizer solo EVER composed in honor of the Captain).

And has your love of Yzerman ever built up inside of you such that you felt you had to let it burst forth from your body in a sublime falsetto "STEEE-HEEEE-HEEEEEEEVIE YYYYYY-HIIII!!"? (Don't lie. You know it has.) Then you can sing along at the 2:50 mark.

This song is the first time you'll notice a reoccurring theme in this blog - songs to which my response is "a little cheesy, but it's about the Red Wings, so I can't not love it".

Is it stuck in your head yet? You're welcome.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part I

I know when I made the introductory post to this series, there was an implication that all the music was going to be awful, but we're going to start this thing off with a song that isn't that bad at all (unless you listen to it fifteen times in a row while you're trying to write about it to block out the noise of your family being crazy all around you, in which case it snakes its way into your brain and NEVER COMES OUT AGAIN).

Stompin' Tom Connors was born a poor black child Charles Thomas Connors in New Brunswick in 1936. He spent the bulk of his youth wandering itinerantly and writing spectacular folk songs that, as an American, I have never heard of. His lasting contribution to hockey music occurred in the early 70s:

Stompin' Tom Connors - The Hockey Song

Love it or hate it (and I've actually met people who really, really hate it), it's the consummate hockey song, and we really couldn't write about hockey music without mentioning it.

Of course, if the original really doesn't do it for you, you can try this Swedish version, which is in English with heavy accents, and has Peter Forsberg scoring the first goal instead of Bobby Orr-Hull-Clarke-Whatever. If Don Cherry hasn't heard this yet, I want to be there the first time he does, with a wheelbarrow, so when he shits bricks over its existence I can take them home and build myself a garden shed.

We're not dead

This isn't really a blog entry. This is a notification that in the near future there will be more blog entries.

Last summer we made a grand total of 8 posts. This summer, we're going to set the lofty goal of at least 15 (wow! 15 whole posts! That's more than we made in the whole entire month of January! Gee golly!). This isn't an empty threat, either. This summer Hockeytown Static is bringing you

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written

even though by "greatest", we usually mean "most embarrassing to admit we actually have saved to our computer".

So whether it's holiday cheer from Johnny Bower, unintentional (maybe) sexual innuendos from Guy LaFleur, or synthesizer solos in honor of The Captain, we hope you can pull yourself away from the beach often enough to join us.

Todd Bertuzzi's Beard

The Red Wings have made enough deep playoff runs in recent years that the fans have come to understand that each one of their playoff beards has its own personality. Kris Draper's once beat Chuck Norris in a fight. Niklas Kronwall's fights crime while he's sleeping. Johan Franzen's apparently gives him superpowers (thanks for the curly fries, Mule. They were delicious).

But Todd Bertuzzi's sort of looks like you're gazing into the void.

yeah, that's the best picture of it I can find.

And because when I gazed into the void the void gazed back, here's the top ten things hiding in Todd Bertuzzi's beard:

10. The rest of his teeth
They had to go somewhere.

9. Brett Lebda
Because he's very small. And he could fit in there.

8. Mike Ilitch's sanity
I love him, but he's crazy(bread).

7. Jimmy Hoffa
I'm just kidding. Jimmy Hoffa lives in a condo in Vegas with Elvis and Tupac.

6. The lost city of Atlantis
The weight of all those buildings could explain why he hasn't been doing anything overly useful the last few games?

5. Zordon
Maybe he got imprisoned in there by Rita Repulsa or something. That seems logical.

4. Free curly fries
They are delicious.

3. A KFC Double Down
He's got to have something to eat during intermission.

2. Whiskey for Larry Murphy
Is there room for enough of it though?

1. Gordie Howe's dog

Just in case Gordie's been looking for him or anything -- I suggest he start in Todd Bertuzzi's beard. That is an awesome sweater though. You couldn't pull that sweater off like Gordie can.

You think it's more likely there's a stripper in there? Leprechauns? The Art Ross Trophy? That's what the comments are for.


Game 5, the second in a series of four consecutive must-wins for the Red Wings, starts at 10pm eastern. If you happen to actually be at the game, you should throw an octopus or twelve. Scott'll show you how it's done.