Sat.  July 7

You will be not being hearing “Dirty Water” or “Sweet Caroline,” either at the House of Blues Foundation Room Saturday afternoon July 7 between the Red Sox-Yankees game. That’s a promise from ex-Dream Syndicate singer-guitarist Steve Wynn, who, with the Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey, co-fronts a band called The Baseball Project. If all goes well - that is, no extra inning or drawn-out slugfest of a first game, they should be on around 4:30-5 doing a free show. They'll also be singing the national anthem at the sceond game. ("I won't be trying to shred my vocal cords during the set," says Wynn.)
    The quartet – which includes ex-R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Wynn’s wife, drummer Linda Pitmon – will be playing a slew of baseball-themed songs. Ex-R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills is actually subbing for Buck, as he sometimes does, on this date. (Occasionally, Buck and Mills both play.)
     The name of the band is truth in advertising. They’ve released three baseball-themed albums, “Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails,"t “High and Inside”  and "Broadside Ballads," a set of songs commissioned by ESPN that aired during games in 2010. The group has three ardent baseball fans: Wynn (Yankees, he's live in New York 20 years, after years of being a Dodgers fan in LA), his wife, drummer Linda Pitmon (Twins) and McCaughey (A’s, Giants and Mariners).  “We’re full-on baseball geeks,” Wynn said. “We talk the talk and walk the walk.”
   Then, there’s the fourth and most famous member, Buck. Wynn said Buck, who plays bass for the Project, is a fan “of whoever he finds most interesting at the time, usually the Washington Senators.” (Yes, the long-defunct Senators, not the Nationals.)  For this tour, Wynn said they once again plucked Mills “from the R.E.M. farm system.” And Baseball Project part-timer, Fenway Park organist Josh Kantor, will sit in, too.
    Wynn, on the anthem: "Scott and I have done it before, we do a prett cool Simon and Garfunkel thing. Mike is doing it this time, too and he’s the best singer in the band, Linda's a good singer, but she will stand ten feet off the mic and move her lips." Now, Wynn has a dog in this hunt, the hunt being the games played and promises no Rosanne-like sacrilege. "For a Yankee fan, I will be very well-behaved. I can’t be 100 percent well-behaved. I feel some need to deal with my conflict … .
… At the Baseball Project concert, Wynn says they've got about 40 tunes to draw upon, and songs from the individual players other bands may pop out - Mills, for instance, will sing R.E.M.'s gorgeous "Don't Go Back to Rockville."
    The folks in the band love to do gigs in conjunction with games. Wynn says on an off day they once drove six hours out of their way to catch a Tigers game. They ride in a van and Wynn laughs, "Our priority is to have Wi-fi to see baseball games in the van, The days of drugs and too much food are gone. Wer'e hooked on fantaty baseball and we're unrepentant . …..

More from our chat …
    JSInk: You and Scott are the primary writers and singers. How do you decide who does what?
    Wynn:  Both of us are pretty prolific, We’re used to writing all the songs in each of our various bands and we always have two or three things going at a time. Neither of us have any shortage of songs or any trouble coming up with them, so being in a band together we naturally divvied them up. We’re the biggest fans of each other songs. My favorite on the new record is Scott’s “Buckner’s Bolero.”
   It’s a great song, as it tells the tale of all the Red Sox miscues that led up to Bill Buckner’s  infamous error in the ’86 World Series..
   Both of us got into that book, “The Bad Guys Won!” about the ‘86 Mets and it talks in great detail about their team and that game. It inspired Scott to recreate the steps.
   There’s a lot of Boston on the record. You’ve got “Tony (Boston’s Chosen Son)” about Conigliaro’s tragic tale, getting hit in the face by Jack Hamilton’s fastball in 1967. You reference Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Mark Fidrych, who briefly tried to restart his career with the PawSox, is the focus of “1976” - the bright young star who fell so fast. You seem to understand the pathos of this team.
    The Red Sox have incredible history with so many great stories and there’s this kind of sadness and frustration.  Everything we enjoy singing about you can see in the Red Sox – them coming so close and not quite making it and finally coming through in 2004. If I wasn’t a Yankees fan I might have even been excited about it. It was rough for me, but I can appreciate the story and it was a long time coming.
   Warren Zevon’s “Ballad of Bill Lee” is my favorite baseball-themed song.
   I  love that song, too.  I think it’s an amazing song and  I was lobbying for that to put on the record or do it live, but we haven’t got it.
   Then, there’s the song about how the Sox parted with Roger Clemens, “Twilight of My Career,” the title taken from former Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette’s kiss-off.
    I remember reading that quote when it happened and being shocked: “We wish him well in the twilight of his career.” My God, he’s 34-years-old, he’s had this great career! I thought it was rough, so harsh.
   Of course, there’s what we now suspect with Clemens and steroids – despite the recent acquittal about lying before Congress.
   Maybe I give Clemens more credit than he deserves, but it made for a better song to look at it that way. I can just imagine where a guy who’d hear that would be so driven to prove people wrong
    You don’t do rah-rah songs. There’s a lot of reflection and sadness on “High and Inside,” even more than the first one.
   If you look at the stuff Scott and I have written over the years, we always do look for the dark, melancholic side of things, or the story of somebody who almost had it or had it and lost it. When we write about baseball, we’re attracted by those sort of songs. We wrote so many songs about beanballs, baseballs hurting people like Conigliaro or Carl Mays’ pitch killing Roy Chapman. I don’t think we have a huge history of funny, uplifting songs. There are some, but it’s not what we do regularly.
  How does this differ from the various other projects you’re involved in?
 It sounds like the music we like. It fits alongside what Scott or I or Peter or Linda would normally do. It has hooks, has a good groove and it’s about subject matter we like.
     The fact that it’s serious, in terms of subject matter …

    It was not a matter of planning, but the way that we write. We each wrote songs things and players we care about, the same way we’d write about anything. You find some universal story that touches us and give a minute detail more importance. ”We would do that if we happened to be writing about bank robbers or murderers, broken love or whatever.
     The songs are specific about players and fans. Do you think they speak to broader, real-life emotions, too?
    I think we go through a lot in our songs. Scott and I have written some of our most personal songs for this band. I think we try to find a story about baseball, on the field or off the field, but it can apply to anybody. I’ve said from the start, you don’t have to like baseball to like our band. I think the songs we write can delve into the geeky, statistical, list-making stuff, but we don’t go too far that way. They’re mostly songs that could apply to many situations outside of baseball, human characteristics,
   I’ve always really rooted for the old guys who come back or hang on. We all relate to that. Scott and I have been doing what we do for a long time and people have said, “You had your day, other people are coming along.” But I can still do it. No matter what your job is, you hit that moment in your life. 

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