Setting Times stories to music: From the Ramones to the Pogues
This week, two young reporters debuted in Great Reads: Andrew Khouri and Chris Megerian (see Tuesday and Thursday below).
And that got me to thinking of music debuts. Which band had the most impressive first album?
Anyone who knows me will guess my favorite: the Stone Roses. The 1989 release might be the only perfect album out of the thousands I own, and that’s even without the additional song on the U.S. release, “Fool’s Gold.” A poll in the Observer newspaper labeled it the best British album of all time.
Of course, their second -- and final -- album, “Second Coming,” isn’t as universally loved. One of my favorite bits in the movie “Shaun of the Dead” has some fun with that. Two of the characters are using their vinyl as weapons against zombies (don’t ask). As they squabble over which albums to sacrifice, one picks up “Second Coming.” The other says, defensively, “I like it.”
Andrew and Chris, I’m confident that no “Second Coming” jinx awaits you.
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read (or, as they’re known in print, Column One) -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later if my fellow editor Millie Quan ushered them through. A story-song combo!
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Do childhood rapes by her father excuse her crimes?
The rapes started when Tatiana Thibes was a child.
Her father’s sexual assaults became more frequent as she grew older and were accompanied by beatings and torture, she recounted in court years later. He used surveillance cameras, she said, to keep her a prisoner at home. When he was arrested for stabbing her in the chest, an investigation revealed through DNA testing that he had fathered her three children.
After her father was sentenced to life in prison, Thibes spoke of overcoming her 19-year ordeal by becoming a therapist to help other victims of sex abuse.
But four years later, the 33-year-old recently appeared in the same downtown Los Angeles courthouse where she once testified against her father, this time as a defendant.
Thibes has been in court for multiple hearings while judges and prosecutors decide what punishment she deserves. She could be sentenced to prison after her conviction last year for helping three gang members burglarize homes in Tujunga. (The Times generally withholds the name of sex crime victims, but Thibes wanted her name used.)
“I know I messed up. I feel like I let a lot of people down. I’m ashamed,” Thibes said in a recent phone interview from jail.
Cases like Thibes’ are a thorny challenge for the criminal justice system, one that judges and prosecutors routinely wrestle with: How should the courts punish serious offenders who have themselves endured difficult or abusive upbringings? The prosecutor who tried her burglary case said he feels torn as his office considers an appropriate sentence.
#storysongs combo: “Punishment Fits the Crime,” by the Ramones. Just looking at the photo of the band in the video makes me smile.
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Does Satan worship lower a Las Vegas mansion’s value?
They came to the Las Vegas mansion in waves, chasing tales of ghosts and murder. Some came to gawk or snap photos in front of its black metal gate. Others came to worship Satan. Thrill seekers broke in and drew pentagrams and carved upside-down crosses throughout the house.
The vandals came after “Ghost Adventures” featured the mansion on an episode that warned of a “nasty, evil spirit” that lurked inside. The homeowner fumed and sued. He wanted the Travel Channel show to pay damages.
But how do you calculate the effect that demons have on property value?
You ask Randall Bell.
The 54-year-old Laguna Beach resident is a doom-and-gloom real estate appraiser. He has carved out a singular niche, fielding calls from governments, big businesses, crime victims and international media, all seeking insight into the worth of stigmatized properties.
His caseload is ripped from the headlines: Nicole Brown Simpson’s Brentwood condo; the Rancho Santa Fe mansion where 39 Heaven’s Gate cult members committed suicide; JonBenet Ramsey’s house in Colorado; the World Trade Center site; properties damaged in the Rodney King riots and by Hurricane Katrina.
#storysongs combo: “This House Is a Circus,” by Arctic Monkeys. Warning: just a tiny bit of Anglo-Saxon language in this (but with the northern England accent, you might miss it.)
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A nurse who is healing patients and himself
He was riding in his aunt’s sedan, a kid in elementary school, watching senior citizens walk in and out of the Lynwood retirement home where his mother worked. Then she emerged in scrubs.
That’s it.
David Fuentes holds on tightly to that simple memory: his mother at work. It’s easier than recalling many other parts of his childhood — “a blur,” as he calls it.
Like the time when he was little and his father, drunk, socked his mother. She remembers the blood gushing from her face and her child standing in the bathroom saying, “Mom, Mom.”
Or the times when he was older and his mother had fallen into addiction. He would stay awake fearful of what might come when she went out looking for a fix.
Or the times he took care of his siblings when no one else would.
“Just like the basic things. That’s all I really remember,” Fuentes says, “kind of helping to make sure they got fed, and just keeping them company, making sure they were OK.”
His face tightens slightly with some questions about the past. But he knows he doesn’t need to remember everything.
He has his one simple memory. His mother, a nurse.
#storysongs combo: “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Couldn’t decide whose version I liked best: Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson or Chet Baker. Sinatra: smooth. Nelson: wonderful phrasing. Baker: vulnerable. OK, let’s go with vulnerable.
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A key cog in the Capitol machine
Irwin Nowick enters the stately Capitol building wearing a frayed T-shirt and carpenter jeans, a flip phone hanging from a belt holster and a manila envelope stuffed with legislation and legal documents in his hands. His dark eyes are rimmed with creases, earned from long hours hunched over a computer keyboard.
The Legislature is scheduled to vet hundreds of bills and resolutions before the session ends, and it’s Nowick’s job to catch mistakes before they become law.
Nowick begins his rounds this quiet Friday by dropping off recommendations to ensure three different pieces of gun control legislation don’t cancel each other out. Then he shuffles off to a state senator’s office, where he proofreads a resolution calling on the federal government to help alleviate prison overcrowding.
After a few more twists and turns, he stops at an assemblyman’s office to say he fixed an error in a bill that would expand healthcare coverage for pregnant women.
Nowick is often viewed as a pest — too focused on minutiae, too rude or too odd — but lawmakers nevertheless rely on his obsessive attention to legislative detail.
Although much of his work is unseen by the public, his role remains crucial nearly three decades after he arrived in the Capitol.
Term limits have caused constant turnover in the Legislature over the years, making his deep knowledge of politics and policy a rarity. And in a building full of people hunting for headlines, he’s known for his willingness to do the unglamorous work — drafting bills, researching court cases, splicing amendments — that’s an essential part of making new laws in California.
#storysongs combo: “This Charming Man,” by the Smiths. “He knows so much about these things...”
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The other voice of the Dodgers — in Spanish
The ball soared off left fielder Carl Crawford’s bat once, then twice, into the dimming blue sky.
And each time, the home runs conjured a familiar call for listeners of Spanish-language radio, one that has made its way onto Dodgers shirts and blended seamlessly with the roaring crowd for generations.
La pelota se va, se va, se va, y despida la con un beso!” Dodgers announcer Jaime Jarrin exclaimed in a voice that seemed practically iambic in its rhythm. “The ball is going, going, going, and you can tell her goodbye with a kiss.”
Vin Scully may be baseball’s poet laureate, but the man who has shared the Dodgers airwaves with him for 55 years is no slouch in the lyricism department.
As the Dodgers tried to close out the Atlanta Braves in Game 4 of the National League Division Series, Jarrin described a wicked, arching pitch by Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw as “aristocratic” in its curvature. A swing and a miss accomplished nothing more than “fanning the breeze.”
Jarrin, 77, has been a fixture with the Dodgers since joining the organization as a 19-year-old and broadcasting his first game a year later. Once a news reporter, Jarrin covered the Watts riots and the funeral for John F. Kennedy. He has called 25 World Series, the Olympics and the “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali.
Like Scully, he is a Hall of Famer, making the Dodgers the only team with two announcers enshrined in Cooperstown. But in many ways, and perhaps not surprisingly, he inhabits a parallel world that makes him hard to fully appreciate if you’re not a Spanish speaker.
“He’s kind of like Vin Scully to Spanish-speaking people,” Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez said before Monday’s game. “He’s been here so long; he’s been through it all.”
It’s a common comparison. But, strolling through the press box, the 85-year-old Scully protested in a way perhaps only he could.
“He’s one of my dearest friends. We go back so many years together,” he began. “He’s not the Spanish Vin Scully. He is what he is, Jaime Jarrin. He stands on his own two feet. He’s a Hall of Fame announcer and a wonderful human being.”
#storysongs combo: “Blue Heaven,” by the Pogues. I chose this because Jarrin’s voice is a little bit of heaven. The photo in the video makes me smile too -- at Shane MacGowan’s legendary teeth.
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If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATgreatreads with the hashtag #storysongs.
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