Are You Ready For Basket Eddy?

 Q: Who is Basket Eddy? And where did this idea come from?

Jeff Matthews:  I’m not quite sure about the original Basket Eddy—I think he was a guy in a movie who carried around his head in a basket. (David Greenberg came up with the name, as I recall, but Jon will remember more about it.) And we were a bunch of seventeen-year-olds with time on our hands (or, at least, I was), so we decided to run for class president as a group, with a puppet called Basket Eddy on the ballot. Our slogan was “Are You Ready For Basket Eddy?” And we won.

Jonathan Stone: I don’t remember the slogan, but from what I can remember Jeff has the origin story pretty much right.  Basket Eddy was the creepy star in a low-budget Fifties horror film (that I’ve never seen, but David Greenberg or Jed Drake must have.) (Editor: It was later deduced during one of the Zoom calls that John Drake, the original owner of the mannikin had named him for some cult movie that no one has ever seen, probably not even John.) Our Basket Eddy was a roughly life-size mannikin acquired from United Housewrecking – a literal figurehead for our junior class presidential run.  Of course today, 45 years later, no one can find the actual mannikin.      

Jeff: Jonny, the only thing I remember is the slogan!

Q: Was Basket Eddy a good class president?

 Jeff:  I contributed nothing, I’m ashamed to say. Zero. The other nine carried whatever load there was. David Greenberg was the school photographer, and Jonny wrote the newspaper. Jed Drake was the AV guy (he fittingly went on to join an oddball little outfit in Bristol, CT called Entertainment and Sports Programming Network—despite several of us trying to talk him out of it—that would become what we all know as ESPN, where he ended up producing Monday Night Football and rubbing elbows with rock stars and sports legends). Roger Tarika was the school’s golf team (still is an excellent golfer); Paul Hulleberg, Bill Almon, and Scott Cecil all ran cross-country; and Brad (a part-time drummer now) was perfecting his timing at Walter Schott dance classes, so I doubt they had much free time. As to who actually did the grunt work, I assume it was Patrick McGarey.  Pat had a stellar career in Washington D.C. and is now with the National Cancer Institute.  He probably carried the load back then. But I could be wrong about all of that. Jonny would have a much better take on it.

 Jon:  Just to confirm Jeff’s observation about his own somewhat peripheral involvement, Patrick McGarey was NOT in Basket Eddy!  One reason for Jeff’s confusion on this point is that Patrick was always making genuine civic contributions at our school, so he should have been a Basket Eddy.  The actual tenth Basket Eddy member is a guy named Bill Evans, who was in the right place at the right time (meaning, at the table with us in the library before school when we formed B.E.  completely randomly and ad hoc).  We’ll locate him at some point, but I like that he remains the Mystery Eddy for now.

 Q: How did you all decide to Zoom together during the pandemic?

 Jeff:  I don’t know. I missed the first one. Duane Almon—Bill is “Duane” to us, after Duane Allman, of the Allman Brothers Band (music being tie that binds us Eddys)—mentioned the BE crew had gotten together via Zoom and invited me to join. To be quite honest, I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to hear from me after all this time. As the famous musician and drug abuser David Crosby said, when asked why he was kicked out of The Byrds: “because I was an ---hole,” and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t much better in those days. But Duane and Brad McLane encouraged me to tune into the second BE Zoom, and I’m very glad I did.

 Jon:  It was all Brad’s initiative.  I got an email with only the subject line “Basket Eddy Zoom, 5:30 Wednesday” and the link.  I hadn’t thought about Basket Eddy in years, but hell, I wasn’t about to miss this!  What an otherworldly experience to click a link and see nine or so other faces from 45 years ago.  White hair, and no hair, and some wrinkles, but damn – there we all are!    

 Q: What was the biggest surprise in all this?

 Jeff:     That the group dynamic was exactly the same. It was startling, and great fun. I remembered why we were friends.

 Jon:  What a gas.  We were all 63 turning 64 - a lifetime had passed by – careers, kids, grandkids, and here we were looking at each other again – and within seconds we’re telling stories of our teenage parties and underage drinking and anecdotes and high jinks from long ago and laughing our asses off.              

Jeff:     “Underage drinking,” Jonny? What?

 Q:  Have you lost any of the Eddys since 1973?

Jeff:     Incredibly, no. But we did discover that a mutual friend—Michael Lytton—had passed away five years ago, and that was a shock. I reached out to his widow and reported on it to the others. “Closure” is a cliché but having the BE crew back together brought out a lot of good memories and shared stories.

Jon: I am so happy that we’re doing this before we lose any Eddys.  Because obviously at some point, we will.

Jeff [subsequently]: We did lose an Eddy, Paul Hulleberg, to cancer in early 2022. Paul was the “straw that stirs the drink” in the Eddys, a musical genius with one of the greatest smiles—and the best laugh—that God ever created.

Q:  What do you talk about?

Jeff:     Anything and everything. Our principal back in the day, Alan Haas, was a guest on an early call and of course there was a lot of talk about NCHS, and “remember when…?” kinds of things. Then, because most of the guys (Duane, Paul, Todd Becker, Jonny and Jed, with Dave working the soundboard) had a band called Thunder Hill back then, there was a lot of remembering of dates and set-lists. (Todd Becker, remarkably, has tapes of actual songs they played!) Then of course there was the time Jed, Duane and I stole Alice Cooper’s mailbox (the whole thing, including the concrete ball); and the concerts we went to, which were many; and the time Brad, Paul and I were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to an Allman Brothers concert by a very cool state trooper…. Everything you’d expect, and much else thanks to Jon, who is the unofficial moderator. Jonny will pick up on some almost-invisible thread that somebody reveals, and the conversation goes in a whole new direction. Jed, of course, is our ad-hoc producer, so when the conversation gets political, or goes down some dead end, he’ll turn the camera in a different direction, figuratively speaking.

 Jon:  One cool feature of these calls is that right away we started having “special guests” on the call.  As Jeff said, our first was our high school principal Alan Haas – late eighties, still alive! – who confessed that a moment like this was on his bucket list. We also had Jed’s older brother John – a mythic figure for all of us.  We have Todd Becker – not technically an Eddy, but Thunder Hill’s drummer, and his brother Kenny and Doug Davies, both of whom were and actually remain great musicians, in contrast to the rest of us!   We also had Laura Jeffries – a high school girlfriend of both Jed and Brad.  We almost had Chuck Smithers, who dialed in but couldn’t connect – so he remains a figure of mythology for us too. 

Q:  So, does it get political?  Politics isn’t much fun these days…

Jeff:     You’re right, it isn’t.  We don’t avoid it, but there’s so much more to talk about. We all had (and some of us still have) very, very different careers.  Also, most of us have children (and Duane has eight grandchildren), and of course we all have special interests. For example, Jonny managed to find time to write nine published books (not to mention whatever unpublished manuscripts he has in a drawer somewhere) while working in advertising, including an actual bestseller called “Moving Day”.  So we all read his newest book, “Die Next,” and talked about it on one call. Dave Greenberg (“TapeDave”) reached out for our opinions on the cover of his next book of music lyrics. Jed took us on his own personal virtual tour of Abbey Road Studios. And Paul wrote a song—literally, wrote a terrific song, on demand, and played it for us on the next call. Astounding! And great fun.

 Jon: We all read Jeff’s ingenious novel about Sherlock Holmes too – “One Must Tell the Bees”–and we’ve got high hopes for its publication.  As far as politics, I have a sense of where everyone stands politically, but I don’t really know – and I love that I don’t know, and that it doesn’t even enter into our relationship with each other.  That is so refreshing right now.     

Q: Where does it go from here?

 Jeff:     Wherever it wants to go. The group has its own internal organic chemistry that’s lain dormant for decades and suddenly came alive again. It’s like a Ouija board. None of us tries to move it in a particular direction—it just seems to go where it goes. I attribute that to the fact that we’re all looking back on our lives and careers, so all that “getting and spending” isn’t part of the equation. We don’t try—couldn’t even if one of us did try—to b.s. each other. Jed said “it’s because we aren’t trying to get anything out of each other.” I think that’s exactly right.

Jon:   I think everyone would agree, it’s been an oddly and unpredictably profound experience.  But I agree with Jeff – one of the coolest things about it is that egos just got checked at the door.  People seem to reveal their life accomplishments only reluctantly – you’ve got to really tug it out of them.  I think the bigger thing for us is turning out to have this ancient connection, and bringing high school back alive – with all its faults and insecurities but also all its hilarity – and most of all, its friendships.  Which are turning out to be more enduring than I would ever have thought.