Johny Baltimore, the Hawks and Nirvana

Kirk Ericson | Jan 19, 20230

I watched Saturday’s Seahawks’ playoff game with a friend, Johny Baltimore. “Baltimore” isn’t his birth surname, but it’s what people call him, mostly because he rarely appears without a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap.

He became a fan of the Orioles in 1988 when the team started the season with 21 straight losses. “I was intrigued by the idea that a team could go an entire year without winning a game,” he told me.

Thus, a fan, and a name, were born.

I’ve known Johny for 20 years, but I didn’t know his legal last name, so I asked him, for purposes of this column. He hesitated. I asked whether he knew my last name — sometimes when you ask a question that someone hesitates to answer, you volunteer the same information about yourself. It’s a reporter’s tactic. He smiled. “I don’t, but I don’t deal with last names.”

So we left it at that.

Johny’s the kind of friend you only run into. Maybe you have friends like that too. We’ve never set up a time and place and agreed to meet at that time and place. Johny allows serendipity to be his guide.

I thought it would be fun to engineer an extended visit with Johny. He’s a Seahawks fan — he had recently attended his first Seahawks game — so last Saturday I scouted around for him.

If you’re looking for Johny, you find him by asking other people, “Have you seen Johny?” And that’s how I found him. He was sitting alone at a table in an establishment reading Rickie Lee Jones’ autobiography, “Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour.”

The TV screen, tuned to the pregame show, was 20 feet away and he had a front-row seat. I joined him.

“Do you have any hope the Seahawks will win?” I asked.

“I’m not expecting them to win,” he said. “I’m just happy because they weren’t supposed to be here. You have to be grateful.”

He remained upbeat when San Francisco went up 10-0 in the first quarter.

“Maybe if we’re down 10-0, we’ll have them right where we want them,” he said. “It will give them a false sense of security.”

After Seahawks running back DeeJay Dallas ran for 7 yards, he said, “DeeJay probably has the best smile on the team.”

His mood remained roughly the same when the game fell apart for Seattle. I asked whether he was discouraged.

“Being down three touchdowns is discouraging, but that’s called life.”

As the game spun out of control toward the end of the third quarter, we started paying more attention to the ads shown during game breaks, including ads for trucks, beer, fast food, new cars, investment advisers, cellphones, legal drugs, insurance … it became a joke because none of those ads were close to advertising anything we’d be interested in, and here we were spending a Saturday afternoon watching the game. People like us were not being represented in the ads.

Then an ad appeared on the screen that showed still shots of fleeing families, maybe from Latin America heading north. The last words superimposed on the screen: “Jesus was a refugee.”

“There we are,” Johny said.

In 2008, Johny gave me a 20-by-24-inch double-exposure print of Kurt Cobain. He took one of the exposures at a Nirvana concert at The Evergreen State College in 1991 and the other exposure around the same time in an alleyway in Pike Place Market. He wouldn’t let me pay him for it.

I asked him Saturday how that Kurt Cobain print came to be, and he told me a story.

After seeing Nirvana perform in Olympia and Seattle in early 1991, he saw them play later that year in New Haven, Connecticut, where he lived at the time. He and some friends gathered outside the venue, The Moon, to greet Nirvana when they arrived. It was Sept. 26, 1991, two days after “Nevermind” — the most influential rock album of the 1990s — was released.

“Before the concert, they drove up in a van,” Johny said. “Kurt came up to me and some friends and asked whether we could get him anything … We got him some cough medicine. He got us all on the guest list.”

You can see the Sept. 26 New Haven concert on YouTube. Nirvana starts with four cover songs. The crowd seems sedate for a Nirvana show, but then the songs on “Nevermind” start. First, “Aneurysm.” Heads start bobbing and jerking. You’re watching people hear the songs, many for the first time, that became the soundtrack of their youth.

“A little homeboy from Aberdeen ended up touching people’s lives” around the world. “Pretty amazing,” Johny said.

“You’re an optimistic fellow, aren’t you?” I asked.

Johny took a moment.

“Hopefully,” he said.