Reading Rolling Stone, Reading Vogue

the helpful thought for which you look is written somewhere in a book

I couldn’t write for a month for a dumb reason, one which has left me with a rather angry looking horizontal scar across my left wrist crease and a prescribed regimen of bending my palm up and down for 20 minutes every day. On the upside, I took it as an opportunity to read a lot of music books, and had many thoughts about them and other things, so here they are.

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe

This was a Christmas gift from my sister and brother-in-law, who spent all of Christmas Day showing off the Les Paul he bought himself and looking up on Wikipedia the names of all the musicians who have played that model of guitar so he could read them out loud just in case anyone wasn’t aware that, for example, Jimmy Page played one. It was very uncool! Anyway, this is Cameron Crowe’s memoir about being a teenage music journalist, the best bits of which were already memorialized in Almost Famous, a far more entertaining effort. The sad truth is that most people don’t hate themselves enough to write a compelling memoir, by which I mean they are unable and/or unwilling to portray themselves in the unflattering light required to make their life story worth reading. No insight is offered by only relating things that are cool and awesome, and Crowe consistently writes around rather than about the tragedies that inform his life—for example, his oldest sister’s cognitive disability, the specifics of which are never made clear, and her eventual suicide, though her love of the Beach Boys and “happy/sad” music is a recurring motif. The exceptions are when Crowe haplessly reveals that musicians he’d felt a connection with let him know that the feeling was not mutual, such as Emmylou Harris offhandedly referring to him as “a kid who used to follow me and Gram around” at an awards show in the ‘90s and David Bowie admitting that he didn’t remember hanging out with him at all.

Selfishly, my favorite parts were Crowe detailing the more quotidian aspects of being a music journalist in the 1970s, specifically his stories about picking up extra money writing press bios for new records, because I do that too. There are tons of books and films and such about being a teacher or a lawyer or whatever, but very few about being a music journalist, and the ones that do exist tend to focus solely on the parts that are cool and awesome rather than the drudgery, which probably contributes to people not considering it an actual job so much as a hobby. But it is a job if you do it properly, although I guess that’s true of anything, and I related to Crowe the most in those moments, and even more so a few weeks later while concurrently writing press bios for two records coming out later this year, hating life and myself because writing is hard, writing is hard, writing is hard.

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan

Okay, first of all, how did I not know that “Take Me As I Am” by Denise & Co., the lead track off the very first volume in the Girls in the Garage compilation series, is about Jann Wenner? WTF. This is an S-Tier rock fact I’ve never read anywhere else and will now cherish forever. Anyway, this book is super juicy! If Cameron Crowe doesn’t hate himself enough to write a good memoir, Jann Wenner has more than enough haters ready to call him a moneygrubbing, morally bankrupt starfucker to make this gossipy book a quick and entertaining read. The first half was extra good, covering the founding and earliest years of Rolling Stone, how it captured the zeitgeist correctly identifying rock music (and drugs) as a cultural and political force, legitimizing youth culture and presenting it within the scholarly bounds of the Oxford Rule. I own a few disintegrating issues of Rolling Stone from the late 60s/early 70s, the ones you need to open like a newspaper to read, and they really are so creative and inspiring—I’m constantly finding things I want to steal and use on Bandcamp. I like old things in new places.

However, as the book went on to cover the years when Rolling Stone became more and more intertwined with the music industry—the eternal tension at the heart of music journalism—I began to find some of the anti-Jann shit talking excessive and dubious. Some of it is likely warranted, but a lot of it struck me as axe grinding from a bunch of self-righteous, under-employed losers hopped up on “rhetoric and conspiracy theories,” to quote Pete Townshend, happily lining up decades later to take spurious shots at an imperfect person who nevertheless invented something legitimately world-changing while they did went on to do nothing of real significance with their lives. (To be fair, it should be noted that I think 95% of music journalists are massive posers who don’t care about music, and so am disinclined to believe them about anything. Keep trying to convince us Geese are an acceptable thing to listen to, morons.)

Then again, music always makes people go insane, just in different ways. One passage that has stayed with me is about Annie Leibowitz, shellshocked and alone in her darkroom surrounded by wet negatives after going on tour with the Rolling Stones, crushed by the emptiness that consumes everything once you’ve been expelled from the garden—something Jann warned her would happen, but of course she didn’t listen. Who would? “I lost years of my life,” Leibowitz says. “I had no idea.” I do.

The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound by Ralph J. Gleason

I learned about this San Francisco psychedelic music scene cash-in paperback’s existence in Sticky Fingers and simply had to read it. I also had to buy it secondhand as it was published once in 1969 and never again, probably because it was instantly out-of-date the minute it hit the supermarket shelves. Written by Ralph J. Gleason, Jann Wenner’s mentor and the co-founder of Rolling Stone, the first half is a potted history of the SF music scene, most of it sourced from Gleason’s own newspaper columns from the period, covering all manner of cool things: the earliest psychedelic ballroom shows put on by promoters the Family Dog and Bill Graham; the influence of underground radio station KMPX; fanzines like the now-forgotten Mojo Navigator and the then-brand-new Rolling Stone; a list of all active bands; and very detailed descriptions of the clothes everyone wore. (I am a girl so obviously I appreciated this!) Although structured like a school textbook—first this happened and then this happened and then this happened—I liked the firsthand, timely account of events only related these days via rosy recollections found in ghostwritten boomer memoirs.

That said, I’m not sure how Gleason could justify breaking with Jann Wenner over RS being too soft on musicians when he’s clearly besotted with his subjects, spilling a lot of ink on shit that doesn’t really matter and giving excess credit to people whose careers didn’t at all bear out his effusive praise. On the one hand, I get it. Back when I used to write a lot of feature profiles, I would also get obsessed with whomever I was writing about; they’d become my favorite band of all time for however long I was working on the piece. But Gleason’s lack of objectivity results in some hilariously bad takes, notably his confident assertion that San Francisco had forever overtaken Los Angeles in terms of music industry importance (counterpoint: the entire 1970s). He then goes on to lavish insane amounts of praise on bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful while dismissing the Velvet Underground, indisputably one of the most influential groups ever, as pretentious and without substance. I did find some truth in Gleason’s barb about “the silliness of cafe culture” because I too hate New York City.

The second half isn’t as good. It consists of a series of extremely long Q&A interviews (like 10,000 words long, a chapter a piece) probably conducted around 1967 or so, likely the unedited versions meant for other publications. I had to skip over most of the 200+ pages of Gleason speaking with each individual member of the Jefferson Airplane because they were making my eyes cross. Though I enjoy their music probably more than most people these days, none of the band come across especially well in these rambling conversations, lacking the benefit of hindsight and age to temper their starry-eyed observations about being at the center of a world gone mad. Marty Balin literally says Christ has returned. Yeah, for sure, man! Much more interesting was the interview with a 24-year-old Jerry Garcia in which he pointedly gushes over every member of the Grateful Dead except Bob Weir, about whom he says some kind of mean things. Unfortunately, the book is littered with a distressing amount of casual racism that undercuts its ostensibly progressive outlook. The numerous references to “spades” and “spade music” and “the American negro,” not to mention Gleason glibly excusing Grace Slick wearing blackface on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by calling it a tribute to the Black Panthers or something—yeah, for sure, man—eventually left me feeling “uptite,” to use the book’s own parlance. Nice talk for a bunch of middle class white people making unprecedented amounts of money off “spade music.”

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood by Michael Walker:

Here’s something about me, I don’t think of music scenes as discrete happenstances that occur at random but more like megaliths along ley lines: plumes of psychic energy that have erupted at various points in time and space, manifesting only briefly in the third dimension but always connected because they spring from a source which is eternal and evergreen. It’s hard to explain without sounding like a crazy person who takes too many drugs, but in essence: All scenes are one scene, one community, one tribe of people dedicated to a single thing forever and ever. And that’s why I love reading books like this one, because they help me understand the things that have happened to me in a way I rarely find elsewhere.

Anyway, this book covers the Laurel Canyon scene over a 15-year period starting in the mid-60s. The narrative is broken down more or less by the preferred drugs of the musicians in question, starting with the Byrds and marijuana and ending in the 70s, when the music industry began making serious money off bands like the Eagles and everyone started doing heroic amounts of cocaine. As it’s told entirely in retrospect, there is an undercurrent of sadness to the book, everyone involved, like Leibowitz in Sticky Fingers, still on some level working through the after-effects of having been expelled from paradise; a lot of them are doing it on Instagram, the ones still living anyway, posting old photos with long captions about the people they knew and the things they did and how it felt to once live at the center of the benevolent universe. “I’ll never forget and I miss you all,” Eric Burdon of the Animals is quoted on a post I’ve saved and often revisit when I am feeling blue because I know exactly what he means. Before I quit trying to explain my experiences with music to non-music people, I would twist myself into knots trying to explain that magic wasn’t fake, it was something that just happened when you walked down the street, something you could feel pulsing beneath your feet and in your heart, the perceptible energy of a group of people remaking the world in diamonds and pearls. But the reaction was always dismissal and diminishment, and I often left conversations feeling like the little squirrel in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, banging on the table and screaming about how Father Christmas has come—he has, he has, he has!—right before the witch turns him to stone. I suppose that’s why I liked Deadheads so much. I didn’t need to explain to them that magic was real. They already knew. You never get over it. You never want to.

The Jive 95: An Oral History of America’s Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco by Hank Rosenfeld

Okay, this book is a fucking mess. I don’t like oral histories generally as I find them to be a pretty low-effort way of documenting a period of time—just write the fucking thing, for fuck’s sake—but this one was a new low for the genre. I rarely had any idea what was going on or who anyone was because there was no real narrative thread to anchor me in time, the same quotes appeared twice in the space of a few pages, there were a bunch of distracting side tangents, and way too many pointlessly corny interjections from the author that served only to annoy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only Ben Fong-Torres consistently came across intelligibly.

Regardless, I did enjoy it. I didn’t know anything at all about KSAN or its predecessor, KMPX, before picking this book up and much of what I learned was genuinely inspiring. The former station employees spoke movingly of their time there, how it gave them a chance not only to be part of music but to serve their community in a meaningful way. They talked about playing records they were sick of over and over for kids to tape at home to listen to later, the only way you could do that in those days; of people sending whole reels to soldiers in Vietnam so they could hear news that wasn’t censored by the government. The day after Altamont, the station took three hours of listener calls live on-air, breaking the real story before the national media had any idea what had happened. There was a long-running segment called the Pharm Chem Report that advised people about the quality of drugs being sold in the area so no one got sick; they talked down kids on bad trips who would call in freaking out. They raised money for striking workers and organized clean-up efforts after the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill. They also did a lot of stupid shit, like trying to caravan across America and Europe, in one genuinely dumbass incident some of them are still trying to play off as cool and awesome, allowed a guest to give the DJ a blowjob while on air.

In some ways, these hazy and haphazardly collated recollections made more sense to me as an instruction manual than a historical document. Literally, sort of: I was recently given radio show on Bandcamp despite having zero experience in the medium, so much of the time I was reading this book about a bunch of insane people pioneering underground radio, I was also teaching myself, with no small amount of frustration and too many cigarettes, how to do it myself. But I suppose all of the books I read were instructional manuals in their own way, transmissions from a time when everything was new to remind me that nothing is really new—not the drudgery, not the politics, not stupidity or the genius, not the happy/sad. And certainly not the community.

The Internet Archive hosts a small number of KMPX/KSAN airchecks that I’ve been listening to lately. It’s an oddly sweet experience hearing songs long since crystallized into “classic rock” or “dad rock” presented as the latest thing alongside tracks from records now considered obscure and underrated, like that lame Skip Spence record everyone’s always going off about, which as it turns out were neither obscure nor underrated but just another new release, same as the rest. (They play way too much Donovan for my taste, but whatever.) I love what’s aired between the songs even more: commercials for phono cartridges and long-gone record stores in Berkeley, announcements for upcoming shows, the DJs talking shit between sets with now legendary bands who were then just local groups, everyone stoned out of their gourds. When I hear something especially good, I save it to my laptop to work into one of my radio shows. I’ve always believed that one must amuse themselves first if they expect to amuse anyone else, and it amuses me to no end hearing KMPX founder Tom Donahue, often credited as inventing the freeform radio format, “the voice of Zeus,” as Bill Graham allegedly called him, holding forth between new tracks from Weird Nightmare and White Fence, his deep baritone intoning about hula hoops and what’s happening at the Fillmore this weekend and does anyone remember the Mugwumps? Groovy group! Old things in new places. But it doesn’t sound out of place to me. It doesn’t even sound old. It’s like I said. All scenes are one scene, one community, one tribe of people dedicated to a single thing forever and ever.

PS. I read this book as well, but the write-up didn’t really fit in with the rest and so was removed. I am putting it here in case anyone would like to know my thoughts about that Manassas record.

Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond by Chris Hillman

I’d been meaning to read this for a while as I’m a massive fan of the Byrds and the Burritos, and so much of the music I love the most springs directly from the blueprint laid out by those two groups. It’s about what I’d expected, if a bit more milquetoast than I would’ve preferred. A late-in-life convert to Orthodox Christianity, Hillman is a really positive guy who, like Crowe, is reluctant to share too many details about the darker aspects of his life, though he does write frankly of his father’s suicide and the anger he carried around for decades because of it. On the other hand, the book shone when he was relating happy memories in simple, declarative sentences, often punctuated with an exclamation mark: growing up surfing and riding horses in north San Diego County; his youthful bluegrass band gigging at Disneyland; joining the Byrds (“One of the greatest bands ever!”) and their first trip to England where John Lennon ordered everyone hamburgers at an after-party, Hillman calling them as the worst he ever ate. He writes a bit about his close friendship with Gram Parsons, whose father also committed suicide, while also describing frustration at Parsons’ flakiness and tendency to run away with the Rolling Stones at every opportunity, which Hillman chalks up to him being a trust fund kid who didn’t need to worry about fulfilling contractual obligations, making records that sold, or anything else. He also has tons of genuinely lovely things to say about Stephen Stills, who gifted him a rare mandolin in thanks for Hillman recommending the Buffalo Springfield for a residency at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, thus launching their career. Speaking of Stills, thanks to this book, I finally got around to listening to that Manassas record as Hillman wrote so rapturously about how well they could play—“Such a good band!” I thought it was okay.