Not on the Cover of Rolling Stone

I used to write for Rolling Stone, that now-disposable but once-upon-a-time bible of the youth culture. My limited involvement was off and on, 1969 to 1971, working as a freelancer a thousand miles from the magazine's San Francisco empire. I submitted reviews only (got no feature-story assignments), mostly of LP records--though I did also get to sound off about a terrific early history of rock and roll called Rock from the Beginning, which was then reissued later as (I kid you not) Awopbabaloobopalopbamboom (haven't checked the spelling of the title, originally a musical shout by Little Richard), by wildman critic Nick Tosches who later wrote bios of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and obscure Southern white musicians, as well as petty-Mafia crime novels. (I mention this book mostly because it's one I forgot to list in my roll-call of sort-of book appearances; the trade paperback of Tosches' book quoted my review, but since I was a writer with no reputation, the publishing company omitted my name and just sourced Rolling Stone. Sigh... the profits of fame.)

For a time, I was happy to have album reviews appearing in RS, especially discussing LPs I felt a special musical connection with, and some pride in having been the writer who got to tug on the public's coat about this or that artist/album. For example, my first accepted review was a rave for Zydeco master, accordionist extraordinaire Clifton Chenier, tagged to his third album on Arhoolie, Black Snake Moan (no relation to the garish and controversial recent film). But I made a point of giving a bigger shout-out for his debut album, the masterpiece called Louisiana Blues and Zydeco. I'd been swept away by Chenier a year earlier when I bought that first LP, and for a few years I would play it for all dinner guests to test their response; only those who loved it got invited back! Black Snake was fine but not the stunner the other was, and still is, today.

The Chenier review appeared in the same issue with my (also positive) review of Otis Redding's posthumous album Love Man; he had recorded an amazing number of individual tracks in the weeks before his death in the airplane crash, tracks which label Stax got to issue posthumously and successfully. This fourth such LP still had great soul tunes like "Direct Me," "Higher and Higher," "I'm a Changed Man," and the title track which includes: "I'm six feet one, weigh two hundred and ten, Long hair and pretty fair skin... Which one o' you girls want me to hold you? Which one o' you girls want me to kiss you?" Had Otis still been alive, I guarantee you there'd have been some willing takers!

In subsequent reviews I mocked the hype surrounding the Blind Faith supergroup and album; gave grudging approval to heavy white blues bands Free and Fear Itself (ending that review "If only these were the last of them"!) and ho-hum quasi-approval to Janis Joplin's album Kozmic Blues; had back-to-back examinations of releases by the Byrds, Steve Miller band, and Elvis live in Vegas (only the Miller got a positive review, even though I've been hooked on Presley since 1955); had loads of fun with the debut albums by Leon Russell and Boz Scaggs; and so on.

Too much of this nostalgia crap gets boring, of course, but I would like to resurrect the two longer reviews I was proudest of--imagining, hoping, that I had some small part in the ascendancy of the Blues to its acknowledged permanent place in American roots music...

Appearing in issue #48 (December 13, 1969, important for its long interview with Miles Davis), was my take on the two-record set called Memphis Swamp Jam, recorded in that steamy city by Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records and then leased (I guess) to label Blue Thumb for wider distribution. This release gave Rock era coverage to some of the oldtimers of the Blues--Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Fred McDowell, Sleepy John Estes, and others--and I was both pleased and amazed that such had occurred, even though some of the performances taped weren't really comparable to the Blues guys' earlier days. But at least they were getting Rolling Stone publicity. (And my review was printed as a full page with photos!)

Quoting a bit: "... the Memphis blues scene has always been special, a kind of middle-ground way-station between the Delta and the North, producing blues that were rural-strong yet urban-polished--all the way from W.C. Handy and 'the birth' back in the Teens; through the romp-and-stomp decades of Frank Stokes and the Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers; to the heyday of Sun Records with its white rockabilly blues in the Fifties; and finally to the sweet soul-blues of the Stax-Volt team in the decade we're about to depart ((the Sixties, that is)).

"Blues with a difference: besides jazz, jugs, and salt-and-pepper seasoning, there've also been the popular songsters like Furry Lewis and the 'Big Mama' shouters like Memphis Minnie... ((and getting to the review proper)) Strachwitz gathered about a dozen of those unfit-for-TV black bluesmen, holed up with them in a garage or studio or something for four days, and finally emerged with enough tapes to produce this beautiful result--two records, 20 selections, in a variety of blues moods and styles ranging from Afro-rhythmic to juke-disjointed..."

And so on. Anyway, Rolling Stone got the message, and soon I was given a second plumb assignment, the full-scale review of a new Vintage Series of Chess Records albums offering rare or unissued tracks dating from the postwar period, recorded for Chess/Aristocrat/Parrot 78's. The initial six albums included reissues of two rare and classic Chess LPs (collector-market expensive, even in 1970 dollars) by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, plus four new releases devoted to sessions by Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Albert King, Otis Rush, and John Brim--a veritable feast of electrified Chicago blues.

So, from issue #50 (January 21, 1970, still remembered for the excellent, in-depth coverage of the era-killing Altamont Festival), I offer a few excerpts... "Hear Muddy, back when he was still more Mississippi than Chicago, wailing on 'Hoochie Coochie,' 'Rollin' Stone,' 'Honey Bee,' 'I Just Want to Make Love to You,' and eight other mojo workouts, while the Wolf chokes and moans through 'How Many More Years,' the 'Smokestack Lightnin' ' that every white blues group has stolen, 'Evil,' 'Forty-Four' and more..."

Harmonica giant Little Walter "was the man--the harp genius whose easy-going but pungent style became the Chicago mainstay, and from whom everybody from Junior Wells to Paul Butterfield took his chops.... two tunes that really jump, 'Oh Baby' and my favorite, 'Mellow Down Easy,' with harp and semi-African drums just naturally laying you in the groove, down and dirty..."

"For Parrot, King's singing was light and uninteresting, and the guitar sounds like somebody else was playing--one of those standard, characterless blues guitarists... Then you get to 1961, and damned if it ain't A. King after all--mellow yet forced-out vocal, his straight-arrow guitar splitting the bull's-eye every time..."

Southpaw guitarist Otis Rush "makes it all the way to the top on the basis of his vocalizing, which manages to be strangled and painful, precise and lovely all at once... The two that matter most: 'All Your Love,' a remake of his earlier Cobra hit--city blues with solid Latin rhythm--and the all-time classic, 'So Many Roads.' "

The album by Sonny Boy Williamson features his "wild, punchy-boxer singing, his wry and witty lyrics, and his spare, seemingly casual harp technique (on the road to Bob Dylanesque, as opposed to Little Walter's saxophone-complexity). Dig... the weird, sexy 'Santa Claus,' as ironic in its way as his brilliant 'Fattening Frogs for Snakes'; and the album's closing number, 'This Old Life,' mournful and moving, on the order of 'Mighty Long Time,' cut lo these many years ago for the now-defunct Trumpet label..."

Elmore James "is as justly famous as Brim is unjustly unknown. Refining Robert Johnson's bottleneck style, James perfected a sound which has long-since entered the blues tradition... a slowed-down version of the Johnson-James standard, 'Dust My Broom'; an infectiously happy jump-tune, 'Madison Blues' ('Put on your Madison blue shoes')... and the fifth number is Brim's earlier Parrot gem, 'Tough Times' (with Jimmy Reed in a rare appearance blowing back-up harp).

" 'Tough Times is here once more...' That's the way Brim sang it in 1953. Since then, the blues have fallen on even harder times--but you'd never suspect it from Chess' memorable Vintage Series... a rare chance to hear the real Chicago blues."

(Dazzle 'em with your footwork, says I! Well, the real dazzle was the photo-rich layout presenting my Chess review.)

But I stopped writing for RS a year or so later, moving on to Fusion (East Coast, with Boston attitude) and then other West Coast magazines, where I could regularly do interviews and longer pieces. Still, I quit the rock-crit game altogether in the later Seventies; I'd had a fun ride, got thousands of free records (those were the days!) and some concert tickets, and a certain writer's cachet. But I also very belatedly realized I didn't actually feel comfortable issuing my non-professional edicts; who was I to tell someone else what to listen to?

I'm older and grumpier these days, happy to gripe and state my opinion on almost anything, at the drop of a hat. But too cynical and jaded, even so, to write for today's puffery-oriented Rock mags. I-Pods? Down-loading? Phooey. Give me the glory days of Long Play records, and the rediscovery of the Blues.

So Few Books, So Much Time

I've never written or published a book, though I've been featured briefly or mentioned casually in several--which relates slightly to the "witness" title this blog bears.

I think basically I'm too stubborn or willful to submit to the necessary work regimen, or just unable to stay focussed long enough, to write a novel or memoir or even a book of related essays; lengths ranging from brief lyric poem on up to feature screenplay seem to be my attention-span limits. Still, other people have deemed bits of my work worthy of preserving--poems appearing first in so-called little magazines, for example, and then a couple of them picked up for obscure anthologies later.

A different example: back in the late Sixties-early Seventies I wrote maybe two dozen short pieces for Rolling Stone; and three of my record reviews were then reprinted in the first book collection devoted to such--brief but deathless paragraphs praising releases by Clifton Chenier (I was proud to introduce his Zydeco accordion music to the world of rock), the Everly Brothers, and... who? Can't remember the subject of the third. (All of the pieces I wrote do also appear in the early bound volumes of Rolling Stone, but that doesn't count since there was no selection process involved.)

Another article I wrote back then, this time for Ramparts Magazine, critiqued what I saw as the phoney revolutionary attitude of Jefferson Airplane, examining the band's Volunteers album in particular, issued while the group was also doing jeans commercials! Many years later this piece was picked up for offprint use in the syllabus of a counter-culture course taught at a college in Germany, and then quoted too in a recent biography of the band, Jeff Tamarkin's Got a Revolution. I guess Internet access served as the key.

On the other hand, my long interview with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman (offered complete, for the first time, in five early chapters of I Witness) has been quoted in a couple of Parsons biographies (one book also used a photo I own of Gram and me, seen below-right on this home page), but because both The Helix and L.A. Free Press underground newspapers long ago neglected to credit me as author, any quotations appeared anonymously (as it were).

Also basically anonymous were my writing and editing efforts for three other books: the notorious mid-Sixties Course Critique of professors and classes at the University of Washington (loads of fun to compile and write, laced with ridiculous puns throughout); the 30th anniversary history of Seattle Center and the renowned 1962 Seattle World's Fair that launched it (Meet Me at the Center by Don Duncan); and a thick Seattle Art Museum catalog for a major exhibition of (pre-Green Movement) giant "Earth Works." The author, some hopeless academic, hated my attempt to enable reader comprehension!

No thanks there, of course, but I did receive brief mentions, merited or otherwise, in two books focussed on Elvis Presley: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train (a later reprint offers after-the-fact acknowledgment for a story he used that I'd told him years earlier) and Peter Guralnick's great two-volume definitive biography of Elvis, for which I had helped line up a couple of interviews with Northwest promoters or reporters. (But you'd have to look deep in the lengthy Who's Who of people thanked to find my name.)

The experiences I had at the Stones' Altamont Festival turned up later in another guy's book too. Record producer and folksinger Sandy Paton, best known for his excellent Folk-Legacy label, published a collection of short prose pieces back in the mid-Seventies (I've forgotten the title and don't find it referenced anywhere) and in the one on Altamont he namechecks me and the battles, Hell's Angels vs. stoned fans, I witnessed with horror that day; Marty Balin of the Airplane, for one, was knocked out by them.

More personal: over the years I've fantasized that someone somewhere would discover my circulating screenplay on Mississippi Bluesman Robert Johnson, titled Hellhound on My Trail (written back around 1968-70; see blog chapters of June 12 and June 15, 2007), and offer to publish it, but only the last 20 or 30 pages have ever seen print. I've come to accept the unlikeliness of that ever happening now and have learned instead to look with special fondness on the final two books I want to mention.

Among the best English Lit courses I took in grad school, at the University of Washington in 1965, was one titled something like "The English Popular Ballad" (meaning the post-medieval Child Ballads, more or less), taught by Dr. David C. Fowler. The major assignment in his course was to select a folk song well-known in England or America that the ballad hunters had missed--to research it through history, try to find the ultimate source for it, analyze its structure and content, and finally make the case for its inclusion in the somewhat ex-clusive ballad books. I chose the Scots folk song usually titled something like "Lang a-Growin'," or "The Trees They Do Grow High," made famous by Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez and others; did all the research, sending for manuscript copies from overseas libraries, reading microfiche and old songbooks, listening to all the recordings available, etc., with no Internet back then to make things easier; then wrote my paper--which convinced Fowler so completely that his own subsequent book, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, cited my research and thanked me for establishing the song as worthy of serious academic study.

That remains the highwater mark of grad school for me (even though I only learned of my inclusion in Fowler's book several years later). I may only be a footnote, but by God, I'm proud of it!

From a Scots ballad to the Nottingham cityscape... as we finally head south to England and the novel titled Living Proof, from the great "Charlie Resnick" series of police procedurals by prizewinning mystery writer John Harvey. Back when I still had a real-location bookstore, the annual BoucherCon gathering of mystery writers and fans came to Seattle, in 1994 or so; as a mystery bookseller I naturally had to "buy" a dealer-room table at the convention.

One evening there was an auction staged to raise funds for the widow of author Robert Bloch (best known for Psycho), whose medical bills and recent death had left his family in financial straits. Towards the end of this worthy event, Harvey as one of the guest authors offered to auction the rights for some fan to appear as a character in his next book. This novel idea (excuse the pun) seemed to leave the room confused, convention-goers looking around at each other wondering whether it would be "cool" to spend one's money so (let's call it) egotistically.

Let me just say that Harvey's generous offer soon became a regular fundraising occurrence at such conventions, and other authors immediately afterwards that same night made similar offers successfully. But this first time out was met with silence. Finally, just to get the bidding started, I raised my hand for the seventy-five dollars or whatever it was... and no one else bid! So suddenly there I was, about to assume some unlikely role in an upcoming mystery. Harvey and I talked a bit; I assured him I didn't care what he wrote, and that he really didn't have to use my name at all. But we corresponded more over the next few months, and finally he sent me a proof of the page and role I'd come to fill...

I'm quite happy to state that on page 137 of the hardback of Living Proof, any curious reader can find one "Ed Leimbacher" and his Seattle store MisterE Books given a comical, slightly venal, but recognizably booksellerish walk-on part (several paragraphs actually) at a fictional book fair in Nottingham. And further deponent sayeth not.

Gee, ain't it grand to be famous for, maybe, 15 seconds?

Rock Festivals Back Then (Part 1)

I didn't make it to Woodstock. I was a laid-back West Coaster not interested enough to travel cross-country for some big rock festival weekend--shows what I knew back then!

But I was lucky enough to hit three other historically significant ones: Monterey Pop, Seattle Pop, and Altamont. My memories of each may be worth recording here...

My first wife and I had planned to go to San Francisco for our long-delayed honeymoon about the time of the Summer of Love ("if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair" indeed). We weren't hippies by any stretch of the imagination, but SF was beckoning us nonetheless. When I heard about the proposed Monterey Pop Festival, I decided we'd try to get tickets, to one day's concerts at least.

No luck on the major rock evenings, but we did manage tickets for Ravi Shankar's matinee performance. (Ragas in the afternoon rather than at sunrise or sunset, but what the hey.) And that would at least give us the chance to look around. On that Sunday we drove down to Monterey, and got to wander for a while before and after Shankar--who was terrific, I should note, him and Alla Rakha and some mysterious woman playing tamboura.

The grounds were sort of hippie heaven, I guess, looking like what would become known as Renaissance Fairs later--craft booths, jewelry, scarves, tie-dye everything, furry hats, fine and freaky people in amazing costumes. I remember we saw both Art Garfunkel and Brian Jones among the funseekers that afternoon, and the rumor circulating was that George Harrison would show up as well, but so far as I know he didn't.

But what did magically occur was some poor soul offered me two tickets for that evening's show, which I scooped up on the spot! My later-to-be-ex- (not really a rock fan) and I hung around, had dinner, and took our seats to see... wow! Janis Joplin and Big Brother, an at-that-time-unknown chick belting out the blues in a convincingly brassy voice, her nipples straining to burst her gold-colored top (I admit I had binoculars), then The Who, not much recognized yet in the U.S., with Roger Daltrey strutting and shouting and Keith Moon grinning maniacally, pounding the hell out of his drums, and Pete Townsend leaping and flailing and windmilling his guitar, and then finally smashing it and the mics to smithereens. Holy bejesus, Batman!

Who could follow that? Well, a flashily dressed black man named Jimi Hendrix sauntered out on stage, his backing guys maybe Experienced but unknown that night, and proceeded to burn down the house. Okay, I exaggerate. But he did play "Red House" and "Hey Joe" and the other tunes that made him famous, making his guitar squawk and scream--and he did finally act to out-do Townsend by kneeling down, squirting lighter fluid on his guitar, and setting it on fire!

To say that the audience went crazy is to be way too subtle. But after we all calmed down again, the rest of the evening was definitely an anticlimax--The Mamas and the Papas, Scott Hamilton, whoever else, if anyone, all basically forgotten in the rush to critical judgment. (Coverage back in those distant days was mostly by major newspapers and Esquire--the rock mag circuit hadn't been invented yet!) Several stars were born that night, and they blazed across the heavens for a few years, and then some of them burnt out way too early. Janis, Jimi, and Keith at least, all victims of their success.

I drove back north to our SF hotel pretty much on auto-pilot, totally blown away, as that relevant cliche goes. I can't remember anything else about our poor honeymoon stay, except that out on the streets I bought the second issue of a new tabloid magazine called Rolling Stone--which convinced me then and there that I had to write about rock.

And I proceeded to do just that, getting published slowly at first and then actually providing record reviews to Rolling Stone--which is how I came to cover the Seattle Pop Festival a year or so later. Seattle's version of the Fillmore was called Eagles Auditorium, run by a hustler entrepreneur named Boyd Grafmyre, who took his club success to the limit by arranging to produce a major outdoor festival weekend, to be held out in the rural countryside in a big cowpie field near Woodinville.

Rolling Stone said okay, so I got press accreditation, enabling me to wander the backstage area all weekend, tapedeck in hand. I had brief and sometimes longer interviews with Jim Morrison of The Doors (one of my first blog posts talks about that peculiar event), Gram Parsons and other Flying Burrito Brothers, Jesse Colin Young of The Youngbloods, Bo Diddley and Albert Collins and others. An amazing stretch was listening to Bo and Collins and a couple of other blues guys shoot the shit for an hour, playing the dozens on each other, and me the fly on the wall! (Man, I'd give a few months of my dwindling life to get back the long-lost, likely recorded-over-later tapes I made that weekend.)

Performing as well though not approached by me were Led Zeppelin, who came and went by helicopter, and Ike and Tina Turner. (Could Ike have been one of the other cats during that talk-fest? Could be; maybe I just didn't recognize him at the time.) The Turner show was outstanding, which is where i was--out standing in the press pit, just below stage front, gawking like a fool at the lonnng legs, and more, of Tina and the Ikettes! Whew! The view was inspirational. Tina and her gals were definitely the hottest act of the weekend...

The Doors played well but Morrison seemed less involved that I'd seen him at Eagles some months earlier. The other acts were fine and worked the stage and the crowd to their advantage, but now, 40 years later, not much of their performances have stayed in my mind. A successful weekend for all us fans anyway, even though Grafmyre later claimed that he lost money on the event.

I did write things up for Rolling Stone, and my review ran alongside some other concert coverage in one long-ago issue--and then I moved on, to generating more and more longer pieces for East Coast rival Fusion. And it was for Fusion that I covered the Altamont Festival a year later... more next time.