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glenn mcdonald’s War Against Rock Criticism

By Steven Ward (June 2001)

glenn mcdonald is one of the most important rock critics working in the field today, though maybe “working” is not a good word; he does not get paid a cent for his insightful and very personal journalism.

If I could only chose the writing of one rock critic to bring with me to a desert island, glenn would be my first choice. (You see, I would have access to all the CDs I want on my desert island and glenn could help me pick and choose.)

Even though some publications have invited glenn to contribute, he won’t do it. A Boston-area software designer, mcdonald prefers to slave away at his computer every Wednesday night and create his fiercely independent, weekly on-line music column, The War Against Silence. No editors, no advertising and no compromises. This may be unheard of in today’s state of music journalism, but it is being practised week in and week out by mcdonald.

You know the pure joy and emotion you can feel after listening to a piece of music? Remember how you used to feel the same way after reading a piece of rock criticism? The kind of writing that made you want to go out and buy a record? Not because it was cool but because the writer made you feel like the record in question was just perfect for you. Something you would just love.

The writing of glenn mcdonald will make you want to go out and browse the aisles of your favorite record store. He still gets a jolt from the thrill of discovery when buying CDs. glenn’s writing will make you want to rediscover that jolt as well.

During the following e-mail interview, mcdonald talks about his column and music writing in general. His take on rock criticism may be the freshest slant that’s ever been published at rockcritics.com. But don’t take my word for it — read on…

steven:   For those that don’t know, you write a very personal online music column each week about CDs you have recently got hold of. Although your columns are very autobiographical in nature, you never let that aspect grab hold of describing the music and what it sounds like. That’s one of your strengths in my opinion, always writing about what the music sounds like as well as what it means to you. Do you agree with that assessment and is it that way by design?

glenn:   Well, I do believe that music reviewing is, at its core, a service industry, or at least it has been historically, or at least it should have been historically. We ought, I think, to have been trying to help readers find music they might enjoy, and to do that we needed to find a way to tell them enough about a record, in terms they could understand and use, that they could make an informed guess about whether buying it was a good risk. We often failed, of course, because reactions to music are intensely subjective and it’s impossible to anticipate when, for example, some particular twitch in a singer’s voice is going to completely alienate a listener who would otherwise seem to be the band’s ideal audience, but in the old world we didn’t have any workable alternatives, so we did what we could. The thing that threatens to render this whole field of endeavor obsolete, however, is that if you’re on the Net you now don’t really need to have music described for you. Bands put sample songs up on their web sites, the online CD stores often let you listen to snippets of every song on the album, and once the major labels get their post-Napster services running we’ll be pretty close, at least within the major-label domain (which is all most people know of popular music, anyway), to radio-on-demand. At that point, detailed written descriptions of music are superfluous and anachronistic. A couple of “if you like Oasis, you might like Travis” links and some clips, and the listener can just make up their own mind.

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Caught With His Trousers Down: The Ira Robbins Interview 

By Steven Ward (May 2001)

If anyone out there has a million dollars and wants to start a music magazine, please let Ira Robbins know about it. Robbins, the co-founder and co-editor of Trouser Press, has said that a million dollars would be the only way anyone could talk him into running a music magazine again. It’s not that he wasn’t any good at it — in fact, Trouser Press quickly grew from a stapled fanzine with a devoted cult following to a glossy monthly magazine that was as good or better than competitors Rolling Stone and Musician at certain times in their publishing histories. For 10 years, from 1974 to 1984, Trouser Press worked towards becoming the “alternative” magazine of its day — a precursor to the early Spin, back when that magazine was any good.

In the mid-’70s, Robbins, the late Karen Rose, and co-founder Dave Schulps started Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press to start championing English music which the conventional rock press was ignoring. Trouser Press writers and editors went to work, telling the world about the Who, King Crimson and Roxy Music. They did not worship at the feet of ’70s critical darling, Bruce Springsteen. (Robbins said he was never a fan.)

When the magazine folded under financial and cultural pressure (MTV had just started and it was forcefully taking over the Trouser Press niche), Robbins continued his crusade with a series ofTrouser Press record guides. Now into its fifth edition, Robbins’s books have become the standard alternative music guides for music fans and rock writers.

Today, Robbins works in syndicated radio and freelances for Mojo, Salon.com, and other publications.

In the following e-mail interview, Robbins talks about the history of Trouser Press, his favorite rock mags and writers, the problem of being pigeonholed as an “alternative” music critic, and the possible future of Trouser Press on-line.

Steven:   Trouser Press was a rock fanzine you started with Dave Schulps in 1974. The fanzine quickly turned into a professionally done and well-respected rock magazine that was forced to close almost 10 years later in 1984 because of financial pressure. Do you miss putting out a monthly music magazine and do you think you would ever get involved in something like that again?

Ira:   Actually, finance was only one of the factors that contributed to my decision to end Trouser Press in 1984. The music world had changed, music media had changed, the lives of the staff had changed, our audience had changed–all of which conspired to make the original thrill of having a credible forum to do with as we saw fit feel more like a Sisyphean duty to fill up a bunch of damnably empty pages every month.

The emotional rewards, for me at least, had dissipated in the face of MTV’s ability to make new wave bands come alive, with audio and video, in a way we couldn’t match on paper. Part of why we existed was because commercial American radio completely ignored the bands we cared about, and college radio was only beginning to matter in the new world.

MTV, in its early-’80s infancy, lunged for the colorful (read: new wave) and the video-savvy (that meant English, since the U.K. use of video to promote bands on TV was already established, albeit not in such a concentrated way) acts–Adam Ant, Duran Duran, Stray Cats (Americans who had started their career in London), Culture Club, the Cure, Depeche Mode, et al. That wasn’t all we did, but they stepped on our toes a lot.

I was frustrated at our fiscal insecurity and, turning 30 after 10 years of doing Trouser Press and nothing else, I discovered that real life, adult life, couldn’t be postponed indefinitely. Plus there was only so much rejection of the mainstream possible if staying in business was a goal. We unintentionally had a new audience–teenyboppers excited by our coverage of their faves but too young to share our sensibilities and our skepticism: one cover story on Duran Duran that attacked the band’s flaws caused howling letters of disillusionment and anger from kids who just wanted the good news on how cute they were. How could we put them on the cover and not worship them? It made sense to us–a big story is a big story, and a band is a mix of good and bad. Little did we know that no one else thought that way. These days, what serious publication dares think that way?

Which brings me to the question you actually asked–do I miss it? Sure. It was fun to publish completely independent music reportage and criticism. Trouser Press stood for things. Our readers thought of us as a friend with strong opinions. We clearly favored cool bands over old-hat stooges, but we had a real respect for veterans and their complex careers. We (I) loved Cheap Trick, the Who, Roy Wood, Sparks, Todd Rundgren and the Clash. We (I) hated Bruce Springsteen and all the manly Americans who bellowed rather than sang. We thought Patti Smith might be over-rated, and we couldn’t cope with L.A.’s hardcore punk (a generational failure, no doubt). But we had a huge soft spot for the enigmatic charmers in the Residents.

It was all seat-of-the-pants, idiosyncratic, irreverent self-indulgence, but it was wonderful fun. It sucked getting dicked around by record companies, advertisers, distributors and all the rest. I took it all personally–I can vividly recall arriving full of enthusiasm and optimism to our 13th floor office on 5th Avenue on many occasions only to discover that the morning’s mail contained a few bucks in checks on days when the rent, or payroll, or a $20,000 printing bill was due. It wasn’t just the money, really, it was the feeling of powerlessness, that the enterprise we put so much of our lives into could so easily be derailed by another company’s incompetence or bankruptcy, or the record industry suspicion that print advertising wasn’t of any real use to them. It was a tough and lonely battle, externally and internally, and we didn’t learn until it was over how many people we were important to.

Having started out so small and informal, we never grew into a well-run organization–although we got our work done and seemed on top of things, how we did it was always pretty slapdash. When I look back at the old issues, they look and read better to me than I remember them from the creative side. It was that kind of experience–hard to watch the food being prepared but tasty once it got on the table.

So, yeah, there are parts of it I miss. But after it was over I was able to regain friendships that were seriously challenged by working together, and that means a lot to me to this day. I look back and see how well Spin did after we quit–not that the two are in any way connected, but if we’d had some of their money and a bit of encouragement, maybe we could have become a much bigger deal than we ever were. When I decided I’d had enough, I looked around for a buyer, had an accounting firm groom us for a sale, and there were no takers.

I’m glad to have done Trouser Press and glad not to be doing it anymore. Sometimes you have to know when to leave what you’ve done frozen in time and let others carry on. Fortunately, the Trouser Press books–which we started doing in 1983, while the magazine was still up and running–provided 15 added years of continuity for me, the magazine’s name and its ethos.

Would I do it again? I’ve always said if someone wanted to put up a million bucks, providing the business acumen and leave me alone to be the editor, I’d love to run another music magazine. Our slow but steady approach to business was fine in some ways, but a lack of initial capital was ultimately fatal, dooming us to be a small-time operation even when we might have done a lot more. I was never a businessman, and we were never able to get past print-it-they-will-read idealism. Successful magazine publishing, I discovered, involves a lot more than a good editorial “product”–it needs a marketing push, professional salespeople, distribution expertise, muscle, resources and management discipline–none of which we ever had. Oh well.

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El David: Saint Dalton Shoots His Mouth Off

By Steven Ward (May 2001) 

David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine. In between 1968 and 1971, Dalton penned Rolling Stone cover stories on Little Richard, James Brown and Elvis Presley. In 1970, Dalton and co-writer David Felton won the prestigious Columbia School Of Journalism Award for their Rolling Stone interview with killer/Godhead/psycho Charles Manson. In 1969, Dalton collaborated with frequent Rolling Stone contributor Jonathan Cott on the Beatles-commissioned book, Get Back, a journal of the recording sessions of the Fab Four’s final album.

One could argue that Dalton has contributed more than his fair share to the rockwrite canon (if there is such a thing).

But some of Dalton’s best writing and most important contributions to the world of music journalism may come from the books he published after writing for Jann Wenner’s media empire. These include:

• 1972–The Rolling Stones: An Unauthorized Biography
• 1977–Rock 100 (with co-writer Lenny Kaye) This book may be the best book of its kind since Lillian Roxon’s 1969 masterpiece, “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia.” I think “Rock 100″ is the spiritual sequel to Roxon’s book–a book she never got to write because of her early and sudden death in the early 70s.
• 1991–Mr. Mojo Risin. Jim Morrison, The Last Holy Fool.
• 1994–Faithfull, the Autobiography of Marianne Faithfull. (co-written with Faithfull). My favorite Dalton book and quite possibly the best co-written rock autobiography ever published.
• 1996–Living with the Dead, an anecdotal biography of the Grateful Dead (co-written with Dead manager Rock Scully)
• 1997–El Sid. Thirty-two chapters on Sex Pistols bassist/self-destruction poster child Sid Vicious.
• 1999–To Hell and Back. Meat Loaf’s autobiography (co-written with Meatloaf) 2000–Been Here and Gone. Dalton’s first novel about a blues musician.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

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Steven:   You wrote for Rolling Stone in the early ’70s. You were one of the founding writers of the magazine. How would you compare that experience to writing for a pop culture bi-monthly like Gadfly today?

David:   Well, long, long ago, when I began writing for Rolling Stone it was as a rock evangelist. This sounds more than a little pretentious (and portentous) even as I write it, sinking it in the past tense of the deep. But, o my brothers and sisters, that was the way it felt to me then. I was as intent as John the Revelator scribbling his apocalyptic verses on the Island of Patmos. Rock was the very plasma that held the counterculture together. Everything was plugged into it, everything I cared about, anyway. It was the Pentecostal flame that would bring the New Jerusalem into existence.

Writing for Rolling Stone I don’t think I ever used the word “I”. “We” maybe. But essentially I saw myself as a chronicler, as a fan who managed to enter this or that sanctum sanctorum and bring back the glad tidings, the revelations, and thus-spake very words uttered by our idols. In Gadfly I often revisited these same stories but now putting myself back into them–in other words looking at them from another perspective, which in many ways was more honest and more interesting than my so-called evangelical reports–and definitely more humorous. For instance the time Brian Wilson mistook me for Phil Spector.

Steven:   How did you hook up with Gadfly and do you like the column outlet?

David:   Jayson Whitehead the magazine’s editor at the time, had read my biography (and experiment in Punk channeling) El Sid: Saint Vicious and asked me to write an article about the Sex Pistols. From there I went on to write articles on James Dean, my terrifying experiences with Charles Manson and the Family (I thought he was innocent and went to live on the Spahn Ranch–I want a t-shirt!) via Dennis Wilson, the Stones Circus, Xmas with the Beatles (I wrote a book with Jonathan Cott that went in their last Brit album, Let It Be). Anyway, Jayson was an inspiring and hip editor who admired the early Rolling Stone and Gadfly then and now has that same feeling of purpose, intelligence and avant-garde evangelism. Gadfly is great! It becomes virtual on May 7, 2001. Gadfly focuses on the great saints of modernism, Kerouac, Francis Bacon, Burroughs, Hunter Thompson–along with rock and social criticism. I usually end up reading every article in the magazine, finding them all interesting and generally well-written.

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Gina Arnold in the present tense

E-mail Interview by Steven Ward (April 2001)

Love her or hate her, rock critic Gina Arnold writes from her own point of view. For Arnold, when writing about music, objectivity is thrown out of the window. Arnold has written and published two superb books about the history of alternative music–Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana and Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense. An unabashed fan of alternative music and culture, Arnold chronicles her own story alongside a music history that tells readers how we got from Johnny Rotten to Kurt Cobain and beyond.

Today, Arnold still writes about music–as a columnist for the San Jose Metro–though not nearly as often as she was in the ’90s. In the following interview, Arnold talks about her favorite rock writers, why music doesn’t mean as much to her today, and what it was like for a woman to break into a field filled with nerdy white guys.

Steven:   You just left the East Bay Express where you wrote your “Fools Rush In” column. You wrote about music as well as all kind of things. Did you enjoy the freedom to go beyond the music format in the column and why did you leave the paper?

Gina:   I left the East Bay Express last month because I was offered a much better salary to put my column in the San Jose Metro. It was sad to leave the Express, which certainly did give me a lot of freedom in the eleven years I worked for them, but it was also time for a change. I always felt readers of my column (“Fools Rush In”) didn’t understand that it wasn’t just a local music column; I got a lot of flak for writing about other things. I am hoping that the readers of the Metro will understand that I’m not just a music writer anymore.

Steven:   Are you still writing full time about music? I hardly ever see your byline anymore in music mags?

Gina:   Gee, that’s depressing. I took a year off last year–I had an NAJP fellowship at Columbia University–so that’s one reason I’ve faded out a little. But I still write full time, mostly for the Metro now, but also in other places. I have never had a lot of success writing for the regular music magazines (Rolling Stone, Spin, etc.). I think my point of view irks them, it’s a little too radical. Also that game is all about who you know, and the editors are all a lot younger than me now. Admittedly, I don’t actually read those magazines, so it’s not like I probably should write for them.

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A rousing interview of self-affirmation with John Mendelssohn, King of L.A.

By Steven Ward (March 2001)

Although no one has written a biography about him, portrayed him in a movie, or released a collection of his rock writing, John Mendelssohn’s name comes up at this site almost as frequently as Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer. That’s because the guy was one of the first and most important rock critics, and an influence to be reckoned with. There was a time when Mendelssohn trashed Led Zeppelin in the pages of Rolling Stone, dressed liked Rod Stewart, and fronted a band–Christopher Milk–that received as many good reviews as bad ones. Today, Mendelssohn is still writing songs and singing with a voice that he wishes were very much better. He makes his living in graphic design, but he still writes–fiction instead of rock criticism.

Here, Mendelssohn speaks his mind on Meltzer and Bangs, Jim DeRogatis’s Bangs biography, what rock writers he imitated, his favorite records, and how he feels about his inclusion in the rockwrite category of wild boys known as “The Noise Boys.”

Steven:   What is the legendary John Mendelssohn up to these days? What have you been doing in the last few years?

John:   Professionally, Website and graphic design. Surviving long bouts of nearly fatal depression. Trying, often not successfully, to maintain a relationship with my teenage daughter Brigitte, whom I adore. Starting a succession of Pythonesque sketch comedy troupes to perform material I’ve written. Writing a thematically linked short story collection called The Total Babe and Other Wine Country Yarns that a big posh Boston-based agent is presently shopping to publishers. Writing other fiction and screenplays in which no one seemed to have much interest. Working on my own music. Breaking up with my girlfriend/fiancée of 12 years and starting a new relationship. Deteriorating physically at a terrifying rate.

Steven:   Do you miss writing about rock and roll?

John:   Very much, and never more than when I hear something like Ron Sexsmith’s Other Songs, which I love as much as I’ve ever loved an album. Of course, it isn’t just writing about rock that I miss, but magazine writing in general. A few years ago I wanted to write about my love for Mad TV, for instance, but could find no takers.

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