Where it all began…
Posted by s woods on July 29, 2009
The Little Sandy Review and the Birth of Rock Criticism
by David Lightbourne in The New Vulgate (“articles of social, political, and psychological constitution”). Recounts in detail the story of the little ‘zine Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake started publishing in 1960, without which it’s entirely possible none of us would even be here. Some nice photos, too.
Just as an aside… via TNV, also found this recent Meltzer piece from the Oregonian about the Beats. In it he notes his discovering the criticism of Leroi Jones (pre-Amiri Baraka): “At 17, I hadn’t read anything that so viscerally spoke to me, and surely it was Jones’ model that enabled me to truck in music-crit myself in the years that followed.”
m coleman said
Nice piece from the meltz that also answers yr ?? about where rockwrite began. Not w/FOLKIES (sheesh) but Kerouac’s writing on bebop.
*In a mag serving mainly as a tepid trade sheet that routinely shilled for the likes of Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson, Jones’ bold, passionate support for such fire-breathers as John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor stood in high contrast. With diamond-eyed focus, he championed these musicians not as “iconoclastic” contenders, contentious blips on the mainstream jazz radar, but as full-fledged, fully-formed artists whose musical agendas were seminal and necessary.*
s woods said
Actually, he’s talking about Leroi Jones there.