Juan Rodriguez's Rock 'n' Roll Life: A rock critic's story, in his own words (2024)

Pioneering rock journalist and longtime Gazette contributor Juan Rodriguez died Saturday afternoon at 76.

Here’s a look back at Juan Rodriguez’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Life, a seven-part series he wrote for The Gazette in 2013 chronicling his years in the business.

Part 1: The early years

The epiphany occurred one night in September 1964, when I placed my father’s Telefunken reel-to-reel tape recorder next to the kitchen radio and self-consciously made a document of musical times a-changin’ as I turned the dial from station to station. At night you could catch American stations with mind-blowingly clear reception; Boston and New York often came in clear as a bell. But clarity wasn’t necessarily the objective. Static and fuzz, due to sudden shifts in wind or interference from other power sources, only added to the authenticity of the moment, of great distances bridged by the discovery of a new and exciting spirit of sound. This dial-turning was my first intensely interior listening experience, sounds colliding like atoms inside my head.

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The airwaves were dense with exploding pop music — supercharged, magic. The Beatles led the blitz with A Hard Day’s Night; the movie of the same name premièred in theatres the previous month. (I stayed for two screenings.) Their hits from earlier in the year — and from late 1963, when they topped the British charts while Americans mourned JFK with teen pap — were now being played as oldies alongside the current releases. The Stones’ Tell Me was beginning a slow fade off the charts — it always sounded like it was fading in and out of the ozone anyway, with its dissonant harmonies and echoed tambourine — replaced by their spanking cover of Bobby Womack’s R&B classic It’s All Over Now.

I often confused the Shangri-Las’ Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand), with its seagull sound effects and haunting fade-out (“the night was so exciting … smile was so inviting”), with the Ronettes’ Walking in the Rain, with its dramatic thunderclap beginning. (The latter group — which I’d read about in Tom Wolfe’s portrait The First Tycoon of Teen, published in the New York Herald Tribune — spurred my weekly search for 45s on producer Phil Spector’s label Philles, featuring his famous Wall of Sound.)

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The Animals’ The House of the Rising Sun was instantly recognizable, its syncopated guitar-and-bass intro booming as if the radio station had turned the volume up a notch. Many stations played the extended version, which included a snaky, rococo organ solo. (When CFCF DJ Dave Boxer dissed the Animals for the song’s length, and ran an essay contest for opinions pro and con, I won. “Very articulate,” muttered Dave.) Roy Orbison had a similar “listen to this” opening guitar grabber — we didn’t use the term “riff” until a year or two later — on Oh, Pretty Woman.

You could always recognize a Motown record (The Sound of Young America): high treble notes, echoed rhythm sections (as if recorded inside a barrel), tambourines, surreal jazzy underpinnings (pithy hints of vibraphone). Echoed stomping noises heralded the Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go. (Or was it their newer, rush-released Baby Love?) You couldn’t miss the yearning of the Four Tops’ heartbreaking Baby I Need Your Loving (“got to have all your lovin’ “).

There was the surf sound: I Get Around by the Beach Boys, standing up for America in the onslaught of the British Invasion (with the immortal line of teen dissatisfaction, “I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up ‘n’ down the same old strip / I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”), and Jan & Dean’s funny, cool The Little Old Lady from Pasadena. There was nonsense funk as fashioned by Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy — sometimes you could switch stations and hear another diddy-diddy almost at the same time, like a tape loop. Foot-stomping announced Glad All Over and Bits and Pieces by the Dave Clark Five. Sometimes you might be tricked into thinking it was the intro to Where Did Our Love Go.

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All this stuff was crammed in and spewed out. Just a short time earlier, radio had been oozing sappy ballads, manufactured pap. This was a breath — a gulp — of fresh air. From my perspective, it was what Dylan meant when he sang, a year later, “You know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?”

This was something I wanted to study, maybe write about. Only problem was, nobody was writing about it, except as social phenomena like the Beatles, Elvis or Sinatra.

Flash-forward to 1979. Rock had exploded as show business throughout the decade — necessitating rock critics at newspapers — and concerts were like Dante’s Inferno to me: spewing smoke and flashing lights and godawful din; the roars and chants and raised arms, like Nazi rallies. And the puke, in the toilets and the aisles. At a Kiss show, I slipped on a puddle of hurl and for the longest moment was twisting in the aisle, desperately trying to avoid landing in it. I returned to The Gazette to be told I had 12 column inches to fill. “Are you kidding!?” I blustered. “They’re not worth 12 f—ing inches! Run some photos — that’s what they’re all about, anyway!” I managed, in a desultory fog, to type out four inches, including: “For every heavy rocket fire of sound, there was a change of lighting but, after a while, it got pretty dull. … There was no real emotion put into the music — perhaps there was no real emotion to be had.”

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I could’ve been writing about myself. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Watching Elvis Presley’s debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 was my first major pop experience, at age eight. The occasion was so keenly anticipated that my parents dimmed the living room lights. I still hear screams and squeals from the studio audience, and see Ed’s stone face betrayed by his wildly darting eyes: Chaos could reign without warning.

Elvis was a gyrating blur, flashing a lascivious yet oddly shy leer. A couple visiting from Ohio — hubby with a crewcut, wife with a starched hairdo — gazed in stunned horror. My father commented with his usual “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” My mother was more charitable, noting Presley’s “good voice.” Of course, young people didn’t care whether or not his voice was “good.” We cared that Elvis was us, dancin’ to the Jailhouse Rock and busting out.

My first radio was a yellow crystal kit. I positioned it on the wall next to my bed at night to receive its one flickering signal — a station that played rock ‘n’ roll. It sounded like something from New York City, but it was actually from St-Jérôme in the Laurentians. Soon, when I graduated to a transistor radio — the iPod of its day — I actually did receive New York City (with DJ “Cousin” Bruce Morrow). When they played one of Roy Orbison’s painfully lonely hits, with a voice that seemed operatic — The Crowd, It’s Over, Running Scared and, of course, Only the Lonely — the world stopped in its tracks.

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By the late ’50s, graduating to folk music was a sure sign of growing up, leaving behind the teen world of puppy love and becoming socially conscious. Folk was pure, steeped in the tradition of the troubadour from Elizabethan times, the country singer (preferably from Appalachia), the Mississippi bluesman. Rock ‘n’ roll was strictly commercial, and hence corrupt. The payola scandals that nailed Alan Freed, the first R&R disc jockey, and implicated American Bandstand’s clean-cut Dick Clark — whose Teflon demeanour was as impenetrable as the anti-acne Clearasil he flogged — were proof that without crass record companies paying DJs to get their product on the radio, such bilge might vaporize. Besides, pop stars were puerile: “Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath,” gurgled Bobby Darin.

Popsters were flavours of the month; folkies were in it for the long haul. Teen idols were phony, manufactured; folksingers were real people, untainted by a craven desire for fame and fortune. While pop acts larded albums with filler, folksingers loaded theirs with substance. Pop stars were monosyllabic; folkies were thoughtful. My socialist parents, friends with impresario Sam Gesser, took me many times to see the morally superior Pete Seeger, who, fresh out of Harvard, had lived the itinerant life — hooking up with the legendary Woody Guthrie — and now lectured us on the ways of the wicked world as if he was our grandfather. It was a black-and-white, one-or-the-other world.

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Then the Beatles — followed by legions of other British groups — invaded America, and folk was dead.

In the summer of ’64 I wore a wool pullover, and sometimes a scarf, aping Mick Jagger’s look in teen magazines. I sweated bullets, but it was a small price to pay for feeling cool.

The Rolling Stones’ eponymous debut album blasted black rhythms; their copycat music reeked of authenticity, codes to a cool world. The Stones were mod esthetes who gave us an insider’s carte blanche into outsider music, black music — blues, R&B, soul and jazz. (Charlie Watts, we were informed, was a jazz drummer who worshipped Charlie Parker.) We wanted to dig everything the Stones dug: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye. And yet on their disastrous debut U.S. tour in June 1964, the Stones virtually disappeared in the vortex of Beatlemania. But we fans — the select few in the underground — just knew.

Of course, you couldn’t mention the Stones without referencing the Beatles. The Beatles were cute; the Stones — standing in the shadow, baby — were ugly. The Beatles were melodists with a beat; the Stones rolled black and blue. The Beatles sang barbershop harmonies; dissonance was as close to harmony as the Stones came. Though I was a Beatles fan, I was a Stones man.

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The biggest surprise was how small the Stones were. On April 22, 1965, with The Last Time riding high on the charts, they arrived in Montreal to kick off their third crack at North America. My friend Simon Schneiderman and I tracked them down to what is now the Hôtel Espresso on Guy St.; when the front-desk guy nervously said “no Stones here,” we knew we’d hit pay dirt. We took the service elevator out back to the top floor.

It was like a scene from The Shining: an empty hotel corridor, luggage outside each of seven wide-open doors. Mick was stretched out on a bed intently poring over fan mail! Charlie Watts was sacked out trying to sleep off the flu. Bill Wyman — “old Stone face,” not nearly as ugly as he appeared in photos — chatted amiably in a surprisingly light voice.

Keith Richards, in a choirboy bob, wearing new blue jeans and cowboy boots, aimlessly twanged on a gleaming, rust-coloured country guitar. When I asked him, awkwardly, “Is this all real? Like, is all this really happening, man?” — in the parlance of the day — he awed us: “We haven’t come this far not to play for keeps.”

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Brian Jones — pale, bags under his eyes, in natty Italian tweed trousers, black turtleneck and two-tone canvas-and-leather shoes — silently passed a large comb through his blond bouffant in front of a mirror, interrupting his concentration to curse a bellhop over his drink order: “When I say double, I mean double!” Bitch.

I clipped The Gazette’s coverage of their airport press conference: Asked about the average age of their fans, Jagger said, “About 3½, but I don’t really know. We try to educate them from the cradle to the grave.” A week later, Jagger and Richards had written (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

Little did I know that four years later, the Stones would provide me with my big break in becoming a rock critic — a species that did not yet exist.

You couldn’t ask for a more extreme pair of opposites than Frank Zappa and Jesse Winchester, who in 1967 played huge roles in my musical education and, it turned out, my so-called career.

LSD and Afghan hash had hit town and most everyone was dropping out, turning on, tuning in — except me, fearing drugs would bust my brain. (A year later, a professor, aptly named Malcolm Stone, got me stoned on Afghan hash. He put my head between earphones, turned on the Doors’ second album and said, “You’ll never hear things the same way again.” Flying high in a friendly sky, I realized: People are strange when you’re a stranger. But I digress.)

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I was two months shy of 19 when Zappa arrived on Jan. 7 for a two-week gig at the New Penelope coffee house (Sherbrooke at Bleury). Hanging out, I was the gofer for owner Gary Eisenkraft, a tall ex-folkie with a goofy laugh who wore granny glasses and a mod three-piece suit; I also designed the Penelope’s posters and flyers. Thus I accompanied Zappa to the nearby Banque Nationale to vouch for him after tellers, frightened by his extreme mien — unruly black hair falling over an ankle-length raccoon coat — refused to cash his paycheques. On the basis of the Mothers of Invention’s debut album, the double-disc Freak Out!, Zappa was my hero. While he had a reputation for fearsome put-downs, the ice crystals that formed on his moustache seemed to make him merely mortal.

“It was 20 degrees below zero,” he recalled in a 1993 Playboy interview. “We walked from our hotel to the club, and the snot had literally frozen in our noses by the time we got to work. The wind instruments got so cold that if you tried to play them, your lips and fingers would freeze to them. The instruments couldn’t even be played until they were warmed up. It was pretty primitive. If we hadn’t experienced that, we probably wouldn’t have come up with some of the more deranged types of audience participation and audience punishment things we were doing at the time.

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“The question became, how far would they go?” Zappa said, regarding the fans at his shows in those days. “What could we get the audience to do? The answer seemed to be anything. … So long as the person telling them to do it was onstage, they would do it.”

This degenerate Dada act included band members throwing stuff (food, rubber chickens) at each other and the audience, lasciviously pawing an inflatable doll and getting creative with a can of Cool Whip. All the while, Zappa conducted the Mothers with swift, assured arm-waving and sudden stabs of a finger — classicism perversely run amok, free-form absurdities never before seen in rock. Many of their songs were brand new, composed for the upcoming album Absolutely Free: Call Any Vegetable, The Duke of Prunes, Brown Shoes Don’t Make It and, of course, Plastic People, which became an anthem the following year in Czechoslovakia’s anti-Communist spring thaw: “Take a day and walk around / Watch the Nazis run your town / Then go home and check yourself / You think we’re singing ’bout someone else.” Our jaws dropped, eyes locked in a fascinated gaze, wondering what was next.

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Zappa had ferocious dark brown eyes; his laugh was a sarcastic sneer. He wore construction boots and marched like a man on a mission. As for me, maybe it was my sycophantic earnestness — or my cheque-cashing cachet — that revealed Zappa’s fatherly side. (His wife, Gail, also in town, was months away from giving birth to their first child, Moon Unit.) He indulged me, taking the time to explain Where It Was At.

He invited me to late-morning breakfasts — with keyboardist Don Preston and saxophonist Bunk Gardner — at the nearby Swiss Hut, a log-cabin-style joint favoured by separatists, lefties, country music fans, bikers, poets, painters, McGill students, lost and searching souls, dealers, freaks, journalists and gadflies. Zappa and mates mustered laughs comparing their oily ham and eggs to plastic Warhol pop art. I listened with rapt attention as they spritzed cultural eclecticism — about Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse (the French-American inventor of organized noise in the 1920s, quoted by Zappa on his album cover: “The present-day composer refuses to die!”); about how Freak Out! was the first underground record sold in Los Angeles supermarkets (“right near the checkout”); about outlasting the Beatles (“In two years, we’ll be as big as them”); about how damned cold it was and how they wished they were back in L.A.

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When I summoned the nerve to show Zappa some college-paper clippings, he dutifully said, “Keep up the good work.” Made my day — well, maybe my life. I’ve remained an unrepentant Zappaphile ever since, despite the so-called arrogant sneer that rubbed rock critics the wrong way. Then again, he uttered a line that lives in infamy: “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” Ouch.

Jesse Winchester came across as a quiet anti-star. He was an oasis of good music, sensitively singing his own songs and a reservoir of standards, accompanying himself on a slightly jazzy guitar. Born in Louisiana, son of a military man, raised in Memphis, he received his draft notice and split for Montreal, where he played in French-Canadian bar bands (not understanding a word) through his first winter in the bitterly cold hinterlands, finally striking out on his own, tenuously, at the Penelope.

Winchester was hesitant, thoughtful, both driven and comforted by a staunch regard for tradition. He was shy, scared, trembled on stage (“treading on thin ice” was the way he put it). His haunting, elegiac songs, recalling Americana — loving it, leaving it — were to be savoured like fine wine: Yankee Lady, Brand New Tennessee Waltz, Biloxi. He painted vivid yet understated scenes — you could “see” his songs — with minimal fuss. He had an innate way with love songs — affection, not lust; classic beauty, not pop art. He delivered them resolutely (including a yearning rendition of Chuck Berry’s Memphis).

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We got to know each other in a halting kind of way. So it came to pass that Winchester’s first write-up in his adopted land was the first performance review I penned, freelance for The Gazette in 1968. Two years later, upon the release of his debut album (produced by Robbie Robertson of the Band), I interviewed him for Rolling Stone; that same year, he opened for the Band at Place des Arts. I designed the cover and wrote liner notes for his lo-fi follow-up, Third Down, 110 to Go.

His songs were instant classics, covered by many. When Jimmy Carter offered amnesty to draft evaders in 1977, Winchester paid a visit — but returned to Montreal. After all, where else could he effectively sing his paean to “that four-letter word,” Snow?

Part 2: Sympathy for the driven fan

Crawdaddy! began publication in 1966 (typeset on an IBM Selectric), providing a pulpit for the first wave of rock critics. Rock, wrote editor/publisher Paul Williams, had become “the arbiter of quality, the music of today. The Doors, Brian Wilson, the Stones are modern music, and contemporary ‘jazz’ and ‘classical’ composers must try to measure up.”

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I was already publishing my little mag Pop-See-Cul, a play on the frosty confection, starting on mimeograph and graduating to actual professional typeface, doing all design and paste-up myself (a bottom-up education in publishing). The mag became a member of the Underground Press Syndicate, centred on music and New Left politics. (As for the name, I later learned French-speakers consider “cul” — short for “culture” in my title — quite risqué. I had no idea!)

Meanwhile, Crawdaddy! published an early version of Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock, a takeoff on academic style, complete with footnotes, but also a densely sentient epistemological work. Inventor of rock criticism, Meltzer quickly became its most prolific and irreverent writer, with a prose style — made-up words, wild punctuation — you couldn’t mistake for anyone else’s. (He also became my hero, and friend to this day.)

“A lot of what happened in the ’60s felt very miraculous, like it was coming out of nowhere,” he told me years later. “You didn’t have ‘rock-surround’ yet. There was no full map, but it was certainly in massive discontinuity (with) what had been encouraged before, in terms of artistic output. It wasn’t even like anyone was making art — it was just an emanation of self, like breathing, sweating.”

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Then along came Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, with the acid-eyed Beatles in psychedelic Edwardian costumes on its elaborate cover collage, and advance hype — a “concept album” they spent months of multi-tracking to create — lending the album a high-art sheen before anyone removed the shrink wrap. Remember: Until then, rock ’n’ roll raves were by and large the domain of teenybopper mags like 16 and Tiger Beat. Academics had missed the boat with Elvis; eggheads predicted Beatlemania wouldn’t last six months. On Sgt. Pepper’s, the Fab Four transformed British music hall into stoned art songs. (Important exception: A Day in the Life, which was probably one of the two most awesome songs to date, alongside Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone.) The professors went ape, comparing them to T.S. Eliot, Schubert and so on. Record companies followed suit, and rock became not only a cash cow, but a sacred cow. Within a year, Columbia Records captured the generational mood with the slogan The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.

I listened to Sgt. Pepper’s incessantly for two weeks. And then I stopped. Forever. It was just bells and whistles, I decided. There was no there there, as Gertrude Stein once said. I won’t get fooled again, as the Who had it.

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Among the visitors to Expo 67 was a young New Yorker seeking respite from a controversy that would mark him forever: Richard Goldstein, who wrote the witty, sociologically inclined Pop Eye column for the Village Voice, had the nerve to pen a devastating review of Sgt. Pepper’s — for the New York Times, no less! To his chagrin, he was on the receiving end of a countercultural twist on the ’50s phrase “don’t knock the rock”: his review received more outraged letters than any other Sunday Arts article ever.

“It was the first time I’d heard a boring Beatles album,” Goldstein told me in an interview for Pop-See-Cul. “And it was very tricky, gimmicky. I listened to it dozens of times, and it was a hard review to write … but I figured a lot of people would agree with me. It never entered my mind it would cause such a huge stink. Professors wrote in saying the Beatles were Schubert and how dare I put them down? … It hurt a lot to have people I respected either accuse me of purposely writing a bad review to elevate my own name, or completely missing hidden significances they found in the album. … I asked myself, ‘How could you hate an album so many people loved?’ I was convinced I was finished as a critic.”

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He was. Years later, he actually apologized for the piece, after leaving the music beat to cover gay affairs for the Voice.

Having dropped out of university in 1966, in my first year, by day I toiled in the mailroom at Montreal Engineering — on St. Jacques St., directly opposite the Montreal Star — and wrote at night, getting rejections, then acceptances. Hit Parader published a hysterical, clumsy screed, The Rock Revolution: Kind of a Drag. I still like the last paragraph: “Legions of psychedelic agents and con men flogging the most syrupy hype imaginable will never be able to replace the standards by which good music must be judged.” The piece netted $50 US.

My very first interviewees, in 1968, were Bill Haley and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys — the former still riding the wave of the first rock ’n’ roll hit, Rock Around the Clock (1955), the latter troubled about his future (thanks to the draft).

The Gazette published six pieces before I summoned up the nerve to ask to be paid. “Fifteen bucks a pop, kid,” said entertainment editor Jacob Siskind. “Chicken feed. Take it or leave it.”

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In 1968, Jimi Hendrix played Paul Sauvé Arena, his speakers perched on coasters on a low-slung stage, producing a grating sound that ricocheted off the walls perfectly. We stared agape at this small, wiry dervish with an Afro, wildly coloured ruffled shirt and tight studded pants, wielding his axe in a soul strut and psychedelic swagger, out there in his own universe, coming from outer space to our town. All sonic kinetics, without a light show. For the hundreds of fans who crowded toward the stage, Jimi used the sparsely filled arena’s echoes to amazing effect.

In the spring of ’69, before embarking on a six-month sojourn in swinging London, I made a proposal to the Star: If I got an interview with the Rolling Stones, would they hire me as their first full-time pop critic? “Sure, kid — go ahead, give it a try.”

Upon arrival, I called the Stones’ office; the secretary said the boys weren’t talking now, but might be in the near future. My heart jumped: This wasn’t an out-and-out no! I followed up to make sure they had my name and phone right, that I’d be here on Big Assignments, and other fibs to indicate I was, ahem, there for them.

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Meanwhile, I settled into a small room on Manchester St. that anchored my dreamlike existence as “foreign (pop) correspondent” in a city with more pop happenings than any other. My pad, between Baker and Oxford Sts., was around the corner from EMI Records’ headquarters — the same building where the Beatles posed for their first album cover! I felt I was at the epicentre of hip.

I wrote longhand on lined paper, every few days typing the honed product on a portable Royal — a modus operandi I hoped would approximate the 500-words-a-day routine Hemingway employed. I soon learned that when the iron strikes hot, you have to go for it. The hours flew by. I mailed articles to the Star, and received nice cheques. (The Canadian dollar went a long way back then.)

I took long walks to Soho: elbow-room-only food and flea markets on Berwick St., a cacophony of co*ckney accents, strip-club barkers. To the Marquee Club on Wardour St., where R&B and jazz combos made their mark (Stones, Yardbirds, Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames). A stroll down Carnaby St., bedecked with Union Jacks and the Who’s mod bull’s eye. Boutiques blaring Tommy (“see me, feel me, touch me”); Marrakesh Express by Crosby, Stills and Nash; Pink Floyd’s spacey soundtrack to the French art film More (which hyped sex, drugs, beauty and life itself); the Stones’ raunchy Honky Tonk Women; The Ballad of John and Yoko (the Beatles were slowly disintegrating in public); anything by Hendrix and, above all, Je t’aime … moi non plus by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, with its churchy/orgiastic organ and heavy breathing, a No. 1 hit banned by the BBC (but not by offshore pirate stations). With the Kinks’ hit Waterloo Sunset ringing in my head, I trekked across Waterloo Bridge almost nightly for a Hitchco*ck retrospective by the British Film Institute.

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Late afternoons were spent poring over Melody Maker and New Musical Express in Hyde Park. There, I attended the free Stones concert introducing guitarist Mick Taylor, replacing Brian Jones — who, it was claimed, wanted to go in different directions (viz.: was unreliable). It turned into a memorial for Jones, who drowned in his pool a few days earlier (with a cornucopia of drugs in his system). The London papers ran Extras throughout the concert: 250,000 Happy Fans and Just a Handful of Screamers; Nice to Have Hells Angels on Our Side, above a photo of helmeted Angels assisting a drug casualty.

As part of the foreign press corps — heh heh — I was invited by the Stones’ office to a press conference introducing Taylor. Street Fighting Man was the anthem of the day, a holdover from the events of 1968, when Mick joined a march on the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square that turned violent. “I got a nice buzz from that,” he said. “It’s like our concerts in the old days. … My whole act was showing off. And showing off is violence. It’s the same sort of feeling of exhibitionism.”

Talk turned to new-wave cineaste Jean-Luc Godard, whose docudrama Sympathy for the Devil (also known as One Plus One) interspersed black-power dudes delivering agitprop lectures with the Stones recording the title track. Mick declared: “I don’t think Godard knows anything about black people. He just got himself a couple of two-bit hustlers.” Keith sneered: “Godard sounds like a schoolboy. He’s just so earnest.”

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The “exclusive” interview ran over three pages in the Star, and I got the pop music gig when I returned in September.

My first review for the Star, of the Doors at the Forum, was headlined Doors Bore but Boppers Love It, and ended: “The crowd loved every minute of what was passed off as music, and they enjoyed themselves. This is called Being Together and it is an easy enough commodity to produce. All the radio personalities on stage had to say was ‘You’re beautiful!’ and the audience cheered crazily. The promoters of this kind of show certainly know ‘where it’s at.’ They’re laughing all the way to the bank.”

“I don’t know how old you are, but man your old. Too old to sit at your desk criticizing today’s art. Let’s face it your not on the right train to where everybody is going. I don’t know how the Montreal Star can pay you to talk about something that your so ignorant of. You make me laugh. Take my advice get yourself a desk on the Lost and Found section of the Star. Because man your lost and I doubt if anyone will ever find you. BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER. YOUR BLIND. BLIND WITH AGE.”

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This missive was the very first I opened after the review. Jim Morrison was blind drunk; the rest of the Doors just kept playing without pause, the sooner to get off the stage. I was barely 21.

Part 3: One of a kind, one on one

When I started reviewing, I handled everything that came to town, regardless of genre (except classical, although in a pinch I did the Bolshoi Opera and Porgy & Bess by the Houston Opera). Assignments ranged from Motörhead to Johnny Cash to Charles Aznavour to Keith Jarrett to Genesis to Robert Charlebois to James Brown to Engelbert Humperdinck to Blondie to Barry White to Nana Mouskouri to Liberace to Zappa to Dylan to Tiny Tim to Kinky Friedman to Bob Marley to Tony Bennett to Led Zeppelin. Most of it’s a blur to me now, yet many moments return like it was yesterday. Those dozen years of interviews and reviews amounted to an education in the music business as it rapidly exploded.

Two early interviews, with Janis Joplin and James Brown, stood out.

An hour before Janis took the Forum stage on Nov. 4, 1969, with her new band, Full Tilt Boogie, I found myself with her in an empty hockey dressing room; it was the kind of thing you could do before rock became a well-oiled business.

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Janis, wearing a pink silk minidress and white fishnet stockings, toted a sealed bottle of Southern Comfort, her trademark libation. This was my first time sipping Southern Comfort — with Janis, no less! — and it went down like candy. The first thing I noticed, apart from her frizzy dirty-blond hair and exquisite nipples poking at her dress, were the small craters from childhood acne on her face — there was something overwhelmingly real about the lady. She exuded the scent of a woman, and not just any woman: fresh herbal shampoo from her thick mane, sweat from her armpits and, perhaps from between her legs, a certain je ne sais quoi. She was all funky sensuality. Her strong-hipped body was fleshy, her ever-shifting décolleté revealing perfect melon-shaped breasts, and her legs, coyly crossed, were the stuff of dreams. Her hyped-up Texan drawl was charged with a blunt confessional tone that said, “Listen up, you better get this right — or else!”

She came on, by turns, like a boss and a girl on her first date. She told me she was impressed by Tina Turner’s defiance and determination. (Turner’s abuse at the hands of husband Ike was not yet widely known.) She fretted over her wild image, and said she hadn’t expected the idolatry. “I’m not really impressed with all this anymore. I mean, I had a totally different conception of what it was gonna be like at the beginning. Why, I’m just a small-town girl from Texas. … I guess I must be getting cynical. There’s nothing I can do about what they say.

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“Say, what do you think of the Rolling Stone magazine? Hey, you know, they’re all so prissy down there … these short little grubby kids. What’d they call me? Oh yeah, ‘the Judy Garland of rock.’ What a dumb thing to say! As a matter of fact, she’s one of the very few singers who really put themselves into the music. That’s where I’m at, man, but they don’t know it.”

She planned to quit the grind, take three months off. “I bought a house in the San Francisco area, just across the bay, and there’s trees and a lake and only beautiful, peaceful people live there, and I’m gonna have a lot of animals around, yeah, and a couple of ducks.” She got up, did a little waddle, and seemed pleased.

But as time wound down, the bottle two-thirds drained, her mood swung dramatically. She pointed at me and scowled: “Ah, you’re not going to print what’s really going on, I can see that! You’ll just write whatever you please. So why don’t you call it quits and go away.” I blushed, not knowing how to reassure her. There was an awkward silence, then I asked meekly, “Am I permitted just one more question?” She broke out into a smile and said, “Why sure, man! Go ahead!”

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“Do you think you have any limitations as a performer?” I asked, addressing criticisms of her as an unrelentingly one-dimensional shrieking vocalist.

“Oh yeah,” she replied in a voice that broke just like a little girl’s. “I’ve got limitations. I mean, the second album compared to the first — there’s no comparison, man. I’ve really come a long way. But I’ve got limitations as a performer … and other sides, too.”

“But that’s your own business, right?”

“I’m not so sure.”

She gave a spellbinding show. It was painfully obvious that the stage was the only place she felt alive and unfettered. “C’mon, take it! Take another little piece of my heart now, bay-bah!” Coming off stage, soaked in sweat, her face dropped when fans asked for autographs. “I gave everything I had on stage. Don’t ask for anything more, please!” She rushed up to me with hugs and kisses, her scent now overpoweringly of sweat, Southern Comfort and patchouli: “Send me your review. I agonize over all of ’em. Man, I’m really neurotic. I really want people to love me.”

I drifted into the near-empty Star building around 3 a.m. and wrote up the interview/review slowly until 6, wanting to do right for the woman. Eleven months later, she died of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood motel apartment, alone. I cried when I heard the news.

Interviewing James Brown, Godfather of Soul, the hardest-working man in show business, was an utter thrill. I first saw him in 1964 as the penultimate act in the TAMI Show, a shindig taped in Santa Monica, Calif., and screened in cinemas soon after through the magic of Electronovision. Like the Rolling Stones, who had the sorry task of following him, I was astonished by this human package of dynamite. My first piece on him, in 1970, was titled I Have Two Selves and One Is Black, and was based on a pre-concert Forum press conference. Eschewing his unique lacquered pompadour, he sported a modest Afro, in solidarity with the black-power movement. Just two years earlier, he famously performed a televised show in Boston, urging blacks to cool it the night after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which sparked urban riots throughout the U.S. With blacks glued to the TV, Boston did not erupt.

“I’ve just released three records at once, man. But the establishment ain’t gonna recognize that,” he announced in his sandpaper voice. “If I have a record that sells 800,000 copies, it wouldn’t even make the top 20, but one of the establishment-owned groups can sell 100,000 and be in the top 10.

“It really amuses me, it don’t humiliate me, just amuses me to see a cat be so stupid, because the truth is gonna come out anyway, man. I feel a little hipper than the cat; I don’t have to do it physically, ’cause I can out-think the cat and make him blow his own thing, ’cause he’s gonna spend most of his time trying to keep me in a bag, but he’ll be in the bag, man, trying to hold me there. Like, you look in the bag and I won’t be there!”

I reported everything he said, in context, without the usual hostile, “angry black” media spin; young white-boy rock scribes tended to be intimidated by him. Mr. Brown (it was never James) evidently appreciated my coverage, for on return visits he invited me backstage after shows to “share some pain” while his hair was being re-permed. Pain? “Yeah, Champagne!” (It was a huge honour to enter through the dressing room door with the fluorescent orange sign: MR. BROWN. DO NOT ENTER.)

In 1974 I penned a long piece to preview his upcoming Place des Arts concert, which sold out quickly. To return the favour, he requested I be given an engraved watch. (I later learned he used to do this all the time in the 1950s, until he stopped because of the payola scandals.) Problem was, this was a holiday weekend and stores were closed. Mr. Brown wouldn’t take no for an answer, so promoter Donald Tarlton — often infuriated yet somehow always gracious over my bum reviews of his mega-acts — dispatched his assistant Skip Snair to procure a hot Bulova (complete with a raggedly chiselled inscription). Near the beginning of his show, Mr. Brown said: “I wanna stop and say thanks to … naw, I’ll do it later.” Eventually he announced my name, demanding a standing ovation. I meekly waved; my moment in the sun. (Is this a dream, or what?)

The last time I saw him, in 1978, he was playing the Limelight club on Stanley St. (then a disco magnet), doing two sets a night. “Man, you don’t look so good,” he observed. “You gotta take care of yourself.” I was not in good shape, ground down by the stream of shows and booze. I could barely swallow some pain, which was by now down from a magnum to a split. Mr. Brown, who said he was 44 but was celebrating his 49th birthday that week, admitted he was tired: “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” He mentioned how Nureyev must feel, but unlike the Russian dancer, he went “90 minutes non-stop.” He was as compactly muscled as ever. “I’m trying to keep my weight down,” he confided. “I got it down now; I just hope I can keep it down.” His formula? “Mind power,” he said, as emphatically as only Mr. Brown could.

He said he wanted to return to play the Olympic Stadium — a long way from the Limelight. “Sounds rough, but I think we can sell it out — sort of a Tribute to James Brown, with Chuck Berry and other people. We can make a film about it.”

Ten years later, in the midst of IRS, drug and marital problems, a wild interstate car chase with police earned him a six-year sentence. Upon early release, he made a concerted effort to assure immortality — as if his invention of funk and the most sampled beats in hip hop weren’t enough. He would set off precious bursts of energy during his live show — a monument to the power of being James Brown, now back in his glorious pompadour, for all the world to marvel.

When he died at age 73 (or 78, as the case may be) on Dec. 25, 2006, I played every one of my James Brown records — my funkiest Christmas ever, meditating on the Godfather of Soul. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Part 4: A critic must die

Leonard Cohen was the consummate man about town in the ’60s and ’70s, a heroic romantic poet in a city of romance. I often spied him striding along Sherbrooke in his famous blue raincoat, and wouldadmirehis upright gait, eyes in the sky. Or loping down de la Montagne to Le Bistro, where he had scrawled a graffiti poem – “MARITA / PLEASE FIND ME / I AM ALMOST 30” – to a woman who had rebuffed him with, “Come back when you’re 30.”

I spotted him at the back of the New Penelope waiting for Joni Mitchell to finish her set. I had devoured his slim, precious volumes The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the scatological/spiritual novelBeautifulLosers (1966). The 1965 NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen was required viewing, revealing him in bed in a seedy Ste. Catherine St. hotel, gazing at the lurid posters of sex cinemas in the Main’s red-light district, reading poetry to rapt audiences of earnestly sexy babes in form-fitting sweaters.

Now, in 1970, I was faced with reviewing his Place des Arts debut. He had developed an intense cult following, fans hugging the front of the stage, hanging on every precious word. He droned on and on, backed by a country band’s somnolent slip-slidin’ twangs. He bored me stiff. I wrote that I had a vision of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans galloping down the aisles to liven things up.

The next day, Cohendemandeda showdown at a Crescent St. bar. “That review was alley talk,” he fumed. “I’ve got a bunch of big guys in my band who wouldlovenothing more than to take you into an alley.” (The band was dubbed the Army.) Three years later, at Théâtre St. Denis, he asked, “What do you have to do to get agoodreview in this town?” (He later confided that his mother worried he was doing somethingwrong.)

Promoting his 1977 Phil Spector-produced album Death of a Ladies’ Man, he invited me into his modest abode off St. Laurent Blvd. We sipped cognac, he offered whatever was in the fridge – just a huge jar of kosher pickles – and he talked about working with pop’s egomaniacal genius.

With Cohen’s voice practically buried within Spect-or’s gargantuan sound, the album was universally panned. “People really don’t know howgreator howbadthis album is,” he said, including himself. Spector suffered delusions of intellectual grandeur. Both drank heavily. But Spector had guns and the keys to the locked studio. One night he staggered over, a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand, a .45 in the other, put his arm around Cohen and pressed the gun to the poet’s neck. “Leonard, Iloveyou,” said Spector. “I hope you do, Phil,” was the nervous reply.

A turning point for Cohen was the 1988 album I’m Your Man, its synthesizer-based sound stunning, sleek and sophisticated. Cohen’s voice, an octave lower than when he started out, was commanding. At his Thé-âtre St. Denis concert that year – one of the most fascinating I’ve attended – he played the microphone, all deep tone and heavy whisper, working the same trick as Barry White. Dressed in a dark double-breasted suit and matching T-shirt, clutching the mic in one hand while gingerly holding its cord with the other, he was the quintessential pro. No longer a helpless mystic, he was a torchlight singer, a smoothie. (Backstage afterwards, he closeted himself with that other smoothie, Pierre Trudeau. Recalled Cohen: “He more or less asked, ‘What do you have to do to get a good review in this town?'”)

In the ’80s he graciously lent his name to my Canada Council grant application for a book surveying Canadian and Québécois pop music. In 1989, he told me, “A lot of people enjoysuccessin their youth, but when someone is still doing it past the age of 40, I think the work becomes more interesting.” That day, in the brilliant sunshine of his unkempt little courtyard, on the eve of my departure for Berkeley to chase down my first girlfriend, Martine (whose brother, coincidentally, was in his Scientology class), he once againencouragedme: “These kind of things can begreatfor a writer. Go for it.” There ain’t nocureforlove.

The sold-out Forum was filled with expectant fans on April 13, 1970 for the local debut of Led Zeppelin, the most-hypedgroup of the day. According to one website, my review was theworstthey’d received up to that time. Zeppelin offered the conviction that more – three hours’ worth – was better. The loudness was a “gimmick,” I wrote, giving an “illusion of Importance.” In short, they blew their wad in the first 10 minutes of the concert, and everything thereafter was mechanical repetition; my friend Herbert Aronoff at The Gazette expressed similar feelings. Mybrutalreview – “ridiculously monotonous,” “sluggish,” “miserable” – took them by surprise. Led Zep, pioneers of the apocalypse, had never faced thecriticismthat they had “as much creativity as an encyclopedia salesman.”Outraged, oh so righteous, at the airport they sought out a soapbox – the CFCF newscast – to vent their hurt. Big-time British heavies resorting to Montreal TV! The local yokel in me had to laugh.

At the Stones’ Forum show in 1972, when Mick whipped off his studded belt and pounded a Persian carpet during Midnight Rambler, I felt it was all over: Rock ‘n’ roll was being flogged as burlesque. The formula encompassed about three sub-genres: insufferably sensitive singer-songwriters warbling about their navel, which they oftenconfusedwith their heart (the insufferable Cat Stevens, Melanie); arena-rock bombast – a sound soon adopted by TV commercials for cars and beer – synchronized with stage lighting; and art-rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Gentle Giant and Pink Floyd, seeking to elevate rock to the level of Pictures at an Exhibition. The whole exercise was dispiriting.

Reading some of my reviews and commentaries today, I’m struck by how doggone earnest I was. From a November 1975 piece titled Rock: Only a Business?: “By 1960 the original rock ‘n’ rollers had been slapped into line and young people’s music was perpetrated by the likes of Fabian and Bobby Vee, who wore thin-lapelled black suits and cardigans, and greased the kids with nigglingineffectualsexuality. … The dawning of the rock age, back in the mid-1960s, was likened to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Never before had there been a generation of young people wholovedreading their press clippings so much. … Most rock acts cannot make a single sound until acquiring tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. … The operative words arehype, money and technology, and you are considered ‘talented’ if you know how to work within this formula. … If a record doesn’t sound like it’s loaded with production, it is not considered music.”

Loudest show (by far): Motörhead, in a small CEGEP auditorium, the sound cannonading off the walls. Mostarrogantinterviewee (no one else was even close): Andrew Lloyd Webber, prattling on about his godawful Jesus Christ Superstar like a self-absorbed British schoolboy. Act to whom I accorded the most raves: Liberace (how could I not!).

Home from an Engelbert Humperdinck interview in 1973 (big revelations: “I relax all day long”;lovessolarium), I noticed anauseatingsmell. Checked shoes, underarms, before realizing the offending odour emanated from my right hand. My split-second handshake with Enge left its mark: He was drenched in rancid perfume!

Bruce Springsteen’s ballyhooed local debut, at Place des Arts in 1975, made me aware that rock ‘n’ roll was now driven by revisionist history, withhypeproviding the gas. That year he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week; the previous year, former Rolling Stone record-review editor Jon Landau enthused, “I saw rock ‘n’ roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” The infamous line was appropriated for a Columbia ad, and Landau co-produced Born to Run (eventually becoming Springsteen’s manager).

“Hypeis the business of building up expectations,” I wrote in my review of the Place des Arts show, “and Springsteen’s talent is that he effectively gears his act to fulfill those trumped-up expectations. … The way so many of (his fans) could hardly wait for his songs to end in order to express their wildapprovalis a measure of how thehypehas affected their consciousness.”

Springsteen was midway through his first number when I heard a fan shouting to his date, “This is exactly like Dylan here in 1966!” Well, no. Back then, Dylan and the Hawks were inventing a careening “wild mercury sound” from the fumes of surreal poetry. As Springsteenadmittedin a phone interview three years later, Landau’s future-of-R&R quote was “unfortunate.”

“There were times when I went out on stage and felt I had to do something to make the roof levitate.” He sounded like a decent guy over the line. “Either the rock industry machine runs you or you can run it. And if you want to be the boss (now his nickname), you better be ready for it.” And yet he was hardly ready when Ronald Reagan, campaigning in 1984, appropriated Born in the U.S.A. –clumsybombast ostensibly about a Vietnam vet, but swallowed whole as a celebratory American anthem. By then, Bruce had bulked up in what he later confessed was his Rambo period.

He’s always sounded mealy-mouthed to me. As I opined in ’75: “His songs are bits of manufactured atmosphere, mainly about running away to the backstreets and sleazing it up with forbidden fruit – the kind of stuff they teach in high school ‘creative poetry’ classes.” Bru-u-u-ce never really graduated.

It was obvious in the early ’70s that much of the rock biz had become a Big Production, with musical values taking a back seat on the highway to fame and riches andhell.

It was the authenticity of black artists – bluesmen, jazz players, soul singers, rhythm-and-blues bands – that captivated me (starting with frenetic Jackie Wilson on the Ed Sullivan Show). For me,the bestgroup wasn’t down to achoicebetween the Beatles and the Stones, but rather the Memphis soul band Booker T. and the M.G.s.

The new R&B-and jazz-oriented booking policy at the venerable Esquire Show Bar, on lower Stanley St., enabled me to see and interview the legends of black music. Although my exposure to R&B had been triggered by the Beatles, Stones, Animals and Kinks, now I was meeting the primary sources. I was awestruck. I devoted big Saturday page space to R&B and jazz artists coming to the Esquire, the In Concert Club, the Rising Sun and other emerging venues.

The long interviews with the likes of John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Earl Hines, Curtis Mayfield, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Billy Cobham, Herbie Hanco*ck and, my favourite, Rahsaan Roland Kirk were an education I wanted to share with readers. The interviews resulted in block-long queues of boomers seeking to connect with the real deal. This seemed to miff rock fans to no end: I wasn’t giving them their weekly confirmation that rock was where it was at.

The Esquire – a funky House ofGoodMusic, its white columns shaped like palm trees – was the last vestige of Montreal’s 1940s/early’50s heyday as a city that never slept. Crusty, cigar-chomping mumbler Norm Silver managed the joint. He had eyes bulging out of dark bags, and a large nose over which he wore Groucho glasses. The desk in Silver’s closet-sized office was cluttered with scrapbooks, 8×10 glossies, bits of notepaper, and the requisite issues of Variety and Cashbox. In the lobby, with its Wall of Fame, he mumbled inquiries about whether so-and-so would draw and shrugged off credit for a sparkling booking: “I just thought we’d do something different.”

The ghosts of big names – Bill Haley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Coasters, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, Junior Walker, Sam and Dave, Martha and the Vandellas, Duke Ellington, Count Basie – enveloped me whenever I walked in. I felt much like Robert Charlebois must have before he became a Quebec superstar; he once said the Esquire was “essential to my career.” (At 14 he snuck in wearing a fake moustache, and in 1968 he played there for a week, sharing the house attendance record with Pickett.)

When Kirk left the Esquire’s stage near the end of his set, playing New Orleans clarinet through the crowd and onto Stanley St., Silver muttered, “Kinda makes you feelgood.”

My memory of the blind Kirk remains incandescent. A perennial poll winner in multi-instrumentalist categories, he literally wore his instruments on stage. I can still hear hiscrankyvoice; I see him brooding beneath bulbous shades and breathing heavily. He preferred small hotel rooms so he could be closer to his stuff, which he arranged neatly in specific places on his bed and dresser. He could find what he was looking for faster than asking you to look for it. He introduced me to snuff, said it cleared out the nasal passages. He explained how circular breathing enabled him to play two, three horns at once. He spoke to me low and tender, patiently, filling me in on what I needed to know about jazz, gesticulating wildly and sermonizing like a prophet, using the element of surprise to keep you off guard or draw you in.

“Any time you try to change anybody’s way of thinking when they’ve been set in acertainlittle bag, you destroyin’ the bag,” he told me. “So if I play two horns, I shouldn’t be doing it, according to thecritics, because Stan Getz wasn’t playing two horns. So the first thing they say (is) ‘It’s a gimmick; he’s just trying to be different.’ They can’t think of nuthin’ else to say. People have hang-ups about people being blind, too. They say, ‘He’s got to begood’cause he’s blind; he’s got to have extraperfectpitch.’ Well, all that stuff don’t necessarily have to be true, because music is work. Anything takes work.

“I believe that people should be entertained, as long as it’s not diverting too much from the music. I don’t spin pop bottles on my head or anything. The music should be carried all over the club, all over the street. I think that when we come back in off the street, there should be people coming in with us. … If I hear a man on the street and he’s powerful enough with his music, I stop and listen to him. ‘Cause it’s interesting to hear music out in the air, unexpectedly. To me, it’s intriguing. But people don’t have imagination no more. Like when I used to sit for hours to hear Sonny Rollins on the radio from New York City, I just imagined. It didn’t have to be true, whatever I imagined, but nobody could take it away from me.

“When Wes Montgomery played, it was sheer pain to stretch your fingers like that. Pain. Now all you have to do is press a button to get that Wes Montgomery sound. It’s pitiful that we have let our minds get so unimaginative that we fall for something like that. And if I didn’t have a horn, I could do something naturally with my hands and get a sound. That’s just the way I feel about things.

“When you go through so much, and when you see all the things you go through, you can’t be nuthin’ else butfree.”

One night I staggered into the Esquire around midnight, after reviewing another dismal show, to catch Bo Diddley’s second set. I was relieved to watch his timeless R&R antics. In peace – or so I thought. A stomper had everyone on their feet – except me. Big Bad Bo spotted me at the back of the room leaning head on hand, elbow on table. “Hey you!” he pointed. “What’s the matter? You sufferin’ from lockjaw!?” The crowd cracked up. Laughs that lightened me up when I needed it most. Thanks, Bo.

On May 5, 1972, Quebec’s liquor cops raided the Esquire, newspaper photographers in tow, and charged it as a hookers’ haven. When I arrived, at 2: 30 a.m., Silver was in shock, nursing a bottle of scotch he’d hidden. “It’s deeply embarrassing. I think I’ve earned a reputation as an honourable man … not that I want to place a halo around my head. But friends ask, ‘Normie, what did you do wrong?'”

For the first time ever, I heard him raise his voice: “Around the corner, what do you find? Topless! But they have a licence!”

The Esquire closed that December; a year later, Silver had open-heart surgery. He died in 1980 at 69. “When they took away his club,” said house booker Roy Cooper, “they more or less took away his will to live.” And Montreal lost part of its soul.

Part 5: An occupational hazard

The nervy high-wire routine of reviewing on a tight deadline was a challenge that buzzed me when I moved to The Gazette in 1975, following years of sending my stuff from home to the Star – an afternoon publication – by taxi at 5 a.m. after a night of partying. Not only did I have to make an early exit from shows that rarely started on time, or haddesperatelylong intermissions, but also factor in a precious 10 minutes to down a couple of doubles at the Mother Martin’s bar next door while trying to decipher my notes, before racing upstairs to the hot seat at The Gazette’s newly installed computers to hammer out some stream of consciousness in 20 minutes, praying that the system wouldn’tcrash(something that occurred with alarming regularity). If it did, I dashed downstairs to scribble out a few complete sentences by hand over another drink, the show’s din still ringing in my head.

Musicians always made it interesting, even if I disliked their music. I was like a moth to their flame, whether Iadmittedit or not.

Phil Collins took 15 minutes out from a midnight gold-record bash – at which I murmured audible blasphemies during the solemn presentation – to drink, share a joint, and ask me exactly what I didn’t like about Genesis. “Aw, c’mon Phil, you know as well as I do that it’s just a bunch of overblown shtick!” He smiled (knowingly?). After a hatchet job on the Strawbs (remember them?), I was invited to chat with leader Dave Cousins – who startled me by saying he agreed with my review and wanted some advice!

Burton Cummings offered his own advice. The Guess Who never had my blessings, but a promo tour in 1975 brought us face to face. The group was on its last legs, and I wore a brand new Guess Who T-shirt for the occasion. (I had no clean change of laundry, I swear.) Politesse reigned during the Q&A. But at 5 a.m., my phone rang. “If I woke you up, I’m glad!” It was Burton on a bender, seething over my review of the 1974 album Road Food, which I trashed song by song for Creem. “Do you know the harm that review did us?” he blathered wildly. “Why don’t you go back where you came from, you wetback!”

The interview gotgoodspace, with no mention of theunfortunatecall. His PR rep phoned,apologizingprofusely. “It’s nothing personal,” I replied. It never is: Some of the nicest people make theworstmusic, and vice versa. Long after I had massacred Dan Hill’s weepy Sometimes When We Touch (“thehonesty’s too much”), we shared apleasantlunch together where he poured out his soul.

A Beach Boys concert at the Forum in 1976 featured the return of wayward genius Brian Wilson, who cracked up on drugs in the ’60s and was now supposedly fit to perform. He wandered out of the dressing room, candy-cane shirt neatly starched, his vacant eyes staring in an effort to locate his position. Possessed bypanic, he took matters in hand by walking out a door – leading to a hallway where fans were guzzling the remains of their beer. He quickly returned, ashen-faced, asking no one in particular, like a child: “Where’s the show?”

Pink Floyd’s concert at the Big O in 1977 washypedas the largest ever held in Montreal: 80,000 fans flocked to witness the Animals Tour, with its giant pig floating overhead in the venue. The Gazette went gangbusters on coverage, dispatching me to Philadelphia to check them out the previous week, and sending me to stake out the Bonaventure Hotel for Floyd sightings the day before the show. (Luckily, I nabbed Nick Mason in the coffee shop.) This Olympian gig meant filing a story by phone at 9: 30 p.m. for the early edition and, two hours later, filing end-of-concert adds and whatever else I had left.

While the Floyd performed the opening half, I commandeered a pay phone in a hall with a hideous echo. Motoring on some speedy yet sharp-focus Hawaiian weed that just arrived in town that week, I started shouting out sentences from notes: “This was the ultimate electronic medicine show. … Luminous obscurity is what Pink Floyd is all about, and they were probably a little more obscure than usual last night,” I barked through the din.

Cupping one ear, my voice rising to be heard over the noise, I hadn’t noticed a crowd of fans gathered to hear what the critic had to say. When I finally looked up, I was horrified at being booed by bleary-eyed, messianic Floyd fans on magic mushrooms, speed, pot and beer, sweat pouring off their faces as they gave me the evil eye while I blurted that David Gilmour’s guitar solos “were formless, mere time fillers leading up to the light and sound effects.

As I glanced at the increasingly ornery crowd, paranoia striking deep, I imagined myself as the subject of a Page One story: RockCriticRipped Apart by Pink Floyd Fans at Big O. (Among them was a saucer-eyed Claude Char-ron, PQ minister for youth and sports, staring at me, bemused.) For the second filing, I sought out a phone farther away, nearer an exit.

In 1973 I programmed a CBC radio show, That Midnight Jazz (hosted by my friend Michael Whalen), that sought to redefine jazz by playing, say, Stevie Wonder and Zappa alongside Charlie Parker.

I spent a day interviewing Keith Jarrett, the so-called enfant terrible jazz star of the day. Notoriously picky over sound systems, pianos and, above all, audience coughing, he sparked wonder (and idolatry) with ecstatic solo piano rambles. We wound up having cognac at the Hô-tel du Parc. “Biggest beds in the city,” he announced, as if he’d personally inspected all of them.

I eagerly wrote the longest newspaper story he had yet received. He had a load of opinions; a partisan of finding electricity in acoustic music, he said something mildlyderogatoryabout Miles Davis’s electric band, in which he had briefly served. Six months later, he hit town for a club gig with hissplendidquartet (Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman). Opening night happened to be my birthday, and a handful of friends helped me celebrate. Between sets, I felt a tap on my shoulder: it was Jarrett, fuming. “I never said those things about Miles!” True, I didn’t use a tape recorder, and I might’ve missed a nuance – stuff happens, Keith. Nevertheless, a Jarrett concert is always special, one of a kind.

The last time I saw him, three years ago, he cut his encore short and gave a harangue because audience members were taking pictures with their cells – something the PA announcer had warned was verboten.

One of the most poignantly sad interviews was with thegreatlyrical pianist Bill Evans in 1980. The sun shone in his hotel room in the early afternoon as he sat down for breakfast. But his hands were trembling and his face was covered by a sheen of sweat. Evans was a heroin addict who also dipped into co*ke.

In 1974 I picked up the phone and Robbie Robertson was on the other end. He wanted to do an interview to generate publicity for a documentary on the Band’s Ontario roots; he was looking for government funding. Living with his wife, Dominique, in the Côte-des-Neiges area (where I grew up), he met me on a snowy afternoon at a bistro where I used to meet my very first girlfriend.

Robertson is a very deliberate talker, measuring every word for just the right meaning and nuance. He speaks to you as if you were his confidant. The interview went like a charm, but he had one condition: He wanted to read his quotes before publication, “just in case I’ve left anything out.” This countered all rules of professional journalism, which prevent the reporter from being manipulated as a mouthpiece for the interviewee. But I happilyacceptedhis condition (I was on this musician’s side) – the first time I allowed a subject pre-approval. (As for my own words, not a chance!)

When my transcribing was finished, Robertson invited me to his apartment so he could check it out. The one-way conversation went like this: “Well, maybe I meant something like this. … You don’t mind if I change this quote? … We should elaborate on this,” and so on. The process was a fascinating glimpse into the mind of Robertson: a benign control freak. The published piece was titled Thinking Out Loud, from a Band song title.

The upshot was that the governmentrefusedthe grant application, so Robertson went to Plan B, with Martin Scorsese filming The Last Waltz at San Francisco’s Winterland theatre in 1976; the Band’s guestsincludedMuddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and many more. Robertson invited me, and his greeting from the stage at rehearsal was, “Well, looks like everything’s in the pocket.” (Indeed, the stage floor was littered with plastic dance-step footprints, indicating the musicians’ locations for Scorsese’s cameras.) A backstage areaincludeda White Room, where invitees could snort co*ke in privacy. In fact, I’ve never seen so manywasted-looking musicians; I took the hotel elevator with Eric Clapton, who, eyes half-lidded, leaned up against the wall as if his life depended on it.

I watched the show from the rafters with Michael J. Pollard (from Bonnie and Clyde). The next morning, a Friday, energized by the show (and a stash I scored), I dictated the story for a Saturday Entertainment front-pager three time zones away. On such a tight deadline, I felt like a “real” reporter, not just a rockcritic.

One ofthe bestinterviews was with Paul Anka, revolving around the sheer survival of rock ‘n’ roll. At 16, Anka scored with Diana, selling 20 million worldwide. He played the Forum in 1957, on a bill with Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Frankie Ly-mon and the Bobbettes. The NFB documentary Lonely Boy – on Anka becoming the youngest person to play the famed Copacabana in New York in 1960 – was required viewing for a knowledge of the industry’s early years. Anka had composed the Tonight Show theme, wrote the lyrics for Sinatra’s signature hit My Way (adapted from the French song Comme d’habitude), was the voice of Kodak commercials and now, in 1979, was known mainly for thecontroversialpro-life anthem (You’re) Having My Baby.

Promoting an upcoming week at Place des Arts, he invited me to his opening of the Boardwalk Regency hotel in Atlantic City. Flowers, fruit, a bottle of wine and an IBM Selectric awaited me. Five minutes before the end of his first set, I was whisked up a private elevator to his suite. Ten minutes later, showered, scented, dressed in a beige leisure suit, he sat down and spoke with theconfidenceborn of his early experience as a teen prodigy.

“Because I was the youngest, I guess I was taken advantage of the most. So I became very determined to protect myself. I didn’t come from a wealthy family – I was just a little kid star from Ottawa. None of us made any money on those all-star rock ‘n’ roll road shows, and none of us were prepared for the sudden stardom. I saw how others gotscrewedfinancially and what this fling with fame did to their lives. I learned early that you need to have respect for business and your craft.”

Having made the transition from rock ‘n’ roller to crooner, headmittedto an identity crisis when the Beatles arrived: “I guess that was the time of life when I was most unsure of myself. This was a new kind of music, the new wave that turned the industry inside out. I didn’t know where I could fit in. I could still perform, but I was living on my past.”

He said Elvis’s version of My Way gave it new meaning: “It was kinda like his eulogy.” The mortality rate in this business was an issue. “Andy Warhol said it: You’re famous for 15 minutes. After that, what do you do? It’s not only a question of handlingsuccess; it’s also coping withfailure.Successis like an axe over your head – it’s a quick in and out. But what do you do for encores? It got to Presley. He didn’t know how to cope with changes in the business.”

The obvious pitfalls were drugs, booze: “I’m a productive person, so I’m fascinated by things that will help stimulate creativity. I’m agreatfan of Aldous Huxley, who really experimented seriously with drugs. But I saw what excess did to Frankie Lymon, who got hooked young.”

Anka spoke about (You’re) Having My Baby being seen as anti-feminist, anti-abortion. “When the song came out (in 1974), there was a lot ofconfusion, with Vietnam and the drug crisis. Thecontroversyhas died down. I think people now see the song as it is – it really gives thechoiceto the woman. ‘You didn’t have to do it,’ the song says. I think what got peopleangrywas the song went to No. 1.”

Part 6: Out of the beat and into the black

Some of my happiest times on the beat were encounters with players in the burgeoning Québécois music scene.

Absorbing Quebec’s pop culture was like plunging into the unknown for a kid from Snowdon whose childhood knowledge of French Canadians in the late ’50s was summed up by the insult “Pepsi.” This pop culture did not exist anywhere else — a counter-reality to the counterculture, a whole different world. Though my knowledge of French was so rudimentary it was almost non-existent — and joual was infinitely tougher to make out — I went at it whole hog. I quickly learned that French and Québécois pop were like apples and oranges.

The Québécois in-crowd quickly picked up on my coverage; I felt flattered, as they apparently thought this anglo saw things in the culture that they themselves had not seen. (For I heard sound, not lyrics — which is numéro un with French-speakers — and I really liked what I heard.) Of course, the Quebec sound, coming from a place geographically closer to America than the French, was raw, rough and ready. (Eventually I wrote a long piece on Montreal music for Creem.)

A rhapsodic two-page analysis of Robert Charlebois’s famous January 1970 stand at Place des Arts was the breakthrough. The show was among the 10 best I’ve ever seen: he wore a Canadiens jersey, sequined gold bell-bottoms and sneakers, and was imbued with the energy of both a boxer and a long-distance runner. Perfectly paced, with confidence and swagger to burn. I considered myself lucky to comprehend a quarter of the lyrics. It took some doing to write the rave he deserved while masking my linguistic ignorance.

At my first interview with Charlebois, in 1971, I presented him with a new, introspective Chuck Berry album, San Francisco Dues; he gave me a disque by French poet/singer Léo Ferré. We drank cider (17% alc/vol) and smoked pot on a sunny afternoon at his Vieux Montréal pad; he drove me home at terrifyingly high speed in his beloved Citroën.

In December 1973, members of his band invited me to meet them on his tour of France. When I stepped backstage in Annecy while Charlebois was tuning his guitar, he said with surprise, “What the hell are you doing here?” Drummer Christian St-Roch handed me a palm-sized chunk of hash “to get you through” France, many of whose citizens regarded us as barbarians at the gate.

I spent long nights hanging out at Michel Pagliaro’s home studio in Vieux Montréal, conveniently opposite the Nuit Magique, a trendy bar-lounge on St. Paul. The studio was both his psychic bunker and musical palette, and his two dozen hits remain local radio staples. The first Canadian to score gold records in French and English, master of the gritty hook and pop sonority in hits like Lovin’ You Ain’t Easy, Rainshowers and Some Sing, Some Dance, he became a cult fave among a handful of critics south of the border.

Unfortunately, his arrival coincided with the explosion of acts more closely identified with the nationalist movement, and although J’entends frapper was a huge part of that group’s soundtrack, opinion-makers of a certain political and social class — can we say, uh, self-described intellectuals? — dissed or ignored Pagliaro.

On Nov. 15, 1976, we attended a Canadiens/St. Louis game at the Forum. Our focus on the game was continually interrupted by the tickertape scoreboard flashing results of the provincial election. Cheers and jeers greeted every Parti Québécois victory. When the final result was announced, Pag muttered, “Well, this is the end for me here.” We retired to his drummer’s pad to spend the rest of the night dabbling in pharmaceuticals.

Pagliaro’s creative process is almost absurdly painstaking: “I may record 40 different takes of a number and pick out just eight little buzzes. Working in the studio is the kind of thing you have to do from scratch, sometimes without even knowing what sound you want to get. Sometimes, though, you get blasted with so much sound that you can’t tell what you’ve heard. That’s when I figure it’s time to go to sleep.”

The longest concert I attended was the One Love reggae event at National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, in April 1978. It featured 16 acts, beginning around 3 p.m. and finishing 13 hours later. The climax was Bob Marley’s first Jamaican show since the assassination attempt in 1976, and the onstage unification of Jamaica’s political rivals, leftist Michael Manley and conservative Edward Seaga.

Beforehand, I’d smoked the most powerful herb I’ve ever experienced. As the show wore on, I scribbled 16 pages of notes. When the pot started wearing off, I went to score some more. That was easy enough, but my notebook got picked out of my back pocket. Solution: Smoke up and start reconstructing the notes on the backs of flyers. Fuelled by pot and Red Stripe beer, I had the impression of the event hanging there like a zeppelin as the day turned to cool night.

You couldn’t escape the disco-styled Heart of Glass in mid-1979, and the sultry, tranquilized face of Deborah Harry. This was ultimo manufactured new-wave pop; the acid test would be Blondie’s concert. The arena was sweltering, I sipped a few beers and, unexpectedly, I liked the show. So I was buzzing as I wheeled into the post-gig party at Regines, quickly downing some Champagne and smoked salmon canapés, anticipating meeting Deborah in the flesh. Flash bulbs popped as the group headed to their table. I made eye contact with Debbie (who I heard was insecure about her talent) and plumped myself next to her.

“Ya know,” I gushed loudly, “you weren’t half as bad as I thought you’d be!”

“Well, thank you,” she instinctively replied. It took three seconds for my backhanded compliment to sink in. Her bandmates glowered at me while they gathered table napkins and made a little bonfire in the ashtray. I skulked away. Blew it with Blondie.

My critic friend Peter Goddard (Toronto Star) wrote in 1987 that yours truly was “probably the first writer anywhere to fashion rock criticism into a form of guerrilla warfare.” Case in point: Neil Young.

Apart from his electric guitar — he might well play the best ragged-rock riffs ever — I’ve never cared for Young, with his whiny singing and his dummkopf lyrics. You know: “helpless, helpless, helpless”; “a maid, a man needs a maid”; “old man, look at my life”; and, at a death crawl, “hey hey, my my, rock ’n’ roll will never die.”

One Young show started with a 40-minute opening half, followed by a “short” intermission. Well, not so short: 45 minutes dragged by, and the crowd started a ritual chant. No response — nothing. What could they be doing in their dressing room? (Heh heh.) After an hour, Neil and Crazy Horse shuffled out and stood stonily by the stage steps. As the cheering went on for five minutes, a couple of kids scurried down to the off-limits empty seats nearest the Young gang. “Neil, Neil, can I have your autograph? Please!” Neil just looked ahead in stony silence while ushers hauled the kids off. Nice guy, eh? Maybe he was preoccupied, as he was a couple of years later at the Band’s Last Waltz, resulting in Martin Scorsese removing, frame by frame, the rock of cocaine hanging from the hairs in Neil’s nostril.

Then, in February 1980, toward the bitter, alcohol-infused end of my first twirl on the pop music beat, there was the local première of his concert film Rust Never Sleeps. An hour before showtime, I slam-dunked a few Cuba Libres at Mother’s and told sports columnist Tim Burke and his buddy Mordecai Richler, “I’m really gonna slam Neil tonight!

“Ya know somethin’? He wrote some of his most self-pitying stuff about his dad (oh so upright Toronto sportswriter Scott Young), who refused him the dough when his old amp blew when he was starting out! Aw, boo-hoo, too freakin’ bad! Helpless, helpless, helpless! Ah-ha-ha-ha-HAH!”

Richler and Burke concurred: “Yeah, hit him with your best shot. The creep deserves it. Bartender, another double for the critic!”

I arrived late, besotted, possessed by the devil. Five minutes of Young’s whine and the audience’s zombie gaze at this motionless figure with the straggly hair and checked lumberman shirt up there fuelled an inescapable desire to shake, rattle and roll. So I proceeded to parade down the aisles, doing an Ed Sullivan imitation: “C’mon, let’s reeeally hear it fer him! Isn’t he great!? Let’s give this Canadian a reeeally big hand fer a reeeally great shoe!!!” And so on. Friends couldn’t calm me down: “Hey, man, you’re blowing your cover.” “Yeah? Well, it’s about damned time!”

The next day while I was sleeping, news of the incident was all over CHOM-FM. I stumbled into the office at noon with a splitting hangover, begged not to write the review (“I can’t be fair!”), and was told to do it if it was the last thing on Earth I did. Took me three pained hours for five paragraphs. Last-gasp graph: “He projects such a brooding image on the screen that you’d think Young had this film made so he could gaze at himself in his bedroom at night.”

The following week, John Denver rolled into town. This time, my editor begged me not to review it. I insisted: “I panned the hippie. Now let’s balance things by aiming at that smarmy dog-shooter!” (Denver had made headlines by shooting a neighbouring canine who was trespassing on his Rocky Mountain property.) I was relatively sober, and put down the evildoer with occasional dog terms: he whimpered, whined, et cetera.

The next morning, CJAD-AM mounted a protest campaign; The Gazette was flooded with 231 calls. “Must be a record,” I boasted to venerable switchboard operator Millie Thompson. “Not quite,” she replied, raining on my parade. Only the third-largest protest, after a scurrilous Aislin cartoon of the Queen and, No. 1, the time the Gaz forgot the avocado in a guacamole recipe. A lesson in life’s priorities.

Two months later, I quit. (My last piece was on some unknown punk band at the Limelight.) I went through the ’80s attending maybe 10 shows.

Part 7: The sound of redemption

I was suspicious of rockers promoting their careers as do-gooders, so I wrote an opinion piece for the Toronto Star (Rock Aid Concerts: Social Conscience or Smug Exploitation?). I brought out the hammer. A few morsels:

“The rock stars got what they wanted — an image of worldly concerned citizens, immune from the barbs of critics, an image that helps sell records filled with the latest rock-pop pap. The occasional ‘protest’ song is so lamely written and buried in high-tech production values that it is savoured like apple pie and ice cream. … The Live Aid benefit treated fans to an all-star marathon in which Led Zeppelins reuniting meant more to couch potatoes than Ethiopia. When Sally Field arrived with taped spiels on hunger, viewers could rush to the toilet and grab more beer and pretzels.

“We Are the World set the tone for today’s ‘protest’ style. By blithely avoiding the stomach-turning thought of famine in breezy All You Need Is Love fashion, it was embraced as an ‘America first’ ditty.”

And so it went. The piece was published the day before Amnesty hit the Olympic Stadium. The morning of the show, I received a frantic call from a Toronto Star editor saying a wire story reported that Sting and Gabriel had issued statements demanding an apology, suggesting they would boycott future Toronto shows. The horror, the horror! (Never mind that this seemed to contradict Amnesty’s principles of freedom of speech.) The editor asked me to attend the show and report on any onstage announcements regarding the piece.

Damn — the first show I’d covered in eight peaceful years, and I’d have to sit through the whole thing!

The concert was sold out, but I managed to procure a ticket from a scalper ($40) and proceeded to search for the press box. A Reebok rep attended to my case, assuring me that although he disagreed with my piece, he thought I was well intentioned, that maybe Sting and Gabriel were overreacting in the heat of the moment. Arriving at the box, I glanced around for the usual suspects on the rock beat. Apparently, there weren’t any. “Geez,” I thought, “there’s been a big turnover since I quit the scene.” I began taking notes, back in the saddle yet again, not wanting to foul up. The show moved as slowly as an elephant, each act performing close to a full set. I found it strange that no star said anything on stage about Amnesty, political dissidents, dictatorships, etc. Between sets, as paying customers lined up to take a leak or a brew, the giant screen flashed commercials for Amnesty that nobody was paying any attention to.

Another funny thing: the press box seemed very well heeled — folks in pressed designer jeans, Reebok T-shirts and bomber jackets. Smoked salmon canapés made the rounds. When someone asked me if everything was to my liking, I replied, “Where am I?” Answer: “The Reebok box.” I asked to go to the press box. “We can’t let you go there — you’re lucky enough to be here.”

Lucky? Lucky enough to know what I wasn’t missing. Rock was just another big business in the ’80s, an era drunk on big biz.

In 1989 I moved to Berkeley to visit an old flame. Across the San Francisco Bay, it was a city of sunshine 315 days a year where tie-dye T-shirts and holistic therapies were hawked on Telegraph Ave.

A neighbour was Robert Hurwitt, then theatre critic and an editor at the East Bay Express, a weekly known as a writers’ paper. Which meant concert reviews, not being overnight assignments, allowed the writer to go long (up to 1,800 words). Thus I started reviewing the odd concert, almost at random (from Skid Row to Isaac Hayes to the Modern Jazz Quartet). Of two shows I saw within 48 hours, I began, “Let me count the ways that Wayne Newton and Genesis are alike.”

Of course, you could not fully experience the Bay Area without seeing the Grateful Dead. The Dead’s first Top 10 hit, Touch of Grey, was the song I heard when I entered my local 7-Eleven for the first time. Jaunty as hell, about aging gratefully: “Every silver lining’s got a touch of grey … I will get by, I will get by, I will get by-eye-eye-eye.” So I asked to review them.

“What’s the Dead’s appeal?” I asked Mark Weinstein, manager of the amazingly huge and diverse Amoeba Records store. Wearing a wildly coloured shirt and psychedelic tie for the concert in 1993, he said he went annually as an anthropological event that values the crowd, which is more important than the music. “It’s the most diverse crowd in rock. I mean, you see stockbrokers there just to let loose. There’s a positive energy at Dead concerts. They’re all there with one purpose only: to have a good time, without necessarily being New Age or like, say, Ramtha. If you get bored with the music, just look at the audience.” Hmm.

I arrived at the Oakland Coliseum at 6, two hours before showtime, and the parking lot (called the Dead Zone) was quite the scene. Young people raising a finger, saying “cash for your extra” like a mantra. Another: “I’ll love you for a ticket.” Everyone was finding their bliss, as heralded by popular meta-philosopher Joseph Campbell. I suddenly realized that some marijuana might enliven the show. I spied a guy in a conservative tie trading dope for tickets. He took cash, too. This was a gen-u-wine hippie bazaar, lined with old VW vans, a cross between Northern California and Marrakesh. Earth types flogging food: burritos, muffins (organic and/or spiked), health food and pizza. Selling acid, selling jewelry, beads, psychedelic baubles, pipes and chillums, selling battery-powered red, white and blue electric yo-yos, ponchos, carpets (magic and/or functional). The legalize-pot folks sold buttons and hemp bags, handing out documents.

Inside the Coliseum, pink signs announced: “QUEER DEADHEAD VISIBILITY. March in San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 27 … We’re organizing a parade contingent of queer Deadheads, with the theme No Time to Hate.”

A sign in the pissoir: “JUST SAY KNOW!!! … Operation DEAD END is a DEA codename for a surveillance and sting operation that is aimed at Deadheads at Dead shows. KNOW who you are dealing with — or don’t deal! … Be cool, alert, discreet + aware!”

As the music began — “the music plays the Dead” was the hype; they were reputed not to follow a set list — I took a couple of puffs … and soon … it seemed … like I was the only person … not standing. Everybody was loosening up to the music (first three words: “We can share …”) — with the most frantic dancers in the alcove at the exits, where they couldn’t even see the Dead! Within minutes, I found myself laughing uproariously. I started taking notes — and soon I saw many Deadheads taking notes, in little books, journals, on matchbook covers, scraps of paper.

The Dead spell set in; couples hugged each other. The band had the technical aspects down to a metaphysical science: soft lights bathed the crowd, in hues of yellows, purples; the circular lasers were tasteful, the kaleidoscopic spots hellishly impressive. The sound quality was the best I’d heard in any arena — every word, every precious note so clear.

Ol’ Jerry Garcia, 50, wore a grey T-shirt, black jogging sweats, and white and Day-Glo pink Nike running shoes. His hair and beard were perfectly silver, shaped just so, as if he could be stamped onto a commemorative coin. They all looked to be in great shape, after all those trips they’d taken.

The music was a blithe mix of country-rock and psychedelic jazz, with a homey feel to it. I took a coupla more puffs and was into the mood. Garcia’s first solo climbed deliberately, slowly, as predictably unpredictable as the curling smoke from my joint.

But … gradually … it started to sink in … like a stone … that the mid-tempo shuffling was about all there was to this band. Garcia’s solos existed in such suspended animation that they were almost inert. (But maybe that’s the point, I rationalized.) Garcia and Bob Weir’s vocals seemed like caricatures of their own limitations; they strained so hard to hit the right notes that they were virtually expressionless.

Intermission. A guy in a turban shouted: “Thou shalt not worship anything that’s unchanging. … Copies of my tapes may be had from the Grateful Dead.” I headed to the merchandise area. The Dead had the most ornate T-shirts in the biz (from $20 to $35), trippy designs with the familiar smiling skull and bones and roses (a cross between psychedelia and Disney). I bought the white Chinese New Year model, figuring it’d look good on a glowing summer-of-love day. (“Wear repeatedly,” the care instructions advised). I bought Grateful Dead Comix ($4.95), authorized and supported by the Dead, featuring sci-fi visions of Dead lore. Inside, there was an ad for The Grateful Dead Movie (“Now you don’t have to leave home to trip out”: $39.95), and another for limited-edition pewter Dead belt buckles, from American Legends Foundry, hand stamped with your personal serial number ($17.50, three for $50).

The second set featured an extended instrumental space piece. It was predictably cosmic, multicultural, into-the-mystic stuff mixed with Star Wars-like flourishes, plenty of New Age and Oriental clichés; heavier and more profound than Pink Floyd, less industrial than Tangerine Dream, with oodles of sound effects — voila, the Dead package tour of inner space.

Garcia had recently said his perception was that the Dead was still improving: “It may be that age will run us off before we get to where we really could go.” Gratefully, the show ended with Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

I called publicist Dennis McNally (author of a Dead book): “They’ve never been healthier. Jerry’s working out, watching his diet, working on his smoking. There’s still a lot of untapped potential in this band … the best potential since I’ve worked with the band over 14 years. I’m not being gushy — well, maybe I am, but it’s sincere.” He said they merchandise over 100 products, the newest being the Daily Tripper, a personal-planner computer program with drawings by Jerry. “But we’re nickel-and-dime stuff compared to, say, the Rolling Stones,” he claimed. “Their fans tend to see them once every three years or so, so they load up on merchandise. Our fans see us three, four times a year, so they’d rather save the money for tickets.”

Regarding critics who went to Dead shows with preconceived notions — like, it’s hip to trash the Dead: “A huge chunk of Grateful Dead reviews are written before the critic sees the show, (but) the band are actually much harder on themselves than any critic could be.”

What did he think of the show? “The spirit was there, the audience was into it, but it wasn’t a particularly good show. They hadn’t played in a while. A-minus instead of A-plus.

Garcia died in 1995. A memorial concert took place at Golden Gate Park. I listened to the remaining Dead live on the radio.

I expanded my jazz listening in Berkeley, hanging out and kibitzing almost daily with Richard Brown at his funky, eponymous record store at the border of Oakland, where I switched to vinyl, including rare deep-groove originals. It was opposite the famed Yoshi’s jazz club, where I saw Little Jimmy Scott — born with a condition that froze his physical development and gave him an unusually high voice — deliver the most riveting show I’ve experienced.

Thanks to Kent Nagano conducting the Berkeley Symphony, I also got into classical music in a big way. (Who woulda thunk?) Lithe, with high cheekbones and his trademark long black hair, he cut quite a figure. (He didn’t just stride on stage — he marched briskly.) At post-concert receptions, changed into faded jeans, he engaged casually with season-ticket subscribers as if they were neighbours. One of the symphony’s patrons, Karen Klaber, publisher of the Berkeley Monthly, introduced us and I wrote two lengthy portraits (for the Monthly and East Bay Express). In 1995, he invited Karen and I to the opening of the postmodern black Lyon opera house; designed to his specifications, it even included little lamps at each seat so listeners could follow the libretto.

Concerning classical music’s place in a rock society, he said: “Things aren’t helped by the fact that classical music organizations tend to portray themselves as extremely erudite and sort of above the normal. That’s really unfortunate, because it is totally possible to find some part of classical music that you can relate to immediately. As a child you might not like caviar, prefer a Snickers bar instead. Gradually, as an adult, you learn to appreciate tastes in a different way. Not that you taste harder,” he laughed.

“I’m not sure that an entertainment form can grow and mature in the way that listening to a Beethoven symphony can be a really maturing process, as you listen to it as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult and an older adult. You’re having different experiences each time, because the music is sophisticated and complex enough that it speaks on several different layers at the same time.” All that’s required from the listener is to “become engaged” with the music.

I quickly became engaged with Nagano’s renderings of the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen, with whom Nagano collaborated on several premières. It sounded spacier and far more mysterious than, say, Pink Floyd.

Nagano first saw Frank Zappa perform on Johnny Carson’s show, and was turned on by friends to his more complex works. In the early ’80s, he noticed Zappa among Pierre Boulez’s projects for the Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris, and contacted Uncle Frank. Zappa invited Nagano to an L.A. show and gave him some scores, later asking him to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in a 1983 recording of his works. (He called several composers, conductors and symphonic players, asking if Nagano had the requisite talent.) The result was two albums, London Symphony Orchestra Vols. 1 and 2, that went a long way in putting Zappa — and Nagano — on the contemporary classical map.

When Zappa was dying of prostate cancer, in 1993, Nagano prefaced a performance of one of his works by phoning him. “What are you listening to these days?” he asked. Zappa: “Well, as you might imagine, Kent, I don’t have a whole lot of time for recreational listening.”

“The real Frank Zappa,” Nagano told me, referencing his “outrageous” image, “is really serious, very uncompromising, meticulous, clear thought, and brilliant, just a genius. That’s not an understatement. He has a brilliant mind, brilliant sense of creativity that simply does not stop.”

I would never have dreamed that years after I returned home in 1996, I would be interviewing Nagano in this city, as he took the reins of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and, as he did in Lyon, pressed for a new maison symphonique.

In 1996, during intermission at a double bill in a Berkeley cinema, a girl asked me for a light — and wound up the evening by kissing me twice, passionately. Carina was an Argentine who drove her Saab super fast. We embarked on a glorious seven-week romance, the soundtrack of which was Portishead’s first album, Dummy, which she said consoled her when she was recuperating from a broken leg. She drove me up winding mountain roads to the telescope at Mount Lick, then ’round midnight inched down that route, car lights off, with only the moon to guide us, while Portishead played spookily in the dead of night.

Needless to say, it became one of my all-time fave albums. It also spurred an interest in electronic pop — the rich soundscapes of Amon Tobin, the zany paste-up hip-hop pastiche of DJ Shadow, the heady angst of Radiohead, the poetic noise of Tim Hecker.

My fave rave was Goldfrapp, a British band that has never gained much of a foothold in North America. Alternating between ethereal atmospherics and shimmering dance beats, it features the mysteriously sexy Alison Goldfrapp and enigmatic studio whiz Will Gregory. Their debut album, 2000’s Felt Mountain, hooked me from the first weird, wired song, Lovely Head: “I fool myself to sleep and dream / Nobody’s here / No one but me / So cool / You’re hardly there / Why can’t this be killing you / Frankenstein would want your mind / Your lovely head.” Well, I guess you had to be there.

Sometime in the new millennium, Goldfrapp played the Spectrum. I stood for the entire show. I gazed at Alison, squeezed into a costume that revealed pale British cleavage and luscious legs in fishnet stockings, appearing vulnerable when she tripped over a wire.

Oh, Alison! Alison, I’m here! Just for you — and the futuristic sounds you represent! I found myself wading into the crowd, toward the stage, transfixed by her spooked beauty … electric sounds to match … the unbelievable mystery … of what … I don’t know … the ephemeral power … of organized sound … a dream come true …

Finally, I was a fan again.

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