Last year, the United States Postal Service, working with Warners and Murdoch and other media giants, pushed through new second-class postage rates. Hardly a sexy issue to protest, what with the war in Iraq, the collapse of the U.S. economy, the destruction of the Constitution, and the sabre-rattling against Iran, so it may have escaped your notice.
It sure didn't escape mine: as someone who's worked with magazines my whole life, second-class postage is a big, big deal. It's the mechanism which allows you to send your print-run to your subscribers for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to mail them first class, and it carries a bunch of restrictions: you've only got a couple of days to get your magazines out, for one thing, and missing a couple of those deadlines means you lose your second-class license.
The new rates, though, were bizarre: the more magazines you shipped, the less each unit cost, and smaller-circulation magazines were burdened with unreasonably higher per-unit costs, instead of everyone paying the same rate. But that's what happens when you allow big business to write the laws.
And on Tuesday, the fallout began. I don't know what Resonance was all about -- the avant-garde of the pop spectrum, I suspect from a cursory glance -- but its editor circulated a letter saying the current issue, which it couldn't even afford to print, would be its last.
But they weren't alone. On the same day, No Depression, a magazine I have read since its first issue and contributed to for years, also announced that it was calling it quits. Many of the same reasons Resonance mentioned were there: cost of paper, declining ad revenues, and, dammit, that second-class postage hike.
Now, I think this is a tragedy from a number of aspects, and not just because of the loss of income and ability to write stuff which pleases me. As No Depression co-editor Grant Alden notes on his blog, "it's important to provide homes for magazines which offer up ideas, for we need an informed democracy if we're to continue having anything which resembles a democracy." He's talking about Wal-Mart's decision to pare back the number of titles they sell, but the "homes" of which he speaks are also the homes of people who subscribe to magazines which espouse unpopular ideas or champion minority cultures, which both Resonance and No Depression did. It's simplistic and obvious to say it, but if print media becomes reduced to People and Rolling Stone, then America is doomed to unspeakable mediocrity.
Oh, but people are reading all kinds of stuff on the web! Yeah, well. I'm a paper guy (and it's worth noting that the price of paper, too, is helping run these magazines out of business). I just can't stare at a screen all day, and I can say that with some degree of certainty because I do stare at a screen all day these days, and have for a number of years. You can read on your laptop on the train, maybe, and if your battery holds out, you can read on it for some of a transatlantic or crosscountry flight, but...why? Why lug a thousand-dollar machine when you can spend a couple of bucks for something you can fold up, or throw out, or clip stuff out of? And I'm no eye doctor, but I suspect the way the eye handles light makes print a healthier alternative. I know that I had excellent eyesight until I started using a computer, and now I use glasses when I read or write. Some of that is aging, but I think some of it is staring at screens.
But beyond the medium -- although that's a crucial part of this story -- is the ability to disseminate ideas. Never have there been more ideas, and more need to spread them to receptive people. The current Bush presidency has resulted in most of the world becoming a counter-culture, a paradox only if you equate that term with being a minority. Most of these counter-cultures have nothing in common except their rejection of the way the world is going, and a lot of them -- radical Islam comes to mind -- are hardly constructive.
No Depression did its little bit. It started shortly after I moved here, and early on co-editor Peter Blackstock, whom I'd known in Austin, visited and stayed with me while on a story about the Walkabouts, an American band far more popular in Germany than at home. Its focus was clear, although back then it didn't have a name, really, but eventually (the music business must have labels!) someone (not on the ND side of things) decided it would be known as "Americana," which was a loaded term if there ever was one. But...there was an extent to which it made sense: if the musicians and performers (and writers and filmmakers) it covered had any commonality at all it was in their examination of the roots of American folk and folk-derived culture, which culture included country music, although in recent years the magazine took a salutary turn in beginning to investigate lesser-known African-American traditions (neglected soul singers, gospel) in its pages.
And, as those of us who lived through the great Folk Scare of the '60s realized, it's hard to dig into those traditions without uncovering some political content, some of which can come as a shock, especially to a generation that became conscious of the wider world during the Reagan years -- a generation which was ND's base. Learning that America had had a Left, that the labor unions once were opponents of, rather than collaborators with, their employers -- these were shocks, especially when an individual found the ideas resonating with half-formed suspicions of the way the world worked and not-quite-articulated ideas about why things weren't right. But making those connections, as a lot of the magazine's readers did, made these young people stronger once it dawned on them that they were part of a chain stretching back decades. Nobody likes to re-invent the wheel, after all.
During the dozen years of ND's existence, it helped give birth to a cultural change which I -- and lots of other people -- believe is just around the corner. Oh, George Bush helped, no doubt about that, and so did the Internet, and probably Paris Hilton did, too, pushing the culture of celebrity into such a caricature of itself that its seams became all too obvious. But for people who live in America, and are invested in its future (as all of us, Americans or not, are, by dint of the country's size and position in the world), and are aware of and in some cases participating in its culture, this continuity with the past, which is so easily forgotten in the onrush of the Now, has become precious. After all, the Constitution the current administration has savaged is no less a part of the cultural fabric as the odd banjo-playing musician Dock Boggs.
And -- funny I should think of him. Because he's been in my thoughts recently, too.
Last week, I got a phone call from a friend in Philadelphia I hadn't heard from in far too long. She was alerting me that a guy named Sam Amidon, whom I'd last seen years ago when he was a teenager on a ramble though Europe, and is the son of friends of hers in Vermont, was going to be playing a gig in Berlin last Sunday. Sam as a teenager was frighteningly smart, a fiddler who was also studying with Leroy Jenkins, the free-jazz violinist whose work I loved, and a kid with a lot of exciting potential. Now he was performing, had a MySpace page and a website, and was going to do a show at a place I'd never heard of in Kreuzberg. I had to go.
Oh, and did I mention that Sam's parents are folksingers?
So off I went, through the mobs of excited Albanians (and who knew there were so many of them in Berlin?) celebrating Kosovo's independence, and rang a doorbell on a nondescript apartment building. Buzzed in, I found a freestanding house in the Hinterhof, in which the downstairs was filled with 20-somethings talking and listening to a copy of The Lily Brothers With Don Stover, a fairly crucial document of the aforementioned Folk Scare. Sam found me, we caught up briefly, and pretty soon, everyone filed upstairs, where there were some chairs and stools.
When Sam finally was ready, he said something memorable: "I don't write songs. I don't know how to write songs. So these are some traditional songs I know." Already I was impressed: if there's anything that the masses of CDs I'd gotten over the years thanks to being listed as a contributor on No Depression's website had taught me, it's that there are way too many people writing way too many songs that don't matter at all.
Not that he performed them traditionally. No, his show would have given most old folkies hives; I watched one older couple, one of whom has an Americana-oriented show on local radio, stalk out halfway through. But since I knew about his connection to American avant-garde music as well as his connection to folk music, I was entranced. So were the young people, his peers, who were watching. Many of them, I suspect, were Americans attracted by hip! edgy! Berlin. Others were Germans attracted to American culture. It was great.
After the show, I hung around some, talking to the woman who'd organized the show, which was part of a series of "house concerts" (she and her husband live in this house) she'd been putting on each Sunday for a few months. Hmm, I thought, this is an article for No Depression. Or maybe Sam is. I'll have to contact Peter and Grant once I'm through with this guidebook-writing project that's eaten up all my time (and is the reason I haven't been able to blog for most of this month).
But before I could do that, I got the bad news.
It's not at total tragedy. I think there's more where Sam came from. Not a lot of them are like him, except in their commitment to exploring American traditions. And, I think, the rise in support for Barack Obama is not unrelated to this, the feeling, which I perceive in a wide spectrum of Americans, that not only political change, but cultural change, is in the air. In speaking of this, I feel like I'm in the presence of a baby: fragile, easily damaged, at risk of infection. But babies grow up quickly, and small rockslides sometimes turn into avalanches. Sometimes.
And I think that, in its not-so-modest way, No Depression has played its part in this. I'm honored to have brought my old-guy, Folk Scare-era perceptions to its pages over the years of its existence, and happy they thought them worth seeking out and encouraging. I'm sorry that the institution won't survive to see this if it happens, but I scarcely think Peter and Grant are going to just slink away. Grant wrote me this week that he's going to keep blogging, because "it may be my only writing outlet for a while." I know the feeling.
Sam gave me a copy of his new record at the gig. It's dedicated to Dock Boggs. A tiny thing to hang on to, maybe, but in times when I have so very little else to be optimistic about, I'd like to ask you to allow me this possibly impossible shard of optimism.
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
His Berlin
I've known John Rockwell ever since I wrote a story for Us magazine, back in 1978 or so. At the time, the magazine was owned by the New York Times, and Rockwell worked for them. They'd asked me for a story on "Women in Rock," which I thought was a great idea, since punk had finally liberated female rock musicians from the "chick singer" slot, and so I interviewed Joan Jett, Debbie Harry (a chick singer, true, but somehow different), Patti Smith, and Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth (who provided me with one of my favorite quotes ever: "Naked, I look sorta like Rudolf Nureyev."). They didn't like the first draft I submitted, so I rewrote the story. They still didn't like it, but were itching to go to press with it, so without telling me, they plagiarized a bunch of stuff from Ben Fong-Torres' interviews for Rolling Stone and a story Rockwell had done for the Times on Linda Ronstadt. I was horrified when I saw the magazine -- for which it was the cover story -- and even more horrified when the plagiarism was spread by the New York Times Syndicate to several dozen daily newspapers across America under my byline. The resultant uproar (Us refused to print a retraction or apology) effectively ended my career for a while and I took a job as a secretary at the Levi Strauss Corporation, which was all my skills could get me in San Francisco at the time.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
A Couple of E-Mails and a Photo
If you live in the U.S. and walk by newsstands regularly, you'll have noticed that Rolling Stone is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. I haven't seen any of the hoopla -- although I hear their Summer of Love issue is pretty good -- but I did get an e-mail a while back from a woman who's organizing a reunion of the San Francisco staff.
Staffs, I should say; in the early days Rolling Stone went through employees pretty often. I should know. I was one of them.
For a little over six months, from sometime in March to sometime in October, 1970, I worked at Rolling Stone. It was a very exciting time to be there, because it was exactly in that period that the magazine took off, that it printed some of the first pieces that put it on the map, and, not so coincidentally, that the record industry, whose ads it needed to survive, decided it was worth supporting.
Under the leadership of the managing editor, John Burks, we learned on our feet, most of us. I sure did; I'd joined the staff, barely 21, by far the youngest, with virtually no idea how to do anything. The first thing Burks asked me to do was to start double-spacing my copy. "The typesetters go blind if you don't," he said. That's right: we used hot type. In fact, for the first weeks I was there, we shared space with the print shop that typeset and printed the paper, at 746 Brannan Street. After that, we moved a few blocks to 625 Third Street, a brand new office building, where we had a whole floor.
That's where we worked, where we printed the stories of Janis Joplin's death, of Jimi Hendrix' death, of the student protests that summer, and of Charlie Manson, stories that won the magazine an award from the Columbia Journalism Review. By the time it arrived, pretty much everyone who'd been involved in those stories had been fired. Me, too. I was cleaning out my desk as two women from the circulation department wheeled in a big birthday cake for the fourth anniversary party. "Are you still here?" one of them asked. "Why don't you get out of here." I got out.
That's why I scratched my head when the woman organizing the reunion announced that there was a web page for it, because naturally I went right there and saw this photograph:
It's labelled "Rolling Stone staffers circa March 1971 at The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco." Which is a hoot. Yes, it's from March, 1971, but the one thing it couldn't be is the staff of that particular magazine, because pretty much every person in that photo had been fired by October, 1970, when I left. There's Jon Goodchild, British design wunderkind, on the far left; someone I vaguely remember but can't name; Patty Hafferkamp, who'd been the receptionist; Burks in some weird floppy hat; Cindy Ehrlich, from the art department (although she often spelled Patty at reception) in her nurse's getup; Robert Altman, the photographer who succeeded Baron Wolman as the Rolling Stone photo guy (and with whose permission this photo is used); John Morthland, fired just before me, the guy who brought the Hendrix story in despite being sent down a million blind alleys -- and of course, despite not being in London; Michael Goodwin, the magazine's film writer, but also a bon-vivant and folkie; a guy whose name I forget but who was an expert in direct-mail advertising; Hal Aigner (thanks, Mike!), who never had a thing to do with RS, but was a fine writer; Phil Freund, who'd been the business manager at Wolman's Rags magazine, and Phil's wife, whose name I've forgotten.
It's a staff photo, all right (although I'm not sure why I'm not in it). It's just the staff of Flash.
Flash was all too aptly named. It blew up and never happened. We had big plans, but they came to nothing. Just why is explained much better than I could in a column by another guy who's not in the picture, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, who was responsible for our cover story, and, indirectly, for nearly getting Groucho Marx busted by the Secret Service for calling for Nixon's assassination. That made the front page of the New York Times, but, sadly, too late to save Flash. It revived Groucho's career, though, so maybe Flash didn't die in vain.
For a while, I was thinking of attending this staff reunion, although most of the folks I'd enjoy seeing again -- Burks, Goodwin, Wolman, Carroll, Morthland, Altman -- I can see any old time when I'm where they are, because we're more or less in touch with each other. It's also around the time that Village Music will be closing, and I'd really like to be around for that. But what really caused me to draw up short was when a follow-up e-mail disclosed that the events of the reunion will cost money -- $295, plus a 3.5% processing fee.
And that brought me back to SXSW this spring, and all the writers walking around wondering where the work had gone, and saying "Thank heavens my wife has a job." (It'll cost $295 plus the fee for your wife, too). In a way, it made me sad; the planned events involve catering and space rental, and a lot of care has gone into planning them. But we're also in an era where thousands of journalists are losing their jobs, where magazines are cutting back on space for writing because ads are disappearing. Maybe not many are as broke as I am, but most writers I know, even veterans -- maybe especially veterans, perceived as being "too old" or something -- are pretty broke these days.
This is going to continue. Things have been a bit better in England, a place where I have very few contacts, but the shadow is creeping up the wall there, too. This week I got an e-mail from a mailing list I seem to have gotten on for writers for two magazines I don't write for there. The one I might write for doesn't much like Americans, and I had my go-round with them years ago, so maybe that's how I got on the list. Anyway, some excerpts from the e-mail may be of interest to those of you contemplating a career in this vanishing industry.
"Dear All
"And first the bad news. For the first time in six years we were unable to negotiate an increase in freelance writers' pay rates this year.
"We had a couple of amiable and informative meetings with [management] as usual, but by the end of their budgeting process [they] explained they couldn't offer anything – likewise no annual increase for the staff.
"The background is a steep decline in advertising – "migrated" to the web and TV – alongside corporate demands to maintain or exceed the 30 per cent net profit gold standard. Consequently, three staff editorial jobs have been lost at the same time as writing for the websites has been offloaded on to the magazine staff and editorial budget cut by a large chunk. Also you may have noticed a reduction in paper quality."
And in case you think any freelancer gets rich writing for them, they posted the rates. (Quoted in pounds: double it for dollars, multiply by 1.5 for Euros).
"Features: minima 295/266; Reviews: short/standard review 43 (150 words); others, minimum 266 per thousand."
Given that this magazine is owned by a huge conglomerate which, as Jon wryly noted in that column, doesn't care about "good writing," but, rather, in the bottom line, there's even a question of whether, or how long, the magazine can be expected to keep up that 30% profit, and how quickly they'll kill it once it sinks to below that. One way to keep it profitable is to do what they've just done: give the staff more work to do. Which means give less work to freelancers. And more staff burnouts, another feature of life at this particular magazine.
It's a shame, but it's the reality of the situation right now; the profession I somewhat accidentally entered 42 years ago this coming September is in steep decline. I happen to think there'll be a correction at some point, because people will eventually discover that they don't actually like spending their lives staring into screens, and that the elegance and resolution of a plain old piece of paper is, actually, the highest and best use of the medium of words. But we'll have to struggle through the days to come first. And there will be fallout. I, for one, am trying to figure out another way of making a living. It's not easy, after all this time, and to be honest I haven't come up with a single answer. But then, I also don't want to be the last rat off the ship.
Anyway, I probably won't be making that reunion party. Not even to hear Ben Fong-Torres do karaoke. Hell, he used to sing around the office, and I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat remembering that.
Staffs, I should say; in the early days Rolling Stone went through employees pretty often. I should know. I was one of them.
For a little over six months, from sometime in March to sometime in October, 1970, I worked at Rolling Stone. It was a very exciting time to be there, because it was exactly in that period that the magazine took off, that it printed some of the first pieces that put it on the map, and, not so coincidentally, that the record industry, whose ads it needed to survive, decided it was worth supporting.
Under the leadership of the managing editor, John Burks, we learned on our feet, most of us. I sure did; I'd joined the staff, barely 21, by far the youngest, with virtually no idea how to do anything. The first thing Burks asked me to do was to start double-spacing my copy. "The typesetters go blind if you don't," he said. That's right: we used hot type. In fact, for the first weeks I was there, we shared space with the print shop that typeset and printed the paper, at 746 Brannan Street. After that, we moved a few blocks to 625 Third Street, a brand new office building, where we had a whole floor.
That's where we worked, where we printed the stories of Janis Joplin's death, of Jimi Hendrix' death, of the student protests that summer, and of Charlie Manson, stories that won the magazine an award from the Columbia Journalism Review. By the time it arrived, pretty much everyone who'd been involved in those stories had been fired. Me, too. I was cleaning out my desk as two women from the circulation department wheeled in a big birthday cake for the fourth anniversary party. "Are you still here?" one of them asked. "Why don't you get out of here." I got out.
That's why I scratched my head when the woman organizing the reunion announced that there was a web page for it, because naturally I went right there and saw this photograph:
It's labelled "Rolling Stone staffers circa March 1971 at The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco." Which is a hoot. Yes, it's from March, 1971, but the one thing it couldn't be is the staff of that particular magazine, because pretty much every person in that photo had been fired by October, 1970, when I left. There's Jon Goodchild, British design wunderkind, on the far left; someone I vaguely remember but can't name; Patty Hafferkamp, who'd been the receptionist; Burks in some weird floppy hat; Cindy Ehrlich, from the art department (although she often spelled Patty at reception) in her nurse's getup; Robert Altman, the photographer who succeeded Baron Wolman as the Rolling Stone photo guy (and with whose permission this photo is used); John Morthland, fired just before me, the guy who brought the Hendrix story in despite being sent down a million blind alleys -- and of course, despite not being in London; Michael Goodwin, the magazine's film writer, but also a bon-vivant and folkie; a guy whose name I forget but who was an expert in direct-mail advertising; Hal Aigner (thanks, Mike!), who never had a thing to do with RS, but was a fine writer; Phil Freund, who'd been the business manager at Wolman's Rags magazine, and Phil's wife, whose name I've forgotten.
It's a staff photo, all right (although I'm not sure why I'm not in it). It's just the staff of Flash.
Flash was all too aptly named. It blew up and never happened. We had big plans, but they came to nothing. Just why is explained much better than I could in a column by another guy who's not in the picture, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, who was responsible for our cover story, and, indirectly, for nearly getting Groucho Marx busted by the Secret Service for calling for Nixon's assassination. That made the front page of the New York Times, but, sadly, too late to save Flash. It revived Groucho's career, though, so maybe Flash didn't die in vain.
For a while, I was thinking of attending this staff reunion, although most of the folks I'd enjoy seeing again -- Burks, Goodwin, Wolman, Carroll, Morthland, Altman -- I can see any old time when I'm where they are, because we're more or less in touch with each other. It's also around the time that Village Music will be closing, and I'd really like to be around for that. But what really caused me to draw up short was when a follow-up e-mail disclosed that the events of the reunion will cost money -- $295, plus a 3.5% processing fee.
And that brought me back to SXSW this spring, and all the writers walking around wondering where the work had gone, and saying "Thank heavens my wife has a job." (It'll cost $295 plus the fee for your wife, too). In a way, it made me sad; the planned events involve catering and space rental, and a lot of care has gone into planning them. But we're also in an era where thousands of journalists are losing their jobs, where magazines are cutting back on space for writing because ads are disappearing. Maybe not many are as broke as I am, but most writers I know, even veterans -- maybe especially veterans, perceived as being "too old" or something -- are pretty broke these days.
This is going to continue. Things have been a bit better in England, a place where I have very few contacts, but the shadow is creeping up the wall there, too. This week I got an e-mail from a mailing list I seem to have gotten on for writers for two magazines I don't write for there. The one I might write for doesn't much like Americans, and I had my go-round with them years ago, so maybe that's how I got on the list. Anyway, some excerpts from the e-mail may be of interest to those of you contemplating a career in this vanishing industry.
"Dear All
"And first the bad news. For the first time in six years we were unable to negotiate an increase in freelance writers' pay rates this year.
"We had a couple of amiable and informative meetings with [management] as usual, but by the end of their budgeting process [they] explained they couldn't offer anything – likewise no annual increase for the staff.
"The background is a steep decline in advertising – "migrated" to the web and TV – alongside corporate demands to maintain or exceed the 30 per cent net profit gold standard. Consequently, three staff editorial jobs have been lost at the same time as writing for the websites has been offloaded on to the magazine staff and editorial budget cut by a large chunk. Also you may have noticed a reduction in paper quality."
And in case you think any freelancer gets rich writing for them, they posted the rates. (Quoted in pounds: double it for dollars, multiply by 1.5 for Euros).
"Features: minima 295/266; Reviews: short/standard review 43 (150 words); others, minimum 266 per thousand."
Given that this magazine is owned by a huge conglomerate which, as Jon wryly noted in that column, doesn't care about "good writing," but, rather, in the bottom line, there's even a question of whether, or how long, the magazine can be expected to keep up that 30% profit, and how quickly they'll kill it once it sinks to below that. One way to keep it profitable is to do what they've just done: give the staff more work to do. Which means give less work to freelancers. And more staff burnouts, another feature of life at this particular magazine.
It's a shame, but it's the reality of the situation right now; the profession I somewhat accidentally entered 42 years ago this coming September is in steep decline. I happen to think there'll be a correction at some point, because people will eventually discover that they don't actually like spending their lives staring into screens, and that the elegance and resolution of a plain old piece of paper is, actually, the highest and best use of the medium of words. But we'll have to struggle through the days to come first. And there will be fallout. I, for one, am trying to figure out another way of making a living. It's not easy, after all this time, and to be honest I haven't come up with a single answer. But then, I also don't want to be the last rat off the ship.
Anyway, I probably won't be making that reunion party. Not even to hear Ben Fong-Torres do karaoke. Hell, he used to sing around the office, and I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat remembering that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)