Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Don Armstrong, author of  _The Life and Writings of
Ralph J.  Gleason_. Don is a retired Associate Professor of
Architecture from the Taylor School of Architecture and Construction
Science at Tuskegee University, USA, where he published academic
writings on design pedagogy and African American architecture.
Though Don enjoyed researching these architectural topics, his
scholarship took a radical turn when he rediscovered music critic
Ralph J. Gleason, whom he had read as a young man. After publishing
two academic papers on Gleason, Don wrote the first biography of the
pioneering music writer, The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason.
Don is now a freelance writer, independent scholar, and the creator
of the Music Journalism History Facebook group, which provides an
essential forum for leading music journalists, musicians, and others
in the music industry. Don lives in coastal south Florida with his
journalist wife, Jessica. Author website:
<https://don-armstrong.com/> 
  

    
Leading the conversation is Gary Lambert. Gary has spent the
entirety of what he laughingly calls his "adult  life" in and around
the music business. Early on this translated to every-  thing from
low-paying jobs at record stores to nearly-no-paying jobs as a 
musician, in a succession of bands that went nowhere. While
continuing to  play for pleasure and gig occasionally, he resolved
to learn more about the  inner workings of the industry, and wound
up in the best school imaginable,  landing a job with Bill Graham
Presents and working there in a variety of  roles for the last eight
years of the great rock impresario's life. In 1991,  after many
years in the orbit of the Grateful Dead, he managed to get hired  by
the band - the closest thing imaginable to a kid's dream of running
away  to join the circus not only coming true, but kinda working out
as a career  move. He was writer-editor of the band's official
newsletter, The Grateful  Dead Almanac, for 12 years, co-hosted a
radio show on KPFA-FM with bassist  Phil Lesh from 1987 to 1995, and
helped the Dead connect with such musical  icons as Babatunde
Olatunji and Ornette Coleman. Since signing on (with the 
inestimable help of David Gans) with SiriusXM's Grateful Dead
Channel and  more recently submitting his face to public scrutiny as
a co-host of  nugs.net's popular series of "Dead Air" interviews
during video livestreams  of Dead & Company shows, he has
experienced a somewhat disorienting kind of  Celebrity Deadhead
status after decades of contented anonymity. Took some  getting used
to, but hey, there are worse fates in life.
  

    
About the book, from Bloomsbury: "This deeply researched book tells
Gleason's story as the son of a horseplayer who became America's
leading pop music critic. Hooked on jazz as a teen, Gleason
supported music-centered youth cultures his entire life. Immersed in
the Depression-era student activist movement, Gleason saw pop music
as a powerful tool for progressive social change." 

More at <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781501366987/>

You can read an excerpt from the book at
<https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/6597ed49f4428a00015ce944>
  

    

Welcome to the Inkwell, Don! I've been looking forward to this
conversation, as Ralph Gleason has been an enduring influence on my
musical and social consciousness since I first encountered his writings
in various forms - record and concert reviews, historical essays and
liner notes - when I was in my teens in the 1960s. I suppose a good
place to start here would be to ask you about how/when you first became
aware of RJG, what impact his work had on your own tastes, and what
inspired you to take the deep dive into his life that resulted in your
excellent biography.
  

    
Thank you, Gary. It's great to be here! Like you, I discovered Ralph
as a sixties teen. In my case, as a Floridian, it was through
Rolling Stone and his book The Jefferson Airplane and the San
Francisco Sound. I loved that book, and I'm sure it reinforced my
fascination with the city's rock music. However, Ralph's most
radical influence came while researching the book in the 2010s.
Reading his writings from the 1930s-the 50s schooled me in jazz.
This led to my favorite research activity - letting his record
reviews turn me on to a wonderland of fantastic music. Swing artists
like Ellington, the free jazz crowd, and Bay Area Third Stream like
Brubeck, daily listening over a decade, scrambled my old tastes and
left them in a better place. Along the way, interviews with two
generations of people who knew Ralph and his correspondence with
folks like Ken Kesey and Nelson Algren left me hungry to understand
what made Ralph tick. I knew it would take more than an article to
do justice to Ralph's story!     
  

    

Yes, "Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound" had a big effect
on me, with Ralph's excellent essay on the origins of the scene and his
interviews with most of the members of the Airplane, Bill Graham and
Jerry Garcia. We'll definitely get to more of that as we go along, but
let's rewind to the early part of your book, which goes deep into
Ralph's early life and the beginnings of his infatuation with jazz,
which happened by almost miraculous chance when he was forced into
isolation by a severe case of measles, his only companion being an
Atwater-Kent radio, on which he discovered the music that would become
his lifelong preoccupation. I already knew that story, but there are
many other details that were new to me about his early education and his
life-altering decision to defy his mother's wishes that he attend a
Catholic college, instead choosing Columbia University - a fairly short
commute from his Westchester County home, but a gateway to another
world, not only because it placed him near the epicenter of jazz, but
also because of its affect on his emerging social consciousness.
What were the sources of information that granted you such great insight
into Ralph's formative years?
  

    
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Thank you, Don, for your superb work. Gleason is a major figure, as
your biography makes clear. A little odd that it took so long for a
biography to appear ... almost five decades after his death. 

I'm also interested in your sources. When I helped Toby Gleason
write the book proposal for the two anthologies, eventually
published by Yale University Press in 2016, I encouraged him to make
his father's papers available to scholars. Were you able to access
that material? If memory serves, his letters appear in the library
collections of his friends and colleagues, but there was nothing
devoted specifically to him. On the other hand, he was very
prolific, so there's plenty of material to draw on there. 

You also do a splendid job of casting RJG as a builder. He created
so many platforms for the music he loved, including the Monterey
Jazz Festival and Rolling Stone magazine. Can you tell us more about
that?  
  

    <scribbled by jonl Thu 14 Mar 24 13:30>
  

    
Gary and Peter, thanks for the kind remarks. The sources on
Gleason's life unfolded throughout my research. I began with his
introduction to Celebrating the Duke and used it to pursue
additional sources. He wrote quite about his Chappaqua childhood in
the Chronicle, I drew on all those columns. I cross-referenced the
info with Ralph's three children Bridget, Stacy, and Toby. They
pulled correspondence, photos, and other ephemera from their files
which they scanned and sent - a treasure trove! I'm in discussions
with them and UC Berkeley to add this material to their archives. 

The family files also illuminated Ralph's college years. Another key
source was the Columbia Spectator. Ralph wrote for the paper from
1935-38 - lot's of material. Reviews of jazz shows and records, his
thoughts about artists, plus, articles about him. His work on dance
committees and the antiwar movement. Even the Spectator ads and
general articles provided wonderful details used to write scenes in
my book.  

To sum up, I drew on a combination of documents and family
interviews. I also researched that era and relevant topics from
horseracing to the Great Depression. The clothing, hair styles and
radio shows from that time. Took a deep dive into Catholic
Irish-America - an essential influence on Ralph's worldview. I
wanted to bring alive the impactful events in Ralph's life.    
  

    
just coming over here to look at this --- and i know i had never
realized before that RALPH GLEASON, someone i had read and heard
about, was my mother's age. just trying to wrap my head around
that...
  

    


It seems to me that the simultaneous effects of Ralph's exposure to
a new degree of political awareness at Columbia and his easy access to
the great jazz venues in Harlem and on 52nd Street were absolutely
crucial in making his social consciousness and his musical passions
inseparable. He quickly recognized, his admiration for talented white
practitioners notwithstanding, that jazz was one of the greatest
expressions of black culture ever invented - he learned to discern
between "straight" jazz (read mostly white) and "hot" jazz (read mostly
black) and unhesitatingly expressed his preference for the latter. He
even could detect changes between the way the great black bands would
play at, say, the Apollo or the Savoy Ballroom and the slightly greater
reserve when playing for more posh crowds downtown.

Don, would you agree that Ralph's political and musical principles were
essentially as one?
  

    
Slight addendum to the above - Ralph’s preference for the black
bands had already been developing during his measles-mandated
confinement to his childhood bedroom, listenIng to the radio that
was his only source of solace. He quickly found that the bands that
spoke to him most strongly were the black-led ones that were
invariably consigned to the late-night hours, while the more genteel
white outfits dominated prime time, because broadcasters didn’t want
to alienate their advertisers and listeners in the South. So Ralph
became aware of those disparities of opportunity very early on.
  

    
Yes, and I really liked your treatment of the neighborhood around
Columbia, which housed what one historian called “the greatest
assemblage of academic progressives and radicals in Depression
America.” Would you say that's what he was going for when he decided
to live in Berkeley?
  

    
Peter, that's a great question. I don't know what the state of
political play was in Berkeley in 1946 when the Gleasons decided to
move there, but it probably wasn't a significant factor. Now, the
Bohemian nature of the Bay Area was firmly established. Having hung
out in Greenwich Village, the Gleasons liked that part of Berkeley's
character. 
  

    
Gary, yes, music and politics were inseparable for Gleason. More
specifically, he believed music drove social change. During the
radicalism of the 60s, he believed that music was a more effective
agent of progressive change than militant leftism, which he opposed.
  

    
One thing I remember about Gleason was his important role in the
newspaper strike of 1968 in San Francisco.  He helped arrange the
temporary relocation of many reporters over to KQED-TV, and was on
camera a lot.  
I just tried to find mention of the strike, which was a big deal at
the time, via Google.  It seems to have been effectively purged, at
least to my set of search terms.  I only found one mention of it, in
a description of a 1994 strike as 'the first in 26 years.'

I haven't read the book yet.  Is there any mention of the 68 strike?
It helped KQED's exposure a lot.
  

    

I found this after looking some more:

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/189733
  

    
David, yes, I discuss the strike in my book. Like you, I found scant
sources, mainly a Chronicle column by Gleason and a temp column he
wrote for the Daily Californian while the strike was on. Thanks so
much for sharing your info. Did you work for KQED? I look forward to
watching the clip and may write a post about it. Although Gleason
criticized the Old Left for being out of touch, he was an ardent
union supporter. Again, thanks for sharing!   
  

    
Wasn't there an earlier strike that led to the Sunday Ramparts, the
magazine's spinoff newspaper? That's where RJG lined up a job for
Jann Wenner. If memory serves, Warren Hinckle shut the paper down in
1967, right around the time Ralph quite the magazine, and the idea
for Rolling Stone arose. 
  

    

>Did you work for KQED?

I volunteered at the auction.  I was fascinated by the power of
broadcast media then, as a 15 year old, and hung around as much as I
could.  Including KMPX-FM, the ballrooms and the clubs.  I got my
3rd class license soon after.

My parents' friends worked at KQED and impressed upon me the value
and importance of the station and its impact on PBS, which didn't
exist until a year later.  We took it as a given that KQED's
Newsroom parented PBS Newshour.  My friends at KQED also worked for
Bechtel and they had a lot of influence on everything.  It's often
forgotten that PBS began in the Nixon administration.
And yeah, there's a Ramparts angle in there too.  But I've forgotten
the details.  
  

    
And by the way, the lead voice on the clip from KQED's 68-69
Newsroom is Mel Wax.  His daughter has a Jefferson Airplane song
named for her.  The world was pretty incestuous back then!
  

    
wrt my seemingly redonk comment in #10, what i was trying to convey
was my surprise that gleason, who so shaped the musical culture of
my teens and 20s, was my mother's age. i had just assumed he was a
boomer, like much of the RS crowd.

which made me wonder what other boomer culture-shaper was also
parental age.
  

    
<loris>, when I first arrived as a freshman at Berkeley I hung out
in the Student Union with Gleason's son, so Gleason was a full
generation older than this supposed boomer.
  

    
right. i just hadnt realized this about gleason, just had assumed he
was someone maybe like greil marcus in terms of generational cohort.

someone like alan ginsberg was also an older culture-shaper --- yet
we all knew he was of the beat age cohort.

carry on...
  

    

the great book about Ramparts, which covers the same period as RJG's
heyday, is Hinckle's _If You Have a Lemon Make Lemonade_.  It is
also the story of Hinckle's partner Howard Gossage, an advertising
man called "the Socrates of San Francisco" in a Tom Wolfe story from
_The Pump House Gang_.