David McGee, part 2

By Steven Ward

Steven:   Where was your first piece of rock journalism published and how did you first get into writing about music?

David:   My first review was published in the Oklahoma Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma. It was a review of the Rolling Stones’ concert in Dallas on the 1969 tour that ended at Altamont. I wasn’t assigned; I went on my own and came back and submitted a review over the transom, and the editor published it, uncut. It was about 700 words, and with a photo of Mick Jagger onstage, it took up almost an entire page in the paper. I couldn’t believe something I had done on a whim got such play in the school paper. But for some reason I didn’t follow it up; in fact I didn’t write anything else for the paper until the summer of ’72, the year before I moved to New York, when I wrote a weekly music column for the Oklahoma Daily, very much inspired by Ralph J. Gleason’s musings in Rolling Stone.

I wrote about Frank Sinatra on the occasion of his "retirement"; about the Doors after Jim Morrison announced he wanted to take a break from the rigors of superstardom; about Woody Guthrie and some people in Oklahoma who were trying to organize a celebration in honor of Wood’s music but weren't getting much support from anyone; a moody think piece about Dylan's John Wesley Harding album--whatever was on my mind that week, and it all reflected the diversity of music I had grown up with and still listened to. I didn't think the columns were all that good, but they were among the clips I sent over to Dave Marsh in 1975 that resulted in me getting my first Rolling Stone assignments. I moved to New York in the fall of '73 and almost immediately had a review of James Taylor at Carnegie Hall published in a free Long Island-based newspaper called Good Times.

But after that Good Times piece and before the Rolling Stone assignments I was on the staff of the music trade magazine Record World, which is now defunct but through the '70s was a lively competitor to Billboard. How I got to Record World was pretty wild. I was married then, and my wife and I had moved to New York in hopes I might be able to get a job at a magazine--there wasn't much opportunity in Oklahoma, unless you wanted to be a newspaper reporter, and that was never my thing. So we packed up our VW station wagon and drove to New York, arriving here in September 1973 with exactly twenty dollars left in this world. That first night here we saw a TV ad for a new A&S department store that was opening in Rego Park, Queens. The next day we went to the store, and both of us were hired. They assigned her to the hardware department, but they put me in a franchise stationery kiosk rented out by a printing company. I was selling wedding invitations, making Xerox copies, that sort of thing. The reason I was put there, according to the woman in personnel who hired me, was because I had a degree in journalism "and you'll want to be close to paper." I swear that was what she said. But I will go to my grave thanking her, because her tangled logic changed my fortunes. Across the aisle from my kiosk was a watch repair shop, and it was manned by a fellow my age. We both worked the late shift, got to talking one night when nothing was happening, and he found out that I liked music, knew a lot about its history, and was aiming to be a writer. Turns out this guy was Barry Mills, whose family was a major player in the music publishing world with Mills Music; his grandfather, Irving Mills, had managed Duke Ellington, launched Lena Horne's career, booked the Cotton Club, and had co-written a bunch of great songs, including "Lovesick Blues." That was for starters--Irving Mills was a giant in the early music business; a controversial giant, but a giant nonetheless.

Barry, as it turned out, had left Record World a few months prior to our meeting, when he had to have surgery on his back. Writing about music was not what he wanted to do, so he resigned his position and at A&S he was in the process of staking out new turf for himself--he eventually became a stockbroker. Barry called Mike Sigman, the editor of Record World--and son of Carl Sigman, one of the great pop songwriters, who wrote "Ebb Tide," "It's All In the Game," and several other standards--and told him about me. I sent Mike some writing samples, and he told me he would hire me the next time he had an entry-level position open. I asked him how often I should check in with him, and he said to call about every two weeks. So faithfully, for six months, I called Mike every two weeks. But no jobs opened up during that time. Finally, in May, as the weather was warming up and I was getting restless being cooped up in a store without windows, Mike had an opening in the mailroom. I jumped at the opportunity, and was hired in May of 1974, at a weekly pay of ninety dollars. I ran errands, went to the bank, picked up ad material from the agencies, got the mail out every day, and really had a great time as someone new to Manhattan whose job was to run all over town. During that summer Mike assigned me to write concert reviews of shows the staff editors didn't want to attend. I saw some terrible bands, and I saw some great ones, and I learned how to write a negative trade review that sounded like a favorable one. By far my most memorable assignment was to review Anne Murray in Central Park, which meant I also had to review her opening act--Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. And I must tell you, I got the same kick inside hearing Bruce the first time as I had when I first heard Elvis, when I first heard the Beatles.

What I'll always remember about that period was when I turned in my first review to Howard Levitt, the managing editor. It was a review of a show at the Bottom Line by the British jazz-rock fusion band If. A few minutes after I put the copy on Howie's desk he came into the publisher's office, where I was watering the plants, and said, "This is better than 90 percent of the stuff that crosses my desk." Mike, Howie, and another staff editor, Ira Mayer, who had been the Village Voice's regular folk music critic for years, believed in me and encouraged me all the time--it's impossible to measure what their support mean to me, but suffice it to say that they opened a very big career door for me. I still look back on that and am amazed and humbled by the good fortune I had all along the way in meeting selfless people who had their own goals but also made time to assist neophytes like me. Plus they're all great guys and treasured friends.

Anyway, summer turned to fall, and Clive Davis formed Arista Records. One of Clive's first hires was a fellow named Gary Cohen, who was the retail editor for Record World. Mike Sigman then offered me Gary's position. In three months I had ascended from the mailroom to an assistant editor's job. And then all of a sudden I was getting free albums, free concert tickets, full tabs for food and drink at all the clubs in town, limo rides to some concerts, invites to all the best clubs and parties in New York. Coming from where I had come from, the north side of Tulsa, I could not believe what was happening to me, or that this world even existed, or that I got paid to do this and got all this free stuff besides.

One of my first assignments at Record World was to attend a reception at the Swiss Embassy for ABBA, who then were celebrating their first Number One single, "Waterloo." It was there that I met Dave Marsh, who was about to join Rolling Stone as reviews editor. I hit Dave up about writing for him, and he asked me to send him some non-trade writing. So I sent my college newspaper jottings, and he called back with an assignment to review the southern rock band the Outlaws at the Bottom Line. It was published without even one word being changed. Then another assignment came to review the Allman Brothers at Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey; on the heels of that assignment, I got a call from Chet Flippo, then the music editor, with an assignment to do a feature on Paul Kossoff's new band, Back Street Crawler. And then it was off to the races--steady assignments from Rolling Stone; a job offer from Jann to be an assistant editor in Rolling Stone's San Francisco office, which I declined in order to stay at Record World; an offer from NBC Radio to write scripts on a freelance basis, for a series of shows being produced on country music stars; a call from Larry Flynt's wife offering me a job as Hustler's music critic, which I declined. But I didn't do a lot of freelancing beyond Rolling Stone. I did do the scripts for NBC Radio, but between Record World and Rolling Stone I had a full plate and a lot of prestige--the hippest trade publication and the hippest, most important music magazine around.

I began writing a weekly column for Record World called "New York, NY" and even more doors opened, because everyone wanted to get ink in that column. "New York, NY" had an irreverent attitude--a fellow who is now a major executive of one of the industry's giant labels was regularly referred to as a "turkey" in "New York, NY," for instance--and it conferred a perverse kind of status on anyone I wrote up. But I used the column as a bully pulpit to talk up a lot of new artists I thought worthy of attention, particularly if they were unsigned. One of those was an amazing blues guitarist up from Austin, who was playing in a band backing a powerhouse country blues singer named Lou Ann Barton. The guitarist was Stevie Ray Vaughan, and it turns out that the review that led off my Record World column the next week was the first national press he received. I had gone to that show with Doc Pomus, who already knew about Stevie Ray and Lou Ann. Knowing my fondness for vocalists, and being a great fan of singers himself, Doc knew I would be knocked out by Lou Ann--that's who he was talking up when he called me, not Stevie, although he did mention that Lou Ann's guitarist was pretty hot too. So we went to the Lone Star to catch Double Trouble's show, and Stevie came over afterwards and introduced himself, as did Lou Ann, who already had had too much to drink. Which turned out to be a big problem for her through the years. On our way home that night, Doc said to me, "Lou Ann ought to be a star, but Stevie will be a star." Typical Doc insight and prescience all at once.

Steven:   What were your favorite rock mags in the ‘70s and what rock critics and writers were your favorites and which ones influenced you?

David:   I read all the main ones at the time--Creem, Crawdaddy, a good newspaper-format publication called Gig--but it was always Rolling Stone for me. To me Rolling Stone epitomized the big leagues, and that’s where I wanted to play. I wanted to reach as many readers as possible.

I can’t say that any of the writers at that time influenced me directly. I certainly didn’t try to emulate any of them. But the ones I always looked for were Jonathan Cott--I liked his low-key, literate style and the breadth and depth of his knowledge about music; Chet Flippo; Ben Fong-Torres; Michael Lydon; Peter Guralnick; I liked Jon Landau’s music writing--in Eye and then Rolling Stone--but found his movie reviews strained; Bud Scoppa; John Mendelssohn I really liked and later published in Record and found to be a thoroughly decent fellow--my favorite Mendelssohn piece was his review of the first Kraftwerk album, which was nothing more than directions on how to change the oil in your car; Dave Marsh’s reviews and opinion pieces were always stronger than his features, and when he was--is--really on, he was--is--clear and concise and provocative; Ralph J. Gleason’s column was in and of itself reason enough to subscribe to Rolling Stone; and Nick Tosches. I’m probably leaving somebody out that I really liked, but those are the names that immediately spring to mind from the period in question.

Steven:   How did you get involved with Record?

David:   Out of the blue one day in May of 1981 I received a call at the Record World office from a woman named Rita Keaton, who identified herself as being from Rolling Stone. She told me they were starting a new music magazine, that I had been recommended for the editor’s job, and asked if I would be interested in coming in for an interview. The call came at precisely the right time in my career, because I had been at Record World for seven years and, as much as I enjoyed what I was doing, I probably had gone as far as I was going to go there. Plus the music business was in a terrible slump following the heady times of the previous decade, and Record World was on its way to being a victim of that downturn as labels began pulling back on their advertising. And also, I had this vague goal of wanting to be the editor of a magazine by the time I was 30. Well, I was then 32, so I wanted to at least be in the ballpark of the goal I had set for myself. At the end of my interview Rita Keaton looked at me and said, "You know who recommended you for this job, don’t you?" And I shrugged and told her, truthfully, I had no idea. She got very solemn on me and said, "Jann"--and then she paused--"recommended you for the job." I took that as a good sign, since I really wanted the job.

I started in July. Now at that time Record was not planned to be a magazine but rather a music business insider newsletter, about eight pages. But the week before I started, Rita called and said they had decided it was going to be a monthly magazine and its format would be quarter-fold on newsprint, like the early Rolling Stone. Otherwise, no one knew what it was going to be, and my first assignment was to write a prospectus that would do two things: define each and every editorial department and be a document the sales team could use to bring in advertising for the first issue, because there was not going to be a dummy issue for anyone to see before it was launched in August. Two weeks after I started, as I was hammering away at the third or fourth draft of the prospectus, incorporating the changes Jann had requested, a friend called to tell me that my wife, who was pregnant with our second child, had gone in for a routine physical and was sent straight to the hospital. Although she felt fine at the time, she was developing toxemia--her body was poisoning itself to the pregnancy--and the doctor was going to have to perform an emergency Caesarian in order to save her life. So my second son was born weighing two pounds, three ounces, and he and my wife were in intensive care, she for a week, the baby for three months. The day after the birth, Jann called me in and said, "You get through this. It’s a lot more important than any magazine. We’ll hold off the launch until September."

So we launched in September of 1981 and lasted until December of 1985. Contrary to what the Rolling Stone music staff thought, there was, as far as I know, never a plan for Record0 to supplant the Rolling Stone music section. But why Rolling Stone, published fortnightly, needed an all-music monthly magazine, was a question unanswered in my time there or to this day. It certainly wasn’t budgeted like it was going to supplant the Rolling Stone music section. In your interview with Anthony DeCurtis, he told you that Rolling Stone would routinely pay a kill fee that was more than our entire photography budget. He was right, but he was at Record only for the last year-plus of its existence. My editorial budget for the first year was three hundred dollars a month. That’s three hundred dollars, I’m not kidding. My staff was two freelance writers on monthly stipends of five hundred dollars, and a college student who served as my assistant, as the photo editor, as a messenger, whatever I needed him to be at any given moment. I think he even wrote a couple of record reviews. My two writers were good--Stan Mieses, who was a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Mark Mehler, who was a veteran music business trade reporter with a great, dry wit--and a couple of issues into our history I was allowed to hire a third writer as a west coast editor. That was David Gans, who some might know from his long-running radio show "The Deadhead Hour," and his standing as a recognized authority on all things Dead. But any way you cut it, three hundred dollars doesn’t go very far, and I wound up writing 12 stories for the first issue. Jann advised me I was going to have to use a pseudonym on a few of the stories so it wouldn’t look like I had written the entire issue.

But lo and behold, Record started doing well. The format was immediately popular, it got great placement on news-stands because it was too large to fit into the regular magazine slots and would have to displayed apart from all the other music magazines, and the reader response to the editorial package was very enthusiastic. We were criticized heavily for relying on staid, old established artists for our covers--our first one was Bob Seger, the third one was Rod Stewart, with Chrissie Hynde on the second--and for too much coverage of artists in the upper reaches of the charts and not enough coverage of new artists. It was valid criticism, and the issue of new versus established was the subject of some heated internal debate. But Jann could not be convinced that a magazine strictly focused on new artists would be successful if it relied on those artists as its cover subjects.

Over time an approach developed: while we did eventually use more new artists on the cover, for a long time the strategy was to use a well-known, familiar face on the cover, then devote most of our feature and news space to new bands and a wide variety of music. I wanted the editorial content to reflect the kind of melting pot I grew up in, focusing on interesting music, regardless of genre or commercial success. The early Record was doing very well; it began cutting into Musician’s numbers, and this made everyone very happy--rather than replacing Rolling Stone, it seemed as if what all the executives wanted was for Record to eclipse Musician.

But in 1983 a decision was made by the brass to change the format from the quarter-fold newsprint to a standard size magazine on slick stock, like every other music magazine out there. Almost immediately we lost readership. People thought we had gone out of business, because the book was now buried on the racks with about a dozen other music books it was competing against. Even though we looked better and we were better editorially because I now had a decent, albeit still miniscule, editorial budget and had brought in some good writers, we were going down the tubes. Record never really recovered from that format change. But there was a solid reason for the change: advertisers were dropping out of the quarter-fold because its odd size required them to make ad materials that could only be used in Record. So one of the things that made us unique was also our undoing.

Now, as a slick monthly, we seemed more directly in competition with Rolling Stone, and advertisers began to question why they should be in both magazines, or why Record instead of Rolling Stone? Of course if they could afford it they were going to be in Rolling Stone, which had a circulation about ten times ours.

But--but--Record did do some good things in its time. Things not even Rolling Stone was doing. In one of our early issues I did a 3,000 word Q&A with Luther Vandross; Doc Pomus did a Q&A of similar length with Dr. John. Dave Marsh inaugurated his American Grandstand column in Record. Deborah Frost wrote terrific profiles of Paul McCartney and John Mellencamp. Laura Fissinger was a regular contributor, and everything she wrote was wonderful; ditto Chip Stern, still one of the best music writers around. Vince Aletti was one of our reviewers, and when he was writing about the black music he loves, you couldn’t find anyone better in America. J.D. Considine was a contributing editor, and his contributions were always solid, never predictable. Nick Tosches contributed a few reviews. Peter Buck of R.E.M. filed a piece chronicling his life as a then-struggling musician. Dan Forte, who is now writing an authorized biography of Stevie Ray Vaughan that is going to be definitive, penned a thoughtful profile of wild Dick Dale when no other magazine was even acting like Dick Dale was alive. For a bit we had a back page column called "Backstage Pass," which was a forum for commentary by the fans. One of Gina Arnold’s first pieces was published in that space. Record was the first nationally-distributed mainstream music publication to publish features on Los Lobos (again by Dan Forte) and Ruben Blades, to cover hip-hop on a regular basis through reviews, through a monthly column written by Greg Tate, and once by way of a cover-length excerpt from a book chronicling the birth of hip-hop music and culture. I didn’t get the okay to push ahead with it, but I had plans for a series of articles over the course of a year under the banner Americana. These were going to look at various music and cultural scenes around the country, scenes and people not ordinarily in the press’s sights. The country artist Michael Martin Murphy, a former racquetball partner of mine, was on board to write about the vanishing American honky-tonk, a subject he was well qualified to write about, since he was actually playing those venues. Given our limited resources, I looked for new writers who deserved an opportunity but couldn’t get in the door at the established music books. One of those was a fellow who then lived in Chicago, Christopher Hill, who developed into not only one of our best reviewers, but one of the best in the entire music press. Chris Hill was a serious, big-time music writer with a beautiful, literary touch, and Record gave him a regular platform. As an editor, that sort of thing is really gratifying, to take the negative of our budget and make a positive of it by finding hidden gems, like Chris Hill, who cared less about the money than about having a place to be published.

We also had a few established writers who were regular contributors, such as Jean-Charles Costa, who had worked at Rolling Stone, and had been the editor of the lamented Gig magazine. One of his great reviews for Record was of Don Henley’s first solo album, a review that should be framed and hung in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The lead sentence was: "You know a record’s got problems when you put on the headphones for a close listening and the next thing you know you’re rousted from a deep and troubled sleep by the sound of the needle clicking in the end groove." Really, you don’t need to say anything more. The lead J.C. crafted could and should stand as the definitive statement for everything that creep Henley has ever done. In another review Costa described Sammy Hagar’s songs as being "like nightmare express trains running through your head," and termed Hagar "the king of slam-dunk guitar."

Yes, Record could have been a lot better magazine. And as the editor, the buck stopped at my desk. I take responsibility for the bad as well as the good. But we weren’t mimicking what Rolling Stone or any other music magazine was doing, despite what Robert Draper says in his history of Rolling Stone [Rolling Stone Magazine]. And a lot of what we were doing--a lot of the things I mentioned above, particularly related to coverage of black music--even Rolling Stone wasn’t touching at that time. I’m not saying this to make myself look good, but rather to see to it that some very good writers, who believed in Record and worked hard for a pittance, get credit for the substantial contributions they made to its brief, tumultuous history. I believe time has been good to Record--if you look over back issues, you see some hip stuff in there.

Steven:   What did you do after writing for Record and Rolling Stone on a regular basis?

David:   The better way to phrase that would be, "What have I been doing... on a regular basis?" because I haven’t stopped what I started after leaving Record. For a couple of years after leaving Record I was a full-time freelance writer/editor. The most interesting project I took on during that period was a managing editor position at Spin, when it was still Bob Guccione Jr.’s magazine. Actually I was hired as an editorial consultant, and signed on for a three-month period, but I wound up being the magazine’s production manager and staying four months before leaving to pursue other freelance projects.

The first of those freelance projects was as editor of a convention newspaper for the New Music Seminar. The seminar organizers had contracted with PSN Publishing to do the paper and I wound up staying with PSN after the Seminar was over. The publisher there, Paul Gallo, wanted someone with my editorial experience for his rather young staff, and we cut a deal that allowed me to be a full-time freelancer for his company’s flagship magazine, Pro Sound News--a trade publication serving the professional recording and audio industries--and have a lot of free time to spend with my two sons. My marriage had ended at that time, and I didn’t want a job that ate up my time as Record had. It was far more important for me to coach my sons’ Little League teams and go on field trips with their classes and take them on long summer vacations on the road than to make a buck. So I negotiated a deal to take less money from PSN than my experience would normally command, and get time in return, including four consecutive paid weeks off every summer to take my sons on cross-country car trips. Guys like Paul Gallo are hard to find in any business; I knew I had stumbled on a rare breed when I met him and I resolved that this would be my professional home.

So I’m still at PSN, which is now United Entertainment Media and is owned by a huge British publishing corporation. But Paul is still at the helm, and I’m now the editor of all of our trade show newspapers, which has evolved into a year-round job, plus I write a column on the back page of Pro Sound News called "Music Etc." It’s about the creative process as it relates to the recording studio--that is, I interview artists and/or producers--or ideally, artist/producers--about the making of an album, how they used the studio as a creative tool to get their ideas out of their head and onto tape. It’s not a technical piece; rather, it’s about the philosophical approach to recording, and covers the emotional journey of an album’s progress from genesis to release.

My time at PSN has included a four-year stint at the Nashville bureau of the magazine. I rented an apartment in Nashville and spent part of each year there and part of it in New York. That was 1990 to 1994. A month after I got there, Fred Goodman called from Rolling Stone and asked me to interview Carl Perkins for the magazine's special issue on the 1950s. That was the beginning of another journey. In 1993, while I was still writing the book, I was asked by Jim Henke to join the curatorial staff of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Over the next year I traveled around and met with artists and their families hoping to convince them to loan some memorabilia to the Museum so that we could honor their work with an exhibit. Some of these were fairly easy to accomplish. I had met and became friends with Johnny Cash while doing the Perkins book, and he wound up loaning us some great stuff. Carl loaned us one of his guitars that he had used at Sun, and one of his stage outfits. I drove over to Macon and met three times with Zelma Redding, Otis's widow, and she wound up loaning one of Otis's suits and some concert posters. On a cross-country car trip I took with my sons in August of 1993, we left Nashville with one of Buddy Holly's amplifiers in the back seat--I had obtained the amp on loan from the songwriter Paul Kennerley, who had received it as a birthday present from Emmylou Harris, when he and Emmylou were married--stopped in Fairmount, Indiana, and spent the afternoon visiting with Bob Pulley, James Dean's best friend from childhood, dropped off the Holly amp in Cleveland, and then drove west. In California we spent an afternoon in Watsonville with Ritchie Valens' sisters and brother, laying the groundwork for a loan of Ritchie's memorabilia, then drove down to Pacoima and met Ritchie's Aunt Ernestine Reyes, the wonderful woman who raised him, and she opened her house to us, showed us the family scrapbooks, some of Ritchie's stage outfits, his first pair of roller skates, and his first electric guitar. Later she made a loan of some of those items to the museum. In between these visits we also spent an afternoon visiting Donna Fox--of Ritchie's song "Donna"--at her office in Sacramento. Needless to say, that was a memorable trip, especially for my sons.

Right now, in addition to gearing up for the next edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, I'm putting the finishing touches on a script for a Broadway musical based on the life and songs of Doc Pomus. I was brought into the project by his brother, the prominent divorce attorney Raoul Felder, who is one of the show's producers. This brings me full circle in a way, because one of my reasons for coming to New York from Oklahoma was to write for the theatre. I had applied to the Hunter College Master's program in playwrighting, but before I even got an acceptance letter back I decided to forego school for awhile but to come to New York anyway, because live theatre was so vital here, and it generally seemed like a good place to be if you wanted to be a writer. Then I got started at Record World and Rolling Stone, and I had a career. So I put the dream of writing for the theatre on hold, for about 25 years. Now I have a chance to fulfill the dream and to do something for a man who meant so much to me, even before I met him, and whose music has enriched so many lives.

Steven:   Your wonderful book on Carl Perkins--Go Cat Go!--began when you interviewed him for Rolling Stone. Are you happy with the way the book turned out and what effect did Carl Perkins' music have on your life?

David:   I’m proud of Go, Cat, Go! I won’t go into all the goals I had set for myself in that book, but one thing I wanted to do and did accomplish was to restore the Perkins brothers to Carl’s history. The music press has pretty much treated Jay and Clayton Perkins as secondary players or afterthoughts in the Carl Perkins story, but in fact there might be no Carl Perkins story without them. Theirs was a complex relationship full of beauty and tragedy, conflict, unbelievable triumph and powerful love. There was no Carl Perkins the solo artist until his first record came out and he found himself top-billed on the label. Up to that moment it was a band, a very popular local band, called the Perkins Brothers Band. There was incredible synergy between the brothers and their drummer, W.S. Holland, and that’s why those Sun records are so amazing. Everyone talks about how astonishing it is that Sam Phillips had artists as great as Elvis and Carl, but he also had two great bands behind them. There were no incidental players in that drama--Scotty and Bill; Jay, Clayton, W.S.--those guys were major artists in their own right as instrumentalists.

One of the other things I wanted to do was to really highlight the extremely personal nature of Carl’s original songs. One reviewer criticized me for quoting so liberally from Carl’s lyrics, saying I did so as if I thought they were great poetry. If that reviewer had actually read the book, though, he would have understood that the lyric quotations generally fell into one of two categories: quotes to point out some uncommonly literate passages or ones revelatory of Carl’s sly wit; and quotes that revealed Carl’s inner life or opened a window into the world of the poor white southerner. My contention was, and is, that Carl was the most personal songwriter of his generation. I don’t know how many people buy that notion, but I do know Bob Dylan does, because he said so when I interviewed him for the book. He even pointed out that the vocabulary of the lyrics had fired his imagination in his formative years as a musician. And that’s good enough for me.

Speaking of lyrics and reviews, Greil Marcus dumped on Go, Cat, Go! in the latest edition of Mystery Train, saying it was marred by my intrusiveness as a writer. This coming from a guy who is nothing if not intrusive as a writer. It’s interesting to me that in the first edition of Mystery Train he barely acknowledged Carl, and now he comes around and says, in the end notes, that Carl made beautiful records for Sun. Then he makes reference to "Put Your Cat Clothes On" as being a song about "race envy," citing as proof the lyric, "I dressed myself up to look like a guinea." This is another example of Marcus constructing some bullshit theory that collapses completely in the face of the truth. The lyric is "I dressed myself up til I looked like a dilly / went downtown to pick up my female hillbilly." All you have to do is listen to the song to hear the correct lyric--really, all you have to do is listen. But when you want to advance your bullshit theory you can’t afford to listen or, God forbid, to get in touch with the artist and ask him if that’s what the song is about. This is a guy, by the way, who wrote a few thousand words about Harmonica Frank Floyd, an artist who influenced exactly no one in his time or ours and never will influence anyone, and who doesn’t even fit the theme of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music--as well as Carl. But Marcus doesn’t know or understand anything about Carl Perkins, doesn’t understand much about any of the early rock ‘n’ roll artists; plus his mytho-poetic Elvis essay in Mystery Train is now irrelevant in light of Peter Guralnick’s well-researched, beautifully written two-volume Elvis biography. Marcus can kiss my ass.

Certainly there are a few things I would change if I could go back and do it all over, but those changes are minimal and, in the big picture, probably more important to me than to the reader. After the book was published Colin Escott was kind enough to call me and point out a couple of typos and a couple of factual inaccuracies that I was able to correct for the paperback edition. My one big regret is that I never could get Sam Phillips to grant me an interview. I tried and tried, but he would not talk. I know he knew I had found out about the lawsuit Carl brought against him in the early ‘70s, when he was found liable for unpaid royalties to Carl, and I can only theorize that he didn’t want to discuss the case. It certainly was a hidden chapter in the Sun story until Carl told me about it and I then spent a few days in the Memphis courthouse sorting through the case records. I would love to have had Sam’s side of the story, as well as his perceptions of the young Carl Perkins and the Perkins brothers.

But in the end I feel deep down that I did right by my subject, didn’t flinch from telling the unflattering truth about certain periods of his life any more than Carl flinched from revealing those episodes, and got the full story out and placed in the proper historical context. I have a lot of beautiful memories about the four years I spent on Go, Cat, Go!, and 100 hours of Carl on tape telling his life story. I have memories of leisurely drives around Jackson and Bemis with Carl after our interview sessions, with Carl pointing out places where he had played as a young man, or just shooting the bull with each other. Catfish dinners with Carl and his wife at Suede’s Restaurant. A trip we made together to Tiptonville, Tennessee, where Carl was born, and some great stories he told along the way about his colorful grandfather and some of the unsavory characters in and around his hometown. There was so much common ground between us it was almost scary, or at least made it seem preordained that I would be the one to write Carl’s biography. He had even recorded "Blue Suede Shoes" on my seventh birthday, December 19, 1955. What are the odds that I would wind up writing the life story of someone whose signature record was cut on my birthday, and whose music had had such a profound impact on the way I look at the world? That Memphis, the city where I was supposed to have been born, would become the spiritual center of the universe for me? Sometimes after my interview sessions with Carl, on days when we had covered some intensely personal subject--I remember a tough session when we talked for three hours about Jay’s decline and death and both wound up with tears running down our cheeks--instead of driving back to Nashville I would head west, to Memphis, and sit out on the banks of the Mississippi in the dead of night, alone, listening to the water lapping at the shore, reflecting on the journey that had brought me to this place and trying to figure it all out. Needless to say, when I got word that Carl had died, it was a rough, rough time for me. So many memories.

Steven:   What music magazines do you read today and do you have any favorite music writers or critics being published today?

David:   Really the only magazine I read in any depth is Rolling Stone. I don’t find the personal stories of today’s rock artists very compelling, and others I’m just fed up with. To me U2 is an utter embarrassment--a bunch of patronizing, power-hungry airheads with an inflated sense of their own importance, and music as bloated as their egos. How much do I want to read about those clowns? And if anyone thinks Bono really had much to do with getting Third World debt dismissed, they just don’t understand how the world works. I agree with “The Daily Show”’s Lewis Black about Bono: "How does an overblown pop star wearing the world’s ugliest glasses get an audience with the head of the U.N. when I can’t even get a bank teller to pay attention to me?"

That said, I do try to pick up Spin regularly and see what Alan Light’s up to, because any magazine he writes for or edits is better for his presence. And I try to keep up with No Depression and Country Music magazines and the Journal of Country Music, because those publications write about music that means something to me, and are generally well-written and well-researched.

Writers? Obviously, since I hired him once, I like Anthony DeCurtis. Of the young writers at Rolling Stone, I think Anthony Bozza has a lot going for him; Greg Kot, who’s at the Chicago Tribune but contributes to Rolling Stone, is always interesting when he gets room to advance some ideas, as in a lead review; I like where Toure comes from as a writer. At the New York Times I find Ben Ratliff’s takes on things informed and interesting; Jon Pareles is reliable on most subjects, but not so convincing when he writes about blues. For my money Stephen Holden, who writes more about movies now, has no peer as a judge of classic pop music. At the Daily News, David Hinckley is always on top of his game, and he covers music that others ignore, such as doo-wop. Jim Farber has always been one of my favorites too. Billy Altman, who writes online and for Newsday and occasionally for the Times, and wrote a terrific biography of Robert Benchley, is as good as anyone out there. On the west coast, my favorite by far is Derk Richardson, who writes for the Bay Guardian and has a local radio show on an Oakland station. Derk covers a staggering array of music and writes about it all in a stylish, informed manner.

I’ll tell you who I really miss as a music writer: Deborah Frost. She’s now married to Albert Bouchard, the Blue Oyster Cult drummer, and they have a son, Ace, and a band, the Brain Surgeons. Deborah got fed up with the whole rock-crit game a few years ago and has pretty much bowed out to concentrate on raising her son and her band. When Deborah was really on, no one could touch her. I don’t know how much interest she has in commenting on the contemporary scene, but I guarantee whatever she would have to say would be provocative. I still talk to her on the phone and correspond via e-mail with her, so I know she hasn’t lost her edge. If I were a music editor today, I would pay any price to get her involved in my publication.

Steven:   Were you ever a fan of Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer and that type of rock writing?

David:   I always read Lester’s reviews, always read whatever Meltzer was publishing, and of the two I preferred Meltzer. But their styles were theirs, and too many music writers tried to be Lester and embarrassed themselves and the editors who published them. I don’t recall too many writers trying to out-Meltzer Meltzer, maybe because he called on so many abstruse philosophical concepts it was daunting and forbidding to Meltzer wannabes. Lester’s style was more colloquial and more street, so he had many imitators, because the voice seemed so accessible. Of course it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I admired each one’s individual voice, but their approach and mine were different. As an editor, you want people like Lester and Meltzer in your mix, for the distinctive voices they bring to the party, but you don’t want their acolytes.

Steven:   You were the writer who handled the ‘50s era of rock for the last published Rolling Stone Album Guide. Is that your favorite period of rock music and if so, why?

David:   It is, along with music before my time. Let me point out that I did some 400 entries for the third edition of the Album Guide--I’ve worked on all three editions, and we’re getting ready to start the fourth in the next month or so--and the time frame on those ran from the turn of the century--Jelly Roll Morton being the earliest--to contemporary country, and included not only early rock ‘n’ roll, but also traditional jazz--Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll, Fats Waller, among others--early traditional country, gospel, doo-wop, early R&B, classic American pop, blues and some ‘60s pop-rock, such as Lesley Gore and Connie Francis.

Why is the ‘50s era my favorite period of rock music? For one very personal reason, it’s the music of my childhood, and it brings back a lot of good memories--more good than bad. But it was also when the music was new and everything was so exciting because the rules were still being made up. And everyone was admitted to the party--the radio stations I listened to in Tulsa when I was a kid would play Elvis, Fats, Carl Perkins, Patsy Cline, Tony Bennett, Bob Wills, Rosemary Clooney--there was no segregating the audience or the music, it was all in the same pot, or on the same playlist. Plus, check out that list of artists--the music was amazing, the artists were amazing. Even when these artists were a bit off their game, their records were still better than a lot of what you hear today.

I’m as crazy about ‘60s music as I am about the ‘50s or earlier, but I haven’t had much opportunity to write about it. I seem to be in that ‘50s-and-earlier niche, which is okay. There aren’t many music writers still active who remember what a Chuck Berry recorded sound like when it was brand new, or an Elvis record, or know what it was like to experience that rock ‘n’ roll culture in its nascent stage. I bring those memories and that experience to my writing about all the various forms of music that were under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella in the ‘50s, rather than some bullshit rock-crit theorizing about the philosophical implications of the music. That music is about heart, and feelings, and a lot of other things having to do with our emotional makeup as human beings; and yes, there is some class-consciousness at work in some of those songs, there’s some social commentary, sometimes covert, sometimes overt, but if you dismiss the human element at the expense of the philosophical, you’re ignoring the music’s appeal. As a writer you need to explain why people found this music alluring, and the reason for that has everything to do with how it made their lives richer, and very little to do with the extra-musical associations critics advance. Which is not to say I am not moved on every level by Percy Mayfield’s powerful "Please Send Me Someone to Love," a wrenching love song that also happens to be a gutsy and powerful protest against racial prejudice by an artist who was a significant player in his day.

And no, I’m not ignoring the sensual nature of the music and how that affected young listeners. What it had in that department that is almost completely absent today is a sense of romance. I heard a song coming out of a boombox the other day, don’t know the title or the artist, but a lyric of it went, "I love you, girl/I really love you, girl/I wanna fuck you, girl/get down on your knees and suck me, girl." How eloquent. I’m not a fan of these pre-fab boy bands, but I understand their appeal: they’re providing something kids, obviously, and especially young girls, can’t get from male rock and rap artists, and that’s romance. I mean dreamy, sweet, soft romantic songs. The Backstreet Boys aren’t my cup of tea, but I get it. I’m older so I prefer the Flamingos, the Drifters, Sam Cooke, Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford and etcetera.

Steven:   What music are you still listening to that holds up from the old days and what new music is making you believe in the power of rock and roll?

David:   All the music I listened to in my early childhood sounds as fresh and vital to me now as it did when I discovered it that summer in Alabama. I would still rather listen to Elvis and Carl or the Soul Stirrers or Joe Turner or Bob Wills than anyone else. There are no female vocalists in rock who mean to me what Dinah Washington did, or Sarah Vaughan, or Mahalia Jackson, or Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Julie London, or the cool pop girls like Lesley Gore and Brenda Lee. Christina Aguilera and Britney aren’t even in the same league with these artists, all of whom could really sing, for starters.

The female artists who connect with me are country women. Trisha Yearwood, Lee Ann Womack, Wynonna, Alison Moorer, Pam Tillis, Carlene Carter, Tish Hinojosa, Kathy Mattea, Dolly--whose The Grass Is Blue was as good an album as any artist released last year--Matraca Berg, Emmylou, Loretta Lynn--I know I'm leaving somebody important out here, but to me these women make mincemeat of the female rockers, as artists and as women. Shelby Lynne pretty much torched the field with I Am Shelby Lynne. I miss Dusty Springfield so much, but Shelby laid some of that Dusty soul on me with that album, and it sounded right. Jessica Andrews is country's teen female phenom. I can't say she's won me over completely, but as an artist she has so much more going for her than Christina and Britney that it's not even worth debating the point. She hasn't sold albums in Christina-Britney quantities, but she's a far more interesting artist--I'll even go out on a limb and predict she'll be making interesting music long after Christina and Britney are playing oldies shows or starring in bad sitcoms.

I don’t know if anything makes me believe in the power of rock ‘n’ roll to do anything but sell fashion and rude behavior anymore. I see bands on MTV playing at fashion shows, with models on the runway, and wonder why anyone takes these groups seriously. The Wallflowers do strike a responsive chord with me, though, and Elliott Smith is a first-rate songwriter. I would still rather listen to Bruce Springsteen than almost any other artist. I saw Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes last week at B.B. King's, and it was the greatest, rocking show, with so much soul, so much heart. But over the past decade or so, bands I've really liked have broken up almost before they got their footing. I loved this British pop band Tallulah Gosh, but I think they actually had broken up by the time their first album was released. I was a big fan of the Gin Blossoms; never could understand why my friends in the press savaged that band. At least Uncle Tupelo split into two very good bands, so there was some continuity there for fans of the original configuration. The bands and artists that resonate with me are mostly in the country or alt-country fields, and there are some promising blues artists around, such as Monster Mike Welch, who was overlooked in all the fuss over Kenny Wayne Sheppard and Jonny Lang. Susan Tedeschi gets a lot of good press, but I don't hear a lot going on there. The North Mississippi All-Stars are giants in my book.

I wish I could be more optimistic about rock, but there's more bad than good about it right now. I cannot for the life of me figure out why a mediocrity like Lenny Kravitz is so popular. I find this baffling. Blink 182, Limp Bizkit--are you kidding me? These guys are pathetic. I wonder if anyone shares my sinking feeling that Bob Dylan may have been right when he told Newsweek a couple of years ago that in ten years' time all these bands that are popular now will be obliterated from memory--no one will even remember them or their music. All of my brethren in the press who inveigh against Nashville and mainstream country music ought to wake up. I could study a country chart right now and find, in the upper reaches, the Dixie Chicks, Lee Ann Womack, Trisha Yearwood, Brad Paisley, and Alan Jackson, and tell you honestly I would rather spend time with those artists' albums than with those by any band or artist on the rock chart. Hell, Porter Wagoner and especially Hank Thompson released albums last year that have more heart and soul than almost anything on the rock chart right now. If I want a spiritual experience, I'll listen to Jimmie Dale Gilmore rather than those U2 blowhards.

On the other hand, maybe you could say that if I'm finding nothing to hang my hat on in contemporary rock, then maybe the bands are doing their job and really speaking to their generation in language they understand, rather than conforming to standards my generation--their parents--wants them to meet. I think there is some validity to the idea that a writer my age has no business passing judgement on 20-something rockers whose concerns and life experiences are a lot different and in most cases not as deep or as broad as mine. Doc Pomus expressed how I feel in one of the last interviews I did with him. He was commenting on how the feelings he wrote about at age 63--"problems with women, problems with finances, problems with just trying to figure out who you are, and mostly trying to get through the night"--are the same feelings young people feel, "but I think they haven't lived the years in this world to experience a lot of those things to the depth, and the feelings aren't as extended as they are with older people. I'm operating with a wide, wide range of experience." That's why I feel kind of disconnected from today's mainstream music. I probably didn't hear Jo Stafford sing "You Belong To Me" until 1956 or so--it was a huge hit for her in 1952, when I was four years old--but that record brought tears to my eyes when I was a kid. I understood the feelings she was communicating, and me only a child and her a mature woman. But its humanity connected; it told of a world I longed for. "It was coming from somewhere we wanted to go," as Bob Dylan said to me of Carl Perkins's songs. I listen to Eminem's second album, and I hear an artless piece of shit, and wonder why anyone calls this punk a genius. A genius at what, pray tell? Sub-literate lyrics? Celebrating intolerance and brutality? What? I can't relate. So I think it's safe to say I'll never be the editor of a rock magazine again, but I will continue to find wisdom, guidance, comfort, romance and spiritual uplift in the music I love, from my time and before. All in all, life is beautiful.

Back to David McGee, part 1