Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Greetings y'all:
Absolutely digging this conversation around the campfire about a guy
who provided me at age 21 or 22, back in the early 70s, living in
Montara, California with some positively life-affirming and
life-changing words that altered my life arc quite substantially. To
be fair, my life arc had been altered earlier when I saw my first
Grateful Dead concert in 1968 but Mr. Gleason’s words had that
effect on my intellectual life while the music of the Grateful Dead
altered for good and forever my visceral life, if I can express that
way: intellectual and visceral, two different spaces, even my
profile here on the WELL has Mr. Gleason quoted first and foremost.

So what was it that he said or did that altered my life arc so
profoundly?
He came up with Gleason’s Law: “No matter how paranoid you are, they
are always doing more than you think they are.”

When I read that for the very first time in the San Francisco
Chronicle, I was struck dumb by the wisdom encapsulated in Gleason’s
Law. I was sitting over coffee and cigarettes in my kitchen in my
apartment when I read those words. On some deep and profound level,
I always had known this but to have it put me in those words was
magic and transformational, that day. The effect, that morning, was
so deep that I decided, right then and there, to write Mr. Gleason a
letter expressing my deep gratitude to him for his Law. So that is
what I did.

I sat down and wrote Mr. Gleason a letter in care of the SF
Chronicle. At this late remove, I do not recall what words I used
precisely, back then but I do know I expressed my heartfelt thanks
to him for publishing Gleason’s Law. I do recall that I wrote about
the great burden that had been lifted from my shoulders when I
initially read those words. In other words, I always knew this,
viscerally for a very long time but it took Gleason’s Law to make it
known to me, intellectually. Boy Howdy, did it ever! I do not
remember how I worded my gratitude to him but I sure was grateful to
him and thanked him profusely in a short letter.


“I wrote a letter, I mailed in the...mailed it in the air indeed-e
I wrote a letter, I mailed in the air
You may know by that I've got a friend somewhere”——
Viola Lee Blues lyric 


As per usual, back in the day, you would always put your return
address in the top left-hand of the envelope which I did and
addressed to Mr. Gleason in care of the SF Chronicle. 

So some time passed and I did not really think about my letter. I
was still trying to fully grok Gleason’s Law. Lo and behold, the
mail arrived one day and there was letter back to me from Mr.
Gleason where he thanked me for my letter and some words of
encouragement from him. This physical hard copy of his letter is
gone and lost in the sands of time so I have nothing but my memory
of this interaction to say one way or the other. But I do trust my
memory about certain events and happenings and this is one of them.
The Other One is about Altamont where me and my buddies witnessed
some mind-blowing shit but left the concert immediately after the
Jefferson Airplane’s interrupted set and did not look back, that
day. 

Anywhoo, I just wanted to tell my story here about Mr. Gleason and
how I hold him in high esteem to this very day.
  

    
I love this conversation! My main goal with the book was to bring
renewed attention to Gleason's impact on the culture of his time.
His ideas are more relevant than ever during this period when
democracy is under fire and music journalism struggles to get its
bearings in the digital age. 

And I'm learning so much from your accounts!  
  

    
Other boomer culture shapers, as per Paulina in #24, might be Alan
Watts (b. 1915), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919), Pauline Kael (1919),
Jack Kerouac (1922), and Tom Donahue (1928). Does Buckminster Fuller
(b. 1895) count? 

Lots born in the 1930s, of course: Bill Graham (1931), Robert Scheer
(1936), Hunter Thompson (1937), Stewart Brand (1938), Warren Hinckle
(1938), etc. 

But I think of Gleason, Graham, and Donahue as the relevant elders
in the Bay Area when Rolling Stone was founded.
  

    

Relevant elders indeed. It's always been my belief that the first great
flowering of the Bay Area tock scene never could have been as effective
and influential as it was without the advocacy of a respected music
journalist like Ralph, the visionary radio programming vision of Tom and
the business acumen and drive of Bill (although great credit is also due
to Chet Helms and the Family Dog, a then-vibrant underground press and
numerous other players).
  

    
Yes, Chet Helms for sure. Not in the same category, but a
sympathetic elder and shrewd observer was Theodore Roszak, who
popularized the term "counter culture." He gave the hippies a fair
hearing when lots of writers were dismissing or ridiculing them. Don
might say that goes double for RJG.
  

    
tom donahue! it was a time i think when people were less divided by
age than 'were you en rapport?' total tangent: my outrage at the 'ok
boomer' meme...
  

    
A couple of corrections are in order wrt #26 in this topic about my
post:
In my profile page, RLG and Gleason’s Law are listed second only to
HST and his oft-quoted line about turning pro..
And I should have said..”when I lived in El Grenada, just down the
street from Montara..”
And I may have my dates a little off, meaning the publication date
of that column where RLG expressed his Law..so I pose this question
to you, Don, in your archives do you have a cite to that column
publication in the SF Chronicle?
The only reason I ask is because it would provide me with a personal
temporal marker for my time living in El Granada, just asking out of
curiosity..it may be a bit obscure and difficult to retrieve so if
that is the case, please ignore
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming 
  

    
Just purchased gleason's "sf sound" paperback - a collector's item
now and there are a few of the paperbacks still circulating. Never
ever knew about the book, so thanks for the info. Knowing Warren
Hinckle and his fiery persona, I have no doubt he and gleason would
be in a battle at ramparts. But we got rolling stone as a result of
that, hard to argue with the outcome.
  

    
Alex, sorry, but I didn't come across that column in my research. I
would love to read it. This would be a good time to plug the SF
Chronicle archives. It's behind a paywall but reasonable. Effective
search engine. 
  

    
Thanking you for that response to my post about RLG and how
fundamentally, RLG changed my life arc at a very young age..

Will take your advice and use the paywalled archives to search out
the temporal marker for that column or article..

If I find it, I will email you with it so you can see it, as well
(if this discussion has ended here)
  

    
To my fellow threadites: What do you think about the state of music
journalism today? How does your familiarity with Gleason's work
affect your views of contemporary writers (if at all)? 

As you may know, it caused quite a stir when Pitchfork announced it
would be folded into Gentlemen's Quarterly. Music journalism is back
into public consciousness, with a sense of nostalgia for 1960s music
writing. Did Gleason provide a model for today?      
  

    

Hi again... sorry to have strayed away from my interviewing duties here
for a bit. I just came off a string of very busy days and late nights
out. I will say that all those nights involved live music, so I'd like
to think Ralph wouldn't mind!

As for your question: I must admit there haven't been a lot of music
journalism I've been reading very regularly of late, and can't think of
any music writers that come close to Ralph's level of inspiration or
influence on my listening. Which is not to say that there aren't good,
smart writers out there, but the field is more diffuse with the
proliferation of blogs, podcasts and the like. And like so many people
in an era when the influence of print journalism as a tastemaker
continues to erode, I find myself turning to other means of music
discovery.
  

    
Gary, you highlight the importance of understanding the context in
which Gleason worked. It was the age of print journalism. By the
mid-1960s, there were only two somewhat independent taste cultures -
jazz and rock. Interestingly, though, by writing a near-daily
newspaper column, Gleason approximated today's online 24-7
information output immediacy.  

When he started writing professionally in the 1940s, the context was
different. He wrote for jazz fanzines, the predecessors of 60s rock
fanzines. It was a niche network of hardcore hot jazz followers.  
  

    
In the UK publication Mojo, I've been finding the kind of writing I
came to appreciate in the 60s-70s via magazines like Rolling Stone
and Crawdaddy, often about the same bands, and certainly about the
same kinds of music. Deep coverage, lots of detail about the people
and the music. I use the Mojo review section the way I used to use
Rolling Stone reviews to help me find the best new music. (Today's
advantage: with streaming you can try anything and everything, and
build a massive library of the best stuff.)
  

    
Don, can you tell us more about RJG’s political views? He seemed
quite sure that rock music would usher in an age of political
progress. He couldn’t seem to imagine that, as Peter Coyote says,
hippies would win all the cultural battles and lose all the
political ones. 
  

    

My recollection is that Hinckle made that point over and over, as it
was happening.  So Gleason either wasn't listening, or rejected it. 
It was pretty obvious to me at the time, as someone who was
radicalized by my probable future in a body bad in a rice paddy.
  

    
I should add that his prediction was something of a useful fiction
insofar as it launched a lot of influential journalism. 
  

    
It did seem - at least for a while there - that music and the
politics of liberation were deeply entwined.
  

    
Reminds me of the review of "Blows Against the Empire" in (I think)
Rolling Stone.  "The Empire can rest easy if this represents the
current threat."
  

    
About Warren Hinckle. He did disagree with RJG about the
counterculture and its music. Which is why Gleason and Wenner
started Rolling Stone. But Warren was also unwilling to credit RS
for anything. 
  

    
Peter, That's what Gleason wanted to see: the counterculture win the
culture war. Based on Plato's writings, he believed that music could
transform society and politics.   

Although he was a Democrat influenced by C. Wright Mills and the New
Left, Gleason distrusted politics. He advocated for Black
empowerment and supported radical community protest as the best
means of achieving it. Thought Malcolm X was a more effective leader
than MLK. 

On the other hand, Gleason came to distrust White radicals like
Jerry Rubin once their movement became militant. Hinckle wasn't the
only Lefty who criticized Gleason and the apolitical wing of the
counterculture. The SF counterculture split over this disagreement
about whether music or political activism would make society more
progressive.     

We must remember that, as a child, Gleason saw the toll the Irish
Revolution had taken on his parents' homeland. He read military
histories as a hobby and saw how violent revolutions often led to
oppressive regimes and more violence. Growing up in Quaker-founded
Chappaqua, NY, Gleason had a natural bent for pacifism. His first
political activity, in the 30s, was in the antiwar movement at
Columbia. 

So, Gleason's political impulses were tempered by his cultural
impulses. As a music critic, this came naturally.         


  
  

    
Thanks, Don. I know that at one point, Wenner asked Gleason to stop
writing about Nixon and politics. Which must have been tough for the
only music journalist on Nixon’s enemies list. 
  

    
That admonition sure did not work when it came to Hunter S. Thompson 
  

    
Right, Wenner thought RJG was overlapping too much with HST. I
gather the former didn’t think much of the latter, but maybe Don
knows more about that. 
  

    
I couldn't find much on what Gleason thought about Thompson. Would
love to know more.