Journobit: Chet Flippo

Chet Flippo, the man who put the country into Rolling Stone, has died.

Here's a slice of Flippo's Dolly Parton coverstory from 1980, the point where Parton was about to add film star to her already packed cv:

One of the lesser noticed of twelve children in a poor Tennessee family, Dolly began planning her escape to the world of money and glamour as soon as she heard about it. The minute she was out of high school, she was on a Greyhound bus to Nashville to try to be a country star. But girl singers – that's what they called them then – in country music were rare and generally regarded as so much flesh. Parton used her iron will, her incredibly seductive and powerful voice, her ability to write songs and her self-confidence and ambition to knock down the brick walls that stood between her and her goals. She also played up her beauty and her hourglass figure. She started to make secret lists of the fairy-tale futures she sought. She is a fiercely positive thinker, and her private lists worked like voodoo. Nashville never knew what hit it. She became a country star.

Still, Nashville wasn't enough, so she plotted her superstar map and left Nashville for Los Angeles and full blown pop management. Her husband, Carl Dean, a seldom-seen Nashville contractor, approved, and she set out to become superfamous. She deliberately made the kind of pop music she thought would gain her both a new audience and the power to do whatever she wanted. She thinks the strategy is working.

After his time at Rolling Stone, Flippo wrote books, taught journalism and then wound up as editorial director of CMT. But you can take the man out of music journalism, but... well, he still was writing a weekly column, Nashville Skyline, for the CMT website.

His last column appeared earlier this month, and aptly for a man best known writing which helped country crossover, he ended with some thoughts on the new Nashville crossovers:

There's also the war between modern radio country -- also being called old rock masquerading as country -- and more traditional artists and then, of course, there's also hick-hop music. You'll see plenty of all of that on display this week.

And there was also the sight of both Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift performing recently onstage with the Rolling Stones. That gives a whole new definition to crossover country.

But then there was also the recently-taped CMT Crossroads with Jack White hosting Willie Nelson as his Third Man Records studio downtown, with Leon Russell, Norah Jones, Neil Young and others, with music ranging all across the country music spectrum.

Then we have the spectacle of Natalie Maines -- remember her? -- declaring "war on Nashville" in the pages of Rolling Stone. Apparently, Maines' war consists of angrily stamping her foot and saying, "Oh, fie!"

Chet Flippo had been ill for some time. He died June 19th, in Nashville, at the age of 69.

Writerobit: James McLaren

Really sorry to hear of the death of James McLaren, former editor of Welsh Music magazine SoundNation and - for the last six years - part of BBC Wales, where he was a prolific music blogger.

James died in a traffic accident yesterday.

SoundNation was a brilliant publication under his editorship - proving that arts bodies could be publicly-funded but still burn with a genuine passion.

Our genuine sympathy is extended to his family and friends.

Journobit: Jane Scott

Sad to hear of the death of, perhaps, the original rock journalist, Jane Scott.

Scott was hired by the Cleveland Plain Dealer three days after Alan Freed had promoted the first rock and roll show in the city, albeit as a society reporter. Ironically, before she would shift to writing about pop, she had a stint covering senior citizens. For some reason, this was doubled up with a column for small kids; the next step was for her to create a miscellany for teens. And it was while gathering content for that column that she came to see The Beatles when they played Cleveland:

"When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show, I knew what the kids really wanted to read. Once I found rock, I was never interested in anything else."

Scott did manage to carry on writing the senior's column alongside, though, for the next two decades. The rock writing, though, would continue until 2002.

She wasn't forgotten, though, even when she hung up her notebook (nb: this line must appear, by law, in any piece about a retiring journalist):

"Jane's impact and influence on generations of rock music fans, performers and journalists can be felt in the tributes, messages and notes that have come pouring into us," Plain Dealer managing editor Thom Fladung told CNN. "From the likes of Lyle Lovett, who said, 'Music lost one of the dearest members of its family,' to the fan who simply said, 'Salutations to Jane Scott. What a badass.'

The Plain Dealer has opened a book of condolences, and has offered a generous slice of her archive. Her obit page has them all, but try the Pere Ubu:

Psychedelic. Now that's a word that has been bruited about. It doesn't even show up in Webster's Third International Dictionary.

Most people consider it mind-bending. Most relate it to the acid rock of 1967, which tried to reproduce the distorted feeling through music that you got through LSD or other chemicals.

So what does the psychedelic music of the '80s mean to them? What are the essentials?

A beat. An emotion. A desire to communicate.

Melody means nothing.

Oh, to have been writing about music when there was still so many introductions to be offered.

Jane Scott was 92.

Marilyn Manson doesn't take criticism well

Apparently confusing himself with Jeanette Winterson, Marilyn Manson is threatening to visit music journalists at home:

"If one more 'journalist' makes a cavailier statement about me and my band, I will personally or with my fans' help greet them at their home and discover just how much they believe in their freedom of speech.

"I dare you all to write one more thing that you won’t say to my face. Because I will make you say it. In that manner. That is a threat."

Manson - who is a bit like Gene Wilder playing Lord Voldermort - doesn't exactly say what he considers to be a "cavalier statement". Would "desperately trying to plough a furrow despite having hit the rock beneath many years ago" upset him, for example? Or "a sense of style which suggests a funeral director who arrived late at the jumble sale" be the sort of thing to set him off.

Still, interesting to see the man who ran into the streets screaming "please don't blame me" post-Columbine is now suggesting his fans might want to beat up people who have different tastes in music. Sure, Manson is just blowing hard on his blog, but his audience is pretty suggestible and not exactly the brightest fanbase around. for their hero to suggest that people be attacked until they are happy to cede their free speech sits oddly with his suggestion that he stands against the bullies of society.

Journobit: Steven Wells

Steven Wells, what are you, Steven Wells?

There is, of course, a story about Steven Wells, whose death was reported earlier today. The punk-turned-poet-turned-NME-journalist-turned-TV-turned-Phildelphia-Weekly-writer story is a great one, admittedly. With a rotten, stinking, too-soon ending.

But if you read his stuff, if it was during his period on the NME that the paper meant the most to you, you'll have memories. The first time my scrawny little name ever graced the inky inside of the NME it was a letter sent to Angst defending something Swells had written about Sellafield, in response to a harping letter from Cumbria the previous week. (Yes, it was that era of the NME.) Not that Wells needed the support from me - he could take care of himself; the weeks when he took the editor's chair for the letters page were always the best Wednesday night tea-time reads: all screeching sound-effects and all the letters complaining about Morrissey cut into one long, dribbling drool, neatly dispatched at the end with a sharp put-down.

There was the frankly bizarre time Mark E Smith started honking that everyone knew Swells and Quantick were doing it to each other, gleefully detailed in the paper. There were singles reviews which, if Feargal Sharkey really thinks Charles Arthur's description of albums is beautiful, would have made the head of UK Music sob bitter tears. There was little time for the Smiths, less for Chapterhouse, and none whatsoever for The Levellers.

Admittedly, many of these targets were still exercising him as recently as this year, and in much the same terms as he was writing about them back in the early 1990s, but presumably his life in the US made it hard for him to update his British music bile in quite the same way.

I think, more-or-less, I can still do a Seething Wells poem from memory:

I'd die for my country said a patriotic dickhead
Well, go ahead, die, you make me sick
Slice your wrists and slash the statistics
The number unemployed fell today
Fifteen thousand bled away
So we stripped them cold naked
And shaved their heads
Stopped the thrashing of severed nerve endings
By boiling the buggers in sterilized lead
Laid them out in cold, grey ranks
Introducing the human sandbag
A small donation to the nation's maintainence
A YOPS scheme to absorb radiation
This depression won't fade away
It'll trickle away down blood-clotted drains
One way or another

Well, he was never going to be writing Hallmark card verse, was he?

Wells was 49.

Amongst the tributes:
James McMahon in the NME:

I’ve been a fucking disgrace. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself; the sheer weight of articulating what his words meant to me, let alone at least two generations of NME readers, has almost ruined me. I’ve made cups of tea, I’ve smoked cigarettes, I’ve been for an obscenely long lunch. I’ve done anything I could do to avoid writing something on page. Even in death, the unique talent, spirit and flair of Steven Wells has left me questioning everything I’ve ever believed. Articulating the life and times of a character as big as Steven Wells is a job for a big man and I can’t help questioning whether I’ve got the girth for the job.

Former NME colleague James Brown writing for the Guardian:

Swells had helped me start my fanzine and given me my first NME review to do. He also helped open the door for my staff job there as a 21-year-old. I repaid him by bringing in a generation of fanatical music obsessives and great writers like Steve Lamacq, Bob Stanley, Stuart Maconie and Barbara Ellen and giving them all the work. He welcomed the revolution but not the smaller pay cheques. As an NME writer, he was obsessed with class war, masturbation, dogs, cancer, Jello Biafra and the multiple use of the exclamation mark. His work was littered with it. Almost creating his own language. '(SUBS LEAVE THESE LAST THREE SENTENCES IN)' was a regular sentence in his copy.

Aside from the surreal comedy column he co-wrote with David Quantick, Swells was increasingly marginalised in a more-music, less–politics NME until he took up the offer of interviewing Phil Collins. Asking questions no one else would dare to, the end result was brilliantly funny and he realised that if he delivered a great interview it would piss the rest of the staff off, which seemed to be his main purpose in life.

I think he'd have been amused by the reaction of Wikipedians, recorded by Sarah Bee in The Register:

Say what you like about Wikipedia, you can't accuse it of lacking tact. Within 48 hours of the untimely death of music journalist Steven Wells, his entry has been summarily marked for deletion on the grounds that he isn't famous enough.

The Quietus, for which Wells was writing, had a nice headline:

Swells Dies. Caps Lock Buttons Sigh In Relief

He was also writing for The Guardian - both the sports section and for the music part online. Tim Jonze:

When I started editing guardian.co.uk/music a year ago, it was a privilege to have him writing for us. We were all agreed that he was the master of bashing out killer blogs: keep it simple, keep it funny, drive half the readers into a frenzy of rage. My personal favourite in recent months was this Guitar Hero blog, in which he argued that all guitars should be destroyed (they take ages to learn, they hurt your fingers etc) and replaced with simple, piece-of-piss "button guitars". When I told him that the piece was getting a lot of our readers worked up, his response was classic Swells: "Tim … never underestimate the stupidity of guitarists."

We'll really miss him.

His co-conspirator David Quantick, in a Twitter two parter:

One more Swells memory - after a news story about a small boy who'd had his arm ripped off by chimps after he'd climbed into their cage...
Steven loped round the office waving an imaginary arm over his head, shouting OO OO MISTER SHIFTER!!!

The last word goes, of course, to Swells. The sort-of final line from his final Philadelphia Weekly column:

This blog entry has no last paragraph. Scroll to the top and repeat.

Billboard hires bloggers

In a bid to keep up to date with what the kids are up to, Billboard has hired a couple of these bloggy chappies from off the internet: Glenn Peoples and David Prince.

The real bad news here is that Peoples is going to shutter Coolfer to concentrate on his new job; Prince is going to continue with The Daily Swarm, but it will shift from main focus to side project.

Lily Allen - perhaps under torture

What, exactly, are we to make of the NME's coverage of the latest Lily Allen drug story?

Lily Allen has admitted that parents should encourage their children to take drugs.

She's "admitted" that, has she? Did she break down after a lot of harsh questioning, conceding that her previous stance of parents not encouraging children to take drugs was mistaken?

Unlikely opening lines to music stories of our time: Number one in a series

From PopMatters:

With the respect Maroon 5 is given within the pop music industry, it’s hard to believe the band has produced only two albums.

Respect? Maroon 5? The closest, surely, Maroon 5 get to respect is when giggling small children take care to make sure the spunking cock that they've drawn on Adam Levine's back looks well defined and has a fair level of pubic hair included.

Execobit: Jerry Wexler

Music journalist, executive and producer Jerry Wexler died earlier today.

Born in 1917, to an emigre Pole, Wexler had initially adopted journalism as a career after his mandated spell in the US Army. He joined Billboard in 1947, staying for four years - during this time coining the phrase "rhythm and blues" - before turning gamekeeper and joining a promotions company. Within a year, Ahmet Ertegun was sounding him out for a role at Atlantic Records; Wexler refused, holding out for a partnership. By 1953, Ertegun had come round to Wexler's way of thinking and sold him a share.

With a management style he described as that of a despot with problems delegating, he played a role in building up Atlantic's reputation and sales. He took charge of everything he could - doing production duties, for example, on Aretha Franklin's version of Respect.

An attempt to establish a powerbase in Nashville proved to be his undoing at Atlantic; following its failure he parted company with the label.

In 1977 he joined Warner Brothers as its East Coast man - a role which led him to sign Dire Straits and the B-52s, shaping the FM sound for the early 1980s. The assocation, though, didn't last long, and Wexler would quickly cut ties with the majors, carving out a freelance niche working with Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, Etta James, Allen Toussaint, the Staple Singers, George Michael and others.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame made space for him in 1987, leading him to sum up his career:

"We were making rhythm and blues music — black music by black musicians for black adult buyers perpetrated by white Jewish and Turkish entrepreneurs."

Signalling his retirement, when Wexler moved to Florida towards the end of the last decade, he also canceled his Billboard subscription. He enjoyed a period offering contributions to a stream of documentaries about the music industry during its glory years, and a small glittery portrayal of his life in the Ray Charles biopic Ray.

Wexler is survived by his wife, Jean Alexander and his children Paul and Lisa. He was 91.

Who the hell does Jeff Dreadnaught think he is?

It's probably best to ignore bad reviews, pop people. It's equally best to ignore the good ones, but ignoring the bad ones is a good place to start.

Believe me, having a coked-up guitarist shouting in your face in a winebar doesn't tend to do anything to raise the reviewer's opinion of a band, and it never comes as surprise to a journalist when a band tells them that they disagree with his or her opinion that they're not very good. I've nver quite understood why bands think that screeching "you know nothing about music" at someone who doesn't like the work is going to achieve anything.

Having said which, Deerhunter's exchange of emails with Jeff Weiss of the LA Weekly does at least manage to be amusing and Weiss makes a fairly wise observation:

The fact is that you are probably in one of the most critically
acclaimed bands out right now. Why care so much about one
writer who doesn't care for your music? Is it really worth your time to
write sarcastic e-mails? It's not going to change my mind or hurt my
feelings. I'm sorry you have such a low self-worth and lack of
confidence in your band.

Do you really think you make some form of populist music that
EVERYONE will like. To quote Wayne's World: Led Zeppelin didn't write
songs that everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees. That's a
joke. You're supposed to laugh. Or do you even have a such of humor?

I really have no interest in continuing some sort of stupid
beef. I'm not the kind of person that carries grudges. I make jokes and I
write about music. That's about it. I'm sorry you don't find them funny.
Unlike you, I've gotten used to the fact that I can't be everything to
all the people all the time.

He's right about the letting it go, although, of course, he's wrong about Deerhunter.

Jack White taunts journalists

Jack White has suggested that music journalists are inherently lazy bums who just copy stuff without thinking, according to an interview NME.com have cut-and-pasted from elsewhere on the web:

"I'd say 90 per cent of what they get is from the press release. We have fun putting things in there - like in the press release for 'Elephant', somebody inserted a joke about how none of our studio equipment was made after 1963.

"Before you knew it, people thought we wouldn't touch a piece of equipment unless it's 60 years old or something! It gets to the point where you're answering questions based on a joke somebody made."

Hmm. Which is all well and good, but isn't it a bit rich to be putting plausible-sounding fibs in your official press handouts and then complaining when people believe them? It's not like the idea of White only using old equipment is so outlandish, given his track record and the existence of a school of thought that music sounded better when it was all amps and analogue; it's not as if they claimed, say, Paris Hilton was doing backing vocals and everyone fell for it.

White carried on:

"Anytime I pick up a music magazine, I assume 90 per cent of it is incorrect, so I make up my own things to believe.

"Everyone knows the phrase 'Don't believe everything you read,' but how many people actually practice it?"

Or possibly he said "I love wearing frilly knickers, but the strapping beforehand really chaffes."

Girdles round the earth

It's a mighty impressive list, it's Jason Gross's 25 Favourite Scribings for 2002. Of course, it's arguable, but its a great starting point. Nothing from NME, you note...

[Ta to TMFTML]
[Update: 20-09-08 - Archive.Org copy of the original list which is now no longer on RockCritics.com]

Brought to book

We've always wondered why music has never yet spawned an equivalent of, say, Wisden's or The Bedside Guardian - a collection of stuff about the year that's just gone; perhaps padded with some statistics and a few pictures. There have been attempts, certainly - Virgin used to produce some sort of Rock Yearbook which was hobbled by aiming for the Christmas market, forcing it to run October to October, and editorially the product was lite. Smash Hits Yearbook first incarations do provide a sense of place, if you look back at them now, but they look through a small window and like their sire title, don't have the quality anymore. The year-end issues of the pop press provide a fairly reliable guide to albums released, but tend to strip them from the context of the year as a progression - although the Melody Maker's annual review did at least order the revisits chronologically and ran them aside headlines from the month; though not any more, of course.

The gap in the market may be plugged, a bit, by Best Music Writing. Now in its third year, this is a grab-happy collection of bits and pieces from a range of sources - including the Onion and I Love Music's message board mesh - which functions like a kind of Music 2002 Reader. It seems like it could be an answer, but still - we'd like something that added some sales pie charts and graphs. We like graphs.