Scribe of rock's 'unruly history' gravely ill

I'd always wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I wrote plays, short stories, a science fiction novel and comics (that I also drew). I didn't think about writing journalistically until I started buying records. Now, journalism is not the first thing that pops into my mind when somebody says, "records" (unless we're talking about public records and that's a whole 'nother ball of boredom). However, I didn't start looking for non-fiction writing about anything until I developed an extreme interest in pop. When I started buying records, I started wanting to read about them. I anxiously awaited new issues of Cheetah in 1967, and Eye in 1968. I still have copies of Circus from about that time, and Creem, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone from the early '70s. The combination of the writing and subject matter got me excited. I wanted to do the same thing for a living. The interesting writers among them, the ones with a sensibility that made their stories more than just pro forma celebrity interviews or consumer-oriented reviews -- juiced things even more. Whatever you think of them individually, Nick Tosches, Ed Ward, Langdon Winner, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau (before he hooked up with Springsteen), Robert Christgau and a host of others, made it fun to read about the music. The writing Palmer Robert Palmer -- No! Not the Addicted to Love singer! -- also holds a high place among pop-music writers (at least as far as I'm concerned). Never shrill, Palmer has calmly and eloquently traced the trails of American music that mattered to him. He has the understated fervor of a professional detective trying to unlock a mystery. His most well-known achievement has to be Rock and Roll: An Unruly History. The project spanned a PBS TV series and a companion book. Particularly in the book, Palmer's wide-open intellect challenges much of the conventional thinking about rock and its origins, while still reporting most of the same historical information to be found elsewhere. (Palmer's account of being accepted into the dark, secret world of nightclub musicians -- and barely avoiding a shootout -- at the beginning of the Unruly History book is a hoot.) Palmer is one of the pioneers as far as rock writing for mainstream newspapers goes. He was the New York Times' first full-time rock writer and chief pop critic (1976-88). I was a rookie journalist in 1976 living and working in New Jersey, and Palmer's writing in the Times became a staple of my pop reading diet. The underlying intelligence of his analysis was the winning element. It wasn't just that the stuffy Times catered to "intellectualism." Palmer never stooped to academic formalism in his writing. Instead, he wrote for that paper with a grace and passion that undercut the Times' stultifying style. He made the Times a fundamentally more human paper. Palmer needs help Palmer is seriously ill, and at last word I have, was to undergo a liver-transplant operation. The medical expenses have been enormous, about $150,000 so far, and he could use some financial help. For information on a tax-deductible fund set up in Palmer's name, contact the National Music Critics Association at NMCAssn@aol.com. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo