Journalist Robert Palmer has died

I heard the news today ...

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

Last bats: Realignment's races will be different

I'm watching the Dodgers trying to stay in the National League West race with less than 1 1/2 games to go when I realize it's not going to be this way next year. The lords of the realm are going to have some sort of realignment plan in place before the next season starts. Baseball is a safe haven for nostalgia. After all, there's no harm done by remembering "the good old days" of a sport. That kind of nostalgia doesn't get in the way of living in the present. However, change has come mighty quick in recent years. Divisional realignment created the wild-card spot in the playoffs. This year, interleague play was added to the regular season. Next year, it'll be a whole new ball of wax with at least a few teams switching leagues. The divisions will be different, although some rivalries will be preserved and new ones created. The sad part about it is that -- duh! -- the changes will be made not to improve the game, but to improve business. The lords of the realm virtually forced realignment to happen when they assigned the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays to the American League West division. Come on! Everybody knows that couldn't stand -- having all the Rays' divisional opponents a day's flight away. I wouldn't want to have that team's jet-fuel bills. Good stories in baseball? This year, however, there's plenty else in the game to give fans the excitement that seasons long past brought. Larry Walker and Tony Gwynn both chased a .400 batting average for a minute. They didn't make it, but few rooted against them. People felt good about these guys the way they do about the big names of old. Unlike the way they feel about, say, Tony Philips. Then, there was the war of attrition in the chase after Roger Maris' record. In the past few weeks, the field shook down to Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. It doesn't seem like either will make it, but when was the last time two guys hit 50 home run in a season? Couldn't be that Mantle-Maris year, could it? Even if Junior wears his hat backwards, he's got a low-key air that keeps him on the good-guy side most of the time. McGwire says he signed his huge contract with St. Louis only after his son, who lives in southern California, said it was OK. It's not the same as Lou Gehrig saying he's the luckiest man alive, but it's a statement that has a similar kind of vulnerability and emotion behind it. Definitely not what you'd expect from a guy who hits rocket blasts almost every day. Speaking of rockets, how about Roger Clemens? The Red Sox have to rue the day they let this fabulous pitcher go, with the hint that he was washed up. Not hardly. There were other good stories in this year before realignment. For instance, people say that pitching's diluted. However, in the year when two hitters chased .400 and another two chased Maris, eight pitchers had a shot at winning 20 games as late as September 1. Enough for instances, though. It's fun to realize that even thought baseball deserves the licking it gets for having the most spoiled athletes in pro sports and possibly the most medieval owners, there were too many good baseball stories this year to mention here. What's most likely to be remembered next year is not the realignment, but the reason for the realignment. Two new teams coming aboard in Florida and Arizona. The fans in those markets will get big-league ball for the first time and cheer their good guys. They won't be cheering the owners. Of course, the owners in their counting houses won't be able to hear the cheers anyhow. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Gov. Symington meant business

I know the following column strays a long way from pop culture, but how can any Arizonan ignore Gov. Symington's forced resignation from office after being convicted on seven of 21 felony fraud counts? Like Evan Mecham, Fife Symington ran for governor of Arizona with the promise that he would make government efficient by applying sound business principles. It was a persuasive argument, apparently After all, a public raised on stories about insane patterns of government spending (insert a ridiculous $ figure paid for a coffee pot or a toilet seat here) knows that there ought to be a tougher method of cost accounting. American business with its "leaner, meaner" philosophy of the '80s seemed to have it. Symington appeared to be a successful businessman, dealing in more dollars than Mecham's auto dealership could dream of. So why not give him a try? Could it hurt to reduce the tax load on the average citizen by making government cut bloat? Other people's money Symington, who dealt in millions of dollars, used a sound business principle to make himself the developer of the Esplanade and the Mercado. That principle is that whenever possible you must use other people's money to power your deals. If you can get people to fund your "vision," you put nothing on the line except your reputation. However, your reputation usually has to be pretty good to get savvy people to put up the money. Symington's reputation was good. He knew the art of the deal, and he put deals together the way an artist applies paint to canvas. People believed he could make things happen and were willing to back him financially. In government, he used the same principle, by using taxpayers' money. He got this government deal to go by promising some returns to the taxpayer in the form of reduced income tax. If you didn't look at the toll it took on social-service agencies such as Child Protective Services and the state's aid program to public schools, it seemed like a good deal. Ultimately, though, government -- especially the government of a democratic republic -- is not a business. Self-interest and public interest A businessman has the right to be out solely for himself in business, but government has to look out for everyone's interests. The businessman will try to convince the other guy that a deal is mutually beneficial, but he'll do everything in his power to make the deal more mutually beneficial to himself. (Think of this idea from George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.") That philosophy doesn't work, though, in government. If there's widespread cynicism about government, it exists precisely to the extent that politicians take the system for all that it's worth, instead of acting as public servants. The system continues to limp along instead of running because of self-serving attitudes in politics. Symington favored business. He showed no sympathy for the average Joe who had to stick his kids in one of Arizona's struggling public schools. How much would even a $50,000-a-year wage earner have to scrimp to put one child through a high-quality private-school education in Arizona? Could even a zero-percent income tax put enough money back in that parent's pocket to make it possible? Business is good Business does make things run, and in general, good business makes good sense. American business has created the standard of living here. However, American business owes its ability to flourish in large part to one of the most stable governments the world has seen. This is not a government that's about to nationalize any industries. (OK, the railroads are the exceptions that prove the rule.) In fact, quite the opposite. Government extends a large helping hand to many troubled businesses. However, because business is powered by self-interest, it can edge toward practices that are not in the public interest. It's costly, for instance, to keep a chemical factory from polluting the environment, and the short-term, bottom-line interests of business would like to avoid that cost. (Having become a modest entrepreneur myself, I face ethical issues every day that make it tough to get ahead. I'm convinced it would be much easier to do business if I didn't have a conscience.) The government is supposed to be responsible for a different kind of cost accounting. It's supposed to ensure the public interest rather than self-interest -- or at the very least, attempt to find a compromise between opposing self-interests. (Although there are many questions about the way government today is shouldering this responsibility, no one has created a model in which business would willingly shoulder the social burdens it creates.) Business is bad Symington, acting in his self-interest, lied to bankers. At least that's what federal lawyers persuaded a jury to believe. This was a crime for which he may well be imprisoned. To my way of thinking, his larger crime was that he used similar false representations -- that he was a successful businessman -- to win election. He will never be put on trial or sent to prison for this, though. There's no law against lying to the voting public. Yet as sure as Symington seemed about his innocence and the soundness of his principles, maybe he really believed that it's OK to lie to bankers. (I can see me misrepresenting my worth to get a loan. Ha!) Then again, maybe he just lied to himself. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Firebirds fly; Phoenix changes guard

Baseball writers like to wax poetic about the way the game and its thoughtful pace connect us to a bucolic past. That past supposedly plays music soothing to breasts savaged by the hell-bent pace of modern living. Yet, it seems the writers are out of step. Major League Baseball, attempting to market its way back into favor after the strike of '94 when the lords of the realm nearly bumbled away the national pastime, says that today's fans want major realignment and a faster-paced game. They want more teams involved in the playoffs. (Nobody seems quite sure whether fans want the designated hitter, though.) Firebirds out, Diamondbacks in It's a sign of the times and of growth that Phoenix is losing its Triple A baseball club, the Firebirds, for the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion National League team. (The Firebirds will play their final home game at Phoenix Municipal Stadium on Thursday, August 28.) It's doubtful that going to Bank One Ballpark, or BOB as some wags immediately dubbed it, in downtown Phoenix will be anywhere near as relaxing (bucolic?) as going to take in a Firebirds game at Scottsdale Stadium or Phoenix Municipal Stadium. The 40,000-plus seating at BOB is considered relatively intimate in the majors. Still, a capacity game is going to seat twice as many people as can cram Desert Sky Pavilion and more than four times as many people than can fit into Scottsdale Stadium, where the Firebirds have been playing their last few seasons. The end of intimacy The intimacy of a minor-league game is never in question. Even the worst seats are pretty close to the action. That intimacy helps create the relaxing pace that baseball writers glorify. If it's a hassle to get in and out of the park and if crowds swamp the concession stands and the bathrooms, I think the pace of the game changes from "relaxing" to "slow." The fact is, though, that the Diamondbacks have already done more business than the Firebirds could ever hope to do here. Even though Triple A ball is just a phone call away from the majors, baseball fans are sending the message that big-league ball -- with its salary disputes, pampered players and mostly clueless owners -- is the only ball worth buying, and they'll pay for it through the nose. Don't get me wrong. I'm looking forward to big-league competition right here in town, but it's too bad we always have to subsitute big-ticket items for the little things that make life bearable. Big-ticket items always take more maintenance, and I wonder whether we're getting good value for the dollar. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Elvis has wrecked the building

"I haven't seen anything like it since Eleanor Roosevelt died." Bemused, Don Rubincam, entetainment editor of The Courier-News, snuffed out another cigarette, and with a very little help from me, set about the task of piecing together the small-town daily's package on the death of rock and roll icon Elvis Presley. The newsroom was in quite a furor, although many of the reporters were my age, leaned toward the Eagles and just didn't get Elvis. I was what they call a "news clerk," trying to write my way out of obituary, weather and police-report duties and into full-time work on the entertainment desk. Just a few months before, Rubincam had read some reviews and previews I'd written and asked our managing editor if he could use me part time. I was supposed to help Rubincam with clerical duties, filing and the like, but Don had me writing more than he had me filing. I wasn't about to argue. I was by no means savvy about the entertainment business or how to find out information. I spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out where Elvis Presley would be playing. Not nostalgia for the old folks It wasn't nostalgia that was driving me exactly. Sure, I had strummed my air guitar in the back yard at age four and shouted the lines: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog!" I did it for what seems like hours (but was probably just a few minutes in adult time). I still remember the white Elvis t-shirt with the king caught in mid-swivel before a big black record. However, I wasn't pining for these things. I'd been getting deeper into the roots of the music that interested me, and from reading some other writers' reflections on the early days of rock and roll, and some things John Lennon had said about Elvis, I wanted to see if Presley held up. It hadn't been that long since National Lampoon had spoofed him with a cover that portrayed the one-time rocking Adonis as a big, button-popping, washed-up lounge lizard. So I had picked up The Sun Sessions in the early summer of '77. What a thunderclap of raw energy! The Sun Sessions was everything that the emerging punk-rock scene wanted to be but wasn't. From top to bottom That's when I hit on the idea of doing a feature for Rubincam that compared Presley's first album with what was then his most recent one, Moody Blue -- his first and last album. (Hey! I was young!) I was in the middle of writing that up when Presley died, and Moody Blue truly became his last album. What a dung heap of misplaced energy! Moody Blue with its insincere, by-the-numbers parodies of rock and roll and its heavy emphasis on overly histrionic ballads, was everything the punks never wanted to be -- but were in their own way. (There were some good numbers here, but the stench of death was about the project from the beginning.) Rubincam didn't outlive Elvis by much, and when he died I got my first promotion. (If it wasn't such an understatement, I'd say that life is very weird sometimes.) Anyway, the Presley piece was the first high-profile article I wrote in my pro career. People seemed to like it, and I felt like I'd arrived. Who would have thought that 20 years later the news media would be full of pro forma coverage of the anniversary of the guy's death? Forgotten in the coverage of the disciples who think that Elvis is God or, at least, the Silver Surfer, is that it all started with records and a guy trying to sing something a little different from what anybody else was singing. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Out of the loop and de-pressurized

Owing to my involuntary "early retirement" from covering the Valley's music scene, I missed Lollapalooza for the first time this year. I've never had any particular urge to have my body pierced or to get a tattoo, but I always enjoyed taking in the spectrum of edgy acts that the "alternative" festival offered. It was a big deal to me because I took some pride in having covered the very first show of the festival's first tour. I had to convince my editors that the show was going to be as big a deal as, say, a Garth Brooks concert. Not just a geek show I was right. The Lollapalooza festival became one of the '90s few "sure things" in summer pop-concert programming. Fortunately, that first year I got the conservative old Arizona Republic to cover it the same way. In subsequent years, unfortunately, the coverage was dominated more by the geek-show aspects than the musical aspect. (That's a major gripe with most mainstream media here. Popular music, however powerful its hold is on large groups of people, is treated as an aside.) Lollapalooza filled a need in an era of unadventurous radio programming by getting any number of "outsider" acts out of the clubs and onto the big stages. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but it always was an adventure, which is not something you can say about most amphitheater concerts. Smaller is better Now, I get new music in smaller doses. Covering concerts for local newspapers is out of the question, and I have little or no budget for the shows. I've got to admit, I miss them. On the other hand, after all the pressure of covering shows for a living (usually in addition to a 40-hour work week and trying to have an outside life with my family) I've got to admit I enjoy just checking out the local scene in a casual way even more. Whether I'm acting as a judge at the Arizona Amateur Blues Showdown or walking in on an act at a local festival or nightclub, life is better on a smaller stage. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Jeff Buckley: Son traced father's footsteps to life's edge

A certain yearning, ghostly quality in Chris Isaak's voice reminded me of Tim Buckley, so I asked Isaak if he was a fan. He said, "No." (So much for some of those theories "critics" espouse.) However, Isaak offered that he'd heard Buckley's son Jeff and that he was a mean guitar player. I filed that info away mentally. Even though I was a big fan, I hadn't realized that Tim Buckley had any kids. After Jeff Buckley made a little bit of a stir in subterranean New York, he signed a record contract in 1993. He soon put out an ep, LIVE AT SIN-E, and followed up with his full-length album, GRACE, in 1994. I was struck by how much he looked and sounded like his dad. Jeff Buckley's voice had that yearning, ghostly quality in spades. When I interviewed him in advance of his visit to Tempe's Mill Avenue Theater in November 1994, it became clear that he was not a fan of his dad's. Why should he be? Tim abandoned Jeff's mother, Mary, before the boy was born. His own man Jeff wasn't exactly resentful. He said he liked his father's music, but that he liked other music much more. He covered Leonard Cohen on his album. After interviewing Jeff Buckley, all I had were questions. Was his musical talent hard-wired into his genes, a present from his long-dead dad? Even though Jeff was not a fan of his dad's music, there was a similar exotic bent to their vocals and choice of chords. Is destiny a product more of nature than nurture? Jeff Buckley admitted that he wasn't happy in school, that there was no job track for him, that he lived and breathed being a musician. Just like his dad! Now that he was performing and recording he said, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world." The news of Jeff Buckley's death at age 30 on May 29 left me breathless, like a blow to the stomach. "Not again! He was so young!" Not again? Jeff Buckley only died once, drowning in the Mississippi on the edge of Memphis. Yet it did seem like a deja vu. His dad died of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol at age 28 in June of 1975. Jeff had met Tim only once, just a few weeks before the overdose. Outrunning demons When I talked to him, the son seemed determined to be stable; to outrun the demons that plagued his dad. Now, there are unresolved questions about why he drowned in the Mississippi. Some say he was a smack user. I can't imagine his mother's sadness. To lose a child at all is tough, but to lose him in a way that dredges up the long-dead past must be painful beyond belief. Jeff Buckley's career got off the ground in Greenwich Village, a place that loomed large in Tim Buckley's career development as well. Jeff's first major appearance was at a tribute to his father. He sang Tim's Once I Was, a song that asks, "Sometimes I wonder, just for a while, will you ever remember me?" Some of us will remember them for a long time and wonder if sons are always doomed to walk in their fathers' footsteps. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo