It's Fe-BREW-ary, folks!

What a month! Salvatore Bono died! Yeah! That's my own dark secret. I shared a first name with Sonny. In the pantheon of pop, Sonny Bono was an odd one to say the least. He had a great talent for spotting a hit and for adapting to the times. Yet, as Phil Spector said of him, Bono had monster hits and didn't know what he'd done.

Spector should know. Bono came up through Spector's wall-of-sound productions.

Maybe Sonny was just humble or maybe he had more perspective than Spector did. From the outside looking in, it seems as though the pop world must have meant much more to Spector than to Bono.

In the end, conservative Sonny found his best expression in politics and with a family, rather than in show biz. You get the feeling looking back that Sonny was one of pop's working stiffs. At the end of the day, he clocked out of the silly trappings of the scene.

Still, when you think about it, his songs touted family values from the beginning. I Got You, Babe -- a sort of poor man's Bob Dylan tune -- rings with "till death do us part" fervor. His own late '60s solo record indicted all sorts of social ills, including porn palaces.

It was probably the Italian in him, but I don't think Bob Guccione would agree.

Month of dread

February makes me shiver.

And I don't mean from the cold, but from dread.

I don't dread Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day or Black History Month. I don't even dread thinking about the Grammys.

However, it's fingernails on the blackboard time when I hear radio and TV announcers say "Feb-YOU-ary" like so many kindergarteners.

The torture continues from about the middle of January and well into March.

Now, in a world of grief and pain this is not much of a problem. Still, I can't help my automatic, teeth-gritting reaction. I want to ask these people, "Do you still say "lie-BERRY" when you mean "library"?

Children might have a hard time putting together that "br" combination in the middle of a word, but to me, an adult mispronouncing "Fe-BREW-ary" sounds like a simpleton.

If that's elitist -- so be it. I think English is a great language and sometimes we ought to bother to learn it and teach it.

After all, it's the little things that mean the most.

Copyright © 1998, Salvatore Caputo

Happy New Year

Ambitious plans can become albatrosses. This web site was going to be the place where I'd continue the only part of my former job that I truly loved -- writing a column on pop music and pop culture.

Not being stuck in the stupid newspaper anymore, the column's boundaries would expand. Nothing would be out of bounds.

I would act as more of a critic since I would not be constrained by editors worried about reaching this or that audience demographic with a particular mix of coverage. I would not have to compromise my judgment to ride management's hobby horses.

For the most part, all of that has happened, and it's been a kick.

 

A little play-acting for my friends

Kicks aside, though, I had made a commitment with the web site that became a struggle to keep in the last quarter of 1997. I thought I could update the site once a week, adding to the online clips file, pointing out upcoming events and, highest on my list, writing this column.

That wasn't to be. When I checked in to do a little "housecleaning" today, I realized I hadn't visited the site since November. As anyone can see, as of today, 57 visitors have been to this site since September.

Obviously, I'm doing a little play-acting when writing for a site with so few readers.

At the newspaper, I had the luxury of knowing that 600,000 newspapers were in people's hands on any given Sunday when the column appeared. In the weird math of circulation departments, that translated to maybe 2 million people potentially taking a look at my words.

I knew that a very small percentage of those readers turned to the Arts Plus pages to read my column, but I also knew it was more than 57 readers per quarter.

Be it resolved that ...

So I'm making a New Year's resolution to market this web site more aggressively, and to keep up with it on a weekly basis once again.

As media conglomerates become increasingly greedy and conformist (Hey! Your bottom line might go down if you don't feed people the farina they want!) -- the emergence of the web as a vehicle for independent criticism seems wonderful. Yet, it's clear that even here the muscle belongs to those whose mouths are full of the mush of marketing for marketing's sake -- the people whose subservience to profit daily grinds meaning out of existence.

It's windmill-tilting time. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Copyright © 1998, Salvatore Caputo

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