How I Got My Start

The passing of the man who assigned and accepted my first magazine piece ever. Plus: music from two duos--Simon & Garfunkel and Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris, and the one and only Bob Dylan.

A slightly different editon today, with fewer short items and then a longer look back at how the late Ed Ward gave me my first shot at rock ‘n roll criticism and a national audience.

News & Politics

Trump still banned: That Facebook board just upheld his banished status but said company should keep options open and not make ban permanent.

Jimmy Fallon: “You know Melinda Gates is thinking, ‘Finally, I can use a MacBook!’” Jimmy Kimmel: “Poor Bill Gates. He’s been sleeping in his jet. It’s very sad.”

The Onion: “Rick Santorum Relieved No One Has Asked Him About Interracial Marriage.”

Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker: “DeSantis Says Florida Will Lift Coronavirus Restrictions to Focus on Voting Restrictions.”

Tucker Carlson has a brother with an even whiter name: Buckley Carlson.

Jake Tapper went after Republicans yesterday for peddling the Big Lie: "Why should I put any of them on TV?"

Sexual reeling? Covid numbing trumped opportunity. NY Times reveals today:

Early in the pandemic, there was speculation that the major changes in the life of American families could lead to a recovery in the birthrate, as couples hunkered down together. In fact, they appeared to have had the opposite effect: Births were down most sharply at the end of the year, when babies conceived at the start of the pandemic would have been born. Births declined by about 8 percent in December compared with the same month the year before, a monthly breakdown of government data showed. December had the largest decline of any month. Over the entire year, births declined by 4 percent, the data showed.

Flying saucers? The Pentagon’s inspector general is looking into the actions the military has taken to address the spate of UFO sightings in recent years involving high performance aircraft that violated military airspace. The probe comes as Congress awaits a public report, due next month, from national security agencies, and advocates complain that some departments and agencies are not fully cooperating by sharing data.

Cheney on way out? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on a hot mic criticizing Rep. Liz Cheney, whose GOP leadership position is on the ropes. In off-air audio of a Tuesday morning Fox News appearance obtained by Axios, McCarthy could be heard telling host Steve Doocy of the Wyoming congresswoman, “I’ve had it with her.” Many GOPers in House pushing for horrid New Yorker, Elise Stefanik. One wag: “The fix is in.”

Proud Chinese: “Proud Boys saw wave of contributions from Chinese diaspora before Capitol attack.”

Music

News emerged yesterday that well-known music writer and historian Ed Ward died suddenly last Saturday in Austin at the age of 72. He suffered from several ailments, including being near-broke despite his many books and long career. I never met Ed but we were Facebook friends and last year I even contributed a few bucks when he reached out for desperately needed funds (he had the Freelancer Blues). Before moving back to Austin a few years ago he had lived in Berlin for quite some time so we also corresponded about our connections to that city, where he sometimes gave tours of remnants of the Wall to well-known visitors.

But also: Ed Ward gave me my start in writing—at least for a national audience.

Back in the early spring of 1970, I was nearing the end of my senior year in college as a journalism major and undecided about whether to take a “straight” job at a daily newspaper, for which I was very well trained (and even interviewed at the Washington Post)—or seek out a position at a counter-cultural publication, following my political and musical passions. I had subscribed to Rolling Stone by then and, among other books, read Crawdaddy founder Paul Williams’ seminal Outlaw Blues.

Somehow this gave me the nerve to write Rolling Stone’s new records review editor, Ed Ward (he had just succeeded Greil Marcus) about submitting a piece. He replied, sure, what do you have in mind?

I had just bought the new Simon & Garfunkel album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and considered myself something of an expert on the duo, having followed them since their early acoustic album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M and even caught them live in Buffalo in 1968. I found the latest album relatively weak, however, and kind of lifeless, despite the presence of two undeniably great songs, the title track and “The Boxer.” Never a fan of “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” and “Baby Driver.” Album featured a cover of “Bye Bye Love” as filler. And who remembers “Why Don’t You Write Me”? As for “Keep the Customer Satisfied”—I was not. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Ed said, yeah, send something along. I did not know that Jann Wenner harbored some reason for not liking Simon, or Garfunkel, or both. So I submitted the review and, lo and behold, soon got a note from Ed saying they were running it in the next issue, even though my prose was quite sophomoric. The promised pay, as I recall, was $15 or $25 for my first published piece of music criticism—and my first of any kind in a national publication. (No, I did not frame the check.)

Of course, back in the pre-Internet days, you rarely saw edits or galleys for upcoming pieces. You’d only learn an article’s fate when the actual issue showed up in your mailbox, and it took forever back then for Stone to arrive in the East from San Francisco. But when it did show up, I was thrilled, of course, to find my review and see my name in cold, black type in the back of the magazine.

Well, sort of. The magazine had spelled my first name wrong: as Gregg.

Okay, still exciting. Then the magazine (I was told) received an unusual amount of hate mail for that review. Still, I can imagine irascible Ed laughing over that.

Emboldened by my one-for-one success as a “rock critic,” I then secured (via an ad in the Village Voice) a position as news editor at an upstart challenger to Rolling Stone in New York City, called Zygote. The pay was almost non-existent but I did get to write numerous major articles and even had a serious encounter with Kurt Vonnegut, which I detailed here not long ago. Then, in early 1971, I revived the moribund Crawdaddy—where Ed Ward had worked, with Paul Williams, back around 1968. I’d remain at the magazine more or less continually for most of the rest of the decade.

For a year starting in 1972, I edited a new column tapping into the brief, new interest in classical music in some corners of the rock world after Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It was called “Going for Baroque”—with the teaser, The original longhair music brought up to date. It was written by….Ed Ward. So the circle was complete.

So thanks, Ed, for giving me a shot and a start. R.I.P., big guy. And here’s Artie & Paul with “The Boxer.”

Song Picks of the Day

On the rare occasions they’ve harmonized, Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris top almost everyone, including S & G. Here they nail a lesser known, but still great, Gram Parsons-Chris Hillman ditty, “Juanita.”

Bonus for this particular day: “I married Isis / on the fifth day of May.” Dylan, with Rolling Thunder (I saw world premiere of this song at first stop on fabled tour, October 1975).

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.