The Best Music Writer You Never Heard Of
Rock history is littered with coulda-shoulda-woulda bands who through some unkind cocktail of music biz politics, bad timing, and self-sabotage turned out to be, say, the Pretty Things instead of oh, the Rolling Stones. While the superiority of one act is a matter of personal preference, their respective levels of fame and fortune are not open to debate. So does the same apply to music criticism? Its leading lights have been codified and canonized, from wham-bam Bangs to holy Greil. Lost among the huff'n'shuffle are the invaluable scribblings of the late great John L. Wasserman.
As a daily columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964 to 1979, "Wassy" was in the right place at the right time. His beat encompassed not only the Haight-Ashbury rock scene of Janis Joplin, Moby Grape et al. (he described the fans at a 1972 Grateful Dead concert as "throwing their hands into the air like thousands of tiny shrimp waggling in a wading pool"), but also Left Coast jazz, avant-garde theatre, porno movies and stand-up comedy. Wasserman weighed it all with a crucial combo of core respect and total irreverence, and not necessarily apportioned as one might imagine--his February 13, 1976 column entitled "Open Letter To Lily Tomlin" alerts the comedienne to the fact that there's a new singer named Patti Smith out there ripping off Tomlin's Sister Boogie Woman character wholesale.
Wasserman died in a drunk driving accident in 1979 at age 40. Had he lived, he might stand atop the pantheon of great music writers. He still should. Though he never completed a book, a collection of his selected columns, Praise, Vilification & Sexual Innuendo: Or, How To Be A Critic, languishes out of print but is well worth tracking down. It includes first person reminiscences about Wasserman from the disparate likes of Woody Allen and Joan Baez, and the consistency of its wide-ranging brilliance remains unmatched. Where else can you go to read about Indian sarod mastery (Ali Akbar Khan "played each note as if it were an entire symphony in itself") and topless dancing (burlesquer Swimmer Dee Dee "rose to the occasion like General Meade facing Pickett's charge and whipped off her top") in a single tome?
Riddled with puns and ribald one-liners, it's hard to believe that Wasserman's columns were ever published by a major American daily newspaper. His pointillist brilliance, pithy but never measly, is more accessible than the writing of not-so-distant gonzo cousin Hunter S. Thompson. And in our present time, when elder rock critics often resemble stuffy dons handing out letter grades to students they can't relate to, Wasserman remains a lesson in wry humility and open-mindedness ("He never assumed he knew it all," remarked friend Clint Eastwood). Which is not to say that Wassy, between frequent fistfights with legendary Fillmore promoter Bill Graham, didn't rack up the numbers. In one of his final columns, "The Big Four-Oh," Wasserman estimated his career output at 1.85 million words. And then he demolishes the notion of that capstone as worth commemorating: "And sew what? A new caftan?"
That Patti Smith/Sister Boogie Woman screed in full...
And here's his savage review of Grease...
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