The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches from the Front by Don Armstrong (Bloomsbury, 2024)
By Jonah Raskin
NEAR THE END of his long and distinguished career as a journalist, a cultural critic and much more – a journey that began in New York in the 1930s – Ralph Gleason reached out to young writers like Greil Marcus to encourage them and warn them of the pitfalls that might await them. Indeed, in 2021 Marcus told Don Armstrong that not long before he died, Gleason explained at his house in Berkeley, California, ‘how hard it was to say in print what you thought – that everything conspired against your being able to tell what you really thought.’ Marcus added that he departed from his meeting with Gleason feeling ‘thrilled and shaken’.
And well he might have. For nearly half a century, Gleason had been the insider’s insider, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine with Jann Wenner, and the author of dozens and dozens of articles about the Beatles and the Stones, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, Creedence Clearwater, Van Morrison and many others.
Plus, Gleason was a savvy promoter of rock festivals, the author of incisive liner notes and a sympathetic listener who interviewed and wrote about almost all of the jazz legends of the twentieth-century, including Miles Davis, who, he wrote, represented ‘the longing of contemporary man, locked within the terrible loneliness that only a crowd can bring’, and Lester Young who he described as ‘a poet, sad-eyed, and mystical’. There wasn’t a corner of the jazz and rock worlds, which sometimes overlapped, that Gleason didn’t know from direct experience. If he couldn’t tell it straight no one could.
In the mid-1970s, Gleason astutely and candidly observed that Rolling Stone magazine ‘cruelly exploited a whole lot of young writers who were so eager to appear in the paper they were perfectly willing to be stepped on.’ Gleason himself wasn’t one of the young writers in Jann Wenner’s stable of authors that included the unparalleled Lester Bangs, who died at the age of 33. Gleason was already a veteran when he co-founded, and wrote superlative pieces for, Rolling Stone. But he, too, was stepped on, didn’t like it and said so, though at times, as he explained to Greil Marcus, he refrained from saying what he really thought and felt. It wasn't always wise to bite the hand that fed him.
Occasionally, Gleason became a kind of flack for the music industry. Two rock scholars and critics, R. Serge Denisoff and Ulf Lindbergh, both ‘criticized Gleason’s hagiographical approach’. That seems like fair criticism: Gleason could engage in hero worship. He wasn’t alone. Mick Jagger seemed godlike and so did Jimi Hendrix, especially when he performed at Woodstock.
I grew up with Leadbelly and, as a teenager, began to listen, along with many of the members of my group, to Presley and Perkins, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. Reading Don Armstrong’s book about Gleason, which is part musical biography and part cultural criticism, took me down Memory Lane. It will likely do the same for boomers. Kids who came of age with hip hop and rap will probably find the book a revelation.
It’s anything but hagiography and that’s only one of its many strengths. Nor is it a conventional biography. It doesn’t deliver what a reader might expect from a bona fide biography. In an age notorious for sex and drugs as well as rock, Armstrong hardly says a word about marijuana and sexual liberation. He mentions Gleason’s wife and daughter, but there’s little about his personal life. As the title makes clear, the book focuses on Gleason’s writings – his ‘dispatches from the Front’. It’s not meant to explore his marriage and family, and his emotional ups and downs, but it’s definitely fair and balanced.
The book is especially good when it recounts Gleason’s views on race and rock and the influence of black music on white musicians. Gleason is mighty savvy on the clashes between the ideologues and the rock’n’rollers. The index and the footnotes are impeccable and the stunning photos, many of Gleason, enhance the narrative.
Armstrong gives credit where credit is due and also holds back credit on the occasions where and when that’s appropriate. In fact, Gleason could be deaf to the music he ought to have understood and appreciated. So, at the start of 1964 he noted that if the Beatles became successful in the States ‘they will be the worst thing the British have seen since Burgoyne’. (He seems to be referring to the Hessian soldiers who fought for the British during the American Revolution of the eighteenth-century revolution.) Of Bob Dylan he wrote in 1963, ‘I am in sympathy with his protests against the Bomb and for Humanity, but I find he tends to bore me and sound oppressively mournful.’
Gleason revised his thinking about both the Beatles and Dylan and became one of their most ardent supporters. As Armstrong notes, ‘one of Gleason’s gifts was his ability to publicly change his mind about revolutionary artists.’ Gleason wasn’t afraid to use potent words like revolution and revolutionary and neither is Armstrong. Some of Armstrong’s writing is lyrical, poetical and inspired as when he remarks that Elvis Presley’s ‘singing style’ marked a ‘new high in audience nirvana’.
Page after page, Armstrong is in the audience with Gleason and with the crowds and fans, and he’s backstage, too, before and after the stars of the shows belt out their hit singles. He’s up close and personal, as well as at a distance, able to sketch the big picture and situate the music, whether bebop, the blues or rock, in the social and political climate in which they were nurtured, from the days of the Cold War and McCarthyism to Woodstock and Watergate.
Gleason began to listen to jazz as a college student at Columbia in the 1930s and quickly learned the hipster lingo. ‘Quite by accident, the other night, we got in on one of the nicest marmalade sessions we ever had the pleasure of hearing,’ he wrote of Tommy Dorsey and pals. He didn’t bother to decode ‘marmalade’, which not surprisingly refers to a ‘jam’ session when musicians play without a written score but rather improvise.
In the 1960s and 1970s, fledgling rock musicians needed an advocate especially when they were attacked by Christian conservatives as immoral and anti-social. Gleason was there with his pen and typewriter fighting the good fight.
The Life and Times of Ralph J. Gleason provides far more than the story of one man and his prodigious and exhilarating body of work. It’s also a rich and rewarding cultural and literary history of the United States from the Jazz Age of the 1920 to the 1970s and beyond. Near the very end of the book, Gleason mentions Jann Wenner’s The Masters, an anthology of interviews the Rolling Stone editor conducted with rock musicians. Wenner didn’t include a single Black performer on the grounds that not a single African-American was ‘articulate’. Shame on Wenner. In 2023, his comment led to his removal from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
One can’t fault Gleason’s reviews and views on Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey; they’re still fresh and worth reading today. When he died in 1975, the New York Times ran an obituary that called Gleason ‘a jazz critic’. Armstrong shows that he was that and a whole lot more: a bold tastemaker and a midwife of sorts who helped to give birth to rock and roll, youth culture and the revolutions of the 1960s and the 1970s.
Hail hail Ralph J. Gleason, who helped deliver at least two generations from ‘the days of old’, as Chuck Berry called them in his 1957 rock anthem. And hail hail Armstrong’s book about a music lover with big, sympathetic ears and the ability to recognize and laud genius when he saw it and heard it.
Editor’s note: Jonah Raskin is one of the most prominent voices on the US counterculture, with biographies of Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman to his name. He has also penned a fictionalised account of the moment ‘Howl’ was first performed, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955. Rock and the Beat Generation wrote about the novel as ‘Book review #2’ on September 27th, 2021.
Marvelously crafted and most thoughtful review of Gleason's biography. I thoroughly enjoyed Jonah's take on the man, the book, and its focus on the writing. Once again Jonah writes about the counterculture with affection, balance, nuance, and genuine insight. Bravo!
Jonah Raskin's American Scream : Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the making of the Best Generation
is unsurpassed -and unsurpassable,I would say -as an introduction to Ginsberg,Howl, the Beat era -and its cultural echoes, which still reverberate today -perhaps more powerfully than any of the participants and observers at the time of its arrival might have guessed... Anything Jonah Raskin writes is worth reading. I haven't read the Gleason book under review, but I have a bone to pick when it comes to Gleason -nit-pick I should say because perhaps in the grand scheme of Gleason's career it pales in significance ...BUT ...Gleason in Rolling Stone was vicious in his insistence that white people couldn't play the blues -particularly regarding Mike Bloomfield - I'm wondering if Jonah Raskin or the author of the book under review are aware if Gleason ever changed his views on that ?.Or what may have motivated his pit-bull approach on this subject - ..I'm grateful for having the opportunity to address ,even so elliptically,Jonah Raskin, whose American Scream is one of the books I will try to rescue if my house goes up in blazes.