DON ARMSTRONG is a retired Associate Professor of Architecture from the Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science at Tuskegee University, USA, where he published academic writings on design pedagogy and African American architecture.
Though Armstrong enjoyed researching these architectural topics, his scholarship took a radical turn when he re-discovered music critic Ralph J. Gleason, whom he had read as a young man. After publishing two academic papers on Gleason, he has now written the first biography of this pioneering music writer, The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches from the Front.
In telling the story of this writer’s life and craft– the bells tolled finally for Gleason, all too early, aged 58 in 1975 – Armstrong draws on a number of exchanges with key media and music figures, including Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner and critics Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Joel Selvin, Ed Ward and Nat Hentoff plus jazz players John Handy and Sonny Rollins and rock stars Grace Slick and Jorma Kaukonen of the Jefferson Airplane.
Now a freelance writer and an independent scholar, Armstrong is also the creator of the Music Journalism History Facebook group, which provides an essential forum for leading music journalists and musicians and others in the music industry. He lives in coastal south Florida with his journalist wife Jessica.
The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason is published by Bloomsbury this week in hardback. A paperback edition will follow in the summer. Rock and the Beat Generation was delighted to catch up with Don Armstrong with publication imminent…
I'm interested in exploring that complex nexus between the liberal city of San Francisco, jazz, the Beats, and eventually rock music. Ralph J.Gleason is an interested bystander in the case of all these topics, I think you'd agree…
Yes.
What was Gleason's attitude to the Beats? Here was a man born in 1917, around 40 as Ginsberg’s 'Howl' erupted in San Francisco as a performance, published poem, and celebrated trial. Did he have a take on the subject?
As I discuss in The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches from the Front, Gleason had a nuanced view of the Beat movement. Having appreciated the work of Thomas Wolfe as a student at Columbia University, Gleason was predisposed to like Kerouac, a Wolfe reader himself. However, Gleason was loath to be identified as a ‘beatnik’ once that term entered the mainstream.
Pictured above: Armstrong’s new Bloomsbury edition out this week
Did Gleason recognize a link between jazz and the Beat Generation? Ferlinghetti and Kerouac, Rexroth and David Meltzer, to name only some, had a genuine interest in the potential of poetry plus jazz as a new and radical art form. Was Gleason aware of these developments?
He praised the poems of Ferlinghetti and Rexroth featured on the Cellar jazz poetry LP but felt the jazz poetry experiments failed because the poets didn’t get jazz. It is understandable when one compares the wooden performances of Ferlinghetti and Rexroth to the swinging presentation of jazz vocalists.
However, to my knowledge, Gleason wrote more about the jazz poetry movement than any other writer. He announced upcoming performances in his column and wrote lengthy pieces on it, some positive and some negative.
I might assume that Gleason was a man of liberal/progressive tendencies. Were the politics of Beat/jazz/race relevant to him in his position as a cultural commentator? It is particularly interesting to note that Lenny Bruce, sometimes bracketed with the wider Beat circle, was the subject of an obscenity trial at which Gleason testified.
Gleason’s positions ran from liberal to leftist. He opposed communism but conspired with far-left radicals starting as a college student in the 1930s. As a student, he was part of the emergent bohemian-left culture in New York City, and when he moved across the country, it was to that culture’s ‘west pole’ in San Francisco.
This milieu was somewhat apolitical – it proffered cultural rather than political means to make society less conformist, warmongering and repressed. Gleason followed this line: a lifelong Democrat, he was drawn more to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King (but felt that jazz and soul music furthered equality more than either leader).
How soon did rock enter his thinking space? I'm conscious that a nascent folk scene – Garcia, Joplin, Meltzer, Valente – was leaving a mark by the early 1960s. Was there a Damascene moment for this writer regarding the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and acid rock more generally?
In my book, I describe this as a cumulative process that began with his prescient embrace (and defense) of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. Added to this is his passionate critique of the folk music scene, including the Bay Area scene, from which many leading psych-rockers like Jerry Garcia came.
Immediately after the Beatles came to America, Gleason began writing about them, one of the first music critics to take them seriously in 1964. He covered Bay Area concerts by UK bands and rising local groups. He wrote volumes on Dylan. These columns influenced local rock musicians. When the sixties counterculture began in San Francisco, it was Gleason who had helped pave the way.
I am also interested in the fact that Gleason was already 50 by the time the Bay Area rock scene was erupting. Today, a middle-aged popular music follower is hardly unusual, but how was he perceived as an older man during this period? How did Gleason rationalize his senior age in relation to his rock tastes? How was Rolling Stone, a hip voice of the counterculture from 1967, able to accommodate an elder of the city's journalistic community?
It was unheard of for middle-aged pop music critics to embrace rock. Gleason took flak for it, but he didn’t feel a need to explain it. It was just in his nature to be drawn to the music of youth subcultures like swing music was to his generation. He loved innovation in pop music, especially when it disrupted stale social mores.
But, after he began writing for a young readership at Rolling Stone, Gleason received mixed responses about his age, from gratitude for his long view of music history to outrage when he critiqued rock star heroes. In my book, I share letters to the editor from Rolling Stone readers about Gleason’s writing.
Was there any evidence of Gleason being shaped by the New Journalism or indeed the Beats? Did figures like Hunter S. Thompson and Terry Southern, who had been affected by the looser, subjective, and personal style of Beat writing, have any bearing on Gleason's voice, do you think?
Although he never mentioned this to my knowledge, he was inspired by the vitality of improvised music, which is evident throughout my book. This influenced his writing process and style, which had great immediacy and spontaneity. My understanding is that the Beats were similarly inspired by jazz music. Gleason was drawn more to African American vernacular English and the style of dystopian novelists like Ken Kesey, Nelson Algren and Colin MacInnes than the New Journalists.
See also: ‘Book bonanza beckons: Beat & music titles in pipeline’, January 19th, 2024
Other useful sources:
Author website: https://don-armstrong.com/
Bloomsbury book page: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781501366987/
Read an excerpt: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/6597ed49f4428a00015ce944.