I'm afraid to see this movie. Young Greenwich Villagers used to belong to one of two camps. My boyfriend was one of very few with a foot in each, jazz and folk. I was of the jazz persuasion, but Jerry was so excited over a folk musician who just hit town I let him drag me over to Gerde's a.couple of weeks after Dylan crossed the Hudson. I simply didn't get him till after my brother (a Mountain Stage co-founder) made me listen to the pre-Sullivan Beatles. In time, I moonlighted as a rock critic, but somehow that wasted night at Gerde's is still the only time I ever saw Dylan live.
Wow, quite the life tale! You should write about seeing both Dylan and pre-Sullivan Fab Four. And do go see the film. It’s also a wonderful evocation of old Greenwich Village neighborhood. Who was your brother? I followed Mountain Stage from its founding through to its maturity as a longtime A&E editor. And where did you publish rock criticism? You’re welcome to email me. Peace outwards.
Whoops—didn't mean to imply I ever saw the Beatles. I didn't. I was back-of-the-book editor of the Village Voice when I got drafted to fill the void after Richard Goldstein quit to write elsewhere. I was unqualified but since it would let me hear a lot of live music free I conceptualized the Riffs column so any number could play. I did the gig for a year '68-'69 till I fired myself. I'd heard and said enough. Spent '69-'70 listening to Satie. I doubt I'll see the movie. it's too mixed up with my real life. I can't read books about the Voice either. Too close to home and I can't bear the inaccuracies. I don't want to drop my brother's name, but if I tell you he was a sound engineer who was good friends with Larry in Elkins you should have a good idea who he was since that doesn't describe Andy Ridenauer.
PS: Was a faithful reader of the Voice in my teens and 20s. Its style of writing and coverage influenced the career writer, essayist and editor I became.
That would have pleased VV founding editor Dan Wolf no end. I think he would have loved the notion of a Gaz writer and editor whose work he had influenced remotely.
A journalism degree was an undeclared disqualification for Voice employment—to the dismay of successive young writers. That training was intended to squeeze exactly the qualities Dan valued—p.o.v., a distinctive voice—out of wannabe writers. I snuck in with a WVU Jschool degree because when I started the stars were lined up for me to prove that everything i'd learned about putting out a WV country weekly applied equally to putting out a big-city neighborhood weekly. The only things Dan ever wrote—painfully—were election editorials, so it neither helped or hurt that I never wanted to be a writer, which when done for pay just takes too much out of me.
Dan literally had a shelf of books dedicated to him, starting with Mailer's 'DeerPark.' Yet the only writer he ever seriously sat down and edited, every week, was Mary Perot Nichols, a world-class local reporter who never pretended to be able to write. More typical was Lucian Truscott, whose Dylan substack I recommended in an earlier comment. While still a West Point cadet he started writing letters to the editor that Dan got him to refocus as news. After Truscott wrote his way out of his commission during the Vietnam war (reporting—NEVER antiwar screeds) Dan had a job waiting.
Dan's "editing" amounted to gently rechanneling your thinking when you weren't looking. He changed my life and others close-up directly, and from afar many more he only intuited. Sensing that could be what keeps drawing me back to whatever you're doing. I don't follow anything else related to West VIrginia.
I specifically avoided pursuing a journalism degree when I went off from my Cincinnati home to Miami University (got one in English, with a minor in Political Science). Was a staff writer for the student newspaper, The Miami Student, (not so affectionately known as 'The Miami Stupid') within weeks of landing on campus. Learn by doing, I say. Not earning the Student newspaper editorship my junior year (they went with an equally competent pal of mine) changed my life. I fell in love with a woman who was headed back to Ireland after her junior year — I was a footloose graduating senior — and so followed her to Dublin. Heading off on (in my head) a Lord Byron-like Grand Tour and the international writer's life I felt was my destiny. Didn't turn out that way. The rest of the tale to be told in my 'sorta memoir,' 'CRAZY DAYS.' Thanks for this inside peek into the Voice and your own life's unfolding. The Village Voice — to a too-well-read kid in a north Cincinnati suburb and hungering to be part of a larger conversation — reassured me that my mind and heart were not alone in the world.
As Margeurite Yourcenar wrote in “Memoirs of Hadrian” (and I would add great magazines and journals such as the Voice in it heyday to her 'books' line):
“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”
I'm afraid to see this movie. Young Greenwich Villagers used to belong to one of two camps. My boyfriend was one of very few with a foot in each, jazz and folk. I was of the jazz persuasion, but Jerry was so excited over a folk musician who just hit town I let him drag me over to Gerde's a.couple of weeks after Dylan crossed the Hudson. I simply didn't get him till after my brother (a Mountain Stage co-founder) made me listen to the pre-Sullivan Beatles. In time, I moonlighted as a rock critic, but somehow that wasted night at Gerde's is still the only time I ever saw Dylan live.
Wow, quite the life tale! You should write about seeing both Dylan and pre-Sullivan Fab Four. And do go see the film. It’s also a wonderful evocation of old Greenwich Village neighborhood. Who was your brother? I followed Mountain Stage from its founding through to its maturity as a longtime A&E editor. And where did you publish rock criticism? You’re welcome to email me. Peace outwards.
Whoops—didn't mean to imply I ever saw the Beatles. I didn't. I was back-of-the-book editor of the Village Voice when I got drafted to fill the void after Richard Goldstein quit to write elsewhere. I was unqualified but since it would let me hear a lot of live music free I conceptualized the Riffs column so any number could play. I did the gig for a year '68-'69 till I fired myself. I'd heard and said enough. Spent '69-'70 listening to Satie. I doubt I'll see the movie. it's too mixed up with my real life. I can't read books about the Voice either. Too close to home and I can't bear the inaccuracies. I don't want to drop my brother's name, but if I tell you he was a sound engineer who was good friends with Larry in Elkins you should have a good idea who he was since that doesn't describe Andy Ridenauer.
PS: Was a faithful reader of the Voice in my teens and 20s. Its style of writing and coverage influenced the career writer, essayist and editor I became.
That would have pleased VV founding editor Dan Wolf no end. I think he would have loved the notion of a Gaz writer and editor whose work he had influenced remotely.
A journalism degree was an undeclared disqualification for Voice employment—to the dismay of successive young writers. That training was intended to squeeze exactly the qualities Dan valued—p.o.v., a distinctive voice—out of wannabe writers. I snuck in with a WVU Jschool degree because when I started the stars were lined up for me to prove that everything i'd learned about putting out a WV country weekly applied equally to putting out a big-city neighborhood weekly. The only things Dan ever wrote—painfully—were election editorials, so it neither helped or hurt that I never wanted to be a writer, which when done for pay just takes too much out of me.
Dan literally had a shelf of books dedicated to him, starting with Mailer's 'DeerPark.' Yet the only writer he ever seriously sat down and edited, every week, was Mary Perot Nichols, a world-class local reporter who never pretended to be able to write. More typical was Lucian Truscott, whose Dylan substack I recommended in an earlier comment. While still a West Point cadet he started writing letters to the editor that Dan got him to refocus as news. After Truscott wrote his way out of his commission during the Vietnam war (reporting—NEVER antiwar screeds) Dan had a job waiting.
Dan's "editing" amounted to gently rechanneling your thinking when you weren't looking. He changed my life and others close-up directly, and from afar many more he only intuited. Sensing that could be what keeps drawing me back to whatever you're doing. I don't follow anything else related to West VIrginia.
I specifically avoided pursuing a journalism degree when I went off from my Cincinnati home to Miami University (got one in English, with a minor in Political Science). Was a staff writer for the student newspaper, The Miami Student, (not so affectionately known as 'The Miami Stupid') within weeks of landing on campus. Learn by doing, I say. Not earning the Student newspaper editorship my junior year (they went with an equally competent pal of mine) changed my life. I fell in love with a woman who was headed back to Ireland after her junior year — I was a footloose graduating senior — and so followed her to Dublin. Heading off on (in my head) a Lord Byron-like Grand Tour and the international writer's life I felt was my destiny. Didn't turn out that way. The rest of the tale to be told in my 'sorta memoir,' 'CRAZY DAYS.' Thanks for this inside peek into the Voice and your own life's unfolding. The Village Voice — to a too-well-read kid in a north Cincinnati suburb and hungering to be part of a larger conversation — reassured me that my mind and heart were not alone in the world.
As Margeurite Yourcenar wrote in “Memoirs of Hadrian” (and I would add great magazines and journals such as the Voice in it heyday to her 'books' line):
“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”