When the great bandleader Duke Ellington died in 1974, longtime Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason (March 1, 1917 – June 3, 1975) wrote a lengthy appreciation for Rolling Stone. Gleason, who began his career writing about jazz and popular music back in the 1930s, co-founded the countercultural magazine with Jann Wenner in 1967.
Near the end of the piece, Gleason quoted French poet Blaise Cendrars, who once saw the Ellington orchestra perform in Europe: “Such music is not only a new art form but a new reason for living.” Though Gleason, who died in 1975 at age 58, was much older than his colleagues in the rock world of the 1960s and ’70s, he never stopped living through the music of American youth.
Gleason is often noted as one of the first music critics to take rock ’n’ roll seriously. Nearly 50 years after his death, he gets a reverential biography that doubles as a glimpse into the changing tastes of record buyers in the mid-20th century. “The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason” is an academic publication (and priced as such), but music fans who remember the names of the writers who made a difference may want to take a look.
Gleason’s early education took place at Columbia University and in the jazz clubs of New York City, but he became a part of the San Francisco fabric after moving across the country in the mid-1940s. He was on hand for, and often instrumental in, many of the landmark events of his adopted city’s cultural awakening — from the performance poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the founding of the Monterey Jazz Festival to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which kicked off 1967’s Summer of Love.
“His sense for watersheds minor and major was extraordinary,” said activist Michael Rossman. Gleason considered himself an activist of sorts, writing about race relations, rampant consumerism and the inadequacies of partisan politics without ever falling out of earshot of the music.
Reviewing a Miles Davis concert, Gleason wrote that the trumpeter played “the whole line of a ballad through once, slowly, and breathily with infinite tenderness and beauty before blasting it joyously into a thousand shimmering pieces in a wildly swinging second chorus.” (Gleason would later write the liner notes to Davis’ jazz fusion masterpiece, “Bitches Brew.”) When, in the mid-1950s, he favorably compared a rockabilly newcomer named Johnny Cash to the better-known Elvis Presley, Cash pocketed a clipping of the review and carried it with him for years.
Here’s Gleason explaining his theory about why the psychedelic rock of the “San Francisco Sound” became the soundtrack of a generation:
“In a culture of noise — not just the jets roaring overhead and the trucks thundering on the streets, but the cyclic noise of the crashing of institutions and assumptions and conventions, the whole crescendo of a collapsing civilization — the only peace seems to be in the middle of an even greater sound in which a special kind of sonic high is produced and a new kind of one-to-one communication occurs.”
Like most writers, Gleason had his trademark tics, some of which pile up over the course of Armstrong’s narrative. He routinely compared musicians to innovators in other artistic fields — Lenny Bruce, James Baldwin, Shakespeare. He dressed the part he created, in trench coats, tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, smoking a pipe. Later in life he adopted a handlebar mustache.
At Rolling Stone, Gleason was decades older than his fellow contributors. His distaste for radicalism and his nostalgia for the swing bands of his own youth sometimes found them at odds. But they also thought of him as a sage — Wenner, for instance, was one of many future notables who spent countless hours at the Gleason family home on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley.
If there was one piece of wisdom Gleason handed down, it always came down to surrendering to the music. Near the end of the book, Armstrong quotes Jon Landau, the former rock critic who went on to become Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager. One night, on the phone with Gleason, he mentioned that he was about to head out to a Neil Young show.
“Have a ball,” Gleason said.
“That was Ralph,” Landau recalled. “As long as the subject was music, he was having a ball.”
Source: James Sullivan, The San Francisco Chronicle
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