2021 Obit: Ed Ward:Music Journalist/Rock Historian

Subject: Obit: Ed Ward: Music Journalist / Rock Historian
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 May 21 - 05:24 PM

I was sorry to hear of the death of Ed Ward, the voice I heard over the years on National Public Radio WHYY's Fresh Air as he reviewed music. He was considered a Rock Historian, but his oeuvre was broader than rock.

'Fresh Air' Remembers Rock Historian Ed Ward

Ward, who died this week, is remembered as one of the first people to write seriously about rock 'n' roll. He wrote for Rolling Stone and Creem and was Fresh Air's rock historian from 1987 until 2017.

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Transcript

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. We got some sad news this week. Music, art and food writer Ed Ward died at the age of 72. He has an important place in the history of rock criticism and an important place in the history of our show. When FRESH AIR was making the transition from a local show in Philadelphia to a daily national NPR program and we were scouting for reviewers and commentators, we asked Ed Ward if he'd be interested in doing a weekly piece on the history of rock 'n' roll. That was a really smart move on our part. He was our rock historian from 1987 until 2017, sharing music he loved.

He knew the history of the blues, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, pop, folk, protest and psychedelic music, soul, funk, Tex-Mex, punk and techno. In 30 years with our show, he never ran out of ideas or great music. He talked about the most famous musicians, like Chuck Berry and the Beatles, and the most obscure, musicians and bands that worked in the shadows of the music industry and never got their due. He told us about musicians who had one brilliant recording and were never heard from again. There were stories about overcoming the odds, and stories that ended tragically. But always in Ed's pieces, there was great music.

Ed has been described as one of the first people to write seriously about rock 'n' roll. In 1966, he started writing for the early rock magazine Crawdaddy. He became the reviews editor for Rolling Stone in 1970 and for most of the '70s, wrote for the music magazine Creem. At the end of that decade, he moved to Austin and became the music critic at the Austin American-Statesman. In '84, he moved over to the Austin Chronicle, where he wrote about food.

He was one of three authors of the 1987 book "Rock Of Ages: The Rolling Stone History Of Rock & Roll," in which he wrote the chapters about the earliest years of the music up to 1960. Ed was one of the first staff members of South by Southwest, the annual music conference that has become a major music industry gathering and showcase. He wrote two recent books, "The History Of Rock & Roll, Volume 1" and "Volume 2."

During the nearly 20 years he lived abroad in Germany and France, he managed to keep recording pieces for us. Early in his time with FRESH AIR, back in 1988, we invited him to be interviewed on our show so that we and our listeners who heard him every week would get to know more about him. This is what Ed told me about how he first started listening to rock 'n' roll.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ED WARD: I can blame this on a kid named Jeffrey Schlosberg (ph), who I was going to school with in third grade or maybe second. He came into school and said, you know, you better watch out because my brother's turned into a rock. I'd never heard this term before. In fact, it's a fairly localized one. But essentially what had happened was his brother was in high school and he had decided to become a hood, and he'd gotten himself a Harley Davidson and a leather jacket.

And so I figured, well, you know, this was a guy whose right side I wanted to be on. So I went over to Jeffrey's house after school. And we went into his sister's room, and he played a bunch of records that he said would help me understand what this whole phenomenon was about.

GROSS: What did he play for you?

WARD: Well, he played a lot of Elvis Presley records. And to me, he sounded like some sort of amphibian singing at the bottom of a well or something.

GROSS: (Laughter).

WARD: I really didn't like him at all. And he played - oh, let's see. I think there was some Buddy Holly in there. And the stuff I responded to best, I guess, back in those days was what has come to be known as doo-wop - you know, Black harmony singing. I think that was probably because I was in the church choir, and I really liked to sing. And you'd hear one of these records on the radio, and you could sing along with it. You could, like, find a part in there that you could sing and harmonize with it.

GROSS: How did you find out about Black music?

WARD: Well, it was on the radio. I mean, in those days, believe it or not, Top 40 radio was integrated, very much unlike what it is these days. If a record isn't made with a specific crossover intent these days, you generally won't hear it on Top 40. But in those days, rock 'n' roll radio consisted of - well, there was even country music on rock 'n' roll radio in those days, people like Don Gibson. And that stuff was very much what country people were listening to. And the Black stuff, like Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers or the Moonglows or people like that, were very much what Black people were listening to.

GROSS: Did you go through periods of abandoning rock 'n' roll for other music?

WARD: Oh, yeah. During the early '60s, I got disgusted with rock 'n' roll radio because there was less Black music being played and more stupid music manufactured for teenagers kind of thing, the infamous Philadelphia sound of Fabian, Frankie Avalon and all that garbage. I remember one day I just got so mad, I twisted the dial as hard as I could, and the dial spun all the way down to the end. And I hit WQXR, which was the classical station in New York City, and began listening to classical music pretty much from that moment on. At about that same time, I befriended a pair of twins who were in my junior high school. And their parents had been heavy leftists, and the kids were really into folk music. And we used to go into New York City and see Pete Seeger. And I really got into the folk thing at that point and pretty much stayed that way until I went to college in 1965.

GROSS: And then what?

WARD: Well, then I came home for Christmas vacation, and my best friend's little brother started making fun of me for being a folkie. And he said, well, you know, the Rolling Stones have recorded a protest song. I said, yeah, sure. You know, the Rolling Stones are just a bunch of commercial pop music mongers. And - but he put on "Satisfaction," and I thought, well, gee, that's a pretty catchy record. So I started listening more to rock 'n' roll at that point.

GROSS: So the Rolling Stones drew you back into rock 'n' roll.

WARD: Yeah. Yeah, the Rolling Stones - and shortly after that, I guess "Rubber Soul" came out, and I thought, well, this is sort of the Beatles doing folk music. And it was just - it was a good time to get back into it. I guess by about 1966, I was really heavily back into it. And I still think of that as, along with 1957, one of the true golden years of rock 'n' roll because it was just before rock 'n' roll lost its innocence, before the calculatedness came back into it and the - sort of people all grasping to become huge stars. There was a lot of really great records that came out in 1966 that were real innocent because nobody really knew what was happening, but they were doing it anyway.

GROSS: How did you start writing about rock music?

WARD: I'd been at school for about three weeks, and I was already bored. This was college. And I was a subscriber to a folk music magazine in New York. And I started sending them book and record reviews, and they printed them. And I thought, well, gee, you know, I've always wanted to be a writer, which is, you know, still the case. And here I am being a writer. So at one point, I was living in New York City, and I read a piece in The Village Voice about Crawdaddy magazine, which had just moved to town from Boston. That was January 1967. So what happened was I wound up moving into the Crawdaddy offices and writing for them. And in about, oh, late 1969, I got a copy of Rolling Stone magazine, and there was a call for writers there. And so I submitted some stuff and started publishing and haven't really stopped since.

GROSS: When you say you moved into the Crawdaddy offices, I have a feeling you mean literally (laughter).

WARD: Oh, yeah.

GROSS: Like, you really lived there (laughter).

WARD: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We had this great loft on 6th Avenue, great big old floor, and we just scavenged a couple of mattresses. And that was - you know, we all lived and worked there.

GROSS: Now, in Philadelphia, where I live, there's a new proliferation of oldies stations, of stations that only play music from the '60s, basically, early through late '60s. And I wonder if you think that this is a good trend or a bad trend. I know that it's happening to some degree around the country.

WARD: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the largest growing radio format that exists at this point. And that - I find that to be really chilling because their view of rock 'n' roll history is an ugly one. I mean, you're not going to hear The Moonglows. You're not going to hear The "5" Royales. You're not going to hear anything obscure or anything that's, like, too ethnic. It's a very carefully managed, very carefully selected view of the past on those stations, and I really don't like that.

GROSS: On FRESH AIR, we think of you as a historian of rock 'n' roll, but I bet you listen to a lot of contemporary rock music.

WARD: Oh, I listen mostly to contemporary rock music. It's only when I have to do these shows that I pull out...

GROSS: (Laughter) We make you go back to those old records.

WARD: I pull out the old records and go, geez.

(LAUGHTER)

WARD: No, I mean, one of the great things about right now is that a lot of the great records of the past are being remastered and reissued. And to that extent, I'm not a record collector nerd, you know? If somebody finds one of my favorite records and remasters it and puts it out on a clean pressing, hey, I'd rather have that than the original.

GROSS: Ed, it was really nice to talk with you.

WARD: Oh, it was great talking with you.

GROSS: My interview with Ed Ward was recorded in 1988. He wrote about music from many publications and was FRESH AIR's rock historian from 1987 to 2017. His death was reported earlier this week. He was 72. We're grateful for the recordings, stories and insights he shared with us over the years.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER")

THE 5 ROYALES: (Singing) Yaki taki oowah, yaki taki oowah, yaki taki yaki taki yaki taki. Right around the corner, that's where my baby stays. Right around the corner, that's where my baby stays. And I can get to my honey's house 15 different ways. Yaki taki oowah, yaki taki oowah, yaki taki yaki taki yaki taki. Well, I can go around the side. I can cut through the back. I broke a picket off the fence.

GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley, Kayla Lattimore and Joel Wolfram. Our associate producer of digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Therese Madden directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER")

THE 5 ROYALES: (Singing) Yaki taki.

Subject: RE: Obit: Ed Ward: Music Journalist / Rock Historian
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 May 21 - 05:46 PM

From the Austin Chronicle. Ward lived in Austin after many years of living abroad.


The Table Ed Ward Built

Pioneering music journalist (1948-2021) wrote rock & roll history

In 1964, when the New Yorker (born Nov. 2, 1948) began scribbling prose for mimeographed folk fanzine Broadside at the age of 16, rock & roll ranked right up there with newsprint at the bottom of the birdcage or litter pan: utterly disposable. Teen Beat and 16 ruled the day with “fab pix and fax,” but Ward lit out for an entirely unexplored musical universe the moment Bob Dylan strapped on a Fender Stratocaster and hired young white Chicagoan Mike Bloomfield to issue slashing, bluesy voltage across his new records.

Ward turned toward another mimeographed rag published out of “an apartment above a Greek deli on Sixth Avenue,” he told me in a 2019 interview. Helmed by 18-year-old music obsessive Paul Williams, Crawdaddy boasted a brand new Village Voice profile when Ward bumped into the “jangly, mop-headed kid with a buncha magazines under his arm” at a Judy Collins/Tom Rush gig at Town Hall. Needing a job, Ward waved his girlfriend’s possession of galleys for Bob Dylan’s book Tarantula under Williams’ nose.

Likely the first periodical lending this pimply electric jive any gravitas, Crawdaddy treated its subject and those like him with previously unknown earnestness. No one took rock ‘n’ roll seriously. Now appeared writers applying critical theory to the genre the same way Pauline Kael applied scholarship to film.

As such, musicians like John Lennon and Mick Jagger paid attention to what writers like Ed Ward wrote. Even industry pillars like Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler developed friendships with this new breed of writer, picking their brains about this culture. That platform still exists, thrives even, albeit less in print and more in bytes, but cultural shifters continue to bear weight.

After a healthy two-year run at Crawdaddy that included overseeing an iteration of then-college student Richard Meltzer’s term paper “Aesthetics of Rock” for the magazine, Ward found himself at loose ends again after a 1967 West Coast sortie. Setting a pattern in his early life and career, he instantly resurfaced as record review editor for Jann Wenner’s new rock & counterculture weekly, Rolling Stone. Hired at the suggestion of the position’s originator, Greil Marcus, who journeyed back to college to get his Master’s Degree, Ward ignored the owner’s warning about a weird shoe salesman in El Cajon, California.

“Lester [Bangs] had already been there,” Ward recalled. “Jann warned about a couple of the people he’d been using. He said, ‘This guy sends stuff every day! You can’t keep up with it. You can only accept what seems to be the best, and don’t encourage him.’ I did encourage him by accepting a few of his things. So I was inundated!

“When I was fired, one of the things I left behind was two or three reel-to-reel tapes of Lester interviewing Charles Mingus. I had no idea who Mingus was. I just thought, ‘Oh, this is more shit from Lester!’ So I just left it there. Now I’m curious what that interview was like.”

Ward continued, an oral history of rock & roll journalism pouring out of him.

“I got some early issues of Creem when it was a tabloid, and I liked Dave Marsh’s writing. So when Creem briefly folded, I told Dave, ‘If you’d like to write something for Rolling Stone, let me know.’ Wenner flipped out. He said, ‘What are you doing subsidizing the editor of a competition magazine?!’ I said, ‘Was it competition? They folded. I don’t think they’ll be back. Don’t worry about it. He’s just a bright kid who needs an outlet. He’s good, and he knows stuff that other people don’t.’”

Ward quit RS in Oct. ‘71. His largesse towards Marsh led to getting hired as the newly-relaunched Creem’s West Coast correspondent.

“Back in those days, writers would get ahold of one another when there was something new,’ reflected Ward. “There was no territorialism or any of that happening.”

Texas Monthly rock scribe Joe Nick Patoski got ahold of Ward when The Austin American-Statesman needed a music critic. This drew him here from San Francisco in 1979. He remained at the local daily through the early Eighties. His reign there ended via two events: A book contract to write “all the Fifties stuff” for a new Rolling Stone rock history book (Wenner’s vendetta now apparently soothed); and pseudonymously contributing to a new underground local rag run by a ragtag crew Ward met around Austin punk palace Raul’s.

Henceforth, Ward wrote for this publication, while simultaneously beginning his decades-long run with NPR as Fresh Air’s resident rock historian.

I first encountered Ward a few months before relocating to Austin in the summer of 1991, covering my first SXSW for Alternative Press. Ward proved a key staffer, barrelling around the conference in a colonel’s uniform. It was comical to those who knew him, but rather intimidating to a young rock journalist from a small Texas town who only knew him via his substantial back catalog, especially his work on the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll’s second edition.

When I arrived at the Chronicle offices at age 24 after unsolicited record reviews sent to then-Music Editor Brent Grulke ran one issue – full of myself after having written for national magazines for five years – Ward razzed me constantly. The upperclassman deflated the brash upstart between classes. Then, at that year’s office Christmas party, I sat on a couch he commandeered.

“Hey, Ed,” I chirped, “I just got this Ricky Nelson double-album compilation from ’73 with your liner notes.”

“Oh, yes!” he yelped. “The Legendary Masters series. That was the brainchild of [name redacted]. He was this horrible chickenhawk whose office at United Artists Records overlooked Hollywood High. So he’d be sizing up all these young boys as they got out of school at 3pm.”

At that moment, Ed Ward gave me a seat at the table.

He began assigning me book reviews, until Margaret Moser assumed that editorship. And she made sure to keep assigning me from that desk. I would only see him at SXSW after that, since he moved to Berlin. Even then, however, Col. Ward kept up with my work, charting my progress.

“You’ve gotten good,” he told me in 1996. “Really good.”

He would have known, too. Witness this gem from his essay “Italo-American Rock” in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: “You see, these guys never forgot their own golden era. In 1964, in the white urban ghettos of New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, while the rest of the world was getting onto the Beatles, a bunch of collectors and nostalgics staunchly clung to the old sounds. In northern New Jersey, a full-fledged acapella revival took place. A lot of young Italian kids got into it, and a lot of Puerto Rican kids, too, and Eddie Gries, one of the big promoters of the revival, inveighed against, ‘...the mass brainwashing of the public [by] imported English garbage.’

“I’m sure he still believes it. He may even be right.”

Or how about this brief encapsulation at James Brown’s arrival at a new sound?

“He stepped up to the mike and shouted, ‘It’s a HIT!’ and the band started a minimalist groove, with the bass out front. The lyrics were nothing much, mostly a recitation of dances leading up to a quick stum on the guitar and Brown announcing, “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.’ They worked on it for seven minutes, with a long saxophone solo by Maceo Parker, whose drummer brother, Melvin, anchored the tight strings of the brass.

“In July, with a brand-new contract with King [Records], Brown edited this epic down to two minutes and six seconds, sticking the rest on the B-side, and he was back on top of the charts, even making Top 10 on the pop charts. When that died down, he pulled out another session he’d done in Florida in May with more or less the same template, ‘I Got You (I Feel Good).’ Neither record sounded like anything anyone else was doing.

“Miles Davis was running around playing them for his friends. It was a new bag indeed.”

Ed Ward never stopped writing with this flair nor this scholarship. When I returned from a 15-year sabbatical from music writing, he literally welcomed me back to the table. I returned to SXSW in 2013, basically exhumed from self-imposed limbo by the Chronicle to profile the reformed True Believers and cover that year’s conference.

I rounded the corner at the Convention Center and found seated around a table several of my elders in this discipline: Patoski, Bill Bentley, Jim Fouratt, and... Ed Ward. All grinned, happy to see me after all these years. Ward pulled out a chair and invited me to join them.

At last, I had a seat at the grown folks’ table.

Ward mostly enjoyed a remarkable last few years in Austin again. I sat with him at the kitchen table in his South Austin rental twice. The first occasion coincided with the 2016 revision and expansion of Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero, a book hampered when its original publisher folded a week after its original issue in 1983.

The second, in November 2019, involved the aforementioned second part of The History of Rock & Roll. On both occasions, he treated me with a jovialness and generosity, full of hilarious anecdotes. He shared a story about his first attempt at interviewing Doug Sahm while at Rolling Stone:

“I went to somewhere in Marin County where he was living and hung out with him and talked. But I never really got around to a formal interview. I came back to the office and sat there thinking, ‘I am fucked, I am fucked… .’

“So Jann shows up at the front of my cubicle and he says, ‘So, did you get the interview?’ So I was like [mumbles]. And he was trying so hard not to laugh!

“He said, ‘He made you smoke pot, didn’t he?’ I said, ‘Well, um, um….’ He said, ‘He does that to everybody. I’ve never been able to get a decent interview with him.’”

I asked whether the first volume of his remarkable rock history – which reported events sequentially, annually, starting with the advent of the phonograph and popular music, rather than a series of profiles of the major artists – had sold.

“No, it was sabotaged,” he reported from across the table. “Fresh Air refused to have me on after 30 years of talking about this particular subject on the air for very little money for them. It killed the book and killed my career. This year, I have made just over $1,000 from writing.

“All I can hope is that I get to do this third volume. I did the first volume, then Chuck Berry and all these other people died. Various things came up, like the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, but my phone just lay there. Nobody wanted to talk to me about any of it.

“So, that’s it.”

I got him to pick up that phone some six months later, COVID-19 pandemic raging. I’d been attempting to transition into books myself, working on an Austin punk history serialized in the Chronicle. The man who welcomed me to rock & roll’s Algonquin Round Table told me he would walk me through the process of netting a book deal, even introducing me to his literary agent.

Disgracefully, COVID slowed everyone’s business. Despite my serialization derailing thanks to low page counts, I called Ward to see if his offer still stood. It did, but he had lost his book deal on the rock history series. Volume Two sold even less than the first, and the publisher reportedly told Ward’s agent he had wasted enough money and was done with the project.

Monday night, after some friends became concerned they hadn’t heard from him, Ed Ward’s body was discovered in his hallway, a few yards from the kitchen table where we’d sat. He was 72, and apparently dead for several days.

He never got to write that third volume of his brilliant History of Rock & Roll, but worse, a key leg of that table he helped build is now gone.

Subject: RE: 2021 Obit: Ed Ward:Music Journalist/Rock Historian
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 06 May 21 - 05:50 PM

Rolling Stone: Ed Ward, Rock Historian and Early ‘Rolling Stone’ Editor, Dead at 72

Austin360: Ed Ward on rock ‘n’ roll: ‘It was an audience-created phenomenon’