Extended Q&A with jazz critic Gary Giddins '70

This week’s Arts section features a Q&A with jazz critic Gary Giddins, who has been on campus for the past month as a guest lecturer teaching about jazz and writing. Here are further excerpts from his conversation with the S&B.

Interview by Pat Caldwell

(On his time as Concerts Chair)

My feeling was, as a general rule, jazz and blues and country … were so much less expensive than rock that we could have a concert every month or two instead of blowing it all at once. So we got B.B. King before he started playing really for white audiences. In fact in my new book Natural Selection I finally published the interview I did with King on the steps of Darby Gym with two or three other kids, him sweating, wearing his tuxedo after the gig and talking to us for about two hours.

(On his time at Grinnell)

I was a terrible student—that is my single biggest regret. I really regret the classes I didn’t pay any attention to. I was an English fanatic and I put all my time into the English courses.

I edited a literary magazine, Montage. We had 1.5 issues, because the second one, the school closed so we never published it; I still have the galleys in my closet, including an unpublished manuscript of Lenny Bruce that someone gave me. But the first issue was exciting. We printed it in Victor, Iowa because nobody in Grinnell would publish any Grinnell [College] publication because of obscenities. I wrote to the S&B, I produced the films, I produced the concerts.

I think almost entirely positively about the experience; it was just the right place for me. I came here as an accident because the idiot guidance counselor at my high school told me it had the best writing program in the country; of course he’s thinking of Iowa City … But it turned out to be a complete mistake—I would have hated Iowa City. Going to a big university and becoming a cog in that. I used to spend a lot of time visiting there, but I needed a small liberal arts school and there isn’t a better one.

(On how Grinnell has changed)

I think in a lot of ways the school is incredibly well-endowed now in a way that it wasn’t then. As an institution for education I think it has probably improved in many ways. On the other hand I’m very disappointed to see that the music department has no serious interest in jazz. They’re searching for somebody now, but I would have thought there’d be a department here.

And I’m a little surprised that there doesn’t seem to be the institutional memory here. We used to hear and tell Grinnell stories about Gary Cooper riding his horse into Gates and we knew about James Hall being here, and the whole Roosevelt brain trust and Hallie Flanagan and all those people. We had a sort of sense of the history, that from talking to people I don’t think is still there anymore.

I think it’s ultimately the same place. I do think you’re wasting the goddamn Forum. My God, that great building. We used to have dances in the North Lounge. The Jackson 5 was so little known that we didn’t even put them in Darby, we put them in North Lounge for a dance with little Michael.

We had Skip James perform in south lounge which is where Borges spoke as well. So those lounges were used a lot. There were jukeboxes in them. Cecil Taylor when he was here emptied his pocket of change into the jukebox and picked only the Aretha Franklin tracks, which there were at least a dozen, and there was a piano there as well, and he backed her for an hour. He just sat there accompanying Aretha Franklin. It was unbelievable.

After graduation, what did you do? Did you start right away in journalism?

I tried. I sent resumes to every newspaper in New York and collected more rejection slips than I care to remember, from just about every magazine that I could imagine myself writing for. I had a terrible first year, it was just unbearable. My father had been very ill, so he and my mother were in Texas being operated on. So I was virtually alone in a house in Long Island, writing and sending out stuff and getting rejection slips.

After about a year of that, the New York Post called, which was a liberal paper back then—a lousy paper, but a liberal paper. They must have run out of nieces and nephews because they had an opening for copyboy. So I got that job and things just started happening…For the next year I was writing movies reviews for the Hollywood Reporter at $5 a review and music reviews for Downbeat at $7, occasionally $15. I never had to pay taxes, that was the only good part. But the copyboy gig which I kept for a while was a pretty good salary, so I was keeping head above the water. And then I sent a piece into the [Village] Voice which they ran, and then they invited me to write every week, and after a year of that they gave me the column, and that’s what really made my reputation.

I wrote the column for 30 years. After I had been doing it for about 6 years, Oxford University published a collection of pieces I had done. That was my first book; I have 9 books altogether. I was also teaching. I taught a little bit at Pennsylvania for a semester, Rutgers for a semester, I taught criticism at Columbia for a couple of years. But for the most part I would write the column, and when I need the time to finish a book they were great about giving me whatever leave I needed…But things started to change there, and after 30 years I realized that you get to a point and you don’t know how much time you’ve got left and there are a bunch of books I really, really need to write, and I don’t want to go to my grave thinking that because I was afraid of not earning enough money to survive, I stayed at the Voice past my interest. My wife totally encouraged me. That was in ’03, exactly the 30th year [of working at the Voice]. I left and I’ve published two books since then, Weather Bird and Natural Selection, and I’m working on two now.

What do you think of the current [Village] Voice?

I’m appalled. I’m just appalled … I don’t know what to say. I still occasionally pick it up. It takes me about 10 minutes to read. The cover stories, with one exception that they did on landlords which was sort of throwback to the old Voice, they’ve been trivial … It’s not a New York paper anymore. Most of the critics are part of this national syndicate of Voice Media.

What do you think of the nationalization of alternative newspapers?

To me that’s antithetical to an alternative paper. What makes a paper an alternative paper is its very city-centric, specific to that area, because you want to wage the battles that concern you and your neighbor. If you’re a reporter, you want to talk about the bad judges and landlords in New York. You want to talk about corruption in New York. If you live in Des Moines, if you live in Los Angles, wherever you live, you want to deal with that city. When it becomes nationalized it becomes another rag that exists for one reason primarily, which is to get ads; to make a profit … Whatever it is, it’s not alternative—it is the establishment. It’s just the establishment by some guy in Arizona who’s in it as a business.