The Beat Patrol

Don’t let the tweed jackets, trench coat and pipe fool you – Ralph J. Gleason was an apostle of jazz and rock with few peers.

Ralph J. Gleason’s Berkeley hills home looks as if he left last week, even though the great jazz and rock critic has been dead for nearly 30 years. His epic LP record collection covers one wall of the living room and a pile of 45 RPM singles sits by the door. A poster from the first San Francisco rock concert at the Longshoreman’s Hall hangs in the center of the living room. It was one of three silk-screened by Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin.

A couple of dozen old friends gathered there one night after attending a screening at Fantasy Studios. It was a night like many long ago, when the house rang with music and laughter and seemed to be the center of the world for the people who were there. It hasn’t been like that in a long time, but this more recent night was special.

Kehala Gleason, 21, and her college pal Jennica Murray spent their junior year making a movie about the grandfather Gleason never knew. At Fantasy, they screened an hour-long rough-cut of the class project for friends and family. Young Gleason, a petite blonde who grew up in a log cabin without electricity or telephones in eastern Washington, was leaving the next day to spend six months with an agitprop street-theater troupe in Mexico.

The sweet student film, which may never screen again, mixed vintage footage from the Gleason family archive – photos of him with the Beatles, Coltrane; film footage of him with Sonny Rollins – with tributes from friends and associates. Her grandfather’s name was still good enough for the young Gleason to land interviews with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, rock critic Dave Marsh, journalist Studs Terkel and others (including myself). Kehala Gleason’s voiceover narrative, in her reticent little girl’s voice, gave the whole thing a sentimental wash.

“We came to this house expecting to find answers and found questions,” she intones over a sequence of shots taken at the Spruce Street house. “We came to the past and found hope for the future.”

Among the friends at the party was an artist who once ran off to Hawaii with one of the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Also attending, coincidentally, was Ron Polte, the man who used to manage the group. Ralph was much in the air. “He was a really cool father,” said his oldest daughter, Brigitte, 53, whose 24-year-old son, Kelly, is living with his grandmother these days. “He took us to the Fillmore and everything. But he always wore a tie.”

Music critics are a dime a dozen these days. Virtually everyone who can score advance CDs from the labels seems to be out there hawking commentary in print or on the Internet.

But there was a time, not that long ago, when there were only a few and they all knew each other. Today’s pop music critics, who cut their teeth on Pearl Jam and Nirvana, will never have the chance to leave behind a legacy like Gleason’s. In an age of the information superhighway and media overload, the era of E! Television and Entertainment Weekly, how do you explain one lone writer working for a daily newspaper in a provincial backwater changing music history? But it was never easy to explain Gleason, even when he was alive.

He started one of the first magazines about jazz. He was the first full-time jazz critic on a daily newspaper in this country. At a time when there were practically no books on the subject, he wrote the history of jazz on the back of album covers, writing literally hundreds of liner notes in the golden age of long-playing albums.

He was the cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival and co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine. When Lou Adler and John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas wanted to throw the Monterey Pop Festival, they traveled north to kiss the Gleason ring, knowing they couldn’t hope to pull it off without his approval.

He was the defender and friend of Lenny Bruce, the chronicler and confidant of Duke Ellington, a man who wrote poetry for Miles Davis albums, hosted John Coltrane and Bob Dylan on television and produced one of the best country and western movies ever made. He was a vigilant defender of free speech and an outspoken lefty who understood that music and politics were inextricably linked. He made Nixon’s enemies list.

His trademark trench coat hangs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He was a natty dresser who favored tweed jackets, deerstalker hats, wore a handlebar mustache and smoked a pipe. He was also a diabetic who drank only milk at nightclubs and always carried a Hershey bar in his pocket in case of emergency.

“He did a wonderful job of living in his world,” said veteran jazz producer Orrin Keepnews, who worked across the hall from Gleason at Berkeley’s Fantasy Records in the ’70s. “He might partake of your world, but he lived in his world.”

The movie, “Remembering Ralph J. Gleason,” begins, as it should, with his writing. The clattering of his Underwood typewriter fills the black screen and his words appear typewritten on the screen, letter by letter:

“Form and rhythm in music are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.”

Plato said that.

The quote comes from the essay “Like a Rolling Stone” that Gleason wrote for American Scholar magazine in 1966. The student filmmakers include the rest of his introduction to that essay later in the film:

“There something happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I’ve got to beware. I think it’s time we STOP, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

Buffalo Springfield said that.

“For the reality of politics, we must go to the poets, not the politicians.”

Norman O. Brown said that.

“For the reality of what’s happening today in America, we must go to rock ‘n’ roll, to popular music.”

I said that.

Old black-and-white footage from a 1965 British Broadcasting Corporation program about people with unusual jobs shows Gleason in his attic office, wearing a checkered shirt, fiddling with his pipe and tapping away at the keyboard. His reedy, pinched voice fills the room: “Well, this is Gleason high in the Oakland/Berkeley hills, as usual, bringing all the latest news from Never-Neverland, which, if you think about it, is where we all really live.”

The idea that popular arts deserved serious commentary emerged in 1924, a mere 10 years before Gleason wrote his first record reviews for his college newspaper, the Columbia Spectator. The publication of “The 7 Lively Arts” by Gilbert Seldes, an East Coast Brahmin and editor of the long-defunct Dial magazine, was greeted by an uproar among the high-brows. He dared to extol the virtues of such prosaic fare as jazz, Charlie Chaplin movies, Flo Ziegfield musicals and “Krazy Kat” cartoons. “Newspaper Comics, Circus, Slapstick Films, Jazz Are Art, Says Editor of ‘Dial,’ ” sniffed an indignant Chronicle headline of the day.

In 1934, both jazz and Gleason were in the full bloom of youth. He discovered the music during a case of the measles, when the doctor prescribed bed rest in a dark room and his mother let him listen to the Atwater Kent. “I lay there, wide awake in the night, picking up those strange sounds in the night – Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson,” he wrote in the introduction to “Celebrating the Duke,” his posthumously published collection of jazz writing.

As with all schools of art, as jazz grew, the music developed a critical elite. Otis Ferguson, also one of the first film critics, wrote about jazz for the New Republic, starting in 1936. The music’s new scholars soon began to document the history. French discographers Hughes Panassie and Charles Delaunay published their error-riddled but nevertheless landmark works in the mid-’30s. Two important books on jazz history – Wilder Hobson’s “American Jazz Music” and “Jazzmen” by Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith – were published in 1939, the same year Gleason left Columbia to start what may have been the first magazine devoted to the music, Jazz Information.

In 1939, New York was the unquestioned jazz capital of the universe and Columbia University was only blocks from Harlem, home to Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway. The Count Basie Band had just moved to New York. The entire world of jazz was swinging in uptown Manhattan, and Gleason used to go door-to-door in the black neighborhoods, looking to buy old jazz records. He also haunted the clubs and theaters where bands played by night.

“And when I got to the Big Apple,” he wrote in a set of Jimmie Lunceford album notes, “and found that you could actually get to see a band like this in person at the Apollo or the Savoy Ballroom or the Renaissance or the Strand or Paramount theaters, I simply couldn’t believe it. It was just too good to be true.”

San Francisco in the ’40s was the world headquarters of the New Orleans jazz revival. Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band started playing in 1939, soon settling into residency at the Dawn Club, a basement in an alley off Market Street, its site marked today by a brass plaque. In 1943, jazz enthusiasts bought a new set of false teeth for old-time New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson and brought him to San Francisco for a series of historic concerts.

In September 1945, Gleason, who spent the war years working for the Office of War Information, booked the old Dixieland jazzman into the Stuyvesant Casino on New York’s Lower East Side. The following year, Gleason and his wife, Jean, moved to San Francisco to produce concerts by New Orleans tailgate trombonist Kid Ory, then living in Los Angeles, only recently rescued from obscurity and his job in the poultry business by appearances on the Orson Welles radio program.

Gleason soon found sympathetic ears at The Chronicle in executive editor Scott Newhall and managing editor Gordon Pates, music fans whose taste tended toward Earl Hines and Edith Piaf, respectively. He started at $15 per review. In 1950, they hired him full-time, about the same time he started contributing regularly to the bi-monthly bible of jazz, Downbeat magazine. By 1954, the Gleason family and its three children could afford a modest home on busy Ashby Avenue in Berkeley’s Elmwood district.

At The Chronicle, Gleason became the first daily newspaper critic in the country to cover jazz and pop music openings like theater or opera openings. Although his main topic was jazz, he was no snob. He picked up stories across the pop panorama. He interviewed Hank Williams and covered his show in 1952 at San Pablo Hall in the far reaches of the East Bay. Gleason gave early glowing reviews to Nat King Cole (“the top balladeer of his time”) and Frank Sinatra (“far and above anybody by a country mile”).

He kept an ear cocked toward other sounds and frequently lectured his readers on the musical qualities of rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues. He interviewed Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Louis Jordan, Ivory Joe Hunter, Big Joe Turner and Ray Charles in The Chronicle. He even paused to scorch the unspeakably square Pat Boone (“pretentious and a bit of a phony”).

From the pulpit of the daily newspaper, Gleason’s jazz criticism penetrated mainstream culture. He gave early coverage to Miles Davis and described Louis Armstrong in 1954 as “one of the most important people alive today.” Gleason and Davis became close friends. Gleason once returned from visiting the trumpeter during a nightclub engagement where the diabetic Gleason discovered that he and Davis used the same-sized hypodermic needles. Davis was not diabetic.

But Gleason never limited his contributions to the printed page. He played a crucial role in founding the Monterey Jazz Festival. It was Gleason’s idea to take the music out of the dark, smoky, smelly nightclubs and into the fresh air and sunshine. Disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, who ran the festival for the first 34 years, located the horse show arena on the Monterey County Fairgrounds. “Ralph was essential to the festival,” said the late Grover Sales, publicist on the first festival. “He suggested the whole concept of the festival.”

They certainly got the cast they wanted for that 1958 weekend – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins. But serving the festival behind the scenes made little difference to his coverage. He was equally capable of cheering or criticizing the event in the paper the next day. When Los Angeles Times jazz critic Leonard Feather complained about Gleason having better seats, Feather was informed that Gleason had paid for his tickets.

A contentious Irish American who read extensively on topics ranging from the Civil War to civil rights, Gleason took a put-up-your-dukes attitude about anything he thought smacked of injustice, intolerance or ignorance. He took up the Lenny Bruce cause when nobody else did. He testified eloquently in Bruce’s trials about his social significance as a comedian and wrote passionate defenses of Bruce’s work in the press.

Bruce sent Gleason presents; he borrowed Gleason’s name in his routines (“and here he is, that silver master of the airwaves, Ralph J. Gleason …”). And, as Bruce’s legal problems with obscenity busts intensified, Gleason grew ever more emphatic in his columns.

“Truly it is Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ brought to life,” he wrote, “to real life. And if the closing walls do, in the end, bring silence, we will be the guilty, all of us, not Lenny Bruce.”

He saw some of the same rebel qualities in Bob Dylan, just not at first. He caught Dylan’s West Coast debut at the 1963 Monterey Folk festival and dismissed him. A year later, he repented. “When I first heard Bob Dylan at Monterey I did not like him,” Gleason wrote, “I was deaf.”

His endorsement of Dylan came from a major, well-credentialed spokesman. Gleason had become widely recognized as the country’s top jazz critic. His Chronicle column was syndicated to more than 60 papers across the nation. In addition to his contributions to Variety, Downbeat, Hi-Fi/Stereo Review and other national magazines, he brought jazz to network television.

From 1961 to 1968, Gleason, who looked like a casting director’s dream of a professorial jazz critic, produced and hosted a half-hour television show, Jazz Casual, hovering over the pianos, puffing his pipe and drawing out such figures as Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Modern Jazz Quartet. “He got Count Basie to talk more than I ever heard before,” said fellow jazz critic Nat Hentoff, “more than I ever did.”

The close-focus, intimate programs were broadcast across the country on what was then called educational TV, the precursor to PBS, long before jazz musicians were accustomed to seeing themselves on television. He produced landmark specials with Duke Ellington. With his connections at the television station KQED, Gleason arranged and hosted a remarkable press conference with Dylan in 1965.

Gleason leads Dylan through the crowded room and makes the introduction while Dylan settles into a seat behind a table. “Welcome to KQED’s first poet press conference,” Gleason said. “Mr. Dylan is a poet. He will answer questions on everything from atomic science to riddles and rhymes. Go.”

The Gleason home, less than a mile from campus, was action central. Student leaders sought his advice and held meetings in the living room. When the four long-haired artists who called themselves the Family Dog planned to throw a dance at Longshoreman’s Hall featuring new rock groups with crazy names such as the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane and the Great Society, they came over to discuss their ideas. “San Francisco can be the American Liverpool, ” Family Dog’s Luria Castell told Gleason.

That night at Longshoreman’s, Gleason stood on the balcony and watched the birth of the San Francisco scene. When he came down to the dance floor, a 19-year-old college student named Jann Wenner, who wrote a rock music column for the Daily Cal, walked over and introduced himself. “I knew exactly who he was,” Wenner said in a phone interview from his Midtown Manhattan offices.

As the San Francisco rock scene exploded, Gleason was there, night after night, reporting each latest development in the pages of The Chronicle. He covered the first public performance by the Jefferson Airplane. He quickly became the band’s biggest booster, wrote the liner notes for the first album and followed the Airplane intensely in the paper.

Band member Paul Kantner later cribbed some lyrics from a piece Gleason wrote about a concert in Golden Gate Park. Gleason wrote a paperback book, “The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound,” and then handed over his column to a guest reviewer who panned the book.

Wenner accompanied Gleason to shows and spent long hours at Gleason’s home. “It was always easy to scrounge a free meal,” said Wenner. “I was predictably there around dinner time.”

Gleason found the fledgling rock critic a job at Sunday Ramparts, a new broadsheet newspaper started by the publishers of Ramparts, a left-wing San Francisco magazine where Gleason was contributing editor. A framed blank page from Sunday Ramparts hangs in the Gleason home to this day, a handwritten message scrawled in marker pen: “Thanks for the job, the advice and the start. Love, Jann.”

Gleason didn’t simply encourage Wenner. He invested $1,500 in the magazine Wenner wanted to start and, when the first issue of Rolling Stone was published in November 1967, Gleason was listed as consulting editor and introduced his long-running column in that magazine with a sermon on race relations in pop music: “Sound Is Without Color.”

At age 48, he was substantially older than both his audience and the people he was writing about. Gleason can’t decide, the joke went, whether he’s two 24-year-olds, three 16-year-olds or four 12-year-olds.

Gleason’s relationship with Wenner turned stormy at Rolling Stone. He battled with his protege over editorial issues and personnel matters. Gleason fumed when Wenner spent precious funds for metal filing cabinets when cardboard boxes would do. He briefly quit the magazine weeks before its first anniversary.

In June 1970, Gleason left his full-time post at The Chronicle. He kept a Sunday column and continued to write a column for Rolling Stone. His old friend Saul Zaentz, owner of Fantasy Records, sold a few million records by a rock band called Creedence Clearwater Revival and built a spanking-new Berkeley headquarters for the label, complete with recording studios and a grand, sweeping staircase leading to the second-floor executive suites. He brought Gleason onboard as a kind of minister without portfolio.

In early 1975, Gleason began frustrating, infuriating negotiations with Wenner to sell back his stock in Rolling Stone. “Do me a favor,” Gleason said to a mutual associate he bumped into on the streets of Berkeley. “The next time you see him, punch him in the nose for me.”

On Monday, June 2, Wenner returned to his office from flying around the state with Tom Hayden – then campaigning for U.S. Senate and married, at the time, to Jane Fonda – and learned that Gleason had suffered a massive heart attack. Wenner burst into uncontrollable sobs. By nightfall, Gleason was dead at age 58.

Within a year, Wenner folded the Rolling Stone tent in San Francisco and slipped off to New York. “It seemed like a good time to get out of Dodge,” he said.

Gleason’s 83-year-old widow, Jean, is sitting on her front porch, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her visitor.

Her eyesight is going but her peripheral vision is strong, so she tilts her head when she talks, looking out of the corner of her eye.

She lives in the Berkeley hills home she and Gleason bought in 1970, sharing the panoramic view with her grandson Kelly, Kelly’s dog, and two other young people who worked with her granddaughter, Kehala, on the documentary. The two college students continue to work on the film, trying to raise money and film more interviews. Ralph Gleason’s books still line the shelves and his papers are stowed in the attic. It doesn’t look like Jean Gleason has bought a single piece of new furniture since they moved in.

Ralph Gleason first met her older brother in a crap game. The brother said his younger sister was a jazz fan. His interest piqued, Gleason took the provincial young lady from out of town to see the jazz bands on 52nd Street. “It was one of those setups you think you’re going to hate, but I didn’t,” says Jean Gleason. “We really grooved.”

They married in 1940. Throughout his career, she was his support team — typing, clipping columns, sending out clippings to record companies and pals across the country, taking his finished copy to the bus stop and convincing the AC Transit driver to take it to the East Bay Terminal where a Chronicle copy boy would pick it up.

Gleason did not keep a desk at The Chronicle office. He worked out of his home and occasionally dropped by the city room at night, on his way out to the clubs, to pick up the mail. The BBC caught Gleason making one of his nighttime visits to The Chronicle in 1965.

Wearing his trench coat, pipe in mouth, Gleason pauses at the entrance by the phone booths at the top of the office to exchange words with city editor Abe Mellinkoff. He drops a column off at the copy desk and he walks back to speak with Datebook editor Judy Stone. “He didn’t like to be edited, I can tell you that,” said Stone in an interview.

The only time his editors cut him off was when he wrote about the anniversary of the attempt to assassinate Hitler (Gleason, a World War II buff, had been reading up on the Third Reich). Managing editor Gordon Pates thought that had gone too far astray for the boundaries of an entertainment section. Pates always told him that the publisher would read the first few sentences of his column to see if he had gotten subversive, so Gleason needed to start tame. That may explain why Gleason developed a habit of what they call in journalistic circles “burying the lead.”

“He was not a good writer,” says his widow. “He wrote about interesting things.”

Joel Selvin