Jimmy Guterman: 1962-2016

About a decade after I read his and Owen O'Donnell's 1991 anti-classic book "The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time," I joined music critic Jimmy Guterman's message board, which he'd set up for anyone who wanted to join him and take on his and O'Donnell's opinions about rock and roll.  (Guterman wrote a solo sequel, "The Best Rock and Roll Records of All Time," in 1992.)  Along with O'Donnell himself, a group of us bantered about and debated the merits of various artists and what constitutes a great rock and roll record.  Jimmy and I vehemently disagreed on Crosby, Stills and Nash and on Jethro Tull, as he despised both groups and I like Tull a lot and flat-out love CSN.  But we did have areas of agreement - we both loved the Band's second album and we both thought the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed was pretentious drivel.  He got me to concede that a good deal of art rock is bad, but he never convinced me that all art rock is bad, as I stuck to my pea shooters and defended Pink Floyd.  Also, he introduced me to Fairport Convention; I introduced him to Family.  It was all good fun and in good fun, but after a few years, Jimmy pulled the plug on his message board, and we and our fellow participants drifted apart.  

Jimmy drifted so far apart from my own orbit that I didn't find out until this past weekend that he died back in late July of 2016. 

I was stunned, as Jimmy was only a few years older than I, and the apparent cause of death was suicide.  From what I understand, he was dissatisfied with how his life was going, particularly his career.   

In discussing rock and roll,  Jimmy gave as good as he got and he made me reconsider my assumptions about rock and roll and actually made me change my mind about some of rock's most fabled bands.  I came to realize, for example, that Yes's reputation for greatness is based largely on select tracks from their Fragile and Close To the Edge albums from the early seventies, but when you dig deeper into their catalog, you come to realize why cuts from Going For the One or Drama are not staples of classic-rock radio.  I had to wrestle with my opinions of  Billy Joel's work when he and Owen O'Donnell explained how his best music was "smooth, Tin Pan Alley-derived pop," while his few genuine rock cuts were "too derivative to be taken seriously."  But Joel, whom the pair labelled as the worst rock and roller ever, did create some genuine rock tracks when he wasn't trying consciously to rock out; however forced "You May Be Right" and "A Matter of Trust" are, "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Only The Good Die Young" were still rock and roll in the former's carefree execution and the latter's subversiveness.  No, Billy Joel isn't a rocker in the tradition of Chuck Berry or his (Joel's) friend Bruce Springsteen, but he is a rock and roll performer in the singer-songwriter tradition, and there were times when he came across as an East Coast Randy Newman.  Everything Jimmy wrote about artists he disliked challenged my own fondness for them, though he could never convince me that Paul Simon or the Grateful Dead were anything less than brilliant.   

Jimmy's greatest gift to me may have been the nerve to start up my blog.  When he moved his message board to this platform, I started the very blog you are reading now, and it followed the lead of Jimmy's own blog, "Quantity Over Quality" (which he accidentally named "Quantity Over Quantity" when he set it up, so he kept it).  This led to his second act; having long since stopped writing about rock and roll for a living as a critic for Rolling Stone, he moved on to writing about technology and video gaming, fascinated by the many possibilities that the Internet was offering.   He probably would have been skeptical, though, about the beautiful-women picture blog I started back in 2006, as there are so many fashion models on it; I recall that he didn't like models very much.  (He and Owen once joked that the original members of Duran Duran, a group the three of us despised, "married models, no doubt for the conversation," a remark I thought was unfair toward the models - especially Danish model Renée Simonsen, who was engaged to Duran Duran's bass player but dumped him because he was a shallow clothes horse and she was an avid reader who got a psychology degree after she quit modeling.)

I'll always remember Jimmy for his commitment to gay rights before supporting gay rights was cool, his fascination with hybrid-engine technology (he owned a hybrid Honda), and his love for Springsteen, as he was originally from the same part of New Jersey that I am from and still live in . . . though I did confess to him that I actually like Michigan's Bob Seger better.  Because of Jimmy's Garden State roots, I can't understand why I didn't hear of his death when it actually happened.  I'm still shocked at hearing about it now.  It turns out that at the time of his death, I was blogging about the Olympics and the presidential campaign, and the following weekend, I posted a record review, a review of Billy Joel's The Nylon Curtain.  Jimmy and Owen called that album "erratic," and I pretty much agreed with them, though I probably cut Joel a little more slack.

Jimmy would have loved that.    

RIP. 😢