BY TOM WALDMAN
When John Lennon first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” he grabbed a guitar. When Robert Hilburn first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” he started buying Billboard magazine.
Both turned out to be wise decisions. Lennon formed a little band called The Beatles and Hilburn eventually became the chief rock critic of The Los Angeles Times, a position he held for an astonishing 35 years, from 1970 to 2005.
Robert Hilburn with his record collection. Photo courtesy Rodale Press
Given that Hilburn, a Sherman Oaks resident, reviewed, interviewed and covered many performers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame it was probably inevitable that he would someday write his memoirs. This month, Rodale Press published Hilburn’s “Corn Flakes with John Lennon And Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life” (with an introduction by Bono).
As rock and roll lives go, Hilburn’s was apparently quite tame. He relates one anecdote from 1971 when members of Creedence Clearwater paid for a beautiful woman to show up late one evening at Hilburn’s Copenhagen hotel room; the couple kept their clothes on, had a friendly conversation, and after an hour or so the young lady departed, claiming she had to go to work in the morning. Regarding drugs, Hilburn had to be asked three times by the Allman Brothers before he would do a line of cocaine with the band.
When the critic separated from his first wife in 1980, the reason was not another woman, or chemical dependency, but that he had been working too hard to devote sufficient time to his marriage and family.
The incidents involving Creedence and the Allman Brothers are among a number of vignettes Hilburn provides throughout his book. But much of the text covers time the author spent with Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono.
These choices should not surprise any LA-based rock fan over 35. Hilburn was always open about his favorite performers, whose work he would not only effusively praise, but often cite as a benchmark in judging the work of others.
Robert Hilburn interviewing John Lennon (1980) from “Corn Flakes with John Lennon And Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life” Photo by Bob Gruen
During a recent phone interview, Hilburn discussed how he got started in rock and roll, as a 1950s teen-ager who attended Reseda High School, and shared his thoughts about rock musicians and rock and the specific field in which he toiled for more than three decades.
It’s the rock and roll equivalent of the question where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated, or the first plane smashed into the World Trade Center: What were you doing the first time you heard a record by Elvis Presley?
Hilburn was getting ready for high school one morning in his Northridge home when the song “Baby, Let’s Play House” came over XERB, a South-of-the-Border station that featured rhythm and blues. Speaking today, Hilburn said Elvis “defined rock and roll on that record”; no saxophone, no horns, but guitar, bass, drums, and sexy, menacing vocals.
Several months later, in 1956, Hilburn heard “Heartbreak Hotel” on KFWB, then the main pop/rock and roll radio station in the Los Angeles market. He was now a dedicated fan of Elvis and rock and roll, buying records at such stores as White Front and Wallach’s Music City, and picking up copies of Billboard each week to see actual photos of the performers whose music he admired.
Robert Hilburn was the only music writer to accompany Johnny Cash (seen above with Hilburn) to his landmark Folsom Prison concert in 1968. Photo by Jim Marshall “Corn Flakes with John Lennon And Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life.”
In the mid-1950s, rock and roll occupied a strange place in American popular culture; adored by teen-agers, reviled or at best tolerated by parents, and essentially ignored by major newspapers, except as a sociological phenomenon.
For the most part, teens communicated news about rock and roll to other teens. One of these message-bearers was Robert Hilburn.
“KFWB had a music correspondent at every high school,” he recalled. “I signed up to do that at Reseda High.” Hilburn would use Billboard as his source for the pick hits of the week, information he then shared with KFWB listeners.
In the late 1950s, however, there was no such thing as a rock and roll career, unless one either sang like Elvis, played guitar like Chuck Berry, owned a recording studio, or hosted a radio program. And the idea of writing serious rock criticism was absurd.
After graduating in journalism from San Fernando Valley State College – now CSUN — in 1961, Hilburn took a job as general assignment reporter at the Valley Times (forerunner of the Daily News). Two years later, he left the paper for a public relations post at the Los Angeles Unified School District, which in the days before pre-Proposition 13 was not a continuous exercise in crisis communications.
By this time, Hilburn, married and the father of two, had lost his earlier enthusiasm for rock and roll. Like many among the first group of fans, Hilburn has little good to say about the period between Elvis entering the army in 1958 and the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.
His initial impression of the Beatles, which reflected his own fondness for rock and roll’s golden era, was that they successfully revived the sound of the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry. But by the release of “Rubber Soul,” in December 1965, Hilburn realized that the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan had established a higher standard.
The high school student who had once filed reports for KFWB approached The Los Angeles Times in 1966 about writing free-lance rock reviews. His timing was excellent; even the establishment press could not ignore the significance of Dylan’s lyrics, “Revolver,” or the rock-drugs-youth politics nexus.
“There was an immediate audience for rock music in the 1960s,” said Hilburn, in our interview. “And if you were in a band, you were speaking to that audience as quickly as possible.”
After filing a number of free-lance pieces over the years, Hilburn, at the precarious age of 30 was named rock critic for the Times. Throughout his long tenure with the paper, Hilburn wrote clear, concise prose, a welcome contrast to the dense, theory-laden style practiced by some post-Pepper critics. “I was always trying to write for that 15-year-old kid in Northridge,” he said.
Within a few months of taking the job, Hilburn wrote a glowing review of an unknown English pianist/songwriter named Elton John, which provided a boost to both careers. In rock criticism, like politics and the movie business, it pays to guess right.
Five years later, Hilburn was among many critics around the country who saw the salvation of rock and roll in Springsteen’s album “Born to Run.” He became something of a confidant to the Boss, offering suggestions and commentary on the direction of his career, a relationship the critic would repeat several years later with Bono.
Rock stars have insecurities too, and the four musicians who receive the most coverage in Corn Flakes at various times sought reassurance from Hilburn, and were genuinely appreciative when he praised their work. And though Hilburn was always honest in his reviews, writing nice things about a performer’s album or albums is helpful when trying to set up a face-to-face interview — as the book demonstrates.
Today technology and a fragmented, less passionate rock audience make the emergence of another Hilburn next to impossible. The Internet encourages everyone to play the role of critic, blurring the distinction between amateur and professional. In citizen criticism, every opinion carries equal weight.
There are those who argue that the diminishing influence and impact of a single critic or a handful of critics – in any entertainment field — is better for the audience. They insist that no one person should have the power to tell the rest of us what’s good or bad. Though Hilburn seems resigned to the change, he remains fond of the old way, as are many of his original readers. After all, who wants to sift through 50 reviews to decide what to hate or love?
“If you were a rock fan living in LA in ’75, said Hilburn, “you would pretty much have to read my review or the one in the Herald-Examiner and that was it.”
Tom Waldman is co-author of “Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock and Roll From Southern California”, which had its second printing in 2009, and author of “the Best Guide to American Politics, “We All Want to Change the World: Rock and Politics From Elvis to Eminem” and “Not Much Left: The Decline of Liberalism in America”. He currently serves as chief of staff to LAUSD Board Member Tamar Galatzan.
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