Rockcritics.com tribute to Robert Palmer

I like to think that I'm immune to that stuff, tbh

Wonderful writer and I've only really scratched the surface of his work. The piece he wrote that had the most impact on me growing up was a feature for Musician on Joy Division and New Order on the release of JD's Substance back in 1988. Detailed, thoughtful, able to bring an appreciative perspective to their work that might not be able to easily happen now that both have been cemented into history so thoroughly.

he wrote about NO?! I need to find this.

I liked his Fat Possum label production work, Deep Blues, and even though it was not comprehensive, "Rock and Roll: an Unruly History" (or whatever it was called).

he wrote about NO?! I need to find this.

He did indeed. This would have been a 1988 issue with Pink Floyd on the cover (the reason I bought the issue to start with).

Found what appears to be Anthony DeCurtis's introduction to Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, published in the NY Times. Lots of remembrances, from DeCurtis and others he interviewed, and also plenty of words from Palmer himself:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/excerpt-blues-and-chaos.html

Yeah, that collection and Deep Blues show Palmer's healthy range of interests, also see Insect Trust chronicles at Perfect Sound Forever/furious.com and commentary, music links on ILM's own insect trust - rfi, c/d

(I still need to check his Jerry Lee Lewis book!)

yeah, interviews w BP and others:
https://www.furious.com/perfect/insecttrust.html

Just had some memory surface of somebody telling me about witnessing him very nervously identifying himself and asking to be comped at a show.

I know I've talked about this elsewhere on here, it's neat to see it all line up in these two links:

So in Ed Ward's remembrance on that Perfect Sound Forever page, he says "The last time was at South By Southwest a few years ago, when he was commuting from Memphis to some college in Pennsylvania, where he had a teaching gig. He was playing with some grunge band, years younger than him, playing clarinet, which (for some odd reason) worked beautifully. We chatted, but he looked distracted, and not in very good health. This, I now realize, was after his hepatitis attack."

I was in that class at some college in Pennsylvania. By the end of the semester nearly everyone had dropped out except for me and my friend, who hit it off with him. He got very deep roots, and he made it clear from the outset he wasn't going to cover anything after 1955 and a lot of people got bored and weirded out by his nervous, sweaty Neil Hamburger presence and didn't care about fife and drum. But me and my friend sure did and would continue the discussion on the way to the pizza cafeteria with him, all of us eating terrible cafeteria pizza week after week because it was the one spot where you could pay cash rather than meal points. It was after class like that where we'd talk about Insect Trust and the Velvets and what he saw going on in NYC in the late sixties, Black Flag, Birthday Party and so on.

He was such an odd presence, I couldn't put it all together until I read the DeCurtis essay, quoting Robbie Robertson "'You know something, Bob? You don't look the part. You'll always look like a bookworm to me. You don't look like a junkie.' And he kind of sniffled and blew his nose, and said, 'Well, I'm from the William Burroughs school of junkies.' And I thought, 'Oh, that's right, there are some like that.' "

I was 19 and not exactly expert at detecting someone who needed a fix. He was charming and so scholarly, deeply expanding my sense of how music evolves and how it's always an aspect of the culture that surrounds it. And that music could be a path for understanding humanity in general. He was a big part of setting up my adult mind, where music became the base metaphor for how I see culture working, because close listening comes easier to me than other forms of inquiry.

^booming post, bendy!

Yes, that's fascinating. I still need to find early out of print Palmer books