April 29, 1972: The Institute for Rock 'N Roll Studies
A pantheon of
April 29,
1972
Classroom
‘Blackboard’:
Disc Player, Speakers
NOTES FOR a pre-med class take up the blackboard in the
functional bareness of the aluminum prefab classroom in Atcheson Annex this
rainy afternoon at the
He’s busy setting up the battered
portable record player, running the speakers out for 20 feet of stereo. That’s
his blackboard. In his briefcase, where most UB instructors would carry books,
he has records.
“I’m gonna play you five or six minutes
of the greatest blues music you ever heard,” he tells everyone who showed up
today for “Suburban Blues,” a three-credit class in aspects of modern rock.
Then he slips on a sinewy cut from a 10-year-old copy of “Ray Charles in
Person.”
When Jeff started this course last fall,
it was about the only place where you could delve into Phil Spector or the
aesthetics of Motown and still get college credit.
For spring, it was divided in two, the
more advanced group meeting weekly in the clubhouse closeness of the attic in
the American Studies House on
* * *
THE INSTITUTE, believed to be the first of its kind in the country,
is the next logical step in rock scholarship. Its purposes: To gather and
disseminate information and artifacts concerning rock music from 1955 to the
present.
“Suppose you wanted to find out all
about Marc Bolan of the British group T. Rex,” Jeff says. “He’s a very
interesting and creative guy. But right now there’s no place you can go to dig
up all his recordings or interviews with him. The Institute would have all
that.”
UB, like
Eric Isralow, who has appeared a couple
of times this year on Alex Bennett’s nighttime aficionado rock show in New York
City to talk about old rock, teaches one group a week for UB’s Social Science
College in his record-jammed Linwood Avenue living room.
He feels that awareness of rock is the
key to understanding modern culture and how everyone fits into it.
“There’s a lot of kids who can’t relate
to what they see as a totally alienating society,” Eric says. “The only contact
with alternative consciousness they had was AM radio. A lot of kids’ lives
revolve around rock ‘n roll.
* * *
“I REMEMBER Chuck Berry’s ‘School Days’ back in 1957, singing
about the guy behind you who won’t leave you alone and the teacher – how mean
she looks. When I heard that, I said, ‘Yeah, that’s just what it’s like.’”
It took Jeff five years to find academic
status for rock. He finally got it when Dr. Lawrence Chisolm’s American Studies
Department agreed to back him in a doctorate in contemporary American
ethno-musicology, the study of our culture through its music.
When Jeff started back in 1967, about
the only place you could talk seriously about pop music in a classroom was in
college English.
There were a few good reasons why it
came up there instead of in music classes. First, most music schools were only
beginning to officially discover jazz. Second, criticism is a big chunk of
English Department turf.
Finally, there now was a generation
whose self-awareness dawned with Elvis and Chuck Berry, that matriculated to
Joan Baez doing Childe Ballads and got its bachelor’s degrees while Bob Dylan
sang about calypso sailors laughing at T. S. Eliot.
* * *
AMONG THEM were a few graduate students with teaching
fellowships in English. By Spring 1968, Jeff’s freshman English class was doing
explications of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and listening to the new Pink Floyd
album.
Next year some of his students posted a
sign-up sheet to organize a class in the history of the blues and asked Jeff to
teach it.
“It was the largest elective course in
the university,” Jeff recalls. “There were over 300 signed up for it and a core
of 70 or 80 were there all the time.
“A group that big was pretty
energy-devouring. It was straight lecturing for a while. Then I drew maps.
Recording studio maps of
After that he led a seminar devoted to
“straight rock ‘n roll, straight cultural analysis,” but the university didn’t
want to give credit for it.
* * *
FRUSTRATED, he took an
Meanwhile, like seeds left to germinate,
several of his old students began rising to prominence. Now they form the
nucleus of the Institute.
The idea of scholarly credit for rock is
still as unthinkable to some people as Dylan’s line about Beethoven and Ma
Rainey, but Jeff feels there’s plenty of anthropological and artistic
justification for it.
“It has artists doing things in an
aesthetic sense,” he explains. “Just because these artists play in bars doesn’t
mean they’re any less important than Mozart, who wrote dinner music for various
barons to eat to.
“Some of that dinner music is cherished
today. And you can see the equivalent in what Stan Szelest does Monday and
Tuesday nights over at Granny Goodness. It’s art and art appreciators.
* * *
“WHAT MAKES ‘
There are two major problems facing the
Institute. Sexism (Jeff wants to overcome rock’s male what-do-YOU-know attitude
toward women) and, most important, funding.
There’s been one gift so far – $100 from
American Studies – which went to magazine subscriptions. The Institute needs
more so that serious compiling can begin.
“The music demands analysis,” Jeff
maintains, “some sort of systemized study. We’ve all been carefully
academically trained and while it’s not an end in itself, it’s the only
methodology young people have today. They’re pretty well excluded from
everything else.”
Later, as the class recovers from the
ecstasies of the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” Jeff’s current favorite, he
proposes a course in the 45 rpm record as an art form.
“It’s really a finite and explicable form,” he explains. “And it has to be a really good monaural mix. Specifically, you go after a muddy overwhelming sound. A 45 is meant to drive you IN-sane.”
The box/sidebar:
Pop Music Roll Call
Founded around a group of UB rock
enthusiasts and sheltered by the university’s American Studies Department, the
Institute for Rock ‘N Roll Studies is almost a roll call of
At the nucleus are Jeff Nesin, a
doctoral candidate who began teaching pop music culture five years ago, and two
of his early students – Billy Altman and Joe Fernbacher.
* * *
BILLY, WHO expects to become UB’s first graduate with a rock ‘n
roll major (he could’ve gotten an English degree last year, but went for an ad
hoc major instead), is music editor for the student newspaper, The Spectrum,
and part-time reviewer for The News.
Joe, a
There’s also Robbie Lowman, night
manager of Norton Union and occasionally Spectrum reviewer; Jim Santella, a UB
library worker and former underground deejay, and Eric Isralow, a doctoral
candidate who specializes in rock history and its cultural ramifications.
* * *
AMONG OTHER writers are The Spectrum’s Jesse Levine and Terry
Bromberg, Richy Pachter, music editor of Ethos, Riverside High senior Gary
Sperrazza, former Undercurrent music editor and the city’s youngest rock
writer. And this reporter.
There are special services from Freda
Prusansky, a speech and sociology major who does Institute photography, and
Frank Maraschiello, overseer of Norton Union craft shops and the Institute’s
resident artist.
Frank does UUAB’s concert T-shirts and
for Rock Week printed some up for the Institute – a picture of The Velvet
Underground’s Lou Reed striking a guitar chord. Unhappily, Frank had no extra
space for the proposed caption: “My Life Was Saved by Rock ‘n Roll.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO: From left, front row: Billy Altman, Matty Goldberg,
Jesse Levine and Freda Prusansky; middle row, Frank Maraschiello, Richy
Pachter, Joe Fernbacher and director Jeff Nesin; third row, Robbie Lowman, Eric
Isralow, Terry Bromberg, Gary Sperrazza and Jim Santella.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: The Institute
didn’t survive the summer break in 1972, but some of the panelists went on to
considerable distinction and/or notoriety.
The kid in
the group, the irrepressible Gary Sperrazza, enrolled at Buffalo State College,
added an exclamation point to his name and published his own ‘zine on campus – The
Shakin’ Street Gazette, which attained legendary status even though it existed
for only 18 issues. It also looked good, thanks to the efforts of our good
friend Dave Meinzer, who did the design.
Gary then wrote
for better-known rock journals such as Bomp and Trouser Press, opened his own
record store, Apollo Records, on Elmwood Avenue, and had a good run as a club deejay
at the city’s premier punk-rock venue, the Continental, and elsewhere.
Eventually, he took his record sales online. He died in 2016.
Gary also
lured the nation’s leading rock critics to Buff State for a legendary
symposium in 1974, which was fondly remembered 26 years later in a guest column
in The Buffalo News by Richard Pachter, who went on to be a record promotion
man and who now blogs, podcasts and works as an editor and writer in
South Florida.
Joe
Fernbacher, who died in 1999, had already ascended into the firmament headed by
the late Lester Bangs, the wild and crazy saint of rock writers. Joe's reviews appeared in almost all of the major music magazines. The most famous of them, at
least on Google, is his trashing of
Jim
Santella’s deep mellow intonations are well-known to
The
dean of the Institute, Jeff Nesin, went on to be a college administrator in the
town where a lot of early rock was born –
Billy
Altman is an award-winning cultural journalist and critic, his website tells
us, but that only hints at his range of connections and accomplishments. His words
have graced the pages of The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and
even TV Guide. He was a senior editor at Creem magazine and an assistant
curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He also wrote a book about humorist
Robert Benchley and teaches at the
Then there’s sports.
He’s been head scriptwriter for syndicated sports radio programs, including “John
Madden’s Sports Quiz.” And, omigod, baseball – he covered it for the Village
Voice and has been an official scorer for Major League Baseball for Mets and
Yankees games.
And finally, Eric Isralow, who became a vivid addition to that hotbed of alternative
culture –
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