The San Antonio Express-News has a long story about how one of its music writers, Ramiro Burr, had been using a ghost writer to crank out stories for him. Burr quit this week as the paper was finishing up an investigation:

Burr, 52, covered the local and international music scene for the past 25 years. He worked for the San Antonio Light from 1983 until the Light folded in 1993 and has been with the Express-News since. He is also a local correspondent for Billboard magazine and in 1999 wrote a book, the “Billboard Guide to Tejano and regional Mexican music.”

“Ramiro caused the Express-News to unknowingly publish work under his name that was not, in fact, his own work,” said Robert Rivard, editor of the Express-News.

“It was the work of at least one other writer who did not receive credit and who we did not know about. Ramiro decided on his own to resign just as our investigation was concluding and we were preparing to take appropriate action. We have a zero-tolerance policy whenever someone on our staff presents work as their own that is not their own.”

(Link via Romenesko.) His unorthodox arrangement began to unravel when the writer he’d been paying to ghostwrite stories and columns started clamoring for credit. The irony—a journalist unclear on the nature of his job getting burned by a ghostwriter unclear on the nature of his—is small but worth noting. Barr had hired a lawyer and had apparently at least started to muster a defense but eventually gave up. As the paper notes, his apology fell a little short.

Burr’s resignation came 24 hours after his lawyer, Glenn D. Levy, sent Rivard a letter contending that Burr is a syndicated columnist and the Express-News “never questioned” how he performed his duties.

“The San Antonio Express-News has openly approved of his work and even promoted his syndicated columns,” Levy wrote, citing language from Burr’s biography on MySA.com, the newspaper’s Web site.

However, calling it a “difficult situation,” Burr threw in the towel Tuesday. In a brief statement, he was somewhat contrite, but stuck to the claim that he was governed by a different set of rules than other Express-News journalists.

“I may have been a little overzealous, or overreached in trying to be the best reporter/syndicated columnist I could be,” he said. “I sincerely apologize for breaking any rules.

“Like all the other publications and online sites I write and have written for, the San Antonio Express-News has been good to me. I wish them all the best.”

The story also charges that Burr had an unusual relationship with a local PR firm, saying that he had his own computer at its offices and that the ghost writer, Douglas Shannon, worked out of the firm as Burr’s quote-unquote intern. The story says Shannon formally asked for credit for the stories; presumably, he had already been bugging Burr for it and finally went public.

The paper in the lede says that the problem involved more than 100 stories since 2001, which averages out to about 15 a year, but read down and it turns out that they were concentrated in a period of about 18 months, starting at the end of 2001. Most of these were a weekly “Latin Notes” music column, but it seems Burr also farmed out a feature once a month or so.

The Express-News is owned by Hearst; San Antonio doesn’t get paid much attention to nationally, but its now the seventh-largest city in the U.S. Seems odd Burr’s editors at the paper never got a whiff that he hadn’t written the things, or that he had his own intern working out of another building.

The Daily Swarm caught this: Joe Carducci, author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Ur-text for everyone who, way back when, thought Henry Rollins was a deep thinker, is back, with a new book of fiction. Ann Powers in the LA Times pricelessly captures Carducci’s point of view:

In 1991, Joe Carducci published a massive, brilliant, stupid, exhaustive, exhausting book called “Rock and the Pop Narcotic,” which set out a theory of what mattered in rock music that inspired many and infuriated more. Since he was office manager/utility infielder at SST, one of the key labels defining American punk, Carducci had more right than most to spout on about the importance of bands like Husker Du and Black Flag.

I hated that book: Carducci came off as a macho libertarian in love with some romantic idea of the working class, who thought male bonding was the key ingredient in music-making, that establishment rock critics were namby-pamby liberals and that anything aimed at the marketplace (i.e., at girls) was hopelessly corrupt.

It’s time for the summer-touring-season package, fine. So the magazine puts on the cover … the Eagles, fine. The cover hedline is “Bitter Feud, Big Comeback.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the Eagles, but I didn’t know that the band had had a new internal feud.

The group has of course had a famously long internal feud, which ended when the members got back together for the successful “Hell Freezes Over” Tour. That was in the mid-1990s. Then the group got into a fight with Don Felder—the guy who co-wrote “Hotel California”—but he left years and years ago.

I thought it would be funny to read about the latest feud. Except … there wasn’t one. It was just a rehash of the old feuds. The band tours a lot, these days, too, so here’s no big “comeback,” either. (They finally put out another studio album, Long Road Out of Eden, but that was last year.)

So anyway, I was about to toss the thing aside when I noticed it was kind of a good story. Then I noticed it was written by Charles M. Young. Young was one of the greatest Rolling Stone writers in the 1970s, which is to say he was one of the greatest magazine writers of all time. Fearless and hilarious, he was possessed of an unshakable rectitude and bottomless self-doubt; if nothing else, his writing on the Ramones and the Sex Pistols helped keep the magazine relevant when the punk generation threatened the mag’s old standbys.

Anyway, the story, though entirely lacking a news peg, is a pretty good look back at how the Eagles functioned as a band during its glory years. The band’s leaders, Don Henley and Glen Frey, are of course greedy, hypocritical assholes. But they also displayed a work ethic and a pretty steely discipline during a chaotic era, and for their troubles can still lay claim to the best-selling album of all time, their greatest hits set. But it’s fun to read Felder and the rest talk about what jerks they were.

Unlike most of the magazine’s cover stories, the writing isn’t attitudinal, flatulent or vaporous in its assessments. Young has a story to tell and some judgments to make and does it well. For example, he lets Henley gas on about not having had enough time to complete Eden, which was a 20 (!)-track double-album … and then lets Joe Walsh tell the real story: If Henley had had more time “We would have had a triple album!”

The story also reveals the details about the group’s cheap-ass deal with Wal-Mart. (You’ll recall they released the album exclusively through it: They made four bucks on each $12 CD sold.) And it has this quote from their longtime manager, Irving Azoff, about the gilt financial realities of the heritage touring act: “We make more money in 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

Unfortunately, there’s but a grubby little excerpt from the story at rollingstone.com here.

If you have to review a bad album, but you’re not the type of critic who actually tells readers that an album sucks, it’s convenient when you have some publicity talking-points at hand to vouchsafe to readers, which is what this writer spends most of the first three grafs of a six-graf review doing:

Verifiable news about “Momofuku” first surfaced on Mr. Costello’s Web site, elviscostello.com, the day of the album’s release on vinyl two weeks ago. (It comes out on CD this week.) The album started, Mr. Costello wrote in his post, when he contributed vocals to Jenny Lewis’s next record, which also included Davey Faragher, Mr. Costello’s regular bass player.

Mr. Costello then brought his drummer, Pete Thomas, into the picture and made his own record in a week, finishing the job less than three months ago. It involved a few other helpers, including Ms. Lewis, the singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice (Ms. Lewis’s boyfriend) and Mr. Thomas’s daughter Tennessee Thomas (also a drummer). Steve Nieve, another member of the Imposters, joined them on keyboards.

How … scintillating a tale! Still, there’s another three grafs to go. What to do? First, scramble around for something, anything, that can be quoted, lyricswise. Odds are they will be cringeworthy, but hey—it’s Elvis Costello, and if you say they display some of his “wit” and “ill-humor,” folks might just buy it, even if you realize they are actually rather lame. (“You can say anything you want to in your fetching cloak of anonymity/Are you feeling out of breath now, in your desperate pursuit of infamy?”)

Then, with the flop sweat about to hit, you reach for comparison to some earlier glories: “The Vox organ suffusing American Gangster Time,’ and its drum rhythm, recalls ‘Radio Radio,’ from Mr. Costello’s 1978 album ‘This Year’s Model’; the ‘In the Midnight Hour’ bass line in ‘Go Away’ sounds like something from ‘Get Happy!!’ from 1980.”

You don’t say the songs are as good as those classics, but the references make everyone involved feel good.

OK, we’re to the end now, but we’re worried about one last thing. Can we encode, somehow, obliquely, backhandedly, the fact that this isn’t a very good album?

How about a gnomic little aperçu that will float by most folks’ heads? How about:

It’s effortfully tossed off; it’s a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.

… And we finish with a reference to those “high Elvis Costello standards.” Those who pay attention know that those standards now consist largely of doing commercials for Lexus and putting out about 19 bad albums in a row, with nary a significant song among them. Hitsville hasn’t heard the new album, but would bet lunch that if there were a significant song on the new album, there would have been more in the review about that, and a little less about Jenny Lewis’s boyfriend’s drummer’s daughter.

We reclined, the other day, accompanied by the new issue of Rolling Stone, a fresh stack of Fig Newtons, and a sense of keen anticipation. Who would not be excited at the prospect of hearing this fabled magazine’s thoughts on the quality of and accomplishments embodied within the new R.E.M. album, Accelerate?

Indeed, “accelerate” was a word we would have used to describe our pulse.

We were pleased to see the reviewer was David Fricke, one of the publication’s critical big guns. Chewing thoughtfully on a cake-covered fruit treat, we read:

Accelerate is […] one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made…

… [Singer Michael] Stipe has not sounded this viscerally engaged in his singing and poetically lethal in his writing since the twilight of the Reagan administration…

…Ultimately, the best thing about Accelerate is that R.E.M. sound whole again.

As we mentally added those emphases, we pondered their meaning, and once we got it straight we liked what we were hearing. There had been a lull, Fricke was telling us. There were certainly some R.E.M. albums that weren’t the band’s best, obviously, but this wasn’t one of them. Since the Reagan years—i.e., the late 1980s—he seemed to imply, Stipe’s singing was sometimes not engaged and not lethal. But that, thankfully, had been rectified. The subtext of all three of these observations was plain: R.E.M. is getting better.

It was a relief. But then we had … a hankering. A hankering to hear about the bad old days.

So we went back to RS’s review of the previous R.E.M. album, Around the Sun. We were a little confused, at first, because the reviewer, Barry Walters, hailed the thing as a “comeback”! He continued:

Unlike 1998’s Up, on which the band crafted beautiful but belabored studio experimentation, and unlike 2001’s Reveal, where they relaxed but didn’t deliver many memorable melodies, R.E.M. here resemble their classic selves.

Hmm. It sure sounded like R.E.M. had been back in top rock ‘n’ roll form for that one too. But fortunately, Walters was pointing us to the real problem: It must have been Reveal!

We hate Reveal!

Our fingers smudged and aching (metaphorically), we paged back to that review next. We couldn’t wait. The executioner was Rob Sheffield:

The last we heard from R.E.M. was the 1998 transitional album Up, their first without [drummer Bill] Berry, a sour, parched affair that hasn’t gained any luster with time.

But the past few years have been rough on R.E.M. and their fans, especially with the departure of drummer Bill Berry. So it’s inspiring to hear Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills brighten up on Reveal, telling a few fables of their own reconstruction with an album of gorgeous, woozily sun-struck ballads. […] It’s a spiritual renewal rooted in a musical one.

We were chagrined at first. A renewal? Why, that’s one step removed from a redux, and a kissing cousin to a comeback.

But then we realized. Reveal wasn’t the problem. We love Reveal! It was a reconstruction-like renewal. And inspiring, too.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle had clicked into place. It was unanimous. David Fricke, Barry Walters and Rob Sheffield: They were all telling us that the nadir of R.E.M.’s career was a snake-in-the-grass little CD called Up. That must have been the real culprit!

We trembled with anticipation to read the spanking the magazine must have given that dog! Ann Powers had the assignment:

Like 1992’s Automatic for the People, Up seeks a unified mood, but its scope is broader than that collection of elegies.

[…]

Radiohead’s OK Computer […] is the Pet Sounds to this Sgt. Pepper—the challenge that stimulates risk. Buck and Mills cultivate the same multitiered spaciousness that makes OK Computer so rich. Trading off instruments, denying the guitar its usual primacy without diminishing its impact, Buck and Mills have orchestrated their rock as never before.

So Up was better than Automatic for the People … and worthy of comparison not just to OK Computer but Sgt. Pepper.

It sure didn’t sound that bad.

At that point, we realized what the problem was. R.E.M. had set the bar for itself, and reviewers, impossibly high. On its eleventh studio album, Up, the group had come up with a Sgt. Pepper-like masterpiece.

Since then, critics have had to deal with something unexpected. R.E.M. have consistently topped that stirring work, each successive release being so good as to make clear the flaws of the one before it.

At this point, the implication is clear: As far as Rolling Stone is concerned, R.E.M.’s best work is ahead of it.

Does it bug you when a certain band puts out a certain CD, and all the press about it keeps hammering on a specific point… and then the band’s next record comes out, and all the press and PR hammers home a precisely opposite one? Generally, it’s a variant of “It’s a return to the band in top rock ‘n’ roll form!”

How many times have I heard, “We wanted to put out a U2 record that didn’t sound like a U2 record” or somesuch, followed two years later with “We really felt like the fans deserved a U2 record”?

It happens for three reasons. One, readers and fans seem to like it—it makes for easily digestible data that can be readily repeated in social situations, and it doesn’t require any pesky critical thinking. Two, it’s part of the PR strategy the band and its handlers had cooked up for that particular CD/tour/live DVD promotional endeavor.

The third reason is the complicity of the press, which gets forgotten sometimes. Consider Michael Stipe in an interview on Pitchfork. He’s talking about precisely this issue; for R.E.M., in 2008, it involves Around the Sun, the group’s last album, which wasn’t considered successful, in the context of the new one, Accelerate, which from the title to the first, riff-laden single, is designed to show off an R.E.M. in, er, top rock ’n’ roll form. (See also Green [1988] and Monster [1994].)

Stipe and Pitchfork then go on at length to discuss how and why this all happens, in their usual intelligent fashion, which at once manages to play into these patterns and put them in context:

Pitchfork: A lot of people have remarked on the punchiness and conciseness of the album. Is that a reaction to Around the Sun?

[Michael Stipe]: You’re going to read that over and over again, and we freely admit that we lost focus on the last record. But we also say, and people tend to downplay this part, I really like the material on that record. I think the songs are great. It’s just the way we approached them in the studio that really I don’t think made them shine as much as they might have. And whatever steps we’ve taken, I’m not going to badmouth any of the work that we’ve done, but I’m also not deluded about it. It’s not as much of a reaction as reporters who we’ve sat at a table face to face with… Everyone comes into an interview situation with their own story and their own idea and then they cherrypick the comments that help create their argument. And so I think for the band members it’s not as much a reaction to the last record as you might read. It’s simply that we all realize that we had lost focus, and we did the most obvious thing, which is to write really fast songs that are really in your face and kind of raw.

Pitchfork: That whole “reaction” line seems to be an easy story to sell.

MS: Yeah, it’s a fine story. It’s not exactly accurate, is what I’m saying.

Except .. it is.

The New York Observer says the NY Times is looking for a replacement for the critic, who is leaving for the New Yorker. The candidates:

According to several sources with knowledge of the situation, the paper has already been in contact with at least two people: Jon Caramanica, a Brooklyn native and Harvard graduate who is the music editor at Vibe (a position that he’s leaving later this week, a source said); and Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, who wrote the cover story on country singer Taylor Swift for the current issue of Blender.

Browsing through an old Variety, I saw a review that reminded me why I like the magazine’s reviewing policy so much. Simply put, it’s that the reviewers calls ‘em like they sees ‘em. In too many other places negative reviews are forbidden, or the bad news is presented apologetically. (Another strategy is to criticize something in a bored, elliptical fashion, so you have to read closely to find the point.)

Here’s Steven Mirkin’s lede to a John Fogerty live review:

On his fine new album, “Revival” (Fantasy/Concord), John Fogerty sings “you can’t go wrong if you play a little bit of that Creedence song.” That’s usually good advice, but at the Nokia Theater, the man who created the classic Creedence template showed what can go wrong.

Things were so bad it could have been a comedy of errors. There were problems with the onstage sound, Fogerty was frustrated by a pair of balky ear buds, a microphone insisted on cutting out, the band was a little sloppy after a two week layoff. And then, around halfway through the nearly two-hour perf, Fogerty’s voice gave out.

Where early on he could navigate the dynamics of “Good Golly Miss Molly” or “Born on the Bayou,” during “Have You Ever Seen The Rain,” his fabled howl, as powerful and blood-curdling a sound as can be found in the classic rock vernacular, lost all power, and his croon was in tatters.

And here’s the last two grafs of the review:

With two, sometimes three guitarists (including the usually reliable Billy Burnett) besides Forgerty, the sound was flabby where is should be lean, at times turning (most notably on the instrumental turn-around of “Commotion”) sloppy. And although he is a fine drummer and he has played in Fogerty’s bands for some time, Kenny Aronoff remains a problematic presence for Fogerty — heavy and busy where the music demands snappy, crisp rhythms.

Shots on the video screens were never in sync or thought through, often a step or two behind the music — close-ups of the bassist during Fogerty’s solos, shots of his hands during the vocals and way, way too many shots of Aronoff.

Why is it that Variety’s one of the only places you can read tough—but seemingly fair—reviews like that?

Maxim has apologized to the Black Crowes for reviewing an album that the reviewer hadn’t listened to, AP reports:

The Crowes’ manager, Pete Angelus, said the magazine explained that its review was an “educated guess.”

Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky responded Tuesday with this statement: “It is Maxim’s editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers.”

Link via Romenesko..

The magazine, which charted the rise of Americana, or alternative country, or No Depression music, or whatever you want to call it, started in September 1995 with Son Volt on the cover and far more quite good writing inside than one would have expected, way back in what was then the fanzine era. Among other things, the first issue had a scintillating column (by one of the founders, Peter Blackstock) detailing the history of covers of “Wichita Lineman.” From the very start the magazine had a magnanimous attitude toward coverage, looking for good music emanating from a wide swath of personal expression.

In a letter to subscribers, Blackstock (co-editor), Grant Alden (co-editor and art director) and Kyla Fairchild (ad director) track the forces that doomed the magazine:

In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.

The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we’ve been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.

Then there’s the economy…

The result? Ad sales down a third from what they were two years ago. The full text of the trio’s note is here. The magazine’s web site, which has a complete archive, will remain active.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy gives “Shine a Light,” the Martin Scorsese Stones concert film, a positive review:

Martin Scorsese’s energetic account of a Stones concert at Gotham’s Beacon Theater in fall 2006 takes full advantage of heavy camera coverage and top-notch sound to create an invigorating musical trip down memory lane, as well as to provoke gentle musings on the wages of aging and the passage of time.

Those who don’t buy into the aren’t-the-Stones-great? tone of almost all coverage of the band can find a lot of cringeworthy undercurrents in the review. For example:

“Shine a Light” is mostly a Mick Jagger show, as a battery of great cinematographers (under the eye of lead d.p. Robert Richardson) keeps its cameras trained on him as he cavorts around the stage and penetrates the audience courtesy of a thrust platform; drummer Charlie Watts, guitarist Ronnie Wood and especially Keith Richards warrant occasional cutaways, as do the numerous side musicians, but the star is the star.

Yeah—who’d want to watch Keith Richards play guitar, anyway? And this:

Sixty-three at the time of the concert, Jagger is not entirely impervious to the ravages of time, and the relentless closeup scrutiny could not be more revealing — not only of his taut muscle tone and evidently fat-free physique, but of his deeply lined face; some low-angle shots are so tight you can examine the dark bridgework on the back of his front teeth.

Sign me up! The review raises some questions about Scorsese’s involvement. He has obvious history in this area: He helped edit the greatest rock movie of all time (”Woodstock”), and directed arguably the second (”The Last Waltz”). But his use of rock music in his films has become a crutch (like the subtle-as-a-flying-mallet use of “Gimme Shelter” in the opening of “The Departed”), and as with his too-agreeable take on Bob Dylan in “No Direction Home” he’s sullying his reputation by lending his tony name to advertisements for the reps of fading stars. Here’s an example from the review:

The band members’ endurance gains perspective through some wonderful interspersed clips and interview footage from earlier decades. Queried as to what question he is most frequently asked, a very young Jagger replies, “How long do you think you’re going to carry on singing?” In 1972, when Dick Cavett asks the star if he could imagine doing what he does at 60, Jagger immediately replies, “Easily.” Jagger’s and Richards’ youthful drug busts are briefly covered, although any mention of Brian Jones is conveniently avoided. But for all the group’s early unsavory reputation, by far the predominant impression Jagger conveys in the archival stuff is one of overwhelming sweetness.

The more-often-quoted Jagger mot on the subject of aging, of course, was that you wouldn’t catch him dead singing “Satisfaction” when he was 45. And “youthful drug busts” aside, Keith Richards’ decades of debilitating heroin addiction essentially destroyed the band’s recording career (it’s taken them an average of five years to throw together a mediocre collection of songs since the early 1980s) and nearly its live one as well. (The Stones toured only once in a 14-year period over the 1980s and 1990s.) Isn’t that one of the most salient facts about the band’s career? How much nicer for the group that the director chooses to mention only those wacky drug busts from the 1960s.

A NYT review today of a Cat Power show at a club called Terminal 5 in Manhattan skirts around an issue that is common at shows but almost never gets its due in reviews:

Terminal 5, on far West 56th Street, was hardly big enough to accommodate Ms. Marshall’s fans on Wednesday, though it was a good deal bigger than the music seemed to demand. Drawing from her new album, “Jukebox” (Matador), Ms. Marshall and her crew played blearily soulful covers of songs associated with Hank Williams, James Brown, Jessie Mae Hemphill and George Jackson. In a less cavernous room the results might have been haunting. The sound surely would have been better.

The review is by the Times’ Nate Chinen. He finally returns to the issue of the sound at the show in this last graf:

To Ms. Marshall’s great credit, the show went off without any unscheduled interruptions, despite the sound-system feedback that plagued almost every song. Though justifiably frustrated, she allowed herself just one small act of protest, lying on her back for a few verses of the old Patsy Cline hit “She’s Got You.” Then she pointed one leg in the air, slowly swung it in an arc above her, and nimbly rose to her feet.

I don’t know what any of this means. Should Marshall get credit for not interrupting her own show? Great credit? And who in the world was she frustrated at? There is a prevalent attitude among too many reviews that the artist is a tool of some unseen forces that create the show around him or her. It’s not; it’s the creation of the person who’s taking your money! Live audio has made truly wonderful advances in the last decade or two; most major arena shows I’ve seen recently have been perfect. Most dedicated rock clubs, too, have control of their own acoustics at this point. But there are a wide range of mid-level venues that take some work to get the sound right for a rock show. Last time I looked, that was a job the artist is getting paid to do.