It seems like yesterday but it was, indeed, November 1973 when I tried to launch a career as a rock music syndicated columnist. I was just a couple months on the job as a swing reporter at my hometown newspaper, The Council Bluffs (Iowa) Daily Nonpareil. It was my second stint at the Nonpareil, where I started my newspaper career five years earlier before entering the Air Force. I had no idea where my newspaper carer was headed since my job included covering the police and courthouse beats a couple days a week, plus three days covering sports.
I did know, however, that this was my opportunity to try my hand at writing about rock music. In my first, pre-service go-round, I had reviewed a few concerts and albums for the paper and offered to do it again. I sweetened the offer by telling my bosses that I was planning to self-syndicate an oldies column and I'd give it to the Nonpareil for free. They accepted.
I created a name for my company, rented a post office box to handle the flood of mail I expected and placed an ad in Editor & Publisher magazine, the meeting place for journalists in those pre-Internet days. The flood of mail never came, but I did land one paying client, The Tablet, a Catholic newspaper in Brooklyn, N.Y. Tablet editors went big, buying two of the three items I offered -- the main Rockback column plus the three-question quiz filler (they passed on Oldies Answered, a 250-word column answering readers' questions).
The Tablet was much larger than the Nonpareil with a circulation of more than 100,000 subscribers. This placed them at the top of my pricing structure, which was, in my estimation, unbelievably reasonable. The check at the top of this post reflects the total cost for a month's worth of material. There were four Rockback columns at $1.85 each and four quiz fillers at 75 cents apiece. With a 10 percent discount for ordering more than one item, the total was a mere $9.36.
Unfortunately, this arrangement lasted less than a year. The Tablet abandoned its youth section in 1974 and my quest for syndicated rock stardom ended, although I began research into what would eventually become my book, The Day the Music Died: The Last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.
Here is a sample of what I was writing about in those days:
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is now available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Comments