It wasn't the pay that lured me in as Advocate music editor, a post I took in early 1977 and held for 16 years. Twenty-five bucks a week was nice, but. Back then, there was a thriving local and regional music scene, with scores of clubs and concert halls populating the map from Brattleboro to Enfield. And there were more bands and players of all genres than places for them to perform. If you remember shows at hotspots like the Rusty Nail, the Red Pantry, the Lazy River, the Center of Town or Nathan's Place, you've clearly earned your standing as a lifer in these parts.
In those days, I was never overwhelmed by the weekly prospect of filling the music and records pages of the Advocate, and had a stable of talented, prolific writers, experts on everything from country to classical, pop to punk, rock to R and B. One of my biggest challenges was getting it all in, prioritizing, making sure we hardly ever missed the boat on a local event or one of national note.
Just weeks after running a punky, late-1977 cover story on the Sex Pistols with the tongue-in-cheek headline, "God Save the Sex Pistols: The 'Seventies Have Begun," we dispatched writer M. C. Kostek to the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta to see the band in person. He returned with a story we thought quite Hunter S. Thompson-esque. The next week we totally changed gears and came back with a cover on internationally renowned trombonist, composer and Amherst resident Charles "Majeed" Greenlee. (And for that issue, I wrote a preview of an up-and-coming band named the Cars, in advance of their appearance at the Lakeview Inn in Southwick.)
Over the years we put together cover stories on dozens of fascinating subjects: Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra, Ed Vadas and Archie Shepp, Michael Jackson and the Beach Boys, Jordi Herold and Rosanne Cash, just for starters. And in relaxed settings, I had opportunities to interview everyone from Tom Waits, Roger McGuinn and Mitch Ryder to Aimee Mann and All My Children star Michael Knight. (I was allowed to stray from music from time to time.)
But regional bands were always my favorite beat and I was proud to write extensive features on such favorites as the Elevators, Clean Living, the Loose Caboose Band, the Cardiac Kids, and Orchestra Luna. Staff photographer Donn Young, my award-winning colleague and friend, used to say to me, "Dave, you can make or break any band in this Valley."
One band I was eager to get out the good word on was the Bricker Band. For a late-'70s cover story, I invited the band, led by the gifted and much-missed singer Pam Bricker, to our funky Amherst office on Amity Street for the interview and photo shoot. I was one of the Advocate's production supervisors at the time, and that entitled me to a desk on the production floor. We'd gotten about five minutes into our interview when I noticed a small pile of dog doo about 10 feet from where were sitting. (Pets were free to come and go in those days.) I subtly moved the meeting onto our equally funky outside deck, and Donn was able to photograph the band sitting in our delivery truck parked outside.
I loved putting together our annual Best of the Valley lists, and even more fun was compiling the decade's-end Top 100 lists of the best albums from the 1970s and '80s. Oh, we got letters, and for months, people questioned my pick of 1989's Everything's Different Now by 'Til Tuesday as my album of the '80s. To this day I stand by that bittersweet selection, one of the great breakup albums of all time.
More than anything else, I'll always remember the great energy that swirled around the Advocate offices in Amherst, and later in Hatfield. The sky was the limit, and there was always music in the air.
After leaving the Advocate, David Sokol went on to tenures as editor-in-chief of New Country magazine and editor of Disney Magazine. When he returned to the pages of the Advocate, it was under the anagram-inspired name Solid Vodka. The best concert David ever saw as music editor was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Hartford Civic Center, just four days after the murder of John Lennon.
