Covering Music in Kalamazoo
By James Donahue
When I was assigned to cover the music and religion beat, I discovered that I had a very large and daunting task laid before me. The city had churches and religious institutions of every denomination operating there. There was an Episcopal and Roman Catholic diocese and it was the center for the Dutch Reformed churches in that part of Michigan as well.
Kalamazoo had three schools of higher learning that included Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, and Kalamazoo Valley Community College, a facility supported by the Reformed churches. All three schools were heavily involved in music. Also Kalamazoo had a community supported symphony orchestra that offered excellent concerts throughout the year in a large 3000-seat auditorium at the university.
Kalamazoo almost had music flowing in the streets. There was an annual Bach Festival, when the best musicians in the city gathered for a week of performances of the music of the entire Bach family. This forced me into heavy research into the history of this amazing family and its impact on music from that wonderful era of the past.
The city also sponsored summer outdoor concerts at the top of a downtown parking garage, and brought in top name musical groups ranging from Beverly Sills of the New York Metropolitan Opera to popular groups like The Temptations and The Who.
We arrived in Kalamazoo in late i968 in the midst of the great hippie movement, when music groups like The Grateful Dead, Jimmie Hendrix, and others were drawing large crowds to San Francisco, Timothy Leary was advocating that young people to take psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Rock bands were springing up in garages and basements all over town. Large popular rock bands performed at Western Michigan University and drew such large crowds the concerts had to be moved to the football field because the 3,000-seat auditorium wasn’t large enough to seat everybody.
In addition to the rock concerts, we had jazz bands and string quartets and choral groups giving public performances almost weekly. There were music teachers offering private lessons all over town. And they all gave regular public recitals. I was expected to write advance stories on all of them, usually always listing the names of all of the children that would be appearing in the recital. I got so bored writing the barrage of these little stories I began making up funny names of non-existing students that I inserted in the lists, just to see if anybody would notice or complain. No one did. Just as I suspected, nobody read these stories other than possibly the parents of the children appearing in the recital. As long as their child’s name was in the list and correctly spelled, nothing else mattered.
While I did not need the additional work load, I saw “garage rock” breaking out everywhere, and the rock bands that came to town drew such large crowds, I strongly felt that the newspaper should be covering these events. But our stogy managing editor refused to recognize rock as legitimate music. He refused to give this topic any space in the Gazette. We had many disagreements over this issue. I wrote stories about the rock movement anyway, and battled to get the stories into print. My argument was that it was wrong to give so much press to a concert by the Kalamazoo Symphony, which might draw two thousand or more, and ignore a rock concert in the football stadium that drew over a hundred thousand.
By James Donahue
When I was assigned to cover the music and religion beat, I discovered that I had a very large and daunting task laid before me. The city had churches and religious institutions of every denomination operating there. There was an Episcopal and Roman Catholic diocese and it was the center for the Dutch Reformed churches in that part of Michigan as well.
Kalamazoo had three schools of higher learning that included Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, and Kalamazoo Valley Community College, a facility supported by the Reformed churches. All three schools were heavily involved in music. Also Kalamazoo had a community supported symphony orchestra that offered excellent concerts throughout the year in a large 3000-seat auditorium at the university.
Kalamazoo almost had music flowing in the streets. There was an annual Bach Festival, when the best musicians in the city gathered for a week of performances of the music of the entire Bach family. This forced me into heavy research into the history of this amazing family and its impact on music from that wonderful era of the past.
The city also sponsored summer outdoor concerts at the top of a downtown parking garage, and brought in top name musical groups ranging from Beverly Sills of the New York Metropolitan Opera to popular groups like The Temptations and The Who.
We arrived in Kalamazoo in late i968 in the midst of the great hippie movement, when music groups like The Grateful Dead, Jimmie Hendrix, and others were drawing large crowds to San Francisco, Timothy Leary was advocating that young people to take psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Rock bands were springing up in garages and basements all over town. Large popular rock bands performed at Western Michigan University and drew such large crowds the concerts had to be moved to the football field because the 3,000-seat auditorium wasn’t large enough to seat everybody.
In addition to the rock concerts, we had jazz bands and string quartets and choral groups giving public performances almost weekly. There were music teachers offering private lessons all over town. And they all gave regular public recitals. I was expected to write advance stories on all of them, usually always listing the names of all of the children that would be appearing in the recital. I got so bored writing the barrage of these little stories I began making up funny names of non-existing students that I inserted in the lists, just to see if anybody would notice or complain. No one did. Just as I suspected, nobody read these stories other than possibly the parents of the children appearing in the recital. As long as their child’s name was in the list and correctly spelled, nothing else mattered.
While I did not need the additional work load, I saw “garage rock” breaking out everywhere, and the rock bands that came to town drew such large crowds, I strongly felt that the newspaper should be covering these events. But our stogy managing editor refused to recognize rock as legitimate music. He refused to give this topic any space in the Gazette. We had many disagreements over this issue. I wrote stories about the rock movement anyway, and battled to get the stories into print. My argument was that it was wrong to give so much press to a concert by the Kalamazoo Symphony, which might draw two thousand or more, and ignore a rock concert in the football stadium that drew over a hundred thousand.