By Janet Sommer

Metronome had been in dire staits, in fact, the 1959 December issue was printed but never distributed, except to subscribers. The newstand copies were never distributed, they just sat there. The circulation had declined, it was very badly run from a business standpoint. So, for all practical purposes, although it wasn't generally announced in any way, the magazine had pretty much died with that issue.

But, behind the scenes, Herb Snitzer, the photographer, was the photo editor of Metronome and he was very unhappy about this sudden death of the magazine, and he had an uncle by marriage, named Robert Asen, who, in his younger days... he was originally from Alabama, from Birmingham, and he had been a professional musician who played tenor and clarinet. Later on, when I got to know him, when I came to work for him, he told me that he had actually recorded for Genet, and he had recorded with a band called "Dink Randleman and his Alabamiams." Anyway, Bob was a very nice man, and Bob was persuaded by Herb to acquire Metronome, which I think he got at a very reasonable price, and the magazine began publishing again in June of 1960, so there was a six month period there where it didn't publish. But it was revived, with a new format, very nicely put together... The art director, Jerry Smokler, was really talented, and it was a very nice looking magazine.

However, they had retained the editor, Bill Coss. Bill had a long time reputation as a jazz writer, he'd been first associate editor of Metronome, then became editor. Bill had a drinking problem, and ... I started doing some freelance work for Metronome actually, before I was offered the job there, and Bill took me to lunch and I remember meeting him at the office and walking a few blocks to a restaurant where we had lunch. During that lunch, there was nothing unusual about having one martini, which he had before lunch, but he also then had one during lunch, and then another one after lunch, so that was three martinis, and they were very dry... He was one of those people who had the gift for being drunk but not showing it, he could walk a straight line and his speech wasn't slurred. But, what would happen, I was told by people who worked there, was that he would come back after lunch and sit down at his desk, and he would look out the window, and that was all he would do for the rest of the day... So, Bob had decided to let him go, and Bill's assistant, Bob Perlongo, he didn't have a drinking problem, but Bob was a poet, and he used to do things like, on his lunch hour, even though the office was on 36th St. between Park Avenue South and Lexington, he would walk all the way up to Central Park because he wanted to see trees and stuff, so he would take two hours for lunch or whatever, so they decided to let him go at the same time.

Bob, I had gotten to know through a girl, Nancy Miller, then later Nancy Miller Elliot, whom I had met actually at the Copper Rail, who was working for Art Ford on putting together this great jazz television show. She was then all of 18 years old, and very pretty, and not really that knowledgeable, but she picked up very quickly, and Art was kind of a strange guy too, but he let her more or less book the show. But anyway, she knew Bob, and that's how I met Bob, and Bob recommended me to take his job.

So, I got this offer from Metronome, and I figured what the hell, I'm not getting anywhere at the Post, and at least I would get some journalistic experience. I knew that the thing was a shaky situation, but, I even got more money than I got at the Post. So, I took the job, and my boss was a guy named Dave Solomon, who was a trip in and of himself. He'd come over from Esquire, where he hadn't been an editor but he'd been in the promotion department. But he was a good writer, and he was full of ideas, and he was deeply involved in what was then the incipient "Beat Scene." So he knew Burroughs, and Kerouac and Gelber and all these people and got them into the magazine. His idea was to turn the magazine into a hybrid that would be part jazz and part cutting edge literature and poetry and photography. Now with the photography, of course, he had an ally with Herb, and that was okay, but as you will see, photography was the nemesis of Metronome. What happened is that Dave was very inventive, and he also had a good ear for jazz, and he was kind of an experimentally oriented guy... He got a lot of good cartoonists, young cartoonists, some of whom became well known later, and before Burroughs published Naked Lunch, we printed a chapter from what was later to become Naked Lunch... And poems, a Henry Miller piece... We went and interviewed Lenny Bruce, the two of us and a tape recorder went to Lenny's hotel room and he sort of free associated about jazz. Lenny was surprisingly hip, and knew a lot... This thing was really his, not much editing needed to be done, and he looked at it and made some changes before it was printed. It was also fun, because I got to meet Lenny and for awhile sort of hung out a little bit with him, until he left New York. But that was interesting, and we had all kinds of adventures, and I got to write very freely, and I really began to sort of blossom, and we got LeRoi Jones who I met also, who was an up and coming young poet then... He did this piece which was called "The Blues Black and White America," which later became the sort of cornerstone of Blues People, and I worked harder with him on that piece that anything I'd done before or since, as an editor, and it turned out to be a very good piece. We also had A. B. Spellman, published him for the first time, we were interested in publishing black writers on jazz, of which there had never been that many.

Dave was also a pioneer in other respects, he had become involved with Timothy Leary and whoever the other guy was at Harvard, who was much less known, and he'd been given some samples of psychedelic drugs, which he administered to his friends and associates, and was done very scientifically, of course, we had to be monitored and everything and we had to fill out a report afterwards... That's how I got to try some of that stuff, which I didn't pursue any further, it was very wierd. But anyhow, Dave later became a disciple of Leary's, and was one of the people who had a hole drilled in his skull, that was Leary's thing, and fortunately it didn't kill him or anything, anyhow, Dave was, shall we say, somewhat unorthodox, but Asen didn't complain about anything of the content in the magazine, he didn't particularly like it, but he didn't complain about anything. He was an active publisher... He owned it, he payed our salary, he would come to the office at least twice a week. He let us have a free hand, but he would sometimes indicate that he liked something, or that he didn't like something, or that he was somewhat bewildered by something, but he would say to me something like, "I really like that piece about such and such..." and he certainly liked the look of the thing.

But then, the photography... Okay. For the July issue, and that was July 1961, so now we've been going for a year under Asen... Dave and Herb decided, they had discovered this photographer who had taken some very nice, kind of interesting photos of Coney Island where there was a stripper, and got the people reacting, you know, looking at her and everything. And it wasn't a Playboy type of prurient kind of thing at all, but nevertheless it was this scantily clad woman, and they decided to put it on the cover. I did not think, even then, although I was not very experienced, I did not think that was a particularly bright idea, and I said so, but nevertheless, it was done. It was kind of toned, so it didn't jump out at you, but there it was. And this was 1961, today this is nothing, but things were different then. Anyway, the first thing that happened, we had gradually been able to increase circulation a bit. It was still very low, it was far from profitable. I mean Asen thought this, I think he and his partner, as a tax write-off, that was what it was for them, and you'll see how that came to an end... As soon as this issue came out, one of our still mainstays were library subscriptions, including school libraries. The first thing that happened was that we got five or six hundred cancellations from high school libraries. I mean, they didn't look at slightly obscene poems and things from Henry Miller and William Burroughs, that they didn't see... Or even a rather startling Civil Rights oriented cartoon that was on the cover of the March issue, that didn't bother them. But as soon as they saw that sex... Boom. Cancel, right away. So, that of course, did not sit well with Asen. Dave had also gotten himself into a few little scrapes about, shall we say, how the way the office was run, there was a bit of pot smoking going on, which got complaints from other people in the building, from the smell. So, to make a long story short, Dave was fired. I think Dave more or less expected me to resign, too, out of loyalty to him, but I didn't. I maybe felt a little bit bad about that, but on the other hand, as I said, I didn't agree with what he had done, and I didn't feel that was my responsibility. He did what he did, and he did it on his own, so there he was. So I became editor.

Alright, so here I was, my career peaked very quickly. I had only been writing professionally for less than three years, and here I was, editor of this famous magazine, which, however, was on its death bed... So, we quickly turned it around, and went back to a full scale jazz policy, put out what I think were some pretty good issues. I think we could have salvaged the magazine, with a little patience, with a little time... and I think Asen was willing to give that. But then, one fine day in November he came to us, and he called a meeting. We occasionally had these just to discuss things a little bit, but this one was serious, and he said, "Unfortunately, my business situation has changed radically, and I will no longer be able to support the magazine." Bob was really very sad, because I think he had genuinely gotten to like us and like our enthusiasm, and what we were doing, and he a had a bit of commitment to the music... So, we had finished the December issue, it was ready to go to press, it was all done, the type was set and everything was ready. So, we sort of fell on our knees, and begged him to let us put out the December issue, so we could give some kind of notice to our readers, and also, with his permission, to try to find somebody who might want to buy us. We didn't have much hope for that, so he agreed to that. As I said, he was a very nice man, and he was certainly the nicest publisher I've ever worked for. So, we put out this last issue, we had become... you know, Ornette used to come to the office and hang out, and other musicians would come up. During this time, the office also moved, we'd moved from the east side to the west side to a less expensive, but more centrally located office. So, we approached Norman Granz, and we approached George Wein, and we tried to see if anybody was interested in buying this thing, but nobody wanted it. If there had been a little more time... but there was really only about a month to try to get this thing done, so, that was it.

So, then I was bitten by the bug at that point, and I said, "What should I do? Go back and try to get a job on a newspaper, or a general interest magazine..." So, I thought "What the hell, let me give it a try, see what happens." For one thing, I was able to collect unemployment, number two, I got myself a gig translating a book, that was Jo Berendts "The Jazz Book," which had been a tremendous success in Europe, but a small publisher wanted to do it so, Jo, whom I didn't know personally but who had learned that I knew German, approached me by mail to ask me to do this. So, I did it, and that came in quite handy... of course you don't make a fortune translating a book, but it gave me a little bit of an underpinning. And I got some freelance work, I had written a couple of articles before the Metronome thing came about, of course, when I was a Metronome staffer I couldn't do any freelancing, but I got back to some of that.

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