First Reviled, Now Revered: The Historic Albums Of 1969

The "profession" of rock criticism was still in its tender adolescence in 1969. Daily newspapers were beginning to hire writers to cover pop, rock and what was sometimes described as "youth culture." Alternative weeklies like the Village Voice became trusted early warning systems for new bands. And Rolling Stone magazine, which began in San Francisco in 1967, had by 1969 become the rock and roll "paper of record."

Concurrently, the industry around rock ramped up into a more sophisticated, professional operation, launching scores of new acts every month alongside a steady stream of new works from established veterans.

It took time for the print media's coverage of those releases to evolve. The rock scribes might have started out offering basic consumer-guide appraisals, but pretty soon a number of them were developing approaches towards serious criticism, creating an art form of their own in the coverage of an art form that many did not yet take seriously. The rock critics of 1969 were working with very few guideposts or templates; some were cheerleaders, some gravitated toward literary-criticism approaches, others tried to position themselves as "insiders" with an understanding of the intersection between the creative work and the business of selling it.

Some tried to do all of that at once. In a chatty piece about Neil Young that ran in Good Times (the weekly originally known as the San Francisco "Most of it somehow has no drawing power, and just never gets to my rock-shriveled hearing." Then, in the next paragraph, he proclaims "This is not a record review anyway; it's a piece of writing about music, a suggestion about a thing to listen to at someone's house, in a record store, on the radio, whatever."