21. Tom & Jerry
As the story was told to me, someone from the local indie rag,
The Willow (see chapter 5) came up with the idea of starting an entertainment awards show. The awards would not be restricted to music but also include theater productions and whatever else was deemed to be “entertainment” by the organizers of the event. At the time, Cincinnati’s daily newspaper,
The Squire, had a staff music columnist. His name was Gerald Rent and I met him when my first CD was released
(see chapter 5). The people at
The Willow contacted Gerald to get his input on the project. Apparently, that’s where the trouble started.
Gerald had been writing a music column for a paper in Memphis but moved back to Cincinnati to be closer to his kids. While in Memphis he wrote a book about that city’s fabled music history. I think he may have considered this something of an achievement. The column he wrote for
The Squire often had an imperial tone, tainted with the kind of witless condescension and doctrinaire stiffness that mars the work of many Pop Music writers. When I met him, the same witless condescension and doctrinaire stiffness marred his personality. Coming from a place like Memphis to a relatively second-rate music town like Cincinnati, he must have felt like a very undervalued big fish in a small pond.
In an act of uncharacteristic magnanimity, he met with
The Willow staff and offered his thoughts. It was agreed that the event would be a combined effort; uniting these two towering pillars of local print media. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. What the staff at
The Willow didn’t realize was that Gerald had something entirely different in mind for this project. Perhaps to establish his role as the preeminent voice in regional music criticism as well as securing his position at
The Squire, Gerald appropriated the idea of the awards show and presented it to his superiors at the paper as his own. Adding insult to injury, he cloaked this journalistic treachery in the guise of civic-mindedness by stipulating that any profits from the event should go to a scholarship fund benefiting aspiring music students. The scholarship was to be named after Algernon “Ma” Raney, a local musician who had been gunned down while conducting a drug deal after a gig in the Over The Rhine neighborhood of downtown Cincinnati.
The result of all this intrigue was that Cincinnati ended up with two award shows. For a town like Cincinnati to have even one such event is slightly absurd. Having two of these things warrants a collective Rorschach test. I found the whole affair comical and I wrote a piece about it in a monthly blog that appeared on my website at the time. Everything was detailed as above along with a few words concerning award shows in general. A link to the article was sent out to an e-mail list that I had assembled through the years. The list included people at both
The Willow and
The Squire. One of the recipients was Gerald himself. It could not have been more than a half-hour after my mailing that he responded with a cease and desist letter. The legal department at
The Squire had been contacted and, he assured me, I would be sued for libel if the article was not removed.
This seemed unlikely but, given Gerald’s nature, it did cause some concern. I worked downtown for an ad firm back then and his e-mail arrived at around lunchtime. There was a restaurant around the corner from my office called
The Tale Of Two where Cincinnati’s other entertainment writer, Tom Finch, always had lunch. He wrote for
The Star; a paper that was on its last legs. Tom had a rough exterior but when you got to know him, he was a very nice and unassuming guy. As a rule, Tom drank his lunch. You could count on him to be at this particular restaurant because it was a block away from where he worked and it had a bar. I decided to see if he was there.
Walking in, I saw him sitting at the bar, going through a stack of papers while nursing his customary glass of gin. After the usual hellos, I explained the situation. He laughed and asked me about the particulars of my article. Before going into the newspaper business, Tom had studied law so he knew something about what constitutes libel. In the end, he told me not to worry because it didn’t sound like there were grounds for legal action. He thought it improbable that Gerald would actually carry through with the threat. Feeling relieved, I ordered lunch and listened to Tom tell his stories of Cincinnati’s bygone show business era. It was all very pleasant.
My post remained on the web site and nothing more was heard from anyone at
The Squire. If the legal department had been contacted they must have considered the matter too trivial to pursue. Gerald continued writing his column for another several years. He was one of the first to be let go when the paper started downsizing its staff. I later heard that he tried to bring an age discrimination law suit against his former employer. This also went nowhere. The award show he had organized was abandoned soon after his departure.
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© 2014 by Maurice Mattei
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