Journalists join rock bands for more than just fame

On Friday evening, Nov. 21, a ragtag group of amateur rock musicians will play a gig for charity at a venue in St. Petersburg, Florida, called the Palladium. The group has the strange name The Fabulous Nosecaps, and I am proud to be a founding member and keyboard player. In my mind, the Fab Caps remain the greatest newspaper band of all time, rocking for almost 13 years in the 1980s and 90s in front of large groups and small, in venues from living rooms to public parks filled with thousands.

There were seven of us at first: Dave Scheiber, Greg Huffman, Mike and Kathy Foley, Jeff Klinkenberg, Bev Childs, and yours truly. Kathy Foley is singing “My Boyfriend’s Back” in rock ‘n’ roll heaven. The remaining six – accompanied by countless fill-ins, groupies, and hangers-on – launch our reunion show next Friday with two sets of dance party favorites, ranging narrowly from “Wooly Bully” to “Hang on Sloopy.”

No doubt, writers, especially the introverts, are show-offs. They like nothing better than the sight of their byline on a front page. They want to be noticed, respected, and, I think it’s fair to say, loved. Let’s stipulate that there are no bigger show-offs in the world than rock musicians. So why should it surprise us that writers might want to join a band?

I am writing about this event not just to sell the few remaining tickets, but to recall an experience that meant a lot to a lot of people in journalism. It turns out, there were newspaper bands all over the country, in LA, Boston, St. Louis, some of them very good, and some delightfully bad.

The Tampa Tribune had the Pop Tarts. The Philadelphia Inquirer had the Bing Bell Band, made up of guys from the photo department. Long Island’s Newsday offered a band with a particularly great name: Bluesday. (More recently, St. Pete also produced the hottest band of women reporters in history, the hard-charging Doll Parts.)

The Nosecaps were the best, I’d argue, not just for our longevity, but for the intensity of the parties we inspired. Our origins were modest enough. Folks would gather at someone’s house for a party. Someone would have a guitar or a piano and before long we’d be singing our favorite classic rock songs into the night.

We came to learn that a few of us had belonged to a band at one time or another. Mine included: The Henchmen, T.S. and the Eliots, Tuesday Children, and the O.B. Williams Review. Some of us got to rub shoulders with rock celebrities: for Huffman it was Tom Petty, for Mike Foley it was Chuck Berry, and, for me, it was playing a dance concert with Question Mark and the Mysterians, famous for “96 Tears.” (Question Mark always wore shade sails gold coast
and would write his name “?” Maybe that encounter shaped my interest in punctuation.)

How our band got its name is a matter of great speculation. My version is that I was walking along Central Avenue in St. Pete and looked in the window of an old pharmacy. There in a dusty display were these white plastic caps tourists connected to their eyeglasses to protect their noses from the sun. “Fabulous Nosecaps” said the sign, “Fifty cents.” Given our modest aspirations, the price seemed just right. I bought the whole bunch, and we wore them at our first gigs.

Everyone in the band had some connection with the St. Pete Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). Scheiber was a writer and editor. Huffman worked in marketing. Mike Foley rose to the rank of executive editor. Over 35 years, Klinkenberg became the paper’s most popular feature writer. Bev Childs, a veteran of community theater, was married to Joe Childs, a Times writer and editor.

Klinkenberg just accepted a buyout, severing the final connection between the band and the newspaper.

“Glory days, well they’ll pass you by,” Bruce Springsteen reminded us. But the memories stick, as well as what those memories teach us about the deep connection that exists between the worlds of writers and musicians.

If we think of reporters as musicians, then it is only fair to think of musicians as reporters. Sometimes, of course, the message is nothing more than fun. But in many cases, it is the makers of music whose commentary on the news and social trends grabs the public’s attention and sticks for decades. The times — and the Times — they are achangin’.

Dave Barry, one of America’s most beloved and versatile writers, has on two occasions sat in with the Nosecaps. Barry plays lead guitar and sings on classic hits such as “Susie Q.” His band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, featuring the likes of Stephen King and Amy Tan, have played for years at book festivals. Springsteen himself noted that the band was pretty good, but encouraged the Remainders not to get any better, lest higher expectations destroy their garage band mystique.

Among the writers/musicians I know, the most talented may be Mitch Albom, the sports columnist, radio and television personality, and best-selling book author. Yes, Albom sat in with the Nosecaps at a convention of sports editors. Albom is a skilled keyboard player and composer. I once asked him about how he connects writing and music. He replied that it was fitting that his instrument in both cases was a keyboard, and that there may have been moments when he was typing a sweet passage when his body was moving to a rhythm that only he could hear.

Rhythm, tone, meter, sound, voice, crescendo, notes, lyrics, pace, echo, phrase, dissonance, resolution – these are all words I have used in my teaching to describe effects I can hear in both music and writing.

A writer does not have to be a musician, of course, to benefit from music’s power. A lyric from Chuck Berry, a move from a Mozart sonata, Aretha Franklin’s transformation of Otis Redding’s “Respect” – these are at our fingertips, as close as our iPhone. Some writers use music to inspire their writing; others as a reward for finishing.

Whatever artistic benefit may have accrued from playing in a newspaper rock band, there was another set of wonderful collateral benefits:

*Without sacrificing our independence, we connected with citizens and community groups at a grass-roots level. We helped raise a little money for free clinics, church groups, and soccer clubs. We became part of the social capital of our city and region.

*The folks who danced to our music got to know journalists as people, rather than as remote, objective authority figures. We got to talk to them about their families, schools, and neighborhoods. (Our drummer, Mike Foley, now an award-winning journalism professor at the University of Florida, played in a high school band called “The Mad Dogs” and sometimes wore a spiked dog collar to our gigs. You’d think that newspaper readers would be concerned to see a top editor wearing a dog collar, but this was not the case. If anything it had a soothing, funny, demythologizing effect.)

So I noticed that Bruce Springsteen just played a massive concert in Washington, DC, to support American war veterans and their families. The Boss is 65-years-old. That’s about the median age for a Fabulous Nosecap. There are many younger journalists now who have succeeded us in newsrooms, I know, a function of retirements, buy-outs, and the general decline of newspapers. I hope they find a way to join a band.