John Swenson

John Swenson in 2009

The last part of the music journalist’s career was his most important as he became a passionate chronicler and critic of the New Orleans scene.

On Monday, I learned that music writer John Swenson died after a long battle with cancer. He fought it for so long that it was hard to imagine how near the end was, even when he said doctors were considering ending treatment. He’d said something similar over dinner last summer and hung on for six or so more months. We all knew John was dying, but yesterday still felt sudden. 

John was part of the first generation of music writers in the late 1960s and early ‘70s who tried to find ways to write about rock ’n’ roll that matched the energy, spirit, and rebellious nature of the music. He wasn’t the stylist or the provocateur that some of his contemporaries were, but he built his career on an authentic, deeply felt passion for the music and the people who made it.

John and I became friends in 1999 when he bought a house in New Orleans and started to edit OffBeat. That began our friendship and a professional relationship that lasted more than a decade with him editing me or me editing him though an assortment of publications. We had good writing adventures together, including the time in the early 2000s that his substitute as the beat writer for the New York Rangers called in sick about three hours before puck drop in Madison Square Gardens. John was in New Orleans, and there was no way he could get back in time, so he came to my house, where we found the broadcast online and he covered the Rangers from Uptown.

John’s love for music and the creative works that moved him were his signature. If he liked your writing or music, he didn’t stop there. More than once, he told me that we were doing “important work,” and he said that about many musicians in New Orleans. Everything that mattered to him in American music came together in The Radiators, and he believed in the band probably more than they believed in themselves. I’m sure The Rads and I aren’t alone, and that there are at least hundred musicians in New Orleans who experienced his profound belief in them and their music. 

I love John’s writing because he could do something I can’t. John always wrote as a true believer. He processed great music as the product of great artists, and he wanted to help more people find and appreciate their art. His desire to shed light on the people he felt deserved it meant that even when he wasn’t feeling well and wanted to dial back his commitments, his friendships and the artists he believed in kept him writing. He felt an obligation, as if no one would say what needed to be said if he didn’t, and it would be a travesty if they or their work didn’t reach a wider audience.

We shared a good run at OffBeat starting in 2006 when we were in a position to document how New Orleans’ music community returned and in what condition. It was a story that music journalists don’t usually get to tell, and he particularly loved to pay attention to the roles musicians played in the post-Katrina recovery. The idea that in a music city, of course musicians would play a meaningful role in the recovery drove much of his reporting and led to New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans, his book on exactly that. 

John experienced the rock ’n’ roll writing game through a number of phases. He was part of its outlaw days and was proud to have submitted a larger expense account to Rolling Stone than Hunter Thompson did for the adventure that produced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In John’s case, he had followed jockey Stevie Cauthen, the first jockey to achieve rock star status, as he raced at tracks across Europe. When he got back, John tried to expense his racing losses. 

Like many writers of his generation, he found other outlets to help make a living, and John covered horse racing and the Rangers during hockey season. Still, his music writing gave him his identity, and he wrote the first biography of Bill Haley, as well as books on The Who and Kiss that lived in the No Man’s Land between fan service and journalism. He worked his way through editorships on a number of magazines, some famous, some lost to time, and edited The Rolling Stone Record Guide, The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide and The Rolling Stone Jazz and Blues Album Guide, all of which gave him a reason to spend time with a lot of music he loved. 

Once he was done with the latter, he had gone as far as he wanted with that kind of reference book writing. He was proud of the work, but he felt the formula in the writing and by the late ‘90s, he decided that what he really wanted to do was write about the music and musicians he really cared about, and a lot of them were in New Orleans.  

Around 2000, John got a gig editing the Knitting Factory’s short-lived jazz website, jazze.com. He asked me to contribute, and the highlight of that experience came when I reviewed a biography of Rahsaan Roland Kirk and talked about the tendency of white writers to downplay the pro-Black politics of Black musicians. John loved the strong take that was about more than just the pros and cons of the book, and he lived for the similarly freewheeling conversations about music, art and culture that took place in print and at the bar. Everybody who knows John will recognize this. The enthusiasm with which he drew connections and talked his way into fresh realizations was the part of the rock ’n’ roll life—and probably just life—that animated him. 

His gregarious and inclusive nature means that a lot of people felt like they had special relationships with John. The broad swath of love and sadness expressed on social media yesterday demonstrates how many people felt John’s presence in a meaningful way in their lives. I’m certainly one, but I know I’m not alone.