Jane Scott:
too old for rock & roll?
Lee Abbott
Rolling Stone, May 17, 1979
“This is my philosophy,” says Jane Marie Scott, explaining how to survive in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, home of the Indians and site of the World Series of Rock, an event whose first “game” last summer featured the Rolling Stones and attracted nearly 85,000 fans. “I never go anywhere without food, peanut butter sandwiches usually. And I always take toilet tissue and safety pins. The lines can be awfully long, so it's nice to be prepared.
Jane Scott — amateur handwriting analyst, Sunday-school teacher, antique collector, oft-engaged single woman and palm reader — is the pop rock writer for Ohio’s largest daily newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She’s also known throughout the music business as rock journalism’s oldest teenybopper. “Any woman who will tell you her age will tell you anything,” laughs Scott, who says she is a “1949” graduate of the University of Michigan. “Let’s just say I'm out of my forties.”
Dressed in a knee-length, fake-fur jacket and buzzing with vim, the ratty-blond-haired, heavyset Scott bustles into action at the Agora Ballroom, a 1000-seat showcase club. The occasion is Steve Forbert’s Cleveland concert, and Scott, in her usual manner, bobs from table to table interviewing fans (whose reactions often wind up in her stories). She then gathers her belongings, which include a suitcase-sized purse full of knickknacks and promo material, and storms a path through stage security. “I never plan,” she says, her face lit with the rapture of a teenager who’s gaining backstage entrance for the first time. “I always take it on the fly.”
“She's a relic, an anachronism,” insists one record-company publicist. “I mean, you’ve got this great rock town that's broken so many acts and is virtually ruled by FM radio, and you’ve got this woman running around asking Ted Nugent what kind of feathers he wears. The bottom line is that she cares, but I keep asking myself why these clowns don’t get a serious rock critic!”
“I’m a reporter writing about music,” Scott says in response to that charge, “not a musician.” One recent week, for example, she wrote a cover story on disco for the Plain Dealer Friday Magazine, the paper’s weekly entertainment tabloid. She also managed a long feature on Stephen Stills and shorter pieces on Cher, Peaches and Herb and Elvis Costello. In addition, she reviewed Nicolette Larson’s appearance at the Agora, attended a birthday party for a local rock station and compiled an up-to-date calendar of events.
Scott joined the Plain Dealer in the early Fifties as a society assistant, writing about weddings, engagements and the Junior League. Within two years she began writing “Senior Class,” a page devoted to the elderly that she was in charge of until recently. Then, around 1958, she inherited the “Boy and Girl” page. “In those days,” Scott says, “we were trying to, aim at the thirteen-year-old, you know, the big rah-rah spirit at Berea High and so on.”
But that spirit changed on September 15th, 1964, the night the Beatles played Cleveland Public Hall. “The kids were so noisy and excited that Deputy Inspector Bare — I can still remember his name — went onstage and stopped it.”
After the Beatles, Scott recalls, she stopped writing about what she and the paper thought the kids ought to hear and started covering the music teenagers like.
“I think I'm sort of critical,” she offers. “I try to balance. There’s always the temptation to be clever, to enjoy making cutting remarks. But you should be independent of personal like or dislike.”
Sometimes such objectivity comes hand. Take the celebrated Elvis Costello incident, which occurred in late 1977 during the English rocker’s first U.S. tour, “There weren’t supposed to be any interviews,” Jane recalls, “so all I asked was how the show went. He gave me this look… the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen.” The run in ended with Jake Riviera. Costello’s manager, shouting. “We don't care if we’re ever in the goddamned Plain Dealer!” The event left Scott shaken. “I was furious. I’m a reporter, and no one, not even Jimmy Carter, can tell me what to do.”
But her persistence and zeal often yield more favorable results. “My age isn’t a handicap,” she says. “There’s a certain advantage in being a mother figure. People l me things they otherwise wouldn’t.” Such as Jim Morrison, who talked openly to Scott about religion. “He really bared his soul on the subject. He wanted to know where he fit in the universe.”
Rockers also tend not to forget Scott. One of her prouder moments came during the Wings over America tour in 1976, when Paul McCartney remembered her from his Beatles days.
“I'm not special,” Scott concludes. “I’m out of sync, time sync. If I were twenty-seven, you wouldn’t be writing about me. But I’m committed to my work. I’m exuberant about life, energetic, enthusiastic and I have strong feelings about things…”
Like Nicolette Larson’s handwriting: “It's aggressive, up and down letters. She’ll go far.”
And the love life of Dr. Hook’s Ray Sawyer: “Very intense,” Scott says breathlessly. “His heart line is very deep.”
And Elvis Costello: “He’s scum. But he sure can write.”