This is the question that has bothered music critics since they have existed, can you be friends with a musician, a rock star, go to his/her show and write an objective review? Of course not!
Iman told me that Lester Bangs told a lot of things, but the only thing I know about him is what he ‘says’ in Cameron Crowe’s film ‘Almost Famous’:
‘You CANNOT make friends with the rock stars. That's what's important. If you're a rock journalist – first, you will never get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. And they'll buy you drinks, you'll meet girls, they'll try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs… I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it.'
'Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.’
Bangs was right and he was only talking about real friendship, meeting a musician and developing a human relationship, as it was a time before all the social media we are equipped with these days. What would he have thought about emails, Facebook, Twitter,… what do you do when a band, a musician is asking you to be friends on Facebook? Now, there are so many different ways to develop some sort of relationship through the internet, beside the old-fashion way, that avoiding some a relationship with a musician for a rock critic becomes harder than ever.
Editor-in-chief of Jazz and Pop, Patricia Kennealy interviewed Jim Morrison in 1969, and eventually became his friend, lover, and even married him in 1970! I guess it is the ultimate relationship, as a critic can’t get closer to the star. This is what she wrote about the conflicting situation:
‘Anyway, the only musician I ever got personally involved with was Jim Morrison, and few I think could blame me. And it was mutual (and I like to think few could blame him). To compensate for what I thought others might perceive as favoritism (though I was scrupulous in fairness otherwise), I sometimes was harder on the Doors than I was on other bands, which was just as biased and unfair as letting them off too easily for musical crimes and offenses. Jim just laughed.’
So she had ‘solved’ the problem by being harsher, but she knew it was not fair either. And it happens more than you think, Chrissie Hynde had been romantically involved with famous rock critic Nick Kent, and the Shins’ James Mercer married a journalist he met when she was assigned to interview him for a story. She is no longer a journalist.
Human relationships are what they are, people meet, become friends or even lovers, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it, even Lester Bangs didn’t totally follow his famous advice: wasn’t he a good friends with Captain Beefheart?
San Francisco Chronicle’s Joel Selvin explained his point of view about the rock critic ethics in 2009:
‘We are encouraged to develop sources as confidants. The better our sources, the more effective our work. But developing these sources inevitably engenders sympathy or, at least, empathy that might be seen as compromising.’
‘I think everybody has to kind of draw their own lines of what is compromising in their hearts. For instance, I take the free CDs and use them as tools of my work. I would not accept any paid travel any longer (I did in the '70s).’
‘I always like to remember what Jesse Unruh – remember him? – said about lobbyists in Sacramento: ‘If you can't eat their food, drink their drinks and vote against 'em the next day, you have no business being here.’
Yes, this conflict of interest exists about anywhere, and almost for any job, if I can take a personal example, it begins with the parent who is offering a Christmas present to his kid’s teacher, I have seen it! The only challenge in this story is to stay, whatever the circumstances, ‘honest, and unmerciful’.