Punk music-loving board member is still ‘Jamming’ after all these years |
On Board Online • March 11, 2013
My other side
Editor’s note: School board members tend to be passionate about their interests. In this occasional feature, board members tell On Board about their “other side.”
Name: Tony Fletcher
Age: 48
School District: Onteora Central School District, Ulster County
School Board Tenure: Four years
His Other Side: Author, blogger, music journalist
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior writer
In the 1970s, Tony Fletcher was a London teenager captivated by punk rock and the counterculture bands that defined the genre. While still in school, he even created a fan magazine he called Jamming in honor of one of those groups, The Jam.
Now a 48-year-old married father of two sons and the vice president of the Onteora school board in Ulster County, Fletcher is still writing about rock. With the same enthusiasm for the subject that he had as a teen, he makes his living as a music journalist and biographer. He also has a personal website and blog called iJamming!
Fletcher’s latest book, A Light that Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths, was published in December in the U.S. by Crown Archetype, an affiliate of Random House, and in the U.K. by another Random House affiliate, William Heineman.
The timing could hardly have been better. The book on the 1980s band is arriving just as U.S. interest in the Smiths seems to be reviving. The group’s highly-regarded guitarist, Johnny Marr, recently was honored as a “Godlike Genius” by the British music magazine NME and is releasing his first solo album, “The Messenger.”
As a result, along with his busy schedule of readings and interviews about the book, Fletcher also has been asked to comment for coverage of Marr. He was quoted last month in a New York Times story about the guitarist.
“The reaction here (in America) has been wonderful,” Fletcher said during an interview at Oriole 9, the Woodstock café where he did much of his reading while he was researching A Light that Never Goes Out.
The Smiths were a phenomenon in Britain but less so in the U.S. Their lead singer, Morrissey, has a U.S. following and might be better known here than the band, which lasted only five years before breaking up in 1987.
The book takes its title from one of the Smiths’ best-known songs, “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.”
The band’s music and emotional lyrics, full of distain for the conservative political institutions of their time, reflected the members’ working-class upbringing and schooling in the gritty northern industrial city of Manchester, Fletcher says. Researching the book gave him an opportunity to indulge his lifelong fascination with the social and political influences that shape young musicians and their art.
Fletcher estimates he spent about four years researching and writing the Smiths book, due, in part, to his exhaustive research habits. Other responsibilities, including his school board service, also played a part.
Fletcher laughed as he recalled that Marr once joked to him: “If you’re not careful, Tony, you are going to spend more time on this book than I was in the Smiths.”
Fletcher’s previous books on rockers include a bestselling biography of The Who drummer Keith Moon, published in 1998 and updated in 2005; Remarks Remade: The Story of R.E.M.; and The Clash: The Music that Matters.
Fletcher still pays attention to new music and young performers. Does it make him a better board member? Fletcher isn’t sure, but it can’t hurt.
“I’ve written a lot about youth culture,” he said. “I don’t go to clubs anymore, but I still feel engaged in youth culture.”
He has written one novel, Hedonism, inspired by his years working in the New York City music club scene during the 1990s, and a history of music in New York City from 1927 to 1977 called All Hopped Up and Ready to Go, which he points to with particular pride.
“This one was probably more a labor of love, because I knew it would not be as big a success from a publishing point of view,” he says of the musical history of New York.
His first book, Never Stop, about Echo & The Bunnymen, is no longer in print.
Fletcher still does some writing as a freelance music journalist, but these days, he finds books more satisfying.
“I’m willing to put in the work it takes to do a book, and I’m more interested,” he said.
Currently he’s between writing projects and is pursuing various music-related hobbies. He plays occasional gigs on keyboards, guitar and vocals with a band of his local contemporaries, the Catskill 45s, and does a turn now and then as a DJ.
He enjoys keeping up with new music and sharing some of the older stuff with his sons, ages 8 and 17. In mid-February, they traveled to Long Island to see The Who at the Nassau Coliseum. “My 8-year-old is a massive Who fan, and he can play many of their songs on his guitar,” he reported a few hours after the show.
Occasionally, Fletcher’s popular culture and school board worlds collide, as they did poignantly on Dec. 14, the day of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Fletcher was scheduled for a 2 ½-hour guest DJ spot that afternoon on WGXC, a radio station serving Columbia and Greene counties in the Catskills.
He decided to stick with his plan to present an eclectic mix of favorites from his extensive personal collection, but pondered carefully how he should open the show.
“I have to say I didn’t feel as if I could just jump in with happy-go-lucky music here,” he told his listeners. “I’m the parent of a young kid, as well as a senior, and I’m also on my local school board down in Onteora. We always fear for something like this. It doesn’t matter how much security you put in place, what policies you put in place, people get their hands on guns and bad things happen.”
The song Fletcher selected was an anti-violence anthem from the early 1970s, a version he said he has on original green vinyl. It was “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
“I just wanted to start the show by paying respect and desperately trying to find something that could cleanse a little bit,” Fletcher said. “I make no apologies for how corny it is, whatsoever.”