A Belated Memorial to Charles M. Young

Charles M. Young on his graduation day from Columbia in 1975
Photo: Hilary Johnson
Originally published in Rolling Stone magazine, Aug. 19, 2014

I am monumentally pissed and disappointed that I missed this. How such a passing managed to slip past my radar is inexcusable.

Charles M. Young was one of my favorite music journalists of all time.

No. He was one of my favorite journalists of all time.

Let me explain...

He sometimes wrote under the moniker "The Rev. Charles M. Young," and I accepted that he might, in fact, be some sort of teacher of things arcane. I didn't realize that it was a playful dig at his Presbyterian minister father. But mostly, Young made me laugh, because he was a damned funny guy who could parse out words to artfully build descriptions and situations in truly hilarious ways.

But he always gave us the story, whatever that story happened to be, and he saw the angles a less trained eye would miss, the details that usually got lost in press releases and mind-numbing meetings with PR flacks. Young put a human face on folks who were more often as not portrayed as being something more than human. And he did it in such a funny way, you couldn't help but laugh as you felt maybe a little closer to the people he was writing about. They fucked up just as much...and sometimes even more...as we did. The divide wasn't quite as great as we imagined, and sometimes that divide needed to be crossed with a bit of piss and vinegar just to provide a little reality check. Consider this passage from his 1977 feature on Kiss (with all due apologies to my old friend Chris Dickerson):

According to Scientific American, every time a buffalo farts in Africa, thousands of dung beetles are alerted to the possibility of manna from heaven. The relationship between the farts and the beetles is a peculiarly honest one. Each species of beetle is genetically programmed to eat a particular kind of dung, so the buffalo need not sponsor marketing surveys to discover where they have to fart for maximum return on their investment. Competing herds do not advertise themselves or offer promo samples. As for the product: buffalo farts do not promise to reveal the meaning of life. Buffaloes do not promise to craft farts that make the whole world sing. They do not promise intellectual respectability if a beetle can interpret their fart sounds with sufficient pedagogy. Buffalo farts promise shit, which is what they deliver.

Among contemporary rock & roll bands, the music of Kiss comes the closest to comparing favorably with buffalo farts. Allowing for a few aberrational songs, they, too, do not promise to reveal the meaning of life, make the whole world sing, or any of that. They scream elemental need, placing as much emphasis on words like "I wanna" as the Ramones, only with no condescending satire to sink them in Middle America.

Young was not all for the laughs, however. You only need to read the heartbreaking opening to his story on the disastrous tragedy at the Cincinnati Who concert in December 1979 to realize that. He gave more than a damn for the fans, probably because, at heart, he never stopped being a fan himself. They were his brothers and sisters. When they hurt, he hurt, too. He wrote of this in a piece taking a look at three of the kids who died at the Who concert. Young spoke with Stephan Preston's mother, Anne Votaw, and she told him a little about her son. Stephan, nicknamed Pips, who died that night in Cincinnati trying to rescue a couple of friends who also were killed. From the story:

She takes me to Pips' bedroom with some trepidation. The bed is an old mattress on the floor, well below the waterline from the flood of molding sweat socks, street signs, rumpled posters and dogeared magazines on the floor. Fading paisley bedspreads hang from the ceiling. A collage of dope pictures dominates the left wall.

"I want you to know why you're here," she says, standing in the middle of the wreckage. "Some of the broadcast media have behaved like vultures through this, sending film crews in trucks to cover the funerals, always sticking microphones in our faces. Every time they did a simple news update, they would show a paramedic beating on someone's chest. But I decided to let you in my house because Rolling Stone was Pips' favorite magazine."

For neither the first nor the last time on this story, my own eyes fill up with tears.

Charles M. Young probably had as much an influence on my decision to follow a journey into journalism as did a handful of other great writers. I doubt that many others gave me as much in return, however. His mix of humor and humanity showed me what real and thoughtful reporting could accomplish.

Sorry I missed his passage, though. He was one of the good ones.