The Pitch at 30: One more ride with the king — LeRoi remembers

This is no country for old record men. Doctors warned LeRoi Johnson a decade ago that he’d be dead by now. Today the ex-PennyLane buyer, Streetside Records district manager and Pitch record reviewer is 56 years old and eight years out of those businesses. But during the 1980s and into the next decade, Johnson was a brand apart from the store. His short record reviews — published under just his first name, often alongside his photo — combined the brevity of alt-weekly critical godhead Robert Christgau with a Midwestern earnestness so artless that it was its own kind of gonzo. Eventually these capsule summations were slugged “Ridin’ With the King,” a reference to his own name (French for the king) and to singer-songwriter John Hiatt’s album of the same title.

Congestive heart failure, kidney disease and diabetes now confine the king to what he jokes is “the poor side of Brookside,” and he doesn’t use the Web, but he says friends supply him with steady infusions of music, movies and shared memories. On the phone, recalling The Pitch‘s start as a record-store newsletter, he’s soft-spoken and still gee-whiz enthusiastic about records, his old peers and the fading art of the album review as epigram.

The Pitch: When did you get involved in The Pitch?

LeRoi: I was there from the brainstorming meeting for the store and the warehouse. We met every Friday to brainstorm stuff — how to increase sales and visibility.

You needed help selling records in 1980?

When we moved to that location in Westport, at that time we were on the far edge of Westport, and our visibility wasn’t very good. I know that sounds crazy now, but at the time we were trying to come up with ideas about becoming more visible to the public. That’s how the paper started evolving. It was basically an advertisement.

Donald Mayberger had the original idea. He’d talked to [owner] Hal [Brody] about trying to do something like that, and there were people who liked the idea and volunteered to write and cut and paste. One of the good things about Hal was, if you had an idea that wasn’t completely crackpot, he’d say try it. It started out with everybody volunteering — someone would say, ‘I’ll try this.’ It was up to Donald to piece it all together.

So your “I’ll try this” was writing reviews?

I’d considered myself a wannabe writer. I started out studying English at Southwest Missouri State [now Missouri State University]. I’d had an English professor who was my adviser, and he knew I wanted to be a writer, so he advised me to get out of the English department and get experiences to write about. He told me to move into social science and get people experience. That’s what I loved about working music retail. Every experience could be wholly new and different, and the people truly wanted to know about music.

There also were many more record stores in town then.

At that time it was all so territorial that it wasn’t very competitive. On a people level, everybody supported each other and were friends. Warner Bros. had an office on the Plaza, and we’d drop in and get promos and posters. Their sales rep would come at least once a week and present the new releases to you, and you’d set up your buy.

Most people would be amazed at how thirsty and unknowledgeable the general public was. I think there’s so much more source material for people to learn about music than back when we were doing this, especially starting the Pitch. There was no collective place for people. That was the fun of the turntable. You’d get a stack of records and take a customer over and start playing them records. Once you could figure out one thing they liked, you could find them 100 things.

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And a reviewer can tell them about 100 more.

Right, but if everyone had the same taste as me, it’d be a really boring world. I wanted people to be exposed to things that they otherwise might not have been. That was the whole reason I decided to write reviews.

I wrote basically for myself. I wanted someone to be telling me about these records, but there wasn’t anyone. I had people throw records in my face because I’d said buy it. I would let people return them. Hal was really good about that — he let us have basically an open return policy. We’d hope they traded for something else. Not so much for money but so they’d go home with something they loved.

I wanted to get response. I don’t care if you love or hate me, just react. You don’t review to build your own ego. You’re trying to get people to like music the way you like it. It means so much to you. You want it to mean a lot to other people.

What was your method?

Because I reviewed, I got more promos than most people. I felt guilty a lot of times because I could take five or 10 records a day. I always listened to them all. I listened to everything I could possibly listen to once. Everything that stood out, good or bad, I’d put in a pile to listen to a second time. Halfway through the second time, I knew if I was going to review it, and if I did, I’d play it a third and fourth time. I’d listen at home, at work, in the car and on headphones. Every record sounded different in all those formats. That’s one reason to this day I like records more than CDs. They have so much more depth of sound.

How did your system start — the stamps reading “Try Me” and “Fly Me” and all that?

We’d hand-write those in at first. Donna Trussell [Pitch editor from 1983 to 1993] came up with stamps. I’d grown up reading reviews in Rolling Stone and I’d read these four-column reviews, and they’d analyze it down to lines in the song, and I’d get to the end and never know if they liked it.

Any reviews you regret?

The one that always clawed at me was, I wrote a scathing review of Anthrax and then later went back and realized I’d really blown it. I attest that to Anthrax being so easy to write a funny line about. To this day, I blame the review on the fact that it was easy.

How do you listen to music now?

I’ve got a couple of turntables — I keep one as a backup — and your basic amplifier and CD-DVD player. It’s just an old clunker. I have a Pioneer amp, an older one. Everything I have is pretty old. In the 1980s, I was talking to Hal Brody one day, and we projected that we’d hear music on little chips. We thought they’d implant them in your brain. I’m amazed at how close we were in our prediction.

You were photographed more often than the average record reviewer. It’s been said you liked the visibility.

It was great fun. I think that first picture probably was me in sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. Mayberger probably came up with that. We once had a contest [in the spring of 1987] to see who could explain where the name “Ridin’ With the King” came from. We gave away dinner with me as the prize. Most people used the John Hiatt reference, but we also wanted people to figure out that it was my name. We had people write in a letter to explain what it meant, and the winner signed hers “Hooker With a Heart.”

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You can’t pass that up.

No, but she also got it right. It was fun. We had a great time.

The thing I remember most was, I was at a Royals game and just sitting there, and a guy walked down the aisle and squatted by me and said, “Aren’t you LeRoi? I love your paper and wanted to say thanks for doing that.” I expected it at concerts and bars and restaurants, but not at a baseball game. But I went to a lot of games, and over time more people came up to me there and wanted to talk music.

Why did you leave Streetside?

I got sick. I had congestive heart failure — chronic, obstructive pulmonary disease — and I couldn’t do it anymore. Every day, I battle with my health so much that it’s really hard for me to do most things now. I go to doctors three or four times a week. I’m starting dialysis for kidney failure. I had a defibrillator put in a year or 18 months ago.

What caused your heart trouble?

Diabetes. It wasn’t diagnosed until the second heart failure, and by then it had taken its toll already.

What music still never lets you down?

Led Zeppelin. Whenever I’m not feeling it, I put on Led Zeppelin and then I’m feeling it.

Which one these days?

Lately it’s been Physical Graffiti. How can you listen to something like that and not feel the adrenaline?

Do you read The Pitch now?

I’ve got to tell you, the paper has evolved into kind of what was our mission. At one point I remember having one of our meetings, and we talked about how we wanted to be like The Boston Phoenix. That would have been so cool. So seeing it now makes me feel really proud.