Music To My Ears

Timothy White was a longtime rock writer who, most recently, was the editor of Billboard magazine, the music-industry trade publication. It was there that he died last week, of a heart attack at age 50. In what would be the final installment of his column, “Music to My Ears”—he filed it an hour before he died—White told a shaggy-dog story about doing a Johnny Carson cover interview in L.A. for New York-based Rolling Stone (where he then worked), then coming home after a party to find his apartment padlocked and its contents, including the Carson interview tapes, removed by the city because his roommate hadn’t paid the rent; White then had to fly to San Francisco to interview the Blues Brothers and got dosed with LSD at a Grateful Dead party. Luckily, later he found the tapes. This particular column made for some good inside baseball; in others, he frequently championed little-known artists.