Gary Kenton

In 1968, when he was between his freshman and sophomore years at Boston University, Gary Kenton landed a job as Review Editor for Fusion Magazine, one of the first national publications (along with Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, and others) to take rock ‘n’ roll seriously and to incorporate all aspects of American life (politics, film, urban life, environment) from what might be called a rock ‘n’ roll perspective. Mr. Kenton went on to Detroit to work for Creem Magazine and to write about music for such publications as The Washington Post, Musician, TV Quarterly, The Chicago Sun-Times, and others.

Tired of not having money (the weekly salary at Creem was $35), Gary “sold out,” moving back to New York to do public relations in the music business. The pay was decent, the expense account was luxurious, and he has stories.

After the birth of his son, Malcolm, in 1985, Gary went back to school, eventually earning a master’s degree in communications at Fordham University.

Gary had started taking notes on the subject on rock ‘n’ roll on television while he was still at Fusion Magazine in the early 1970s. It only took four decades for a book to emerge.

In addition to compiling the most comprehensive account of the TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond), Gary is among the few scholars to apply the tenets of Media Ecology to the topic. Briefly put, Media Ecology is the interdisciplinary field of study that developed from the explorations and writings of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. The essential idea is neatly encapsulated by McLuhan’s 1964 aphorism, the medium is the message. A half-century later, magnetic resonance imagery has proven McLuhan’s thesis: every communication technology creates its own environment and the human brain is impacted differently by exposure to different media.

Applying this idea, Gary not only traces the colorful history of rock on TV, but demonstrates that, despite many memorable appearances, rock ‘n’ roll and television are inherently incompatible modes of communication. For those interested in the details, Gary has provided a book: Transmission and Transgression: The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll on Television (Peter Lang).