THE BEAT GOES ON
PASADENA, CA-Tm a roots man, I see everything in terms of what came before,” says Ian Whitcomb, author and novelist, songwriter, disc jockey, BBC correspondent, archivist, recording artist and ex-pop star of the 60’s, “and there’s a terrible tendency in this country to think anything that happened five years ago is nostalgia.
THE BEAT GOES ON
Ian Whitcomb: Still Turned On
PASADENA, CA-Tm a roots man, I see everything in terms of what came before,” says Ian Whitcomb, author and jiovelist, songwriter, disc jockey, BBC correspondent, archivist, recording artist and ex-pop star of the 60’s, “and there’s a terrible tendency in this country to think anything that happened five years ago is nostalgia.”'
Whitcomb is sitting in a coffee shop in Pasadena, looking less like the “true renaissance man” his friend Barry Hansen (“Dr. Demento”) calls him than the logical end product of his stage persona—where he moves about so chaotically his sets are like 50 years of American pop music condensed into 50 minutes. His act is no sterile presentation of Tin Pan Alley, but a raucous look at America’s past.
Actually Whitcomb had less than an hour’s sleep the night before. After hosting the Sock Hop Ball at the Variety Arts Center in Los Angeles he had to be on the air at 6 a.m. for his KROQ-FM radio show. For four hours he plays old records and gossips amusingly about artists, in between suffering through commercials and stoned callers on the request lirie.