In his Lexington apartment, Walter Tunis faces a wall lined with hundreds of records.
From the floor to the ceiling, the records represent 46 years of his work as the Contributing Music Critic for the Lexington Herald Leader, which began in 1980 and abruptly ended last April.
Tunis explains what happened. “McClatchy Media, which owns the Herald Leader, and a number of other newspapers around the country, decided to discontinue the use of freelance reporters, of which I am one. So that ended everything there. This was not a decision of the Herald Leader; it was a decision of McClatchy, and it affected all their newspapers.”
Was it a gut punch, he’s asked? “Absolutely, absolutely, because when you do something for 46 years, anyway, it would be. But when it’s that long to do something that you really, really enjoy, and I'm still wrapping my head around it.”
Still, there’s a lot to celebrate.
The 67-year-old Tunis saw and wrote about many of the giants in modern-day music, including McCartney, Prince, U2, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles.
Was it fun? “Absolutely. Oh my God, it's been incredible fun.”
Tunis grew up in Louisville, and his introduction to a live rock concert started at an early age. He was 11-years old when his brother and sister talked their dad into allowing Walter to join them for a concert featuring Steppenwolf.
“They had to do a lot of talking to my dad to let me to go. He was really wary of it, because they just thought, you know, in those days rock and roll was just, you know, you won't come back alive from it. So, they had him convinced, and then the day of the show they printed a picture of Steppenwolf in the paper. My dad saw it, and he just about signed off, but he let me go. I had a great time. I came back fine, so he was good with it from that point on.”
Tunis was hooked on music, and in 1976, he moved to Lexington to attend the University of Kentucky to major in journalism. He first wrote about concerts in the Kentucky Colonel, the UK student newspaper. In 1980, at age 20, Tunis began writing for the Lexington Herald Leader.
His first assignment was a concert by Don McLean at the University of Kentucky Center for the Arts. Later it was replaced by the Singletary Center for the Arts.
“I knew that journalism would be my career. When I got into college, I did a lot of theater classes, just kind of as electives and things like that, because I enjoyed it, and I'm glad I did. But journalism was always the focus of it, and since that was where my writing had initially started, and that's where my real interest in almost by accident, came, that's what took hold, and that just went from there.”
He says the biggest challenge, especially in the early years, was meeting the newspaper’s deadline. At that time, there were two newspapers, the Lexington Herald came out in the morning, and the Lexington Leader was delivered in the afternoon.
“My deadline, for the most part, it stayed this way after the papers merged, was usually around 11:30 in the evening, so that usually meant having to leave a performance, especially if it was a multi-act performance at Rupp before it was over, so it meant sometimes you had a half hour, 45 minutes to write, and sometimes it would read like it the next day.”
Tunis describes writing notes in the dark as the concert was still going. Sometimes he used a flashlight as the music continued, and doing all this as the fans around him were often getting wild. He didn’t have a front row seat to the concerts and rarely went backstage afterwards because of his deadline to write the story. Tunis says he focused on being honest in his concert review and treating the musicians and performers fairly.
“The job of a critic is to present an opinion that is hopefully informed. It’s not biased, and bias means if you have a personal like or dislike, that kind of goes beside and try to impart one, what happened. You want to give some factual accounts of what happened, and also give your opinion of it, and hopefully give some reasons as to why you're doing that, which you know when you're a 21-year-old writer, that's a lot to kind of process.”
Technology forty years ago was also a challenge. Tunis used a “very primitive laptop” which was hooked up to a phone, on a land line. Cell phones did not come on the scene until much later. He says his reviews received very few complaints from the bands. One exception came from a legendary country music family.
“We got an angry phone call from Hank Williams Jr. one time, who didn't like what I had written about him, and it's been so long ago I can't even remember what it was I wrote about him, but I guess I didn't like the concert. I get more pushback from sponsoring organizations for a concert. Certain radio stations that may have sponsored an event that has their own morning DJs on the next day would be very vocal about it, but that comes with the turf, you know. By the same token, the number of people, the reverse of that, has been complimentary and supportive, and has luckily greatly outweighed that.”
Best concert he ever saw? Bruce Springsteen in 1984.
“It was near Christmas time. He was actually ill at the time; he had the flu, and just ripped it up, and it was just a combination of just great songs, great storytelling, and an immediacy that comes together in a concert setting, that's one of the beauties of rock and roll, even as acts get older, a lot of times their musical chops may get better. Sometimes even their singing gets better, but you lose your youth, and that vitality you have at that stage in your life, and getting to witness that, which you know, Springsteen would have been maybe closing in on 30 at the time, that was something.”
Biggest disappointment? Jefferson Starship in 1978, featuring rock music icon Grace Slick.
“I was really excited about that, and it just was... it wasn't a bad show, but I thought the potential was there for it to be much better than it was.”
Most difficult performer? “A great jazz artist named Henry Threadgill, who played UK one time, and he was a very unique artist, a very off-the-radar kind of, but he was very good. I called his management one time to see if we could do an interview, and he didn't just say no, he just said Henry doesn't want to talk to you, and there's something about the tone of it made me think he probably never asked Henry, but it wasn't like no, Henry doesn't want to do the interview, he doesn't want to do the interview with you.”
Biggest changes he’s seen in the music business? Much higher ticket prices, and changes in journalism.
“When you write for a daily newspaper, and you look at what the role of a newspaper was in 1980 when I started, and what it is now, it couldn't be more different. The attention to any form of the performing arts is very different right now. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as deemed important as it used to be. I think that's a loss. I think that's a very genuine loss, but you also have to consider that, you know, newspapers just aren't the go-to form of information.”
Tunis says he has no plans of stopping writing and is looking for new places to show his wordsmith talents. His writing craftsmanship brought him a big tribute from one of the world’s most famous bands.
In 2018, the Eagles were looking for someone to write the forward for their eighteen-disc box set, and it just so happened that Tunis had interviewed Don Henley at a Rupp Arena concert. The management of the Eagles reached out to Tunis.
“Pretty astounding, it was a little bit disbelief. When I first heard it, I thought, "You've got to be kidding me. And you know what they wanted was like a 600-word essay, which is like half the length of a normal story, so it was no problem at all to put together, and they needed it fairly quickly.”
Tunis pulls out the Eagles’ box set and opens it to show the forward, signed at the bottom “Walter Tunis, Lexington, Kentucky, July 2018.”
Tunis reads the last paragraph.
“It all makes up a legacy that has roared on for more than 45 years after the release of the Eagles' debut album. It has survived a band breakup everyone accepted as permanent, and has pushed forward through the death of co-leader Glenn Frey. It's a legacy so expansive you could be rocking out on the border, languishing in the darkest corridors of the Hotel California, or yes, even standing on that famed corner in Winslow, Arizona. An Eagle song will always be close at hand. That's how a great legacy works. Represents music made for its time, but welcomed back for all times.”
That’s one of many examples of Tunis’ vibrant writing that captures the moment and flavor of live music from some of the best to ever sing a verse or strum a guitar.
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