Rodriguez thrived as a pioneering member of a budding cultural class: the star Canadian rock critic whose word carried weight.Paul Taillefer/Montreal Star
At the turn of the 1970s, a nascent Led Zeppelin was the talk of the rock ‘n’ roll world. But if fans flocked to the deafening blues rock, for critics such as the Montreal Star’s Juan Rodriguez, the music went over like a lead balloon. Covering the British band’s concert at the old Montreal Forum on April 13, 1970, Mr. Rodriguez dotted his scathing review with adjectives such as sluggish, miserable, pretentious and monotonous.
“Their overriding gimmick is the loudness of their music (if it could be called that),” he wrote. “Everything is built around this element. Make enough noise and fans cease to listen; they are mesmerized into a dumb stupor and will accept anything.”
Many did not accept Mr. Rodriguez’s damning criticism.
“I remember he was the most hated man in Hingston Hall after he dissed Led Zeppelin,” said David Young, referring to a dormitory on what is now the Concordia University campus in Montreal.
Decades later, long after Led Zeppelin ceased to exist, Mr. Rodriguez met the band’s singer, Robert Plant, in the press lounge of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. When the journalist admitted to writing the brutal review, Mr. Plant graciously smiled and replied, “Nice to meet you, glad that we’re still both hanging on.”
Mr. Rodriguez, the handsome, hard-living son of a Spanish immigrant and gifted, iconoclastic music writer with the Montreal Star and The Gazette, died on Aug. 3, at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, of renal failure. He had lost a foot to amputation because of diabetes years earlier, and had suffered a stroke in 2023.
He was 76.
Embedded in the popular-music scene of the 1960s and 70s, Mr. Rodriguez thrived as a pioneering member of a budding cultural class: the star Canadian rock critic whose word carried weight. “He was feared and respected by promoters, bands and music fans, who often winced at his superbly written, well-informed columns following a show,” said veteran Canadian music journalist Larry LeBlanc, who cut his teeth in the same era. “He towered above us all.”
Mr. Rodriguez was an incisive stylist whose writing directly reflected the energy and rebellious attitude of the music he observed and analyzed. Hired by the Montreal Star in 1969, the brash 21-year-old brought an underground-press aesthetic to the mainstream. He had self-published the cultural fanzine Pop-See-Cul (an allusion to the frosty dessert on a stick) since 1966.
Although Rodriguez was known for his acerbic slant, he was not uniformly negative. He was an anglophone who took an interest in the province’s Francophone scene.Louis Rastelli/ ARCMTL
His friend Peter Goddard, pop-music critic for the Toronto Star from 1972 to 1988, wrote that Mr. Rodriguez was “probably the first writer anywhere to fashion rock criticism into a form of guerrilla warfare.” Writing on tight deadlines and fuelled by the leading intoxicants of the day, the Montrealer dazzled, amused and often angered.
“That review was alley talk,” Leonard Cohen told Mr. Rodriguez, after the latter’s unfavourable write-up of his concert in the early 1970s. “I’ve got a bunch of big guys in my band who would love nothing more than to take you into an alley.”
Mr. Rodriguez recalled that exchange in one of a series of Gazette articles in 2013 which more or less served as his memoir. He wrote that Mr. Cohen, in 1977, invited him to his Montreal home, where they sipped cognac and ate from the only thing in the refrigerator – a huge jar of kosher pickles.
Music promoter Dan Burke was a 17-year-old copyboy at The Gazette when he first came across Mr. Rodriguez in 1975: “He came gliding through the newsroom one day. He looked like a rock star to me – long hair, lanky legs in flared jeans, handsome face. He really was a suave, iconic henchman of the sixties rock culture.”
Mr. Rodriguez was immune to music industry hype. He knew plenty of five-dollar words, but “hagiography” was not one of them. He dismissed the Beatles’ landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as “just bells and whistles.” The Doors were slammed, Beau Dommage was dismissed, Neil Young was broadsided and Phil Collins was panned.
“He called them as he saw them, no matter how popular or iconic the artist,” said music journalist Tim Perlich. “That takes integrity and also some guts. It’s one thing for a well-known critic to posit that the Beatles are overrated and quite another to slam a Montreal performance by Leonard Cohen at his peak while writing for a high-circulation Montreal newspaper.”
Although Mr. Rodriguez was known for his acerbic slant, he was not uniformly negative. He endorsed American guitarist Mike Bloomfield and wrote a favourable feature on the draft-dodging, Montreal-based singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester for Rolling Stone magazine. He was an anglophone who took an interest in the province’s Francophone scene.
Mr. Rodriguez’s first stint with The Gazette came to what he called a “bitter, alcohol-infused” end that was marked by an unflattering review of Mr. Young’s 1979 concert film Rust Never Sleeps: “He projects such a brooding image on the screen that you’d think Young had this film made so he could gaze at himself in his bedroom at night.” Mr. Rodriguez said it took him “three pained hours” to write the seven-paragraph piece.
By his own count, he attended less than a dozen concerts in the 1980s. He landed a job writing questions for the many versions of the Trivial Pursuit board game invented by Montreal newsmen Chris Haney and Scott Abbott. It is believed that he composed more than 50,000 questions for 20 editions of the game.
In 1989, he left Canada for Berkeley, Calif., where his first girlfriend lived. He began writing concert reviews again, for the weekly East Bay Express. He returned to Montreal to cover a variety of music, including jazz, classical and Francophone pop, for The Gazette.
Mr. Rodriguez was an alcoholic, fond of the barfly bonhomie. He wrote about it in 1999: “Although I’ve enjoyed periods of sobriety, I’m entwined in a love-hate relationship with booze, experiencing the happiest of times and the worst.” That year, he stopped drinking after being diagnosed with diabetes, chronic pancreatitis, nerve damage and other effects of a lifetime of boozing.
In the early 2000s, he took a strong liking to electronic pop, which help revitalize his love of music for music’s sake. He was particularly entranced with Alison Goldfrapp of the English duo Goldfrapp, who he saw one night at Montreal’s Spectrum.
A touch claustrophobic, he preferred to watch shows from the side of the stage. For the Goldfrapp concert, however, transfixed by the singer’s “spooky beauty and electric sounds to match,” he found himself wading into the crowd toward the stage.
“Finally,” he recalled years later, “I was a fan again.”
Named after his father, Jorge Juan Rodriguez was born in England on March 4, 1948. With the country still on war rations in 1953, his family immigrated to Montreal. His father was a Spanish-language broadcaster with the BBC and the CBC. As an actor he did readings from Don Quixote and poems of Garcia Lorca for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. His mother, Patricia Johnson, was a teacher with a flair for storytelling.
As a child, he underwent speech therapy for a stutter. He drew, painted and wrote from a young age. “Those who stutter often need to express themselves in other domains,” said Rosa Rodriguez, one of two sisters.
His first radio was a yellow crystal receiver that picked up the flickering signal of a station in Saint-Jérôme, Que., playing rock music. Graduating to a transistor radio, he heard stations from the United States. “This dial-turning was my first intensely interior listening experience,” he recalled. “Sounds colliding like atoms inside my head.”
Young Mr. Rodriguez was bent on adventure. “One of his favourite films was Treasure Island,” said his sister. “This was not a kid who sat in front of an iPhone.”
In the summer of 1964, he watched the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, staying for a second screening. He was more of a Stones guy, though, to the point of adopting Mick Jagger’s mod taste for scarves and wool pullovers. “I sweated bullets, but it was a small price to pay for feeling cool,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in 2013.
In 1966, he enrolled in Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), but quickly quit. Working in the mailroom of the Montreal Engineering Company, he printed the initial editions of his Pop-See-Cul zine on their mimeograph.
One of his first published freelance pieces was with Hit Parader magazine, titled The Rock Revolution: Kind of a Drag. He was paid US$50 for what he later described as a “hysterical, clumsy screed.”
Before leaving for a six-month trip to London in 1969, he proposed a deal to the Montreal Star: If he landed an interview with the Rolling Stones, would they hire him? They would, and did. It was hardly an exclusive – Mr. Rodriguez covered the Stones’ concert and press conference at London’s Hyde Park that introduced new guitarist Mick Taylor – but it was enough to earn him the job as the Star’s pop-music critic when he returned to Montreal at the end of the summer.
That fall, he interviewed Janis Joplin backstage at the Montreal Forum, where they shared a bottle of Southern Comfort before the show. Speaking with the Montreal Underground Origins Blog in 2016, Mr. Rodriguez said he and Ms. Joplin embraced as she left the stage after the concert. “I live and die up there,” the singer said to him. “Gimme a good review.”
He gave her the good review. She died of a heroin overdose less than a year later.
Reflecting on his career, Mr. Rodriguez once explained his relationship with the artists he covered: “Musicians always made it interesting, even if I disliked their music. I was like a moth to their flame, whether I admitted it or not.”
Mr. Rodriguez leaves his sisters, Rosa Rodriguez and Carmen Rodriguez.
In 2016, it was reported in the media that he was homeless and had gone missing. “It wasn’t true, and it bothered Juan,” said Irwin Block, a friend and former colleague. “He had simply skipped a dialysis treatment.”
In an interview with the Montreal Journal in 2017, Mr. Rodriguez said he regretted spending his money on drugs in the past, and that he now relied on his pension.
Although a manuscript of his book on jazz exists, Mr. Rodriguez’s autobiography has been misplaced, according to his sister, Rosa. “He told me over the phone that it was some of the best writing he had ever produced. But nobody knows where it is now.”
Ms. Rodriguez believed her brother was akin to Sammy in Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?. The title character in the 1941 novel ran and ran, with death as the only finish line.
“Juan was constantly creating and doing things,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “He was always running toward something.”
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