Pioneering Montreal rock music critic Juan Rodriguez has died at 76

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Juan Rodriguez, a pioneering Montreal rock music critic for The Gazette and the Montreal Star, died Saturday afternoon at the Jewish General Hospital. He had faced health challenges for some time. He was 76.

Friends and former colleagues remembered him on Sunday with fondness, acknowledging his prodigious gifts as a writer, his formidable knowledge of musical history and his courage as a critic.

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Rodriguez was “one of the last rock critics who really disdained the cheerleading we hear now,” said Bernie Perusse, who was The Gazette’s rock critic for several years until his 2013 retirement. “He embraced the idea of taking contrarian and unpopular positions when he felt it was necessary. We don’t have that anymore.”

Longtime friend and former colleague Irwin Block said of Rodriguez: “He developed strong opinions as a critic, and had the guts to write about it, without fear of dissing icons. He was embedded in the rock culture, which allowed his strength as a writer to emerge. He later did the same with the Québécois music scene and in his coverage of jazz.”

Said Perusse: “I haven’t met many with his knowledge of musical history or with the 24/7 passion he had for all kinds of music. He never stopped thinking about music and we never stopped talking about it. He had a real depth of knowledge.

“The great thing about seeing Juan is that I would sit down and it would be right in, full speed, talking about music — as if the conversation had ended an hour before.”

Covering the Montreal Jazz Festival together, he and Rodriguez “shared war stories and it developed into a friendship,” Perusse said. “When we would do the wrap-up at the end of the festival, it was a highlight of my year.”

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“Knowing Juan, he would want no part of a hagiography, so I will say this: He was a complicated guy,” said former Gazette Arts & Life editor Basem Boshra, currently senior managing editor of CBC Quebec.

“He could be stubborn and dismissive and vainglorious. But as a writer and observer of rock music, my goodness. He was capable of such dazzling and incisive criticism and, as the cliché goes, he certainly forgot more about rock music than I will ever know.

“Sitting down and just hearing him reminisce about his crazy years in the trenches, especially during the formative years of rock that he played such an essential role in chronicling, are memories that remain pretty vivid for me, even so many years later.”

Rodriguez was born in England in 1948 and came to Montreal with his parents and two sisters in 1953. The family lived in Snowdon and he began writing about music in the early 1960s, while still in high school — he attended West Hill High, today Royal Vale — and published one of the first music fanzines in Montreal, Pop-See-Cul from 1966 to 1970: It’s a play on words of the frozen treat.

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He dropped out quickly from what is today Concordia University because he knew he wanted to be a music critic. He’d always liked writing in school. “In those days, anyone could start up … there were a bunch, maybe about 20 of us on the continent, writers who later contributed to Rolling Stone and Creem and all the rock papers,” he recalled in a 2018 interview.

There was no master class in criticism “and you just sort of learned it on the fly. Now, it’s more of a careerist thing … the whole industry has become a lot more predictable and a lot more pat. In the ’60s, a lot of new things were happening and it was … a thrill to see and meet some of these artists you had you known growing up.”

Rodriguez was hired by the Montreal Star in 1969 at age 21. The first show he reviewed for the paper was The Doors at the old Montreal Forum — and he panned it.

“Jim Morrison was so f-ing drunk that the Doors didn’t even stop between songs, they just kept rolling into the next one, get the show over with as quickly as possible,” he recalled. “And I had to write the review, and the headline was Doors Bore but Boppers Lap It Up. Did I ever get mail!”

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In the first Leonard Cohen concert he reviewed at Théatre St-Denis in 1970, “I just totally slammed him,” Rodriguez recalled. He described the mood at the concert as “sickeningly reverent — like along the stage they had put candles, you know: It was like going into St-Joseph’s Oratory except it was a show.”

Cohen had a country band and “I thought that he just droned and droned and droned. So my review was something like ‘It made me pine for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to add some pep to this country music.’”

Of The Beatles: “I always thought that The Beatles were totally overrated and I still believe that to this day,” he said.

In 2013, Rodriguez wrote of the Rolling Stones: “They’re big business more than a vital group and have become what they once disdained: showbiz. I’ve always been a fan, but wild horses couldn’t drag me to a Stones concert today.”

Rodriguez, a voracious reader of musical biographies and contemporary novels, was a valued source for anyone writing about music in the eras he covered, said Louis Rastelli, director of ARCMTL, a not-for-profit organization working to promote and preserve the independent arts in Montreal. Rodriguez did an extensive interview with the organization in 2017 and remained a source of information for ARCMTL projects chronicling the New Penelope, a Montreal concert venue during the 1960s, and the Black Bottom jazz club. He wrote an unpublished book about jazz and also a memoir, although the laptop on which he wrote it has been lost, Rastelli said.

Years of hard living took a toll on Rodriguez’s health and he fought a long, tough battle with illness, including diabetes — he lost a foot to amputation as a result — and kidney failure. For the last several years of his life, he underwent dialysis three times a week. He suffered a stroke in May 2023. Unable to live on his own, he had been residing in government residences for the past few years.

During that time, Rostelli visited Rodriguez and helped to look after him, along with Jorn Reissner, a musician and longtime member of the Stephen Barry Blues Band. Problems getting a suitable prosthetic made it difficult for him to get around, even with a wheelchair, and the brunch outings to Mile End he had enjoyed with Rostelli and Reissner became impossible.

Rodriguez is survived by two sisters living in Europe. It was his wish to be cremated, Rostelli said, and a memorial event is to be held at a future date.

sschwartz@postmedia.com

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