Legendary Journalist Mikal Gilmore

Publishes New Essays

On Just Launched Substack

 

Night Beat, The Life and Times of Mikal Gilmore

Stands as Substack’s No. 2 Rising Bestsellers in Music

 

Go to mikalggilmore.substack.com

To Read and Subscribe

 

Award-winning journalist and author Mikal Gilmore launches Night Beat, The Life and Times of Mikal Gilmore. Since his first post on January 5, the Substack publication has stood at No. 2 on their Rising Bestsellers in Music. Night Beat’s work is essay-driven and reflective, moving between personal history, cultural memory, music, and questions of moral inheritance. It is not news-driven and not promotional in nature, but a continuation of the long-form writing Gilmore has done over the years in a less constrained format. Go to mikalggilmore.substack.com to read and subscribe.

 

Gilmore notes, “I have spent much of my life writing about music, violence, history, and the ways personal experience collides with public myth. As a journalist, I wrote for decades about rock and roll and American culture. As a memoirist, I wrote about family, trauma, and the long afterlife of violence. Night Beat continues that work in a quieter register. Here I write essays that move between personal memory and cultural reckoning: pieces about art and music, about family and inheritance, about the moral weather of American life, and about the things that endure after the headlines fade.”

 

Mikal Gilmore is a legendary music journalist. In 1977, he began working for Rolling Stone. There, he conducted interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Sinead O’Connor and Jerry Garcia, among others. He also wrote at length about the lives and deaths of David Bowie, the Ramones, John Lennon, George Harrison, Frank Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Leonard Cohen, Charlie Watts, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin, and Duane and Gregg Allman.

 

In addition, Gilmore won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994’s renowned Shot In The Heart, in which he chronicled his own difficult family history, as well as that of his older brother Gary, ten years his senior. Gary was executed in 1977 for two murders he’d committed in Utah the previous summer. Shot In The Heart has proven to be an enduring American classic, named among the “Best True Crime Books” by both Esquire and Publishers Weekly, which declared it “truly essential… an epic as engrossing as any of the great Russian novels – but all the more harrowing for being true.” The Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning memoir was adapted into a movie for HBO.

 

A leading Rolling Stone journalist since its 1970s heyday, Gilmore is also the author of the BMI Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award-nominated book, Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll (Knopf, 1999) and Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents (Free Press, 2009). The latter was hailed by the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani as “a book that leaves the reader with a powerful portrait of the cultural and social tumult of the ’60s and ’70s… (Gilmore) brings to these much-dissected subjects uncommon abilities: a gift for reconjuring the mood of that period in rich, visceral prose, and a knack for limning the connections between the social upheaval abroad in those years and artists’ efforts to explore the possibilities of the newly influential medium of rock ’n’ roll.”

 

In 2018, Gilmore released a book co-written with his wife, veteran publicist Elaine Schock, titled Stay With Me (Cool Titles). It is the first major book entirely written from original Facebook posts and provides a powerful and remarkable personal testimony of one couple’s devastating but ultimately life-affirming experience. It is also a much-needed survival guide for those struggling with HPV-related cancer, and their loved ones.

 

About his Substack newsletter, Night Beat, Gilmore writes: “Over the years, in addition to shadowing music, I also loved, I lost love, I married, and I changed cities. What’s more, I saw family and friends thrive and die, and did the same myself. I didn’t exactly die, but I came close enough several times.

 

“At age 74, that is why I have started this newsletter: to pay witness to the triumphs and tragedies of those years while I feel I still have a vital voice. I’m off to a good head start here by benefit of much of my earlier work for Rolling Stone, Downbeat and elsewhere, plus there is all that I have written new for this Substack feed. In addition to being about music, the new writing is also family, marriage, coping with near-fatal disease and near-fatal accidents. It will take a long time for these stories to unfold, but I trust—or at least hope—that they will prove worth the attention of those who choose to follow this feed.”

# # #