Rock On, Lady

Jane Scott, gave her grown-up life to rock & roll:

In four happy decades as a rock writer for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ms. Scott, who died on Monday at 92, braved mud and mosh pits, foul weather and fouler language, “a drop of bleached blond and pink polyester in a roiling sea of blue denim and black leather,” as The Philadelphia Inquirer once described her.

...

Ms. Scott, who took up her beat in 1964 at 45 and retired nine years ago at nearly 83, was often called the world’s oldest teenager, a description she hastened to correct. “Second-oldest,” she would say. “After Dick Clark.”

At a time when newspapers were famously inhospitable to women, Ms. Scott made her career by tackling a beat that few writers of either sex wanted — a beat that barely existed when she began writing about rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1960s.

Over the years, she interviewed many of the biggest names in pop music, including Paul McCartney (“such a nice boy,” she said afterward); Mick Jagger (“sweet and funny”); and Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix (“I loved them both”).

Ride on, Lady Jane. The musicians loved you, like Lou Reed himself:

“I love Jane Scott. I always have, I always will. When I was in the Velvet Underground, Jane was one of the only people I can remember who was nice to us. Interested in the music, the styles -- a very smart, guileless lady who loved music and musicians and had unbiased attitudes towards the evolving culture.”

You're gone now, and those times are riding out faster every day.