Lillian Roxon - Rock Criticism

Rock Criticism

Her articles about the burgeoning rock scene are now credited as being foundation stones of serious rock writing, and she has since been described by other leading critics as "the mother of rock". She was friendly with many leading music stars but rarely became personally involved. Although she looked young enough to mix easily with the rock crowd, she was at least ten years older than most of the musicians she wrote about. Unusually for the time, she did not smoke or take drugs and only rarely drank alcohol. These factors, together with her renowned wit, combined to give her writing a degree of ironic detachment that influenced many younger rock writers. She was one of the first mainstream journalists to treat popular music with any degree of seriousness and to regard it not as a trivial "flash in the pan" but as an important social phenomenon.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roxon became close friends with critic and rock manager Danny Fields, Village Voice journalist Blair Sabol, musician and writer Lenny Kaye (later the guitarist in Patti Smith's band and compiler of the original Nuggets LP), photographers Linda McCartney and Leee Black Childers and Australian academic, author and feminist Germaine Greer.

In 1965 she was joined by Sydney Morning Herald's autocratic foreign correspondent Margaret Jones. It was a clash of two unbending personalities which her biographer Robert Milliken described as "like two sopranos sharing the same stage". Perhaps to keep these two apart, Margaret was posted to Washington the following year.

Roxon also played host to many Australians who visited the city, including The Easybeats and singer Lynne Randell and artists including Clifton Pugh. Australian singer Helen Reddy credits Roxon for her first awareness of the women's movement and for providing much of the impetus for co-writing her international hit, "I Am Woman".

Linda McCartney (then Linda Eastman) was one of Roxon's closest female friends and she did much to further Eastman's career, but the friendship ended abruptly in 1969 when Eastman moved to London, married Paul McCartney and cut all ties with all her former friends, a move which wounded Roxon deeply.

Lillian eventually retaliated, four years later, with her famously scathing review of the McCartneys' first American TV special. Published in the New York Sunday News on 22 April 1973, Roxon's review panned the documentary and poured scorn on Linda, slamming her for being "catatonic with horror at having to mingle with ordinary people", "disdainful if not downright bored ... her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw", and "incredibly cold and arrogant".