We May Not Understand The Music, But We’ll Miss His Writing

Joe Ehrbar left The Spokesman-Review last week to seek his fortune. At 26 he has been not only IN Life’s music writer, but a translator for his generation.< The rows of desks in the editorial department of The Spokesman-Review, like most contemporary workplaces, are largely filled with baby boomers. Accustomed to a world that revolves around our generation and its musical tastes, Joe’s fine, prolific work has been a bit of a puzzlement.

Here’s a classic Ehrbar line: “Martin Vs. His Big Ass delivered a clunky, uneven, broken-down set of knucklehead rock. They were great.”

He writes of alternative bands, not just the purple-haired, nose-ringed Lollapalooza type to whom we’ve become uneasily accustomed, but lately even a vampirelike Gothic-rock band called Type O Negative.

Pardon we boomers if we believe the blood they want to drink is our own.

Those of us with all those awful middle-aged “M” words in our lives - mortgages, minivans, Martha Stewart - will never understand the music of which Joe writes.

No more than my parents understood my Santana album. (Come to think of it, I never understood my Santana album, either.)

We’re supposed to be startled and a bit threatened by the next generation’s strange, dark musical energy surging up behind us.

But one thing we do understand, as our parents did, and as anyone should who makes it to middle age: Joe and his contemporaries are not us. They will never be us.

But they are our salvation. They not only deliver us from our own self-absorption, they are our best hope.

We’ll miss you, Joe.

, DataTimes