Chapter 32: What do people get wrong about you?

Originally written July 27, 2021

An example of the “fan mail” I used to receive as a journalist. One reader of my old music column assumed I had serious constipation because I had a different opinion of an album he liked. I assumed he was an idiot.

Having been basically a public figure in a small city for nearly all my adult life, a lot of people make weird assumptions about me.

Being a music writer and radio show host a lot of people just assume that I love any kind of music, especially any kind of rock ’n’ roll.

One time during a legislative session, this lobbyist I know came up to me with a big smile on his face. “Steve! Guess who’s about to go out on a new tour. BOB SEGER!!!”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

I don’t hate Bob Seger or anything, but I’ve only bought one of his albums in my whole life, (“Bought” is an exaggeration. I got it with one of those “12 albums for a penny” deals Columbia Record Club used to offer), and in my career as a critic, I never reviewed any of his records.

Is this who he was talking about?

But this guy was just trying to be friendly and maybe get some kind of affirmation of his musical taste from the local rock critic.

So I just smiled and said something like “Cool,” and didn’t try to educate him about how Bob Seger is so inferior to The Mekons or Dead Moon and how Seger lost most of his appeal for me somewhere between “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and “Against the Wind.”

I always thought a major purpose of my column was to make people aware of music they might not have heard of, not to belittle anyone’s taste. Occasionally I did resort to mercilessly slamming some band or singer, but not nearly as often as a lot of critics do.

Here’s where things start to get Sticky:

The Sticky, when I first saw them on July 16, 2021. They were great. I’ve seen them since and I actually wish I had seen them years before.

Just recently I went to a show in the Santa Fe Railyards by a local funk group called The Sticky. Before the show I ran into an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in more than a year. I casually mentioned that I’d never seen this band before and she was shocked.

“But they’ve been around for years and YOU’RE THE MUSIC GUY!”

She just assumed that I was always out seeing bands — not realizing that until I retired a couple of years ago, it was extremely difficult to go to shows during the week because my work frequently required long nights.

And because I had radio shows on Sunday nights and, for more than 20 years, Friday nights, I usually couldn’t make concerts that weren’t on Saturdays. Lots of people just assume I spend all my spare time at music shows.

Plus I usually had one or both of my kids on the weekends. Being a divorced dad, I couldn’t and didn’t make a habit of going to concerts on Saturdays. So, especially when Anton was young, I went to a lot more superhero movies on Saturday afternoons than concerts on Saturday nights..

So for a couple of decades there, the overwhelming majority of music I listened to was from inside my home or my car. (Of course, I hit far more shows now since the kids are grown and, especially, since I retired.)

As far as The Sticky is concerned, here’s a little of what I’d been missing:

But my work with music didn’t spawn nearly as many misconceptions as did my work as a politics reporter. I’ll never forget one online comment on a story I’d written from a woman who was not pleased.

“Steve Terrell is a conservative Republican,” she stated with the bold certainty of way too many dingbat Internet partisans.

I laughed twice as hard at this as I normally would have because just the day before, another online commenter on another story blasted me for being a loony liberal. This dope was closer to being accurate, but both of them were idiots.

These hyper-partisan blinders, of course, have only gotten worse in recent years, and any political writer trying to do an honest job routinely gets attacked by anonymous cretins from both the left and right who somehow know all the writer’s motives and who read all sorts of strange stuff into the writer’s work.

And I love how people who have never set foot in a newsroom have all sorts of wild ideas about how newspapers work, but that’s a topic for another place.

Ever since I first started in the news biz, a lot of people in the community — acquaintances, parents of old high school kids, etc. — assumed I had all sorts of authority or knowledge that I didn’t have.

They seemed to think that I could take care of their home-delivery problems.

Or, if they didn’t like a story that one of my colleagues had written, I could just step in and write the story myself, pointing out and correcting the alleged “mistakes” in the story that was published.

And this is a minor complaint, but a lot of people, including some friends, seemed to think I read the paper cover-to-cover each morning. They’d ask a question about some article concerning Congress or South Africa or whatever. When I said I hadn’t seen the story, I’d often get, “Well, it was in YOUR paper …”

I suppose I should be complimented that they thought my knowledge was so encompassing. But it was irritating.

And aside from misconceptions about me related to my old job, there are other areas in which people had the wrong idea about me.

For instance, both my kids, when they were teens, used to say things like, “You just want to control me,” when I’d make unreasonable demands like be home by a certain hour. That’s pretty common, though, and I probably said similar things to my folks when I was in high school.

I think they both have realized for years now that I wasn’t the fascist they made me out to be. I had far less interest in “controlling” them than wanting to be sure they made it through adolescence so they could be independent, creative people — and that actually I was a pretty liberal parent with relatively few demands.

Being fat for most of my life, I’ve experienced people seeing me filtered through stereotypes.

People expect me to be “jolly,” which, thanks to Santa Claus I suppose, has become practically synonymous with “fat.”

When my album was released in the early ‘80s, one writer who reviewed it even referred to me as the “jolly singer from Santa Fe,” which made me feel somewhat less than jolly. 

I know that growing up with obesity taught me to deflect insults with humor. Fat kids often become class clowns, so I suppose I routinely lived up to that jolly stereotype.

But basically, like that old song by The Animals, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

And now, in the words of Ed Sullivan, for all of you youngsters, you’ve been very, very good tonight, I’m proud of you …