I first met Dave Sanjek at an IASPM-US Conference in Chicago in the early 1990s. It was over lunch (or was it drinks?), at some hole-in-the-wall blues club that Dave had found. That day, we became instant old friends. Even at a first meeting I could see all those attributes that friends and colleagues have recalled in the avalanche of tributes and emotion that followed his untimely death on 29 November 2011 in a New York airport: the encyclopaedic mind, the quick wit, the wry sense of humour, the innocent charm, the unbridled enthusiasm, the generosity of spirit, the desire to connect (and connect with) people, the drive to establish community. Dave was all this and more. He knew more about popular music (and film, theatre and literature, for that matter) than just about anyone I had ever met. And he definitely wasn't shy about sharing what he knew. Let's just say that Dave never had a problem holding up his end of a conversation. Indeed, most people who talk as much as Dave did might be accused of what James Brown called ‘talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothing’. Not so, Dave. Almost everything he had to say was well worth hearing. And interestingly, perhaps paradoxically, he was also a good listener; he was genuinely interested in your interests and what you had to say.
I had the good fortune to get to know Dave as a friend and as a colleague. Prior to his most recent gig at University of Salford (UK), most people knew Dave as the long-time Archivist at BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) in New York. But, as all-consuming as his music and media interests seemed to be, there were many more facets to Dave's life. He had a great interest in things gastronomic; his mother, Elizabeth, was trained as a chef-level Chinese cook, which exerted no small influence on Dave's own culinary preferences. And, who knew that before his professional involvement with music, Dave had an 18-year career in a place where there were ‘no televisions, no CD players and no MP3s’? That was Farm and Wilderness, a Quaker camp for kids in upstate Vermont, where he worked from 1973 to 1991. Dave was a major big deal at F&W; I first learned this when he helped my son Tai get his first real job at one of their five residential summer camps. Just how important was he? Well, he made a sufficiently deep impression that 20, 30, 40 years later, a number of former campers still remembered enough about how important he was to their lives to post moving tributes on the various websites honouring Dave, and the F&W website linked to his obit on its home page.
At BMI, Dave was preceded by his father, Russell. I had actually met Russ before I met Dave because Steve Chapple had interviewed him extensively for our book, Rock ’n’ Roll is Here to Pay. As a Vice-President at BMI, Russ's knowledge of the music industry was unsurpassed, and his participation in many of the events that helped shape it was legendary. He was widely regarded as the conscience of the music business. Knowing Russ even a little bit, it was easy to see that Dave had come by his encyclopaedic mind and sense of social justice honestly. He carried on the family business admirably. Upon meeting Dave, I blurted out: ‘So, you're Russ's kid.’ For the next two decades, Dave delighted in repeating that phrase in a Bronx-tinged accent that sounded like Billy Crystal doing Edward G. Robinson in the film The Ten Commandments. It remains one of my fondest memories of him.
As noted in his BMI obit, Dave ‘served as Director of the BMI Archives from 1991 until 2007. While in that position, he continued to maintain a strong presence in the scholarly world, strengthening the ties between BMI and the academic community’. As BMI Archivist, Dave was helpful to anyone who contacted him. He could track down copyright holders, provide photographs and cite court cases. He was a veritable treasure trove of relevant music industry anecdotes. Often, he could put his finger on the precise piece of information you were looking for in a matter of minutes, and he could turn you on to resources in your area that you didn't even know you needed. In addition to contributing measurably to everyone else's research, Dave also maintained a research and publication agenda of his own that would have been the envy of most full-time academics. This period in his life was punctuated by dozens of journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, reviews and conference presentations. Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century, his update and revision of the final volume of his father's comprehensive three-volume history of the music business, remains a valuable source for many in Popular Music Studies.
Dave took to academic organisations such as the American Studies Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology like a fish to water. He attended conferences religiously, and could always be counted on to present high-quality papers, to offer insightful and constructive comments from the floor, and to engage in spirited debates that often began in the hallway and ended up in late-night sessions at some local watering hole. The organisation he developed a special fondness for was the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Perhaps this was because IASPM was founded as the organisation for academics and practitioners who fell through the cracks – those of us who shoehorned Popular Music Studies into departments of English, History, Sociology, Political Science, Communications or, in my case, Human Services, along with our colleagues from Music, where popular music was still something of a bastard child. Dave worked tirelessly to promote the IASPM everywhere he went, serving as president of its US chapter from 1995 until 1998. He was the guy who began to impose a sense of organisation on what was up to then a wonderful network; it was Dave who incorporated IASPM-US as a tax-exempt non-profit organisation. Of course, bureaucratic accomplishments alone only scratch the surface of his commitment to IASPM. A cursory look at the heartfelt comments about Dave on the IASPM website clearly reveals the widespread recognition of and deep appreciation for the love, energy and spirit with which he approached IASPM and its members, both nationally and internationally.
Interestingly, Dave's profile in the academic community grew at a time when many of his colleagues viewed his job at BMI as more glamorous than their own – he did get to go to those glitzy Grammy and Rock Hall events, after all. Dave actually got to rub elbows with many of the people the rest of us just wrote about. Ironically, throughout this period, Dave himself wanted nothing more than to be in the academy, which should have been an easy transition. In Popular Music Studies circles, Dave was almost universally acknowledged as one of the most generous, engaged and productive scholars in the field. So it was bewildering, as many commentators have noted, that for him the road to academia was long and arduous. Dave soldiered on in the face of disappointment after disappointment, but never lost a vision of what could be. Then, finally, along came Salford University. The folks at Salford not only recognised in Dave what others had recognised; they had the good sense to reward it in a way that it should have been rewarded years earlier. And so, with a résumé that included nary a full-time academic post, Dave walked into a professorship and directorship of a popular music research institute at Salford – which was exactly how it should have been.
For Dave, Salford was a dream job, but it was not an easy transition. He worried about relocating; what would he do with the archive of stuff that he called his apartment? He worried about money. He worried about his health. Coming from the USA, there was the challenge of adapting to a new currency, not to mention learning how to navigate educational and health care systems that were nowhere in his experience. At the same time, there should be no doubt as to how much Dave appreciated his new circumstances. At Salford he was in his element, developing programmes, making contacts, organising conferences and colloquia, attending to his own ambitious – and generally behind-schedule – scholarly agenda and, as always, placing students' needs at the centre of his universe. As he wrote in ‘Letter #6’, one of a series of lengthy single-spaced updates he periodically sent to an undisclosed list of confidants and supporters: ‘This is … what they pay me to do, and what I've always wanted to do, so I'm usually feeling like a pig in manure, thank you very much.’
Kudos to the folks at Salford for enabling Dave to realise his dream before he left us. He hadn't yet hit his stride, but he was on a roll and he knew where he was going. At the time of his death, he was en route to a meeting of the Recordings Registry panel of the Library of Congress, which assists in selecting an annual list of 25 major pieces of recorded sound. He had just distributed the Call for Papers for the upcoming IASPM-UK conference to be held at Salford. And there is so much more that remains unfinished. In collaboration with Dave's brothers, Roger and Rick, Salford is setting up an archive in Dave's name. It is a fitting tribute. According to Rick, this vast collection comprises some 900 file boxes of Dave's, ‘books, records, CDs, DVDs, tapes, papers, etc.’ Among these are book-length manuscripts and journal articles that Dave left in various stages of completion as he prepared them for publication. Hopefully many of them will see the light of day in the not too distant future.
In our last email exchange, I described for Dave a collaborative living retirement project that some friends and I have been working on. ‘Wow,’ exclaimed Dave, his boyish exuberance showing through. ‘Can I reserve a place?’ We never got to finish that conversation. But for you, Dave, there will always be a place – certainly the one in our hearts. Rest easy, my friend.
If you plan to make a contribution to The David Sanjek Archive from the UK you can do so by downloading a donation form from the university website at http://supporters.salford.ac.uk/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=274. Complete the form stating that the donation is for the David Sanjek Memorial Fund, attach a cheque and send it to the address detailed on the form.
If you are making a donation from the USA, you can do so through the British Schools and Universities Foundation, Inc., a tax-deductible US-based foundation. Donations can be made by credit card via the Foundation's website, or by check using the BSUF Donor Transmittal Form, which can be downloaded from the Foundation's donor page at http://bsuf.org/DonorInfo.html. Please indicate that the donation is for: The University of Salford/David Sanjek Archive.
