It’s 2001, and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is playing in a club in Greenwich Village. He comes to the end of his fourth song when a cell phone’s electronic preprogrammed tune blares out from the audience, ruining the blissful moment of musical elegance that has settled in the crowd. Marsalis pauses only for a second, not allowing the listeners to fully come to their senses, when he plays, note for note, the same cell phone melody. He then proceeds to repeat the tune again and again, alternating it slightly each time until the song becomes its own entity; not quite the original and not quite something new. Marsalis finally finishes his improvisation. The audience’s ovation is overwhelming.

This is just one of the untold, but beautiful moments in pop-culture history that David Hajdu loves to inform the world about.

The Syracuse University magazine professor has a long and celebrated career in writing. As well as being a teacher, he is music editor for The New Republic and former general editor of Entertainment Weekly. Hajdu is also a constant contributor to half a dozen magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair and has published articles in magazines such as Rolling Stone and Playboy.

‘I actually think I got the urge (to write) from Superman, because Clark Kent was a writer and I thought, ‘Well if it’s good enough for Superman, it’s good enough for me,” Hajdu said. ‘I remember being told when I was young that writing was a pipe dream; nobody really does that, and then going to college and seeing those hundreds of thousands of books in the library and saying, ‘Well someone must have done that, maybe there is room for me.”

Since the age of 9, when he created his own newspaper and distributed it around his hometown in New Jersey, Hajdu knew he wanted to be a reporter. Ever since, he’s refined his writing technique to form a unique and methodical process. The extreme amount of time and research Hajdu puts into his work means his pieces evolve into lengthy stories; no word count should get in the way of telling history, Hajdu said.

Hajdu’s intense love of music is nothing surprising, due to the generation he’s from. The Beatles exploded into the public eye when he was in grade school, and music in someone’s life confirmed the presence of cool like nothing else.

‘People are often interested when I say I play guitar, but everyone my age played guitar, Hajdu said. ‘It’s like right now asking, ‘Do you play video games?’ You just played guitar.’

Yet to Hajdu, music was more than just a way to gain popularity or meet girls – it was his connection to the outside world. Since he grew up in a town that had no television stations, no real radio stations and was far from both Philadelphia and New York City, music became his take on what was happening outside of his town.

‘What was the top-selling single or what was the new album was our news; it was our art and our window to the world,’ Hajdu said. ‘We wanted to know what Dylan said about civil rights or what The Beatles said about drugs or just the state of the world. We learned about the world through popular music.’

‘Lush Life,’ Hajdu’s first book, was published in 1996, fulfilling a longstanding need to tell the unknown story of Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn was Duke Ellington’s ghostwriter and challenged the jazz legend’s feelings of wanting to be a sole figure in jazz history. Hajdu wanted a chance to change the conventional wisdom about Strayhorn’s supposed lack of involvement. ‘Lush Light’ gave Strayhorn his due credit, as well as revealing the fact that Ellington’s music, and much of the jazz that came out of the period, was a collaborated, as opposed to a singular, effort.

For his next book, Hajdu posed the question that if Ellington was the giant of pre-World War II pop music, then who held that title post-War? The answer was Bob Dylan. Hajdu didn’t want to just retell Dylan’s life, but put him into a new context based around three others: Joan Baez, her sister Mimi and Mimi’s husband, Richard Faria. The book was a national bestseller and named one of the 10 best books of the year by numerous publications.

‘Dave’s story in some ways is the larger story of publishing of our time,’ said Paul Elie, senior editor with Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers, the company that published all of Hajdu’s books. ‘It’s a story of real resourcefulness and technique and artistry brought to biography books, when once that was only associated with fiction. He’s really got a nose for the story in a way we associate with journalists, but in a way that works with the past.’

The one way Hajdu could put together such powerful pieces of music history is his work as a critic. Using his longtime love of music and an ear for what’s progressive, Hajdu knows how to criticize music and put it into a time context, which helps him write about his subject.

‘Duke Ellington said, ‘There are only two kinds of music, good and bad, and if you like it, it’s good,’ so first, I trust a visceral response,’ Hajdu said. ‘I think any critic who isn’t true to his or her emotional or intellectual response disrespects the work and is irresponsible. I always try to respond to the work honestly. Then I research the heck out of whatever I’m writing about.’

The extensive – almost to the point of fanatical – amount of research Hajdu puts into everything he writes is the price of his love for untold pop music history. Through the years, Hajdu has gotten very good at getting unknown information. For his latest book, ‘The Ten-Cent Plague,’ a story to be published next year about the hysteria caused by comic books in the post-World War II era, Hajdu did more than 200 interviews and thinks he may quote 15 people. He had thousands of pages of transcripts and is sure he will only use about a dozen. Before any real writing begins, a writer must be a researcher and learn as much as possible to truly convey the story correctly, Hajdu said.

‘I think his writing is amazing, and it’s a worthwhile work, but I could never do what he does,’ said Torrie Hajdu, his daughter and an undecided sophomore in The College of Arts and Sciences. ‘It’s exhausting and it exercises every part of his body. He’s always writing and always involved and everything becomes the book.’

Due to his methodical drive for information, Hajdu is actually one of the only people to interview reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon in the last 50 years. Pynchon, a man who loves his privacy so much that he makes J.D. Salinger look like Madonna, according to Elie, was a good friend of Richard Faria. Hajdu was so insistent about getting an interview for his work that Pynchon finally gave in and agreed.

‘David is an unusually good writer and has a fresh take on a subject that everyone thinks has been done to death, which is American pop music,’ said Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. ‘The range of his knowledge of popular music is all formed from experience and clearly discriminating in the way he writes. He’s interested in things that other people aren’t when dealing with the subject.’

This is Hajdu’s third semester teaching at SU, but he has a rich history of educating. After receiving his Bachelor of the Arts from New York University in 1978, Hajdu was an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the New School University, as well as being the writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago. He is very proud of his teaching style, which uses a strong emphasis on his real world experience to show the trade.

‘He was pretty picky with editing, but that’s how editing works. It’s best to learn from one of the best,’ said Jen Math, a senior magazine major. ‘The thing I noticed about all magazine professors is that they teach through telling their stories, like, ‘This happened here’ and ‘Watch out for that,’ and it’s fun to learn like that because they are entertaining stories.’

Hajdu doesn’t try to change his students’ individual styles of writing, but instead offers assistance to better their techniques. He gives each student a sheet with three words on it: ‘clarity, brevity and euphony.’ They are the watch-words of writing, and will answer all the questions a writer could have if honored in that sequence, Hajdu said.

‘He’s a very accomplished man, but he’s not stuck up at all,’ said Alicia Ricardi, a senior magazine major. ‘You don’t even notice that he’s so far accomplished through his personality because it’s not a factor when he’s speaking to you; it just comes through in his teaching.’

Hajdu is very happy with his current position in life, but it seems he will never be satisfied with his workload. Along with his teaching career, writing articles for multiple publications and finishing up a new book, he is already at work editing a three-part anthology of essays written by musicians about their art, and contemplating his next biography on a completely inconsequential person, something he is calling his ‘Aunt Rose book.’

While very humble about his life’s accomplishments, comparing himself to a squirrel or bat when he sits in his attic writing, both in actions and interest, Hajdu is clearly a grander figure than he’ll ever give himself credit for. Using a powerful combination of writing ability, patience for research and the drive to get the story absolutely perfect, Hajdu has already changed the face of pop culture history, and will continue to do so with everything he writes.

‘You turn on the radio and hear something like, ‘That was that great Ellington/Strayhorn tune,’ when 10 years ago, (Strayhorn) was never mentioned,’ Elie said. ‘It’s a thrill to think that someone who works at Syracuse sat down and pulled together all this information, and history has been changed because of it.’

Published on October 31, 2005 at 12:00 pm