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CHICAGO: Jane Scott got her start as a rock critic covering the Beatles when she was 45. By the time she retired at 82 she'd gone shopping with Jimi Hendrix, had a beer with Jim Morrison and sung 'California Girl' with Brian Wilson at a hotel bar.
Scott, who covered rock music for the Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio for more than four decades, died Monday at age 92 after a long illness.
“She was a legend,” said Lauren Onkey, vice president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. “Every band has a good thing to say about her no matter what their style. I think that speaks to her curiosity. She was an avid rock 'n' roll fan who... had a way of communicating with artists. She got into every show.”
A matronly woman who wore big red trifocals and carried earplugs and a peanut butter sandwich in her purse when she cover a show, Scott sometimes called herself “the world's oldest teenager.”
She was an avid fan who found something to love about every act she saw, which endeared her to her readers and many of her subjects, even if it didn't win her much respect from fellow critics.
“Scott was on a first-name basis not only with music fans throughout northeast Ohio, but with most of the luminaries in the rock 'n' roll universe,” Plain Dealer pop music critic John Soeder wrote in her obituary.
Lyle Lovett was among those luminaries, writing on Twitter that the rock music world had lost “one of the dearest members of its family.”
Scott was born on May 3, 1919 in Cleveland and worked as a code-breaker for the Navy during World War II before getting a job at the Plain Dealer as a society writer. She retired in 2002.
