He’ll Exit--Stage Right

Hello, hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye I say hello.”

--Lennon / McCartney

This is goodbye and hello from your friendly neighborhood rock critic.

After almost 12 years on the Orange County pop beat for the Los Angeles Times, I’m moving on.

Or, more exactly, moving over--as I shift from covering the pop music scene as a critic to covering Orange County theater and cultural institutions as a news and feature writer.

Taking over for me is Randy Lewis, a familiar byline in these pages since 1981. Lewis, who is the Orange County daily Calendar editor, will resume the job he handled for seven years before my arrival early in 1988 from Providence, R.I.

I think the Orange County rock critic’s job provides an unequaled listening post. A fertile local scene produces more noteworthy sounds and interesting characters than one writer can absorb. Venues large and small are humming with the music of name touring acts.

What’s more, the amount of space I’ve been given to write, and the support I’ve had from my editors here and at The Times pop music desk in Los Angeles, are precious gifts that would make any writer exult.

This has been the best job in the world.

But it is no longer the best job for me. Reasons of health and family entered into my decision to change beats. The health issues are not acute, and they don’t keep me from most normal activities. But it isn’t advisable for me to follow the often grueling pop-beat routine of covering daylong festivals and writing into the wee hours after concerts, trying to concoct a coherent review.

The best newspaper job in the world happens also to be one of the most abnormal newspaper jobs in the world, and I owe my wife, my son and myself more normalcy.

Regrets? Not one.

I’ve been lucky most of my life to have a kind of inward compass that guides me intuitively at important crossroads. It’s pointing in a new direction now, and I’m eager to follow.

I don’t, in fact, see this change as all that drastic. I will still delve into the stories creative people try to tell, and the social and institutional frameworks in which those stories are presented. The medium will be different, but the messages, I expect, will be the same eternal, human themes that always drive art and entertainment of substance.

The theater side of my beat will appeal to the former English major in me; I guess there was a reason for all those Shakespearean and biblical references I dropped into rock ‘n’ roll stories.

An excellent teacher, Penn Kimball, told my classmates and me that a life in journalism is the world’s best continuing education course. I’m tackling a second major, as it were, and I relish the chance to broaden my reach and deepen my understanding.

Does it really matter who the rock critic is here, anyway? In the grand scheme, this is possibly the least important beat at the paper. Nevertheless, the ability to make and enjoy music are vital parts of what marks us human. I hope that the 2,500-odd bylined stories I’ve written for The Times have helped this community carry on one of life’s great pleasures--a continuing conversation about music.

Critics can be useful as timepieces. After a while, if you’re a regular reader, you get to know whether the clock of the reviewer’s taste ticks in sync with your own, or keeps flawed time.

I don’t think you’ll have to reset your watches with Randy (who also happens to be a musician). As far as I’m concerned, his taste and temperament run right on time.

I guess this is where I’m supposed to say how much I’ve appreciated the kindness and cooperation of almost everybody in the music scene over the years, and, most of all, how greatly I’ve valued the time and attention of Times readers. But I’d like to think that each article and review in some way expressed how important you all have been to me.

Goodbye. Hello.

Mike Boehm can be reached by e-mail at Mike.Boehm @latimes.com.

Randy Lewis can be reached by e-mail at Randy.Lewis @latimes.com.