To the Editor:

In the interest of fair and unbiased book reviews, I am writing in response to Robert Christgau’s mostly negative review of Fred Goodman’s “The Mansion on the Hill” (Book Review, Feb. 2). While Christgau made a point of noting that he slightly knew of Jon Landau, one of the book’s main characters, he neglected to reveal that elsewhere in the book, he and some of his early rock criticism are the object of some criticism of their own.

Ruth Fecych, Senior Editor, Random House, New York

*

Robert Christgau replies:

I found none of the three references to me in “The Mansion on the Hill” derogatory. But while we’re at it, their accuracy could have been more absolute. I appointed myself “the dean of American rock critics” two years later than Goodman suggests. My oft-quoted description of Jimi Hendrix at Monterey as “a psychedelic Uncle Tom” did not appear in Esquire because the magazine’s lawyers insisted that “psychedelic”--but not, the fools, “Uncle Tom”--was libelous; I restored the original language in my 1973 collection, which is presumably where Goodman found it. And when editor Harper Barnes calls me (incorrectly, but hey) the only rock critic besides Landau who “had any credibility” in 1970, I could only note in the margin: “Tell it, bro.”