‘A life fully lived’: Rock journalist and cultural commentator, Glenn A. Baker, dies aged 74

Glenn A. Baker, an Australian rock music journalist, collector, commentator, author and broadcaster, has died. He was 74.

A long-time contributor to the Herald and The Age, Baker died of old age on Friday morning, his son Orson told this masthead.

“Glenn had an amazing life,” Orson said. “He was so deeply involved in the music industry that we are talking about a man who absolutely had a life fully lived.”

He told the ABC earlier that Baker had experienced a “period of illness” and was “declining for a while”.

Born in 1952, Baker grew up in Sydney and Canberra, his love for rock music sparked when at age 12 when he saw evening news coverage of The Beatles arriving at Mascot Airport for their 1964 Australian tour.

“Just seeing them, hearing a burst of their music, changed my view of everything, and even though I couldn’t afford to buy the records, I could walk into a record shop and actually touch the brown Parlophone sleeves, which also carried releases by The Easybeats and The Hollies,” Baker told Peter FitzSimons in 2024.

Baker often credited his long career in music journalism to the first time he heard Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone a year later. He would recall this moment as an epiphany, whereupon hearing Dylan’s lyrics, Baker decided to dedicate his own life to words.

He started working in the music industry in 1972 after founding the band Ol’ 55 in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. Baker spent more than 20 years as the Australian editor of Billboard, contributed to more than 200 magazines, including Rolling Stone, authored more than 20 books and regularly featured on Australian radio, as well as writing for this masthead.

Orson said he remembers his father as having the “power of the pen”.

“He became quite a prolific journalist and that fed from his absolute passion for music,” Orson said. “But [he] then found himself travelling so frequently to see shows or meet artists that he started to actually write travel pieces, and so the second half of his career was not just music, but he became an accomplished travel writer.”

“He wrote nonstop. In fact, I’m just going through all of his different writings right now … In his later years, he became known as the guy that when you met him, he gives you a copy of one of his books because he had so many to spare.”

In 2024, Baker, a fierce collector of records, CDs, books, magazines, newspaper clippings and other rock music ephemera, put his record collection up for auction – which had an estimated 80,000 items.

Among with his vast collection of records, Baker had a reputation for accumulating stories about rock stars, including how he once walked right into Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, knocking her over. Or when he met Fidel Castro at a poolside bar in Cuba with Jimmy Buffett of Margaritaville fame.

Baker was also well known for always donning variously coloured fezes – Ottoman-era Turkish headwear.

“I first wore it for fun for the cover of one of my travel books, sitting upon the engine of a 747 – they had to get a ladder to get me up there – and then when I went out to do interviews about it, people would say, ‘Oh, where’s the hat? You look great in the hat!’” Baker told Peter FitzSimons in 2024.

“As I was follicly challenged, I just started wearing it, and I was given a really hard time with people saying it was a terrible affectation.”

While remembered widely as a formidable journalist and music enthusiast, to Baker’s six children and 10 grandchildren he is simply known as dad and pop.

“He’d take the 10 grandkids to the movies,” Orson said. “Especially around culture. He felt it was very important to bring culture to his family.”

Read some of Glenn A. Baker’s stories.

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