A meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy interview with Dave Marsh

By Scott Woods (February 2001)

I recently called rock critic Dave Marsh — one of the founders of Creem (and more recently, Rock and Rap Confidential), former editor at Rolling Stone, author of a dozen or so bestselling rock tomes (including The Heart of Rock and Soul, his personal run-down of the 1,001 greatest singles of all-time), and the man who first paired (in print, anyway) the words “punk” and “rock” — at his home in Connecticut to find out why he bothers to still do what he does, to pin him down on his “disco perplex,” to bend his ear on Napster, Springsteen, anything else I could think of. I’d planned on chatting for less than an hour, but we went on for double that (and I’m sure we could’ve doubled that). During the interview, I was serenaded with all sorts of kooky records playing in the background, from O-Town to Vitamin C to some girlie-country thing to what sounded like a cheap Woody Guthrie imitation (unless it was actually Guthrie; highly possible given the no-fi acoustics of my phone receiver).

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Scott:   As one of the few people who’s consistently written rock criticism for over 30 years, I’m curious to know what your primary motivation to continue to write about it is.

Dave:   I guess if that was a question you thought of very much you wouldn’t…I mean, there was never a…

Scott:   I guess what I’m getting at is…

Dave:   I don’t mean it’s not a good question, I don’t have a good answer. [laughs] Tell me what you were getting at.

Scott:   I guess that when you look at old issues of Creem and that sort of thing–or if you read some of the other interviews on this site–there just seems to be a lot of people from that period [the early '70s] who don’t seem to be doing it any more.

Dave:   Some of them are dead, so I guess the first reason is I’m still alive. [laughs] You know? And the second reason is, what’s there to do that’s better? I don’t know–my lack of need for responsibility is very helpful here.

Scott:   Well what made you want to be a writer in the first place?

Dave:   What made me want to be a writer was being a reader. And what made me want to write about this stuff, which might be what you mean by that question, is listening to the music and deciding that, well, I’m living in a world at that point in my life where it’s invisible in culture–much more invisible than it is now. And back then, a show like “Roseanne” was inconceivable. You could have “The Life of Riley” that completely ridiculed working people, or for that matter “The Honeymooners”, right? But something that sort of seemed to come out of that culture and express that culture’s values at some marginal level–that didn’t exist, except that it existed in music. So, it was like, I was invited to that party; I wasn’t invited to the other party.

Scott:   How would you define the role of the critic?

Dave:   I don’t think that there is a role. I think different people do it different ways.

Scott:   How do you define your job?

Dave:   What I think I’m doing–which I guess is how I define the job–is I think I’m still doing that thing, of trying to look at this thing, the music thing, and how it expresses things for people who don’t have any other means of public expression. Which can be applicable to Eminem, it can be applicable, in a funny way, to Sting, it can be applicable certainly to dozens of performers around the world who–I don’t know, hundreds, thousands, millions. And the other thing I’m trying to do, I’m trying to write from the point of view of an informed and intelligent and at this stage I would guess it’s fair to say ‘expert’ audience member. I’m not trying to write from the point of view of a musician, I’m not trying to write from the point of view of a record industry insider, that’s not what I do. So those are the two things I’m doing, that I can see.

Scott:   What are you listening to in the background?

Dave:   You know something, the record player is in the other room, and it just changed itself. I was listening to the third or fourth disc of that Stax compilation, the one that’s live [The Stax Story]. Hang on second…[Music increases in volume.]

Scott:   Is that an old girl group thing?

Dave:   Well, whatever this is I’m not going to be listening to it much longer!

Scott:   So, aside from the obvious fact that there’s a lot more rock criticism nowadays–it just keeps growing exponentially–how do you think rock criticism as a genre has changed since its early days?

Dave:   Well, it’s changed in so many different ways that it would be hard to nail down one. To me, the first thing that comes to mind is, one of the things you can say about it, amazingly enough, is that it’s better. And it’s better simply because people are better informed, people have a little better idea of what they’re doing. I think the standard of craft is considerably better. And then, you know, you can go to the other side and talk about why it’s worse, and it’s worse because the whole thing as a project has had its spirits dampened considerably by events, by the rampant kind of–well, even that’s a contradiction, because on one level, the most obvious thing to think is, from the point of view of aesthetics, is that there’s too many records made, too much music, whatever. But that’s really a bizarre thought. And I think what it is is that there IS an over-production of the commodity, but the fact that so many people are making music of one kind or another and that virtually all of it has some relationship to this rock/r&b thing in terms of coming from that rhythmic basis if nothing else–that’s a pretty remarkable thing, it seems to me. So I am a little weary–I don’t think it’s such a good idea to say, well, that’s too much.

So, you’ve got your hack work, but you always had your hack work. You always had the teen magazines, and there are even gradations in that. I don’t mean to stand here and put down my friends who edited teen magazines, like Gloria Stavers at 16 and Danny Fields at Date Book and Paul Nelson at Hullabaloo, because they did great stuff that helped inspire me. But there was always crap out there, and in a society organized the way this one is, there always will be. I don’t even know how you would measure it out and try to figure out whether percentage-wise it’s gone quote-unquote up or down. My instinct is that there are more people trying to do serious work now than there were in 1969 when I started at Creem. Quite a lot more, percentage-wise.

Scott:   I would agree with that, and I thought one of the assumptions made in Let It Blurt is that rock criticism has gone downhill since Lester Bangs died, and I’m a little uneasy with what I thought WAS an assumption.

Dave:   Well, you know, Jim’s got his own particular take on it. Jim’s a lot more–he comes out of that kind of punk-alt rock perfectionist thing, which is a group of people who tend to see the world in very politicized terms, in terms of the office politics of things, and miss the big political picture. [laughs] In terms of the social structure of politics. And I think when you look at it from that point of view, it would appear–I have to be careful what I say here because it’s not what I think, and it’s so fucking easy to caricature it [laughs], and I have a real talent for that, I think–but from my own point of view, that kind of angry, cynical… there was this writer I used to work with in Boston named James Isaacs, I think he does public radio or something up there, and his thing used to be, “Nothing ain’t no good no more.” Well, you know, if I felt that way I wouldn’t even be here; I’d just check out, that’s easy to do. It isn’t even expensive any more. There are great drugs! I mean, what could that Darvon that Lester took–not that I think Lester killed himself, that’s a bad joke. But really, one of the things that this society we live in provides us is: you don’t have to stick around if you think it all sucks, you don’t have to be here. And I’m not encouraging anyone to leave, it’s just, you know, if that’s how you feel, then check yourself out. And how I feel is, I’m glad to be here.

Scott:   Were you pleased with the Bangs biography? Did you feel it was an accurate portrayal of both Bangs and the whole world ofCreem and all that?

Dave:   I would say in terms of the place where Lester and my world intersected–which is at Creem –I’d say it’s about 3/4, which is above the average by a little bit. There are things in there that I told Jim weren’t true, and quite logically explained to him that it was impossible, for instance, that I had ever gone out on this night of bar-hopping with Lester and Handsome Dick Manitoba, for the very simple reason that I never go bar-hopping in my life with anybody. It’s not something I do. [laughs]

Scott:   I actually re-read that passage today, and he made it sound like you couldn’t handle it or something, and that was the last they saw of you…

Dave:   Well I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to handle it–that’s one of the reasons why I don’t do it. And the other reason I wouldn’t have been able to handle it is that unlike those people, I’m not an alcoholic. In short, I had no reason to handle it. I had a whole other kind of life, and it was certainly… you know, here’s what I think. I think Jim meant well 100% of the time. I think he had a theory and I think there are lots of parts of the theory that are correct, but my interest in that book–I have not sat down and read that book from beginning to end for a bunch of different reasons including the fact that I’m working on something very far afield from it, and also because I think I would find it very painful. Not because of how I feel about Lester–I mean, not because of any negative feelings I have about Lester–but because I miss the smelly old bastard. But I did read the stuff about Creem, so all my comments are only about Creem and whatever other places, like that Dick Manitoba thing… like, he’s got that whole story about me leaving Pine Knob. The only way you can get out of Pine Knob is by automobile, otherwise you have to walk. I didn’t have a driver’s license, and the nearest person I knew to Pine Knob is my mother who lives about ten miles away. I guarantee you I would remember a ten mile walk in the middle of the night. And I told it to Jim just like that: It didn’t happen, and this is why it didn’t happen, this is why it couldn’t have happened. But like I said, he’s got a theory and he stuck to it.

Why Can’t We Be Friends?

Scott:   Through various things that you’ve been involved in, such as some anti-censorship campaigns, you’ve come to know and probably befriend a lot of musicians, and you’re obviously pretty close to Springsteen, and I think you’ve been stupidly criticized for that–it’s not like you’re not qualified to write a book about him; that’s just an old argument and a stupid one. But what I am curious to know is, is it difficult for you to separate your personal relations from your professional obligations? Have you ever panned any records made by your friends, and what was their response?

Dave:   [laughs] Yeah, it’s happened, you know, I mean, Peter Wolf didn’t speak to me once for about a year-and-a-half. The last time I saw Roger Daltrey was in an elevator at about 8:00 in the morning, and I think if I hadn’t been standing with a friend of mine who happened to be black and at least as big as his bodyguard, I’d still have a lump on my head. So, yeah. It’s funny because I have this contradictory reputation on the one hand for being this kind of acerbic, trouble-making, fire-starting, invective-brandishing bully–tough guy, whatever. And on the other hand, being this callow sap for celebrities. Well, you know [laughs], both are wrong. Because nobody’s that simple. And really, one reason why people didn’t like the Springsteen books–those who didn’t like them–was because that’s the point of the Springsteen books. Not only does celebrity not make you happy, it also doesn’t mean that you have to be sad, or a sad case. It doesn’t predetermine anything. And, like I said, people have got theories and they stick to them, and boy, did that fly in the face of a lot of what people… that’s what people–it isn’t that I’m close to Bruce, which I am, what it is is that I didn’t think that he became a rat when he became successful, because he didn’t become a rat when he became successful. He didn’t even become–life became more complicated in some ways, and simpler in others. That’s what happens, that’s what all the stories are about, that’s what the Who story’s about with an unhappy ending. And really, I went from the Who book into the second Bruce book to get the taste of the ending of the Who book out of my mouth, it’s as simple as that.

This thing was coming up, I knew it was going to be an extraordinary thing. Bruce is not only my friend, he’s also somebody in whom I have a lot of confidence, and I thought there was a story there. I had no idea I was going to drag Ronald Reagan into it in quite such a direct way, but you know, I could see a story shaping up there that I wanted to tell, and I thought I really needed, after the Who book, and Keith and the reformed band and Cincinnati and all of it, I just said, I need to tell a true story with a happy ending, where I am gonna be…You know, listen, I’m working on a Marvin Gaye biography, my daughter gets cancer and dies, I spit the bit on the Marvin Gaye book for the simple reason that I couldn’t go through…another one of those. And in a strange way, the Marvin story was another one of those. So some of it is how I internalize this stuff, and nobody has to know that–unless they ask–but I do think that in terms of the ideology of the whole thing, what I do is, where I stand, is not, you know–I stand in the place where I think Jann Wenner’s full of shit, I think Thomas Frank is full of shit. [laughs] I just think that they’re both wrong! And it’s not this great giddy thing to become a rock star, and it ain’t always good, and people who become successful aren’t always good–including some of the ones who are the most celebrated for being good–but then on the other end of it isn’t always bad. And you’re not trapped.

That whole kind of po-mo thing that Frank represents, I guess–which I think, actually, Jim DeRogatis in some ways falls into–is this notion that if you become involved in certain things that are bigger than a fly speck, you’ve sold out to the system. But you haven’t sold out to the system because there’s only one system and all of us live within it. Some of us are working to change what the system is, and some of us are working to keep things the same, and some of us are visibly engaged in denying that any change is possible, which to me is the post-modernist project. But that was always very far afield from the Creem project, and the Creem project–I can’t really speak for anyone else, but I’m pretty sure that this is still true for Jaan Uhelszki, and for me and her alone–but for me, the Creem project was about having this culture that gave people like us a voice, and using it, and not making too many assumptions based on that about what was worthy and unworthy. You know, sometimes trash is trash, and it’s hard for some of the people who’ve discovered that trash is sometimes art to get around that. It’s like, okay, you’ve learned to hit the curve ball, now we’re going to throw you the slider. [laughs] And it’s interesting to me because the signal characteristic of the sort of defeatist po-mo mob is that they’re very well educated, and yet, they have this need to see things in this very extreme terms, and the human dimension, and the muddled and tainted dimension–it’s as if things can exist un-tainted. And you know, really, they can’t. The Replacements can’t. the Clash couldn’t. I’m trying to think of other things that really tried to be un-tainted. Bruce couldn’t. Everybody walks around with some part of both things… the worst people you can think of are tainted by stuff that’s great. Look at Ahmet Ertegun. Here’s a guy who virtually made destitute any number of people who I both know personally and revere as artists, right? And yet, at the same time he also made this music that, as much as any single, non-performer, he made this thing happen. So it’s just, it’s a messy world, as Rodney Crowell once said.

White Lines

Scott:   Are you happy to take credit for coining the phrase ‘punk rock’?

Dave:   Well, happier every year! It’s funny because a bunch of different people, even Bob Christgau, called me up and said, Legs McNeil says in his book [Please Kill Me] that he coined the term. And I said, well, he didn’t. This is when it happened–in my ? Mark and the Mysterians “Looney Tunes” column. And Legs McNeil was still, you know, learning how to lift his tone-arm at that point. And that’s just true. Now, he has some need, I guess, to write me out of the story. I mean, hey, being able to write that much oral history about the MC5 and Detroit and not mention my name? That takes a very skillful and dishonest person. What was impressive to me about it was the skill, because I already was aware of the dishonesty.

Scott:   You may have partly answered this question already, but in regards to the punk rock that did emerge in the late seventies, you were a little more skeptical about it than many of your contemporaries at the time…

Dave:   I don’t like movements in music and in the arts. I don’t trust them very much. I like social movements. And what punk was in the United States, as a social movement, was not clear to me, and the parts of it that were clear to me I didn’t like from the git. From the git, I was aware that Lester had wound up in the White Noise Supremacists. I always saw that. And part of how I saw that was that’s how Iheard it, and by that I mean, the drumming and the bass lines–with the exception of the Clash bass lines which were very, very good, and some of the Sex Pistols–but for the most part in that music the rhythm is atrophied. That wasn’t very interesting to me. And to me, one of the cycles in these musics is that they’re kind of invented by outcasts of one kind or another: black people, poor people, Southern people, you know, English working class people, whatever. And much nuance gets obliterated in the taking over because, well, you can look at it in different ways.

For instance, Brian Wilson just had a lot more education than the guys who were doing the doo-wop records, and he knew some things about harmony that many of them didn’t know. I’m not sure he ever actually made a record that was any more harmonically sophisticated than a Platters record or a Flamingos record, but with the run of doo-wop records, sure. You get into bluegrass music, bluegrass music becomes an instrumental music even though it’s basically, before the college kids get involved, a platform for voices. Well, the kids can’t sing. The Charles River Valley Boys and those various groups–they can’t sing like the Stanley Brothers or the Butch Mountain Boys or Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. They can’t do that! So, they reinvent it and it becomes this kind of Jerry Garcia/David Grisman thing. Something is lost. And I think that if you move from Johnny Thunders to Richard Hell you’re doing another version of that. I just think you are. And I think that there was something going on in the music of, let’s say, the MC5, the Dolls, the Sex Pistols, that is not going on in most other punk music. That’s a gross way to put it, and it’s unfair to all kinds of people–it’s unfair to Pete Shelley–but as a general thing, that was what was happening. And it also meant ignoring–I’m not gonna give up liking Bootsy Collins. For that matter, I’m not gonna give up liking Jackson Browne! If the price of this is becoming musically narrower, I’d never have noted yes for that. Even with the MC5, which seems like the narrowest possible thing, you go look at those early issues of Creem, we’re writing about Charles Mingus, we’re writing about Ray Charles, we’re writing about all kinds of things… [laughs] Let me put it this way, we’re writing about all kinds of things that are much more sophisticated than anything that we know to say about them. But there isn’t a blanket–I’m not the one who wrote James Taylor must die ["James Taylor Marked For Death," Lester Bangs]. I didn’t like James Taylor very much, but I’m not the one who wrote James Taylor must die, that was somebody else. And so, if you’re weary of that, then you’re weary of the whole thing. Do I think that what happened in punk was important? Yeah, it was important. I don’t know that it was any more important than disco.

Scott:   I was going to ask you about disco.

Dave:   In the long run do I think punk was more important than disco? I think in the long run the way that punks who survived as musicians mainly sustained themselves by taking ideas from funk and disco. I think that answers the question right there. And do I think that the revolution in white rock ‘n’ roll, or in part of white rock ‘n’ roll, that happened in England and was stillborn in the United States with punk, approaches the significance of the rise of rap music? That’s a silly idea. It seems to be the idea that has animated much of rock criticism for the last 20 years, but it’s an absurd idea, I mean, it’s just ludicrous.

Scott:   It seems like your own feelings about disco at the time were kind of complicated.

Dave:   My feelings about everything at ALL times is pretty complicated. [laughs] Here’s what happened. I wrote a piece about some of the r&b vocal groups that had been desperately trying to make disco–Archie Bell & the Drells. And Vince Aletti wrote a brilliant rejoinder to it in the Voice, which totally changed my mind about what was going on. And really–I think I may have called Vince and apologized. [laughs] I remember doing something like that. And then of course the other thing that happened was that horrible pogrom at the Detroit Tigers / Chicago White Sox game with those racist disc jockeys. Then I think the other thing was–it’s in The Heart of Rock and Soul–I went to Yankee stadium before opening day, must’ve been ’78 or ’79, the year of the Reggie Bar, I think it was. And Reggie Jackson’s doing batting practise and he’s hitting ball after ball… hang on a second, I gotta get my dog. [Calls dog into the room.] He’s hitting ball after ball into the right field stands, and while this is happening the record that’s playing at full volume over the Yankee Stadium loudspeakers is “Disco Inferno.” Well, you know, I argue with lots of things, but I do not argue with my ears.

And when you hear–disco music is a music that–and house is like that and some of the techno and stuff that’s derived from techno–is that you have to hear it in the right context or you can’t get it. I remember Arthur Baker being astonished, because I’m not a clubgoer and I like the first house records that he played for me. And I liked them because I understood the ostinato piano figures as being basically a sped-up version of Chicago blues, which they are. But that was a fluke. In general, you’re going to have an experience that snaps you out of your context and INto the context of that music. I can hear free jazz very easily–not to say that I understand it or write about it well, but I hear it, take pleasure in it, and have some concept of what’s going on because of all those Sun Ra / MC5 shows, it’s as simple as that. I have been in that world long enough to know, right? And sometimes that’s truer than other times. Early reggae you didn’t need that, or at least I didn’t, because you could rely on some parts of your r&b thing to get you through. Dancehall, you’re gonna have to work harder, it’s as simple as that.

Scott:   You wrote a lengthy piece in the late ’70s–it’s in Fortunate Son–about pop music in the movies, the piece about The Buddy Holly Story…

Dave:   Yeah, the thing I did for, one of the movie magazines–Film Comment.

Scott:   I’m just wondering if there’s any recent movies in which you were, say, astounded at the way pop music was used. There have been a lot of music-dominated movies recently.

Dave:   [pause] The way that the rock & roll scene is portrayed in Cameron’s movie, Almost Famous is tremendously accurate, emotionally, and even down to–people can say what they want to say about those characters, but I knew people like that, particularly the women, who to me are what that picture’s about, which is about nurture at various levels, and it’s more about the women than it is the men–to me. So, no, the picture that comes to mind is, believe it or not, Crouching Dragon because it in some way… A friend, my co-editor atRock and Rap Confidential, Lee Ballinger said–he described it to me as a hip-hop movie, but without the music, and that’s right. It was astounding how they didn’t use pop music. [laughs] It was astounding that they could avoid it. But I don’t think… We know certain things about music, now. Right? Science is beginning to tell us things about music, and one thing it’s telling us is that music seems to be the art that’s most deeply imbedded in humans. That in fact it pre-exists humans, that there are no human societies that are without the art of music. That there was music before there was cave painting, there was music probably, it now seems, there’s a fairly good chance that there was music before there was fire–controlled fire, cooking. [pause] That’s pretty amazing. And yet, primates are visual animals. I still think that music videos and music in the movies are basically tails wagging dogs.

Scott:   Does High Fidelity fit into that? [pause] Did you see High Fidelity?

Dave:   High Fidelity‘s like the tip of the tail wagging the tail that wags the dog. [laughs] You know? High Fidelity was like, I used to know those people; Almost Famous was like, I used to BE those people. And I liked High Fidelity quite a lot. And I thought it got to a couple of things that are worth getting to, including Marvin Gaye. That thing at the end, I mean, whatever my doubts may have been, that resolved them. Especially–I saw it later on Pay Per View on TV, and I realized well, actually, he doesn’t sing the song ["Let's Get It On"] particularly well. And at that moment, at least the first time I saw it, he could’ve been Marvin Gaye. And that’s a truth about music that, with the utter demise of Top 40 radio, or any kind of music radio, which somebody who’s not a fanatic can listen to–take it for granted that all pop music fans under 17 are fanatics–that’s a truth that… where can you be surprised any more? I’m not really gonna be surprised on Napster because Napster requires a volitional act to find the thing. One of the reasons why I probably still DO this stuff is the possibility for surprise. Even if that means listening to all twelve discs of the Carter Family box set on Bear Family. And the one thing I got out of it, aside from stuff I already kind of knew, the one shock of surprise I got was hearing them sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in an arrangement NOT terribly far from Elvis’s, which had never been released before. And, you know, you also have to at that point, you have to go think about what would Peter Guralnick make of this? How inauthentic of the Carter Family to sing an Al Jolson song–that’s what he thought about Elvis. So, that was like my great, oddball discovery, but that’s everyday, or you’re looking for that everyday. *I* am. So I’m not an alcoholic, but I am a junkie for that.

Scott:   Can you single out your all-time favorite musical moment in a movie?

Dave:   There’s that unbelievable moment in American Hot Wax where Alan Freed plays “There Goes My Baby,” that’s an unforgettable one, just absolutely a killer. But I don’t–that’s not how I relate to the stuff, I relate to the stuff as sound. I don’t relate to it as lyrics, I don’t relate to it as score and composition, I relate to it as sound. So my visual memory of music has as much to do with watching Atlantic and Motown map labels spin around on a turntable, or album covers or something, but it isn’t movies. But it ain’t mainly visual. Visual memory of music for me is the exact spot I was standing in the first time I heard “96 Tears”–that I remember!

Scott:   Do you still place as much emphasis in your own life on singles–as opposed to albums? Because you kind of make an argument inThe Heart of Rock and Soul, uhh, for singles, I guess.

Dave:   [pause] It’d be like valuing horses and still driving the car. There aren’t so many horses around any more.

Scott:   Do you mean specifically Top 40?

Dave:   Well, a single is a different thing now. It’s not, or often as not, it’s not a commodity in the same way that it was when–you know, I caught just the last moment of–that book [The Heart of Rock and Soul got written at the last moment practically that it could've been written, and then everything kind of blew apart for reasons of formatics and reason of record business economics and broadcast formatics, and a million things blew it apart, right? But to me I guess the thing is--it tends to be that the records that I have high regard for will tend to have a song or two or three that--particularly the rock records--that will just galvanize them for me. This Everclear record was that with that, whatever it's called, Songs From An American Movie. That for me is, like, totally, like, a smash. Not whatever the single is--which I think is "AM Radio"--but this other thing. So that galvanic response is still there. I don't think--it's not laid out in such a simple fashion any longer. I am neurologically incapable of listening to music radio in the United States. It's like, I would just get out of the car and either kill myself, or beat somebody up. [laughs] It’s literally true that I almost never listen to music radio.

And yet, it’s funny, because just the other day I actually switched over from AM to FM, which I hardly ever do, but everything I had in the car was boring–everything on AM was boring. And I was kinds dancing around the dial, and I found some Supremes record followed by a Bobby Womack record, and then I dialed into one of the college stations and they were doing something interesting with some singer-songwriters who I think are interesting right now, and then I just got out of the car and I was just confused–it was like, “you mean you can actually do this again?” Then I thought, oh God, more information, and who needs more information in [pause] Babylon?

D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Scott:   Okay, I just want to get your thoughts about a few genres and artists–forgive me if you’ve written about some of this stuff in Rock and Rap Confidential recently. Curious to know what you think of D’Angelo, and some others who I place in that same vein–Erykah Badu, Jill Scott.

Dave:   Well, I think that’s a place where you really notice the decline in vocals and vocal harmonies–at least I do. D’Angelo in particular strikes me as doing, or trying to do, for instance, Sly Stone’s act and not quite getting it. I was pretty disappointed by that record [Voodoo. I... I love R. Kelly, though, 'cause R. Kelly's doing the Marvin Gaye thing and really getting a lot of things right, I think. So I don't know where you would put the boundaries on it, but for me the person that's really doing it is Kelly.

Scott:   Yeah. I'm in 100% agreement with you.

Dave:   You know, the D'Angelo thing is--it's cold! But people tend to like, right now, some very cold--some music that strikes me as very cold and brittle.

Scott:   I find that that music sometimes kind of comes with a little bit of an agenda, that people--the sort of rootsy, I don't know...

Dave:   Well, I think that, I would go you one better and say--I would go all the way to Macy Gray and say that. I'm not of the opinion that, outside of hip-hop there's a whole lot of great r&b being made right now. I just don't think that there is. I think that there are things, and I think that there are things in gospel music in particular that may bode well for popular music depending on who sells out, and when. [laughs] People can talk about Erykah Badu and Me’shell Ndegeocello, or, I used to call her Me’shell Unpronounceable–I used to call her Unspellable / Unpronounceable actually. Maybe even Unlistenable–I don’t like her much. Those kind of people–if you’re going to listen to that music, let alone some tuneless, really out-of-key fingernails-on-the-blackboard type like Lauryn Hill, then what you really oughta do is you gotta deal with how good people like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are, because they’re better at it.

Scott:   Yeah.

Dave:   It’s as simple as that. The material may not be always as good, but I tell you something: You give Erykah Badu–who actually I’ve come to like some–you give her, or Jill Scott, or any of those people the same song as Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston will beat them over the head with it and leave them in the gutter, bloody. There are some other people–there’s TLC, who I like a lot, En Vogue, Mary J. Blige–there are people around doing things that I find interesting, but in the end, when I want a contemporary black vocal music thing, I always listen to a hip-hop record, and these days that would start with Outkast. Or Eminem.

Scott:   Any recent teen pop stuff that you like?

Dave:   I like this new Backstreet Boys single, “The Call”?

Scott:   I don’t think I’ve heard that.

Dave:   They sent me the single, and I kind of played it and went, ahh, it’s got a good beginning, and then it sort of drifts off, and then I heard the ending of it on the radio today and I thought, that’s really quite good. And I guess what it is is it’s probably too long, like most records are right now. But I loved New Edition, I found New Kids on the Block much more tolerable than most people did. I like that Maurice Starr thing anyway. So, I kind of–I was soft on New Kids on the Block. I’m trying to think if there’s anybody else…

Scott:   Britney? Christina Aguilera sort of stuff, or…

Dave:   Mmm, I haven’t heard anything by those people that I admired much, I don’t know. This is changing so rapidly there’s 15-year old kids I know, who, when they were 14 or 12, were listening to what we’re talking about, and are now listening to Ben Harper. There’s a whole RANGE of teen things that I don’t like very much, although I’ll tell you that Ben Harper is one of the more exciting acts that I’ve seen live in the last ten years.

Scott:   You wrote a lengthy piece in Mojo a few years back on Oasis…

Dave:   Was that piece long? [laughs] The concert was long, it was interminable.

Scott:   I think that piece was done around the time of the Morning Glory album…

Dave:   This is what I know about that piece. It was the first time in England, I was told, that anybody had said ‘No’ to the little brats. And I found that quite amusing. I don’t hate their records; being in the same room with those guys, you know… that one guy has John Lennon pretensions, let me tell you something, that guy, watching Neil or Nigel or whatever the fuck his name is up there on stage–not Liam, Liam’s just a garden variety, if he had the nerve he’d turn into that kid from the Pogues–but the other one, the poseur, he ain’t Jimmy Page, forget about John Lennon!

Scott:   Well I gathered from the piece that you actually like their music quite a bit.

Dave:   Oh I DO like it, I like the records, but one of the things that history has taught us–or it should’ve–is that people who make good records don’t always, or even often, also make good shows. The show I saw was just atrocious, and it was fundamentally disrespectful to, even contemptuous of, their audience, which I found–I was insulted, I was part of the audience, I was insulted.

Scott:   Does all that stuff ruin their music for you?

Dave:   No, they went and made a couple more records and did that themselves. [laughs] I mean, generally speaking, this is an odd thing about me. I’ve had very intense friendships with people whose music I can’t stand. I mean, I was very close to Harry Chapin. And Harry and I just agreed that we didn’t agree about the quality of his music. And I miss him. He was a really good friend. It was funny, there was a record store about a block from my house, and I went down there to get something one day, this was in the summertime, and one of the clerks who knew me said, “Oh well, did you hear that Harry Chapin just died in a car accident out on Long Island? I’m sure that’s a great day in rock criticism for you,” or something. Totally legitimate thing for him to say. And I literally ran out of the store to go home and find out, could this be true?

So there’s that. And then, on the other side, there’s–after the Albert Goldman book [Elvis came out I wrote something about it in the end-of-the-year issue in Rolling Stone, and Jerry Schilling, a Memphis Mafia guy who I've known for a while, he called me up and he said, "You're very upset by this, I want you to know one thing: You and Elvis would've really liked one another." I'm not so sure. That ain't all on Elvis, obviously. But it don't make no nevermind, because it's very very rare that you go to meet somebody whose music you admire who's as great as whatever conversation you've been having with them in your head for the past however long you've been listening to them, right? And I remember Patti Smith told me this about meeting Bob Dylan. I asked her what that was like, and she said she wasn't sure what it was like because of this conversation that had been going on that he hadn't been privy to. Or some great Patti way of explaining that--this is around the time of the Rolling thunder tour. And I thought, that's a very valuable thing to know, and it applies all the time. I've been very fortunate in the sense that I like the guys in the Who, you know, Bruce is my friend, Sam Moore from Sam and Dave is my friend. Smokey Robinson has always been a fantastic person to spend time with. These are people who I admire immensely, and to have that click on both levels--that's a fantastic thing. But I don't ask it, and I don't...Peter Wolf of J. Geils is another person I should mention, and Jackson Browne, probably, are two more that I'll feel bad if I don't throw in there, and Steve Earle. But, you know, they're separate experiences. Listening to Sting is not having dinner with Sting. Which [laughs]–dinner is always great, listening is a little more of an up and down experience! I mean, I think I probably like it better than many of my colleagues do, but, you know, there are times when it goes over the top for me quite a bit.

Scott:   One other person I wanted to ask you about was Beck.

Dave:   [pause] Well, what about Beck? The Jeff Beck group changed my life! In so many positive ways! I mean, fantastic–one of the greatest rock bands I ever saw!

Scott:   [laughs] Okay, I like that answer, we’ll leave it at that.

Dave:   Beck is, Beck is…

Scott:   I mean, he’s doing some neat things…

Dave:   Beck is doing absolutely nothing that black people haven’t done before and better. And even that stuff, that he did fairly well, he only did on his first [major label] record [Mellow Gold]–the other records are, you know, are we gonna seriously sit around and compare this guy and the art of oral montage to… forget about black people, compare his art of oral montage to Frank Zappa?! Compare it to the people who made the Public Enemy records? Are you gonna compare Beck to Dr. Dre?! ‘Cause that’s what you’re starting to do when you’re starting to deal in that area, and it’s just, it’s silly.

Scott:   Not to mention the country blues artists, Charley Patton…

Dave:   Well, the country blues artists, what he’s doing is, he’s not playing country blues music, he’s playing country blues records, and that’s a separate thing! And what it is, is–it’s like Ry Cooder with the Buena Vista Social Club. You can like that record as much as you want to like that record; if you think that it has something to do with Cuban music, you’re wrong. And anybody who knows much about Cuban music will be happy to tell you why you’re wrong. I don’t think anybody who listens to Charley Patton on a regular basis sees Beck as an heir of Charley Patton, do they? It’s all people who don’t listen to Charley Patton who say that. It’s like, people who listen to jump blues records–when the “swing” thing, the jitterbug thing was happening and they called it swing, it was like–and this happens over and over and over again–and people said, what do you think about it, and I said, I think if I went over and picked out any of the 15 or 20 Louis Jordan discs I’ve got you’d be embarrassed you asked the question. And it’s similar, people ask me what I think about these English kids and the so-called ‘electronica’ stuff, and the answer to that is, go listen to Derrick May’s “Innovator” record and tell me–or Kevin Saunderson’s double disc greatest hits, which is fantastic–and then we’ll have the discussion. But I mean, do I like Moby? Yeah, I like Moby, Moby’s a different thing than that, to me. To me, Moby is actually some strange kind of visionary, who I undoubtedly would hate on sight. But–I’m not a vegetarian.

Share the Files: After Napster

Scott:   One of the Top Five lists on RockCritics.com is “Five Reasons Why You Should Or Shouldn’t Download Music From Napster.” It didn’t actually get much response, but I did want to read you one guy’s response…

Dave:   [laughs]

Scott:   It goes: “Because how the hell else could I have gotten my girlfriend her Christmas present this year (which, by the way, I’m still not done with): Dave Marsh’s entire list of the 1001 best singles of all time from The Heart of Rock & Soul? Hardest song to find: Skipworth & Turner, ‘Can’t Give Her Up (12″ Mix).’” That was Michelangelo Matos.

Dave:   Another guy I know, Dean Fiorre, from Connecticut, has just finished getting all 1,001. And Skipworth & Turner was hard for him too he said. The one that was hard–he gave me a list just today–and it was also hard for me–was “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band. Which I actually had to find on one of those bootleg breakbeats albums they sold to DJs. There’s this record store called Downstairs Up that had, like, singles. One end of it was doo-wop store; and in the other end it was the hottest place for DJs to come and buy the new dance records, and they would also buy their breakbeat compilations. [laughs] Musical paradise! Late ’80s. So, yeah, well, that is great!

Scott:   Okay, well let me ask you a question about Napster, you’re obviously very pro-Napster…

Dave:   I’m not pro-Napster. I’m pro-file sharing. I’m not pro-Napster. Napster’s now part of BMG, I’m anti-Napster, in that respect. If you think that the money that BMG takes in from your Napster subscription is going to people who make music, that would be a demented thought.

Scott:   Okay, well, I was going to ask you as a follow-up question anyway, because I’m a bit confused about it–I’m not really sure what’s happening with Napster in terms of the BMG affiliation or takeover. What’s the scoop with that?

Dave:   They’re gonna take the money. They’re gonna charge you money for what you’ve been getting for free, except that you won’t have access to as much music if you pay them the money because they’ll only have music that’s licensed to them, and what they do with the money is an open question only if you think that suddenly record companies are going to start dealing with artists fairly rather than contractually. So, you know, bye-bye Napster and I ain’t gonna miss ya! Something else will come up. They can’t stop this–look, the FCC and the big broadcasters think they stopped it, right? There’s been a pirate radio movement in this country for the past 15 years, and finally, David Kennard at the FCC just decided that the way to deal with this is we may as well license the low power stations because then we can have some hope of controlling them. It wasn’t gonna work, and what it did instead was flush out what the National Association of Broadcasters, how much power they really wield, and determined they are NOT to let you hear anything except the nonsense and evil that they spew. And this is going to be similar. They’re gonna think that people are going to go and pay them, I don’t know, five dollars a week, ten dollars a month, whatever it comes down to, to go and download just the stuff that they have, and then pay another similar fee to somebody else to download just the stuff that they have, and then they’re not going to be able to do the things with it that they’ve been doing with it, like playing it for their friends who are living in Papa New Guinea, which can only be done by transferring the file to another computer since you’re in Tacoma, right? And they think that’s gonna work–that’s not gonna work! It’s not going to work! It’s not going to happen. It may very well be that while it’s not working, and before the society adjusts and accepts that every time your synapses hum a tune record companies are not entitled to get paid–’cause that’s my ultimate theory, that they want to put a chip in your head, and every time you remember a song they’ll charge you for it.

You know, people are gonna go to jail. There’s no doubt in my mind; I could go to jail! I could go to jail for conspiracy or advocacy or something. But people are gonna, people are gonna go to jail. There’s already–there’s one kid who’s been convicted of a felony, there’s this other kid out in I think Oklahoma or Kansas who’s being brought up on charges now. This is a very serious thing.

Scott:   Well, let me take the question down to its most basic level: Is music something that people should pay for?

Dave:   That’s not the most basic question. The most basic question is: how are musicians going to eat and be sheltered and have health care and be taken care of in terms of their material needs. And that question can only be answered when you start to answer it for everybody else. And, yes, those needs must be taken care of–for everyone. And until that question is joined, it’s irrelevant whether people should pay for music. I don’t know whether people should pay for music or whether people should pay for donuts. All I know is there is a human need to eat. There is a human need to hear music. If you make it, or try to make it, so that only people who have money can eat or listen to music, or make music, and distribute it–’cause it’s all part of the same thing, it’s a verb not a noun, as Christopher Small said: “Musicing”–then you’re criminalizing people for basic human needs. That’s not a good idea; that’s a really bad idea. And that is, however, what is happening. What is happening is–I mean, this is even before you get to the question of, when you pay the money to BMG what happens to the money? Does it go to this family that was involved with Hitler? Does it go to some group of shareholders that we don’t know who they are? Does it go to a bunch of record executives who, by and large, hate music, or would appear to? Or does it go to the people who make the music. and if it doesn’t go to the people who make the music why should anybody care whether it gets paid for? In the end, I don’t care whether the Sony building is there in the morning; if it isn’t, something else will replace it.

Scott:   But the artist has to get some royalties from somewhere, or is…

Dave:   That’s not the way the system is set up now. The way the system is set up now is the “creator” of the work is the copyright owner, and the copyright owner in the vast, vast majority of cases, I’d say, in recorded music–more than 90% of cases; a lot more–is a corporation, which, even if it has an underlying contract requiring it to pay royalties is very likely not paying them, and even if it is paying them it’s probably not paying them based on an accurate count. Nobody gets to audit at the pressing plant. Nobody in the history of recorded music has ever been allowed to audit at the point of production, which means that all audits are inherently flawed. It’s like the IRS just saying, okay, well if you give me all your W2s I’ll take it for granted, with every single human being in the United States, that you had no other income. The IRS will not DO that. The reason the IRS will not do that is because the IRS is not stupid. [laughs] So that’s even if you’re Madonna. Even if you’re Michael Jackson and supposedly has a 50/50 deal: you don’t know how many records were pressed. Because believe me, if Sony had caved on that with Michael, or if Time-Warner had caved on that with Madonna, there would be major repercussions in the sense that a lot of artists would now be auditing at the pressing plant. They won’t let you do it. Can you think of a reason other than self-initiated piracy that they won’t let you do it? You should go pass out a questionnaire sometime at the gates of a record pressing plant, see what kind of phone calls you get. They’re terrified if you’re a union organizer, and more terrified if you want to know about working conditions from a journalistic point of view.

So, the question isn’t whether people should pay money for music; the question is whether the present setup is rational, and the answer is, no it isn’t. And the further question is, should we set up a whole bunch of systems in the name of protecting creative people that enshrine, more or less permanently, the present setup, and the answer is no we should not! And listen, my wife works in the record industry. My family’s income mainly isn’t from rock criticism, right? I said I didn’t care whether the Sony building wasn’t there, right? All human beings have a right to eat and shelter and transportation and health care and all of those things, and that includes Tommy Mottola and Ahmet Ertegun and everybody. Everybody. So, I didn’t say I hope the people who run Sony aren’t there tomorrow, I hope they are there. Some of them actually love music–actually, Tommy would be one–and I hope they are able to spend their whole life working with what they love. I feel very privileged that I’ve been able to do it. On the other hand, this is a whole separate question than that. Part of the answer is as long as the social setup remains this complex, yes, you’re going to pay for music. But it may very well be that most of the people who are asking that question think that they are getting network TV for free. [laughs] Or that they get radio broadcasts for free: not in America they don’t! And actually, even if it weren’t an advertising system then they’d be directly paying taxes for it, so nobody gets ANYthing for free.

Scott:   Okay, talk a little bit about editors. I want to know who’s the best editor you ever worked for–at a magazine.

Dave:   Well, three or four people come to mind. Let me just sort of take a little moment here because I don’t want to leave anybody out. I’ll give you a handful of people that I’ve learned a tremendous amount from in terms of their line editing–you know, their actual editing of text –the assignment part is a whole other thing, and a much thornier issue. People who come to mind are Bob Christgau, Marianne Partridge, Jann Wenner, and Barbara Downey–now Barbara Landau.

Scott:   What makes a really good editor?

Dave:   Well this is what I try to do; this is my theory about it, and different people deal with this in different ways and I would not say that all of the people, with the exception of Christgau, and maybe Marianne on a good day–this is not what Barbara and Jon [Landau] and half of Marianne were after–but what I’m after and what I think Bob’s always after, and what I think even Jann’s sometimes after is to take something that a writer has done and make sure that the writer has gotten the most out of that that they can. Barbara Nellis, my editor atPlayboy, I should also not fail to mention because she can be very good… It’s to make sure that the writer is saying as clearly and effectively and, hmmm, whatever that x-factor is, let’s say entertainingly, grippingly, however you want to put it, as possible what it is they have to say. There are other things–and this happens a lot at Rolling Stone, where it was sort of like, there were other agendas about what people wanted said, or what people wanted not said, and that to me is a hallmark of… you can’t call it bad editing, to me that’s just an approach I don’t think very much of. It’s both the most dreadful process and the greatest one.

Scott:   So Christgau’s one of the great editors…

Dave:   Oh Christgau’s great, I mean, fantastic. Tremendous insight into what you’re trying to say, really good ideas about what you might do, he’ll spot holes in your thinking–his sense of other people’s language is not nearly so–at least when I worked with him, which is a long time ago–not nearly so insular as his own writing has become, or at least as I think it’s become. No, he’s a fantastic editor, just an absolutely fantastic editor.

Scott:   Okay, but you do have–I’m not looking for you to slag some of your contemporaries or whatever, but you obviously have some problems with Christgau. You did that piece on the Pazz & Jop poll a few years ago.

Dave:   Oh I have tremendous problems. I think I basically–first of all, I think he hates rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t even think he makes much of a secret about it. If you actually look at his reviews, he doesn’t like rock bands. He said some miserably–I can’t think of a better way to put it but bigoted things about, for instance, the heavy metal audience. And I think he’s promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock criticism oughta be. So, yeah, I disagree with all those things, and there’s no reason to make a secret of it. And he carries on, and I carry on, and it doesn’t make much difference to the clock ticking.

Scott:   One last question, it’s kind of a pretentious one. Obviously I know you hated Clinton, and I’m sure you’re probably happy that he’s out of there, so I’m just wondering if you think that an administration as conservative as Bush’s will have any effect on pop music over the next four years–or what kind of effect will it have?

Dave:   Well, in this country, all any government, as presently constituted, can do by getting involved in any way, shape, or form with culture, is harm it. Either by narrowing its ideas–its range of ideas–or by actively stepping in to repress it, and I would expect that Ashcroft will clamp down, particularly since he seems to be, you know, the poster boy for sexual repression. I would expect him to clamp down as hard as he knows how on all parts of the entertainment industry that he finds to be involved in sexual expression, and I would expect that to include the parts of rock that intersect with the porn industry, because I think the porn industry will come very very quickly under a real shelling from this administration–that would be my guess. It is a guess.

If there was anything good about the Clinton administration’s relationship to the arts, and there wasn’t much, it was that after the Sister Souljah crisis, and when Clinton wasn’t in need of some much weaker individual to kick, they pretty much let it alone. But, the thing you have to remember is, it wasn’t going to be Al Gore/Joe Lieberman’s approach–hell, I don’t think it would’ve been Ralph Nader’s approach, and I was on Ralph’s committee [laughs]–but the Gore/Lieberman people I think would’ve been worse, in effect, because they were clearly theocrats as much as Ashcroft and Bush are. That was made very explicit at the beginning of the campaign–they were totally intolerant of the entertainment industry and what people who don’t agree with the government have to say. They’ve been very clear about that. So, really, in the end, I think that the biggest difference is that people will fight Ashcroft and Bush, and they wouldn’t have fought Gore and Lieberman–they would’ve just let them do whatever they wanted, and you would’ve had to shut up because otherwise… you might get Bush! Well now you got Bush, deal with it.

But I also don’t think that–it’s like trying to stop file-sharing. You’re not gonna be able to stop the adult movie industry, you’re not gonna be able to stop Marilyn Manson–and if you do, something just like him, only more extreme, will pop up–you’re not gonna be able to get rid of Eminem, and ditto if you do. When people say you can’t legislate morality, what that means isn’t that you can’t pass laws against morality, it means that the laws don’t work. So they can do whatever they want to do, but that’s an area that the government can’t win. They can make things very difficult for certain people, and in my opinion they will, but I would be surprised if they were able to achieve very much. But, you know, fear will do. And certainly the spectacle of seeing all these performers, particularly in popular music, race off for the Democratic God Squad and do all that work for them, that was so putrid I’m lucky I survived this election just on a nausea level alone. And the good thing is, Tipper Gore in private life–I like that. Let her go raise more children badly if she must.

Everyone’s a rock critic: The lost Lester Bangs radio interview

In 1980, following the release of Blondie, Lester Bangs was interviewed for a radio program called “News Blimp.” A copy of the tape was sent to me anonymously by someone who “fished it out of the garbage.” The interviewer is unknown, and my searches online for “News Blimp” also pulled up nothing. I’ve been advised by someone who was close to Bangs that there’s really no issue with my running it on this site, especially given that the source is a mystery. (And yes, it’s the real deal.)
- Scott Woods, 2001

Interviewer:   First let me ask you if it was difficult writing a biography without the help of the people that you were writing about?

Bangs:   You know, in a way it was and in a way it wasn’t because there’s something that happens when you get the collaboration, or the cooperation, of the people you’re working with; all of a sudden you’re on their side, they take you into their confidence and you’re all buddy-buddy, and you’re almost like a recruit to the cause. Whereas if you have absolutely no cooperation at all, then you know that you at least can maintain your objectivity, you know?

Interviewer:   Lester, is this the first book you’ve written?

Bangs:   Yeah…Well, I wrote a novel in 1968 when I was in junior college called Drug Punk about drinking Romilar cough syrup, but this is the first book I’ve written that’s been published.

Interviewer:   Why did you decide to choose Blondie? Was it a vehicle you were approached with?

Bangs:   Yeah, it was a vehicle I was approached with and at the time I figured that it was a good way to talk about a lot of things I wanted to talk about, one of which was to tell the story of the connection between the glitter era and the punk era in New York, punk rock, whatever. I saw that as history, just getting it down, getting the facts straight, like, for instance, that the Ramones did come before the Sex Pistols, you know, in spite of what everyone’s been told. And then, second of all, because in a lot of ways they epitomize a lot of the sort of Andy Warhol blank-out–emotional, anti-emotional, arty kind of neuvo-pop art that has come about in the past few years–the whole People magazine thing that I’m always ranting and raving about–and also because I knew ‘em, and it was kind of like, writing about people is better in a lot of ways than…you know, just…oh, I’m starting to babble.

Interviewer:   This brings me to some questions about a rock critic’s place in chronicling not just music that seems a growing part of pop culture–let me start by asking how someone becomes a rock critic?

Bangs:   I think everybody’s a rock critic, to the extent that you when go into a record store and you decide to buy this one over that one, you’re being a rock critic. I don’t have any more credentials than anyone else. What I would say for myself is everybody knows my prejudices. I’m not God and just because I write something doesn’t make it wrong or right, and I think that being a rock critic a lot of times–the impetus for me and a lot of people I knew was just that we really love rock ‘n’ roll and wanted to talk about it, you know? And there was this outlet. And what kind of makes me mad is a lot of times today it looks like a lot of rock critics that are writing in these magazines it’s like a good way to get a start in a career in journalism or something, you know? It’s not–you don’t sense a real passion for the music.

Interviewer:   How did you first get published, and how do most critics begin to get published?

Bangs:   Well, I started in, like, 1968, ’69, you know, and there actually used to be a little box in Rolling Stone that said, “Do you write, take pictures, draw pictures? Send your stuff to us and maybe we’ll publish it.” So I actually believed this and I started sending them record reviews, and like, I sent them a pan of the second Grateful Dead album, a pan of the second Steve Miller album, and a review that said White Light/White Heat was the best album of 1968, and Lou Reed was going to be the Chuck Berry of the ’70s, and I raved about The Marble Index by Nico, and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t print any of this stuff, and then finally I sent this review of the MC5–I really hated their first album at the time–and they liked that, so they printed that, so that was how I got started.

Interviewer:   What about the contention many people have that rock critics are frustrated musicians? Do you find that true among people that you associate with in the rock writing circle?

Bangs:   Well, I’m not frustrated anymore because as everybody knows I’ve gone ahead and made my own music. But of COURSE they’re frustrated musicians, everybody’s a frustrated–I think all rock fans are frustrated musicians in the sense that anybody that ever stood in front of a mirror playing an invisible guitar while a record was spinning around playing behind them is a frustrated musician. You know?

Interviewer:   You mentioned about the first things you did, and they were pans, there’s also a contention that it’s easier for a critic to write a bad review than a good review because you can pull out all the stops and make clever quips at the expense of bands. Do you find this to be true, and do you find yourself sometimes tempted to head in that vein of a negative review just to sort of clear out your pores?

Bangs:   No. Like I always–even reviewing…things like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, I always hope their next album will be really great because you always want something good to listen to. Like I hate everything right now, there’s only about three or four groups I like currently that are actually existing. I want everything to be really great so I’ll have something to play! And, like, I don’t sit down and think, well, let’s see, who can I find to pick on today? Besides which, I think people with critics–critics are the people you love to hate anyway.

Interviewer:   Does that ever bother you? Do you find yourself in the center of controversy ever, that bands may take a negative view of you just because you’re a rock critic?

Bangs:   Umm, well, I just generally find that if I am ever put in a weirdo position it’s usually by some wretched worm, never anybody that I have any respect for that has any intelligence or anything going for them–it’s usually the worms and the miserables, you know, the wretches of the world, because there’s something about me that I’m sort of like–I don’t know, I’m not snotty with people. I never wrote anything that I thought…well, I wrote one thing, actually, that I thought was wrong, which was that description of Rachel, Lou Reed’s old companion, in Creem.

Interviewer:   She’s a sweet girl–or man, or whatever.

Bangs:   Yeah, right, I thought that was really vicious and un-called for, and I still regret that, but other than that, I don’t think I ever wrote anything about anybody that they didn’t have enormous hype, a bunch of ego, and a bunch of other crap behind them, and you know, in general I don’t treat people snotty, I don’t go out of my way to pick on groups that are just starting out or trying to get a foothold or whatever. And as far as people attacking me personally, there’s been a lot of reviews that said I couldn’t sing or that I had no business in music or stuff like that, and I welcome those. See, what I think is that anybody that gets up on stage or makes a record is saying, “I’m something special!” And therefore they should be able to take anything that comes through the door, you know. So I’m not gonna whine about any negative reviews or anything like that of my own musical endeavors, ’cause I think it’s just like–it’s an open marketplace of ideas. And there’s even been one review of the Blondie book that–the NME didn’t like it, which I expected coming because all those limeys hate us all ’cause they think we’re decadent Americans anyway. But you know, that guy has a right to say that, and it’s my right to hate a record or this or that, and even to take cheap shots, you know. Like someone in the East Village Eye reviewed my single, and it was a really moronic review–all it said was, “Well, the music stinks, the singing stinks, the lyrics stink,” and that was about the extent of the review, it didn’t go into any really deep analysis or anything, and, all right, fine! That guy has a right to do that, too.

Interviewer:   In terms of your own pans that you have produced, have you ever seen anybody afterward who has perhaps said to you, well, those points you pointed out were very valid, and I’m glad you brought them to my attention? Or maybe if not so, other comments that let you know that perhaps some of your negative points of view are taken to heart?

Bangs:   Yeah, and like, what I can specifically remember is one case–I can’t name who it was for a reason that’ll shortly become obvious – is I reviewed an album last year by an artist who is one of the most beloved around the New York scene and all that, you know, and I really tore it to shreds, and a person who’s a friend of that artist and a real well-known writer called me up the night the review appeared and said, “Listen, I know you’re gonna get a lot of flak for this, but it’s true and everything, and all his friends have known it for a long time and nobody had the heart to say it, so in the long run you’re doing him a favor.”

Interviewer:   You can tell me who it was.

Bangs:   Well, all right, yeah, it was David Johansen, I just don’t want to say who the other person was…

Interviewer:   Oh, I thought maybe it was Tom Verlaine or something.

Bangs:   I wouldn’t do Tom Verlaine any favors.

Interviewer:   You started in 1968, and certainly rock journalism and criticism has come a ways from then. Do you think it is in danger of becoming considered “valid” journalism, or do you think it is getting too tainted by respectability, sort of the same type of respectability that people like the Sex Pistols protested about of rock musicians itself? Do you think a counter sort of thing could be happening with rock journalism becoming too staid and accepted?

Bangs:   I think it barely exists anymore, but then, neither does the music. I mean, everyone’s acting like there’s this big renaissance going on, and it’s all the emperor’s new clothes. I mean, there’s a few groups that are doing really exciting things, and then there’s like all these phony power-pop groups on one side and all these phony synthesizer groups on the other, and I think it’s a big hype. I think it’s a lot of garbage, and I think that the critics are writing up and saying that all these people like the Pretenders and Lene Lovich and all this stuff is really about something or means anything or stands for anything or isworth anything, only because it gives them something to write about, ’cause otherwise they’d be stuck. It’s not like in 1977 when you had, you know, the Clash, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and the Sex Pistols and all these groups–and the Ramones–and they all stood for something, they were about things. Talking Heads…they all had a real point of view about the world and they really, you know, really meant something, and these groups now, they’re all just interchangeable, they’re just singing piddly little love songs that don’t even matter. You know, I mean, so what if a girl tells a guy to blow off–big deal. Lesley Gore did it years and years ago–so what?!

Interviewer:   Lester, artistic points aside, what about the economic viability of the rock criticism profession? IS there economic viability in it?

Bangs:   Very little, you know. I mean, I wouldn’t advise anybody to go into it if they wanted to get rich, but I wouldn’t advise anybody to be a writer or a musician if they wanted to get rich. Hell, I’ve known a lot of musicians in bands that had top ten albums and didn’t have a dime in their pockets. But as far as record reviews and that, it doesn’t pay that well. It’s like–I don’t know, if you worm your way into the heart of Rolling Stone and you can get all this money for writing that so and so–that’s one thing I tried to get away from in the Blondie book. It’s like, you read this article that says, “Her heart-stoppingly gorgeous face,” you know. I mean, if you want to write pap like that, you could also go work for the PR agency of a record company or something, you know?

Interviewer:   What are your feelings about the influence that critics wield? First of all the medium itself is based on music and listening, and rock critics introduce the writing medium, which, given the average rock fan’s mentality perhaps isn’t too good a start to begin with–what are your feelings about the impact that rock critics have on music? Do you ever wonder whether you’re beating your head into the typewriter?

Bangs:   Nah! I mean, for one thing, look what you just said: “the average rock fan’s mentality.” What do you think, they’re all morons or something?

Interviewer:   Many.

Bangs:   I mean, okay, I edited Creem magazine for five years, and we had, like hundreds of thousands of readers who really dug it that we were telling Dylan and the Stones and all these people to go jump in the lake. They weren’t idiots that just swallowed any hype that was shoveled to them. I really–I hate that, that everybody thinks that, that fans are just morons that’ll just swallow any garbage. ‘Cause I think the kids are really sharp. I talked to this 13 year old, he called me up the other day, he wants to write a book about Blondie that–he was right on top of it, you know?

Interviewer:   So, you think critics really can serve useful purposes of maybe being a sort of lightning rod to…express new opinions, to at least let other people know that there are others who are thinking along similar lines.

Bangs:   Yeah, that’s it, exactly! Because it’s like, okay, let’s say a new Bob Dylan album comes out, right? And it’s all this hype–I’ll give you an example, Hard Rain. When that thing came out, I was sent the album in the mail, I reviewed it, I panned it, I panned the TV show based around it, you know, the whole thing, then I sold the record, and then they started showing these commercials for it on TV and they showed it every station break on the late show, and again and again you see him [affects nasal Dylan whine--words unintelligible]…by the time I’d seen this commercial about 900,000 times, I was ready to go out and buy the damn album over again myself! And–you know what I mean? When you get that much hype battered at you, and you’re told this is hip or that’s cool or something…I mean, I’m not setting myself up as any great God or arbiter or judge or anything, except for me, you know? And like I said at the beginning, everybody knows what my prejudices are. Some of the things I like are very unpopular, some of the other things I like are more popular but, if people are reading me or something, and–let’s say if I, the listener, the record buyer out there, suspects that the new Dylan album is a hype, and is not the great masterpiece it’s cracked up to be by the record company, and all the bought-off people at all the places like Circus and Rolling Stone and all of that, then, you know, then maybe I won’t buy it! You know what I mean?

Interviewer:   About these bought-off few, do you feel that a lot of rock criticism is more a pocket-book motivation…

Bangs:   No, you don’t understand what I mean. I don’t mean that they’re given direct payola, what I mean is that–it’s more insidious than that. In this country today–like, in Britain, they have a tradition of adversary journalism. It’s expected that if you put out a record the critics are gonna lambaste it, or that the writers or the press are gonna kill you. Here, in terms of rock and popular music and the entertainment industry, in this country, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it is routinely expected that if any artist gives an interview to any writer that they’re automatically gonna get a favorable story, and I think that’s obscene! And they also ask for things, as Blondie did with this book, like, you know, right of approval of a story or a book on them. And I told Chris Stein that I would never give that to anybody because that amounts to an authorized biography which is nothing but a puff job in the first place. And I think nobody should ever–no artist should ever ask for right of approval from any writer for any story.

And I’ve heard all kinds of stories, like, you know, Chet Flippo got thrown off the Rolling Stones tour when he was covering it because Paul Nelson had the temerity to pan Some Girls in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine when Chet Flippo was covering the tour for the same magazine, you know? The same thing happened in England with Stiff Records when I was over there. Some writer panned the Stiff “Greatest Hits” tour, and then asked for Damned tickets, and they said, “Can you believe the nerve of this guy?” And I said, “Well, give him the tickets!” Of course he should have the tickets, so what if he hates every other act on your label except the Damned. If he likes the Damned–or even if he doesn’t!–it’s his right as a critic, you know, to do that. And it really, really angers me that everyone goes along with it. That’s what really kills me. You know, it’s like, “Well, what can you do?” And all the magazines go along with it, and they just print all this pap–they might as well just be writing press releases.

Interviewer:   What feedback have you got, if any, from members of Blondie about the biography?

Bangs:   Well, after making it incredibly hard for me to do it, they told me they liked it, and since the book has come out I’ve been over to Chris and Debbie’s apartment, you know, and interviewed Chris for my next book, and I guess relations are friendly, I don’t know.

Interviewer:   What about the future of rock criticism? Do you see yourself maybe moving into other modes; do you see that maybe you’ll get involved in other kinds of journalism as well, that maybe are pop culture-oriented but not as directly about music?

Bangs:   Yeah, I wanna write a book about sex. And in fact, I’m already working on it, it’s about, like, relationships, and men and women and sex, and…I have other interests too. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, I’d like to write a book about that, umm, there’s a whole lot of things I’d like to do, you know?

Interviewer:   What do you find is the toughest part of being a rock critic?

Bangs:   [Pause] Well, you finally asked me a question I can’t think of an immediate answer to. The toughest part of being a rock critic? I don’t know! I mean, let’s face it, I’ve got it easy, I mean, nobody knows it better than I do. All right, I’ll tell you: What bothers me the most is that I never know if anybody is being straight with me. Say, like, about my record; people say, “Oh, I love your record!” I don’t know if they actually mean that because, you know, everyone wants you, if you’re a rock critic, to say that their band is good or something like that. Except now, what you have on the alternative, is that everybody’s picked up the cue from the English, they’re supposed to be snotty, so they cop this pose of being, “Oh, who needs you? Blah blah blah.” And, like, basically the toughest part is running into people who react in ways that they think they’re supposed to–they’re trying to impress you with how much they like you or what great people they are, or they’re trying to impress you with how much they don’t care, but either way it’s phony. That basically I’d say is, for me anyway, the thing that bugs me the most.

Interviewer:   How has the book been selling?

Bangs:   Oh, real good, it’s doing great!

Interviewer:   Do you have any opportunities–or do you expect to–to be on Merv or Dinah discussing the entire rock scene and what-not?

Bangs:   Well, I told them I wanted to be on Joe Franklin, and nothing’s happened yet, but basically it’s been radio.

Interviewer:   Do you find yourself at all changing as you become perhaps more of a media personality and less of just a rock critic?

Bangs:   I don’t wanna be a media personality. That may seem like a contradiction in terms since I’m doing this interview with you right now, but I just wanna be a good writer, and to the extent that I can keep a low profile and do that, I’ll be happy. Like, I don’t want my picture in People magazine, or even New York Rocker as some guy that’s “on the scene” doing all this garbage. I don’t care about any of that stuff, I just go ahead and do what I do, you know? And I think this whole thing of being a celebrity and a media personality, it’s like, in so many cases it so much tends to eclipse whatever the person might want to do artistically or creatively–it just about disappears, and I think that’s the big trap. Everybody’s a media personality now, you know what I mean?

Interviewer:   Like Andy said, everyone’s famous for 15 minutes.

Bangs:   Yeah, well I just think it’s a shame old Valerie missed.

Interviewer:   One last question, Lester. People that wanted to get into rock writing, rock criticism–youngsters out there, maybe even people ready to give up their present career for another one–what advice would you have for them? If it wasn’t to not get into rock criticism, how would you advise them to go about it?

Bangs:   I actually don’t know, because I’m so utterly alienated myself and utterly disgusted to be quite frank that I wonder if I really wanna do anything in the next few years. See, the thing is, everything is turning into People magazine, like all the radio, all the press, all everything is turning into this…even the book industry. I was talking to my agent yesterday, and I said to him, “Do you think it’s gonna reach the point where the only thing you can sell is a celebrity biography that’s just a puff job?” And he said, “I don’t know.” You know? I sit around and wonder if maybe the best thing I could do for myself as a writer would be just to completely get away from all this stuff. [Tape side ends, some of Bangs's answer gets lost.]…I’m not gonna saw away at my violin here and try and break everybody’s heart, because like I said, I know I’ve got it easy. The fact is, I don’t have to get up in the morning and go work from 9 to 5 in a factory or something. And I do have access, and I do have a lot of things that, you know, nobody should feel sorry for me. But at the same time, everybody I know is just totally alienated and fed up and disgusted with just about everything, and I do know that most of the people in the media that are dispensing this stuff are as alienated from it as the audience is. The audience is just taking it because there’s nothing else being offered. And personally, I’m just wondering when people are gonna just say No! I refuse! I don’t want any anymore.

Interviewer:   Lester, I don’t have any more questions. Is there anything I haven’t asked you about, about your book or about your career or your writing in general that you want to bring up?

Bangs:   Nah, I’d probably rant and rave on my high horse way past any of those points anyway. [laughs]

Richard Riegel: From Jester to Lester

By Steven Ward (March 2001)

There was a time when Richard Riegel worried about his idolization of a friend. Worshipping a friend, co-worker and colleague doesn’t really sound too healthy, but in Richard’s case, I think we can forgive him.

The object of Richard’s devotion was the late rock critic Lester Bangs. Although fans of rock journalism have much to praise in Lester’s writing, we can also thank him for nurturing the writing of Richard Riegel. If it wasn’t for Bangs’s inspiration, Richard probably never would have submitted his first review to Creem magazine–home to Riegel’s musings throughout the ’70s and ’80s.

Funny, irreverent, and dead-on perfect with his observations on pop culture, music, and the people who love rock and roll, Riegel’s writing continues to stand out from the pack. Consider his opening to this recent review from the Village Voice on the My So Called Band CD, The Punk Girl Next Door:

“Once upon a time, the sight of a punk girl moving in next door might have sparked a neighborhood watch for the barricades of cultural revolution. By today’s grim revolt-into-product times, the lights are on next door, but the punk girl’s not home; she’s started up a dotcom offering real-time textual analysis of Jerry Springer’s ‘Final Thought’ homilies for a fee. So much for intellectual-property values on your street.”

Riegel, a married family man who worked for years in the welfare trade in Cincinnati, writes in a voice full of wit and outrageousness; his use of the language can be as rock and roll as both Bangs and Richard Meltzer at their best.

From his musical obsessions (such as Arthur Lee’s Love) to his “psychic struggles” with writer Greil Marcus, Riegel discusses his craft, his years at Creem, his current writing gigs (which include the Voice and his own Loose Palace fanzine), and of course, the man who inspired him in the best way–Lester Bangs.

Here’s the interview rockcritics.com published 12 years ago with Paul Williams. It was Pat Thomas, I’m pretty sure, who suggested the title, and I saw no reason to dispute it. 

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The Godfather of Rock Criticism: Paul Williams

By Pat Thomas, with Christoph Gurk (August 2001)

Growing up in the late 1970s, there was very little available to read by legendary rock scribe Paul Williams. His books were out of print, old issues of Crawdaddy! were long gone, and Paul himself was M.I.A. for the most part. It wasn’t until Paul published his first major tome on Bob Dylan [Bob Dylan: Performing Artist] that I was able to get into the meat of what made Paul great. Here was a book about Dylan that didn’t worry about what color shirt he was wearing the day he recorded this song or that one. The book went past that bullshit and got into the essence of the music. How does it sound and more importantly how does it feel? Paul was able to explain feelings about Bob’s music that I didn’t know I had. And most importantly, although Paul’s writing was very personal, he left his ego at the door. Later when I met Paul, there was no ego, no “I am a rock legend” or “I know everything” attitude, that I have experienced time and time again from music journalists with far less to brag about than Paul Williams.

Paul, for many reasons, is not gonna be on MTV interviewing Pearl Jam, he’s not gonna blow hot wind in front of a video camera doing a documentary on the history of rock n roll–he’s just not that kind of guy. I strongly suggest you check out his revamped and reborn Crawdaddy!. No ads, no corporate sponsorship, just solid heartfelt writing. Paul’s writing has moved me to check out bands I never would have dreamed of checking out, because he brings the human element into it, gets inside of himself, seemingly getting inside of me. Now, I know this sounds all flowery and new agey, but Paul came out of the 1960s and he never lost his naiveté about listening to music; it still sounds fresh to his ears. He’s not some jaded hack on the staff of (fill-in-the-blank magazine) being forced to listen to crap he doesn’t wanna listen to, he only reviews what he really likes and what truly moves him. I think that’s rare these days.

One of Paul’s faves is Neil Young, who I personally have given up on (though I applaud his commitment to keep waving the flag). Nevertheless, it’s a Neil Young song title that sums up Paul Williams for me, and that’s “Mr. Soul.” What follows is a previously unpublished interview I did with Paul in a café in Germany a couple of years back. (Also joining us was Christoph Gurk, who at that time was editor of Germany’s most respected, if overly scholastic, music magazine, SPEX).

So what does Paul have to brag about, but doesn’t? The man started the first real rock music magazine, Crawdaddy!, while still a teenager–a year-and-a-half before Jann Wenner startedRolling Stone. Via Crawdaddy!, he gave a lot of other “legends” their first writing outlet: Sandy Pearlman, Peter Guralnick, Jon Landau, and Richard Meltzer, to name just a few. He also hung with Tim Leary and sang with him on John and Yoko’s “Give Peace A Chance” single, recorded in a Montreal hotel room in 1969. If you ever get a chance to see the video from that day, Paul’s clearly in it…I could go on all day. He’s the man. Long may he run.

Something New: The Birth of Crawdaddy!

Pat Thomas:   Why don’t we just start at the beginning: How you first got into writing. Were you doing any fiction or non-fiction writing before you actually started writing about rock ‘n’ roll?

Paul Williams:   Well, not really, I was writing high school term papers or something like that, but I usually say that I got started as a professional writer by publishing myself, because when I started Crawdaddy! I didn’t have anyone else writing for me so I had to write all this stuff to fill up the pages. And it took a while, but after all I got a sense of what I wanted to do, you know? And I started sounding more like something that was really me. My first publications outside ofCrawdaddy! were either, like, Hit Parader reprinting something from Crawdaddy!, and then other magazines calling me up because Crawdaddy! was starting to get attention.

Christopher Gurk:   That was ’66, right?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, the first issue came out at the end of January in 1966.

Pat Thomas:   And how old were you then, Paul?

Paul Williams:   17.

Pat Thomas:   How did you get the idea? This was really the first rock magazine or fanzine…

Paul Williams:   In the States, yeah.

Pat Thomas:   So how did you dream this up?

Paul Williams:   Well, there were two big influences on me. One was that I’d been a science fiction fan and was used to putting out magazines. When I was 14, I put out my first science fiction fanzine, and there was a whole community of people doing that, and I put that out for a couple years. You know, mimeograph stencils and writing your own magazine seemed normal to me coming out of that world. The other influence was, when I started Crawdaddy! I was at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, I’d grown up in Cambridge and the Boston suburbs, and there was a very active folk scene, and of course there were folk music magazines…

Pat Thomas:   Like Sing Out and Broadside…

Paul Williams:   In Boston there was one called Boston Broadside, which was really great and it came out every week, and that was really a model for me, too. When I turned from being a folk music fan, ’cause I’d been a real Club 47, you know, blues/folk fan, and the Rolling Stones converted me to rock ‘n’ roll–’cause it was kind of like a passageway from blues to rock. It’s interesting, because after resisting the Beatles and kind of liking some of their songs, or even a couple Beach Boys songs, I was still not taking any of it seriously because I was a folk snob. Then I got really excited about Rolling Stones Now! and the single “The Last Time,” and the Kinks’s “You Really Got Me” and the Beatles’s “Ticket to Ride.”

Christoph Gurk:   All in ’64, ’65.

Paul Williams:   Yeah, basically for me it was February, March 1965. I guess it was just before Bringing It All Back Home came out. As I was becoming a rock ‘n’ roll fan, “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds came on the radio, and that was really what gave Dylan–I mean, even though he’d already recorded “Subterranean Homesick Blues”–it gave him permission to go in the direction he wanted to go.

Christoph Gurk:   You didn’t see that festival where Dylan…

Paul Williams:   Newport? No, I didn’t, no. I was at Newport in ’66, but Dylan wasn’t there. I got turned on to Dylan in 1963 because a friend of mine went to Newport and came back and was telling me all about Bob Dylan and I had to listen to his record, which was Freewheelin’. And I saw him for the first time in ’63, but that was still an acoustic show, a solo show.

Pat Thomas:   It seems like it was easy for you to–you mentioned once in one of your books I think about hanging out with the Beach Boys in their studio, another time you mentioned something to me about being involved with David Crosby writing some songs…it seems like it was easier for you to kind of “mingle with the stars” as it were than it would be if someone wanted to do that now. Do you think that was maybe because you were kind of the first guy trying to get their attention?

Paul Williams:   Um, yeah, sure, there weren’t very many rock journalists, so it was easier to get access for the few people who were. It’s kind of different in each case. I was a big fan of the Rolling Stones but I never met them; I don’t remember trying to, but I would’ve loved to, you know what I mean. [As for] the American bands, I would get turned on to them early; I saw the Doors, the Buffalo Springfield, and Jefferson Airplane and so forth before they were nationally known. So, yeah, you always had access to bands at that level.

Christoph Gurk:   [The Doors] were fairly underground, they were the house band at the Whiskey or something.

Paul Williams:   Yeah, that’s right. Really, anybody could meet them if they wanted to.

Pat Thomas:   So you actually flew out to California and said, “Here I am…”

Paul Williams:   Yeah, you know, I can’t remember, for example, how I met the Springfield–it was the week they were recording “For What It’s Worth,” and I was already a fan because I’d heard “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” on the radio, it was a single that came out before the album. So I wanted to meet them and I think there was a girl in the Youngbloods’ office in New York who was already a Springfield fan, so she told me how to get in touch with them or something. But it was that kind of thing. In the case of the Beach Boys, I remember that Michael Vosse, who was working for them, drove me up to Brian’s house, but exactly how it was all set up…you couldn’t get help from record companies, some of them were organized to do that and some of them weren’t, but it was way before, you know, the whole publicist kind of world grew.

Christoph Gurk:   I guess the whole circuit of music writers, magazines, and publicists wasn’t such a big mechanism as it is nowadays.

Paul Williams:   That’s right, it was tiny compared to how it is now.

Christoph Gurk:   More or less people knew each other maybe better than they do today. I don’t know any publicists in Germany, and I don’t want to…

Paul Williams:   No, you don’t want them calling you up, right. Same for me, I’d rather buy my records than have to get calls from publicists.

Christoph Gurk:   Would you say it was more casual than what it is today?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, unless you were dealing with–I mean, that’s why I didn’t meet the Rolling Stones, because then already there was a star thing going on where you had to fight your way in, and it just didn’t appeal to me to do that. When I met the Beatles it wasn’t because of Crawdaddy!–I mean, I didn’t meet the Beatles, I met John Lennon–but that was because I was with Tim Leary and we went to the Bed-in for Peace, it didn’t have to do with being a rock journalist as such.

Pat Thomas:   How was Crawdaddy! initially published and distributed?

Paul Williams:   Well, it started out completely as a fanzine, and the first issue I mailed out to record companies and radio stations, and waited for something to happen. Same thing with the second issue. And I began selling it in newsstands in Boston and around Philadelphia and New York, and each issue kind of grew a little. We really didn’t know anything was happening, it might’ve died between the third issue–there was a big gap, I think the third issue came out in March, I was still at Swarthmore. And then I had that problem which caused me to drop out of college, that you know about, Richard Farina’s death. I went back to Boston, didn’t know what I was going to do, and finally put together another issue of Crawdaddy! that was mimeographed and sold it at the Newport Folk Festival in July. And that, actually, was kind of a breakthrough. We put Bob Dylan on the cover, which was a good idea [laughs]; we sold a lot of copies at Newport. Simon & Garfunkel’s office actually gave me $100 to write a little bio or something, but it was a way of giving me some money so I could print the next issue. But the response to that issue was very encouraging. And the other thing was I met Jac Holzman of Elektra at Newport, and he bought the first national ad for the next issue of the magazine, so it’s like, all right, now we can do the next issue!

Pat Thomas:   Do you remember what record it was for?

Paul Williams:   I think it was probably What’s Shakin’, a compilation–the famous compilation because it had the Butterfield Blues Band’s “Born In Chicago” on it–it was a hit single. [Paul later amended this to state that it was actually Butterfield's East-West, which came out in '66.--ed.]

Christoph Gurk:   That was a hit single?

Paul Williams:   Well, it was LIKE a hit single. It wasn’t a hit single in the normal sense because it wasn’t a 45, but Jac had the idea of putting out this sampler of things from Elektra and the first song on it was “Born in Chicago.” Records in those days cost about $3.50, but this album only cost $1, and people were buying it like crazy because of this one song, “Born In Chicago.”

Christoph Gurk:   And Rolling Stone magazine started when?

Paul Williams:   The fall of ’67, about a year-and-a-half after Crawdaddy!

Christoph Gurk:   Was there any communication between the people from Crawdaddy! and Rolling Stone? Did you feel competitive–or did they feel competitive toward what you were doing?

Paul Williams:   They probably felt more competitive than what we did, just because Jann has got more of a business sense–that’s just more of his direction. I knew Jann a little bit before he started Rolling Stone; he was writing a music column for a paper called the Sunday Ramparts that Ramparts magazine was putting out for a little while on the west coast. And we talked, and he was interested in Crawdaddy!, and Ralph Gleason, who helped Jann start Rolling Stone, was an early supporter and fan of Crawdaddy!. And one of the first sort of ‘star’ writers that Jann got was Jon Landau, who’d been writing in every issue of Crawdaddy!Because Jann liked what he’d been writing in Crawdaddy!, he got him to write for Rolling Stone, which wasn’t too hard since we weren’t paying him.

Christoph Gurk:   So Landau was writing for Crawdaddy!?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, the first place he was published was in Crawdaddy!. He was working in a record store in Harvard Square, and I would come in, and we would talk about music, and he would say, “You know, you should let me write this stuff,” and I said, “Sure!” And he started writing reviews for Crawdaddy! in the summer of ’66.

Pat Thomas:   Who else was writing for Crawdaddy! that people would know now?

Paul Williams:   Well, the mainstay writers, the ones that would write every issue, were Jon Landau, Richard Meltzer…

Christoph Gurk:   Richard Meltzer…

Paul Williams:   Very controversial right from the beginning. People hated him–you loved him or hated him. He was writing brilliant stuff at the time. Sandy Pearlman, he went on to become known for his work [as a producer] with Blue Oyster Cult, formerly the Soft White Underbelly. And he did a Clash album, I guess [Give 'Em Enough Rope], so he was also a regular. Those three guys and myself. And then there were interesting people who contributed now and then: the science fiction writer, Samuel R. Delaney, did some pieces for us; David Henderson, who wrote that first book about Jimi Hendrix ['Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky], a black poet, he wrote for us occasionally; Peter Guralnick, probably his first music writing that was published, some pieces on blues singers, were inCrawdaddy!; Tony Glover wrote for us a few times. He’d actually been writing for Little Sandy Review, Paul Nelson’s ‘zine. Paul Nelson wrote a little bit forCrawdaddy!, too. Little Sandy Review was a kind of forerunner of Crawdaddy! in a sense; it was strictly a folk magazine, but it had that fanzine kind of feeling to it.

Christoph Gurk:   So more or less the people who made it later in Rolling Stone and who achieved some fame, most of them you still remember as Rolling Stonewriters…

Paul Williams:   Yeah, some of them. I don’t know if Meltzer was ever a Rolling Stone writer, I don’t think so. He’d wrote a lot for all the New York press and so forth, but…yeah, Lester Bangs hadn’t shown up on the scene yet, he was writing for Creem, that was really where he got his exposure. Creem came along afterCrawdaddy! was already out. I did Crawdaddy! for about three years.

Crawdaddy! Lets It Bleed

Pat Thomas:   That was gonna be my next question: how or why you dropped out after this initial push?

Paul Williams:   Well, there’s a couple of reasons. I left at the end of ’68. Basically, I couldn’t stand being in New York anymore, I couldn’t stand running a business anymore. I mean, I started it myself and I always felt like I had to be in control of it–it wasn’t gonna come out right, I couldn’t let somebody else own it, or blah blah blah, and as a result, as it got bigger I just had all this responsibility and dealing with all these people and with what they expected, and that was how I grew from 17 years old to 20 years old, and, you know, it was exciting, but the stress of running a “business”–we never made any money, but each issue we’d be doing better, so we’d just be able to grow. Whatever money you theoretically made went into the next issue being bigger. And so it grew from 500 copies to 25,000 copies.

Christoph Gurk:   25,000?

Paul Williams:   Around the time I left I think we were up to something like that, yeah. So it really grew–it was a great success story in a way. There was no money in it, but because it was the first thing on the scene, and because the rock ‘n’ roll scene was getting so much attention then, Crawdaddy! got a lot of attention. But, when I left, I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to stay in New York. And, it had been a kind of crusade. I always identified with the underground press papers that were coming out around the same time, and I was a hippy, I was taking LSD and marching in peace demonstrations and everything that went along with that, and for me, I started the magazine because I thought that since people were so intense about this music that they were listening to, it was a great common denominator, where we can talk about everything we’re interested in, using the fact that we’re listening to the same records. So, if I talk about what I’m hearing in this new Stones record, it may not be the same as what you’re hearing, but we have something in common that we’ll make a connection. But I was always publishing basically a personal essay. Landau focused more tightly on the music than the other writers, but everybody was writing these long personal essays based around this new record that they were excited about. Certainly in not as commercial a form as what Rolling Stone did, and Rolling Stone was what people wanted. So I was feeling that pressure already–I knew what the readers of the magazine wanted, but it wasn’t necessarily what I was interested in, you know, more news, more personality features, more photographs, whatever.

But the other thing was that Crawdaddy! was a crusade. When I started it people said, how could you possibly write about rock ‘n’ roll? You know, there’s nothing to write about–ridiculous! And so we were into having people take the music seriously. Not that we were just serious–that was kind of an image we had–there was a tremendous amount of humor, for example in Meltzer and Pearlman, that some people couldn’t see. But the whole idea was that, yeah, this is our music and it’s just as good as any other art form from any other era. We’ll just talk about it like we think the stuff is great, and it was thrilling to see the Doors album and the second Jefferson Airplane album going up the charts because suddenly our music was getting popular. And it was an exciting time. By the time I left Crawdaddy! in late ’68, that battle had been won. Now the New York Times was reviewing rock music, you know? Plenty of people were writing about it and taking it seriously, and it was growing into a big business, and there wasn’t any sense anymore of trying to prove something or rallying a community or something like that. And that was what had been fun for me. It was like, all right, we did that, it’s over.

Christoph Gurk:   As soon as rock ‘n’ roll became recognized as an art form, with records being reviewed in the New York Times, this was the same time when the commercial breakthrough happened. You could promote and turn this into a bigger market by declaring this as an art form…

Paul Williams:   Well, the same thing is going on right now with the independent world and the success of indie rock following Nirvana and so forth, and Matador, which is really a great company, but [which] in fact, I think we can say now, has been swallowed by Atlantic. There’s been a lot of arguing about what’s true, and they’ll argue…but it’s a real issue for a lot of people. There was this independent scene that was really strong in a certain way, and you can’t blame a band for wanting to have a larger audience to make a living, but at the same time there’s a tremendous sense of something being lost. And there really is no answer to it. I mean, the Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll attitude is just as ridiculous as the major label attitude, really, so as an individual musician, or as an individual music fan, or whatever, you have to find your way through it.

I mean, one more footnote on the subject is that Kurt Cobain was somebody you could sympathize with, but he took it all much too seriously. Again, this religionof the indie scene. I like Nirvana’s music better than Pearl Jam’s, but I like Pearl Jam’s values a lot better, in terms of they’re standing up to Ticketron and refusing to do videos; Nirvana gave off much more confused messages [laughs] as far as their actual business decisions and that kind of thing. But it was the self-consciousness of, you know, “we are the indie movement.” That doesn’t work.

But anyway, going back to what happened to Crawdaddy!, the best that I can say is that, you get a little period of freedom before the rest of the world discovers what’s happening, and you just have fun during that time and run with it. The same thing happened to the San Francisco ballroom scene, the Fillmore and the Avalon. It’s forgotten at this point, but a lot of people were tremendously disappointed when the Fillmore started getting a lot of publicity and all these people were coming in from the suburbs and the sense of community fell apart. And it just seems like it’s a natural sort of process that something really exciting starts happening, and, at least in this business, when it gets to a certain point then it attracts the attention of the world, and that doesn’t mean that it’s spoiled. It’s a ridiculous attitude to think that, say, R.E.M. only matters during their indie period. Obviously, a great band can just go on and continue to make great music, and it would’ve been ridiculous for R.E.M. to stay at an indie level. But, in a lot of cases, you just have to let it go when the world discovers you.

Pat Thomas:   I guess you effectively “sold” Crawdaddy! to someone else?

Paul Williams:   Well, in theory. I knew that if I didn’t stay in New York that I wouldn’t get paid. If I wanted to get paid I’d have to stay in New York another year, and money wasn’t even an issue to me. I needed to go on with my life. I was very young and it was time to go. So, I sold it, but I never got paid. And I brought in my friend Chester Anderson to take over as editor, and he did another four or five issues after I left, and then the people who were bank-rolling it gave up or ran out of money. What was strange was that it didn’t die; it died and came back. I wasn’t around so I don’t know exactly how it happened. But Peter Stafford then became the editor and it came back as a newspaper format like Rolling Stone, and it was that way through 1970, I think, and it kept going. After Stafford it was edited by Raenne Rubenstein and then Peter Knobler. And Peter Knobler’s father actually bought it–again, not from me, nobody owned it. At some point they paid me a little money for the trademark, which I still theoretically owned. This is 1973 by this point.

The magazine kept going, it kept coming out every month, until 1979. They wanted to broaden the base or something. They changed the name to Feature, and they expanded and it didn’t work, and it went out of business a couple issues later. So I always figured that the name was magic, somehow [laughs]–it kept it afloat, and once they lost the name, that was it.

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

Pat Thomas:   So at this point you kind of jumped in the woods, right? You moved to Mendocino?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, I moved from New York City to a cabin in the woods in Mendocino at the end of 1968.

Pat Thomas:   And at this point you totally removed yourself from the rock ‘n’ roll world?

Paul Williams:   Umm, not immediately. During 1969 I was freelancing. I wrote pieces for Crawdaddy!, though I don’t know if I did any music pieces for them. And I was travelling a fair amount, too. I was at the first Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions, and that’s where I was songwriting with Crosby, although nothing actually got used. And I traveled with Timothy Leary for a while and I ended up at John and Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace in Montreal. Later that summer I went to Woodstock, ostensibly as a reporter for Playboy, though ultimately they didn’t use it, it was too radical. And I wrote a couple, just maybe two, reviews for Rolling Stone in that period. Actually, the reason I met Tim Leary is that Jann asked me to interview him for Rolling Stone, but again, the interview didn’t get used, probably because somewhere in the conversation Tim and I talked about Jann Wenner. It wasn’t unflattering, we were just kind of–Tim was teasing him, you know, “Be a little more revolutionary.” And Jann could never decide whether to cut it or keep it in, so ultimately the piece just didn’t run at all.

But what happened to me is that my writing was so individualistic, or maybe I was just being ornery, that more than half the time stuff wouldn’t get published. So I got tired of doing that. I left Mendocino in the spring of 1970 and moved to a wilderness–the idea was to completely get away from civilization, to go off the end of the road, and that was to an island in Canada, and at that point I really lost track of the rock scene. In fact, I think the last writing I did that had to do with music was, indirectly, a strange book called Time Between, which was almost a journal of intense communal living, travelling, LSD taking, and so forth. I was writing it as it was happening, and people who were in the story were reading it as it was happening. But it started out partly being fuelled by Let It Bleed and Volunteers, the late 1969 albums that were driving the book musically.

Christoph Gurk:   So it was kind of a political testament or something?

Paul Williams:   In a way. Political, social, it was an explosion of energy, and it was written on the typewriter in such a way that the only way to publish it was to actually photograph each page, because the way the words were laid out on each page was part of the book. So it only ever came out in a limited edition. [Time Between was reprinted in paperback in 1999 and is now available from Amazon and from PaulWilliams.com.] But it was an interesting document of the times. But then I stopped writing about rock ‘n’ roll. I was in Canada for a year, I went to Japan, met my first wife there, came back to New York City and tried to start another magazine–the old fantasy of a general interest magazine for our generation, or something. It didn’t work–it’s a very hard thing to do. It was called Rallying Point, we never really got a full first issue out, we just kept getting things together, trying to raise money, and we got a sample issue out that we sold in a couple cities.

Anyway, after that I stayed in New York, and at one point I started writing record reviews for the Soho Weekly News, which was fun, but I was never completely satisfied with the writing I was doing in that period.

Pat Thomas:   That was the mid-70s?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, it was ’74 or ’75. It was a real exciting scene in New York, but unfortunately I had small babies and lived way uptown, and hanging out at the clubs wasn’t really a possibility for me if I wanted to stay married. So I didn’t see too much of…I saw Springsteen a lot in the early days and that was great. ’73, ’74–I was never crazy about the records but it really was one of the greatest live rock ‘n’ roll bands that I ever saw at that period. But Television, for example, who I absolutely love, and Patti Smith, I just saw them maybe once each before leaving town.

Pat Thomas:   And there was a book called Outlaw Blues?

Paul Williams:   Outlaw Blues was my first book, and it was basically essays from Crawdaddy!, some of them written with the book in mind. I worked on it for years. I got a contract for a book at the end of ’66 when I was just 18, because Crawdaddy! was getting all this attention: the Crawdaddy! Book of Rock. But I really couldn’t do whatever the publisher had in mind, they wanted something exploitative. I don’t mean that I refused to do it because of principles, it just wasn’t in me, I didn’t know how to do what they wanted, and eventually it changed publishers, went to E.P. Dutton, got a good editor, and I realized that the best way to do the book was to take pieces I’d already done for Crawdaddy! and write some new ones. Outlaw Blues came out after I left Crawdaddy!–in the beginning of ’69. It actually got good reviews; it was a success at the time, on a modest level. But I was very ornery. The publishers were all ready to have me do more rock ‘n’ roll books, and I’m like, no, I don’t want to be stuck as a rock ‘n’ roll writer, I’m gonna do something else.

Pat Thomas:   You also had this incredibly successful book which I’ve never seen…Das Energi, is it called?

Paul Williams:   Das Energi was written in 1970 when I was on this wilderness commune in Canada. It was the next book afterTime Between. And I’d been thinking about it for a while. It came out of these late night conversations, where you suddenly, you’re sitting around with your friends, you get all excited and you figure out what the world is all about, how everything works, and all these ideas that were in the air from taking psychedelic drugs, reading science fiction books, using the I-Ching, and all that kind of thing. I had some vague idea before I started writing it of, yeah, let’s get all that stuff down somehow. And then I was writing fanatically, turning out all kinds of stuff, and I break, which really turned out to be only for four or five months, and when I started writing again, I was in this community in the woods, writing with a pen, and it started coming out in this funny way, just like a few sentences on a page. Maybe an extension of what was happening with Time Between, where the way the words are on the page is part of the story. And, I wasn’t really thinking about it, but you start writing and one page leads to the next one, you say, well, let’s see, what other subjects haven’t been covered yet. I gotta talk about security, I gotta talk about whatever. It was a book of thoughts, though everything I write is really an essay of some kind, and this was just an essay stretched out, where there might just be a paragraph or a sentence on a page, but it’s still an essay going from one thought to the next. It doesn’t look like a book, it’s just…

Pat Thomas:   Where was this book filed in a book store?

Paul Williams:   We’d never been able to solve [that] problem. it didn’t come out until ’73–all the publishers turned it down, and it was again Jac Holzman of Elektra Records who published it. He was a friend and he’d fallen in love with the manuscript and he wanted to do it, so in the end Elektra published it–it was the first and only book that they published. And he had ideas about putting it out in record stores and stuff, but he was actually leaving the company, he sold it to Warner at the time…Anyway, to everyone’s surprise, it caught on kind of by word of mouth. I mean, it never got any reviews. If it did, they were negative, but it started to be something that people discovered–it had a great cover–and they’d buy copies for their friends, and that’s really how it’s gone through the years.

Pat Thomas:   You told me once it sold quite a few copies?

Paul Williams:   It sold, like, 350,000 copies. It was a real underground hit, no question about it. It’s just one of those weird things that you can’t duplicate, you can’t explain it, it just happens…

Pat Thomas:   Is it still in print now?

Paul Williams:   Oh yeah. Now this title, I have to explain…it was called Das Energi because of Das Kapital. The idea was that Marx’s book was called Capitalbecause he recognized that the source of power had shifted while nobody was looking, and people were still acting as though power was based on having land, but that it was really now much more based in capital, and people hadn’t realized that. And so, by extension the idea [of Das Energi] was that the power is shifting from capital to energy, meaning not oil, but human energy.

Bringing It All Back Home (The Rebirth of Crawdaddy!)

Christoph Gurk:   Looking at the way you do Crawdaddy! now–Crawdaddy! used to be a magazine that ran along with the times. And now it’s more a magazine that does not represent the spirit of a generation, but represents more your own idealism–it stands on its own terms. It doesn’t seem to connect to the times–looking at them, but not feeling part of it, really, any longer. Is that correct? There’s not the feeling of wanting to change the world…it’s like thinking out loud.

Paul Williams:   Yeah, thinking out loud, which is basically what I’ve always done. Yeah, I think that it happened…Crawdaddy! is historically significant and had sort of this exciting period that I was involved in because it happened to come along when there wasn’t such a thing as a rock ‘n’ roll magazine and the rock ‘n’ roll scene was expanding very rapidly in terms of the attention it was getting, so it was a moment where, yeah, the whole idea of writing about the music and taking it seriously and acknowledging this community of interest that we have was very powerful, and in a sense when I tried to start the magazine Rallying Point in 1972, ’73, I was trying to recreate history and I couldn’t do it, because that wasn’t the moment. And I’d say your description of Crawdaddy! now is quite accurate. I didn’t start it with any specific ambition, but it was almost only after the first issue was out that people started pointing out to me that it was really very similar to the way Crawdaddy! was in the beginning: that is, these long essays, the point of which is that the music that’s coming out is exciting, and hey, let’s talk about it, and using the records as a jumping-off place. And yeah, if there’s any idealism behind it, it is exactly in the sense of just being a model that, well, you may not get rich, but you can somehow find a way to say what you want; that working for the formats that exist in the corporate universe is not the only alternative. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to do that or anything, but at least it shows that you could do something else.

Christoph Gurk:   It’s a pretty radical way to deal with this because it seems to refuse to even be tempted to go along with the business side. There doesn’t seem to be any idea to expand–just to keep it exactly on the level. There are no ads in the paper, and…

Paul Williams:   And there are personal reasons for that. The one policy I started with is we won’t take ads of any kind. Now in terms of ideals, it’s not that I’m anti-advertising as such, but if I were going to change the world or change the United States, I would pass a law outlawing advertising. If I had to do it gradually, I’d start with political advertising, and then go on from there. But that to me is my idea–I mean, I’m just as radical as I ever was. And I’d just say, no advertising, no paid advertising, you just have to figure out another way to do it. To me, the fall of communism, quote-unquote, just made me think, well, if communism falls, capitalism can’t be far behind. And, I don’t know, I’m very unhappy with the United States at this point, but I’m not surprised at the direction it’s going in, just depressed about it.
But in any case, it gets down to a very personal thing. In writing Crawdaddy!, the thing that’s interesting about it for me, or that’s satisfying, is to try and find a way to tell the truth about what I’m listening to and what I’m hearing in it, and I recognize that there’s constant pressure from the world, and it’s not a conspiracy, it just is the way that it is. If I get free records–and I do get free records–when I’m given a choice, I try to discourage them, but I haven’t totally made up my mind, I haven’t yet got to the point where I just say, no, you can’t send me records. So I’m still kind of sitting on the fence. But the thing is that, just even writing about rock ‘n’ roll like I do in Crawdaddy!, I start to feel the same pressure that every music journalist feels, which is to discover something new. To be in touch with what’s happening, to be “hip.” I mean, Greil Marcus, perceptively, when he first saw a copy of Crawdaddy! which was a couple of issues ago, and it had the Counting Crows on the cover, he says, “Well, don’t you know that it’s not hip to like the Counting Crows?” And I think what he was saying…

Christoph Gurk:   He said that?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, but I think he said that in an approving way. He was saying in a subtle way that I appreciate that you have the balls not to be hip. But that’s always there. You’re always thinking about what people are thinking about you–what you’re writing, or what you’re saying about it. When I wrote about Sonya Hunter’s album in the first issue–because you [Pat] sent it to me–I liked the idea that there was a record in there that people didn’t know about, because I was mainly writing about established artists. And the thing is, my girlfriend’s a musician [Cindy Lee Berryhill], I’m totally sympathetic to how hard it is to get attention for deserving new music. But I also realized, again, that one of the things that makes all rock journalism end up the same is that we’re responding to the same pressures. And what the music business wants from rock journalism…I mean, record reviews don’t sell records. We know that. But what they DO do, is they HELP in the long process of breaking an artist. So what’s useful for the corporate business–and I’m not putting it down, it’s also useful for the indie business–is if rock writers write about new artists because that helps bring them to the attention of radio and helps them get more attention in the companies, and it’s a whole process by which, then, you eventually break an artist. And while that’s fine, the trouble is, in order for me to do Crawdaddy! that is to just be the voice of the listener, in a sense. I’m not claiming that I’m the same as any other listener, but I just want to be the voice of the listener I am. I somehow have to keep trying to compensate for, or avoid, the natural pressures that are there. It’s not just like someone’s handing me money and therefore I’m gonna do what they want me to do, it’s much more subtle than that, and it can be something as worthwhile and sincere as wanting to help new artists. But the problem is that it’s still not the same as, you know…What I’m writing about in the next issue is [Neil Young's] Sleeps With Angels because it’s a great record. It’s just a great record. And that’s where I started from. I started Crawdaddy! this time to write about Automatic For the People, because a) I wanted to write about it, and b) I thought, this is like the old Crawdaddy!days–here’s an album that everybody’s gonna be listening to, and everybody’s gonna be interested in somebody’s opinion about it. It’s that kind of a record; Sleeps With Angels is that kind of a record.

Pat Thomas:   The thing about your work for me that’s always been interesting is you have a way about writing that’s so personal, that you get me to read…like, you wrote about Arrested Development. If any other writer in the world had written an article about Arrested Development, I wouldn’t even have picked it up, because I’d think, this isn’t my kind of music or whatever, but your writing is interesting enough, where you sort of dragged me through that album [3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of...]–which I still haven’t even heard, by the way–but I felt after reading your thing that I knew something about this band, or something about their music that I didn’t know before. So I guess what I’m saying is your writing is compelling–it drags me in. The other thing that I like about it is because of the fact that you publish it yourself, you can write as long as you want. In other words, if David Fricke said I want the lead-off review in Rolling Stoneto be 20,000 words on the new R.E.M. record, they’d tell him to fuck off.

Paul Williams:   Yeah, you can’t do it.

Christoph Gurk:   Everything is about formats in rock journalism.

Pat Thomas:   So it’s kind of going back to what I call the old style of rock writing, because there was a time when Rolling Stone did write long reviews.

Paul Williams:   Maybe. I’m not sure if they did. Maybe a little bit.

Pat Thomas:   Yeah, a little longer. And sometimes they would even have two people review the same record.

Paul Williams:   Occasionally, yeah.

Pat Thomas:   And so to me you’re also sort of going back to that, which is, if the music is really worth it, then it’s worth writing more than 300 words.

Paul Williams:   Right. Not that a long thing is necessarily better, but it’s just a kind of a freedom to do something different.

Pat Thomas:   Because I think that rock magazines in general insult my intelligence. Because if it’s something that I REALLY want to know about, it’s never long enough for me. You take a magazine like Option, which is a fairly interesting, fairly intellectual [magazine], but they might put someone on the cover and still only write two or three full pages about it. At that point, I think…

Paul Williams:   Where I’ve always been radical–’cause I’ve been talking to people about the Dylan book, and it’s been brought to my attention because you forget about these things–is that I pretty much insist on writing about the music. And when I say that I mean, writing about what I hear, because I have a point of view that the art exists in the experience of the listener. So someone was asking me yesterday, where’d you get this radical idea of writing about Bob Dylan from the point of view of the music instead of a biography? And it’s funny that that should be a radical idea. [laughs]

Pat Thomas:   Your Dylan books [cf. Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1960-1973: The Early Years] are the only books that get into the heart of the music rather than argue what color of shirt Bob was wearing that day, and who was playing bass on which song.

Paul Williams:   The other thing that happens is not just biographical details, you also get these people who write about Bob Dylan who try to explain what the 1960s meant. Then you get much more highfalutin stuff, but it’s still just a mush of ideas rather than saying, well, here’s this new Neil Young album and this is what I hear in the song “Driveby,” and this is what it means to me, and what do you think about the fact that there’s two different songs with the same backing track, and blah blah blah. [laughs]

I’m Free To Do What I Want

Pat Thomas:   One thing that me and Christoph were discussing last night on the phone is your sort of lower profile compared to your contemporaries, people like Greil Marcus, or Dave Marsh, or Christgau. Or maybe you’ve kind of consciously not done things that would bring you more into the mainstream. Like your bookRock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles is a very eclectic book: rather than picking a bunch of obvious songs or writing something that would totally placate a yuppie audience that would want to have all their favorite…

Paul Williams:   Well, I can’t do that, but it isn’t a matter of not selling out, it’s that I don’t have the ability to write something that isn’t what I feel. I’m no good at that. If someone tried to pay me a lot of money to do what they thought would sell–if I agreed to it, whatever I turned out would be terrible because I don’t know how to do that, really.

Pat Thomas:   You haven’t done any coffee table books yet.

Paul Williams:   Well, you know, I mean, I’ve had plenty of bad ideas over the years, but you run out of energy long before they turn into a book. I’ve had plenty of ideas that I’m glad I didn’t do. But what I’m saying is that it’s self-limiting. It isn’t really a matter of high moral principles, but I’m just not the guy for the job, you know?

Pat Thomas:   Do you feel any affinity or any distaste for any of these so-called rock critic elite?

Paul Williams:   Well, I don’t really like to comment, because I think we’re all naturally somewhat competitive. I mean, it’s very hard for my girlfriend to just respond completely openly to a female artist. I mean, she does, but there’s always this thought that she’s comparing herself, kind of thing…

Pat Thomas:   I see that more often with female singer-songwriters than I do with men, for some reason.

Paul Williams:   Well, it’s because men are, you know, the norm, and female is, like, an identity. That’s not the way it should be, but it is the way that it is. Whether it’s in female nature or whether it has something to do with the culture…but anyway, if I comment on other rock critics, I’ll just, you know, make a fool of myself.

Pat Thomas:   Let me just say this. Rather than name names, do you ever feel like, how can I say this…you’ve obviously, for various reasons, enjoyed less financial or less public success than some of these other guys. Do you ever feel short-changed? Or like the Velvet Underground of rock critics?

Paul Williams:   No, not really. I mean, no one’s really getting rich in this business anyway. It’s nothing compared to the rock ‘n’ roll stars. Naturally, I think, I would love to find it easier to sell books–I mean, to sell books to publishers in the first place and then sell more copies when they come out. That would make me happy, and naturally I feel frustrated at times when I can’t find a publisher and the books don’t get reviewed or blah, blah, blah. I mean, it even frustrates me a little bit that Crawdaddy! isn’t growing faster. The people who read it, love it, but it doesn’t go in stores at all. I haven’t tried very much to put it in stores, but it’s clear that it just doesn’t fit people’s picture of what a fanzine is these days–it doesn’t have the right kind of cover or photos or whatever, and people don’t want to read all those words. That’s fine, obviously it’s what I’m doing and it isn’t necessarily what any kind of large audience is gonna want. Yeah, I mean, it’s frustrating knowing that the people who like my stuff really like it; I figure there are more of them out there, but how can I reach them?

But, you know, I couldn’t do the books that Dave Marsh does, and I will say that I probably wouldn’t want to, in most cases. In one case we did a similar thing–he did 1,001 best singles [The Heart of Rock and Soul] and I did 100, but they’re very different kinds of books. On the other hand, even though I haven’t read a lot of what Greil Marcus has done, I completely respect…without reading it, I still can certainly see what he’s trying to do, and I admire that. It’s different than what I do, but it’s not unrelated. But as far as my success or failure or low profile or whatever, it’s because of the things that I choose to do, and that’s certainly something I create for myself.

Pat Thomas:   Yeah, well obviously you’re coming from–as we’ve been talking about on and off–such a personal approach…

Paul Williams:   It’s not what sells. At the point that Rolling Stone was coming out at the end of ’67, it was already clear to me that–it wasn’t a sense of competition on MY part, because I knew that they were doing what the public wanted–I couldn’t compete. I never had Jann Wenner’s business sense or ambition in that particular way, and it wasn’t what particularly interested me, to go in that direction. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t think it was worth doing, it just wasn’t something for me to do. And…I’ll say this. Naturally, when I’ve got money problems or whatever, and I feel frustrated and think blah, blah, blah–like anybody–but there’s a flipside to the coin, which is my freedom. And when I have my head on straight, I realize that it balances out very well. I actually feel guilty sometimes, talking to my friends who are rock critics, because they say–you know, this guy’s working for the San Francisco Chronicle or whatever, he says, “God, I wish I could write as much as I wanted to about the new Elvis Costello album, but I have to get it down into 300 words.” And I’m getting to do what I want.

Christoph Gurk:   You can get from being powerless or whatever…

Paul Williams:   Right–exactly! And look, if I could really make or break a new act, my phone would be ringing all the time, my life would be hell! The publicists don’t give a shit about me, and that’s just fine.

Christoph Gurk:   I respect that you don’t want to comment on other people’s work, but do you find among newer writers in rock publications anything substantial?

Paul Williams:   I don’t read it enough. I read Rolling Stone, which is actually surprisingly informative, and I read Ice–a newsletter that’s also quite informative. But I really don’t keep up at all, I never have. So I don’t read the other writers that much. So there could be brilliant young writers and I don’t know about them, and I would be interested. I’m looking for other people to write for Crawdaddy!, but I’m not looking very hard…But when I say that I don’t know of any it’s because I’m not reading the stuff. Even with records, it always amazes me that many of the people I meet, many fans, can keep up with so many new acts and so forth. I’m a slow listener. I’m a slow reader and a slow listener. It has its good sides and its bad sides. Its good side is that when I decide to listen to a record, I don’t make my mind up in two or three listens; I really spend a lot of time with it. But the bad side is that an awful lot of stuff is coming out that’s interesting, and I don’t hear it, or if I’ve heard it once it still doesn’t mean anything to me. And I also find that unlike some of my friends I don’t play music all day. I sort of wish that I could, I could process more, but I actually always think that I’ll listen to these records while I’m doing this busy work, but then I forget to do it. [laughs] It’s like I need a certain amount of silence, too.

From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever:

“….in Cagean spirit, the following is a series of aleatoric impressions of the ideas and music of John Cage…”

i.e.,

This might be a good time to put in a mention of Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″, which I read a couple months back, and, for the most part, enjoyed tremendously. (My one disappointment: a bit too much focus on the man rather than the song.) There’s a good interview with Gann (by John Ruscher) here:

“I think that as many other composers have taken environmental sound into their aesthetic, the actual impact of ’4’33″‘ will become a little diffuse; it was revolutionary at the time, but in young people’s hindsight it appears to seem more and more obvious and necessary. It will always pinpoint a crucial historical step, but like Columbus’s egg, it seems less and less surprising that someone thought of it. One student in Serbia mentioned to me recently that he thought the only real performance was the first one, a total surprise, and that the ‘aura’ of the work could never really be recreated again. Cage, who kept redefining the work for himself, would have disagreed, but for most people I think there’s some truth to it. By now, almost anyone who hears it live has an idea what will happen and how to think about it.”

A rousing interview of self-affirmation with John Mendelssohn, King of L.A.

By Steven Ward (March 2001)

Although no one has written a biography about him, portrayed him in a movie, or released a collection of his rock writing, John Mendelssohn’s name comes up at this site almost as frequently as Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer. That’s because the guy was one of the first and most important rock critics, and an influence to be reckoned with. There was a time when Mendelssohn trashed Led Zeppelin in the pages of Rolling Stone, dressed liked Rod Stewart, and fronted a band–Christopher Milk–that received as many good reviews as bad ones. Today, Mendelssohn is still writing songs and singing with a voice that he wishes were very much better. He makes his living in graphic design, but he still writes–fiction instead of rock criticism.

Here, Mendelssohn speaks his mind on Meltzer and Bangs, Jim DeRogatis’s Bangs biography, what rock writers he imitated, his favorite records, and how he feels about his inclusion in the rockwrite category of wild boys known as “The Noise Boys.”

Steven:   What is the legendary John Mendelssohn up to these days? What have you been doing in the last few years?

John:   Professionally, Website and graphic design. Surviving long bouts of nearly fatal depression. Trying, often not successfully, to maintain a relationship with my teenage daughter Brigitte, whom I adore. Starting a succession of Pythonesque sketch comedy troupes to perform material I’ve written. Writing a thematically linked short story collection called The Total Babe and Other Wine Country Yarns that a big posh Boston-based agent is presently shopping to publishers. Writing other fiction and screenplays in which no one seemed to have much interest. Working on my own music. Breaking up with my girlfriend/fiancée of 12 years and starting a new relationship. Deteriorating physically at a terrifying rate.

Steven:   Do you miss writing about rock and roll?

John:   Very much, and never more than when I hear something like Ron Sexsmith’s Other Songs, which I love as much as I’ve ever loved an album. Of course, it isn’t just writing about rock that I miss, but magazine writing in general. A few years ago I wanted to write about my love for Mad TV, for instance, but could find no takers.

Steven:   ”The Noise Boys” were a group of rockcrits from the early ‘70s dubbed such by James Wolcott. Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches were part of that group, but so were you.

John:   No, I wasn’t! Not for a minute! Different coasts. Different, you know, aesthetics. Different personal habits. Different everything! This Wolcott fellow calls ‘em Noise Boys? I call ‘em the Bukowski Wannabe School, and I say to hell with ‘em. Which isn’t to imply that I wasn’t occasionally awed by the work of the first- and third-named personages.

Steven:   Do you feel like your past rockwrite work has not been as celebrated as much as those guys.

John:   As my daughter might have put it a couple of years back, well, duh.

Steven:   The Lester bio, and the recent collections by Meltzer and Tosches have all garnered much media attention lately. Do you chalk it all up to that?

John:   I find the recent deification of Mr. Bangs absolutely incomprehensible. He was capable of being spectacularly funny. Far, far more often, I found him insufferably masturbatory, an infant playing with his own feces. I’m sorry, but I can’t for the life of me see why people prefer him to someone like the all-but-forgotten Rick Johnson, who had a comparably antic style.

Steven:   Ever think about releasing your own collection of rock writing?

John:   I have long thought that the stuff I wrote for Creem in the mid-80s would make an interesting book. Unfortunately, publishers have no comparable thoughts.

Steven:   In Jim DeRogatis’ Lester bio, he says you were the “odd man out and the most disliked by the others” in reference to the “Noise Boys.” Do you agree with that and what did you think of DeRogatis’ book and his portrayal of you in it?

John:   In view of my distaste for them, I wasn’t troubled to learn that they disliked me, though Mr. Meltzer is the only one who ever expressed it to my face, and then passive-aggressively. He invited himself over to my home with Mr. Tom Nolan, an early writer-about-rock whose work I found breathtaking, but whose personality I wouldn’t have fucked with your dick. They were both sloppy drunk and suffering from colds or allergies or something. Mr. Meltzer made a point of dropping soggy facial tissue all over my apartment. Take that, running dog lackey of The Industry!

Mr. DeRogatis is, in my experience, a backstabbing scumbag. He phoned me out of the blue to interview me for the book. I put aside things I was working on and tried to be both cordial and helpful. Two years hence, apparently for the purpose of justifying Lester’s alleged animus toward me, I discovered that he’d deliberately distorted what I’d told him. During our conversation, I recounted, in a clearly apologetic tone, having been a power-mad little twerp in my days of greatest influence. In the book, he makes it appear that I was reveling in what I’d gotten away with! I find this unconscionable.

Steven:   Do you think your writing was similar to Bangs and Meltzer’s stuff and what did you think of those two guys personally and professionally?

John:   I think if we had anything in common, it was irreverence, but I suspect that they found me insufficiently irreverent. Certainly our tone was extremely different. I enjoyed affecting a sort of patrician hauteur while they often pretended to be Joe Sixpack. I would far sooner be compared to Mr. Tosches than either of the other two, as he was by far the best writer of the three.

My dear friend Mr. Richard Riegel and I have an ongoing debate about these guys’ deliberate loutishness. Mr. Meltzer in particular seemed to believe that disrupting record company parties with outrageous drunken displays of infantilism was somehow heroic, the only moral response to The Industry’s avarice. Fair enough, but why’d you go to the party in the first place?. Call me old-fashioned, but I find peeing in the punchbowl after stuffing yourself on free canapés a little hypocritical.

Steven:   In retrospect, what do you think of the music of your old group Christopher Milk?

John:   I find it embarrassing, and no one more to blame than myself. The others could play a bit, and the guitarist was capable of real brilliance, though he was forever overextending himself. I should never have allowed myself to be talked into being lead singer. The group as a whole–if not the rhythm section–would have been (marginally) better off if I’d remained the (woefully deficient) drummer.

Steven:   Do you think rock critics have any business making music?

John:   No, I believe that people who love music enough to write about it ought to be forcibly restrained if they try to purchase musical instruments.

To cease to be sarcastic, I learned the hard way that you can’t really do both simultaneously. I’d ravage somebody in print one week and the next week we’d be opening for them at the Whisky. Their bodyguards would beat me senseless just before I went on stage. My performance would suffer.

Steven:   Nik Cohn was a huge rock writing influence on you. What was it about his writing that you connected to?

John:   He was screamingly funny, with apparently absolute confidence in his own taste. And once he’d dismissed you, you stayed dismissed, boy. My own star began to rise very quickly after I perfected my imitation of him.

Steven:   What other music writers did you like in the beginning and later during the 70s?

John:   Robert Hilburn, Richard Riegel, and the June Taylor Dancers..

Steven:   How did you get into the rock criticism business and how did you end up in the pages of Rolling Stone?

John:   I’d originally started writing sheerly out of boredom, loneliness, and my hatred of The Doors. Rolling Stone ran a little ad that invited people to send things in. I sent something in–my Led Zeppelin I review. Next stop: wealth ‘n’ fame!

Steven:   Lester Bangs used to change his mind all the time about records he once slammed. You destroyed Led Zeppelin in the pages ofRolling Stone when writing about their 1968 debut.

John:   1969. And I didn’t destroy it. My review was very sober and boring. It was a miracle that Rolling Stone printed it, especially in view of its having already been published in my college newspaper. It was Led Zeppelin II I “destroyed.”

Steven:   Do you still feel that way about that album?

John:   Certainly not. I hate it much more confidently than I did at the time. All that infernal screeching! All that showing off on the guitar! All those interminable versions of Joan Baez songs! And not a trace of the things I adore–melody, vocal harmony, expressive musicianship, and intelligence, or at least wit.

The only record I’ve ever changed my mind about was The Stooges’ debut, which I came to love a few weeks after dismissing it in the L.A. Times as crapola.

Steven:   How did the whole “King of L.A.” tag and the dressing up like a rock star thing evolve?

John:   Mr. Bud Scoppa, himself a critic of vast renown and impeccable tan, confided sometime around 1992 that when he’d moved to L.A. a couple of decades before, he’d thought of me as the King of L.A. I was duly amused, and used it as the title of a chapter in my autobiography.

I began dressing up like a rock star as soon as I was old enough to buy my own clothing. As a 17-year-old senior at Santa Monica High School, I bought myself a pair of Thom McAn Beatle boots and a plush velour turtleneck that inspired some of my classmates to question my heterosexuality. In fact, it was my heterosexuality that inspired me to dress like the musicians I idolized.

Steven:   After your time at Rolling Stone, you wrote for Creem. What was it like writing for Creem magazine all those years and when you think back, what is your take on Creem?

John:   Early in my career, I was flabbergasted by my own success, as I didn’t think I could write at all (an impression I have since corroborated!), had no idea what I was talking about, and didn’t even have the courage of my convictions. I did my best writing about rock 18 years later for Creem, especially after realizing that my editors would allow me to do just about anything I wanted. (What I wanted mostly was to shame groups like Motley Crue, which I regard, along with Kiss, as the worst in the history of the music, off the face of the planet.) Creem had far fewer and less attentive readers, though, and in that sense writing for it was far less satisfying. I’d very much enjoyed being famous, you see.

There were several wonderful writers, but I always wished that Creem‘s art direction had been very much better. (I’ve always believed that for an act to be ultra-deluxe, it need not only sound terrific, but look terrific too, as Elvis and The Beatles and the early Who all did.) Creemalways looked woefully amateurish. It was my wonderful taste in graphic design, we pause to note, that led to my becoming a graphic designer in the 90s.

Steven:   What possessed you to write your autobiography–I, Caramba (Confessions of An Antkiller)?

John:   Rhino offered me money. (Unfortunately, once I’d written it, they essentially took the position that I hadn’t. The week Rolling Stonegave it a very good review, for instance, you couldn’t buy a copy anywhere in San Francisco, a fairly large American city.)

Steven:   The Kinks were a band that moved you when you were younger. Do they still move you?

John:   All the stuff I loved then I continue to love, from Face to Face up to and including half of Lola vs. Powerman, still gives me great pleasure. I believe that Ray Davies went off his game in around 1971 and has never been remotely the same. It always perplexed me that I was so closely linked to The Kinks, as I was a much, much bigger fan of the Who, at least through Tommy.

Steven:   Are there any newer bands in rock that make you feel like The Kinks once did?

John:   Not necessarily “bands.” Over the years, I have adored selected works by the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, the Cocteau Twins, Innocence Mission, the Ocean Blue, Bruce Springsteen, Squeeze, Talk Talk, Graham Parker, Crowded House, and the sublime Sexsmith, among many, many others that I’m having trouble remembering because so many brain cells have deserted me without so much as a fare-thee-well. I regard Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life” as the perfect pop record and Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay With Me” as the vocal performance in comparison to which all others pale.

Steven:   Do you read rock journalism today and if so, what mags and writers do you like?

John:   I don’t pay much attention. It’s far easier to tell you a rock writer I rather enjoy detesting–Ms. Gina Arnold, whose work has always struck me as a remarkable meeting of completely unfounded self-assurance and glaring incompetence. I believe her to be the worst critic of anything in the English language.

Steven:   Tell me about your e-zine Ned.

John:   Just what it says. A collection of unpublished or murdered-by-editors magazine pieces that I couldn’t bear to just let die in peace, along with some satirical writing that I’m proud of.

Steven:   What’s up next for John Mendelssohn?

John:   It is my pleasure and privilege at the moment to be ghostwriting the memoirs of London’s pre-eminent dominatrix, Mistress Chloe. They will be published next spring in the UK, to which I might relocate if Mr. Barney Hoskyns offers me the use of one of his multiple guest bedrooms. .

Steven:   You have not written rock criticism in 14 years. You have been creating music though since that time. Please tell us about your new music and the songs you have written lately?

John:   I’ve never really stopped composing for long, and honestly believe that my songs stack up against just about anybody’s. The problem being that, while I write beautiful melodies and thoughtful, provocative lyrics and inventive orchestrations, I still can’t sing. Sometimes I think I’d be much better off being interestingly awful like Billy Corgan or Tom Waits. As it is, I’m just off key enough to be excruciating. But I’ve never been able to establish a successful working relationship with a singer, I suppose because a part of me can’t bear to relinquish the spotlight.

For the past 18 months I’ve been working on an album that I thought for a long time I’d call Rousing Anthems of Self-Affirmation, but which I’ll probably now entitle Between Breath and Suffocation, from a song I composed on Christmas Day, 2000. I didn’t so much as hear my daughter’s voice all day, and that would have sent me into an emotional tailspin that I’m not sure I’d have survived if I hadn’t decided instead to devote all my energy to trying o create something beautiful. And thus was born “Life’s Dare,” the song for which I hope to be remembered. It’s taken me my whole life to this point to repudiate cynicism and to realize the truth of the things I say in the song. A couple of sample verses:

Once I thought desolation was romantic and sort of cool
Suffering for one’s art and all of that. God, was I a fool
Any day you can nearly die laughing or curl up and ache with despair
I choose the former. I accept life’s dare.

The water gets murky sometimes but I still can refuse to drown
Gazing into the mirror I can stare my accuser down
You don’t get all the days you’ve spent pouting refunded as you approach death
Between breath and suffocation I choose breath

Choose breath, dear reader. Misery is, as the Brits say, naff.

Gina Arnold in the present tense

E-mail Interview by Steven Ward (April 2001)

Love her or hate her, rock critic Gina Arnold writes from her own point of view. For Arnold, when writing about music, objectivity is thrown out of the window. Arnold has written and published two superb books about the history of alternative music–Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana and Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense. An unabashed fan of alternative music and culture, Arnold chronicles her own story alongside a music history that tells readers how we got from Johnny Rotten to Kurt Cobain and beyond.

Today, Arnold still writes about music–as a columnist for the San Jose Metro–though not nearly as often as she was in the ’90s. In the following interview, Arnold talks about her favorite rock writers, why music doesn’t mean as much to her today, and what it was like for a woman to break into a field filled with nerdy white guys.

Steven:   You just left the East Bay Express where you wrote your “Fools Rush In” column. You wrote about music as well as all kind of things. Did you enjoy the freedom to go beyond the music format in the column and why did you leave the paper?

Gina:   I left the East Bay Express last month because I was offered a much better salary to put my column in the San Jose Metro. It was sad to leave the Express, which certainly did give me a lot of freedom in the eleven years I worked for them, but it was also time for a change. I always felt readers of my column (“Fools Rush In”) didn’t understand that it wasn’t just a local music column; I got a lot of flak for writing about other things. I am hoping that the readers of the Metro will understand that I’m not just a music writer anymore.

Steven:   Are you still writing full time about music? I hardly ever see your byline anymore in music mags?

Gina:   Gee, that’s depressing. I took a year off last year–I had an NAJP fellowship at Columbia University–so that’s one reason I’ve faded out a little. But I still write full time, mostly for the Metro now, but also in other places. I have never had a lot of success writing for the regular music magazines (Rolling Stone, Spin, etc.). I think my point of view irks them, it’s a little too radical. Also that game is all about who you know, and the editors are all a lot younger than me now. Admittedly, I don’t actually read those magazines, so it’s not like I probably should write for them.

Steven:   One of the reasons I love your first book, Route 666, is because you are telling the history of 90s alternative music through autobiography. Your perspective on your subject is both detailed and historical but from a fan’s point of view, not some kind of academic approach. Do you agree with this assessment and is that the way you planned to write the book or did the personal, fan-based approach just happen as you were writing?

Gina:   No, it was all very planned out–the book was pitched as a first person account. I have always felt that one of the flaws in a lot of rock criticism (besides the boring prose style) was that it tried to be objective–which is impossible, with something like music. The best you can hope to be is descriptive: you know: this is who I am, this is what happened to me, this is why it means something to me, if you agree you might like it too. And if you don’t, well then, ignore it. That first book is kind of a good snapshot of who I was and what I thought at the time. But it’s weird to read it now, it reads so young and innocent.

Steven:   Tell me about your background–where you grew up, went to college, etc.

Gina:   I grew up in Palo Alto and went to UC Berkeley. I had a very vanilla upbringing–like a lot of punk rockers I think.

Steven:   What music mags did you read growing up and who were your favorite rock critics and writers–both influences on you and others you just admired?

Gina:   When I was in high school, Creem was on it’s last legs and I really liked it. I read Rolling Stone of course. I liked Dave Marsh’s writing a lot–and Greil Marcus, and a writer named Bob Duncan, who was at Creem, and of course Lester Bangs (although I don’t find he holds up so well). I loved Nik Cohn’s books. But the truth is I only read rock criticism for a brief period before I started doing it myself and then I started to find it thoroughly inadequate: for one thing, there were no women writers, no one with my perspective on music, and it was full of a lot of cliches and bad writing and what I call “stancy” stuff–you know, where the writer takes a perverse stance just to be hip or something. It seemed so insincere. Now I don’t read much of it at all. I just read other things, novels and whatnot. A writer who’s done some accidentally good work in rock is John Seabrook at the New Yorker. Steve Erickson at the L.A. Weekly (he’s really a novelist) is good. I like Nick Hornby’s books, but not his criticism so much. The writer that most influence my style, I think, is Joan Didion.

Steven:   Where did you first get published and how did you first get into the rockwrite game?

Gina:   For my first year of college, I went to UCLA (I was recruited to the swim team, if you can believe it. I was a big jock. Still am.) I just walked into the paper one day and said, “can I review records?” and they said yes. Then when I transferred to Berkeley I continued at the Daily Cal. When I graduated, I got a job stringing for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, a daily paper in my home town, and then at theSan Jose Mercury, and finally the L.A. Times. But daily papers weren’t too kind to me and I went down to the alternative world pretty fast. I don’t know. I don’t really consider myself to have had a very successful writing career, so I wouldn’t take my advice on any of this. I’ve had a lot of good luck though–and met a lot of great people.

Steven:   Did you find it hard in the beginning of your career to break into the field because you were a woman and most rock crits were guys?

Gina:   Oh god, no, it was the exact opposite! Being the only woman rock critic in the ’80s was a total advantage! First of all, it got me lots of attention–and there were a few wonderful people who actually were concerned about the subject at the time, like Bill Flanagan at Musician, and my editor at theSan Jose Merc and even at the L.A. Times, who were determined to hire women. I know for a fact John Pareles at the N.Y. Times hired Ann Powers and Danyel Smith because he wanted to equalize the gender situation. But these days I don’t think it’s a topic anyone pays attention to. If anything, things are more sexist now, not less so.

However, being a girl has always only been an advantage to me, I can’t think of any negative aspect to it, except of course that it got me a lot of flak. You know–99% of the hate mail I receive is from men–and it’s all about me, not about my opinion or what I said in the article. A woman will write me, “I disagree with your opinion about Sonic Youth because…” A guy will write, “you are a horrible person who is probably a big fat ugly cow!” And I know they wouldn’t write that to a man. For some reason, my opinions are read as threatening–and I don’t know if that’s because they are uttered by a girl, or because they actually are threatening (although if it’s the latter, people sure are easily cowed). But I sometimes wish I had used a non-gender specific byline. But then, maybe I wouldn’t be as well known as I am–and for doing as little.

Steven:   What do you think about the whole gonzo school of rock crit, i.e., Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer?

Gina:   Can’t read it. Bangs wrote a few good lines–I liked it when he said that Elvis Presley gave him “an erection of the heart”–but I was more impressed with it when I was younger. Gonzo is kind of dated now, isn’t it?

Steven:   Your second book, Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense was a sequel to Route 666. It continues the story of ’90s alternative music. Do you think there will be a third book and do you see any bands out there now that might have the impact of Nirvana?

Gina:   No. No third book. I think that era is over. Or if it’s not, someone else can write it. I went to a rave the other day in Miami Beach–it was really fun, but it was definitely somebody else’s story, not mine.

Steven:   What bands or singers do enjoy listening to nowadays? Do any of those bands make you feel like Jane’s Addiction or The Pixies once made you feel, or do you think that kind of experience is tied up to being young–or a certain age?

Gina:   Some people manage to retain that feeling, regardless of age, but I don’t seem to be one of them. As for new bands I like? I like this band Idlewild, from Scotland. I liked Dido’s record a lot. Uh….some of my old favorites are still putting out good things–I like the new Nick Cave, I like PJ Harvey. I like a lot of rap I hear on the radio but I don’t know the names of the artists (‘cos I’m not really paying attention.) And no, indeed they don’t make me feel like I used to. But that’s just me, not everybody. The truth is, Kurt’s death really kind of killed a lot of my enthusiasm (though it took a long time for me to acknowledge that.) Also, I began teaching around then (95? 96?) and as my life got broader in its spectrum of whom I knew–I wasn’t just living in a bubble of alterna-rockers, junkies, industry types and so on–I stopped being quite so adamant about everything. I mean, it was a fun youth, but at a certain point it’s more fun to branch out.

Steven:   You wrote a great essay about the state rock criticism–about how no one goes out on a writing limb anymore the way Bangs and Nick Kent used to. Do you still feel that way today and do you ever find edgy rockwriting in fanzines or the Internet? Also, what is the state of rock crit in 2001?

Gina:   I don’t remember that essay, what was it in? And no, I don’t see edgy rock writing but then I’m not looking for it, it could be out there. To find that kind of writing stimulating I suppose you have to care about the genre, and at the moment I’m in a lull. I hope the lull ends, but it doesn’t really matter to me if it doesn’t. It’s a wide world out there with many, many different subjects to write about. Rock was a great topic for me, but to write about it forever seems a little limiting. And unfair to the younger writers who are probably a lot more into it than I am right now.

Steven:   What’s next for Gina Arnold? Any books? Where can your fans find your byline?

Gina:   What’s next for me is, I’m having a baby in June, and after that I don’t really know. I’d say, no books for a while–the experience of book writing is not really all that wonderful. I’m glad I did it, but I don’t know when it will happen again.

Steven:   What advice would you give younger writers who want to write about pop/rock music for a living today?

Gina:   Oh, that’s a tough one. “Write what you know?” That’s a big cliche, but it’s true. I guess I’d just encourage them to do it. I remember when I was 16 or so, I read somewhere that according to the IRS, only 5% of writers made a full-time living at it, and instead of thinking, ‘uh-oh, that’s bad,” I thought the opposite: “Five percent! Oh goodie, well, I’ll be one of them.” And I am. I think if you really want to do something, and you know exactly what it is, you have to think positive like that. And then everything falls into place.

El David: Saint Dalton Shoots His Mouth Off

By Steven Ward (May 2001) 

David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine. In between 1968 and 1971, Dalton penned Rolling Stone cover stories on Little Richard, James Brown and Elvis Presley. In 1970, Dalton and co-writer David Felton won the prestigious Columbia School Of Journalism Award for their Rolling Stone interview with killer/Godhead/psycho Charles Manson. In 1969, Dalton collaborated with frequent Rolling Stone contributor Jonathan Cott on the Beatles-commissioned book, Get Back, a journal of the recording sessions of the Fab Four’s final album.

One could argue that Dalton has contributed more than his fair share to the rockwrite canon (if there is such a thing).

But some of Dalton’s best writing and most important contributions to the world of music journalism may come from the books he published after writing for Jann Wenner’s media empire. These include:

• 1972–The Rolling Stones: An Unauthorized Biography
• 1977–Rock 100 (with co-writer Lenny Kaye) This book may be the best book of its kind since Lillian Roxon’s 1969 masterpiece, “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia.” I think “Rock 100″ is the spiritual sequel to Roxon’s book–a book she never got to write because of her early and sudden death in the early 70s.
• 1991–Mr. Mojo Risin. Jim Morrison, The Last Holy Fool.
• 1994–Faithfull, the Autobiography of Marianne Faithfull. (co-written with Faithfull). My favorite Dalton book and quite possibly the best co-written rock autobiography ever published.
• 1996–Living with the Dead, an anecdotal biography of the Grateful Dead (co-written with Dead manager Rock Scully)
• 1997–El Sid. Thirty-two chapters on Sex Pistols bassist/self-destruction poster child Sid Vicious.
• 1999–To Hell and Back. Meat Loaf’s autobiography (co-written with Meatloaf) 2000–Been Here and Gone. Dalton’s first novel about a blues musician.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

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Steven:   You wrote for Rolling Stone in the early ’70s. You were one of the founding writers of the magazine. How would you compare that experience to writing for a pop culture bi-monthly like Gadfly today?

David:   Well, long, long ago, when I began writing for Rolling Stone it was as a rock evangelist. This sounds more than a little pretentious (and portentous) even as I write it, sinking it in the past tense of the deep. But, o my brothers and sisters, that was the way it felt to me then. I was as intent as John the Revelator scribbling his apocalyptic verses on the Island of Patmos. Rock was the very plasma that held the counterculture together. Everything was plugged into it, everything I cared about, anyway. It was the Pentecostal flame that would bring the New Jerusalem into existence.

Writing for Rolling Stone I don’t think I ever used the word “I”. “We” maybe. But essentially I saw myself as a chronicler, as a fan who managed to enter this or that sanctum sanctorum and bring back the glad tidings, the revelations, and thus-spake very words uttered by our idols. In Gadfly I often revisited these same stories but now putting myself back into them–in other words looking at them from another perspective, which in many ways was more honest and more interesting than my so-called evangelical reports–and definitely more humorous. For instance the time Brian Wilson mistook me for Phil Spector.

Steven:   How did you hook up with Gadfly and do you like the column outlet?

David:   Jayson Whitehead the magazine’s editor at the time, had read my biography (and experiment in Punk channeling) El Sid: Saint Vicious and asked me to write an article about the Sex Pistols. From there I went on to write articles on James Dean, my terrifying experiences with Charles Manson and the Family (I thought he was innocent and went to live on the Spahn Ranch–I want a t-shirt!) via Dennis Wilson, the Stones Circus, Xmas with the Beatles (I wrote a book with Jonathan Cott that went in their last Brit album, Let It Be). Anyway, Jayson was an inspiring and hip editor who admired the early Rolling Stone and Gadfly then and now has that same feeling of purpose, intelligence and avant-garde evangelism. Gadfly is great! It becomes virtual on May 7, 2001. Gadfly focuses on the great saints of modernism, Kerouac, Francis Bacon, Burroughs, Hunter Thompson–along with rock and social criticism. I usually end up reading every article in the magazine, finding them all interesting and generally well-written.

Steven:   You are English–born in London and raised in British Columbia. How did you wind up in Upstate New York and how did you first get involved with music journalism?

David:   I came to New York City with my dad one summer and refused to leave. I got into Columbia that fall because I was able to recite the Cataline orations and read the New Testament (He Diatheke) in Greek to Joseph Campbell (a pompous, fatuous, idiot). Went to art school simultaneously and when I got out the Brit Invasion had begun. I supported myself taking photos of rock groups. Yardbirds, Animals, Stones, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, etc. I was the same age as the people in the groups–it was fun and these were heady days. I saw the first issue of Rolling Stone in the fall of ’67, had a payphone in my loft with an open line and started calling up Jann Wenner. In December, came close to getting busted, and thought it a good idea to go back to England for a while. I started sending Jann photos (Yoko’s exhibit–the one John saw and fell in love with), Stevie Winwood, etc. “We need stories to go with these pictures,” Jann said.

Photographing rock groups is a pain to sensitive souls like myself, requiring either the brashness, fawningness, or military bark I lacked. You are constantly dealing with self-conscious, obnoxious teenagers like oneself but to whom one had to pander, cajole, or plead in order to get a decent pic. Somebody in the group would always be secretly giving the finger, have their eyes closed or fly unzipped, or, my favorite, “Too bad Percy couldn’t've made the photo session.” The captions to my pictures were getting longer and longer anyway, viz: “You’ll never guess what happened 30 seconds before I took this picture.” I lost my Pentax in an airport and thus began my long, blessed and oft-cursed career as rock writer, first as a journalist, then as a rock-dog-on-the road anecdotalist–Ah yes, I well remember the time Janis and I were kidnapped in Kansas City–then as a rock biographer and omnium gatherumist, then as a rock star doppelganger, The Autobiograpy of Marianne Faithfull by David Dalton type of thing.

Steven:   Were there rock writers you admired or that influenced you before you started, or was it too early in the rockcrit game for that?

David:   We were in the first ten seconds. Before us–nothing! I suppose Tom Wolfe was the first great Pop-cult writer, but my own nutty project early on was to link rock mythology with anthropological mythology—i.e., seeing Janis’s self-flaying performances as a parallel to the dismantling-of-their-own-skeleton ceremonies of Igluk shamans.

Steven:   Besides Rolling Stone, what other rock mags did you like to read and what other rock writers did you come to admire as the ’70s rolled along and rock journalism actually became a sort of vocation?

David:   First the fanzines, Crawdaddy, Mojo Navigator, then R. Meltzer, Jonathan Cott, Michael Lydon, then, of course, like everyone else, Hunter Thompson who showed us all how it should be done–not that he wrote about rock but he did write with perfect pitch in the rock-drugs-on-into-the-hallucinated-frontier tongue of fire.

Steven:   Do you prefer magazine journalism to writing rock books?

David:   These are really two different ways of looking at things arising from different phases of my life. When I wrote rock journalism I was younger, I was involved with the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since. I admire my peers still out there at the barricades but also consider it self-deluding. Each era has its own current and you have to be of your age, to have grown into it, to really get it–i.e., you have to be young, have grown up and into the time-spirit of your age, otherwise you are a sort of dirty old man peering through a basement window at children’s playground games. Writing books is now my natural mode. I love it. I love taking forms like biography and just letting my temperament warp the form. I’ve gone from mytho-poetic memoir (“Piece of My Heart”) to fairly straight biography (“James Dean: The Mutant King”) to meta-biographies Mr. Mojo Risin’: Jim Morrison, the Last Holy Fool and El Sid: Saint Vicious.

Steven:   You have written rock bios and written “with” rock icons like Marianne Faithfull, Rock Scully (the flaky, one-time manager of the Dead), and Meat Loaf for their autobiographies. What is the process like–writing with someone as opposed to writing about someone?

David:   More like fiction. Basically you conceive of your subject as a character, and, being rock stars, rock dogs, etc., they already have well-established personae–masks through which they speak. Then you write their stories as if you were writing a first-person novel. You dilute your subject into a literary solution, so to speak, and get high on them (not that I ever have shot anything up–it’s a metaphor, babe). Afterwards one has to have ones brain rewired. Biography is supposedly a more objective form, but I have come to think of it in somewhat similar ways. Proust in an essay, “The Method of Sainte-Beuve,” describes two types of biography: (1) where you weigh the pros and cons of a story, an anecdote, a personality quirk and come to some conclusion; and (2) where you identify with your character. On this point Marcel and I agree–only the second is honest. In El Sid: Saint Vicious I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me (abusively, of course: “You naff, ‘ippie wanker,” etc.) and included this as his diary entries in the book–some of this was from things he actually did say, of course.

The Meat Loaf book doesn’t really count in this category–Meat was going on a U.S. tour that fall and the book had to be written in six weeks on the preceding European tour. Also, working with Meat, who’s a sweet guy, was a little like writing a book with Henry Kissinger (as I imagine it). You got a couple of hours every other day when Meat would recount. There wasn’t much room for mad writing and definitely no fictionalizing, so it was a sobering experience. So, be fore-warned, ye who attempt this genre–your general as-told-to book is far more likely to resemble the Meat Loaf saga than that of the hipster-memoirs of Faithfull and Scully. Living With the Dead (out again this fall from Cooper Square Books with a psychedelic Austin Powers cover) is one of my favorite books because in it we tried to evoke the jumping-out-of-your-skin ecstasy of the times–it’s written not only in the first person but also the present tense–an absolute necessity when recounting acid trips. I think the autobiography and the ‘ghosted’ autobio are great forms when the writer is allowed to wing it. Not too good for one’s ego, though, since, as my principle states, the better you do it, the more invisible you become. I’ve always loved first-person accounts–ie Celine, Pliny the Elder on the eruption of Vesuvius (he died while observing it–now that’s dedication!), the encounter of the French ambassador with the pungent, bawdy, iconic Elizabeth I, Proust’s maid on Marcel in “Monsieur Proust,” and the Duc de Saint-Simon on life at Versailles. Bring us the quivering, freshly-hatched Now from the womb of time.

Steven:   How did the Rock 100 book with Lenny Kaye come about and why did you guys decide to not let readers know which writer wrote the different biographical essays inside?

David:   Jonathan Cott had been asked to do this book, a hipper update of Lillian Roxon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Encyclopedia, I imagine, but didn’t want to do it and talked me into doing it. I immediately went to seek out Lenny’s help. We began with very different writing styles, but–curioser and curioser–we ended up absorbing each others mannerisms–or, as we like to call it, vision. Still, I think it’s pretty obvious which ones Lenny wrote. Lenny really has chops, not only in the godling category (Elvis, Hendrix) but also in the demi-mondes of rock, the garage-bands, the glitterati, the bizarre, and idiosyncratic demons. Lenny’s Mr. Nuggets, after all! Also, foolish mortal, we wanted it to seem to be a Gesamtkunstwerk or the Gotterdamerung of rock, where we, scribbling as lava of the future poured over these histories, fused our souls in a single apostolic voice.

Steven:   Marianne Faithfull seems to me to be the coolest woman in rock music. It’s something about her being so sophisticated yet devilish. What do you think of that assessment?

David:   It’s pretty close. She fused the myth of the decadent Romantic poet with the jaded, hipster rock star in one seamless persona that was so potent it almost killed her (a number of times). I love Marianne. She’s an aristocratic Beatnik. In other words, a hip, literate, post-degenerate rock star who has become the curator of her persona and voice.

Steven:   Tell us about Jann Wenner and your experiences at Rolling Stone.

David:   My theory about Jann is that there are two Wenners (and he ain’t ashamed). There’s the evangelical Jann who started the magazine and Jann the clever business man who jointly started the magazine with him. As Rolling Stone became more successful–and, also, as we moved out of the utopian (and naive) sixties, cynicism reigned, radicalism was mocked, the more extreme projects of social change became clearly unattainable–we grew older, got married, went into rehab, etc. and rock became part of the entertainment industry again (it always had been, but the illusion that it functioned as an independent engine of change was a powerful motivator)–the radical Jann was unceremoniously dumped over the stern of the ship one night by the by now hugely successful captain of industry, Citizen Jann, who owned the steamship line lock, stock, and board of directors. But this whole tale and my befuddled relationship with Jann and Rolling Stone is told in “We Visit Mr. Zeitgeist–Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Jann Wenner” which I have attached as an addendum to this questionnaire.

Steven:   What was it like to interview Charles Manson in 1970 for your Rolling Stone piece with David Felton?

David:   David had worked for real newspapers, I had only written for rock magazines–pretty much only for Rolling Stone, actually. I was, as I said, a rock evangelist, and, like most of my hippie peers (including Jann–who originally wanted to put “Manson Is Innocent” on the cover), I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every long-haired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie. My whole harrowing adventure is told in “If Christ Came Back as a Con Man: Or How I Started out Thinking Charlie Manson Was Innocent and almost Ended Up Dead” in Gadfly–which should be archived at Gadfly. Org, I would think.

Steven:   Did you ever do any rock criticism? I would guess you consider yourself more of a rock writer than critic.

David:   I have always said I’m too confused to render an opinion on albums (or anything else). I also think there’s something inherently elitist in the whole business–well, duh! If someone likes a Kid Rock song, a Dixie Chicks album, who am I to trash it? And, philosophically, it seems irrelevant, if not actually against the democratic grain of rock itself. Most of these critics posit themselves as post-modern hipsters laying down what’s cool and what’s not. You only have to look at back issues of Esquire (or Rolling Stone, for that matter) with their lists of what’s in and what’s out, to sense the pathetic nature of these endeavors. And, really, in the postmodern world we now inhabit there is no bad or good, we are Nietzsche’s progeny–it’s all stuff to be sampled or looked at from another POV-from the Sex Pistols to the Spice Girls.

Steven:   What are your favorite pieces you’ve written?

David:   My novel, Been Here and Gone, also El Sid: Saint Vicious, Mr. Mojo Risin’.

Steven:   Do you read any rock mags today, are there any new, younger writers you like and what do you think of the state rock journalism today?

David:   I occasionally flip through my son’s magazines–XXL, Vibe, Murder Dog, etc., but I don’t think I’m competent enough to judge. The writing is probably better, hipper, even kind of psycho-telegraphic and code-lingo-saturated, and I’m always glad to see that–to watch words morphing. I’ll sometimes see a review in Mojo, for instance, and it reads like a Japanese cyber-punk haiku.

Steven:   What’s up next for David Dalton?

David:   Dunno. Any ideas?

Steven:   If you were stranded on a desert island, what CD would take with you (if you could only take one) and why?

David:   If I had to choose just one it would be Blonde on Blonde. But you’d probably give me a little more latitude than that, and, therefore I’d add the StonesExile on Main Street, for similar reasons to those for Blonde on Blonde–in other words an album that creates a world in miniature, a sort of self-contained planet inhabited by the fantasies that rock projects, and, as with Blonde on Blonde, a species of rock bunker hallucination–the same might also be said of my third choice, Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. It’s not that I play these albums that often. I tend more to perform séances with them. On nights when the moon is dark and little children have forgotten to say their prayers.

Lead on, Bob, into your noirish ghost movie! Blonde on Blonde is an intercortical epic of Beat hipster Tales of Mystery and the Imagination filmed by an androgynous vampire rock star swaddled in fur coats and amphetamines. The recluse who rises from his coffin in the crypt of his house on Bleecker Street accompanied by dwarves and monkeys, gypsies, and thieves. The songs begin in the middle of some already-existing psycho-turbulent scene. Inspired automatic writing–haunted dioramas of the lower depths, drugs, doom, desire, fetishism, mysticism, claustrophobia, exile. His phantasmagoric vision of America like the delirious memories of a deranged Captain Ahab. The cross-country travels of two years before (and the radio geography of his childhood) have become a hallucinatory, panoramic portrait of America. The USA as a mythical place–the road maps of the Beats taken into the black heart of the continent. Images almost telepathically transmitted from some shadowy zone of Dylan’s head. As if while listening to the song these thoughts spontaneously occur to Dylan and you. “If the songs are dreamed, it’s like my voice is coming out of their dream.” Henceforth journeys would be interior explorations–thus the need of drugs to bring out the new hidden reality.

Caught With His Trousers Down: The Ira Robbins Interview 

By Steven Ward (May 2001)

If anyone out there has a million dollars and wants to start a music magazine, please let Ira Robbins know about it. Robbins, the co-founder and co-editor of Trouser Press, has said that a million dollars would be the only way anyone could talk him into running a music magazine again. It’s not that he wasn’t any good at it — in fact, Trouser Press quickly grew from a stapled fanzine with a devoted cult following to a glossy monthly magazine that was as good or better than competitors Rolling Stone and Musician at certain times in their publishing histories. For 10 years, from 1974 to 1984, Trouser Press worked towards becoming the “alternative” magazine of its day — a precursor to the early Spin, back when that magazine was any good.

In the mid-’70s, Robbins, the late Karen Rose, and co-founder Dave Schulps started Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press to start championing English music which the conventional rock press was ignoring. Trouser Press writers and editors went to work, telling the world about the Who, King Crimson and Roxy Music. They did not worship at the feet of ’70s critical darling, Bruce Springsteen. (Robbins said he was never a fan.)

When the magazine folded under financial and cultural pressure (MTV had just started and it was forcefully taking over the Trouser Press niche), Robbins continued his crusade with a series ofTrouser Press record guides. Now into its fifth edition, Robbins’s books have become the standard alternative music guides for music fans and rock writers.

Today, Robbins works in syndicated radio and freelances for Mojo, Salon.com, and other publications.

In the following e-mail interview, Robbins talks about the history of Trouser Press, his favorite rock mags and writers, the problem of being pigeonholed as an “alternative” music critic, and the possible future of Trouser Press on-line.

Steven:   Trouser Press was a rock fanzine you started with Dave Schulps in 1974. The fanzine quickly turned into a professionally done and well-respected rock magazine that was forced to close almost 10 years later in 1984 because of financial pressure. Do you miss putting out a monthly music magazine and do you think you would ever get involved in something like that again?

Ira:   Actually, finance was only one of the factors that contributed to my decision to end Trouser Press in 1984. The music world had changed, music media had changed, the lives of the staff had changed, our audience had changed–all of which conspired to make the original thrill of having a credible forum to do with as we saw fit feel more like a Sisyphean duty to fill up a bunch of damnably empty pages every month.

The emotional rewards, for me at least, had dissipated in the face of MTV’s ability to make new wave bands come alive, with audio and video, in a way we couldn’t match on paper. Part of why we existed was because commercial American radio completely ignored the bands we cared about, and college radio was only beginning to matter in the new world.

MTV, in its early-’80s infancy, lunged for the colorful (read: new wave) and the video-savvy (that meant English, since the U.K. use of video to promote bands on TV was already established, albeit not in such a concentrated way) acts–Adam Ant, Duran Duran, Stray Cats (Americans who had started their career in London), Culture Club, the Cure, Depeche Mode, et al. That wasn’t all we did, but they stepped on our toes a lot.

I was frustrated at our fiscal insecurity and, turning 30 after 10 years of doing Trouser Press and nothing else, I discovered that real life, adult life, couldn’t be postponed indefinitely. Plus there was only so much rejection of the mainstream possible if staying in business was a goal. We unintentionally had a new audience–teenyboppers excited by our coverage of their faves but too young to share our sensibilities and our skepticism: one cover story on Duran Duran that attacked the band’s flaws caused howling letters of disillusionment and anger from kids who just wanted the good news on how cute they were. How could we put them on the cover and not worship them? It made sense to us–a big story is a big story, and a band is a mix of good and bad. Little did we know that no one else thought that way. These days, what serious publication dares think that way?

Which brings me to the question you actually asked–do I miss it? Sure. It was fun to publish completely independent music reportage and criticism. Trouser Press stood for things. Our readers thought of us as a friend with strong opinions. We clearly favored cool bands over old-hat stooges, but we had a real respect for veterans and their complex careers. We (I) loved Cheap Trick, the Who, Roy Wood, Sparks, Todd Rundgren and the Clash. We (I) hated Bruce Springsteen and all the manly Americans who bellowed rather than sang. We thought Patti Smith might be over-rated, and we couldn’t cope with L.A.’s hardcore punk (a generational failure, no doubt). But we had a huge soft spot for the enigmatic charmers in the Residents.

It was all seat-of-the-pants, idiosyncratic, irreverent self-indulgence, but it was wonderful fun. It sucked getting dicked around by record companies, advertisers, distributors and all the rest. I took it all personally–I can vividly recall arriving full of enthusiasm and optimism to our 13th floor office on 5th Avenue on many occasions only to discover that the morning’s mail contained a few bucks in checks on days when the rent, or payroll, or a $20,000 printing bill was due. It wasn’t just the money, really, it was the feeling of powerlessness, that the enterprise we put so much of our lives into could so easily be derailed by another company’s incompetence or bankruptcy, or the record industry suspicion that print advertising wasn’t of any real use to them. It was a tough and lonely battle, externally and internally, and we didn’t learn until it was over how many people we were important to.

Having started out so small and informal, we never grew into a well-run organization–although we got our work done and seemed on top of things, how we did it was always pretty slapdash. When I look back at the old issues, they look and read better to me than I remember them from the creative side. It was that kind of experience–hard to watch the food being prepared but tasty once it got on the table.

So, yeah, there are parts of it I miss. But after it was over I was able to regain friendships that were seriously challenged by working together, and that means a lot to me to this day. I look back and see how well Spin did after we quit–not that the two are in any way connected, but if we’d had some of their money and a bit of encouragement, maybe we could have become a much bigger deal than we ever were. When I decided I’d had enough, I looked around for a buyer, had an accounting firm groom us for a sale, and there were no takers.

I’m glad to have done Trouser Press and glad not to be doing it anymore. Sometimes you have to know when to leave what you’ve done frozen in time and let others carry on. Fortunately, the Trouser Press books–which we started doing in 1983, while the magazine was still up and running–provided 15 added years of continuity for me, the magazine’s name and its ethos.

Would I do it again? I’ve always said if someone wanted to put up a million bucks, providing the business acumen and leave me alone to be the editor, I’d love to run another music magazine. Our slow but steady approach to business was fine in some ways, but a lack of initial capital was ultimately fatal, dooming us to be a small-time operation even when we might have done a lot more. I was never a businessman, and we were never able to get past print-it-they-will-read idealism. Successful magazine publishing, I discovered, involves a lot more than a good editorial “product”–it needs a marketing push, professional salespeople, distribution expertise, muscle, resources and management discipline–none of which we ever had. Oh well.

Steven:   For those who don’t know, Trouser Press was started because you wanted to cover bands that mainstream rock mags were ignoring. That turned out to be a lot of British rock and progressive rock bands in the mid-70s. As time went on, non-mainstream acts turned into the punk/new wave/alternative wing. During the magazine’s last few years, did you consider yourself or the magazine a champion of “alternative” bands or just scribes who were chronicling the bands that were non-mainstream?

Ira:   It’s nice of you to use the verb “champion,” since that is exactly the reason why we put out the magazine. At the outset, our view of what mainstream rock magazines were overlooking included history as well as obscurity, so we latched onto the past (namely British Invasion bands) as well as pub rock, prog-rock and assorted marginal artists few publications cared about. But we were hardly doctrinaire about it. (As you may recall, both Genesis and King Crimson were considered prog bands at the time.) In the first two years (12 issues) of what was initially known as Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, we covered the Who, Mott the Hoople, Todd Rundgren, Peter Frampton, Steve Harley, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, the Rolling Stones, Status Quo and Roxy Music–among others.

Confession: As the mid-70s wore on, we found ourselves covering bands we knew we were supposed to care about but actually didn’t (privately, we referred to them, using a bit of borrowed British slang, as “wallies”). I was opposed to making too much of the New York underground scene we all loved and took part in, because we didn’t want to be seen as locally obsessed. It wasn’t as if bands like Blondie or Television or Talking Heads would ever escape the Bowery (as I foolishly believed) and be able to be heard by anyone outside the metropolitan New York area. (Bear in mind that most CBGB/Max’s groups never released any independent records, and major labels were very slow to come calling. Then came the deluge, and in retrospect we quickly found out how naïve that view had been.)

Flash forward to the early ’80s. New wave had become new romantic; the class of ’77 was either dead or digging itself into a rut of decreasing quality and originality. The pop stars we could stomach–Adam Ant, Go-Gos, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, Madness, Squeeze, Stray Cats–were just that, pop stars, which made them less emotionally rewarding to champion. U2, R.E.M., Blondie and others were numerically significant AND good, but there weren’t enough of them for a monthly. So, yes, in a sense we were phoning it some of the time, and that hypocrisy really made us lose enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. Meanwhile, we were somewhat removed from the indie rock stuff that was exciting–the Dead Kennedys, Neighborhoods, X and Pere Ubu were cool by us, but Black Flag was really not appealing to me musically in 1982. They sounded like the era we’d just come out of, minus the insight and credibility. (OK, so I was wrong about that, too.)

Steven:   For better or worse, when I think of a rock critic who specializes in new wave or alternative music, I automatically think of Ira Robbins. Do you think you have been unfairly tagged with that title or do you think the connection is an apt one?

Ira:   Unfair but hardly unwarranted. My musical interests, taste and areas of expertise, I’m happy to say, extend further than A Flock of Seagulls to the Butthole Surfers, but I suppose we all have to be typecast for something, so I can’t really complain. (And I did title the first Trouser Press book a “guide to new wave records,” so who am I to quibble?)

Long before there were skinny-tie bands, I was devoted as a fan and journalist to the Who. (When I handed Pete Townshend a copy of Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press #3, the second issue of ours to feature his band on the cover, in 1974, he took it to be a Who fanzine rather than a generalist rock magazine.) I’ve cared about Bob Dylan, blues, soul, folk music and British rock of the ’60s my whole sentient life–one of my best recent CD purchases was an old Canned Heat live album I had worn out on vinyl. Glam/glitter is also a favorite era of mine (Roxy Music/Slade/T. Rex), and I also love old-school hip-hop, Blossom Dearie, bluegrass, smart singer-songwriters and Humble Pie.

I would hate for people to assume, based on my writing and editing work, that I woke up in the mid-’70s, decided the Vapors were the bomb and never gave it another thought. By the time Elvis, the Pistols, Clash, Stranglers, Vibrators, Damned, Buzzcocks, Pere Ubu, Devo, etc. crossed my radar, I’d been a professional music journalist for five years and a devoted rock and roll fanatic for 15. And I’ve kept involved, active and enthusiastic to this day. I’ve co-produced a J. Geils compilation, written liner notes for Yardbirds reissues and the Electric Light Orchestra box set, reviewed the Broadsides collection and done a lot of other things regarding music–all because I wanted to.

Steven:   Tell me about your favorite rock magazines in the early ’70s. What were you reading before you started Trouser Press and what rock critics were your favorites? Which ones influenced you?

Ira:   I have trouble recollecting exactly what I was reading in those days, but I can tell you with some surety that future Dictator Scott Kempner turned me on to Creem in high school, and I found that very inspiring. I was desperate to write for it, and sent them a couple of pitch letters/spec submissions which elicited encouraging scrawled notes (in red pen, as I recall) from Lester Bangs. But my classmate Hank Frank was the first to get a record review–of a Sparks LP, I think it was–published. I was green with envy! By 1971, I was buying Melody Maker and subscribing to the New Musical Express (which came months late, via sea mail, rolled into a baton-like tube). In 12th grade, future TPco-founder Dave Schulps and I would read it furtively behind the large fume-gathering hoods on our desks in an elective chemistry course at Bronx Science that year. I had readHit Parader and 16 Magazine occasionally as a kid. (I recall how the late 16 editrix Gloria Stavers, a fascinating and wonderful woman who we later persuaded to write a Doors article for Trouser Press, would manage to slip names like John Coltrane and Al Jackson Junior into her pages, along with ads, for some instrument company, that pictured Frank Zappa–and you thought it was all the Monkees and Man From U.N.C.L.E.!) Creem was a revelation. Rolling Stone meant nothing to me (unless the Who was on the cover), and continued not to for years–I only got interested when my ambitions as a writer grew to see it as a magazine I’d like to write for. (Which I had.)

The magazines that really led to our thinking about Trouser Press were ZigZag (genealogical history, not an incomprehensible enthusiasm for the wrong kinds of American rock), Crawdaddy (general excellence), Bomp! (record collecting and discographies), Phonograph Record Magazine (serious and entertaining scribing), Alan Betrock’s Rock Marketplace (the mail auction ad business of which we took over when Alan folded it to launch New York Rocker–this was before Goldmine became the ne plus ultra of that realm), Let It Rock and of course the British weeklies.

Dave Schulps and I discovered that the New York Public Library owned a collection of Melody Maker, going back for decades, on microfilm. Dave had this idea of researching British rock using them, so we spent untold hours at the Lincoln Center library, going cross-eyed and seasick as the scratchy old images raced by, writing down every British musician we could find reference to, which bands they had been in, and when. Dave came up with a coding system for instrumentation which I use in note-taking to this day: G/V/K/Y/B/D–guitar, vocals, keyboards, synthesizer, bass, drums–etc. We would write this stuff on sheets of notebook paper, listed vaguely alphabetically, by musician’s name, and attempt to put their careers in chronological order. Then we would go to the stores that sold cutouts and look up the names on records’ back covers to see what we could add to our knowledge base and our record collections.

Dave–who I hasten to add turned me on to the Bonzo Dog Band, Roxy Music, Sparks and a whole of other profoundly formative music–was a fiend for this stuff, and we both learned a lot of bizarre details we would later trot out at interviews and frequently shock subjects with the extent of our knowledge of their careers. (The same idea later became a series of books called Rock Record. But we did it first.)

Steven:   If guys like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus were considered academics and Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer were considered gonzo writers, would it be fair to say that the stuff you were doing–and your writers at Trouser Press–was more historical stuff. Maybe like Lenny Kaye and Greg Shaw were doing at the time?

Ira:   Only at the beginning. As TP went along, especially when the underground scene and new wave started making contemporary music good and exciting again, our emphasis on history faded out. When we started, in 1974, glam was mostly done and there really was a lull in innovation and novelty. So history made us feel like we were doing something valuable–anyway, it was how we learned about music, and we were thirsty for info on what had gone before (in the ’60s, at least. There wasn’t much a whole lot of acknowledged pre-Beatles enthusiasm in our house.) But once things in the music world got good, history started feeling musty and ass-backwards as a journalistic ideal, so we downplayed it. But we never cut it out completely.

At the outset, we were fans who recognized that there was a lot we didn’t know. We weren’t serious record collectors (a joke around our place was to say “The more you pay, the better it sounds” as recognition of how out-of-touch serious collectors could get about music as artifact, not art), but we were devotees of rock history who also loved contemporary music. Lenny Kaye was certainly a hero of mine–his liner notes are responsible for my ever-since obsession with Eddie Cochran–and so was Paul Williams, although I wasn’t as fully aware of his work. Most of the music writers I admired were English–Nik Cohn, Roy Hollingworth (who I buttonholed in a champagne-induced stupor, mine if not his, at a legendary Hawkwind after-show party in NYC in ’73 I think it was), Nick Kent, Pete Frame (who became a pal and contributor to TP), Mick Farren (ditto).

We were completely clueless when we started Trouser Press. There were three people involved–me, Dave and the late Karen Rose, who Dave and I met at a guy’s house in Yonkers. We were into the Who. She was into Jeff Beck. We all knew a couple of people and inveigled them into writing for the magazine. The two cornerstone pieces we got under our belts in the first year were a huge multi-part Yardbirds history by a great guy Karen knew or met called Ben Richardson and a fine Animals retrospective by Dave Fricke, who was still living in Philadelphia and was writing for a local weekly. My dad knew his dad through the stamp business, but we met Fricke through a friend of Dave’s who helped out with Trouser Press in the very early days. I met a Puerto Rican guy who lived on Tiebout Avenue in the Bronx who was into the Beatles and especially their bootlegs.

We did what came naturally, which was to write as exhaustively as we could about the bands and music we loved. Pete Townshend wrote back in reply to the first issue. Lenny Kaye contacted us to say he dug the mag. Dave Marsh looked us up and bought us lunch a year or two in. Kathy Miller, who was a pal of Lester’s and a regular contributor toCreem, as well as a former partner in crime of my first wife, the rock photographer (and NY Dolls fan club co-founder) Linda Danna, wrote some great glam-rock profiles for us.

Dave and I had met Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches at Susan Blond’s office at UA Records when we were both writing for our respective college papers before we started the magazine in early 1974. We sort of knew Meltzer through Scott Kempner (RM actually wrote an article for Fusion magazine that was supposed to be about the high school band me, Dave, Scott and Hank Frank had that got so far as “rehearsing” in my parents’ living room a couple of times, perfecting a version of “Do You Believe in Magic” that no one else ever heard us play. We thought we were called Gorilla, but Meltzer changed all the relevant details and called us Hank Frank and the Hot Dogs in the article. We were still thrilled.) At UA, where he and Tosches were furiously bagging sealed, un-punched promos they could sell, R.–who remained a personal hero of mine until his insane and juvenile screed about Jon Tiven’s decades-old bathroom activities last year–gave us a crucial bit of advice which I remember to this day. (To be honest, I’m completely paraphrasing, since I probably forget his actual words the next day, that’s how awestruck I was.) He told us to make sure you put something in everything you write that’s just for your own amusement, like ending one word with “s-h” and then starting the next with “i-t.” That beats four years in journalism school (something which I never considered) hands down. Thanks, Dick!

We didn’t have any money (the founding capital budget for TOTP was $60 to buy 10 reams of mimeograph paper, a box of stencils and a couple of tubes of black ink), and we had no idea real rock writers were used to working for nothing. We didn’t know any of the name brand writers personally, and were too shy to meet them. (Dave did get chummy with Gordon Fletcher, a Rolling Stone contributor in DC.) We certainly didn’t imagine they’d be interested in our dinky little enterprise, so we got people we knew, or met, or who found us and volunteered to do writing for the magazine. We kind of knew what we liked, so we knew when we were on to good things. Dave and I both did lots of writing–he emerged as one the magazine’s main feature writers once he finished college and came back to New York in 1975–but we were up for almost anything if it seemed credible and worth reading. Within a year of our starting, Jim Green and Scott Isler had joined the staff; Jim as a singles columnist and feature writer (not to mention distribution manager), and Scott as the art director (and editor in training). Both became major contributors to the magazine over the rest of its life.

Steven:   Tell me about your staff at Trouser Press. Did any go on to do bigger things at more mainstream rock mags. For instance, I know Scott Isler went on to do some great stuff at Musician after Trouser Press folded.

Ira:   I’ve always been very proud of our alumni and how they spread into various roles in the industry. Jim Green has written for a lot of publications and done liner notes for Rhino as well as build an incipient acting career. Dave, who now lives in L.A., and I work for the same radio company; he’s done plenty of writing over the years for a lot of different publications in the U.S. and U.K. Tim Sommer, who came to work for us a teenaged intern and stayed to become an indie-rock columnist, has already had several brilliant careers, writing for Sounds, newscasting for VH1, rocking in Hugo Largo, signing Hootie and the Blowfish to Atlantic and so on. John Leland, who was also an indie-rock columnist for TP, was on staff at Newsday and Newsweek, the editor of Details and is now a reporter at the New York Times. Jon Young, who was a contributor for many years, has kept up the good work for numerous publications while working in a real job. Steven Grant, another freelance friend of the family, is a big wheel in the comics world. Joel Webber, our first ad director, co-founded the New Music Seminar, put out some very cool records and became an A&R man at Island Records but died in his early 30s of a congenital heart defect. Steve Korté, our second and final ad director, moved on to an editor’s job at Star Hits magazine and has continued to prosper in other publishing realms.

Steven:   Did you ever have big time rock writers do any work for Trouser Press?

Ira:   Over the life of the magazine, we did publish some big names (Lester Bangs, Pete Frame, Mick Farren, Roy Carr, Gloria Stavers, Chris Salewicz, Dave Marsh), but none of them other than Farren were regular contributors or in any way more than momentarily identified with the magazine. We had some future stars (David Fricke, Kurt Loder, Paul Rambali, Pete Silverton) and some really cool interns (like Fall album cover painter Klaus Castensjold), but by and large we used people we liked. We grew our own.

By the way, although the perception is that women writers were shut out of rock journalism until the post-punk ’80s, we used a lot of women writers, not as a political statement but because they knew their shit and wanted to write for us. Like Creem used to advertise, we didn’t see ourselves as anything special, so we didn’t exclude anybody who could help us. (Plus the magazine was co-founded by a woman.) Toby Goldstein, Marianne Meyer, Karen Schlosberg, MT (Marilyn) Laverty, Kris DeLorenzo, Kathy Miller and Galen Brandt all come immediately to mind, and I’m sure there were others.

Steven:   In connection with the above question, I’ve noticed that you never had guys like Marcus or Christgau write for any of your record guides. The writers are always younger, less-known writers. Was that by design because those writers were more in touch with newer, outside the fringe music or did you want to give those younger writers a chance at publishing some of their music writing?

Ira:   Yes. I don’t like Marcus’s writing at all, and Christgau has his own record guides to do (for which I have, on one or two occasions, loaned him records), so there’s no chance of either of them being involved in a TP book. On the other hand, Neil Strauss, David Fricke, Karen Schoemer, Gary Graff, Greg Kot, Michael Azerrad, Tom Moon, Jim DeRogatis and many other highly regarded, well-established not-entirely young writers have all contributed.

Basically, I’ve always lived and worked outside the rock critic establishment. I’ve never been friends with any of the big shots (except for Lenny Kaye, and Paul Williams, whom I met in the early ’90s) and I’ve never written for them. Nor most of them for me. I started in rock journalism on the outside and have, for better and worse, remained there for most of my career. I’ve never been in the in crowd.

Steven:   What do you think of Bangs and the Gonzo school of rockwrite and Christgau and his more acute approach?

Ira:   Nice but not me. I enjoyed reading Lester when I was a kid; thought his Clash trilogy in the NME was brilliant; rarely believed anything he said but often got a laugh out of the superficial silliness; I don’t suppose, in retrospect, I really understood what he was raving about. I re-read a lot of it when his book came out and was struck by how much I had missed hidden in the blizzard of bluster. Meltzer was always more my kind of loony.

Xgau? I have had both fundamental aesthetic and cultural disagreements with his work as well as enormous respect for it. I suspect that the dean has gone through as much of a growth process as have us mere mortals (though his writing has rarely allowed the possibility of incomplete comprehension or knowledge or insight or foresight, so I can’t say for sure whether he would have ever agreed with that assessment), so maybe it’s more a matter of asynchronous timing than outlook. I was never part of his club–maybe that’s why I didn’t get to be the Village Voice‘s music editor the one time I seriously pursued it. Or it could have been because I didn’t really want to work with someone who had once called me a white supremacist in print.

Steven:   What do you think of rock journalism today? Do you read any rock mags today and are there any newer writers out there that catch your eye?

Ira:   Obviously it’s changed. There’s an astonishing amount of mediocrity in music journalism nowadays–a shocking lack of history and context combined with a congenital audience-pleasing inability to express an independent critical view. I think bad editors have, for good reasons, encouraged a lot of weak writers who have become even worse editors, propagating a downward cycle of incompetence. (That said, the worst editor I have ever worked with was a grizzled old veteran who insisted that everyone should write as incompetently as he did. I tried that for a while but couldn’t hack it and left a very lucrative freelance setup.)

The old values of rock journalism–which, to my mind, are no different than the current values of good journalism in general (like what you see practiced in the New Yorkerunder David Remnick)–have been set aside in favor of a comfortable and profitable collusion between stars, audience and publication. At Trouser Press we always saw ourselves as beholden to no one, and I think that’s largely been lost.

The careerism that emerged once mainstream magazines began covering rock in the ’70s has been a boon and disaster for the field, making it a field one can earn a living in (as opposed to the $10 Creem used to pay, forcing the first wave of writers to live on label largesse and free T-shirts) but encouraging the shallowest of efficient lamebrains who can pitch well and write smoothly but have no original ideas. Considering how many magazines are written largely by freelancers, there’s a major lack of critical depth and strength in a lot of what I read.

Oddly, a lot of the best music journalism is now in daily papers, which once treated pop music like a problem, rather than the music magazines that are devoted to it. I am always happy to read Jon Pareles (by far the finest working critic in America), Greg Kot, Jim DeRogatis, Steve Hochman and Tom Moon, among others. Dave Fricke ofRolling Stone is just as enthusiastic and compelling a writer as he was two decades ago. Tom Sinclair and David Brown both do great work in Entertainment Weekly; I’ve enjoyed Steven Daly’s features in Rolling Stone and Douglas Wolk in the Voice. And while I hasten to note that they are both close friends of mine, I am a big fan of Dave Sprague and Michael Azerrad. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone blindingly obvious. I’ll think of them later.

Steven:   You’ve put out five editions of your comprehensive and intelligent Trouser Press Record Guide. The last edition, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, was published in 1997. From what I understand, you are not working on a sixth edition of the book. Are you going through some kind of withdrawal with no book to work on or is the break a welcome one?

Ira:   No withdrawal. None whatsoever. And I really can’t see doing another, at least not if I have to edit it. Each edition of the book has been harder to do than the previous one, and while I am a glutton for that sort of self-abuse, at this stage of life I’ve actually come to my senses. The amount of work, stress and concentration they require, editing and writing five of these books has done enormous damage to my personal life and psyche, not to mention my ability to earn a living. And the travails of working with a book publisher presents far more frustration than I can endure any longer. The fifth edition, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, wound up taking an entire year, seven days a week, at least 14 hours a day, fighting an impossible self-imposed deadline which I met only to have my publisher waste by bringing it to stores after the big winter buying season, which was the whole point of the deadline in the first place.

Steven:   Tell me about what you are doing today. I know you work in radio and your byline crops up from time to time–recently in places like Salon.com and Mojo.

Ira:   In the years since Trouser Press ended, I’ve alternately freelanced and worked three real jobs–as an editor at Video Magazine, the pop critic and music editor of (New York) Newsday and, for the past four years, as the editorial director of MJI Broadcasting, a radio syndication company in New York. I oversee a department that provides music and entertainment news to commercial stations all over the country. As you note, I’ve done some pieces for Salon, a Television feature and a Joey Ramone obituary forMojo, some book reviews for the Hartford Courant and assorted other things when the mood has struck. I’ve also written reviews on and off for Rolling Stone, done stuff forEntertainment Weekly and liner notes for a big Rhino project. I know for a lot of people I’ve gone invisible, but I’m still here. Freelance writing for a living is hard–not just financially, but emotionally and ethically–so I do it now for the fun and exercise, writing for people I like who ask me or give me room to write about things I care about.

Steven:   Tell me about the future of Trouser Press on-line?

Ira:   The site was originally created as a partnership with Sonicnet - I had the “content,” the brand name and the ideas, they had the electronic know-how and resources. It started well but didn’t really go anywhere, and after a series of corporate fish-eating exercises, Sonicnet ended up as part of MTVi, which without any warning or notice near the end of 1999 simply took the site down. They were very nice about giving it back to me, but it took most of a year to get all the registrations transferred etc. So now I have the site back, and have been toying with the next move. There’s the possibility of working with another web site that has expressed interest in a new partnership, or I’ll do it myself. But I’m discovering that to do what I think it should be–all of the contents of the five Trouser Press Record Guides, with some sort of updates for important new releases, plus some archival stuff from old issues of the magazine–is more than I can really do on my own. So I’m kind of mulling and plotting and fiddling with. No timetable. A lot of folks have expressed interest, which is both nice to know and kind of encouraging me to get something done, but I want to do it right, and my available time to devote to it (not to mention web expertise, of which I have very little) is limited.

Steven:   Finally, what is your favorite record of all time. If the question is too hard, how about a top five list?

Ira:   After 40 years of listening to music as a hobby and a profession, I can’t see any way to select one record as a clear favorite, since each one I love means something different to me, stimulates a different part of my being. It would be more practical to name the musical artists who have meant the most to my life. I guess they would be…

The Who, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis Costello and the Clash. And Roxy Music, Cheap Trick, the Bonzo Dog Band, Creation, New York Dolls, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Television Personalities, Velvet Underground, Small Faces, Muddy Waters, the Move, Sam Cooke, Eddie Cochran, Bill Monroe, Marvin Gaye, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

glenn mcdonald’s War Against Rock Criticism

By Steven Ward (June 2001)

glenn mcdonald is one of the most important rock critics working in the field today, though maybe “working” is not a good word; he does not get paid a cent for his insightful and very personal journalism.

If I could only chose the writing of one rock critic to bring with me to a desert island, glenn would be my first choice. (You see, I would have access to all the CDs I want on my desert island and glenn could help me pick and choose.)

Even though some publications have invited glenn to contribute, he won’t do it. A Boston-area software designer, mcdonald prefers to slave away at his computer every Wednesday night and create his fiercely independent, weekly on-line music column, The War Against Silence. No editors, no advertising and no compromises. This may be unheard of in today’s state of music journalism, but it is being practised week in and week out by mcdonald.

You know the pure joy and emotion you can feel after listening to a piece of music? Remember how you used to feel the same way after reading a piece of rock criticism? The kind of writing that made you want to go out and buy a record? Not because it was cool but because the writer made you feel like the record in question was just perfect for you. Something you would just love.

The writing of glenn mcdonald will make you want to go out and browse the aisles of your favorite record store. He still gets a jolt from the thrill of discovery when buying CDs. glenn’s writing will make you want to rediscover that jolt as well.

During the following e-mail interview, mcdonald talks about his column and music writing in general. His take on rock criticism may be the freshest slant that’s ever been published at rockcritics.com. But don’t take my word for it — read on…

steven:   For those that don’t know, you write a very personal online music column each week about CDs you have recently got hold of. Although your columns are very autobiographical in nature, you never let that aspect grab hold of describing the music and what it sounds like. That’s one of your strengths in my opinion, always writing about what the music sounds like as well as what it means to you. Do you agree with that assessment and is it that way by design?

glenn:   Well, I do believe that music reviewing is, at its core, a service industry, or at least it has been historically, or at least it should have been historically. We ought, I think, to have been trying to help readers find music they might enjoy, and to do that we needed to find a way to tell them enough about a record, in terms they could understand and use, that they could make an informed guess about whether buying it was a good risk. We often failed, of course, because reactions to music are intensely subjective and it’s impossible to anticipate when, for example, some particular twitch in a singer’s voice is going to completely alienate a listener who would otherwise seem to be the band’s ideal audience, but in the old world we didn’t have any workable alternatives, so we did what we could. The thing that threatens to render this whole field of endeavor obsolete, however, is that if you’re on the Net you now don’t really need to have music described for you. Bands put sample songs up on their web sites, the online CD stores often let you listen to snippets of every song on the album, and once the major labels get their post-Napster services running we’ll be pretty close, at least within the major-label domain (which is all most people know of popular music, anyway), to radio-on-demand. At that point, detailed written descriptions of music are superfluous and anachronistic. A couple of “if you like Oasis, you might like Travis” links and some clips, and the listener can just make up their own mind.

steven:   Do you consider yourself a music critic–or a rock critic?

glenn:   Sort of. I think the sad truth is that most people writing about music didn’t agree with me about the first purpose of doing so, even in what are now becoming the old days. Far too much criticism tries to be an arbiter of value, in addition to, or even instead of, describing the music and letting the reader/listener supply their own response. Witness the grades and star-ratings nearly everybody puts on their reviews. There’s no such thing as “a B+ album” or a three-and-a-half-star album or whatever. Value is not an internal property of a work of art, so to me grading a record is not just inane and offensive, it demonstrates a profound misunderstanding about how people react to art. An album could be an A+ to one person, on one particular day, because it delivers a completely perfect encapsulation of everything they’re currently asking for from music, but to somebody else, with different needs and prejudices, the same album could be absolutely awful. To the same person who loves it today, it could be merely mediocre three years from now. Real responses to art are complicated and mutable, with all kinds of dependencies and ambivalences and reservations. If you think your job, as a listener or as a critic, is to stamp a C on something, or an A for that matter, all you’ve succeeded in doing is impoverishing your own experience of the music, or if you’re unlucky enough to be influential about it, impoverishing some other people’s experiences of it, as well.

Of course, there’s still the other traditional role of the “critic” (as opposed to the “reviewer”), which is to try to place the work in some sort of larger context, and/or analyze it in a deeper way than a casual, under-informed listener is prepared or willing to, and thus get at some notion of artistic merit, which at least in theory is separate from the question of how valuable it is or isn’t to any particular audience. This can be done with music, but a) almost no popular music criticism actually amounts to this, and b) I don’t even think it would be very interesting if it did. It’s probably possible, for example, for a group of reasonable, knowledgeable people to agree that The Joshua Tree is a work of high artistic merit. It’s a technically proficient implementation of a distinctive and influential aesthetic with a complex and intriguing heritage. But so what? It still may be too slow for you, or too pretentious, or not sexy enough, or any of a hundred other things that mean when you listen to it, your skin crawls, or your attention wanders.

So what’s left? Why write about music at all? I think the worthwhile thing you can still do, and on a good week this is what I’m intending to do in my column, whether I succeed or not, is write about how music moves you, about the ways you find to connect with it, and how you contrive to allow it to affect your understanding of the world, or yourself, or break-ups or gender-politics or the Civil War or something. You can be an object lesson in how to have a more rewarding relationship with music.

steven:   You are not on any record company mailing lists. You buy everything you write about. Why is that? It seems to be some sort of statement of purpose or intent.

glenn:   To be totally precise, I do occasionally get given CDs. I turn down all submission requests, and there’s no mailing address on my web site, but I’m not opposed to gifts from friends, and there are a few people who I’ve become friends with as a result of writing about their music. But in that case it’s a personal matter. Getting boxes of free crap in the mail from strangers, which I thought sounded like paradise when I imagined it as a kid, in the end doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like buying music. It’s my favorite thing to do with money. I like pacing up and down the aisles of record stores, I like coming home and unwrapping the week’s pile of new CDs, I like knowing that my money is part of the reward system for the people who make these records. I might feel differently if I couldn’t afford it, but I’ve got a decent software job and at this point my music-buying is gated by listening time, not money. Which is, in turn, an even more important reason not to get crap in the mail: I barely have time to listen to all the music I purchase for my own reasons. The last way I want to spend that time is putting on albums I didn’t ask for or anticipate and probably, statistically speaking, won’t enjoy. Plus, if somebody sends me something I feel obliged to at least respond, and I really hate writing notes of the form “Sorry, I know you poured two years of your life and soul into this work of art, but I turned it off after three songs because it seemed totally mundane and I don’t think you’re actually a very creative person.”

steven:   What kind of feedback do you get from readers and who do you think your audience is exactly?

glenn:   I get some very intense, emotional feedback, I think for a couple of reasons. One, I write about a lot of fairly obscure bands that don’t get much other coverage, and that certainly don’t otherwise get the kind of detailed attention I give them, so there are quite a few bands for whom my reviews are kind of the definitive treatments by default. If you’re used to being ignored, either as somebody in one of these bands or someone who follows them, it can be pretty cathartic to discover that some stranger in Boston has actually sat down, listened seriously to this record you’d started to think nobody else had even heard, and tried to explain why it’s special. The bigger reason, though, and the source of the most harrowing, confessional feedback I get, is that I do write about myself, and my own fears and hopes and epiphanies, in the course of writing about the music. Some weeks I’m much more of a diarist than a reviewer or a critic, and I think for people who want their lives and their music to mean something, my struggles sometimes resonate.

steven:   Where did the title of your column come from–”The War Against Silence”?

glenn:   It doesn’t have an exact meaning, but I think it’s some kind of a combination of my war against the absence of what seems to me to be the essential personal element from most other music criticism, and music’s war against the inertia of quiet, and perhaps an oblique acknowledgement that at times both of these may be misguided fights. But that makes it sound like I devised the name for the column, and in fact it basically happened the other way around: the phrase occurred to me, and I immediately realized I had to start writing a weekly music review column so that that could be its title. I’m being only slightly facetious. I’d written a lot of reviews before starting the column, all in the form of a book that was meant to be my answer to the Trouser Press and Rolling Stone and Christgau guides, but in its first draft, at least, which is as far as I got in the first year and a half, it wasn’t really comprehensive enough to be a reference work, nor personal enough to be anything else. I wrote it in 1993 and part of 1994, and at the beginning of 1995 I was planning to start on the second draft, incorporating reviews of all the new music I’d found since the first one. When I sat down with it again, though, I realized both that interpolating several hundred new records into the existing organizational structure (it was ordered associatively, not alphabetically) was going to be a logistical nightmare, and that doing so was almost certainly not going to change an unpublishable book into a publishable one. A weekly column was a way out, a way of reducing the problem to something I could fight one small battle at a time.

steven:   Does the writing ever become a chore and does it ever take away the joy from listening to music for pleasure?

glenn:   Not so far, in the first 330 weeks. It’s a physical ordeal at times, since the block of time I have for writing the column is Wednesday nights, which usually means I start writing around 8pm and finish far into the morning, trying to proofread while my vision is blurring from exhaustion. On a good week I go back to work Thursday morning with four hours of sleep. On a bad week, one or two. But the writing itself is necessary to me. It’s part of my process of listening, and I’d do it even if nobody were reading. I started writing that book because I went to my shelves one day to get an old Hunters and Collectors record to listen to, and realized that there were three of them and I couldn’t remember how they were different. The thought of all this music entering my life, affecting me, and then vanishing again, without leaving some kind of trace, terrified me. If my memory were better, maybe I wouldn’t need to do this, but it isn’t, and I don’t know of any better way to store these experiences.

steven:   Tell me about your music writing influences–favorite rock critics and magazines you read in your formative years and what music critics, writers and magazines do you like to read today?

glenn:   I didn’t read about music in my formative years. Up until I started working for a living, I never had enough money to buy more than a small fraction of the records I knew about from radio and friends, so reading about other bands I didn’t have any good way of hearing wasn’t useful. And spending valuable record-money on magazines would have been the height of Pyrrhic ridiculousness. I vividly remember the first time I bought a record because of something I read about it, but it was Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, and I bought it because of an article in some audio-gear magazine about the mechanics of her tape-bow violin. I subscribed to Q for many years, later, but I never liked their smug writing style and basically skimmed it for UK new-release info, and cancelled my subscription once I realized that I could get all the UK info I needed from the net. The only music magazine I subscribe to now is ICE, which obviously isn’t criticism. Most music criticism just makes me angry. Magazines too often try to homogenize their writers, either by restrictions and editing or just by rolling so many of them together that it’s nearly impossible to make sense of individual personalities. I’d rather read about music on mailing lists and discussion boards and random web sites, where people aren’t afraid to care about what they’re saying, and have the luxury of being themselves.

steven:   Have any famous or professional rock critics ever gotten in touch with you about your writing or opinions about music?

glenn:   Yes, a few have. Most prominently, Christgau once mentioned my positive review of Paula Cole’s This Fire in the course of writing her off as worthless. I voted in the Pazz & Jop for the first time this year, and did this Critical Alignment Ratings analysis of the poll, afterwards, that you’ve got a link to on your site, after which I heard from a lot of other voters. I’ve had offers to write reviews for four or five real outlets, depending on your definition of “real”, but I’m pretty attached to my independence, and the prospect of writing a few one-off reviews for the Village Voice or the like is not very appealing. I’m not going to do that instead of writing my own column, and there are too many other things I want to do with my time for me to do it in addition.

steven:   I know you love Marillion, Big Country and Tori Amos? Tell me what it is about these musicians that move you and what other bands or artists move you?

glenn:   The other two from my long-standing top-five are Game Theory/The Loud Family and Kate Bush. Kate hasn’t figured into my column very much, since she hasn’t made any new records since I began writing it, but in the other four cases I’ve spent a lot of words trying to say what it is that moves me about each of them. They’re very different cases to me. In general, I think I respond most strongly to thoughtfulness and vivid personal presence. I like to feel that an artist is trying to understand something, and maybe even trying to represent some sort of approach to understanding, not just selling units of entertainment. I react very badly to anything I perceive as insincerity. If I have to choose between melody and rhythm, I’ll take melody. I hate the blues. I hate joke songs. I don’t drink or do any drugs, so I’m not very big on music that’s meant as accompaniment to intoxication.

The next band on my personal chart, after those five, is probably Low, and as live performers Ida, Mecca Normal and Emm Gryner are close behind. I’m an ardent Roxette fan. I love ABBA, the Alarm, American Music Club, Aube, Black Sabbath, Billy Bragg, the Chameleons, Beth Nielsen Chapman, the Comsat Angels, Crowded House, Del Amitri, Emmylou Harris, the Icicle Works, IQ, the Jam, Cyndi Lauper, the Magnetic Fields, Magnum, Manic Street Preachers, New Model Army, Pop Art and Smart Brown Handbag, Runrig, Rush, Richard Shindell, Jane Siberry, Talk Talk, Yes and probably a hundred others nearly as much. I think Alanis is great. I still believe Jewel has some brilliant records in her, although she’s trying very hard to convince me otherwise. I’ve offered to marry Juliana Hatfield, and to write lyrics for Lita Ford. I don’t have any trouble finding things to be moved by.

steven:   Would you or have you ever considered freelancing for a living or trying to get a conventional job in music journalism?

glenn:   No. I have a horror of screwing up one of the things I love most in the world by trying to make it into a source of income, especially since music-journalism seems particularly ill-suited for that. Software design is a good profession for me, because I’m good at it and I care that it’s done well and I think it matters, but it’s not self-expression to me, so if business contingencies or customer pressures force us to go against my design instincts it bothers me, but I can accept it without feeling like my personal identity is at stake.

steven:   What’s your opinion of the current state of rock criticism?

glenn:   Beats me, I hate most rock criticism too violently to have a very good perspective on the field. It feels to me, from my own limited and subjective experience, like the bulk of mainstream writing about music is just journalism, at this point, and most of the rest of it amounts to a contest to see who can piss on things with the most elegant arc. It seems like everything polarizes into sycophancy or superciliousness. I think it’s incredibly important that there be a intellectual and aesthetic dialog about popular music, but I rarely read anything that seems to be trying to be a part of it. Fortunately, popular music carries on its own conversation about itself, so virtually any insight a critic might have stated, some other record will come along and demonstrate.

steven:   Tell me your favorite five records of all time and an album that you would take with you to a desert island if you could only take one (no box sets please)?

glenn:   As you know if you’ve waded through much of my column, reduction isn’t really my forte. When I did a Desert Island Disk list for my 100th issue, I allowed myself 100 albums and 100 more stray songs. The shortest list I can give you has eight: Tori’s from the choirgirl hotel, Big Country’s Steeltown, Kate’s Hounds of Love, Game Theory’sLolita Nation and Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood, to have one album for each of them, and then Roxette’s Don’t Bore Us–Get to the Chorus!, Runrig’s Amazing Thingsand Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. If I had to call one of these the “best”, it would probably be Spirit of Eden, but that’s an album about quiet and empty spaces, and if I were stranded on a desert island neither of those would be in short supply. Amazing Things is the most life-affirming work of art I know of, but if I were fighting for my daily survival, I don’t think ennui and cynicism would be the issue. If I’m going to be there alone, Misplaced Childhood is too romantic, and Lolita Nation is too similar to what already goes on inside my own head. from the choirgirl hotel, on the other hand, is too alien, and Hounds of Love is too detached. And Steeltown I long ago memorized, so bringing it seems a little superfluous. It’s Roxette, then, by elimination. Which means that when you finally arrive to rescue me, depending on my mood, you’ll either be greeted with an insanely cheerful “Hello!, you fool!, I love you!”, or else a sardonic shrug and “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”

Metal Guru: Inside Mike Saunders’s Brain

By Scott Woods (July 2001)

‘Metal Mike’ Saunders belongs to that unusual breed of species known as rock-critics-turned-musicians, an esteemed list that also includes (most notably) Lenny Kaye, Andy Shernoff, John Mendelssohn, Neil Tennant, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Chrissie Hynde, Greg Tate, Ira Kaplan, and Shaggy. After dashing off a record review in 1968 forRolling Stone — at the tender age of 15, no less (stay tuned for the upcoming bio-pic) — he continued to write for a host of music publications until the summer of 1973, at which point he waved bye bye bye to Jann Wenner and co. because “rock music was over.” (Until the Swedes got a hold of it, that is.)

After a stint in the punk band Vom (with fellow scribes Richard Meltzer and Gregg Turner), Saunders co-founded the Angry Samoans, penning such ageless chart toppers as “Right Side of My Mind,” “They Saved Hitler’s Cock,” and “My Old Man’s a Fatso.” In 1999, he was drawn back into the fold of music writing, and he’s been filing massive critical tomes for the Village Voice — America’s foremost teen-pop journal — ever since.

I didn’t think to ask Saunders my burning heavy metal question, but he answered it for me anyway, and I am eternally grateful.

Scott:   What do you make of the fact that at least three young female performers in the last year have appeared in public wearing New York Dolls t-shirts? (I’m talking about members of Dream, Destiny’s Child, and the Corrs.)

Mike:   That’s a darned good question. It must be because it’s a fairly catchy logo, from the ’70s, and everyone knows the word “New York.” I’m sure the music has nothing to do with it. I’ve seen other acts (in magazine photos) besides just the ones you mention.

Scott:   Have you ever appeared in public wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt?

Mike:   At the start of the ’80s, the basic “New York Dolls” logo (red on yellow, or red on blue) was one of the common 2/$7 record store T-shirts around here (up at the stores in Berkeley) back then, so I had a couple. They got sufficient use to eventually wind up stuffed in a “retired” box somewhere.

Scott:   Are you a band t-shirt sort of guy? Why or why not?

Mike:   I am when they come from the $1 Goodwill store racks. Here’s a quick survey of my closet’s ’90s thrift store acquisitions of that $1 type: four Green Day Kerplunk, four ’80s Bon Jovi (two diff designs), Def Leppard Hysteria tour, two Hanson, an ’80s Belinda Carlisle, a Hammer “U Can’t Touch This,” four or five total of my favorite two NKOTB designs (I must’ve seen several dozen over the years, these were the winners), three of the same Debbie Gibson Electric Youth tour, of course a flock of Poison and Warrant shirts (I’m seeing about eight different plus some dupes), two diff Nelson that are very scary (one of ‘em with the whole “band”), and two Pat Benatar Seven The Hard Way tour. And from the last 12 months: six Spice Girls shirts (of five diff designs), two diff B*Witched, and one Britney. I wish to stress these are only the $1 thrift-store shirts, and of acts whose music I’ve enjoyed at one time or another. I’ve passed on reams of thrift store shirts to friends (by acts I don’t like, or just of shirts I didn’t like the design of).

Chuck Eddy probably has several Def Lepperd in his closet to attest to this fact. Being the one-man-corporation “merchandise” mogul (at my band’s gigs), I’ve dropped a screen of the red “Angry Samoans” logo onto my personal wardrobe’s favorite Spice Girls design (twice), a B*Witched, and a Britney, not to mention an early shirt of a hideously grinning ‘N Sync.

Scott:   In your Radio Disney piece you wrote: “Beatles–better songs; [Backstreet Boys]–better beats.” That’s not very fair to Ringo, now, is it…(please expound).

Mike:   Wow, you are of course right since most Beatles recordings 1963-65 have great beats. I hereby extend my sincere apologies to Ringo in hopes that I can be excused from Traveling Wilburys road crew duty for yet another decade.

Scott:   In “Lester Recollected in Tranquility,” Richard Meltzer wrote that Bangs “even begat a not-half-bad (early-‘70s) clone in ‘Metal Mike’ Saunders.” In lieu of me just asking Richard Meltzer to explain, how do you think he meant? And how would you respond to that?

Mike:   Meltzer’s a lot older than me, or I should specifically say WAS. He was like 26 when I was a 19 year old headbanger in 1971 (saying and writing good things about Grand Funk and Black Sabbath, who at that time weren’t touched with a 20 foot stick by anyone else in the rock prozines except Lester Bangs). So I would interpret this as a piece of older brother – younger brother criticism. Who knows what he meant, since explanation is not found in any of the VOM lyrics (recorded or unrecorded…our set had about 14 originals w/Meltzer lyrics, plus “My Eyes Have Seen You” and “Louie Louie”).

Scott:   Did you ever go through a period where (like Meltzer, and maybe Bangs too) you felt that writing about rock was a dead-end, a waste of time?

Mike:   Actually I had a double whammy moment, and a formal “drop out” point in time that was 12/31/73. My favorite rock bands had all tanked in America (commercially)–Stooges, Slade, New York Dolls, Raspberries. Plus by that late moment in time all the rock prozines sucked–Creem and PRM were both pretty lame by this point (PRM changed format around the end of 1973). Like a lot of other fans, I kinda thought rock music was over, kaput. (Let it be noted that the following year 1974 was the end of the UK “glitter rock” chart scene, with every manny, moe & jack scraping the charts, usually pretty dire musically…not to decry Mud’s eternal genius on “Tiger Feet” and “Rocket.”) So I wrote a half-page short on (Ohio hardpop-rock act, ok album on Mercury) Blue Ash in PRM‘s “year end roundup,” with the distinct notion that this was the last thing I was ever gonna say re: “rock music” in the prozine press, not that anyone was counting or keeping track anyway, and my comments were real negative (re: the state of “rock music”). Sure enough, 1974 was by far the worst year for rock music of the entire ’60s or ’70s. I became an ABBA fan and didn’t write a word in a national prozine for 25 years.

Scott:   Is teen-pop your way out of this (supposed) dead-end?

Mike:   Actually, Chuck Eddy contacted me a good 25 years later (very early 1999) and asked, “hey, are you interested in writing something on B*Witched?” Since I already had both the non-LP CD-single track and the 12″ with both dance remixes and the mega-mix medley, as a plain old consumer/music fan, I apparently fit his qualifications to become one of his pop-music hitmen. The fact that I euro-dance “pretty ok for a white boy” is just a bonus.

Scott:   Do you think rock critics are more–or less–attuned to what’s happening in bubblegum and teen pop now than they were 30 years ago?

Mike:   Boy, when I see the lists of what “rock critics” listen to, I have no idea what planet they’re on. Over the last 60 days in April-May 2001 I identified (and acquired the CD-singles of) songs I really liked by Sarina Paris (dance hit “Look At Us”) and Finnish act Tik N Tak (singles “Upside Down,” “Don’t Turn Back”) by trolling the contents of a teenmag named BOP! that recently shifted to all-music coverage. I gather the “rock critics” were busy listenin’ to Radiohead or Lucinda Williams…

Scott:   Would you agree that punk rock made it even more difficult for critics to pursue writing about radio pop and bubblegum? Did punk kill this stuff off in the rock crit voice?

Mike:   Actually I found it even dumbfounding at the time how lame both the mags and writing were in the “overground” music press during the 1977-82 era…i.e., New York Rocker, Trouser Press, ZigZag, etc. The last time I ever felt there was some kind of “rock crit voice” was during the NME era of Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray…During that 1973-1977 stretch I read NME avidly (subscribed) and really thought it a well-edited rock mag, no small note considering that I am about the ultimate anti-Anglophile. (Me like Grand Funk, James Gang etc., don’t own a single tune by can’t-rock weenies the Clash and Elvis Costello.)

Scott:   Who are the best editors you’ve worked for–and what is/was so good about them?

Mike:   Greg Shaw and Marty Cerf at Phonograph Record Magazine were very good, enthusiastic and didn’t mess much with your basic copy or content. Jon Landau as “review editor” at Rolling Stone had to continuously apologize for what their “copy editor” back in San Francisco did to his record review sections he submitted bi-weekly…writers’ copy was hacked and mutilated to the point where it was often unrecognizable. I never wrote much forCreem ’cause it was disorganized and unprofessional beyond description during Lester (Bangs)’s time there as “review editor”…he chronically assigned things that didn’t run/never saw print, i.e., solicited far more reviews each month than saw print, it was a big mess. I kinda had the minority opinion thatCreem was great for about a year, mid-1970 to mid-1971, then had to “sell out” to commercial considerations when they went to a slick cover in Fall 1971…for me as a reader the magazine pretty much sucked after that point in time. For instance, they never ran an article on the Dictators in ’75 (i.e., Girl Crazy), I mean how retarded was that? It was pretty much unanimous in rock fandom at the time that that was one of the best and most important rock albums ever made. 35 years later we’re still listening to babble bout how Bob Dylan revolutionized rock lyrics (in 1965) (always sounded like a folkie on speed with dubious taste in backing musicians to me, but I like the songs anyway); well, the Dictators did that in an entirely different 360o (degrees). For us musical boneheads that don’t understand “poetry,” “Master Race Rock” and “Two Tub Man” were inspiration to write dumbass lyrics and be proud.

Back to “music editors,” Chuck Eddy in modern times is a near genius. What Chuck does with the stuff I’ve written for him, is take the “formal copy” plus all related (informal) e-mails, then cut and paste the two animals together, and then reshuffle some more while adding some catchy phrases or adverb clauses I didn’t think of. Since the funniest stuff is always in long forgotten e-mails, I never know what I’m going to see when something appears in published form.

Scott:   Can you relate any hellish experiences in your dealing with editors over the years?

Mike:   Actually don’t have any. Except for the gruesome things Rolling Stone did to record reviews (see previous explanation) on the “copy editing” end. In the ancient 1971-72-73 days, I didn’t even have a telephone in my $50/mo college garage apartment (with personal bathrom/shower, let it be said), just access to a phone inside the front house…communication from Jon Landau at Rolling Stone came in the form of tiny 1-page memos in the mail. And vice versa.

Scott:   How or why did you start writing about music? Was it a big ambition of yours when you were younger?

Mike:   Actually, it was a complete accident. In 12th grade English class in Fall 1968, one of our weekly “writing assignments” was to write up a “review” of something (TV, movie, stage, music). Being a 15 year-old suburban white boy, fall 1968, of course I was listening hard and heavy to the “blues.” The Small Faces, Procol Harum, and Bonzo Dog Band might’ve been the only rock bands with albums out that year/season that I liked…Beatles, Stones, and Hendrix were utterly useless by the end of ’68, so Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield, and Lightnin’ Slim it was (and also my first introduction to “catalogue” albums, graduating the next year to the catalogs of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, etc.). Anyway it seemed a conspicuous omission to my mind that Rolling Stone (which I got through the mail, it was not available on Arkansas newsstands) had never reviewed John Mayall’s Hard Road album with Peter Green. So I wrote up a review for the English class assignment, and what the hell, never mind that the album was a year old, also sent it in to Rolling Stone (who did not have a “review editor,” but instead a back-page box requesting submissions). They actually ran it, rotten grammar and hyperbole and all (no cash payment). The following spring of ’69, I sent in a review of some album or other I had in hand, and not only did a small cash payment come back, but a note from their first “review editor” ever, Greil Marcus. He was angling for someone to do an interview with (Dylan producer) Bob Johnston in Nashville, and figured Little Rock was a day’s drive away on the interstate system…I had to explain that I was a 16 year old high school senior, and even tho’ possessed a 1966 Chevy Nova had a very tight schedule and a ‘term paper’ to write, etc. So you can see, my motivation to be a Cameron Crowe was nil from the git go.

Anyway, I only wrote a few record reviews during Marcus’s year as editor. When Jon Landau came in in Oct. 1970 as the new review editor, he immediately pegged me as a guy who liked “English pop” (of the Badfinger, Raspberries type) and hard rock/heavy metal. He had a gap in those categories (for reviewers) or something. And actually I’m a little ahead of myself here…it was later in the May 1971 Creem, reviewing the first Sir Lord Baltimore album (released the first week of Feb 1971, just two weeks ahead of Sabbath’s Paranoid, so let’s figure the review of my promo copy was typed up in Feb. in my Univ of Texas at Austin dorm room), that I threw down the phrase “heavy metal” in its first use in the rock press ever (outside of the Steppenwolf lyric) as a descriptive term. Yep, all blame and shame goes to me. That was also the Creem issue where Dave Marsh coined the phrase “punk rock” in a column about seeing a Question Mark & The Mysterians club gig…something was definitely in American’s drinking water that month.

Scott:   How did your relationship with Rolling Stone evolve over the years? Did they have you pegged for certain types or reviews? Were you in their “good books,” so to speak?

Mike:   No evolution, I was a frequent/regular record reviewer only during the long Jon Landau era, fall 1970 – summer 1973.

Scott:   Is ‘Metal Mike’ your own invention? How did that come about?

Mike:   Simple question, Black Sabbath and Grand Funk were parked on my stereo a huge amount of time during the last half of 1971, my junior year at Univ of Texas at Austin. You know how college nicknames go, “Metal Mike” stuck pretty quick, and has never really left the building.

Scott:   How do you think the genre of rock crit has evolved over the last thirty or so years? Are there any essential differences between writing reviews in 2001 than there were writing reviews in 1971?

Mike:   As someone who avidly follows a daft VH1 show like, say, Bands On the Run, it has just occurred to me that that disqualifies me from having a legitimate opinion on anything except, uh, maybe which WNBA team’s gonna win the Western Conference this year. But I’ll be glad to ponder the endless musical crimes and hilarities of Asswhacker, Flickermydickonastick, and Harlot (Soulcracker, Flickerstick, and Harlow to you civilians) with anyone who gives me a beer. I know a helluva lot more about them than about Radiohead.

Scott:   What do you make of DeRogatis’s thesis (more or less) in Let it Blurt that rock criticism has been ‘sold out,’ gone downhill since the early ’80s? Is he onto something with that or is he missing the boat entirely?

Mike:   Whoa, I’d say he’s almost ten years off. On my radar the boat went out to sea waaaay before Duran Duran showed up.

Scott:   What/where are the best things happening in rock criticism right now? What/where are the worst things happening in rock criticism right now?

Mike:   Since I don’t even know which sea the aforementioned boat got lost in, I don’t have the slightest idea what a possible answer to this question might be.

Scott:   How did your stint as a music critic influence your music in the Angry Samoans (if at all)?

Mike:   Didn’t, no cross-influence between the two. You have to remember my original (and favorite) instrument is drums, the non-musician slot of the breed.

Scott:   How has your work in the Angry Samoans influenced the way you write about music now (if at all)?

Mike:   Didn’t, since both hobbies were sort of accidental or incidental in the first place. Playing in a band I got a tiny glimpse into what mind-racking mental torture recording is on the back-end of overdubbed-vocals and mixing, endless decisions of “is this good enough” jammed against a small budget of money and time.

Scott:   What sort of ‘real jobs’–if any–have you held in your life, apart from the Angry Samoans and rock criticism? Have any of these jobs been informed by your writing or your music? (And vice versa.)

Mike:   My ‘real’ career would be 24 years and counting in the accounting profession, since picking up the degree in May 1977. I loaded up my 401(k) and IRA “retirement funds” to such a compulsive degree that two years ago I got the luxury of cutting back to half-time work (to just cover expenses) and have since been living the life of Reily listening to Britney tracks back home at 2 P.M. any day of the week.

Scott:   In an interview in Hangnail, you said: “DO NOT SPEND your time practicing loud music in a small practice space in a rock band–this is bad for your ears. I spent my time instead (for about 23, 24 years) writing songs.” Do you still write songs? And what’s harder, writing songs or writing reviews?

Mike:   Ah, I never really did quite enough volume of “rock writing” to be able to compare the two. Songwriting, though, was something I periodically busted my ass on and eventually wound up with over 1,000 finished rock songs (on paper & tape)–over about 23 or 24 years of work. Music is easier for me than words/lyrics, so the combination of being a solitary writer (by circumstance) doing both ends of the work was really a big headpain at times. I’ll still write a crummy song, or even a good one, anytime a guitar is in my hand, but the compulsive exercise of spiffing it up and then committing it to paper and tape was “retired” at some point after the 1000th song. And yeah, there were a couple albums’ worth of good songs that my band never got around to learning or recording before we semi-retired into the e-z club/hall headlining slot of being an “oldies” act (in the last 4 or 5 years)…which certainly gave LOTS of insight into what it must’ve been like to be Chuck Berry, or the Who, or any other act with a core of 15 old songs that’s all most of the audience is ever gonna be interested in hearing.

Scott:   Did the Angry Samoans get many bad reviews in their heyday? What was your response to them at the time? Did bad reviews sting, or were you prepared for them given your experience on the other side of the fence?

Mike:   American punk rock was mostly verboten from the mainstream press during the ’80s, so as curator of “printed matter” that box was 90% from all the fanzines and oddball magazines. The interesting thing was that when you do albums that are distinctly different from each other, a mere four in our case, the takes on them (in print) in the “career summary” type articles is all over the place. Lot of people/writers even preferred the one (or two) that sucked…or maybe just the style they were in, I guess.

Scott:   Which rock writers have most excited you over the years?

Mike:   Ah, since “entertainment writing” is the dregs of the writing world, I don’t have a whole lot of incisive commentary here. Back with the late ’60s – mid ’70s writers, my favorites were Nick Kent of NME for journalistic ability, and Lenny Kaye for style (his tilt towards a historical bent and a ‘fannish’ tone of voice). I’d agree with Lester Bangs himself that his writing mostly went in the tank after he moved to Michigan and lost his “outsider” perspective. But, ‘Lester Bangs’ is one of the great sounding names of all time, so if they’re gonna canonize a rock writer I can’t think of a better suggestion.

Actually, if you remember that VH1 panel-type show with a handful of writers discussing the topic of the day, there was a guy on there named J.D. Considine (from Baltimore) who was really entertaining, kinda iconoclastic. This past year I noticed a couple talking heads on the current VH1 shows that’re pretty funny and actually from Rolling Stone (usually being asked about pop or rock music…those dopey “Year In Music 2000…1999…1998″ specials).

But if I may render one and one opinion only about rock writing past or present, the funniest and thereby best thing ever written under the auspices of “rock writing” was the original printing of the Paperback Writer book by Mark Shipper (a private pressing, mid-late ’70s). When a major publisher later put it out they cheezed out and deleted or messed up a lot of the hilarious graphics so I don’t recommend the later pressing. For those not “in the know,” the book was a phoney-history of the Beatles culminating in a 1977 Beatles reunion tour/album (that bombs and they wind up opening at the bottom of Peter Frampton bills)

Scott:   If you were going to form a band with some rock critics now, who would they be? And please try and describe the music you would play.

Mike:   If I was in a band with actual “rock critics,” we’d do songs like, “Eric Clapton Sucks” and, “Styx Are The Worst Fucking Band Of All Time,” to the tunes/music of cover songs. I’ve always liked cover songs. Wouldn’t matter who was in the band. You know a song called “Eric Clapton Sucks” played by rock critics is gonna be good.

Scott:   What article or review of yours is your personal favorite; and can you summarize what you were trying to say in it?

Mike:   Ah, easy, the long endless Britney diary-type spread (for the Oops album) in last year’s Village Voice. What it was was, the first 2,000 words were literally culled/chosen by Chuck (Eddy) from a very sizable collection of e-mails and even internet postings (to message boards), me being a quite fixated Britney/Max observer from Day 1. Chuck found/pulled some funny stuff from long-forgotten e-mails that I’d totally forgotten. The last 30-40% of the spread was of course self-consciously written, starting from the single (“Oops”) and “SNL” appearance and pre-album promo…but reading it cold for the first time, like an unsuspecting reader, was really funny (since I had no idea what was contained, and had told ed. Chuck to not show/send any of it to me). My inarguable qualification for being the official rockwrite Britney-head was of course accidentally trolling up (in the local record store 50-cent cassette junk bin) a copy of the Summer 1998 shopping-mall-tour cassette sampler long before the “Baby One More Time” single. I still regard the 6 uptempo cuts from Sweden (on the Oops album) as a milestone in modern pop music, so any Max Martin nay-sayers do not tangle with me.

Scott:   What’s your favorite most pretentious album of all-time?

Mike:   That’s easy, I’d have to go with the first Aorta album (on Columbia, 1969). It’s utterly daft/wack, about everything you would expect or hope for from a Windy City psych-album. It charted for eight weeks that spring, so there’s no reason for anyone not to own a copy.

Scott:   Being in Canada, I’ve never heard Radio Disney. Is it still, a year or so after your Voice epic appeared, as appealing? Do you still hear segues that you would describe as “surreal”?

Mike:   Unfortunately, the playlist got tightened up a lot sometime around the end of Year 2000, with their oldies mix suffering particularly.

Scott:    What are your most sublime movie-music moments? (I’m thinking here of music as ‘soundtrack’ rather than foreground…i.e, not scenes featuring bands playing songs.)

Mike:   This is the one question in this Q/A collection that has me scratching my head, so it’s the one question I’m throwing out. Swear ta god, I keep thinking of the end of Never Been Kissed where Drew Barrymore goes all smootchie to the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” And I liked lots of the music/songs as ‘backdrop’ in last year’s Detroit Rock City…I’d say I’m disqualified entirely from even commenting on music in movies.

Scott:   Favourite version of “The Locomotion”?

Mike:   Kylie’s version is a seriously great SAW (Stock, Aitken, Waterman) production, so I’d have to count hers as a tie with the very different Little Eva original. Grand Funk’s version is only fit to torture people with.

Scott:   Forced to choose on a desert island: Tiffany’s or Tommy James & the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now”?

Mike:   I like ‘em both.

The Grey Lady’s Pop Music Man: Jon Pareles in Conversation

By Steven Ward (July 2001)

Whenever I interview rock writers for this site, I always ask them to name their favorite music critics — writers that make them want to read about pop music. Many of these writers drop the name of Jon Pareles, the pop music critic for the New York Times. Ira Robbins recently called him “by far the finest working critic in America.”

Because of accolades like that, I had to find out for myself what makes this guy so great. I was always a great fan of Pareles’s work at the New York Times. During the following e-mail interview, Pareles talks about his time as a full-time staffer at Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice before taking over for the late and legendary Robert Palmer at the New York Times.

During the course of the interview, I found (as you will) some of what makes Pareles so special. Some lessons fellow critics might learn: never limit yourself to writing about one genre of music; album liner notes contain just as many enlightening ideas as newspapers and magazines; and writing for a newspaper may be more fun than writing for the monthlies.

So sit back and let one of the masters tell you a thing or two about the Peter Pan profession of rock journalism.

Steven:    There was a time when rock criticism was considered a very influential force in popular culture journalism and you happen to be the pop music critic at the nation’s (arguably) most respected daily newspaper. Your music writing obviously reaches many people. Do you think rock criticism is still an influential force today? And what do you see as your mission at the New York Times?

Jon:    Was rock criticism ever influential? I have my doubts. I know it reaches people who care about music and who want more variety, depth, honesty, independence or crankiness than they get from other sources of information about music. (It also reaches some very touchy musicians.) But popular music too rarely informs broader culture journalism. Most of my fellow newspaper writers would probably agree that in newsrooms, rock critics are seen as dealing with mere “entertainment” and “kid stuff”–even when an Eminem album is a more complex cultural artifact than most movies, TV or fiction. And pundits who wouldn’t dream of not knowing about The Sopranos cheerfully flaunt their ignorance of gangsta rap, which has far greater cultural repercussions.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Popular music, sometimes even music that sells millions of albums, can still move under the radar, which makes it so ceaselessly fascinating. If pop culture is society’s id, music is the fastest, most polymorphous, least compromised vision of that id, so it’s strange that more people don’t pay more attention. But hey, it’s not my problem.

Back to your question: I would never call what I do a “mission.” (If there’s anything a fan should learn from rock, it’s not to take yourself too seriously.) My job is the same as any other journalist and critic with specialized knowledge: to see what’s going on, tell the truth about it, offer a judgment and give some sense of what’s behind that judgment. And privately, it’s about figuring the music out for myself. I’m not trying to impose my taste on the universe, since that would eliminate surprises; as Mao Zedong said (though he didn’t mean it), “Let a hundred schools of thought contend.” I just want to provide a vivid account of what I hear and one informed perspective.

At the New Music Seminar one year, when I was wearing a name tag, someone came up to me and said, “So you’re Jon Pareles. I never agree with anything you write.” I shook his hand and was happy to meet him. For that guy, I’m a completely reliable critic; all he had to do was take the opposite of my advice. That’s fine with me. But I’d rather have my record collection than his.

Steven:    Tell me about how you first got involved in the rock criticism business? Where were you first published and how did you wind up at Crawdaddy! in the ’70s?

Jon:    Except for my high school and college newspapers, Crawdaddy! was the first place I was published.

I had always been attracted to music–I have perfect pitch–and started playing the piano when I was 6. I played keyboard and flute in rock bands during high school, and majored in (classical) music for my B.A. at Yale. But I spent just as much time at the radio station, where I became music director, listening to all the new albums and suggesting what songs to play. I also played in a rock band, sat in on flute with some jazz musicians and pealed out music on the carillon, a belltower full of heavy metal (54 bronze bells): acoustic broadcasting. And back in the early 1970s, I got to use the music school’s very early electronic music studio, including an Arp 2600 synthesizer that took up most of the room and was hooked together with patch cords. Getting sounds from it helped me understand a lot of the electronic music to come.

A friend who was also at the radio station, Gary Lucas–a virtuoso guitarist who went on to play with Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley–had written some rock reviews for various magazines, and told me he got free albums. After I graduated, I had a dim idea of becoming a disc jockey, but luckily–I’m so glad I didn’t become a radio disc jockey–no commercial station was interested in my tapes.

I had acquired a serious new-album habit, though, and I had written a few reviews for the college paper. So I thought I’d try to become a writer. In late 1974 or early 1975 I sent out a packet of three reviews to Crawdaddy!, Fusion and Rolling Stone magazines. (I don’t remember if I got names off mastheads or just sent them to Reviews Editor.) I never heard from Rolling Stone, but John Swenson at Crawdaddy! accepted one (of a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross reissue, which came out soon after Joni Mitchell recorded Annie Ross’s “Twisted”) and encouraged me to do more. Fusion was about to fold, but its editor/publisher was starting a giveaway paper for the Boston area (where I was living) with the unfortunate name of PopTop, and he wanted me to write for it. The pay per article was approximately zero, but I did a lot of writing and saw a lot of shows. I later wrote a few columns for the Real Paper, an alternative weekly.

Eventually, Crawdaddy! realized that I was a careful self-editor as well as a writer they wanted to use regularly, and in 1977 they offered me a job as copy editor. This was no longer the beloved magazine founded by Paul Williams but its later incarnation, bankrolled by the editor’s father. Still, there were so few nationally distributed non-teen rock magazines that Crawdaddy! published some fine writers, including Timothy White (now editing Billboard), Mitch Glazer and Charles M. Young, as well as most of the Trouser Press crew. I came to New York for that job and I’ve been here ever since.

It was a lucky time to come to New York: the moment when the city was germinating the ideas that would dominate the next generation. Punk, hip-hop, dance music and art-rock were all new and all mixed up with each other; Philip Glass was playing at the Peppermint Lounge, Fab Five Freddy was rapping with Max Roach at the Kitchen in SoHo. There was always something new to discover.

Steven:    You went from Crawdaddy! to Rolling Stone. Was that exciting and how did you make that jump?

Steven:    I deserted a sunken ship. Crawdaddy! had folded, possibly because its status as a tax write-off had run out. By then, I was the music editor, assigning/editing/proofreading record reviews and front-of-the-book short features. Tim White had already moved on to Rolling Stone, where he had assigned me some stories (including a cover on the Cars) and clearly was praising me to the right people. They needed an assistant music editor, a deputy to Peter Herbst who was running the front-of-the-book music department, and that was my job. Rolling Stone had much snazzier offices and a bigger staff, and felt like a real business. It also felt like an institution, with a lot of people who had longstanding relationships that didn’t particularly welcome newcomers. I learned a lot–watching Jann Wenner take up a cover story, devour it, point out precisely what its unanswered questions were and then jet off to other business–but I didn’t have a lot of say. Or perhaps I wasn’t pushy enough.

Steven:    I understand that you were at Rolling Stone for a very short time. (Maybe a year.) Why did you leave and did you feel like the magazine or its editors at the time did not allow you the space or assignments to strut your stuff, so to speak?

Jon:    Mostly I left for a better job. (Jim Henke, now running the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, took the one at Rolling Stone.) I had been freelancing around New York, including writing for the Village Voice, and when Robert Christgau took a leave of absence for a year to write his Consumer Guide in 1980, I was offered his job temporarily. The Voice had a tradition of treating writers respectfully, and it was a much better written paper then than it is now. Staff writers and regular contributors included hotshots like Tom Carson, James Wolcott, Peter Schjeldahl, Alexander Cockburn (before he got lazy), Geoffrey Stokes and many others, along with smart writers like J. Hoberman and Michael Feingold who are still there. Christgau pushed the music writers to make each review speak to something beyond simply rating an album. The job offered a chance to work with a great stable of writers (Gary Giddins, Tom Johnson, Greg Sandow and freelancers like RJ Smith, Lester Bangs, Nelson George, Vince Aletti and Tom Smucker), to write as much or as little as I wanted and, most of all, to have autonomy. It was supposed to last six months; I think it lasted a year and a half, and it was a wonderful gig.

Steven:    I know you played keyboards for the Rolling Stone ”in-house” band, The Dry Heaves, along with Jann Wenner, Kurt Loder, Timothy White and others. Do you think rock critics should stay away from musical instruments or do you still play today?

Jon:    I don’t think critics should stay away from anything. A critic should learn as much about music as possible, from any angle that seems interesting: music theory, history, psychology, literature, theater, acoustics, religion, dance, anthropology, film theory, pharmacology, economics, fashion, linguistics, electronics, sports, and all the other things that touch on music. Playing an instrument and being in a band help you appreciate what musicians have to learn, how groups make decisions and how songs feel from the inside. It’s one way, though not the only way, to understand how music works.

If critics were forbidden to play, you’d lose some fine music by ex-critics and current critics like Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Ira Kaplan, Stephin Merritt and Sasha Frere-Jones. But obviously you don’t have to be a good musician to be a good critic; there are many other perspectives.

As for me, I spent so much time listening to music and writing that I rarely had the opportunity to play, until I fell so much out of practice that it was hard to listen to myself. I guarantee the world did not lose much of a keyboard player when I became a writer. I still keep threatening to start again, though.

Steven:    I know Robert Christgau’s writing and the man himself had a huge impact on you. Tell me about that impact and the relationship between the two of you.

Jon:    I greatly respect Christgau. He can pack megatons of erudition and perception into one of his famously dense clauses. As anyone who wrote for him can tell you, he’s the kind of editor who always improves his writers: not making them sound like him, but bringing out more clearly what they were trying to say in the first place. Before I was even thinking about writing about music, Christgau was one of the people who were fighting, and winning, the battle to have rock criticism addressed intelligently by writers, and to be read seriously by the kind of people who have discovered this web site.

Sometimes our tastes agree, sometimes they don’t, though his are always backed by a good argument. I share his affection for African music; I’m baffled by his blind spot with heavy metal. And I was thrilled when he lent me his job.

But when I was at the Voice on a daily basis, Bob obviously wasn’t, and I wouldn’t say we have a relationship other than friendly mutual respect. I’m not part of his circle of close friends, or of some imaginary rock-critic in-group. And while I may not be a reliable analyst of my own approach, I’d say a greater influence was the other Robert: Robert Palmer, who brought me to the Times and passed his job on to me.

Palmer was a seemingly effortless, straightforward writer who was always listening to everything: Ornette Coleman, ethnomusicology from Chad, Megadeth, the Five Du-Tones, Pandit Pran Nath, Live Skull and of course the blues. He had an ear for connections; at times, I thought he had what I’d call a phonographic memory, allowing him to cross-check anything he’d ever heard. His way of explaining his musicology sounded natural rather than pedantic, and he got astonishing stories out of the musicians he talked to. Palmer had a taste for the noisy and un-tempered–from the blues to raga, he loved music that couldn’t be reduced to Western notation–that has proved to be extremely durable. And when he brought me to the Times, he was a good example to follow because he was one of the few bylines there (along with Vincent Canby and the sportswriters) who wrote conversationally, not sounding stuffy or taking on an English accent.

Steven:    Sort of in-line with the above question, tell me about your rock critic/music writer influences and your favorite rock magazines that you read in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Jon:    It was never just rock criticism. I’d say the reading that arrived at the most crucial moment was Ishamel Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo, a wild-eyed, hilarious romp through history, myth, race, sex and other things with a direct bearing on music. Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, the great American rock novel, also had a decisive early effect. And all the Dr. Seuss books in my childhood showed me that words were for sound as well as meaning.

I didn’t read a lot of rock criticism growing up. I was too busy with music itself (and other things). Of course Rolling Stone was around, and though I didn’t pay much attention to particular writers, Paul Nelson, Ed Ward, Chet Flippo, Stephen Holden and Dave Marsh certainly sank in. R. Meltzer’s ideas about rock’s irrational genius shaped the way I listen, and I also read Ellen Willis in the New Yorker, though I don’t think I realized just how astute she was until I read the pieces later in her anthology Beginning to See the Light. My main exposure to music criticism was probably through liner notes: Palmer on a lot of jazz albums, Lenny Kaye on Nuggets and John Mendelssohn on The Kinks Kronikles, for instance.

Living in Boston, I read good critics like Michael Bloom and Bob Blumenthal in the Phoenix and James Isaacs in the Real Paper and my fellow fledglings atPopTop, including Steve Morse (now at the Boston Globe), Don Shewey, and Michael Freedberg. But only when I started writing did I start reading rock criticism in any organized way: Rolling Stone, the Voice and good old Creem, then at its comic peak with writers like Lester Bangs and Rick Johnson. That was also when I read Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, and was impressed by the way he found metaphysical significance in every microscopic musical nuance. As an editor at Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone and the Voice, I read just about everybody who was or wanted to be a critic at the time, and I probably learned something from all of them.

Steven:    How and when did you end up writing about pop music at the New York Times and was that a bigger experience for you than landing a gig atRolling Stone?

Jon:    The New York Times was supposed to be a summer job. I was freelancing after Christgau came back to the Voice, and also working on the first edition of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. In the summer of 1982, two of the Times‘s critics, Stephen Holden (who was writing about rock) and John S. Wilson (who was writing about jazz and cabaret) both went on vacation. Because I was writing about a broad range of music and could cover both Holden’s and Wilson’s areas, Palmer brought me in to fill the gap.

I was a stringer–a freelancer–and the gig was supposed to end when Wilson and Holden got back. But the “Culture” section of the Times had just changed editors, and every editor likes to have more troops, so they kept me on. In 1985, the Voice offered me the music editorship since Christgau was giving it up, and after agonizing over the choice, I decided I preferred writing to editing, and ended up using the offer to persuade the Times to put me on staff.

Soon afterwards, in the late 1980s, Palmer decided he was tired of the grind, and he went back to his old stomping grounds, Oxford, Miss. (near Memphis) to teach and write a book. That’s when I became the chief pop critic at the Times.

And yes, it was a very big deal. My mother started to tell people what I did for a living, and people I hadn’t heard from in years, who weren’t reading music magazines, saw my name in the Times.

The Times was, and is, a giant institution, and especially back then, it still had the grimy romance of newspapering. Although the linotype era was over–typesetting was done by computer, and only a few people still wore eye shades–it was still a throng of people working above a big printing press. The typeset stories would be pasted down by hand, and if they didn’t fit at the last minute, they’d slice off the closing paragraph: “cut on the slab,” punchline or no punchline. Trucks pulled in from 43d Street with giant rolls of blank newsprint and drove out with damp newspapers. The first time you got a story on the front page, they’d give you the etched metal plate it was printed with. Since then, the press has been moved out of town, and in a few years, the Times will move to a gleaming new corporate headquarters; it’s in the information business now.

Despite the Times‘s stodgy image, Robert Palmer had been quick on the uptake for punk, hip-hop, no wave and all kinds of other avant-gardes. (So was John Rockwell before him; Rockwell, after detours through classical music and running the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, is now the editor of the Arts and Leisure section.)

At the Times, the editors don’t second-guess the pop critics. When I got there they were all from an older generation that cared more about classical music, and even now, with an early baby-boomer hierarchy, they assume we know more about the subject than they do. We get treated something like being a science correspondent or the head of the New Delhi bureau; we’re sending back dispatches from the distant reaches of Musicville. As a result–and unlike writing for a music magazine–no one was particularly worried about what was in the pop charts. We could, and still do, cover what we think is worthwhile. Palmer could write all he wanted about Sonic Youth–which was quite a bit–and I can follow my own inclinations, though obviously I’m not going to skip Madonna at Madison Square Garden.

Back in 1982, not many people had PCs, and I used to go to the office to write, wearing the jacket and tie I had bought for the new job. Everyone there seemed considerably older than I was, and they thought I was covering barbarians, but once it was clear that I was a “clean” writer (not a lot of editing work), that my facts were straight and my opinions were intelligible, and that I was dependable, I was treated as a colleague. The tie soon disappeared, as did the jacket, and once I got my first PC I mostly worked at home, where the albums and stereo are.

Incidentally, this might be the spot to clarify what I do at the Times. A lot of people seem to assume that I’m some sort of music czar there, overseeing every word written about popular music, and I’m not. What I do is write; I also assign the weekly review schedule. Otherwise, I don’t assign or edit, much less oversee all the various music coverage in the paper. If “Arts & Leisure,” “Metro,” “Business,” “Style” or the New York Times Magazine run a music story, they do so on their own. It’s a big organization.

Steven:    As a Times writer, you write record and concert reviews and you report music feature and news stories. Which of those do you prefer and why?

Jon:    I’m a critic by temperament, not a reporter. I can do reporting, and I generally have a good time with interviews. But I’d rather analyze and interpret than track down the he-said, she-said nuggets that make good reporting, and I’d rather do musical studies than character studies, which is what features are. Every critic should get facts right–that means reporting–and character is part of music. But reporters have to strive to be objective, while critics are subjective, which is more fun. I have boundless respect for the good, careful, revelatory reporting I see all around me at the Times, and a snappy feature is a pleasure to read. But what I like to do best is a combination of close-ups–concert reviews, album reviews–and long shots, where looking at an entire musical landscape yields some insight.

Steven:    You would think that the Times would keep you extremely busy. But you find time to freelance. What keeps you writing for other publications?

Jon:    I try to limit repetition at the Times. If I’ve written about somebody’s previous album, then I prefer to have Ann Powers or Neil Strauss or Ben Ratliff or a freelancer write about the next one: readers get a fresh perspective. Similarly, if I’ve reviewed an album, I like to send someone else out to review the concert. So if I know I’m not writing about something for the Times, and if someone asks me, and if I’m interested, I freelance.

Steven:    Tell me about which rock mags you read today and who are your favorite current rock/pop writers out there now?

Jon:    I read a lot of magazines occasionally, among them Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard, the Village Voice, the Source, Entertainment Weekly, CMJ(weekly and monthly), Alternative Press, Vibe, Rhythm, No Depression, Reggae and African Beat, Wire, NME, Tower’s Pulse, DJ Times and on and on.

As for writers, I got the Times to hire the best ones I could find: Neil Strauss, an extremely rare combination of amazing reporter, knowing critic and hilarious writer; brainy, heartfelt, far-seeing Ann Powers and eclectic, penetrating, imagistic Ben Ratliff. Stephen Holden was at the Times before me, and he’s primarily a film critic now, but he still writes about cabaret and singer-songwriters, and he conveys like nobody else the way words, music and voices fit together. All together, it’s the best popular-music staff the Times has ever had.

Other music writers I recruited, who were in and out of the Times while I’ve been there, are Karen Schoemer, Danyel Smith, and Peter Watrous. Incidentally, there are other things to read besides rock criticism. I’m also a fan of two of the Times‘s classical critics, Bernard Holland and Paul Griffiths; the architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, and the art critic Holland Cotter.

Among other music writers I enjoy, let’s start with daily-newspaper writers like Tom Moon, Greg Kot, Geoffrey Himes, Steve Morse, J.D. Considine, Jim Farber, Edna Gundersen, Richard Harrington, and David Hinckley, who manage to be graceful and intelligent under daily constraints and deadlines. In magazines, one writer no one should overlook is David Fricke, who’s equally brilliant in reviews, features and historical liner notes; he does serious research, pays attention to both music and people and writes with real spark.

I also like, along with writers I’ve already mentioned and in no particular order, Rob Sheffield, Joshua Clover/Jane Dark, and Mike Rubin for irreverence and big ideas; Charles Aaron, who slips deep thoughts into little spaces; Eric Weisbard, who chews on complex questions; Anthony DeCurtis, who knows how to assess icons, and a bunch of others, alphabetically: Lorraine Ali, Michael Azerrad, Jon Caramanica, Sue Cummings, Francis Davis, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Banning Eyre, Will Hermes, James Hunter, Enrique Lavin, Alan Light, Amy Linden, Michaelangelo Matos, Mike McGonigal, Peter Margasak, Rob Marriott, Sia Michel, Ed Morales, Simon Reynolds, Scott Schindler, Ethan Smith, Toure, and more that I’ll probably think of later.

Steven:    Reaching a lot of readers is an obvious advantage to writing about music for a publication like the New York Times, but what else do you think is important about your position and what are your personal goals in music writing for the Times?

Jon:    Don’t tell anybody, but the job is really an excuse for my continuing education. New York in all its variety–social, artistic, ethnic, attitudinal, sonic–is a cornucopia of musical phenomena and a constant spur to learn more.

I don’t forget that I’m writing for the New York Times, and the paper is supposed to be comprehensive. To me, covering popular music in New York City means paying attention to the full spectrum of music here: rock, hip-hop, pop, jazz, Latin, dance, world, avant-garde, commercial, non-commercial. That’s what the job should be, and that’s what I try to do. Obviously I can’t get to even a fraction of what can be heard–I’d have to go to ten shows a night–but I hope that over the course of a year I can give readers a glimpse of the music that’s out there.

I love the nightly variety: N’Sync, Cheikka Rimitti, Dismemberment Plan, the Dirty Dozen Bass Band, Squarepusher. But I also have another goal, which is to fight provincialism. No one has to like everything–there are huge amounts of mediocrity out there–but no one should be afraid of certain music or deliberately ignorant of it. Cliquey types who listen to just one kind of music, whether it’s classic rock or hip-hop, are only depriving themselves.

People still sometimes act as if the Times should define the taste of the elite, or if whatever is covered in the Times is therefore within the elite. I’m happy if something I write about in the Times is then picked up by other media, though it would be better if they made their own decisions. But “Hound Dog” was right–if they say it’s high class, that’s just a lie. Rock, and popular music in general, proves again and again that the elite is the last to get the good stuff; it almost invariably comes up from the lowest classes and, sometimes, from the underworld. Trying to cover popular music from the top down, whether that’s the Top 10 or what the yuppies are listening to, would be ridiculous.

The center–arena concerts, hit albums–is important, but so are the margins. This is where popular music differs from the other arts beats, like books or film (despite a smattering of independent films), and from sports, which basically covers the pros. Music is far more decentralized, and it can thrill you in a stadium, in a basement or between headphones.

Steven:    What is your take on the state of rock criticism today? Many, comparing it to the adventurous writing in the ’70s, dismiss what’s published today as PR hype. What do you think?

Jon:    Everything looks better through nostalgia, and I don’t believe we’re necessarily worse off now. It’s true that in the 1970s, feature writers could get a lot closer to bands, a la Almost Famous, and that the publicity machines weren’t quite so slick. Magazines also gave writers more space per article, which could be room for crazed inspiration (Lester Bangs) or bloat (no comment); now, there’s more of an emphasis on consumer advice–thumbs up or thumbs down–than extended thought. It’s hard to say much in a 150-word capsule review, or to project much personality.

But the real difficulty–for criticism, not for music–is the sheer avalanche of releases, 25,000 to 30,000 a year. If a publication wants to cover as many worthwhile ones as you can, then each gets fewer words. One response to that overwhelming number of albums is for writers to turn into specialists: only hip-hop/R&B, only dance music, only punk and metal. It’s part of the whole divisive niche-marketing mentality of the 1980s and 1990s, and for a critic it’s a mistake. Musicians keep their ears wide open; they’ll steal from anywhere, and they should. And listeners don’t go to stores thinking, “I want a two-step garage song”–they just want good music.

The narrowness of too many music critics is at odds with what happens in the real world. I’ve found that musical events are what you might call culturally demilitarized zones, where people and ideas can interact freely. Music always invites people in, even if they’re outsiders with notebooks.

The flipside to the glut of releases is that there are also more outlets for information about music than ever before. Music magazines are proliferating, competing for every micro-niche and sometimes aiming for a general audience, and of course there’s the Internet, where everybody’s a reviewer. The writing’s not usually stylish, and rumors masquerade as facts, but, again, schools of thought are out there contending. Among the pros, meanwhile, look at that long list above: There are as many smart writers now as there ever were.

Steven:    Newspaper writing or magazine writing? Which do you prefer and why?

Jon:    Newspaper writing, no contest. Newspaper writing is almost instant gratification. Soon after it’s written, it’s in print, if not the next day then by the end of the week. With magazines, I’ve just about forgotten what I’ve written by the time it comes out.

Yes, there are serious constraints in newspaper writing; no obscenities, the need to paraphrase what’s going on even in some non-obscene lyrics because they get too raunchy for “a family newspaper,” and the occasional copy-editor demand to explain something I don’t think needs explaining (just the other day I had to insert that the Go-Gos were an all-female band). I also don’t like calling everybody Mr. or Ms., though it does have some enjoyably absurd moments: Mr. Sixx? But the inconveniences are worth it because writing improves when you’re constantly seeking clarity and economy. Magazines have their own editorial tics anyway.

Beyond that, writing for a newspaper means you might reach someone who wasn’t already interested in music. A newspaper is a miscellany: Kosovo, New Jersey, the stock market, recipes, real estate, the crossword puzzle. That’s a good thing; something is lost with those online news services that only tell you about what you already know you’re interested in. With a newspaper, readers might be finishing a feature on Lincoln Center or looking for a book review and suddenly find themselves reading about hip-hop or Brazilian music just because it’s on the page, and maybe it will give them a new bit of information or make them curious. You get more serendipity in newspapers.

Steven:   The dreaded Greil Marcus Stranded question. What CD would you bring to a desert island and why?

Jon:   I hope it’s in tomorrow’s mail.

Man On the Moon: An Interview With Tom Moon

By Steven Ward (August 2001)

Former professional musician Tom Moon, currently the pop music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer, started his career in rock journalism because he was anxious to hear a new Steely Dan album. The year was 1980, the album was Gaucho, and Moon, then a freshman studying saxophone at the University of Miami, was about to embark upon a career of writing reviews.

After a stint at his college newspaper, Moon began writing about music for the Miami Herald, while playing off and on with musicians like jazzman Maynard Ferguson. As a writer, Moon’s perspective on professional musicians is unique: he was one before he picked up a pen.

Like New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles, Moon’s name constantly comes up when other critics talk about their favorite music writers. rockcritics.com decided to find out what all the fuss was about, so we promptly sent Moon a questionnaire. The 40-year-old critic talks in detail about our favorite topic.

Steven:   You are the pop critic of one of the largest daily newspapers in the country, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and you are a frequent freelance reviewer for Rolling Stone. Do you feel like you have power and influence with your position at the paper?

Tom:   I’m not in it for power and influence. And if I was, the daily newspaper racket wouldn’t be the place: We’re pretty low on the overall food chain–it’s much more important for an act to crack MTV than get some kind of (often short and ultimately inconsequential) mention in our pages. I’m not sure that the people who buy CDs and are avid consumers of pop culture media take their cues from newspaper critics. Because it’s a general interest publication, we often look hopelessly un-hip to savvy music heads simply because we have to cover the Willa Fords of the world. And the Neil Diamonds.

My goal is more to shine a bit of light on those artists who are not turning up all over the increasingly crowded media matrix, to advocate for stuff that is compelling musically. And when a Destiny’s Child record comes around, talk about it in a semi-intelligent and non-condescending way, to give both those who love and hate them a sense of what’s happening on the record.

Steven:   And since the paper job is one that I would assume is so demanding and time consuming, why do you continue to write for magazines like Rolling Stone?

Tom:   I have learned a ton from my editors at the newspaper, particularly Linda Hasert, with whom I’ve worked for the last ten years. She’s a really sharp eye who makes everything she touches better. At the same time, she’s the first to admit she’s not a music person. A while ago, I figured if I was ever going to get any better at this writing thing, I would need to work with a bunch of different kinds of editors–particularly people who were listening to all kinds of music. Anthony DeCurtis was one of the first people I encountered at Rolling Stone, and his approach remains an inspiration: He’s into checking out all kinds of stuff, very open minded. I’ve tried to emulate that: Somebody will have an assignment on an act I don’t know much about or isn’t my taste, and I’ll do it just to learn something. Right now there’s so much coming out all the time that I actually like it when someone can yank me away from the five records I have to hear for the paper and push me toward the one that I maybe wouldn’t find otherwise.

Steven:   You write feature stories, CD reviews, concert reviews and do some music reporting at the paper. Do you prefer one of those tasks to the others?

Tom:   For me it’s about a mix. I get cranky if I’m writing reviews of records and shows for too long without talking to people who are engaged in making music. Newspaper work means juggling many assignments at once, and that can be synergistic: You hear something in a record you’re reviewing that suggests an approach to profiling some entirely different artist.

Steven:   How and when did you decide that you wanted to write about pop or rock music for a living, and did you find it hard to break into the business?

Tom:   I went to University of Miami School of Music to study saxophone, improvisation, etc. My freshman year there, I was broke and heard that the campus paper would pay for record reviews. My ulterior motive in 1980 was to hear Steely Dan’s Gaucho as soon as possible. I remember not getting an advance, but writing about that–it might not have been my first piece, but it was one of them.

After that year I stopped writing–I was playing in Latin bands in Miami and was too busy. Then after college I made my living playing professionally–everything from weddings to shows (Peter Allen, the Fifth Dimension) to cruise ships. I spent nearly a year playing with Maynard Ferguson, and some time on the road with a rock band from Greenville South Carolina. It was probably when the rock band, Freeze Warning, was stuck without a gig for a week in Owensboro Kentucky that I began thinking seriously about doing something else. When I got back to Miami I wrote a bunch of letters to people at the Miami Herald, complaining about their music coverage. After several rounds I was invited to go review a jazz show–not for publication, just as an audition. Did that for about a month, and they then asked me to start freelancing. This was very lucky, I learned later: I had no formal journalism training and no prior newspaper experience, prerequisites for work at paper of the Herald‘s size. The folks there (particularly a former Rolling Stone editor named Jane Karr) were incredibly patient with me–I don’t want to think about what my copy looked like when they got it. As a result of their willingness to go out on a limb, I had a much easier time “breaking in” than most people do today. I’m not sure I agree with those basic newspaper requirements–several years of hard news experience as a minimum–because there are a lot of folks out there with deep knowledge of the arts who paid those dues in different form. It seems the papers might benefit from being a tad less rigid…

Steven:   Tell me about your rockcrit influences. What were your favorite rock magazines to read while growing up and what rock critics and music writers were your favorites and why.

Tom:   I read Rolling Stone avidly in high school–the era of Kurt Loder, Anthony DeCurtis, etc. I learned tons reading David Fricke–those longer pieces he and Chuck Young did for Musician magazine were tremendous blends of reporting and analysis. Musician was, for a long time, very much an influence: I liked the fact that the writers were knowledgeable about the rudiments of music as well as the history. I grew up outside of DC, and one of my first encounters with impassioned music writing was reading Richard Harrington in the Unicorn Times and later the Washington Post. Here was incredibly descriptive writing that was clear and concise, and just full of respect. He just led you right to the record store without screaming or doing anything fancy. At the same time I was reading rock mags I also began to check jazz criticism–particularly Whitney Balliett, who is for me one of the titans, a master of making the little details signify something you might otherwise miss. His accounts of live music, which are collected in several volumes, remain an inspiration. Later I got into Gary Giddins at the Voice–another giant, a craftsman whose sentences are phrased perfectly–as well as Christgau and Greil Marcus, who could make you care about something you never considered before. You asked about the past but how about the present: We’re very lucky right now to have folks doing really creative writing about music all over the place. I’m thinking particularly of the New York Times writers, Ann Powers, Neil Strauss, Ben Ratliff and Jon Pareles, and also Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune. If we can’t get better reading these insightful, provocative voices, there’s no helping us.

Steven:   Many people deride the writing in Rolling Stone magazine. Why do you think that is? I assume you don’t agree.

Tom:   Don’t assume anything. I’m not going to be so brazen/foolhardy/arrogant as to try and diagnose Rolling Stone–it is its own world, and like anything that endures a long time it has gone through its evolutionary peaks and valleys. There’s a tricky balancing act at work in the music section there: This is a magazine that is trying to cover hip-hop and current pop culture while remaining a source of information to the classic rock record buyers. There are probably a million reasons people bemoan the content now, and to that chorus I’d just add one tiny writer’s lament, about the length of the record reviews. It may be possible to communicate what’s important about a record in 250 words–previously the length of the “short” reviews–but I’m not sure it’s possible to give readers anything consequential, much less useful, in 150 words, the current length. I know all the bromides about the challenges of writing short, and I agree that it’s good discipline. But at the same time I’m not proud of all those mini-reviews I’ve contributed to RS–and I blame myself, not the format. We struggle with the same thing at the paper: The need to cover all the important works is often at odds with the finite space available. We know what loses out–the cool under-the-radar records, the oddball thing you stumble on…

Steven:   Please do me a favor: Could you read the last interview at the site with online critic glenn mcdonald? I’m curious what a high-profile critic like you thinks about Glenn’s DIY approach and his view on the state of rock criticism.

Tom:   First of all, I really like his writing, the way he thinks and the passion in what he’s doing. That for me is the acid test: I turned 40 this year (the age the critic John Milward warned would begin the “mid-rock crisis” years) and people kept saying to me “How can you still do this job, be around kids at shows?” I never thought about it, but it’s what drives Glenn (and myself and lots of other critics) to the store to buy stuff: That belief that somewhere out there is a three minute song that can and should rearrange the dusty furniture in your brain. That’s just a very common trait among people who care about music, not just so-called professional critics, and it is what drives the whole train. That quality of passion is especially important right now, when the labels are working mainly to generate hits rather than career artists. Music needs all the champions it can get, working in all kinds of fields. As Michelle Shocked likes to say “Music is too important to be left to the professionals.” That goes for listening and creating.

Steven:   How do you feel about the Lester Bangs/Richard Meltzer school of gonzo rock writing and do you see a place for that style in today’s rock criticism?

Tom:   I came late to that stuff. I didn’t really experience it in its cultural moment. I think that some of those more extravagant writing devices might be passe now, but the thing that gets me the most about both of those guys is (sorry to overuse the cliched phrase) the sense of passion, the feeling that they’re using everything at their disposal to advocate for what is good and ridicule what is not. That sense of attitude/outrage, and even more basic than that the sense that the material they’re addressing matters, is essential to all criticism. This is where current media culture does consumers no service at all: Everything is calm, considered, responsible, informed by the best academic experts and designed to serve as a consumer guide. Too often that makes meaningless prattle. We’ve trained people to look for the star rating or letter grade and read right over whatever analysis might be lurking in the text. We have the glib/snide school of criticism and the confessional here’s-why-this-matters-to-me school of criticism and for me it’s two sides of the same narcissistic coin. We’re so living in an age when our own responses as consumers matter more than anything. and as critics we forget that we take those responses to the grave. The work we’re supposedly addressing, the music and film and prose, should live beyond us. The work matters so much more than any ego-driven critic’s snarky response to it. And the Internet, with its instant polls and User Reviews, has just amplified the opinion mill without adding much of consequence to the discussion. In the immortal words of Amazon: “Was this review helpful to you?” Please.

Steven:   Can you tell me the names of all the publications your music writing has been published in?

Tom:   I’ll try but I’ll probably forget some. The Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer (and the Knight-Ridder wire service); the New York Daily News’s Sundaymagazine (long gone); Rolling Stone; Spin; Esquire; GQ; Vibe; Details (the old one); Musician; Jazziz; Jazz Times; Us Weekly; Revolver; National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Steven:   What advice would you give somebody trying to break into the rockcrit business?

Tom:   First I’d say keep an open mind, and listen to as much as you can. The people mentioned above, the folks like Christgau and Pareles, are compelling precisely because they don’t specialize. I have a quote on my wall that says “The more you love music, the more music you love.” I believe that. Now there’s nothing wrong with having areas you like a lot and are comfortable in, but it seems like one of our missions as critics is to really try and get inside what we don’t like, to analyze stuff that we might, as listeners, just dismiss. And from a pure business standpoint, you want to have a few moves–if some editors come to you for hip-hop that’s great, but you can work more if you have other people who want your perspective on blues or electronica or whatever.

My other thing may be an outgrowth of my experience: I think it helps to understand a little bit about music. Not theory necessarily, but the way music works, what it’s like to play an instrument, to have a bad night, to play something that totally gets you off. For many of the people we cover, music is a lifelong pursuit and not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s like yoga in that way. Lots of critics get called “frustrated musicians” and I’m sure that applies in some cases, but I think that any direct interaction with music enhances your critical sensibility. Every time I pick up my horn or sit at the piano I encounter something new, and that orientation goes with me when I write. There’s so much to learn. I’m humbled by music daily. And this job is one where those learning experiences show up in the mail on a regular basis.

Steven:   Tell me about your most memorable musician interview or story.

Tom:   That would be Miles Davis. I have no idea why Columbia Records agreed to it–I don’t think I was yet on staff at the Herald–but one day in 1984 I found myself at his NY apartment. There was a Fender Rhodes in the living room giving off a nasty 60 hz hum, and a serious telescope on the balcony, which overlooked Central Park. His task for the day was to select a piece of his visual art to send to Los Angeles for the Olympic arts festival. Before I could ask a question we were sitting at his dining room table looking at his paintings, and he’s asking me and his handler at Columbia, Sandra DeCosta, what we like or don’t like. I had no idea how to respond to this–I hadn’t yet had the chance to converse enough to cultivate any trust, and didn’t want to piss him off before I had the chance to turn on the tape recorder. I have no idea what I said, but it wasn’t a disaster–we ended up talking for probably two hours. He was a real animated thinker–all you had to do to get him going was mention a Prince track or something, and he’d be off, rapping.

Steven:   Could you comment on the recent accusations about Blender editors changing critic’s reviews and ratings. In general, how much of that kind of thing goes on in the freelance world, in your experience?

Tom:   It definitely happens. For sound editorial reasons (the text doesn’t match the rating, etc.) and unseemly political/personal ones (the publisher is best friends with the manager, etc.), and it can be tricky for a freelancer in some remote place to get a clear sense of what’s going on. When I first had a rating changed at Rolling Stone, I was outraged–more because it was done without any conversation. Seems to me the honorable way for an editor to handle this is a simple heads-up conversation, which does usually happen. As for Blender, that was with the first issue of a startup. Let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt for a minute and chalk it up to growing pains.

Steven:   Any chances of a book collection of reviews or articles? Or maybe a rock band bio?

Tom:   Probably not. I think the rock book world is adequately served by the folks who now publish anthologies–we don’t need more takes on the same set of records, and re-purposing newspaper/magazine stuff for books may not be the best use of anyone’s time. I have a project percolating that might lead to a different sort of book somewhere down the line, but it seems premature to talk about. As for rock band bios, the one thing I like about the newspaper pace is that you finish with something and move on. I’m not sure I could devote a year to thinking deep thoughts about any single artist. We’ve all suffered with some rock books where it was clear that the author ran out of deep thoughts after six months…

Steven:   The dreaded desert island disc question. Which CD would you bring on a desert island and why. Also, favorite band/album of all time?

Tom:   My DIDs change by the day. Revolver sustained me recently. So did Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. And every time I hear Hendrix it’s a different jolt through my body–right now he’s the one musician who slays me the most, with Miles and Wayne Shorter and Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley and John Coltrane right behind.

San Franciscan Nights: Music Writer Joel Selvin in Conversation

By Barbara Flaska (August 2001)

Joel Selvin has been in motion on the field, providing a play-by-play account of the Bay Area music scene, for three decades. As a journalist, he calls them as he sees them, observing and tracking the players and events. His long running weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle has followed the hometown bands and the music they’ve made during the past 30 years. From the blossoming of the flower power days, into the swirl of psychedelic dance palaces. Slipping through the disco joints, then charting the power chord of arena rock spectacle. Tracing the currents of the persevering blues scene, and the emergence of the funk, the punk, and the rave and techno movements.

In addition to writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joel has published articles in Rolling Stone, the L.A. Times, Billboard, and Melody Maker. Joel also can be read here and there just by turning an album over and looking for his liner notes on dozens of CDs–Creedence Clearwater Revival (Bayou Country and Pendulum), John Allair (Cleans House), Merl Saunders (It’s in the Air), George Thorogood (Anthology), Tommy Castro (Can’t Keep a Good Man Down), Journey (Time3), or Mitch Woods and His Rocket 88′s (Solid Gold Cadillac). Joel’s involvement in the music scene extends well beyond writing music reviews and criticism.

His biography Ricky Nelson: Idol For a Generation (1990) was nominated for a Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. The book took the subject back to the small screen when used as the basis for an original VH1 movie, Ricky Nelson: Original Teen Idol. Joel has since written books such as Monterey Pop: June 16-18, 1967 (1992) and a best-selling flash-back that details more than sex and drugs and rock and roll titled Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West (1994). Joel prepared the narrative and Sammy Hagar the introduction forPhotopass: The Rock and Roll Photography of Randy Bachman (1995), a posthumous tribute to the Bay Area photographer’s work. Selvin’s next work provides a quirky collection of anecdotes, stories, and secrets of dozens of the area’s music greats, as framed by the clubs, recording studios, and residences they inhabited, The Musical History Tour: A Guide to Over 200 of the Bay Area’s Most Memorable Music Sites (1996). Joel also contributed the introduction for Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse (1993) and Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (For the Record) with Dave Marsh as editor (1998). He’s just finished reading through the galley proofs for what promises to be an interesting and colorful collaboration on the Treasures of the Hard Rock Café: The Official Guide to the Hard Rock Café Memorabilia Collection. Scheduled for release to the general public through bookstores in September 2001, the book is available now at Hard Rock Cafés. The 300-page book is quite pretty, a large coffee table edition of 2000 color photographs.

Joel’s also been teaching classes at San Francisco State University and lecturing at the U.C. Berkeley Journalism Colloquium, Mills College, and The Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco. In May, 1997, Joel was a super-docent at the opening of “I Want To Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-69″ exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Hall had assembled a huge collection of psychedelic artifacts from San Francisco and London. Joel Selvin was curator of the San Francisco portion of the exhibit, which included such mementos as the cream-colored, fringed top that Grace Slick wore at Woodstock and Janis Joplin’s resplendent 1965 Porsche 356C Cabriolet.

On June 16, 2001, Joel provided a keynote address at “Monterey Pop Revisited”, a symposium which opened the doors of the Monterey History Center, for a newly installed exhibition of the Monterey Pop Festival. In his opening remarks, Joel reiterated his long-held belief that “Section 43″ recorded in 1965 by Country Joe and the Fish is “the definitive recorded example of genuine acid rock.”

Joel and his musician wife, Keta Bill, are also active with Thunder Road, an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center for youth. The center was named for the Bruce Springsteen song. Joel has been recognized as a “VIP” (that’s an acronym for a very important person) for his continuing support of H.E.A.R. (Hearing and Education Awareness for Rockers). Additionally, Joel is a board member-at-large for the Arhoolie Foundation, an organization which branched from Chris Strachwitz’s offbeat Arhoolie record label. The Arhoolie Foundation’s prime purpose is “the documentation, dissemination, and presentation of authentic traditional and regional vernacular musics and by these activities educate and enlighten the public as well as support and reinforce traditional community values.”

Joel’s a founding member of the infamous literary rock band The Rock Bottom Remainders with Amy Tan, Steven King, and Matt Groening. You can catch them on disc on the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” label and hear what critics are panning, or even watch a video immortalizing one of their concerts performed May 25, 1992, at the Cowboy Boogie in Anaheim, California. The celebrity writers banded together en masse to benefit writers’ groups and the anti-censorship movement. By then, the numbers of “Remainders” onstage had swelled to jam-band proportions to include Dave Barry, Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Ridley Pearson, Joel Selvin, Amy Tan, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Al Kooper, Josh Kelly, Jerry Peterson. Sen. Paul Simon provided the introduction for the show. Watch in amazed disbelief as they drown onstage in a “Sea of Love”, almost completely lose “Money”, and show off their spelling with “G-l-o-r-i-a”. The group in various configurations still performs at benefits for literacy projects and charities.

Last, but not by any means least, Selvin also co-produced the triumphant comeback recording by surf guitar king Dick Dale, Tribal Thunder (1997).

Music informs the life of Joel Selvin, and through his writing Joel informs others about music–but culture and community and the human beings who make it make their appearance, too.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Barbara:   What have you been up to lately?

Joel:   Cooking in the backyard.

Barbara:   How was this job for Treasures of the Hard Rock different from your regular work for the Chronicle?

Joel:   Never before have done the kind of detailed photo editing and organization–in collaboration with the Rare Air designers and co-author Grushkin. The text was a milk run.

Barbara:   Can you give me some more background information? Where you were born, went to school…

Joel:   Born in Berkeley, failed to graduate with Berkeley High School class of ’67. Went to work as a copy boy at the Chronicle and got on the guest list for the Fillmore. Never looked back.

Barbara:   Did you know you wanted to be a writer early on in your life?

Joel:   I always liked newspapers. I was a printer before I was a writer.

Barbara:   When did you discover rock and roll and which artists were part of that experience?

Joel:   Heard rock and roll on AM radio, but it wasn’t until psychedelics that the whole thing became this huge obsession–Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, and Little Richard loomed large in my mind.

Barbara:   Where was your first piece of rock journalism published and how did you first get into writing about music?

Joel:   I left the Chronicle for a short, misguided tour through college (UC-Riverside) and started writing pop for the paper there. I sold my first professional piece, a record review, to Rolling Stone and, oddly enough, it was later anthologized.

Barbara:   Do you remember what pop you wrote about at Riverside? I’ll forgive you if you don’t.

Joel:   I wrote record reviews, columns and all sorts of features. I interviewed (among others) Little Richard, Sly Stone, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, Dick Dale.

Barbara:   Did you just send the review to RS cold or walk it over when you were back in SF? Which record, by the way?

Joel:   If memory serves that would be U.S. Mail. First Step by the Faces (the band’s first album with Rod Stewart on vocals).

Barbara:   Your favorite rock magazines and critics in the ’70s? Which rock critics and writers were your favorites and which ones influenced you?

Joel:   I liked Stone OK, some of Christgau’s Esquire stuff, but as a Chronicle subscriber Ralph Gleason was always the man. Sports writers have been more of an influence on my work than other pop writers.

Barbara:   I enjoyed your book The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock and Roll, Free Love and High Times In the Wild West. Are you happy with the way the book turned out and what effect did The Summer of Love have on your life?

Joel:   I love the book. I spent more than four years of my life making that book everything I wanted it to be. I spent the summer of ’67 hiding out in Indiana–my real summer of love was ’69, when I worked at the Wild West Festival and saw shows every night.

Barbara:   Was it difficult to translate “the underground” to the “overground”? Is there an “underground” today?

Joel:   I feel a kindred spirit with the raves and techno scene to the ’60s underground thing. Underground is difficult to find in this media-conscious age, but there are still people trading intriguing ideas out of the limelight of the commercial marketplace.

Barbara:   I also liked your “if-walls-could-talk” approach in 200 Clubs [Musical History Tour]. That was a fun spin on architectural history and made the stories more three-dimensional. Why are those old stories important?

Joel:   Thank you. I thought it was an interesting way to capture anecdotal history–lore, in other words–and lore must be preserved outside the memories of those who know it or it disappears.

Barbara:   Is history relevant to the present? What would you say to people who don’t care to learn the roots of art, history, or anything else.

Joel:   History is great because that’s where all the best stories are.

Barbara:   If you think about the younger reader, do you ever feel like you’re writing subtitles to foreign films?

Joel:   Young people these days are so much smarter and hipper than we were at their age. I never have to talk down to them. It’s the people my age that need a little help understanding sometimes.

Barbara:    What music magazines do you read today? Do you have any favorite music writers or critics being published today?

Joel:    I love Mojo–it’s the Architectural Digest of my field–and I dig Vanity Fair, although that doesn’t have much to do with rock and roll. There are so many good critics and writers in pop these days, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I’d be foolish not to mention my outstanding colleagues at the Chronicle: James Sullivan, Neva Chonin, and, my main man, Aidin Vaziri.

Barbara:   Do you think internet publishing has changed music journalism for better or worse?

Joel:   Farm club baseball–room for lots of young writers to get experience on the Web.

Barbara:   How does a writer avoid “hack” pieces? Any tricks you can recommend to stay fresh?

Joel:   A French whore once said there are no tricks, just enthusiasm. I suspect that applies as much to writing as sex.

Barbara:   Do you have a favorite period of music?

Joel:   So many–Harlem in the ’30s, Chicago in the ’50s, Memphis in the ’50s, Nashville in late ’40s, early ’50s, London and SF mid ’60s. I even like the New York disco era. Texas anytime.

Barbara:    What music are you still listening to that holds up from the old days? Any new music that makes you believe in the power of music?

Joel:   I like Olu Dara, but he hardly counts. New music has a lot of disadvantages these days. Have to adopt wait and see attitude, check and see what’s still floating five years from now.

Barbara:   You started up your career in a very exciting time and place. To my way of thinking that milieu has changed considerably. Let’s pretend you’ve been asked to make commencement remarks to a group of young aspiring music writers. What sorts of things would you say to them? What’s the most important thing to remember when writing about music?

Joel:   Got to tell ‘em how it sounds. A baseball report is no damn good if you don’t know the final score by the end of the first paragraph. You must care. The readers do.

Barbara:   Is the idea of “community” important to music?

Joel:   Community is important to us all, but music is one of the ways we make community. Musicians also understand the concept better than other people, so, in SF at least, there is an authentic music community.

Barbara:   Want to talk about Chris Strachwitz? Why does everyone love and respect him so much?

Joel:   Only person I know who is still in the music business because he loves the music.

Barbara:   Anything you’d care to say about your biography on Ricky? That’s become a collector’s item (I saw it listed for $65 on ebay). Did the small screen shape his career or should I just read the book?

Joel:   David Halberstam liked my book. He digested my 300 page book in about 12 pages of his book, The Fifties. He told me that he didn’t think it was a book about rock and roll as much as it was about the American family. I liked that.

Barbara:   Should musicians write their memoirs or autobiographies?

Joel:   There’ve been some good ones; Count Basie, Mick Fleetwood, Ian Whitcomb.

Barbara:   A common question–are Hard Rock Cafés a form of globalization? The imitators who hopped on what they thought was a trend (Planet Hollywood, and so on) collapsed fairly quickly, yet the Hard Rock endures. What are they selling in terms of cultural appeal?

Joel:   It’s the memorabilia, I’m convinced, that keeps Hard Rock going. It’s a great collection and the stuff means things to people in ways I try to describe in the book.

Barbara:   There are plenty of rock and roll museums and more on the way. Why is the memorabilia at Hard Rock Cafés important? If those walls could talk, what would they say?

Joel:   It’s about authenticity–these instruments are not props, they are genuine connections to important human deeds. It’s a psychological thing that I try to explain in the book.

Barbara:   Any projects you can’t wait to get started on?

Joel:   I’m looking forward to finishing my research and book about the Brill Bldg era of N.Y. R&B.

Some Smiles With Miles: Milo Miles in Conversation

By Steven Ward (September 2001)

If you have read rock criticism consistently during the last two decades, odds are, you have a read a piece by Milo Miles. Or maybe you have heard him on NPR. Either way, Miles leaves an impression–the man knows his stuff.

For instance, I don’t know shit about Afropop except for the kernels I scoop up from the occasional Robert Christgau piece I might stumble upon in theVillage Voice, or in one of his books.

Last month, while checking the Voice online, I see a headline–”Senior Superheroes.” It’s by Milo Miles. The lede mentions African pop, so I start reading.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“When Ghana’s E.T. Mensah brought highlife music to Nigeria in the early 1950s, he set off a mania. Highlife’s electric guitars excited as much as its translated Cuban rhythms and jazzified arrangements, and the style’s cosmopolitan concept clinched the seduction: ‘highlife’ was the name fans who couldn’t afford to get in bestowed on the music of barroom swells.”

Soon after reading, I get on Yahoo and start punching in “highlife” in the search box and I start looking for Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe CDs at Amazon.Com.

The best rock critics can educate and make you want to find music based solely on their powerful writing. In this regard, Miles, a former music editor at the Boston Phoenix, is one of the masters.

Steven:   I’ve been doing some research on your byline and you seem to be the consummate freelancer. I’ve come up with the Village Voice, The New York Times, Salon.Com, NPR (Fresh Air with Terry Gross), L.A. Weekly, Spin and Rolling Stone. Am I leaving any publication out? Tell us what the life of a freelancer is like and is it as hard as many writers make it out to be?

Milo:   Should mention that I’ve spent half my professional years as a full-time editor, first for the Boston Phoenix and later for the on-line music store/magazine Rock.com.

For significant publications, you missed the Boston Globe–daily and magazine–San Francisco Examiner‘s “Image” magazine,Newsday, ReQuest (long ago when it was worth reading), the late, lamented 7 Days, CD Review, the first couple issues of the revivedVanity Fair way back when, NY Rocker and Subway News (see below), a few I’ve forgotten at the moment and, yes folks, PopTop. Who imagined that buttrag mag had so many future notables contributing to it?

As to freelance writing, if you are not part of the scarce elite who get hitched to the slick-magazine gravy train you better be part of a two-income couple, as I am, if you want to get by at all. The biggest problem with freelancing is that too many people who do it don’t have any skill and should give it up tomorrow. If you can imagine doing absolutely anything other than writing about the arts, you should. I, unfortunately, don’t have any choice. I was branded with the “C”-for-critic letter at birth. It’s not scarlet. Kind of a washed-out orange tone, actually.

Steven:   Do you remember when and where your first piece of music journalism was published? How did you first get interested in pursuing rock criticism as a career?

Milo:   In 1976 after I graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula, I published a profile of a local band named Blind Boy Bug and a year later a review of the Ramones’ Leave Home in the leftist alternative weekly called The Borrowed Times, which is where I first saw the term “politically correct” used. (They were quite in favor of it.) I said that Leave Home was a thrill all the way, a judgment I never regretted for a moment.

I had read Creem and the Village Voice obsessively since 1970. I offered to hawk Voice subscriptions as a college frosh, but was too disorganized to follow up on the pitch. Rolling Stone already seemed too sane and they couldn’t appreciate Led Zeppelin OR the Velvet Underground. Although I had no idea how brief the period would be, at that time rock writing offered some of the escape of rock playing–you could make it outside the system and speak to hordes of people, if you were damned lucky. It’s impossible to convey nowadays how goofy a career choice pop writing was before 1977. Like it or not, punk was music that demanded commentary and the rise of mere professionalism was not far behind.

My pre-professional rock-write memories start with the only rejection letter I ever thought was worth a shit. In 1974, Lester Bangs sent me a note from Creem (with Crumb’s “Boy Howdy” logo and everything) saying that although he had wanted to run my review of the New York Dolls’ Too Much Too Soon he had been overruled by Dave Marsh because Bob Christgau wanted to write about it. I forgave them both, later. But it did delay my professional debut for two years. I was astonished that, when I first talked to Bangs in person six years afterwards, he remembered more about the Dolls review than I did–whole lines, even. And of course, like the even more deranged slob I was 25 years ago, I misplaced the rejection letter in one of my frequent moves.

Steven:   What were your favorite rock magazines from the ’70s and what rock critics influenced you as a writer?

Milo:   Ehh–a problem with the usual discussion of rock writing is that everybody keeps it in the family circle. To break out a bit, my influences include: Arthur Rimbaud, because he was the first to show how a teenager could rattle history with his ear and his voice.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, because he made not giving a fuck about anything sound like such a passionate, fulfilling anti-adventure and because I believe he’s locked in a small room for all eternity with Franz Kafka–a fate both of them would accept as typical behavior from the broken God they perceived.

The British fantasists T. H. White and Lord Dunsany, because they taught me that dreamers could be tough and precise.

Horror oddball H. P. Lovecraft, because he proved that an almost unknown pulp writer who was ostensibly an utter loser could seep all across the world’s imagination, given enough time. And because he could make you think for a split second that a gigantic amoeba with 14 eyes and thousands of poison claws was just inside the wall next to you.

Comic-book giants Carl Barks and Jack Kirby, because they showed me what clueless grownups called junk could be divine.

B. Traven, for setting the standard on what politically aware novels could accomplish and for writing “Macario,” just about the only authentic death you can read on the page these days.

Sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, because he was so paranoid he saw modern paranoia coming before it got here.

The late poet Richard Hugo, because he taught me how to write against my will, told me I was a critic and I believed it, and because he forced me to admit that poetry was language and sound, not sense.

And then, some straight music-writer inspirations:

Kit Rachlis, my first editor at the Boston Phoenix, who taught me what he had learned about editing from Bob Christgau, the best, and added the special insight that most editors are sadists and most writers are masochists. (By the way, the one person he cited as a rare sadist writer has been interviewed on this site.)

Ellen Willis, because she’s still the most socially revolutionary and culturally astute feminist thinker out there. In New Yorker pieces, she alerted me to a delightful, ultra-obscure record by Five Dollar Shoes; turned the even more remote San Francisco band Eyes into the group I’d most like to hear but never have (Willis made them more exciting than any mortals could be). And she taught me one of the fundamentals of rock and roll: the good bands know that “a .45 is more dangerous than bad karma.”

Ann Powers is Willis’s great inheritor and I feel closer to her because she likes girly diaries and seems less intellectually carnivorous.

Bob Christgau and Dave Marsh articulated the potential strength of popular music better than anyone else, and to this day I agree with Bob about albums more frequently than any other critic.

Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick have written the only rock books I’m sure will be in print 50 years from now. Not only that, people will still be learning from them and talking about their ideas. Both of them are dead on about Elvis, you know, with all the contradictions that implies.

Jon Pareles is as smart as six reviewers put together–nobody has done a rock encyclopedia as thorough and consistent as the original one he did for Rolling Stone. I read him constantly and he’s a big reason I write for the NY Times.

The masterfully tactful and humane Joe Levy and Ann Powers were dream editors at the Village Voice–I’m particularly proud of pieces they let me do on the New Music Seminar, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, Rosanne Cash, John Prine and “stoner rock” before anybody had ever used that term. Joe has one of the most difficult high-profile music mag jobs as music editor at Rolling Stone, and I can’t imagine anyone else doing it as well at this late date.

The original Creem was a mind-shaper, of course, also PUNK (unmatched humor) and NY Rocker and Boston’s finest, Subway News, put out by Doug Simmons, now a big muckety-muck at the Village Voice, but who only equaled his expertise as a fanzine editor with his outstanding column about being a cab driver called “The Hack,” done for the Boston Phoenix. He also gave me this nugget: “No rock movement is any good once more than 10,000 people know about it.” A point always worth debating.

The Brit Contingent have delivered books I adore like Simon Frith’s Sound Effects and Performing Rites, Charles Shaar Murray’sCrosstown Traffic, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, David Toop’s Ocean of Sound, and Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstasy, among others.

Jazz writers Bob Blumenthal (the most deserving Grammy winner since Bonnie Raitt), and Francis Davis, who, without making any fuss about it, makes you appreciate him as a superb humanist as well as a top-flight critic in any field.

The late writer Mark Moses for a torrent of insights about music –especially classic soul–and for the most pleasant editing experiences I’ll ever have. He would bring in a piece, it felt like we would yak about music and words and tell jokes for an hour, and an excellent critical article would come out the other end. I’d give anything to experience those ’80s sessions with him again.

Steven:   You are able to write about a wide range of music. Besides rock music, you write about world, roots/Americana, jazz and even classical music. You even write book reviews. There are not many rockcrits who write about such a variety. How important is it to be able to cover the gamut versus specializing in one genre?

Milo:   (I talk about my mysterious classical criticism below.)

In fact, I also regularly write about comics/graphic novels, animation, science fiction and popular science with a specialty in insects and dinosaurs (thought about becoming a biologist, but couldn’t hack the math). The enemies of good popular music commentary have been identified on this site over and over: ignorance of history (more of a problem every year, natch), bad editors who mentor even worse editors and writers, the smothering ascendance of mere careerism in pop criticism. But the two most insidious enemies are more internalized. Hermetic specialization in some sub-substyle of music is one; the other is its ugly, slouchy cousin, bone-deep distrust of popular art itself. Ken Tucker and Jon Pareles did particularly good jobs of explaining the evils of specialization, so I’d refer readers to their interviews. But I do have my rant about dislike of pop itself. With tongue in cheek, I blame the Velvet Underground for this repulsive phenomenon. The Velvets were famously commercial duds during their time together and while other now-revered bands like the Who were also slow starters, Lou & Crew had a whole sound as well as a sensibility ahead of their time. If you were a Velvets crazy in, say, 1973, you could feel some of the evangelical fire that drove the original fans of rock and R&B. You knew your tomorrow was coming.

From my perspective anyway, the whole point was that the Velvets (and Iggy and the NY Dolls etc.) should become huge popular successes–they should become pop stars because only huge pop phenoms really riffled the texture of the times. The Beatles would have meant little as a cult band. Trouble was, just a decade later, after the spurt of punk and the rise of “indie cred,” the whole idea was to be zealous about bands you were sure would never become popular. Dave Marsh has talked endlessly about the stupid post-punk idea that selling zillions means, ipso facto, selling out. I don’t think it’ s a reason to knock punk as music, but it is a dumb idea and he’s right that it was lurking in there somewhere with the rest of Kurt Cobain’s army of angsts.

Nowadays it’s dogma for everybody but the most naive music fans that no profoundly good pop has ever been popular (I’m exaggerating, but not much). I once did a piece that examined the outline of every Number One hit in Billboard from 1955 to 1985 and it is true that for a period of about 1964 to middle 1967 the best pop being made was also, by and large, the most popular. And of course, wondrous tunes continue to be huge hits every so often. (Yeah, yeah, we’re in a pretty dry spell right now.) This is just anathema to many folks. One fashionable escape riff is to claim boomers suck and their music has dated to hell so those classic hits were really sellout garbage. Aside from the ever-more-tedious repetition of generation gap resentments, I say this is what folks get for listening to the radio. Their pathetic, passive howl: “This crap you’re spoonfeeding me is so terrible. I’m super pissed off you’re not spoonfeeding me better crap.” Turn the damn thing off and make your own soundtrack. I understand all about the former role of radio in pop, but it is waaaay over. I haven’t listened to anything other than the occasional hour of alternative college stations (and NPR for professional reasons) for about 15 years and I defy anybody to tell me what harm it did my soul. There are hip-hop shows that are plainly exceptions to the drabscape, but I don’t live near any of them I know about. So what’s the problem with just tending your own little sub-sub-subgenre garden? Other than the evils of overspecialization Tucker and Pareles articulated, anti-pop attitudes sadden my heart because they make the music into just another elitist/academic pursuit like high art. “Us refined and instructed types are the only ones who appreciate this nectar” was the message I got from hack humanities teachers my whole student life. Popular rock ‘n’ soul shot that sentiment into Swiss cheese–the sound was nectar and every slob and slobette could appreciate it. Not any more. I hope this makes halfway clear why I think something potent has been lost with the dominance of anti-pop.

Steven:   Although you freelance now, you once held the position of music editor of the Boston Phoenix. When was that, how long did you do that, and what was the experience like? Also, do you prefer freelancing to a full-time staff position at a publication?

Milo:   I was music editor at the Boston Phoenix from 1982 until 1989, a period that I not surprisingly regard as a golden era of arts coverage at the paper. And, though this is not the standard line, I think the ’80s produced the best proportions of volume to quality in pop music writing to date. There’s probably as much or slightly more thoughtful, readable stuff out there now, but there is surely an oceanload more of pandering dreck. The ’80s were the time between the rise of professionalism, when pop writing became a normal if disreputable part of journalism, and the triumph of commodification, when pop writing became no more and no less liberated than, say, movie writing. Just for morbid fun, let’s stay it was the period from the death of Bob Marley to the death of Cobain.

There was still some sense that the inmates should be allowed to run the asylum and that rock and soul fanatics could tell what was coming over the horizon. I made a conscious decision to maintain and extend previous music editor Kit Rachlis’ strict standards and wide range. We would hit every high point in every style we could (folk was the hardest category to fill with consistently insightful writing); we would ignore or slam turkeys from the major stars (and cheer worthy big sellers), and we would cram in as much instructive pop history as possible. Remember, back then a reissue like James Brown Live at the Apollo was an unprecedented milestone. Many great things were flat out-of-print, baby.

Joyce Millman (now of Salon.com) Mark Moses (the New Yorker‘s first pop music writer after Ellen Willis and the only one so far incisive enough to follow her; he died from AIDS complications in 1989), Peter Guralnick, James Hunter, Howard Hampton, “Iron Mike” Freedberg, jazz masters Bob Blumenthal and Francis Davis and classical ace Lloyd Schwartz were the core. Folks like Dave Marsh, Ron Wynn, Howard Litwack, Banning Eyre, Chuck Eddy, Timothy Ryback, Gerard Cosloy, Tim Riley and Michael Bloom (“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”–the definitive disillusioned-Zappaphile piece) made key, prophetic contributions. And I think all of them could write like angels and think like devils when the stars were right and the air was still.

On the good weeks, we were the best music section in the country. Scrappier than Stone. Smarter than Spin. Edging out the Voiceenough times to keep me happy. Things I wrote that history has been kind to: a piece praising the Replacements’ Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, the Minutemen’s The Punch Line, and the Wipers’ Youth of America as work from bands who would endure; early and obsessive praise of R.E.M.; dedicated coverage of hip-hop and Afropop. I wrote a piece for a special issue about “Wither the Avant-Garde” that said hip-hop was the true avant-garde music because it had a prayer of becoming as hugely popular as it has and the experimental rock set wanted to crucify me. I did neglect the noisemakers’ future potential, but I was still basically right. History has not been kind to my unimpressed response to Madonna, but she remains the kind of icon-star I have a hard time loving rather than appreciating from a distance. I’ll take Chrisse Hynde, Deborah Harry, Oumou Sangare. Wrote about Bruce Springsteen at least a couple times more than I wanted to, but remain convinced that if we must have mainstream ultramegasuperstars, he’s way more nourishing than most. Was a lotta fun, kids. Too quirky and not profit-minded enough to survive, I guess. Saw the writing on the wall when the paper ran a piece I had never assigned about an unimportant local band. Back into your straightjackets, you lunatic bums.

Steven:   Do you think it’s important for rock critics to listen to jazz and classical music and to read jazz and classical music criticism? How do you find, for instance, rock criticism different from classical music criticism?

Milo:   There must be this high-cultured doppleganger of mine wandering around who writes classical music criticism that the controllers of the Matrix prevent me from seeing. I’ve done maybe two tiny classical pieces in 20 years. You should interview my friend Lloyd Schwartz, the rockin’-est Pulitzer-Prize-winning classical critic in the world (he’s a fan of the movie Re-Animator). For the record, I think an understanding of the basics of music theory and notation as well as an overview of Western classical history will help any pop writer. This information gives you another way to talk about tunes and performers–a significant way, but simply one among many.

Steven:   There was (is) a web site called Sound Stone and you were the music editor for a time. There was a popular feature at the site called “Ask Milo” where people could ask you random music questions and you would respond. How did that come about and did you enjoy it?

Milo:   Hey, interaction with the visitors was a watchword of e-commerce, remember? Fellow editor Brett Milano and I were chatterboxes of the first water about music subjects and so it was a natural. For all three years the site lasted I enjoyed it enormously, far more than I expected, and would do it again in a second. The primary kick was that the questions people sent in proved that many, many folks were smarter about music and hungrier for knowledge about it than the conventional wisdom suggests. Where can I find birdcall records? What’s the connection between Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles? Where did the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” come from, any way? What was Freddie Mercury’s background? Just what in hell DOES “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” mean?

The only questions I found tiresome were “What’s the name of this song? The lyrics go something like…” because I’ve always been strangely bad at that game. And, I guess, because the answer holds little general interest. Incidentally, SoundStone.com becameRock.com, which continues as site with music information, though I have no connection with it any more.

Steven:   You have been a music critic for NPR since 1989. That’s a different kind of music writing, isn’t it? How do you approach radio versus newspapers and magazines?

Milo:   Radio scripts are done in an idealized version of your conversational voice, which doesn’t work on the page. You get all the advantages of inflection nuances and all the disadvantages of non-repeatability. Seems people miss vital information no matter how many times you say it over in a piece that goes by just once. Best of all, you don’t have to describe how music sounds: you can freakin’ play an example of it and keep going.

I met Terry Gross through her now-husband Francis Davis back in the early 1980s. She is one of my heroes. You will never encounter a harder-working person with a more active mind. Talking with her is a joy and yes, she asks you those laser-sharp questions, too. Here’s my other key on-air experience and why I got out of commercial radio. About 25 years ago, I did an all-night show at a station right in downtown Missoula, MT. It was supposed to be plain C&W but the station’s library was a field of cornball so I brought in my own sides and went into blues and folk and bluegrass. (The Holy Modal Rounders’ Have Moicy! was a favorite.) So anyway, without warning one morning around 6:30, the big boss–not the Idaho owner, but his head honcho above the station manager–waddles in smoking a dolomite cigar, sits me down after my set, announces that there was been a reported theft of cash from a desk and would I consent to a lie detector test about it? Totally innocent but smelling witch hunt, I was gone in a week. The program director who hired me was gone two weeks after that, and I never looked back. They soon switched to pre-taped-DJ shows.

Steven:   You write a lot about Afropop for the Village Voice now. Is that your favorite genre of music? What bands out there now move you like certain bands might have when you were a teenager or does music affect you in a different way today?

Milo:   Yow, these are two completely different questions. I started writing a lot about Afropop, which is really many genres of music, back in 1981 for the usual reason–almost nobody was covering a bunch of performers and albums I loved. I write a lot about Afropop today because publications ask me to, or they accept my pitches for stories because there are still few people covering it. As to favorite genre…I’ve bought every King Sunny Ade LP, for example, I’ve ever seen (about 40), but even as a whole Afropop has given me no more pleasure than blues, rock, soul, funk, reggae. It’s up there, though.

My response to pop music has always been weird. I would call it compulsive but sustainable. Even when I was in high school I thought all but a couple of my peers had dorky attitudes toward rock ‘n’ soul ‘n’ country ‘n’ blues. They cared too much but in a shallow way–”these folks are gonna get disappointed with this stuff,” since they couldn’t tell the difference between the Osmonds and Elvis. Of course, there were guys who thought Dylan was supreme but just walled him off in a sacred sanctuary. Anyway, I could read lit for six hours every day and listen to music for six more and there wasn’t anybody around like that. Every day I still get up ready to find something that will plaster my brains like stalactites to the ceiling, as Lester said, and that’s always struck me as a more grown-up passion than the supposedly “adult” attitude that there’s no new waves under the sine.

Steven:   Do you read rock magazines today and what music writers are your favorites that are currently out there?

Milo:   Giant Robot has some of the zaniness of the original rock pubs; Mojo, the Wire and Jazziz cover mutated sounds others ignore;Stone and Spin still surprise me with the smart, well-financed feature. Natasha Stovall and Peter Margasak are clear, vivid writers and penetrating thinkers who made outstanding contributions to Rock.com editorial in its heydays. I’m basically tired of wiseasses who are as mechanical about being “outrageous, confrontational, and controversial” as their hated enemies are about being defiant liberals. Too many people telling me to buy shit records for more reasons than I ever thought possible.

Steven:   What do you think of the Lester Bangs/Richard Meltzer gonzo approach to rock writing?

Milo:   Tsk, tsk–always asking the same questions. Well, I knew Lester a tiny bit and will just go ahead and shamelessly reproduce my comments about him from the “Table Talk” chat thread at Salon:

I concur with those who note Lester was affirmative and upbeat, though he could be exasperating at the same time. He had gifted comic timing, which is hard to get across in anecdotes. For example, he was sitting with a band (the Dawgs? somebody like that) in the hellhole dressing room of the Rat punk club in Boston when a photographer came in for some candid snaps. “C’mon guys–good times! good times! Y’know–good times!” quipped Lester, grinning and jiggling like a lunatic. It was both a send-up of the happy hellion image of New Wave punk and an indirect insistence that, yeah, we are having fun here. You got both messages instantly.

He had a beer in his hand then. I hadn’t seen him without one for hours. It was late in the very long day he spent promoting the Blondie book to radio stations in Boston and Cambridge. Lester (like his fans) was very much a prisoner of the awful syndrome that settles on well-known, dissolute creative souls. Getting wasted with these folks and half hoping something outrageous would happen was part of the drill. The pathetic thing was that the little bunch of us (slightly) younger writers with him lacked the guts or the imagination to come up with anything else to do while he was around. Earlier, in the afternoon, after we had just stopped by the package store and settled in at an indie-magazine publisher’s house. Lester did reward our young-scalawag adoration.

Lester’s rape story came up without warning, and very little preamble. We were talking about feeling excluded as music geeks and writers and general teenage social losers. Lester mentioned that in the later 1960s, not long after he started living on his own in SoCal, he was stuck with a batch of roommates that he totally loathed. He was uncertain of himself, desperately afraid of seeming uncool and a ready target for torment. “We know why you like that Velvet Underground album, Lester, it’s ’cause yer a fag….” “No, no guys–it’s the violin–Cale’s got serious chops.”

Anyway, nearby in the rundown neighborhood was a biker bunch hangout and Lester would go over to score weed or whatever else might be available that appealed to him. One night the leather assholes dragged in a runaway teen girl and Lester witnessed a horrendous gang rape. His narration of the horror and helplessness he felt as the ordeal unfolded was incredibly vivid–suffocating. You felt trapped in the same seething room back then with him. Aside from a psycopath Viet Nam vet recounting his slow slaughter of his enemy/victims in the Mekong night, it was the most heart-stopping story I ever heard.

What seared deepest into Bangs was his hapless passivity. Aside from some terrified wisecracks, he sat riveted in the room for at least a couple hours, smoking joint after joint, and did nothing to stop the animalistic abuse in front of him. He never forgave himself. Wallowing in a slimepit of guilt afterwards, he resolved, after years of farting around, to become a writer: he would not be silent, but speak out to redeem the wretchedness, the falsity, the cruelty and empty promises of the world. That’s one source of his power and why he’s an erratic, unreliable critic–his work wasn’t exactly about making aesthetic judgments. The tale could have been embellished, even a fabrication for all I know. (It does have a fable-like resolution.) I believe Lester wrote a long letter to Greil Marcus recounting the same events and transformation. I don’t know whether or not it’s in Let It Blurt. I do know that no mere prose recounting could equal the right-between-the-eyes impact of hearing Lester tell the story.

I thought I’d add some quick comments about Richard Meltzer’s essays on Bangs from A Whore Just Like the Rest. Sometimes (“Dead Men Don’t Deconstruct”) Meltzer simply seems to wish Bangs had shared more of his attitude toward music and culture (that’s why the late-period “humanist” Bangs offends him so–Borneo Jimmy ain’t gonna cave to no curdled milk of human kindness, nosuh). Or else, that he had gotten the job of assembling the posthumous anthology. Is wishing that your author friend at his blowing-dead-dogs worst was more represented in print an affectionate act or not? I have mixed feelings. Piety about St. Lester is a crime, repulsive. On the other hand, we don’t need his bared ass hanging over his memory forever, either.

One thing I do know–saying Bangs belongs with the dregs of Beat writers is flat-out ugly (“Another Superficial Piece about 176 Beatnik Books”). Meltzer’s retrospective is riddled with his busted relationships and Lester avoided becoming another one only by dying. Finally, Meltzer breaks past the tedious “if Lester had lived, would he have continued writing about rock or not” debate by posing a few fascinating questions: if Bangs had indeed given up pop commentary, what evidence is there he would have been any good at straighter writing? And if his straight writing had cost him his blessed-and-accursed notoriety, could he have dealt with it? And if so, how? If you look at Bangs’s work, you have to wonder.

Steven:   What’s up for the future? Will you continue to write for The Village Voice semi-regularly? Also, how do you like working with editor Chuck Eddy, one of the great and original music writers?

Milo:   All the gigs I have going now will continue for the foreseeable. There are a few internet and book projects on the burners that I’m not ready to talk about just yet. And, well, Bob Christgau has edited all but one of my recent pieces at the Voice. However, I edited Chuck Eddy many times in the ’80s. If Kit Rachlis and I weren’t the first to pick him up after Christgau, we were damned close. I still remember calling up his base in Germany when he was in the army and asking to speak with Chuck Eddy. The Drill Sergeant on the other end went “DO YOU MEAN CAPTAIN CHARLES EDDY?!?!” As for the incomparable Chuck himself, what can I say? He can write any Amstergoddamned thing he wants and I’ll read it.

Steven:   Would you ever consider writing a rock book and what rock books are your favorites?

Milo:   The popular music book I would love to write–as opposed to the one that somebody would publish properly or pay me enough for to make it worth my time–would be one of those coloring-outside-the-lines creations. In his recent anthology, Nick Tosches noted that what originally drew misfit writers to rock was that one could just leave the putative subject behind right away. Rock was the all-purpose excuse to speak the unspeakable any way you could get away with. There’s no market for this any more because nobody believes rock ‘n’ soul operate beyond the boundaries and the music that does operate beyond the boundaries has no literary toehold.

For example, I’d include a section called something like “Rock and Roll Pictures That Don’t Have Anything About Music in Them,” with items such as Peter Beard’s photo of a bodacious honey in a bikini standing in front of a dozen sweating Africans loading a trussed-up rhinoceros onto a truck, Eddie Adams’s “Murder of A Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief,” Eric Fischl’s painting “Bad Boy” and Richard Hamilton’s collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?”

Or an as-long-as-it-takes section about the thoughts of an old-fashioned DJ as he or she spins an hour’s worth of music and the point of view shifts from the present-time DJ to anyone else who has played the record on the air, or listened to it, or the performers as they made it, or the music exec who signed the contracts, or people who made it in a record-pressing plant, or who painted the cover–you get the idea.

Or just dwell on some cultish obscurity like Serpent Power or White Animals or Roy C. or Charles Brackeen and not pretend anything more than that they deserve to be heard. Give them their moment in that bright afternoon.

Rock books–the ones by the writers’ I mentioned already. Try some Afropop books, maybe. Banning Eyre’s In Griot Time, Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Steven:   If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only bring one CD with you, which one would it be and why?

Milo:   I’m tempted to say: any one sharp enough to cut my throat, since life would not be worth living if you had only one CD to listen to.

But of course, this is really a question about how music can function as a life-support system. There are performers and collections that contain entire worlds I will always want to visit. Here’s the first 15 off the top of my (non-severed) head: James Brown, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, the Ramones, Hank Williams, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bach, The Sugarhill Records Story and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

Here’s some Milo Miles articles you can check out online:

• Village Voice piece on Rage Against the Machine (2001)
• Village Voice piece on Afropop–Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe,the Super Rail Band, and Djelimady Tounkra (2001)
• Village Voice review of Phish (1997)

All through school, I had been taught the importance of getting a secure job, so I went to work for the Prudential Assurance Company as a Trainee Surveyor. I stuck it for eight years, but my interest in rock music was overwhelming. I went to as many gigs as I could. All around me, the 60s were reaching a crescendo… and I knew I had to “drop out and do my own thing, man”. At the time, there were no publications dealing with the music I loved, so I decided to start one: Zigzag. The first issue was April 1969. I had no training as a journalist and just relied on enthusiasm to carry me through.

- Pete Frame, interviewed by Beppe Colli at Clouds and Clocks in 1999. I know Frame, as many do, through his Rock Family Trees. Did not know he was the founder of Zigzag also.

Flaubert On the Off Days: Interview with Fred Schruers

By Steven Ward (September 2001)

From an early stint at Circus, through a tenure at Rolling Stone magazine that spanned from the late ’70s to the early ’90s, then to Entertainment Weekly and Premiere in the ’90s and beyond, Fred Schruers has spent the last three decades chronicling the lives of musicians and actors.

Whether covering Bob Marley’s funeral in Jamaica or taking a side trip to profile Navy SEALs in Men’s Journal, Schruers has a prose style that dazzles and informs with equal amounts intelligence and passion.

During the following e-mail interview, Schruers, currently a senior editor at Premiere, talks about his days at Circus and Rolling Stone; he also (bravely) defends the celebrity profile–something he mastered a long time ago.

Steven:    Around the beginning of 2001, you became a Senior Editor at Premiere magazine. How do you like the job so far and what is it exactly that you do as a Senior Editor?

Fred:   Premiere is a very writer-friendly place; through all vicissitudes, there’s a real camaraderie and a sense of mission. Via e-mail and the weekly speaker-phone calls between the New York and L.A. offices (I’m at the L.A. bureau) there are pretty fervent debates over which films to invest pages in, with the usual art vs. commerce parameters.

What exactly do I do as a Senior Editor? That’s the very question you hope your boss isn’t asking. In fact, it’s mostly a writing job, taking on my share of covers and large features, hunting up more heavily reported stories on the business side, and being part of the squad when we do three-plus months of extensive interviewing for the annual “Power Issue.” The bulk of that burden is on the L.A. office, and we then divvy up the writing chores for the issue.

I try to live up to the Editor designation by getting in the debates over what stories we might cover, doing the occasional read of a piece covering something I have some expertise in, and kibitzing on my fellow writers’ drafts when asked. Sometimes I even put on the sports coat that tends to hang uselessly behind my door and go off to a meeting.

Steven:   Let’s go back a long time. Tell me about the circumstances surrounding how you decided that you were going to write for a living and how did music journalism come into play?

Fred:   My folks have a picture of the little four-eyed imp that was me sprawled on a couch reading with literally dozens of magazines scattered around. I think getting my mitts on James Agee and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and soon thereafter Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, plus a heavy dose of Dickens my grandmother had recommended, gave me the idea that language could capture (and in their case, if not mine) enoble all that surrounds us. More to the point of this web site, in 1967 I read a striking essay on the Doors’ first album by Richard Goldstein in the great old Herald Tribune Magazine (Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe were in that mix, too). I was a kid who had quite literally put his hands on the little beige A.M. radio that played the Beatles’ first U.S. single and listened to it all agape. To realize that someone like me, without portfolio, could write about this music was intoxicating, if a little scary.

Steven:   What were your favorite rock magazines before you started to write about music? Which ones did you like to read in the ’70s after you started? And what rock critics and music writers influenced your writing or had some kind of impact on you?

Fred:   It was a real smorgasbord. I repeatedly devoured the earliest Crawdaddy! issues with R. Meltzer pieces like “The Occupational Hazards of Self-Conception,” saw Creem as this powerful but somehow alien hotbed of rude, unpretentious energy, liked the broadsheet feel that Fusion had, thoughtRolling Stone was too handsomely uptown (though loved that there was someone named Chet Flippo, later to be a mentor, with that droll, distinctive voice of his). It says nothing against the New Yorker‘s very lucid Ellen Willis that the New Yorker pieces I turned to first were Whitney Baillet’s great profiles of jazz artists. When it came time to write profiles I tried to learn from the way he would let the people who had been in the room at key moments carry the narrative in their own words.

Steven:   Somewhere around 1977 you were writing for Circus magazine. Were you a full time staffer there and if so, what was it like to write forCircus and to work for editor-in-chief Gerry Rothberg? Also, it seems like Circus was like the Triple A farm club for Rolling Stone, where you worked soon after. Writers like you, Kurt Loder, David Fricke and Daisann McLane left Circus to work for Rolling Stone all around the same time.

Fred:   My great friend John Swenson, who I don’t see enough of these days, had steered me to the legendary Paul Nelson. Paul was a clarion moral voice, without preachiness, and just being around him kept you honest. (Footnote: I had some clips from the Boston Phoenix, where I’d apprenticed for the wonderfully warm and cerebral Ben Gerson. At a typical must-see gig in Boston those days you’d find him, Dave Marsh, Jon Landau, Janet Maslin, Ken Emerson, and a guy named Jon Kriedl, who’d I’d have to guess was the model for Jeff Goldbum’s hilarious portrait of a sly-dog rock critic inBetween the Lines, a.k.a. Head Over Heels.) Anyhow, Circus needed a staff writer. I was hired by Robert Smith (later an exec at Epic and Geffen), who told me to get an answering machine and taught me everything from caption writing to where to find the best Danish pastry in midtown. Circus was the right name for the place in those days–I recall interviewing Warren Zevon on the phone while a publicist friend who’d come down from the Chrysalis office upstairs wrapped duct tape around my head. Gerry was fine–I owe him a lot for hiring me and presiding over that fine bunch of colleagues you mention. How can you complain about a job that sends you to England on a Ramones tour? Robert had told me I’d be at Rolling Stone in six months, and I laughed, but it was actually four.

Steven:   How did you land the “Random Notes” writing gig at Rolling Stone? And what it was like to be in the RS offices back in those days?

Fred:   Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Reverend Charles M. Young. (By the way, he wrote my favorite interjection ever in Rolling Stone–”Well, you can all take a big bite out of my ass”, in defense of Kiss–but that’s another story). He’d been doing “Randoms” for about a year, wanted to graduate out, and gave the job to a nice guy who burnt out immediately and ran off to sea. True story. In some desperation, Music Editor Peter Herbst, who’s now an exec at Hachette Fillipacchi, where I work, hired me. Jann Wenner sent my first set of “Randoms” back with quite a bit of ink cross-hatchings and, in 18-point handwriting with three exclamation points and five underlines, “TOO MUCH PUNK!!!” The truth is, he was a great boss. Whip-smart, tough, but ever supportive of actual journalism and of his slightly rebellious wards. He could come in and see a big pile of busted vinyl on top of a mound of shattered plaster–with five wine corks taped to the pillar above–and just laugh. Though he did once disallow a bar tab I had with two late lamented Pretenders in Santa Barbara; $75 bought a lot of drinks in those days.

Steven:   In Robert Draper’s book, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, Draper wrote that you used to tease Dave Marsh by dangling from a window ledge 23 stories up when he walked by. Is that story true?

Fred:   Yeah, but some people preferred the handstand on the balustrade on 28. The very capable Draper took me out to dinner to make sure he could tell the tale and not be sued. You had to understand that Dave, who was a dear pal and mentor, was so afraid of heights he refused a windowed office. He wouldn’t even glance at the window in the lobby, so I crawled out there when he went to the men’s roo and I wedged my feet into a course of bricks so I could say his name and pop my hands up in the air when he came through the door. He took one look and he was l, in a sort of half-crouching, turning-away, silly-walk kind of thing. It was done out of fondness. I owe Dave a lot for his early support.

Steven:   Was Rolling Stone responsible for you making the transition from writing about music to writing about movies and actors, or were you always interested in covering both?

Fred:   I was certainly interested in film, but RS covered it mostly through Jonathon Cott’s big, brooding, admirable interviews with auteurs. Barbara Downey, who was a top editor and also Mrs. Landau, suggested I do a piece on a film called Breaking Away, and pretty soon thanks to her I had a sideline in movies–things like Alex Cox’s wacky production of Walker, which took me to Nicaragua during the Sandinista ascendancy. On the plane down were two guys from the completion bond company, looking to shut him down. That was just a row of crazy nights on the terrace with Joe Strummer, Ed Harris, a whole gang.

Steven:   Besides Circus and Rolling Stone, you wrote about music for Crawdaddy!, Musician, the New York Daily News, and the Washington Post. Was this all freelancing and what is the freelancing life like compared to working full-time for a magazine or newspaper?

Fred:   Those were freelance gigs. You meet people and they hook you up at the next place, so Jon Pareles went from Crawdaddy! to using me at theVillage Voice, and either he or Chuck Young introduced me to Vic Garbarini at Musician, who was succeeded by the wonderfully funny and literate Bill Flanagan. I wrote a Who history for Bill at VH1 not long ago. When Harriet Fier went from running Rolling Stone to the Washington Post, I did a row of directors for her–Scorsese, DePalma, Milos Forman, and others–but also covered Bob Marley’s funeral in Jamaica for her as well as for Rolling Stone. Life as a free-lancer lets you jump on things–a trip to India, Brazil, Cuba, etc.–but the magazine accounting departments just seem to get slower and slower, so the phrase that your mortgage keeps whispering in your ear is “automatic deposit”, which means a staff job. The other thing staff jobs bring you is first pick of the stories.

Steven:   In the last few years you have written many celebrity profiles for Us Weekly, and Entertainment Weekly more than music stuff. Do you write about music today in any capacity or is that part of your past?

Fred:   My first two pieces for Entertainment Weekly were a history of the making of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, and an N’Sync cover. I was faintly embarrassed at the latter assignment, but it was my day to pitch. That was last year, and this year Robert Christgau, no less, is calling them “quite wonderful” in Rolling Stone, so go figure. I did Melissa Etheridge and Jackson Browne for Us in recent years (yeah, I’ve been remanded to the aging folk-rocker division), did Aimee Mann for Elle, and in fact, I’m keeping an eye out for more music stories these days.

Steven:   Since you have written many celebrity profiles, I want to ask about the constant criticism thrown at writers of such profiles. Many say it’s all fluff and PR crap. The recent Tom Junod-penned Michael Stipe profile in Esquire was fictionalized as some sort of reaction to the so-called predictable celebrity profile. What’s your reaction to the criticism?

Fred:   At the risk of sounding staid, and with respect to the very accomplished Tom Junod, I would have rather seen him use his skills to go spelunking into Stipe’s cryptic body of songwriting work.

Nobody is being handcuffed to radiators and made to read this stuff. Let the people who abhor this system–and I’m as unhappy as anybody with the manipulations that an entrenched PR hierachy tries to enforce on the press–go read their Flaubert, like I do on my off days. That said, everybody has his or her story to tell, even celebrities. My corny idea is that there’s a form of truth to be found across those lunch or saloon tables. The endless reiteration of “celebrity” as an epithet ignores the fact that these people we profile do in fact work for a living, whether with a guitar or a director, and I’m still interested in hearing how they go about it.

Steven:   You have written two quickie fan bios–one on Blondie and one on the Kinks. Do you ever plan to write another book or collect your journalism in between hard covers?

Fred:   The Blondie book was a true quickie, albeit with some generous cooperation from the band. The Kinks book was snuffed by the publisher and is still buried in my drawer (it’s referenced on a web site as if it were out, but don’t be deceived). Very possibly one day I’ll get an electronic version out there for the true believers. People have mentioned a collection to me, and if I found the right publisher I’d cook up a nice title like Kurt Loder’s Beefheart riff–Bat Chain Puller–and do it. But the likeliest book project from me will be a true crime story of some kind.

Steven:   Out of all the music profiles and feature stories that you have written, which few stand out as your favorites and why?

Fred:   I wrote an RS story about Elvis Costello, without his assent, on his ’79 tour, and that comes to mind. I talked to Elvis in early 2000 for a piece onFathers and Sons, and we discussed that crazy time. Some members of Bonnie Bramlett’s road troupe had wound him up, and he tried to out-redneck them. Knowing all we now know, and having talked to Elvis, I believe he did it satirically, probably drunkenly, and of course foolishly. But you’ll never convince me he’s an actual racist.

There were others I hugely enjoyed doing–an early U2 story for Musician, a Kinks piece for RS, my first RS cover with Ted Nugent–but the one that meant the most was a Bruce Springsteen cover pegged to the tour for The River. Years later I went out on the folk tour to talk to him again. He remains an inspiration.

Steven:   What’s your opinion on Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer–the so called Gonzo school of rockcrit?

Fred:   Lester was obviously brilliant, even when thoroughly mistaken as he was in panning Bob Marley’s Kaya in a lead RS album review. Meltzer for me was concrete poetry, with a nice unbderbelly of furtive meaningfulness. I like his collection Gulcher a lot–let’s face it, “A Fatal Jerkoff on the Moon” is a pretty irresistible title for an essay.

Steven:   Do you read rock magazines today? What current rock critics do you like and what do you think of the state of rock criticism today?

Fred:   This would require a really long-winded answer, so let me just say that I largely don’t (though I think Rolling Stone is still well-edited in that regard, Spin seems to have some fire in its belly, and I look forward to the Oxford American music issues). With some exceptions, I think rock criticism is just as impoverished as, by and large, the art form is. I’ve done mys stories with Master P, interviewed Suge Knight in jail, and there’s a lot of rap I find exciting, but mostly the solemnities of booshwah music critics writing about rap have to make you snicker.

Steven:   What advice would you give young people today who want to write about rock music for a living?

Fred:   Do what most of your predecessors, me included, largely did not do–get into the musical nuts and bolts and give us insight into the actual construction of songs and albums, and only then start dazzling us with your wordplay. As for where and how, just get assignments from anyplace that will have you and start slogging up the hill, using the last clip to get the next job.

Steven:   It seems like a couple of years ago your name was still on the masthead at Rolling Stone as a “contributing editor.” I’ve always been curious about what the criteria is to have your name in that spot, or is it just Jann Wenner’s monthly whims or something?

Fred:   I guess I had my name on there as long as anybody–though Charles Perry held the title for a while. It can be whimsical, or a reward for hard work, or any combination in between.

Steven:   What is your favorite record and band of all time and why?

Fred:   My favorite record would have to be anything with the ten best Otis Redding songs, with Robert Johnson knocking on the door. Album-wise, I think Kink Kontroversy takes the proverbial kake.

Cum on Read The Noise: An Interview with former Creem writer, Robert Duncan

By Steven Ward (October 2001)

Rock critic Robert Duncan, a second generation Creem writer — he joined the magazine in the mid-’70s — is also the author of The Noise: Notes From a Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. Criminally out of print, The Noise is an exceptional study of ’70s rock and other cultural artifacts from the era — a book that devotes equal amounts of space to Mott the Hoople, Richard Nixon, and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Oddly enough, Duncan was so dissatisfied with The Noise, he claims to have never even read the finished product!

Despite his “inexplicable urges to interview drunken midgets,” Duncan has more or less left behind the rock critic profession (though not music itself–see below) for good. Which is our loss, not his.

Steven:    First of all, where are you living today and what are you doing?

Robert:   I live 23 miles outside San Francisco in a weird, hippie throwback of a town, pop. 7,500. We’re the last little ville before it all turns into dairy farms and state parks. Still, the downtown area has three seven-day-a-week music venues and a four-plex theater. When I moved here 17 years ago, it was the nearest place we could afford a house un-small enough to accommodate two kids, my wife’s art studio and my (literal) garage band. Three years ago we moved four blocks further to a place that has more than one bathroom and can accommodate the garage band’s burgeoning recording studio.

While I worry that I’ve so thoroughly adjusted to life outside of NYC (where I spent most of my life), it sure is purty here. And it sure is nice to have a little elbow room for all our various schemes and projects. About ten years ago I started writing songs and playing music again, and I’m now working on my third CD. My wife makes strange, tiny artworks. My daughter, who’s about to leave for college (in New York City, of course), puts out a fittingly intense poetry zine. And my son is a drum ‘n’ bass DJ, who at 14 already has a weekly gig in a nearby tavern and shares the studio with me and the band. In other words, music and writing persist.

By day, I’m the so-called creative director of a small advertising agency 4.5 miles away, that a partner and I started 10.5 years ago. We do print ads and TV spots for videogame companies and some of the remaining Internet music startups, among a motley assortment of others. It’s not where I imagined I’d be, but we’ve managed to create a company that takes absolutely nothing too seriously, except being funny. So, to my surprise and delight, it winds up being a lot of fun. And most of the time it pays more than Kenny the Record Guy (see below).

Steven:    When exactly did you leave the world of rock journalism behind and why did you do that?

Robert:   The world of rock journalism makes it sound a lot bigger, more varied and more lucrative than it was (maybe today you could actually make a living; probably not). After we had our first kid, I found it a lot harder to make a go of it on $35 reviews and selling promo records to a paranoiac named Kenny. So if I ever formally left the world of r.j., I’d have to say it was on account of my daughter. But, in fact, it was probably time to move on anyway. I was broke, bored and, having just spent three years trying to write my way out of a book contract (by actually writing a mess of a book called The Noise), burned out–although every once in a while I still get these inexplicable urges to interview drunken midgets.

Steven:    Tell me about your beginnings in the profession. Did you set out to become a rock writer and where did you first get published?

Robert:   I set out to become a rock star. I’d played in bands since I was 12, first as a guitar player and then, when I was the first guy in the band whose voice changed, as a singer. The bands eventually got to be pretty good (knowledgeable others tell me we were proto-punk, but I was generally too drunk to remember). But our original songs just didn’t cut it (like any bar band of the time, we played mostly covers). My own early songwriting attempts always seemed a little labored (in contrast, I hope, to my more recent songwriting efforts), but only slightly less so than my band mates’. The high point of my musical career–as well as my musical crossroads–came when Sam Andrews, former lead guitarist for Big Brother (Janis Joplin’s band, kids), invited me to be singer in his first post-Janis group. We had played together at the Cafe Bizarre in the Village one night and the dilemma was that I had always liked his playing (and was impressed by his fame), but didn’t like being dependent on him or anyone else for decent songs (because while I knew my old songs sucked, I was enough of a writer–and incipient rock critic, I guess–to know when other people’s songs sucked as well–which was most of the time). So at 21 I turned down my shot at stardom (I later got to know the drummer from Big Brother, who lives in my little hippie town of course, and he said, good thing, because Sam wound up going through some long, low years in the narcotic wilderness).

My new plan was to combine my vast knowledge of pop music with my writing aptitude (it was the one thing in school I was consistently good at) and get famous that way. And I had decided to move to California–specifically, this amazing town, spread out along these crazy narrow streets on the hills overlooking the bay, called Sausalito that my older brother had introduced me to a few years earlier. While looking for an apartment there, I ran into–almost literally–this brusque, burly guy with long, greasy black hair, black devil beard and black cowboy hat who looked like a Hell’s Angel. As I walked toward this place that had a big For Rent sign, biker boy, carrying a box, called out threateningly, “Hey, it’s already rented.” Still he let me look around (somehow I brought myself to ask), and I noticed he was wearing a press pass. Turned out he was Ed Ward, former reviews editor of Rolling Stone, now book review editor of San Francisco’s City magazine and contributing editor to Creem. I was too shy/proud/afraid to ask for an assignment on the spot, but at a party, my girlfriend did several weeks or months later. So my first published piece was a review of Thomas McGuane’s novel 92º in the Shade that ran in Ward’s book review section. My first “rock” piece was (I think) a brief interview with the banjoist Earl Scruggs, who was passing through SF. Anyway, through Ed (now a “rock historian” for NPR), I met John Morthland (another ex-Rolling Stone-r), who would later recommend me for a job as a copy assistant (gofer) at Creem.

Steven:    How did you become an editor at Creem, how long were you there, and what was that experience like?

Robert:   After nine glorious months in California and a couple of bleak ones back in NYC (don’t ask), John Morthland, who by then was serving as interim editor of Creem (I think this was in the immediate post-Marsh era), called to ask if I wanted to be editorial gofer. I arrived in Detroit days later in the middle of a cold, snowy night. Morthland and Bangs picked me up at the airport, and we went directly to Pasquale’s restaurant on Woodward Avenue in Birmingham (the suburb where the offices were now located), and got drunk. Repeat as necessary.

Or maybe just repeat, period. Because that’s what we did for most of the 15 months I was there. Get up late. Go to work. Go to Pasquale’s for this casserole thing on the menu called “Special Spaghetti,” as well as for multiple “bolos” of beer (I never did learn if the word bolo, defined evidently as a profoundly oversized goblet of beer, was a regionalism or Pasquale’s-specific), served up by a slightly older, increasingly attractive, endlessly patient (even occasionally amused) bottle blonde by the name of Wanda (who I heard a few years ago still works there). It continues: Order last call (bolos, of course) and have one of us (after Morthland left town, it was me, Lester and usually Air-Wreck Genheimer) peel out down Woodward to the big drugstore to get 12-packs for that night’s post-Pasquale’s celebration. I think that during this time we also did some writing.

I’m not sure how long I worked as gofer. It was a few months maybe. But I guess I showed I was capable of other things, and Lester decided I was OK and gave me an assignment or two, and then they brought in an outside editor, who soon bailed to return east, and then I think they promoted someone else, who bailed to return east–by which time, several more months later, I had inadvertently demonstrated a talent for editing and (albeit in a very unusual, incomplete, and inadvertent way) managing.

Basically, I was a terminal comedic exhibitionist, driven to get everyone around me to laugh at anything and everything, including most especially me. Which is apparently a pretty good way to run a so-called creative business. Lester once said I was the only person he’d met who was as funny as him (which gives you some insight into Lester). Anyway, publisher Barry Kramer took me out for a ride in the Cadillac and told me I was the best editor he’d had since Marsh and would I be the overall editor of Creem. I recognized that in Kramer’s offer there was something of a dis (possibly unintentional, probably subconscious) to Lester. More than that, there was something unworkable. Because while Barry and even Lester would say that Lester didn’t want to be editor, that it wasn’t his interest or forte, I felt that, as the heart and soul of the magazine, he should at least have the titular honor. And that he probably wanted it. So I went to him and said, how about you be editor and I be managing editor and you do what you want and I do everything else. Which meant Lester didn’t fight me (subtly or not so subtly) every step of the way like he did some of those other editors who wound up bailing for the coast.

Steven:    Were you very close to Lester Bangs in Detroit?

Robert:   Not at first. At first, he didn’t like me–though I didn’t really know it at the time. I thought that’s just the way the place was, a little cliquish. Later, he told me he had decided I was going to be “another [name deleted to protect the entirely innocent],” a former staffer who had evidently been some kind of yes-man (to whom, I’m not sure) or something. It was always unclear. I worked hard when I got there, and kept relatively quiet at first. But I had traveled all the way to Detroit under the impression that, even if it was Creem, it was a job, which I desperately needed at the time, not to mention a job in journalism–and covering rock ‘n’ roll. At the time, I sloughed off the social frost–and of course went on to become very close to Lester. But looking back, I think it revealed a petty side to him that hasn’t made it into the pop hagiography. I’m guessing that he didn’t like that I didn’t kiss his ass, that I wasn’t enough of a yes-man–to him (for a celebrity puncturer, he could be surprisingly vain about his own growing celebrity). But I had barely heard of Lester when I went to Creem.

So, like the rest of us, Lester could be an asshole. No big deal. Still, it was that kind of petty assholism that later in New York would make me quietly break off our friendship. But in between those times, we came to be great buddies and constant companions. In fact, once he had deemed me OK, he was nothing if not generous. He laughed at my jokes and pushed me to become a better writer. At the same time, I laughed at his and, in a different way, pushed him as a writer. Specifically, I asked to dig through unpublished manuscripts (e.g., “John Denver is God,” in its original 60-80-page methedrine form) in hopes of discovering overlooked gems (e.g., “John Denver is God” in its Creem-published form) and, ultimately, I challenged him to take his writing to the next level, which at the time I (and, to a lesser extent, he) defined as New York.

Steven:    You were the first Creem staffer to leave the magazine and head to New York City. I assume you wanted to freelance. Did that happen right away and was the transition easy?

Robert:   I left because I was a restless, confused 21-year-old who thought I was in some kind of serious relationship with a flaky girl in New York. Actually, the end of my time at Creem started when, catalyzed by said girlfriend, I went AWOL for ten days. When I returned from back east and Barry decided to hold my paycheck (an entirely reasonable reaction–although he was mainly just fucking with me), I stomped out. Drove to New York that night. I was a demanding little shit. Back in New York, my $500 Datsun died at the doorstep of the girlfriend, who informed me she didn’t want to continue the relationship anyway. Doh. But I did manage to pick up some freelance work right away–from really nice guys like Paul Nelson, who called me out of the blue, and Jean-Charles Costa–enough so I fantasized that it was possible to make a living.

Steven:    Who were your rock critic influences when you started out and tell me about your favorite rock magazines and writers from the ’70s?

Robert:   When I was a kid I used to read Rolling Stone and, growing up mostly in New York, the Village Voice and, for a time, the East Village Other and whatever other crazy hippie magazine there was. I also used to devour the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday New York Times. And not just about music, I’d read about theater, film, dance, whatever. I was a kid who read the arts section as avidly as other kids read sports. In fact, I think I liked reading reviews of stuff better than the stuff itself. I’m still that way. A lot of what I know about the world, I’m afraid to say, is from reviews–although I seem to know a lot, down to about an inch deep. I was at this party once talking to a guy who turned out to be a physicist. I had read this review of a book about some obscure physics thing, and we were chatting and he suddenly said to me, surprised: “So you’re a physicist?” That’s what I mean.

As to Creem, I used to see it at this one newsstand down in the subway at Astor Place, and I thought it was this strangely Detroit-centric rag–Iggy, Iggy, Iggy, MC5, Iggy, Grand Funk(!). In addition to seeming a little hick, it seemed a little teenybopper. Yeah, from afar, I was unimpressed by Creem. My opinion changed when I started to write for it. As to specific writers, I’m not sure I had any favorites. None that I remember. In the early days, I thought Hunter Thompson was funny. Was he?

Steven:    Do you read rock journalism today and are there any newer rock writers that stand out for you?

Robert:   I devotedly read music stuff, still. In spite of the fact that I kind of hate it, I get Rolling Stone at home. My kid gets Spin, so I steal that. My other kid gets DJ Times and Mixer and a bunch of techno-related stuff, so I read those. I also read a bunch of technical mags (Mix and EQ), because I like gear and have a recording studio in my basement. In recent years, I’ve liked pieces by Jon Pareles in the NY Times. I read something last year about Fred Neil in Mojo that I really enjoyed (I think it was by ex-Creemster Ben Edmonds). In general, I don’t notice any great new writers (then again, I’m not really looking). I do notice that the average writer seems better than the average writer of yore–stylistically and, in particular, analytically. These guys tend to know their stuff (or maybe I no longer know MY stuff). And they tend to seem, you know, professional. Which impresses me–if it doesn’t thrill me.

Steven:    Your 1984 book, The Noise: Notes From a Rock ‘n’ Roll Era was an ambitious study of rock and roll’s effect on America culture. How did you get the idea for that book and were you satisfied with the way it came out?

Robert:   I wish I could blame the idea on drugs (it would seem credible). It actually came from a very vague feeling about the state of things that never became much more than a very vague feeling even in the 200-page explaining of it. Which is probably why I remain dissatisfied (to say the least) with the book. Actually, I’ve never read it cover to cover. Writing it was among the most painful (and protracted) experiences of my life. I was stuck in a contract that left me stuck in a vague concept, and I was getting crazier and broker by the minute. A death spiral that only ended when my editor said he was on his way to my apartment to take whatever the hell I had written away from me two years after it was originally due. Thank god he did. But then he got fired and the publisher who’d signed me retired and the company totally dicked me. Put that godawful cover on it and dropped it in a port-a-potty somewhere in order to satisfy their end of the bargain. So I’m bitter that it sucked (in my admittedly biased opinion), and I’m bitter that they didn’t help make it better–or at least sell it. And at the time I was too young and naive to do anything about it.

Steven:    In The Noise, you quote Abbie Hoffman when he says “Mick Jagger can sing all he wants about fighting in the streets; he’s gifted and outrageous. But he probably inspired more young people to become millionaires than to overthrow the system…” Do you believe that money and power is still a large chunk of what inspires people to become professional musicians today or is it worse now or better?

Robert:   What’s worse? What’s better? This music got started mainly because people wanted to get rich and famous and laid. Those guys in the ’50s (not to mention their predecessors in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s) weren’t out to make Art. This idea of pop music as art surfaced in the hippie era, with the Beatles. Sure, those old guys had a vision of what sounded cool to them (and maybe of what they thought would sound cool to others), and some struggled to maintain what we might call artistic integrity. But above all it was about entertaining audiences and being materially rewarded. Which is not to say that lots of it isn’t artistic, even great art. But that’s our backwards imposition. That wasn’t the plan–and it still isn’t for most bands today. Anyway, I think art is a lot better off when it doesn’t think of itself as such–certainly pop music art is better. I was in Chicago the other day in some cheesy, ’50s-themed diner, and this came on the loudspeaker: “They used to call me Speedo, but my real name is Mr. Earl.” Now that’s art–pretending to be trash.

Steven:    You were partially responsible for getting Lester to leave Detroit and come to New York. Can you describe how he became a different person in NYC or was there no difference.

Robert:   I think my leaving helped prod him to do something he’d always dreamed of. And when I told him there was an apartment available cheap ($200/month) on my floor in the funky Gum Joy building, that was the final impetus. At first, he seemed much the same old Lester, kind of goofy, kind of hick–all the more so in the context of hipster NY. “New York, just like I pictured it!” But at the same time, he thought of himself as some kind of conquering hero. He seemed to imagine that almost everybody he’d meet would’ve heard of him (although a surprising number had). Which in a way added to his hickness. So he was open and generous and ingenuous and gullible and an egomaniac all at once. His writing got more serious–he was definitely trying to take his game to the next level. Sometimes it seemed a little too serious–or too self-consciously so–to me. In general, I prefer the oldCreem stuff. Although his Elvis obit for the Voice is one of the best things he or any rock writer ever wrote, the ending especially.

Anyway, I think NY Lester was basically the same as Motown Lester, maybe a little more mellow, a little more serious, a little more nervous, a little less drunk–until his live-in girlfriend departed. At which point he cranked up the drinking and pills and scene-making, and the overbearingness and obnoxiousness got more pronounced, and the funny got less funny. It was some time in this period that he pissed me off with some callous comment about an ex-girlfriend, and I decided I’d had enough. He probably never even knew what he did. Beneath it all, we were really tight–which is part of the reason I felt hurt. Closer to the surface, I just didn’t trust him anymore. Practically speaking, he had become a giant pain in the ass. But mainly I found it all too hard to watch. I remember one time there was this serial killer going around NY carving up homeless guys and drunks. My wife and I came home to find Lester passed out on the sidewalk and dragged his 250 pounds into the safety of the vestibule. I told Morthland–who was probably Lester’s best buddy at that time–that I had carried Lester’s body in, but that if he didn’t stop drinking and drugging I fully expected to be carrying his body out sometime soon. I was hoping Morthland would do something. I don’t know why I didn’t. A few months later we were literally carrying Lester’s ashes down Fourteenth Street.

Steven:    I think you were the person who discovered Lester’s body because you guys lived in the same building (542 Sixth Avenue). Could you elaborate on that experience and was it something that shocked you or something you saw coming in some ways?

Robert:   It didn’t shock me (see above) that Lester had died from his dangerous behavior. It seemed absolutely inevitable. I didn’t know until afterwards that he had gone on the wagon in the month or two prior to his death, but based on his past adventures in wagoneering, I would have still thought it inevitable. I remember when he quit drinking in Detroit. The plan was to eliminate beer (notably, the bottomless bolos we consumed nightly at Pasquale’s) and just drink a little wine–almost, Lester seemed to suggest, as a digestive. He ordered a carafe of white with dinner. Then he ordered another. Then another. By the end of his first night of not drinking he may have drunk more liquid and more alcohol by volume than on his most fervid drinking day. Lester was a maniac. And a hopeless drunk. And, perhaps most importantly, his genius as a writer and an appreciator of music was all wrapped up in the fact that he was certifiably, biochemically mad.

As to discovering the body, it happened like this: The landlord, a man about my age (28 at the time) who lived in the building and who actually seemed fond of the loud, crazy tenants on the top floor, knocked on my door. I think there’s something wrong with Lester, he said, and led me next door. Apparently, a woman visitor had discovered him or discovered that he wasn’t answering the door. She was there. My wife, Roni, came in. Lester was on his back on the couch, as if asleep. But his eyes were open. I felt for a pulse. I shook him. I yelled in his face. Somebody had called the paramedics. When they arrived, a minute or two later, I loudly insisted they shock him. They wouldn’t. I kept pushing. Finally, one of the ambulance guys turned on me, saying angrily, Look, we could maybe get a pulse, but he’s been gone too long. He’d be a vegetable, brain-dead. And that was it. A few minutes earlier Roni had heard him doing his patented stumble up the stairs. A few minutes earlier–10? 15? at the most, she guessed–he had been alive enough to climb five flights. Now he was nothing. Neither the paramedics or the cops recognized his name when we told them. And so Lester lay on the couch, as we had found him, uncovered, unceremonious, unknown, for hours, until the meat wagon arrived. The apartment smelled like death. But then Lester’s apartment had smelled like death for a long time. And I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. It was easy to see it coming. Impossible, I tell myself, to stop.

Steven:    Could you envision a music magazine today that was like the Creem of the ’70s and early ’80s?

Robert:   The music isn’t anywhere near as important to people in general as it was then. So that would be a limiting factor. Still, I’m not one to think those were the golden years, that never again will music be as good or even as culturally significant as it was in the [your decade here]. More golden years are yet to come, I’m convinced. Which means there will certainly be another Creem. Maybe it’ll be in another medium. A cable TV series. A web site. (Maybe there’s another Creem out there already.) And maybe I’ll be hanging with Lester in rock ‘n’ roll critic heaven when it arrives. But it’s coming, I’m sure.

Steven:    Can you tell me about your most memorable interview or journalism experience at Creem and why it was so important?

Robert:   In ’78 I got to spend three days on the bus with Springsteen and the E Street Band. First of all, Bruce was a great interview, thoughtful and forthcoming, and we got along famously. Second, the tour was going from Houston to New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi. Talk about flavor (and keep in mind that I’m not some carpetbagger; my family’s from the South, and I spent a lot of time there as a kid). Anyway, between those two circumstances, I put together the best story of my career to date. It got a lot of good reaction, earned me some attention (and work) from other magazines, and probably gave me the confidence (overconfidence?) to write longer, more sophisticated stories, and, ultimately, The Noise. Which, I suppose, is the black lining.

In other magic moments, I got to ride on a big, private jet (something like a 727) with Ron Wood and Keith Richards when they were doing that tour (circa ’79) as the New Barbarians. The whole front end of the plane was a lounge, with swivel chairs, tables, a bar and a proper British barman. And the limo actually drove onto the tarmac and deposited you at the base of the plane’s stairs. Now that’s Rock Star. That was also the day that, while using the phone in Keith or Woody’s hotel room (they were both there–Keith so drunk as to be quasi-psychedelic), I accidentally bulldozed an entire mound of white powder off a bedside table and onto, and into, a white shag rug. I’m not sure of its journalistic significance, but it sure was funny. Later.

Steven:    If you were stranded on a desert island, what CD would you bring with you if you could only bring one?

Robert:   I’d bring something brand new, a double or triple album of something I’d never heard before, by a band I’d never heard of before. Because, to me, nothing sucks more than the same old shit.

Covering the Dirty, Nasty, Offensive, and (Occasionally) Stupid: Metal Critic Don Kaye

By Steven Ward (October 2001)

Heavy Metal. It’s a music genre most music critics won’t take seriously. Worse than deriding most of it, heavy metal is still often ignored by the mainstream music press unless record sales are so enormous a magazine like Rolling Stone is forced to acknowledge it. So it’s always been the job of more fan-orientated mags – Circus, Hit Parader, Metal Edge – to give headbangers thorough coverage.

Don Kaye is one of the better writers covering the ghetto of heavy metal in fanmags, which he’s been doing since the late ’80s. During the following e-mail interview, the Kerrang! and Metal Edgewriter talks about his beat, how “nu metal’ stacks up to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, and freelancing in New York.

Steven Ward:   It seems like I see your name in a ton of magazines. Which music magazines do you currently write for, and do you have a full-time gig or do you walk the tough road of a full-time freelancer?

Don Kaye:   I currently write primarily for Guitar World, Revolver, Kerrang! (U.K.), Metal Edge, and Request, as well as film magazines like Fangoria, Shivers (U.K.), and Schwann DVD Advance. The number is down a bit from the last couple of years because of other job responsibilities and the dot-com crash, which killed a lot of music sites that hired people like me for “content,” which is a word I despise.

In the past, I have contributed to print outlets like Creem, Circus, Hit Parader, Metal Mania, Metal Maniacs, Rock Scene, Alternative Press, Burn (Japan), Rock Hard(Germany), and many others, as well as webzines like  Allstar, Launch, MTV.com, VH1.com, DrDrew.com, and several others in that forum as well.

I have only been a full-time freelancer once, during the period of 1997-2000, and even then I was lucky enough to have a part-time consulting gig with the company I now work for full-time, otherwise I wouldn’t have made it. It’s very tough to be a full-time freelancer in New York, unless you write for outlets like Vanity Fair and other high-end magazines. I never thought of myself in that league, so frankly the magazines I work for (and have worked for in the past) are not high-paying enough to make a full-time living here. At one point during the period I mentioned above, I was probably doing well enough that I could have gotten by in a small town somewhere, but New York? Forget it.

So I’ve almost always had full-time jobs, although they’ve been in the music business as well, so there’s always been a level of convenience with that.

Steven Ward:   Tell me about the circumstances surrounding how you ended up writing about metal music for a living and do you remember where and when your first piece of professional piece of rock journalism was published?

Don Kaye:   Second question first. My first professional piece of rock journalism–meaning the first one I actually got paid for–was published in March of 1986 in a magazine called Aardschok America. Aardschok was a big deal in Europe and they tried to launch a U.S. edition, but it folded after two or three issues. However, I did get paid $200 for an article I wrote, although ironically, I can’t remember what the story was! Unfortunately, I don’t have access to all my files at this moment to look it up.

As for how I ended up writing about metal, it sort of flowed naturally from my personal interests. I was always into the music since I was a little kid, and when I got to college (Brooklyn College, 1983-87), I started doing a metal music program on the tiny AM station there. I also got involved in the tape-trading underground at that time, which is where bands like Metallica and Mercyful Fate and Slayer first came to prominence through the circulation of their demos by underground metal fans. I also began circulating tapes of my show, and soon got asked to contribute to some fanzines, including Kick-Ass Monthly, which was one of the leading metal fanzines at that time. Next was Hard Rocks, a spinoff of a weekly NY/NJ music paper called the Aquarian. With the clips I gathered from those, I approached Kerrang! and started writing for them. Kerrang!was THE metal bible at the time, so that was my first big-time writing gig, and it led to many others. I sort of became one of Kerrang!‘s leading authorities (along with the late, brilliant Paul Miller) on the underground speed/thrash scene, and many other mags needed someone to cover that stuff as well.

Steven Ward:   What about your formative years as a fan of rock criticism. What were your favorite rock mags to read when you were growing up and what rockcrits and writers were your favorite to read and which ones influenced you as a music writer?

Don Kaye:   Circus and Creem were the two main magazines I read when I was a kid. I didn’t always understand Creem at first, but came to appreciate the style as I got older. Some of the writers I admired at that time were Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson, Robert Duncan, Billy Altman…again, as a youngster, some of their stuff went over my head at first, but I loved their passion and freedom and, especially with Lester, that sense of abandon that captured the spirit of rock and roll.

I also have to admit that there was a magazine for a while called Rock Scene (not the one I wrote for later) that was a black and white, almost all-photo zine. It had lots of pictures of bands playing live and horsing around backstage, and all those photos of that lifestyle were so intriguing and thrilling to me. I wanted to get near that, and be a part of it.

Steven Ward:   You write primarily about metal. Do you think mainstream music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin ignore the genre and why do you think that is?

Don Kaye:   Mainstream magazines have traditionally ignored metal until it becomes too big for them to keep doing that, but even when they do cover it, it’s always with this sort of condescending air–as if to say, well, this music is really beneath us, but we’ll take a look at it anyway. Spin has always had that attitude. Rolling Stone has done its best to ignore metal for years, but I understand that they’re putting Slipknot on the cover now. However, no one has any illusions that Rolling Stone is anything but garbage these days. The only reason Slipknot is on that cover is because Jann Wenner sees it as selling magazines, the same way he sees half-naked pictures of Britney Spears or N’Sync as serving the same purpose.

But mainstream publications generally ignore metal for the same reason as, say, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame: in their view, it’s this dirty, nasty, offensive, stupid, bastard child of rock music that they’d rather not have to deal with!

Steven Ward:   I’m curious about what you think of Chuck Eddy’s metal writing in the ’80s, and a guy like Martin Popoff who is still writing intelligent and irreverent metal stuff today?

Don Kaye:   Chuck Eddy was a huge influence on me during that time, and we used to talk quite a lot back in those days as well. I really admired a lot of his coverage of metal, and he introduced me to several great bands, primarily among them White Zombie. I haven’t read as much of Martin’s stuff, but what I’ve seen has always been well-written and, as you said, quite intelligent.

Steven Ward:   You have written for both American and British metal magazines. How do you think U.S. mags like Circus, Hit Parader, Metal Edge and Metal Maniacscompare with Kerrang! and Metal Hammer?

Don Kaye:   Well, I’ve only written for Kerrang!, but I imagine that some of the same things can apply to Metal Hammer. However, one thing that no single U.S. magazine, nor Metal Hammer, can or has ever been able to match is Kerrang!‘s newsworthiness. By virtue of being weekly, they have the most up-to-date news coverage and reviews of any metal mag. The only things that beat them are daily newspapers and the various news Web sites.

As for other differences, there’s a more personal style to the writing in the British magazines–some of the writers in Kerrang! used to be well-known for using half an article to detail what they did the day of the interview, how much they had drunk the night before, etc.–and there also seems to be more of a relationship between the writers and the readers. For example, I really don’t think that readers of U.S. magazines pay very much attention to who the writers are, whereas in England, they do, and have very specific opinions about the writers’ work. So in the U.K., someone like me has his “fans,” so to speak, and his “detractors.” The writers themselves are sort of personalities over there. It can be fun simply because you know that people are reading and taking a stand, whether they agree with your opinions or not. Whereas in the U.S., sometimes you feel like the work is just sort of disappearing into this vast media vacuum!

Steven Ward:   You write for the brand new U.S. metal magazine Revolver. The magazine, so far, seems like a pretty literate take on the genre. Does the magazine’s existence excite you, and do you wish others would crop up on the scene?

Don Kaye:   The magazine does excite me because I feel that an elaborate, high-end metal magazine that can compete with the Spins and Alternative Presses of the world is long overdue. The genre needs a magazine that can be taken seriously outside the hardcore fan base, although it’s vitally important that they relate to and enjoy it as well. Many, many metal mags in the past have suffered from tunnelvision or isolationism or some of the other bad qualities associated with metal, not to mention just plain lousy writing and design. I think there’s a feeling among some publishers that they can throw any piece of shit out there with Metallica on the cover and it will sell (and sometimes they’re right).

So I think the approach that Harris Publications, and editors Brad Tolinski and Tom Beaujour, are taking with Revolver could be the right one. I’m not crazy about everything I’ve seen in the mag so far, but I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there. As for whether there’s room for more magazines in that vein, that’s based purely on how well metal itself is doing at the moment. But if they did crop up, I’d probably try to write for them!

Steven Ward:   What music magazines do you read today and are there any particular writers out there today who move you?

Don Kaye:   I guess because I work in the business, I really don’t read music magazines. I have been reading Revolver‘s first two issues, and I do sometimes read Kerrang!. But when I’m relaxing and not working, the last thing I want to do is read something work-related! Unfortunately, that’s a side effect of being a rock journalist, at least for me.

I will read an individual interview that interests me, even just standing at a rack in a bookstore, rather than pick up an entire publication.

As for writers, I like to read the New York Times people: Jon Pareles and Ann Powers. I think David Fricke still manages to do some really good interviews despite being stuck in the heap of garbage that is Rolling Stone. I’ve seen other good stuff here and there, but I guess I’m just as guilty as any other American reader of not always remembering who wrote a particular article!

Steven Ward:   What is your take on the Lester Bangs/Richard Meltzer gonzo school of rockwriting?

Don Kaye:   As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t able to fully appreciate Lester Bangs when I was a little kid first reading Creem, but I gradually was able to understand him and now consider him a god. A lot of people have embraced the Lester legend in recent years, but his writing has been a part of my life–sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground–for more than two decades. I didn’t read as much of Meltzer, but what I have seen I’ve liked as well, plus I was a huge fan of the lyrics he wrote for Blue Oyster Cult, one of my all-time favorite bands. I think those guys were, for all their faults, amazingly creative and passionate guys who really cared about rock music and writing–which is something you see all too little of these days.

Steven Ward:   Are there any rock interviews that stand out for you as your favorites and why?

Don Kaye:   God, I hate to sound like a schmuck, but my mind always blanks out at questions like these. It’s a little more difficult now because I don’t have some old magazines or books nearby at the moment to leaf through. Wait a minute, now that I think about it, the interviews that Lester Bangs did with Lou Reed, which are reprinted inPsychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, are pretty great!

I just did one of my best interviews recently. It was Iggy Pop. He’s one of my rock and roll heroes and a genuine legend, plus a nice, intelligent, funny, and articulate guy to boot. A real pleasure to talk with, and he’s got great opinions and stories to share.

Some of the best interviews I’ve done have been with personal heroes who turned out to be really nice people. I was a huge Judas Priest fan and have had many great interviews with Rob Halford and the other members of the band over the years. The guys from Black Sabbath have been tremendous too. I was also a huge Soundgarden fan and found both Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil to be tremendous interviews.

One interview that always stands out in my mind is Mike Muir of Suicidal Tendencies. He has this tough, punk rock image, but during our interview he began to talk about his younger brother, who, if memory serves, was mentally handicapped, and at one point, Muir began to cry. It was a moment I’ll never forget, because I immediately saw a completely different and very human side to this musician that I had never seen before. It didn’t feel exploitative or anything like that. The best interviews are the ones where you achieve a real chemistry with the subject and learn something about them that you never knew before.

Steven Ward:   In the late ’80s/early ’90s there was a syndicated metal radio show called “Metalshop” (I remember the intro–”MMMMMMMMetalshopppppp!”) Anyway, how did you get connected to the show, what did you do and what ever happened to it?

Don Kaye:   Good memory, man! I got connected to “Metalshop” through a good friend named Gene Khoury, who went to the Donington Monsters Of Rock festival in the summer of ’87 and met up with Mark Snider, then the writer and producer of the show. Mark mentioned casually that he was possibly looking for a co-writer and associate producer, and when Gene came home, he immediately told me to get in touch with Mark because of my writing and college radio experience. I called Mark, interviewed with him, but then the job got put on the back burner for a few months. In the meantime, I took a job doing publicity for Noise Records, but in March of ’88, Mark called me back–the position was open again. This time I got it, and worked on “Metalshop” for the next six years. I was associate producer for the first year, and then wrote and produced the show by myself for five years after that when Mark left. I think I ended up writing and producing somewhere around 300 shows, as well as doing about seventy-five percent of the interviews. The host was Charlie Kendall, one of the great rock radio voices.

“Metalshop” was great for its time because we played a lot of music that rock radio didn’t normally play. That way when kids called up the stations looking for Metallica or Megadeth, before they became mainstream acts, the station could say, “Well, listen to ‘Metalshop’ on Fridays, that’s where we’ve got all the metal you could want.” Unfortunately, the nature of syndicated radio gradually changed during the early Nineties, and after a very successful run of probably about eleven years, “Metalshop” went away. But many people remember it fondly, and I had a blast doing it. I got to meet and interview a lot of my all-time favorite metal musicians and basically created my own audio magazine every week!

Steven Ward:   What is your take on all this Korn and Slipknot-type “Nu metal”? Does it stand up to Led Zep, Deep Purple and Judas Priest?

Don Kaye:   Well, for one thing, I think the phrase “nu-metal,” even though I’ve used it myself, is virtually meaningless at this point. It’s just a blanket term for all the bands that have emerged in the last five years. But the thing is that none of the bands who are the cream of this crop–Korn, System Of A Down, Slipknot–sound like each other, except in the sense that all metal bands share loud, distorted guitars, etc. Does Static-X sound like Limp Bizkit? Not at all. One is a slickly packaged rap/metal train wreck, the other is more or less a knockoff of White Zombie and Ministry. Yet you’ll find them both in any article about “nu-metal.”

But if you’re going to look at the latest generation of bands in an overview sense, there’s a lot of issues going on. Like every other music cycle–and in the last ten to thirteen years, we’ve had the thrash cycle, the funk-metal cycle, the grunge/alternative cycle, the punk cycle, and now the “nu-metal” cycle–there’s always a handful of bands that come out and do something new, a few of them break out and become huge, and then the labels–and many of the musicians–try to cash in with a never-ending procession of increasingly weaker copycat bands, each successive wave more diluted and generic than the last. That’s what we’re seeing right now. I’m getting records that are nothing more than bland, corporate “product” that just rehash the musical and lyrical themes of the “nu-metal” bands that came before them. And they all look alike: piercings, dyed hair, tattoos up the arms, wife beaters, sweatpants, etc., etc.

Korn is a great band. System Of A Down is an awesome act–one of the most original metal bands of the last ten years. Slipknot are amazing at what they do. But a lot of the bands that have followed in their wake have nothing to say, either lyrically or musically. The lyrics are especially loathsome in that they just push this sort of pointless nihilism and hatred. There’s not even a hint of subtlety or flair in what they’re doing, it’s all lines like “you worthless piece of shit” repeated over and over. A lot of this hatred is directed toward women and family members, and I have to say that none of it sounds particularly credible. Did every single person in the world have a fucked-up childhood?

With the rap-metal stuff, again, some of it is credible and original, but most of it is suburban white kids trying their best to sound ghetto. It’s fake, cynical, and sometimes even laughable, but a lot of it makes for just poor music. And to top it off, so much of the music is created on computer programs like Pro-Tools. There’s no way that any of these bands could go into a studio, play live, and create a masterpiece in three or four days, like Black Sabbath did with Paranoid.

It’s tough to say things like this, because you’re automatically accused of being old and out of touch. But that’s bullshit. There are great albums being made right now by bands like System and Machine Head. Slipknot’s Iowa is awesome. I am 36 years old but fully capable of appreciating new, brutally heavy music that’s good. The difference is that I’m also old enough to remember when the standards of art and entertainment were higher than they are now. The whole culture has been dumbed down, not just music. If you say that The Godfather was a better movie than Pearl Harbor, does anyone accuse you of being out of touch? Now, it’s true that rock music is oriented toward the young, but there is no doubt that there are practically no heavy bands today who can stand up to the likes of Zeppelin, Priest, and Sabbath. Those bands had their bad albums and weak moments too, but will Limp Bizkit or Puddle Of Mudd or Slaves On Dope produce a body of work that will stand the test of time like those artists did? I doubt it. Even some of the A&R executives I know, whose job is to find the damn bands, privately admit that they think most of what they sign is shit and they’re only doing it for the quick buck.

Steven Ward:   What advice would you give to young writers who want to make a living as rock critics?

Don Kaye:   I’m tempted to say don’t do it, of course, but I would never really say that. My first advice would be to make sure you have alternate means of income; things can get very lean. Or if you want to write full-time, be prepared to write as much as possible–to the point of burnout–and live very cheaply just to make ends meet.

More importantly, don’t ever let the music biz compromise your thoughts, your words, or your opinions. That’s getting harder and harder to do, since more and more magazines read more like extensions of the record company publicity departments than real magazines featuring honest appraisal and criticism. Magazines and writers are less and less inclined to take a position, especially when the labels threaten to withhold the interview for the big cover story if they see a writeup they don’t like.

Don’t fall into the Almost Famous syndrome either. You are not there, as a rock journalist, to be a friend to the stars. You can be friendly with them to a certain point, but if they deliver a bum album, or make news in a negative way, it’s not your job to shill for them. It’s your job to tell it like it is. I know one journalist who once ran a highly respected magazine, but turned out to be more concerned with losing his relationship with a certain band than printing a story about them that was truthful but damaging. Fuck that.

You are writing for the readers. They may go out and spend hard-earned money based on your opinion (at least we like to think so, although the truth is probably more depressing, ha ha), so it’s your task to give them the most honest and undiluted opinion you can. Contrary to what a lot of people think, it’s not easy to write bad reviews, nor is it enjoyable, but it’s a part of the job. Be objective, be passionate, be knowledgeable about your subject, be joyful when you can (I don’t think it’s necessary or good to slap a coat of irony over everything), but most importantly, be honest to yourself and your readers.

Steven Ward:   Desert Island Disc–what would it be and why?

Don Kaye:   Jeez, just one disc?? Sorry, I’m gonna pick three:

• Iggy And The Stooges–Raw Power
• Blue Oyster Cult–Secret Treaties
• The Beatles–1967-1970

Writing About Dancing: Disco Critics Survey

By Scott Woods (March 2001)

“He tried pretending a dance is just a dance/But I see.”
– “Let the Music Play,” Shannon (1983)

Cineaste magazine recently ran a feature called “Film Criticism in America Today: A Critical Symposium,” in which they asked 24 well-regarded movie critics five questions primarily about the frustrations and rewards of writing movie criticism. It dawned on me that I’d love to do something similar for this site, and because there’s such an alarming (in my view) paucity of great writing about dance music to link to on the web, the subject of disco seemed like a natural direction to head in. To this end, I sent out ten survey questions to several music critics who I think write really well about dance music (which I defined in my original letter to them as “disco or anything influenced by disco”). I wasn’t looking for answers so much as for insights, jokes, arguments, better questions, genre and/or band recommendations, etc.

Many thanks to Chuck, Michael, Frank, Simon, and Tricia for their time and for their wonderfully suggestive ideas.

Contributors
[note: bios submitted in 2001]

Chuck Eddy is the music editor of the Village Voice, and the author of Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe and The Accidental Evolution of Rock’n'Roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music. Techno critic Tricia Romano says he dances with a “white man’s overbite,” but she’s wrong.

Michael Freedberg…born in Salem, MA long ago. Went to Andover Academy (6 years before President Dubya) & Princeton (seven years after Ralf Nader). Started writing about music in 1974 for Zoo World (!) two issues before it folded….wrote for Boston-based Pop Top, along with Jon Pareles, Don Shewey, Steve Morse…joined the staff ofNightfall, a Boston-based disco magazine (really!), where I did the first ever interview with Donna Summer…also one with Grace Jones.

It was while at Nightfall that I met my wife….at a disco, naturally…then in 1979 I was called to the Boston Phoenix, to write about soul music…in 1980 I was called to the Village Voice too…I wrote a LOT, for LOTS of publications.Crawdaddy, Phonograph, the New York Times, even Rolling Stone. In 1991 I did a book, a Guide to the Best of Disco. All Music Guide has it now…I’ve written for the Voice for many editors: Bob Christgau, Jon Pareles, Joe Levy, Chuck Eddy. I also did lots of record co. bios, esp. for Warner Brothers…

I’ve seen 100s of concerts and probably 500 DJ performances & reviewed at least 1000 records in my 26 years as a critic!

Today I am looking to do two more books…I have proposals waiting, at St Martin’s Press….We’ll see…

Frank Kogan paints white stripes on black zebras, black stripes on white zebras, and black-and-white stripes on plain zebras. In 4th grade he told a story. In ninth grade he bought a record. In 1987, when he was 33, his girlfriend said to him, “I’m sorry I’m being such a bitch.” Frank said, “Ah, but you’re my bitch.” The rest is silence. (Actually, it isn’t. I mean, not at all. Silence in my farts, maybe?)

Simon Reynolds wrote a book about rave culture called Generation Ecstasy and is the main content-provider for a website devoted to all kinds of electronic dance music that can be found by clicking here. His favourite dance tunes ever are “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Energy Flash,” and “Renegade Snares.” Sadly these days he doesn’t get out much and so does most of his dancing in the living room with son Kieran, aged 18 months.

Tricia Romano is the Club Crawl columnist for the Village Voice. She’s been writing about dance music for pubs like Urb, Spin, Paper, Resonance, and Artbyte, and likes to DJ for her cats in her spare time. At 27, she’s officially a Grandma Raver and refuses to believe that drum’n'bass is dead. She dares you to go dancing with her and Chuck Eddy to see for yourself The Famous Chuck Eddy Two-Step.

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1. Because house music and disco are conceived primarily for the dance floor, does this make them harder to write about than more “contemplative” or “conceptual” forms of pop?

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
Why should music for the dance floor be “harder” to write about than music “contemplative” or “conceptual”? First of all, one adopts, assembles, or accepts standards for appreciating music of whatever genre or format and applies them to whatever music one is asked to appreciate. Besides, who is to say whether a piece of music is to be danced or listened to? To me this question assumes its own conclusion. I know many folks who listen to house music resting. Sometimes I do it myself. I know others who dance to FM album rock…

CHUCK EDDY
No, and I don’t see how being conceived for the dance floor would preclude, or significantly diminish their chances of being, contemplative or conceptual in the first place. And why would a writer limit himself to what music is intended for anyway?

SIMON REYNOLDS
As U.K. house outfit K-Klass put it, “Rhythm Is a Mystery.” It is very hard indeed to write about why one groove or beat is more compelling than another. Even if you get into drummer’s lingo (triplets, flams, syncopation, etc.) or the technicalities of programming, the “it” — that edge of excellence or distinctiveness you are trying to capture — will just endlessly recede from your verbal grasp. For instance, it’s quite easy to write generalities about “breakbeat science” and apply them to whichever jungle producer you’re writing about — but almost infinitely harder to convey the signature that makes, say, a Dillinja or Doc Scott production instantly recognizable and special…Same goes for the particular rhythm traits or production hallmarks of the other genres — the finicky hi-hats in house and garage, the DSP (digital signal processing) timbre effects in Kid606 type IDM, the filter sweeps in French house, the 303 acid-riffs in hard trance etc., etc…What makes for one exponent’s instantly-audible superiority over another?

And even then, you can write about the programming and production and be strenuous in your attempts at exactness, but you might still fail to convey the electricity, the rush…what can you actually say about the nature of, and relationship between, the guitar, the bass, and the orchestral sounds, in a Chic song, that could actually tell you anything about how its magic works…

Mind you, it’s just as hard to say why in rock or pop, one melody is heart-rending and another isn’t, why one singer’s grain-of-voice reaches deeper into you than another…not to mention the great rock mystery of the Riff…

But dance music, by diminishing or stripping away altogether the other elements that one might critically latch onto (lyrics, persona/biography of the artist, relevance to the outside-the-club world etc.) as a bulwark against the ineffable does rather shove one headfirst into the realm of sound and its materiality. (Which a surprisingly large number of people still find quite discomfiting).

Kind of appropriately, really, writing about dance music does confront you in a very direct way with the old “dancing about architecture” futility/absurdity dilemma — because it is so purely musical, functional…what is there really to say? I suspect a lot of the people who might have made good dance critics, who have real taste and knowledge of its history, become DJs instead — because you can actually support the music and evangelize in a very direct way: playing it to people.

So if it’s so hard to do, so pointless, why bother? As an old comrade of mine Paul Oldfield once put it in a zine we did together, Monitor, because there’s “the possibility that words might fail interestingly or suggestively.”

Also true that this music is very site-specific…a lot of the sonic content in dance music is barely audible on a domestic hi-fi…so that with a house record played at home, the kick drum can sound tinny and weak and monotonous, but in a club, on massive system, the monotony becomes compelling because it’s so physically, viscerally impact-ful…the kick drum becomes a cocooning environmental pulse…similarly with jungle, the bass permeates your flesh…unlike rock, r&b, pop it is not mixed for radio or the home hi-fi.

TRICIA ROMANO
I think writing about dance music is harder in some ways than writing about pop or rock or other types of music that have lyrics or actual personalities you can discuss. I mean, who didn’t have something to say about Eminem this year? And, who had anything to say about, I don’t know, Photek? I mean how do you describe something that’s so textural or so reliant on your actual dance floor experience? It drives me batty, and sometimes I feel that coming up with ridiculous metaphors or imagery just alienates the reader: 300 adjectives later, the readerstill doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

FRANK KOGAN
I simply reject the premise of the question, that you can separate out the dance from the contemplative, that these are different musics. Saying the word contemplative is like waving a red cape at me. For one thing, that a song has a dance beat doesn’t make it less contemplatible than if it didn’t. “Oh, this song has beats, therefore I’m not able to think about it”? Conversely, if I’m on a dance floor, working out steps and movements, responding to or avoiding other dancers, cutting some sort of figure for onlookers — for sure in all of this I am thinking. I’m not rubbing my beard and going “Hmmm,” but I’m thinking nonetheless. (Actually, there’s a dance called the “hmmm dance” in which I do rub my beard and go “hmmm,” but I also throw in a left-arm movement and a slight knee bend that I wouldn’t use in nondance situations.) In general, I don’t divide up my life into the “active” and the “contemplative.” If I’m a thoughtful person I come up with good ideas, but the ideas arise from what I do as a whole, not from a fenced-in little area called “contemplating.” Holding my head in my hands and puzzling things out is part of the process, writing words on paper is part of the process, hearing people comment on those words is part of the process, but these are hardly the whole of it. (By the way, I do a dance called “hold my head in my hands” where I hold my head while contorting my mouth into a “scream” shape, like in that Norwegian painting, and then I sink slowly to the floor.)

So, to approach your question, there’s as much subject for thought in disco as in anything else, in fact disco contains thought. And then to retreat from your question, I’ll point out the obvious, which is that the vast majority of the world’s music has a dance beat, or, if not a dance beat per se, a physical-response beat, a join-in-this-activity beat. Even if you want to get “contemplative” in your music, ragas have beats, Stravinsky has beats. (In fact, “Rite of Spring” is dance music.) The music you buy vegetables to at Albertson’s has a dance beat; the music you listen to in your car has a dance beat. Heavy metal has dance beats, country has dance beats, Adult Top 40 has dance beats, Radio Disney has dance beats (typical set on Disney: The Chipmunks’ version of “Achy Breaky Heart,” Stacey Q’s “Alphabet Song,” a Brooklyn Bounce techno track, ‘N Sync’s “It’s Gonna Be Me”). “Dance” isn’t so much a type of music as one of the things that can be done to almost any music. So if someone finds it hard to write about disco or house, this is not because disco and house are conceived for the dance floor.

I haven’t answered your question. But I’m not done with it, since I often think about how to write about music, and I’ve never come up with a consistent method. Some ideas:

(a) The sound of music is impossible to convey. Period. I don’t know why this is. Read a novel and you’ll get a sense of what the characters look like, what the landscape is like, the furnishings, and so forth. What the author leaves out you’ll supply from your own imagination. Your picture may not match what the author had in mind, but at least you’ll get a picture. But if the novel contains a description of music, you won’t hear music. You’ll get a vague sense of something — “airy and light” or “loud and pounding,” say (“airy and pounding”?) — but you won’t hear it.

And music’s technical vocabulary doesn’t convey sound at all: riff, motif, chord, interval, melody, tonic, subdominant, dominant minor, back to subdominant (which is the chord progression to “Louie Louie,” and see what I mean about nonconveyance?), backbeat, hi hat, snare, counterrhythm. Writing the words “Bo Diddley’s chunk-ah chunk-ah chunk, chunk chunk rhythm” might convey the rhythm to someone who already knows it (but then, writing the words “melody to ‘If I Fell’ ” may bring forth the melody to someone who already knows “If I Fell,” too, and so what?). I

In general, you’re stuck with a handful of genre names, overused adjectives, and metaphors, as well as clauses that begin “sounds like…” – e.g., “sounds like Deep Purple on Quaaludes, which is to say very Deep Purple.” So even when I want to describe music, I’m really going to end up doing something else, and often I’d rather do something else, anyway.

(b) The impulse to dance and the impulse to write are closely related, at least in me. When I’m dancing I’m locking into a basic beat but I’m also hearing the other beats and the riffs and melodies and what I’d call the general “arc” of the music, and I’m constructing my movements around these but also in response to what the other dancers are doing (if they’re not all staring into outer space). So the music is inspiration and source material for my dance, and so are the other dancers, though they also get to be audience for my dance, if they want. And when I write I do something analogous: I don’t lock into a main beat, but I use music as source material for my writing; and what other people have said, done, and written is also source and inspiration for my writing, and people are audience for my writing, if they want to be, and their response can be further source material and inspiration (or goad), etc. So in other words the page is my dance floor; or perhaps the page is part of a general dance floor composed of a lot of pages and computer screens and conversations and events. But note: when I say that music is source material for my writing – analogous to its being source material for my dancing – I mean it. Which is to say that, fundamentally, I’m not writing about music any more than I’m dancing about music. I’m just living my life on the page — except that, since Ilove to comment and analyze, there’s always a whole lot of “aboutness” in my writing. “Aboutness” is one of my dance moves, you could say.

But then, there’s “aboutness” in dancing too: adding a new dance move can tell you something about a piece of music — that it could provoke this particular move — and the move itself might in some way be “about” the dancer’s relation to the other dancers.

My point is that when I’m dancing to “The Real Slim Shady” I’m not doing something different in kind from when I’m writing down an analysis of the feints and traps and shock effects in Eminem’s lyrics. In my dancing I’m thinking by acting out my relationship to other human beings — in my writing I’m thinking by acting out my relationship to other human beings.

“Ah ha! There’s a difference! When you’re dancing to Eminem you’re dancing to the music, whereas when you write you’re drawing on his words and personality.” Yes. Not that words and personality aren’t part of the music, but yes. I’ll use music as source material for both my dancing and my writing, but I won’t necessarily use the same parts of the music for each. I use words and personality whenever I can — this is because they’re easy to use, and they’re powerful. I can quote words, I can use them, I can make them my own. Words are great. Even when I’m trying to convey sound, I’ll make lyrics and personalities my pathway, if I can.

O.K. Let’s go to the videotape; this is from a piece I wrote about Donna Summer, for Spin:

“No disco artist sang with such a raging coldness. Smart, funny coldness. In ‘I Feel Love’ she was out there and gorgeous in synth-cold outer space and no one could touch her. If she felt love, it wasn’t for me.”

All right, this has one root word to describe the music (cold/coldness), two that pertain to music (sang and synth), and the rest is sci-fi metaphor, a lyric with variations (“I feel love”), and Donna’s relation to me. This was as close as I’ve gotten in my life to actually describing a sound, and without the lyric and her persona I couldn’t have done it.

Now here’s my description of the disco ethos, from my Corina review:

“Disco managed to be audacious without being upscale in the usual sense, so it could incorporate cabaret, opera, kung fu, anything, and still not be ‘culture.’ It could be ambitious without leaving anything behind, without shedding its down-home mannerisms. ‘Down-home’ is probably the wrong phrase here. It’s like Elvis: Elvis never stopped being a truck driver with dreams; the point is, he dressed himself in the dreams, not in overalls. I’m not sure what I’m driving at here, of course. A disco is basically a Saturday night bar ‘n’ dance floor that doesn’t know its place. But that doesn’t make it a would-be supper club, dinner theater…It’s got its own style. It’s like Tony Camonte in the original Scarface, asking the sophisticate Poppy what she thinks of his jacket. ‘Kinda gaudy, isn’t it?’ she says, and he says, happily, ‘Yeah,’ oblivious to her sarcasm and winning her over. In my dream, disco doesn’t ignore the sophistication and the sarcasm; it incorporates it, discofies it. Again, what does this mean? How do we take sarcasm, knowingness, a sense of tragedy, politics, and make it gaudy, turn it into a circling disco globe? I’m working on it. A flash of glitter, dime-store glamour. The vision is made of scraps and probably won’t amount to much in the daylight. But fuck the daylight, that’s not what music’s about. The point of having a vision is to use it, not to check it for accuracy.”

So, words that pertain to music: two (cabaret and opera); phrases that allude to dancing: one (dance floor). And the rest? A 1932 gangster film; a 1950s rock ‘n’ roller — his clothes — and a flash of glitter, a dream, a disco ball.

And now here’s me describing a record that had no singer, no words, no personalities, no jacket photos (and I had no clue what the clubs were like that played this music, what the dancers looked like, or how they danced):

“Phuture’s 12-inch single ‘Slam!’ is ‘acid disco’ if by ‘acid’ you mean the stuff you throw in your estranged lover’s face, to disfigure it.”

And then towards the end:

“I’d like to hear it on the dance floor. It’s made for sudden, sharp movements — the moves I used to do at early ’70s glitter shows to prove I had an ‘edge.’

“It might provoke interesting dance-floor interaction — communal dance-floor frenzy if you take out the ‘communal.’”

So, if there are no human beings and no social intercourse in earshot, this doesn’t matter, I’ll invent them.

But one doesn’t have to invent. If you can’t hear words, voices, personalities, social life in the music, and you can’t imagine them, just play the record in a roomful of people. You’ll get words and personalities and social life, I guarantee you. And there’s your subject matter, if you want it: the music in action, what it does, how people use it. And of course the words and personality can be yours, in your room or on your dance floor: the page.

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2. What do you try and get at when writing about dance music: beats, textures, words, voices — or some combination thereof?

CHUCK EDDY
All of them, and lots of other shit too, and if anybody gives any other answer to this question I no longer trust them (assuming I did in the first place). (Though I guess with some instrumental dance songs, words and voices might not matter much.) (And, okay, I don’t know if I’ actually use the word “texture” very often, to be honest. It’s always struck me as a fairly vague word. But maybe that’s just me, you know?)

TRICIA ROMANO
Yes, all of it. I try to convey as much as possible the mood the artist sets, the style they work in. For example, if they are a minimalist, I try to reflect that somehow, either through my own style of writing, or through descriptions that vividly convey a piece of work that is sparse or stripped down. Unless I am writing for a hyper-informed underground audience, like Urb orXLR8R, I try to stay away from serious geek terminology or references to other obscure 12-inches that only a few hundred DJs own, because people feel alienated from dance music already — they don’t need any further assistance from the reviewer. My goal is to get people interested in this music, to read the article with an open mind, and to hopefully go out and check the artist out with an open mind. We have enough people dissing dance music as not being “real” music as it is, I don’t want to contribute to the problem by dancing with myself in an article.

SIMON REYNOLDS
Everything…you can still use the trad rockcrit arsenal of interpretive techniques too — you can do lit-crit style exegesis of sampled phrases and catchphrases, the song titles can be decoded and unpacked, the artist names…there is always discourse around the music…then there’s the question of the music as social text — the behaviors it is designed to trigger or enhance…you don’t have to have field-researched it and actually heard it played out in a club, ‘cos the records contain these behavioral cues, clues to how they’re supposed to be used or responded to…you hear a trance record and the structure of it, with build, breakdown, hands in the air refrain, etc., tells you how it is used…what tableaux it creates in the club, out of the audience’s bodies.

FRANK KOGAN
Well, obviously I don’t try to get at these things so much as at what they do. But I’m also interested in the “how” of it — I used to be a musician, after all. The trouble is that anything I say on the subject is boring and unintelligible to all but a few. Sometimes I go ahead anyway, and I try to put in enough jokes or exciting stuff elsewhere so that I don’t totally lose the reader. And of course I sent you — Scott — that long email about how changes in pitch and texture are also changes in rhythm (it’s a snare drum’s “texture” that differentiates it from a tom and that makes the snare stand out, which is why the snare is often used for the backbeat), and how both the wah-wah peddle and the 303 allow you to change texture within a note and so you can use them to create rhythm and syncopation within the note. (The wah-wah is the device used by the guitarist on “Shaft!”; the 303 is the acid-house machine, used recently by Timbaland on Aaliyah’s “Try Again.”) This is interesting to me, but I don’t know if there’s a whole lot more to say about it.

In my Phuture review I wrote:

“‘Slam!’ breaks the ['Acid Tracks'] pattern by breaking the rhythm — nearly abandons the one-two-three-four — edges towards Afro-Caribbean syncopation but jams it between the measure bars. So it doesn’t feel like a groove — more like a spring held tight.”

Well, this comes close to the categories boring and unintelligible. What I meant by “Afro-Caribbean” was that the bass drum played on the two-AND instead of the TWO or THREE — have I achieved intelligibility yet? (In a four-beat measure, if you’re hitting the main beats, they’re “ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and-FOUR-and.” If you’re hitting what the Phuture drum is hitting, you’re playing “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and.” Capitalization for the beats that get hit.) On the main riff to “Satisfaction,” Keith and Charlie hit the TWO while Bill hits the two-AND, which helps the song to move, but my saying this conveys nothing of the motion.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
What do I try to get at when writing about “dance music”? I try to get at the message or picture that it conveys and how it uses beat, rhythm, or the rhythm-and-voice duet that underlies all such musxic to convey it. Often, though, the message or picture conveyed by “dance music” is an active one, a kind of documentary observation of the lives of its fans — or of its own life…

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3. How much of a technical perspective about dance music (i.e., how it’s actually made) do you bring to your writing about the music? Is a technical perspective even necessary?

SIMON REYNOLDS
Try to, while being aware that a) it’s kind of dry and un-romantic and scientific so you need to be sparing ‘cos you can lose the lay reader and b) it’s simultaneously a crucial part of the way the music works and at the same time doesn’t tell you enough, i.e., all that stuff about signature, aesthetic eminence, why one track is better than another even when using the exact same techniques…often resulting in relapse into the superlative, the ineffable, the imprecise…terms like ‘funk’, ‘soul’, etc…

Most dance reviews, when you boil them down, all they’re saying is ‘this is a funky record’. Or that the guy/gal reviewing it finds it funky which doesn’t even tell you whether you’d find it funky.

FRANK KOGAN
My quick answer would be no. To drive a car you don’t have to know how the engine works; to write an email you don’t have to know how a computer works. My not-so-quick answer is that if a writer were to tell the story of a musician or a producer by focusing on the technical choices — why he hit this beat rather than that one, why he used this device rather than that, what adjustment he had to make to overcome a particular obstacle — the reader would get a better idea of what the music maker was doing in all ways, not just technical but social and emotional and intellectual. Just as if you were to examine why a writer uses an adjective here, verbs there, a particular sentence structure in a particular context, a certain rhetorical device, figures of speech, you’d probably get not only a good sense of his writing strategies but a much deeper sense of what he was saying.

TRICIA ROMANO
Not really very much. I mean, unless you are talking about an artist or a track that revolutionized a genre, or became known in the genre for using a specific piece of equipment to create an identifiable sound (like the 303 or the 909), I don’t think it’s helpful for most people. Most folks don’t even know what a 303 is, let alone what it sounds like, (though you can break it down for them and give example of tracks that made the equipment popular). But again, I think these are exceptions. For certain producers, like Photek, or Thomas Brinkmann, the innovations they bring to the table technically are important, so you state that Photek’s beat programming is unrivaled, he’s the producer’s producer in drum’n'bass, and Brinkmann gives new meaning to minimalism with certain tracks, but you don’t want to concentrate too much on the technical aspect. It’s not what they used necessarily, but the sound they got out of it and why that’s important that should be stressed.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
Well here again is a question like question one, that presupposes that “dance music” is a thing apart. But it is not. Techniques matter no less to the structure and motives of jazz than to “dance music.” Maybe that is because “dance music” and jazz inhabit the same continuum. Jazz was “dance music” for all of its useful life, viz 1900-1960…Which is not to say that rock & roll is not dance music: because it used to be always that, and still sometimes is…

To me the techniques by which rhythm-structured music are made are crucial to understanding it, appreciating & judging it. In “dance music” those techniques begin with the deejay — and (almost) end with him.

CHUCK EDDY
I basically bring in none (unless you count the fact that I know my daughter’s new drum kit is a Slingerland), and no, it’s not necessary at all. It might even in some cases be detrimental, because I would quite possibly fall asleep while reading it.

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4. Talk technology. Have technological changes in the recording industry — samplers, computer sequencer programs, etc. — improved, damaged, or made no difference whatsoever to the music?

FRANK KOGAN
Improved, but the difference has been overstated. The sampler just facilitated something that was already culturally and musically long underway, going back to reggae in the late ’60s and various DJs and mixers before then. As I said in one of my Top 5s, I don’t see a fundamental difference between copying, taping, splicing, looping, or sampling. And in itself I don’t give a damn whether I’m listening to a drum machine rather than a breakbeat, any more than I give a damn whether I’m listening to a Fender rather than a Gibson. Of course (see my answer to number 3), interesting individual stories can be told, e.g., how Jimmy Page’s guitar style changed when he shifted from Fender to Gibson, and so forth.

And I’ll say that I don’t like house and techno 2001 nearly as much as disco 1977, but I don’t blame this on the technology.

TRICIA ROMANO
They’ve improved things in many ways. Just the accessibility and the affordability of the equipment has enabled scores of bedroom producers to come up and start mini-revolutions. Without this, much of what has happened in dance music in the last few years would not have been possible. Two-step and drum’n'bass, especially, have benefited from cheap equipment getting in the hands of 17 and 18 years olds. On the flip side, I hear a lot of grumbling from more experienced producers about the ProTools technology, or the all-in-one Groovebox, with its pre-set sounds, stripping away some of the creativity and making editing and mixing down too easy. This can create a lot more formulaic music, especially if the producers are not going out of their way to create their own beats, find their own samples, and make their own sounds. ProTools encourages simplistic, formulaic set ups, especially in drum’n'bass and house music, where there’s clearly an unofficial guideline that’s being followed. More access means more records, but also more crap to sort through. Dance music is so disposable already, and this can sometimes contribute to the problem.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
The techniques you mention gave the “dance music” musician more devices to work with, yes, but they make no essential difference: any more than the sudden availability of band instruments in post-Spanish American war New Orleans made the jazz that was developed on them, or than the invention of the amplified gee-tar made 1940s R & B different. Additional techniques simply challenge the inventive musician to assert his already existent innovative instincts a bit more aggressively than he might otherwise have done…(I might add that the techniques you list belong to hip hop just as fully as they do to “dance music”…)

CHUCK EDDY
Well, people danced before those changes (and before electric guitars or fiddles, even), and people danced after them. So no, they haven’t made much difference at all. Isn’t that kinda obvious? Though okay, sometimes I do miss those cute little robotic analog synth sounds of olden times. But they’re coming back, aren’t they? And DJ P and DJ Z-Trip have even remembered that Pat Benatar and Rush and Phil Collins and Tom Petty have beats on their records, which is something hip-hop and techno sheep stopped understanding a couple years after Afrika Bambaata invented the turntable. (Before him, they were called “record players.” And I have just now decided that I’m gonna start calling “turntablists” “record-playerists” instead, just to be obstinate.) But okay, maybe I’ve gone off on a tangent here. Sorry. Actually, my very favorite songs to dance to are probably mostly soulful garage rock songs and garage-rocking soul songs of the late ’60s or so — you know, stuff like “The Oogum Boogum Song” or “Expressway to Your Heart” or “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love)” or “The Love You Save” or whatever — so maybe dance music has gotten worse over time. But I don’t know that technology is necessarily what I would blame for it.

SIMON REYNOLDS
When a new piece of tech comes on-line as it were, there is always a gap where the trad musically skilled don’t know how to deal with it, and the discursively sharp, culturally astute types — often non-musicians in that Eno mold — seize the time and surge ahead, finding unexpected applications for the new machine, ways of (ab)using it. But then things level out again as everyone assimilates the new technology and the old hierarchies of talent over non-musicality return…you can see it time again — with synthesizers (Daniel Miller of Mute/The Normal said the synth was only any good when used by non-musicians), with drum machines, with sequencers, with sampling…At first the canny ones move in and do stuff, perhaps superficially striking stuff, with it, and then the more musical ones come in and do stuff that’s more sophisticated, in key, arranged a la trad musical values…being an old punkie at heart I tend to valorize the surge moments when the sharp-witted DIY barbarians seize the new tools or think up new ways of bending existing tools…e.g., hardcore rave and early jungle, with the whole speeding up the breakbeats, using timestretching etc. thing. Because they don’t know the Rules of Music…you get all kinds of interestingly wrong-sounding music, improperly integrated fusions…when “musicality” comes back, it’s less interesting, because “music” has been done really hasn’t it, there’s no shortage of pleasant melodies or harmonious, euphonious stuff to listen to.

Ultimately though I tend to think in any era the really musical ones will rise to the top eventually once the new technology-induced commotion settles down… although a lot of musically talented folk get caught in the ‘wish I could make music like the golden age’ retro-trap and get pulled out of the innovation game, as it were.

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5. What are the biggest assumptions and misconceptions about dance music that a person writing about it must challenge or at least consider?

TRICIA ROMANO
That it’s not real music. That it takes no skill. That the musicians are untalented. That it is somehow worth less than other forms of music. That you have to be high to like it. That it’s just drug music. That’s it’s going to be over and dead within a few years. That it’s gay music. That it’s shallow. That it’s just disco for the year 2001 (and we all know “disco sucks”).

SIMON REYNOLDS
That dance music is mindless, that dance fans are not listening closely — a dancer is “listening” with every sinew and muscle and nerve ending in his/her body.

That crowd responses are essentially de-invidualizing — well, they are, but what’s wrong with that? What’s so great about being an individual? That sort of dis is like saying I don’t like cheese ‘cos it tastes cheesy…the whole point is to get lost in the crowd, merge with something bigger than your paltry self.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
You know very well which assumptions impede writing dance music criticism: that it is an inferior genre. Ever since the 1970s the view of the rockcrit clique has been that “disco” is a lesser genre, an imperfect, diseased, even illegitimate form of pop music.

Most editors still hold to this view. Editors of the coated-paper magazines (the ones whose paper has a slick, cloying odor to it) generally know nothing about music but do know a lot about “trends” and “trendiness,” and they look only for what is most obvious …Dance Music is less than obvious, because (in the U.S.A. at least) it cannot be heard on the radio and employs far less numbers of publicists and gives out almost no free records. Thus there are no inducements to editors to assigning articles about it, and no interest generated among editors in assigning writers to cover it. Knowing that, writers do not ask to write about it.

Fortunately I do not have that problem at the Phoenix, nor from Chuck Eddy, the only establishment rockcrit/editor who understands and even likes ”disco.” Outside the U.S. it is a bit different. In Montreal, Milan, Barcelona, and Paris, dance musicis pop, and it gets some coverage (though not, of course, from the U.S./U.K.-influenced magazines — the ones who think the Chemical Brothers, Moby, and Carl Cox are dance music…).

CHUCK EDDY
Um…the idea that “dance music” is a genre, maybe? The fact that idiots at deejay magazines think Stone Roses were a dance band, and Guns N Roses weren’t? Or that they think calling Aqua or Toy Box “cheesy and gauche” is some kind of insult? (I mean, wasn’t one of the great things about disco that lots of it was gauche?) In general, I get the feeling that a lot of artsy techno subcultures (especially drum’n'bass and Intelligent Whatever It Is, maybe, but don’t quote me on that) are afraid of hooks. Which means they’re afraid of the pleasure without which parties wouldn’t be parties. Which is such a fucking stupid thing to think that I won’t dignify it with an argument.

FRANK KOGAN
Assumptions to challenge: that dancing is visceral rather than intellectual, that technology is “cold,” that “dance music” is only for dancing, that disco was just fluff and fun for the pop marketplace, that disco and rock have nothing to do with each other, that disco and hip-hop have nothing to do with each other, that other musics (e.g., rock, teen pop) are less scene-oriented than rave is, that techno and house are better than Europop, that techno and house are more innovative than pop is, that techno and house are more disco than teen pop is, that disco lyrics don’t matter, that disco lyrics are no good, that Kraftwerk is more important than Boney M, that you can’t understand the music if you don’t get high. To expand on a few of these points, here are some thoughts I had after reading Jon Pareles a couple years ago comment on the 20th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever. I was noting in general the tendency of professional intellectuals (though not necessarily Pareles, who’s normally pretty smart) to get it all wrong, to project the wrong grid, not to mention the most schoolmarmy one. I’m thinking here of their need to debunk a supposed “rockism” and “essentialism” and ________ (fill in the buzz word) and to celebrate disco as a trivial, “inauthentic,” celebration of artificiality. Which portrays disco as simply a photonegative of rockism.

(a) There is too much emphasis on the “simplicity” of the disco beat — I don’t think disco’s one-two-three-four was necessarily any simpler than swing’s one-two-three-four or the Velvet Underground’s one-two-three-four. It would have been simple only if the one-two-three-four were the only rhythm going on.

(b) There is too much emphasis on the rock vs. disco divide and hence on disco’s supposedly being artificial or synthetic in relation to rock. I have all sorts of problems with this emphasis. First, I don’t know if anyone who isn’t a critic or an academic sees it like this. Was a rock fan’s antagonism towards disco based on his perception of the music’s being artificial? Did he really think in such terms? (By the way, as a rock fan myself at the time, I didn’t see disco as any kind of a threat; I saw “soft rock” as a threat.) Second, no matter how the rock fan saw it, the disco-goer most likely did not see disco as synthetic in relation to rock. I wouldn’t say that disco never saw itself in some sort of relation to rock, but I don’t think it particularly saw itself through the eyes of rock. So to overemphasize “artificiality” is to not see disco on its own terms. I think that the disco synth (other than for comedians like Kraftwerk) was more about mastery and creativity than artificiality. And then there’s the whole gospel aspect of disco, which had nothing to do with artificiality. And the sex aspect, which for some people was absolutely meant to be as spiritual as the gospel (and for others was meant to be as spiritual as pudding).

I saw disco’s gaudiness and glitz not as “artificiality” but as reach, something similar to Dolls glitter or the Warhol superstars: three-chord glamour that anyone could play, if you say you’re a star, you are. And then for some it just plain is glamour. I think commentators would be more comfortable if it were merely about glamour.

(c) In discussing the differences between disco and rock, there is usually a misinterpretation of the meaning of “live performance.” Which is to say, there’s talk both of rock musicians constructing the music in the studio to make it sound live, to cover their tracks, to not emphasize the studio (is this even true? think of Electric Ladyland), and of rock musicians really playing their instruments in live performance (vs. disco divas singing to backing tracks or simply lip synching). Whereas, in fact, it’s disco that assumes a live setting — a dance — a public space. Disco is much more the live music, and disco records are raw material for this live show.

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6. Does one have to go out dancing — participate in the activity and culture of disco — in order to write well about it? Are you a good dancer?

CHUCK EDDY
Nobody can do the shingaling like I do. Nobody can do the boogaloo like I do…okay, I lied. I don’t even know what the shingaling or boogaloo are. But yeah, I’m a kick ass dancer, as long as the song’s pretty fast or pretty funky. I challenge any rock critic on earth to a dance contest; I will fucking dance all your butts into the ground, motherfuckers…Um, as long as it’s not, like, salsa, and there’s lotsa Hispanic people there, in which case I might get kinda shy to avoid looking like a complete clutz. (I’ve been told I don’t move my shoulders enough while Spanish dancing. So okay — I’m mainly good at dances that don’t have steps. in them. Dancing is about personal expression! So as for steps, I can’t go for that, no can do. Both my ex wife and ex girlfriend wanted me to take a ballroom dancing class, but I couldn’t be bothered.)

As for “participating in the activity and culture of disco”, um, well, I don’t know what that is. If you mean Chris Cook telling me that Harry Casey from KC and the Sunshine Band lives under his bed because he’s his boogieman — and God knows why you wouldn’t mean that — then yeah, I participate in disco activity and culture a lot. If you mean watching my daughter and her seventh-grade friends figuring out how to jump around to all those Destiny’s Child and Mystikal hits, then yup yup yup. If you mean dancing drunk to “Jive Talkin’” at house parties or weddings or office Christmas parties or even clubs sometimes, then yeah, sure, why not. (Friday night I danced til 4 in the morning with a lovely 23-year-old Russian-born Jewish girl at a Ft. Greene bar where much of the clientele was middle aged black men dressed like pimps.) But if you mean do I think one has to swallow ecstasy pills regularly and suck penises in hot tubs to write about disco wisely, then no, I would say that that would not be the case.

SIMON REYNOLDS
Honestly and truly I’d say, absolutely. Participation is essential… or at least, you have to have gone through a phase of being intensely into clubbing and dancing at some point to really undertand the appeal…the collective synchronized rush induced by certain tracks or certain DJ manoeuvres… dance culture is full of Gnostic refrains like “this is for those who know” or “hardcore you know the score” and so forth, and what they allude to is this physically-felt knowledge that comes from having experienced what happens on a dance floor when a certain kind of bass-drop takes place, or a certain drum build, or whatever…the way goose bumps ripple across the crowd-body…The crucial distinction: it’s not elitist, but it is tribal.

I can almost invariably tell from a piece of dance writing if the writer has experienced this stuff ever…or whether they are writing from “outside” the experience…they might have interesting insights through being totally detached but…well, I would never follow their consumer guidance tips, shall we say.

And needless to say, drugs play a big part in this as most dance styles are full of effects and sounds that play into, enhance, or trigger certain drug sensations…

A great piece of dance music, or a great DJ, makes me into a good dancer, I find… awakens the Dionysus within… the music dances you, as it were…Nietzche: “Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me!”…otherwise one can find oneself just shimmying along adequately as if at some office party disco, dancing as social ritual rather than flash of the spirit…

TRICIA ROMANO
I think so. If we are talking about dance music and not IDM, I think the dance floor experience is very important. Even with some minimal techno, drum’n'bass, house, the 12-inch records are tools to be used by the DJ — and sometimes they really, really, really need the skill of a DJ to layer and build, add and subtract. Especially with minimal techno, the records are all building blocks that add up to a greater whole at the end of the night. Listening to a Hawtin track straight is a mind-numbing (and sometimes boring) experience, but when you put several of his tracks together, it all makes sense. I maintain that the musical movements in dance happen with 12-inches, not with albums, and most of this music is made (literally, engineered) to be played loud, on a massive soundsystem. Certain genres, like d’n'b, are very physical; they are made for the club, designed to be played loud, which is why it just doesn’t translate well to the home listening format. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone shopping for records and turned down certain tracks because they sounded lame or whatever, and then when I went out later that night and heard the same record on a big system, it was just like a revelation.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
Recorded performance stands on its own merits. There is no need to go out dancing in order to appreciate properly a recorded dance-music set, any more than there is a need to see a live rock show in order to judge a rock CD. Still, that part of music that is live performance can only be appreciated live. It must be seen in action. Still, a live performance is a different animalentirely from a recorded performance.

As to my dancing ability, it depends on the music being played. If the music uplifts and illustrates and moves me, I dance well; if it does not., neither do I….

Makes sense, yes?

FRANK KOGAN
Well, you’ve seen my dance floor, whaddya think? But your question — surprise! — breaks into several questions for me. And I’d make your question plural: not the activity and culture but the activities and cultures. Say that someone who went regularly to Studio 54 is in the culture of disco. All right, well, what about the teenager in Fort Collins who’s only read about it and heard the records but decides to walk into his high school with the dress and attitude of disco — as he’s imagined it — and maybe gets the shit pounded out of him? Maybe he knows something about the music — its risks and possibilities — that the authentic club guy safe in New York bohemia doesn’t know. Or what about my ex-wife Leslie, who as a 5th grader back in Alexandria, Virginia, was terrorized by black kids in the hallways who’d call her “Lesby” and sing “Kung Fu Fighting” while doing martial arts kicks that came within inches of smashing her face? Or what about a friend’s little kids who changed Debbie Deb’s “You’ve got the music, here’s your chance” to “you’ve got the music IN YOUR PANTS”? (I’ve seen Debbie Deb perform, by the way, and I’m sure she’d love the in-your-pants version.) Or what about the kids’ mom? When I asked her once to recommend some History of Art books, she mentioned Gombrich and Jansen but thought that they were too dry and that I’d prefer Sister Wendy — you know, the nun who does the art analysis on PBS — because Sister Wendy was “more disco.” Isn’t this all the “culture,” too?

But my relation to disco is like Brian Wilson’s relation to the beach: I almost never go to dance clubs, so a lot of my writing on the subject is — you know — a work of the imagination. The sort of “disco” I went to back in the day was more likely to have a jukebox than a disc jockey. My favourite dancing has usually been in people’s living rooms. And in my room I’ll use “dance” music as background for almost anything: crossword puzzles, napping, doing the dishes. (I once changed an LL Cool J lyric to “You’re the type of guy who gets suspicious/I’m the type of guy who always does the dishes.”) Really, my only claim to disco authenticity — other than having read Sister Wendy’s analysis of the pre-Raphaelites — is the one time I saw Debbie Deb.

Now, my lack of knowledge doesn’t always bother me, but for sure I’m not proud of it. And you will notice a tension in some of my answers here, say between my response to number 1 where I talk of using disco as source material for my writing, and number 5 where I talk about wanting to understand disco on its own terms. The two endeavors are not necessarily at odds — in fact they can augment each other, inspire each other – but they’re not the same, either. I don’t have time to go into this — I have to cut short in a few minutes. But I’ll say here that (a) understanding disco “on its own terms” actually means understanding a multiplicity of terms, people, scenes, some of which may be in conflict with others, and (b) true understanding is a work of the imagination, too. Here’s a passage of Thomas Kuhn’s:

“When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer…, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.”

This can be unsettling work, finding sense where you’d only seen absurdity. Kuhn is talking about how to understand scientists of the past, whose modes of thought are different from our own, but I’ll generalize this to music scenes — even the ones you know pretty well — by saying look for the unexpected, the absurd, the boring, the strange, the inexplicable, and ask yourself why interesting people would engage in such activities. Once you’ve found an answer, once these activities make sense, you might discover that the rest of what these people do — the part of their behavior that had seemed normal, that you’d thought you’d understood — comes to have a new meaning. In other words, if you’re reading someone, pay close attention to what he actually writes and to what doesn’t seem to fit. If you’re dancing, pay attention to the other dancers, and come and face the strange.

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7. What do you think is the most important development to have taken place in dance music in the last ten years?

TRICIA ROMANO
The affordability and availability of the technology (samplers, etc.). See above. Musically speaking, I would say that drum’n'bass and two-step are the two most innovative forms that have come out of dance music lately. But, like anything, they reach a plateau in terms of development and just level off. I think we are all so spoiled, we expect a new innovation every three months, and if we don’t get it, we’re bored and, don’t you know, XX genre is so OVER!

SIMON REYNOLDS
Drugs — both the highs and the darkside — have massively mutated the evolution of the music and caused it to splinter as it adapts to different social-racial-sexuality-drug oriented factions — not just Ecstasy, but the ever more powerful forms of weed, relatively newer and nastier drugs like ketamine, the perennial amphetamine and acid…and also the rise of the polydrug culture that mixes and matches all of these substances.

Production — with ProTools, plug-ins, Virtual Studio Technology etc. — the level of intricacy and detail in production is staggering — rhythmic complexicity of accents and nuances far exceeding any real drummer’s capability…it does mean the music sometimes loses the power of a simple Big Riff though…

Growth of sound systems and a “big room” aesthetic in the music, with tracks designed to exploit the quadraphonic potential of the club space, the frequency spectrum…tracks that are sculpted in four dimensions, riffs like blocs of sound in motion that swoop through the crowd-body…full of almost a-musical wooshes and FX…the music becomes spectacular, a sonic spectacle.

The gradual emergence of a single unified bass-beats-bleeps culture, a trans-Atlantic confederacy of street sounds — whether it’s 2step garage coalescing as an only-in-London hybrid of house, jungle, ragga, and Timbaland-style R&B, or conversely, with techno-ravey-drum’n'bassy sounds and riffs infiltrating US gangsta rap (due to Ecstasy catching on with B-boys?), R&B, and even Jamaican dancehall.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
The most important development to have taken place in the last ten years of “dance music” is, by far, the rise of the DJ as featured performer. Since about 1992-93, when the record labels started issuing DJ-mix CDs featuring big-name DJs, as a means of fighting off the street corner vendors selling home-made house-music bootleg mixes, the DJ has been able to record at length the way bands, singers, and solo instrumentalists are used to doing. Today Danny Tenaglia, Junior Vasquez, Cevin Fisher, and Todd Terry sell tons of full-length CDs and even 2-CD sets.

CHUCK EDDY
Um….fuck, I don’t know. But that first Britney video is probably way up there.

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8. Overall, do you think dance music is in healthy shape today? Why or why not? (Feel free to talk about this in comparison with the rock and pop – or any other – world.)

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
Despite the rise of the DJ to featured artist status, “dance music” is, no, not in good shape. At least not in the U.S.A.: overseas and in Quebec things are wholly different: there, “dance music” IS the pop mainstream. But not here in the U.S., where most “dance music” genres remain cult items at best. Some genres are actually declining. There hasn’t been a noteworthy diva-style CD since 1998, Eurodisco — which circa 1995-97 looked to be taking over — has lost its self-confidence, and even house music — the fundamental principle underlying club tastes — has shrunk down to one or two flavours only. 7 or 8 years ago there were “garage,” “hard house,” “deep house,” “Eurohaus,” and “traxx.” Today, except for hard house, you’ll listen long before hearing any of the above house styles in most U.S. club sets….

The disappearance of diva style is a drastic and unhappy development. Disco cannot exist as we know it without Divas soaring: think Loleatta Holloway, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner. Yet where are the great divas of house music today? Barbara Tucker…Ultra Nate…Liz Torres…Sabrina Johnston…

The trouble with diva-style is that when the genre reigned it was SPECIAL, now everyone’s a diva. The word in its dance-music context (a show-off, a fashionista, a “Miss Thang”) had a place in the genre, as a danceable expression of self-esteem (“I am beautiful damnit”); today it just means anyone with an attitude. Well. If anyone and everyone’s a diva, who needs cult-music singers??? In addition, diva-style, like the rest of “dance music,” simply does not sell big numbers here in the U.S.A. Singers need to be paid. Ergo…Most dance-music record labels have barely enough money to pay the DJ, much less a chick singer too. Ergo: goodbye divas…(back in the early 1990s, when divas reigned, they barely got paid. how else could Strictly Rhythm or Champion have afforded to use Barbara Tucker & Sabrina Johnston?) Where there is money to pay a diva singer, as in a Danny Tenaglia session, they sometimes still appear…

Lastly, diva style has declined, like most of house music and all of Eurodisco because the dolts who program FM music radio here in the U.S. don’t think it plays to “their audience.” Like the people who like “dance music” are aliens or something…I go out to the clubs here in Boston A LOT and the 1000s of folks I see there look no different to me from the folks who go to “rock” shows. If anything, there’s MORE of them these days than there are of “rock” people. But the slick music magazines say “buy Radiohead. Buy Pavement. Buy Eve Six.” Or “buy Destiny’s Child. Buy ‘N Sync.” So…is it any surprise that the dolts who program U.S.A.’s FM music radio buy Radiohead, Eve 6, and Pavement or Destiny’s Child & ‘N Sync rather than Danny Tenaglia, Ultra Nate, and La Bouche? Hell, it’s hard even for Madonna to get her new MUSIC onto FM radio., much less club stuff. Of course this is true only in the U.S. In Montreal, Milan, Barcelona, Paris & Bologna things are just the opposite…

CHUCK EDDY
My favourite dance music tends to rock and pop, and my favourite rock and pop tends to dance. So again, Scott, why you’re accepting all these silly false dichotomies is beyond my comprehension. But anyway, I do like that so many producers have ripped off Timbaland. And I bet I heard 50 or 60 really good electronica CDs last year, and calling them “electronica” can still piss some people off. So yeah: good shape.

SIMON REYNOLDS
I’m not sure if it’s any more healthy or unhealthy than rock or pop or rap — 90 percent is shit is the general rule — if it has an edge, in terms of being alluring to youth, is that the drugs-loudmusic-brightlights-bizarrelydressedfolk combo of clubland is still an unbeatable leisure paradigm — and also, because the music is functional, even hackwork and clones can play their part by providing DJs with grist to the mixing mill, whereas lame copyist rock or pop is just lame…

TRICIA ROMANO
I am hating dance music right now, mostly because there seems to be little of substance or longevity coming out. I am tired of the dance music industry, which builds mountains of hype around the worst stuff, only to knock it down three months later in favour of promoting more crap. I hate the trance movement, I wish it would go away, and I’m tired of the disposable aspect of dance music. But it’s a double-edged sword. I used to love the fact that every week I could go into a record store and a whole new world was waiting to be heard. Every week, I would ravenously attack the record store and blow way too much money, but these days, the whole DJ scene just depresses me. (I mean, what’s the world come to when PERRY FARRELL calls himself a DJ!!) But that said, even though I feel things have stagnated with too many of the same old DJs holding on to the throne (Derrick Carter, Sneak, Doc Martin, Carl Cox, etc., etc.), as long as there’s dance music and raves and club culture, there will be some kid sitting in his (or hopefully, her) basement making tracks, learning how to spin, and hopefully coming up with the next shit. It all goes in cycles, like anything else — I mean, I can’t wait for Britney Spears and all of that to disappear, I just hope she takes Paul Oakenfold and his cronies with her someplace far, far away.

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9. Where’s the best stuff in dance music today coming from? (You can approach this question in a number of ways: Is it happening in underground circles or on radio? North America or Europe? Is it taking place in some exciting new sub-genre?)

CHUCK EDDY
It’s quite possibly coming from Detroit (i.e.: Eminem, Kid Rock, ghetto tech stuff like DJ Assault, electro revival stuff like i-F and the Detroit Grand Pubahs), but I could be wrong. It’s not like I’ve done any worldwide inventories or anything. I would say the South is probably in the running too; lotsa dope back-your-azz-up beats down there. And never count out continental Europe — they’ve got Max Martin and Sven Vath too!

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
The best “dance music” today comes from Paris, where electronic dark funk REIGNS; from Montreal, where girly stuff rules; from Milan and Barcelona, where all of it is popular and much else besides, anything Euro and housey and dry and funky… Also from New York,. where the best DJs work and record even now (though Danny Tenaglia and his equals spend ever more time overseas).

SIMON REYNOLDS
re: dance floor oriented music, London pirate radio culture is still the cutting edge as it was all through the nineties: hardcore to jungle to drum’n'bass to U.K. garage to 2step. Time for another paradigm shift from that quarter.

Germany’s rockin’ it with the Cologne glitch stuff, weird house, Berlin’s dub-techno Pole-types, Timo Maas on the populist Sasha-with-balls tip…

America’s got it’s own post-rave vanguard with the kid606 and friends, Schematic, kit clayton etc. etc. types bringing in humor, personality, urgent opinions and emo-core venting to the rather sterile world of post-Autechre IDM — not sure if much of it really counts as dance music though.

Actually there’s good stuff going on all over the place, mavericks and hacks alike come up with the goods, so much it’s impossible to keep up with it. But at the same time there’s no obvious scene that has surged ahead of everyone else and is the obvious leading edge, as there was with jungle in 93/94/95…there’s no sense of revolution, no next big thing but lots of next medium-sized things.

TRICIA ROMANO
England seems to be light years ahead of the States. Even our own artists like Derrick May and Stacey Pullen get more play overseas than they do here. And it’s always funny to see New York DJs that I’m so totally sick of get top billing in the U.K. at their super clubs. But, still, that country is the most progressive musically that I’ve yet to see; they are up for anything. At the same time, because dance music is so massive over there, instead of ‘ N Sync, you’ve got to contend with Tall Paul, Oakie, and Boy George as the big pop stars. What a nightmare!!!

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10. What are the greatest challenges and obstacles in writing about dance music these days?

SIMON REYNOLDS
Er, not being boring? Actually, not being bored is more like it.

Avoiding boosterism and developing a truly critical language for dance music. Most dance reviews are 7 or 8 in essence even when un-graded. there should be 3′s and 1′s and zeroes. Of course, the boosterism is based on feeling like the scene is underground and needs support, so it’s sort of understandable to an extent.

Resisting nostalgia for the early, less professionalized and more anarcho days of rave, before it became an industry. Things can never stay the same. Don’t fall into the Meltzer trap!

Learning that “vibe” migrates and that you can’t keep looking in the same place for your bliss. Knowing when to leave the party (and find another, more pumping one)

Retaining the capacity to be astonished. (So much stuff comes out that the landmark releases don’t stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness).

TRICIA ROMANO
For one thing, major mags and papers play a fucked up sort of “affirmative action” with their sections, and apply this in a particularly heavy way to dance music coverage. I.e., an editor will tell you they can only run one dance music CD review in an issue, or that they can’t cover 2-step this month because someone wrote about it five months ago, or that next week we’re featuring the Chemical Brothers and so we can’t have another dance music article two-weeks running. It’s utter crap, and these same editors would never ever think of applying these asinine rules to rock or pop music. “OH WAIT, we just ran a Teeny Bop piece this week, can’t run another one for six more months!!” Or, “Wait, we can only slot two indie rock artists per section.” You get the drift. Am I annoyed? Yes.

I guess you could argue that the audience for dance music is not as large as the audience for rock, but it’s a two-way street (and I would argue that if you started running electronic music pieces/features on a regular basis, you would discover a whole new audience, which is larger than you think). I mean, NYC raves reach capacities of 10,000 with flyering as the sole promotion, and Twilo, the Tunnel, and the Limelight pack outs thousands of people on a weekend, yet can you find me a rock show that’s not Bruce Springsteen, that would be able to pack out a venue of that size with only word of mouth and hand-to-hand flyering and one month (or less) of promotion!!?. Most of these clubs don’t even bother taking out big ads in the papers, because they don’t have to. And considering how many venues are dedicated to dance music not rock music in NYC, I think the argument that there’s no audience and that no one will read it, and that it’s not important, is utterly absurd. There’s an audience, they just don’t buy records, they go raving or clubbing, instead.

MICHAEL FREEDBERG
See my answers to Question 9 especially. One of the greatest challenges for a U.S.A.-based writer is that we live in a kind of “no-dance music zone.” We have to travel, usually overseas, to hear the best “dance music,” to see it in action, and sometimes even to buy the music. Then there are the other challenges. The preconception most rockcrits have that dance music doesn’t count, because Spin, Gear, Vibe, etc. don’t write about it. The editors are often a challenge. One editor (at a publication other than the Phoenix and Village Voice, mind you) once told me I was not on his preferred dance-music assignment list because I’m not gay. Which is like saying that because I am white I cannot write about music made by blacks. Unhappily there are some editors who think that way too…

Sometimes one breaks through the fog of ignorance. Back in 1994 I wrote a scathing letter to Tower Pulse! complaining about their Dance Music column, which was being written by an enemy of the style, one Lorraine Ali. They called me, told me my letter was better written than any of her columns, fired her & gave it to me. (I wrote it for four and a half years, until a new, “typical” editor took over the magazine and fired me.) During that time I wrote about “deepest house and highest Euro,” as I told Pulse! that I would. Wrote about it and was glad of it! (Of course Lorraine Ali had no trouble making it to Rolling Stone, natch, and then on to the big time, where writers of her outlook are especially well received.)

CHUCK EDDY
Didn’t you already ask this question?? (See number five above.) I actually suspect the rock press is, if anything, more open to dance critics in the post-techno/post-hiphop era than it was back in the disco era. Which is definitely an improvement. Though I don’t know that most dance critics reek any less than most rock ones do.