My Rock Journalist Years

On being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool

David Bowie, as shot by Michael Benabib for Blender CD-ROM Magazine

It all seems sort of improbable now, but there was a time in my life when I was interacting with legitimate musical superstars (including some of my all-time heroes) on a weekly basis. And what’s more, I was doing it as part of a job that I had no real training or preparation for, just jumping from one random high-stakes interview to the next without ever reaching the point where I was treating it as a professional occupation. I approached it as a wide-eyed fanboy, for the most part, consistently amazed that I was getting paid to chat with some of the most talented musical artists in the world. (And yes, also a few less-than-stellar flavors of the week, but those interviews were rewarding in their own way.)

I was given this opportunity when I was poached from an NYC fanzine by Regina Joseph, a former SPIN editor who was the editor of a super-hyped new pop culture CD-ROM magazine called Blender. I’ve written about this awesome experience previously, and honestly the history of the magazine is deserving of multiple columns (and who knows, perhaps one day I shall write them).

But for now it suffices to say that Blender was a chaotic fever dream in the best sense of the phrase. Incredibly well-designed by Jason Pearson and expertly programmed (in Macromedia Director, no less!) by mad genius David Cherry, the thing was years ahead of its time. And while it certainly suffered from the typical managerial and editorial issues, it remains the single best place I’ve ever worked, and the opportunities it afforded me as a cocky 20-something were beyond belief.

In fact, I still fondly remember the very first major assignment I was given: a sprawling remit to cover both the burgeoning phenomenon of Lollapalooza (which was on its fourth go-round in 1994, the summer I started) and the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, which was being celebrated that year with a high profile festival in Saugerties, New York. Unfortunately the fledgling magazine didn’t have enough money to send me to both, so it was decided that I would take a video camera to the Chicago stop of the latest Lollapalooza tour and interview every band or musician I could find.

I honestly don’t remember who I had official access to. I definitely had a backstage pass and media credentials, and I’m certain that the interview I conducted with Kim and Kelley Deal of the Breeders was an officially sanctioned sit down, but most of the footage I got was obtained just by walking up to musicians I recognized and inquiring if I could ask them a couple of questions on camera for this nutty digital interactive magazine they’d never heard of.

Which is how I ended up with completely random things like a montage of Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips rhapsodizing about the onstage antics of Japanese noise rock pioneers the Boredoms, intercut with the Boredoms themselves hamming it up for the camera.

The strangest part of this entire chapter of my life is that I never harbored a burning desire to become a journalist. I’ve been obsessed with writing fiction since middle school, and have always poured the majority of my passion and effort into writing novels and short stories. But I’ve also been a musician and music-lover my entire life, and so naturally took whatever opportunities I could find to wax poetic about my favorite artists. The fact that this led to a decades-long career as an entertainment and (later) political journalist has always amazed me (as it all came together, I still remember the flabbergasted annoyance of my roommate at the time, who was fresh out of J-school and struggling to find a job).

Anyway, after my Lollapalooza baptism by fire, the steady stream of celebrity interviews never really let up. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the time the hype surrounding interactive content was at a fever pitch. It was the early days of the internet, which was buggy and slow as molasses, so the ability to combine text, music, and video seamlessly, with very little lag, seemed like some sort of mind-blowing futuristic alchemy. And that hype, combined with marketing savvy and decent funding (Dennis Publishing, the magazine’s generous benefactor, would later launch the improbably successful Maxim Magazine) made my job of procuring high-profile interviews absurdly easy.

If I learned anything during those years of interacting with well-known personalities it was this: the more famous the person was, the more accommodating and generous they tended to be. I’m not saying that this is a hard-and-fast rule — I’m just saying that, in my experience, once a person has reached a certain level of success, they’ve worked out exactly how to play the game, and realize that it benefits them to treat their interviewer with kindness and respect. The few abysmal interviews I had (that weren’t my own fault, of course) were with mid-level or up-and-coming artists who acted like the entire experience was beneath them, and either mumbled their way through the interview or responded with disdainful, mono-syllabic answers. But with very few exceptions every famous musician I interviewed was a consummate pro, and never made me feel like the inexperienced, over-eager kid I so obviously was.

Then again, none of these encounters were in-depth, hard-hitting interviews. What I was doing was basically fluff journalism dressed up in shiny new-media finery, and so the chances of an interview going completely off the rails was pretty slim.

The other truism about interviewing famous people is that it’s usually pretty boring. Everybody involved is doing a job, and with few exceptions nothing especially exciting or noteworthy happens. So with that in mind, I’m not going to provide an exhaustive list of my interviews here, as most of them were pretty pedestrian affairs. But there were definitely a few that have stuck with me to this day, for a variety of reasons, so I thought it might be fun to talk about those here.

David Bowie

This was, without a doubt, the most personally thrilling interview I ever conducted. Bowie is easily one of my favorite musical artists, and his songs have soundtracked more important events in my life than I can possibly count. When the opportunity to interview him during his promotional tour for the (criminally underrated) Earthling album arose, I seized it with both hands (and probably wrapped my legs around it for good measure).

The incredible thing is that I had to fight a bit to get it into the magazine, which is completely nuts. But at the time Bowie was considered a bit of a has-been, I suppose (although certainly not by me). His “Let’s Dance” heyday was far behind him at that point, and his recent output (the Tin Machine alt-rock experiment, Black Tie White Noise, Outside) hadn’t generated much buzz. But he was still a god to me, so I arrived at the interview location (Philip Glass’s studio, of course) as nervous as I could possibly be.

But true to his reputation, Bowie turned out to be one of the nicest, most engaging stars I ever met. He put me at ease immediately, showing me and the photographer around the studio a bit (Glass wasn’t there, sadly) and settling in for a relaxed on-camera interview that felt like chatting with an old friend. He was self-deprecating, insightful, and generous to a fault. At one point, while talking about the types of cheap consumer cameras he was using onstage during his upcoming tour, he pointed at our much-abused Sony camcorder and quipped “much like that little fellow there.” Coming from somebody else it might have felt like a put-down or an insinuation that we weren’t a professional outfit, but coming from him it came off as a fun bit of camaraderie, and an acknowledgement that great technology was becoming more and more accessible to the masses.

In short, he was the best, and I sorely miss having him — and his incredible music — in the world.

Metallica

I remember this interview well because it was the first truly “big” interview I did — meaning it took place in a proper studio, and was one of the few I did that had both a professional photographer and a stylist.

This was during the band’s Load/Unload era, right after they’d cut off their long hair and were in the process of figuring out their place in the new, grunge-centric musical landscape. It was also a period of notorious turmoil within the band, with bassist Jason Newstead at odds with the other members over his side project Echobrain, and presumably already planning his departure from the group.

But none of this tension was apparent during the interview. In fact the band was completely genial and happy to play around with the novel concept of recording an interactive feature. (Are you sensing a trend here?) Even questions that almost certainly irked them (including the inevitable one about the radical hairstyle shift) were met with jocular, quotable answers. (“There were scissors involved. And beer.”)

I also got to enjoy a measure of personal vindication, as this was my one and only Blender cover story, and again I’d had to argue for it, since many of my co-workers were convinced that the Stone Temple Pilots album coming out the same day as Load was going to be a much bigger deal. As it turned out Metallica blew STP out of the water in terms of sales, and I got to crow about it for weeks.

No Doubt

Not going to lie — there wasn’t anything super-memorable about this particular encounter. Blender legal brain, camera person, and sometimes scribe David Glitzer and I interviewed the band in an East Village Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor right before they completely blew up, and they were fun and talkative and not even a tiny bit pretentious. I do remember thinking that Gwen Stefani was the most attractive person I’d ever met up close, and being more than a bit intimidated by that fact.

I’m mostly including it because they’re all such babies, and seeing them at this age and stage in their career still tickles me. Plus Gwen’s answer in the attached clip is sadly evergreen, and particularly relevant in these trying times.

The Beastie Boys

After my time at Blender, I continued to work as a freelance music journalist for years, although my opportunities for big blockbuster interviews definitely fell off. One of my print magazine high points, however, was when Time Out New York flew me out to Salt Lake City to interview the Beastie Boys during their 1998 tour for Hello Nasty.

I’m pretty sure Time Out picked me because I’d written a few articles for the Beastie’s Grand Royal Magazine, and they thought I had some sort of personal connection to the band (I did not). In fact, the issue of Grand Royal that I wrote for was the very last one, and I’ve heard rumors that the subject matter of that issue (bass music, in all of its forms), along with the booty-centric cover, is what caused the band to pull the plug. I have no idea if that’s true, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. But I still think it was a good issue, and the main article I wrote for it is one of my all-time personal favorites.

Anyway, my interview with two-thirds of the band (Adams Yauch and Horovitz) was a completely shambolic mess, as it took place only an hour or so before the concert in a cramped room inside the cavernous arena. The guys were in good spirits, but obviously focused more on the upcoming show than the interview, and spent almost the entire time bantering with each other and giving goofy answers that would prove incredibly difficult to weave into a satisfying narrative.

But it was still a hugely memorable experience, and as a bonus I got to witness one of the most bonkers concert crowds I’ve ever seen. After finishing the interview I took to the floor of West Valley City’s E Center, which was mostly packed with well-behaved young white kids (I’m not saying that they were all mormons, but I have to imagine that many of them were). These kids stayed almost completely still for the entirety of the excellent opening set by A Tribe Called Quest, and I began to wonder if they just didn’t know how to dance.

And then, the second that the lights went down for the Beasties and the rumbling, bass-heavy keyboard line of “Super Disco Breakin’” kicked in, the floor went completely berserk. It was like these kids had been waiting their entire lives for this exact moment, and every ounce of pent-up energy and aggression they had just came pouring out in a frenzy of madly writhing bodies and non-stop crowd surfing. It was both amazing and slightly disturbing, and made me appreciate the raw power of music as few things ever had.

So there you go — that’s pretty much my entire music journalist career in a nutshell. It was quite a ride, and one that I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced. But I also don’t regret leaving it behind, as I just can’t see myself keeping up that level of intensity and encyclopedic musical interest forever. It’s a young person’s game, in my opinion, and one that I’m now happy to experience as an avid consumer rather than a participant.

But who know — maybe one day I’ll write a novel about it.