Episode 215: With Michael Azerrad
Links
- TCU Wiki
- Download not available
- Download CSV
Transcript
Transcript
Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Butthole Surfers. What do these bands have in common?
They've all been written about by the iconic rock journalist Michael Azarath.
Today we'll be asking him the questions for his first appearance on Time Crisis
with Ezra Koenig.
They passed me by, all of those great romances
They were, I felt, probably, all my rightful chances
My picture clear, everything seemed so easy
And so I dealt to the floor, when a bus had to go
Now it's different, I want you to know
One of us is crying, one of us is lying
Leave it on me, babe
Time Crisis, back again. How's everybody doing?
Doing great. Pretty warmed up. Full disclosure, we're banking the eps.
We just talked about Nirvana and Taylor Swift.
Down in the mines, banking the eps.
Now we're going to talk to Michael Azarath.
Yeah, today's show is all about Michael Azarath, legendary rock journalist,
author of the classic Nirvana book, Come As You Are, as well as Our Band Can Be Your Life.
Very excited to talk to him about his life and work, and we'll be talking about a lot of classic bands.
Who here has read Our Band Can Be Your Life?
I've read it.
Naken Seinfeld?
No, I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
Go to hell.
Is there an audiobook?
There is an audiobook, and actually, I haven't heard it, but each chapter is read by a different musician.
And one of the chapters is read by Dave Longstreth.
I believe he reads the Black Flag chapter.
Okay, will I get it if I go to his first? Do I need to listen to them in order? Can I skip around?
I'm assuming you can skip around the chapters on an audiobook.
I mean, I think Azarath thoughtfully picked whatever 10 or 11 bands and placed them, each chapter in order,
to tell a larger story about the American independent music scene.
It's in chronological order, right?
Yeah.
So it's like a book. It's like a normal book style.
It's not exactly chronological, but I think he wants you to read about certain bands first.
Somewhat chronological.
I have a dog-eared copy.
Great book.
On my bookshelf.
Quick question. What's the best music book you ever read?
That's a good question.
Mine would be Hellfire by Nick Toshias. Does that count?
What's that about?
It's the story of Jerry Lee Lewis.
I mean, it's an incredible book. I don't know if you-- I mean, it's maybe one of my favorite books ever written.
Really?
Yeah, it's incredible.
Just because Jerry Lee Lewis had such a crazy life?
Yeah, but mainly because Nick Toshias is one of the greatest, you know.
I don't know Nick Toshias.
Oh, he's like-- let's see what else. He wrote this great book on Sunny Liston.
I mean, it is really about music. But would you say specifically-- also, what's that grill mark? It's lipstick traces?
That's more of like rock--
Oh, I've heard of that. Yeah.
That's a great one.
I like-- I've been enjoying The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I got that recently. I've been kind of-- I'm not kidding. I've been thumbing through it.
Hannah loves that book.
Does that count as a music book? Or is that like more of a--
He said-- well, he's a music guy.
No, of course that's a music book. It's-- I think he purposefully kept it without like juicy details about rock history because he wants it to be almost like a self-help
book for, you know, for people trying to be creative.
So, no, that's totally fine.
I also say I-- because I don't read as many of these music books, I think, as you guys do. I really liked-- featuring Vampire Weekend, I really liked Mimi in the Bathroom.
Oh, yeah. People like that book.
I think that's a good one. What's your favorite?
I mean, let's see. I've read so many because I can-- I can just burn through like a musical memoir very quickly.
You know, there's a book I cracked open again recently called I'm Your Man that's a very detailed biography of Leonard Cohen.
And that's like the only music book I've ever wanted-- I've ever like specifically gone out of my way to start reading again.
We'll see if I make it through a full second read, but I kind of like-- liked having this whole-- going through his whole career.
Is it just a story or is it written? Is it-- is there something sort of really nice about the way it's written?
You know, that's hard to say. I mean, the writing certainly doesn't get in the way.
Obviously, with something like that, you're so much more fixated on the content than-- and probably not appreciating the writing.
But I think it's-- I think it's very strong.
Probably the deepest I've gone is maybe last year I found a book that was specifically about the making of Infidels, the Bob Dylan album.
Wow. That's amazing.
It's called Surviving in a Ruthless World.
How long was that book?
The Making of Infidels.
God, there are so many music books.
Yeah, and I've always like wondered like how many people have bought this book?
That's really deep.
How long is it? You know, it's maybe like a few hundred pages.
Wow.
Normal book length.
You are assuming it must be pretty short.
I mean, I was picturing, yeah, more of like a 33 and a third style, like, you know.
No, no, no. It's longer than that.
It's-- some of those books are great. I'm not a big music book guy, to be honest.
Let's talk about Love. Have you read the Carl Wilson Celine Dion?
Love it. Great Canadian.
That's a classic. That's a classic.
I love that one.
Oh, yeah. He's a good writer.
Yeah, the Celine Dion one.
Oh, let's see. I read Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography.
That's deep.
Last year. I loved it.
Dirt. Great.
Oh, I've heard that's great.
Oh, it's great.
When I moved to L.A., I moved into this apartment and there was a-- someone had left behind Slash's autobiography.
And I was like, this is perfect. I'm going to read this the first week I live in L.A.
But I got to say, like, a lot of those music books, like, you kind of-- they just kind of like wash over you.
And then I-- yeah, they don't really leave much of an impression, but that's just me.
I want to read a little bit of Surviving in a Ruthless World, Bob Dylan's Infidels.
"The Joker Man we hear on the album is like one of the rare earth elements atomic scientists created by bombarding uranium with neutrons
and creating something that did not exist previously.
The released version never was played or sung in the way we've heard it since 1983.
It is a miracle of digital technology and perseverance.
What began in the early spring was completed in summer.
The first run-through of Joker Man starts the session on April 13th.
It's a five-minute instrumental take.
After that, it is an apparently spontaneous '50s-style slow rocker called Try Baby that runs for eight minutes.
Then it seems like an attempt at Joker Man was stopped and recorded over by a blues workout.
After three more time wasters, Columbus, Stockade Blues, a couple more years, and Do Re Mi, they return to Joker Man.
Dylan sings the first line and remarks, "It seems too familiar," and suggests they drop a transition chord in the second bar.
Dylan's piano drives the band ahead."
So I guess this guy had access to the tapes.
And so he's like really going deep about like how many times they tried to record Joker Man
and how like, you know, take nine is different from take ten, which I do find pretty interesting, actually.
Well, it sounds like he went into the studio with it being a really nebulous, loose idea
as opposed to just like, "Here's a song I wrote. Let's track it."
Yeah. And that's also just so alien to like the modern way of recording.
Just be like, "So they tried Joker Man, Bob lost interest, then they ran through three blues standards and then came back to it."
Just like, just sitting in front of the computer with Pro Tools open.
It's just like, it's night and day.
A fully different way of making music.
♪ Standing on the water, casting your breath ♪
♪ While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing ♪
♪ Distant ship sailing into the mist ♪
♪ You were born with a snake in both your fists ♪
♪ While a hurricane was blowing ♪
♪ Freedom, just around the corner from you ♪
♪ The truth so far off, what good will it do ♪
♪ Joker Man danced through the night and gave to me ♪
♪ But fire had not alighted in me ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪
♪ Joker Man ♪
Guys, Michael's on the horn.
Let's call him.
All right, let's get him on.
Now, let's go into the Time Crisis Hotline.
[phone ringing]
Hey, Michael.
How's it going, Jake?
Good, how are you?
Good, thanks.
Hi, Azrad.
Hey, what's up, man?
Good to see you.
Good to see you, too.
Michael Azrad, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
We were singing the praises of the Amplified "Come As You Are"
in our last episode.
Oh, thank you.
And we talked at length about Kurt and where he was coming from.
But today we're going to find out where you're coming from.
Oh.
So, let's get behind the book.
First of all, I got to say, you're a very rare figure in this day and age.
You know, somebody who has two classic books about music
that kind of have stayed in the zeitgeist.
It's just something that doesn't seem to happen a lot.
Yeah, I wonder why that is.
Yeah, both of those books have stayed, "Come As You Are"
and the other book you're talking about, "Our Bank Could Be Your Life,"
about the American indie rock scene in the '80s.
Yeah, they've stayed in print for 30 years and 23 years, respectively,
which is really rare in itself.
But yeah, I don't know.
People keep coming back to those books, and we can get into that if you want.
Sure.
Well, it's also interesting talking to you at this moment
because what I'm curious to get your take,
that obviously you're known for those books
and you've written in a million different places as a music journalist.
And with the news about Pitchfork a few weeks ago,
there's definitely a lot of talk and chatter about music journalism being in crisis.
And you saw some people saying, "Well, it's been in crisis."
This is just, you know, example 175 of that.
So it's very interesting to think about, to talk to you now,
at this moment, when, you know, you've been in the game for how long?
Let's see. I don't know. Something like 30, 35 years, something like that.
You've seen many, many different vibes in the profession. Fair to say?
Fair to say. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think those vibes correspond to states of affairs in the music industry.
Like when I got in, so that was '85.
So that's like 39 years, sorry.
When I got in, the record industry, the music industry was booming.
So there was a lot of money flying around, not just for bands, but for advertising.
And advertising floats magazines.
And then, you know, things started to change through the '90s and obviously into the 2000s.
Streaming and, you know, pirating and all those things happened.
And there wasn't as much money to throw around.
So there wasn't as much money that was trickling down to music publications either.
I got in right at the end of the golden years.
Right. And what was your first job?
I was working at a place that sent music videos to nightclubs around the country.
And it was called Rock America.
And that was a thing.
In like, yeah, in one word, Rock America.
Why was that a thing?
That was a thing because in 1984 and '85, MTV was huge.
People wanted to see music videos a lot.
And there was no place to see them except MTV.
And then only then, just kind of a limited palette of them, really.
So music videos got shown in nightclubs.
And Rock America would aggregate these into different genres.
Like compilations?
Yeah. Yeah. Compilation tapes. And we'd send those out.
There was a modern rock, new wave one and an AOR, dance R&B.
And there was one other one, mainstream kind of pop stuff.
And clubs would show these things on big screens through large sound systems.
And it was like actually kind of a draw.
Like for clubs where people would be dancing?
Yeah, they'd dance or stand around with their drinks and just watch the screen.
Or they'd show them in between bands.
It was just an extra draw for nightclubs.
And after a while, that obviously went away.
But for a while in the mid '80s, it was a thing.
Now there's a scene in the last Brett Easton Ellis novel, which takes place in LA in '82, '83,
where he goes to a club on Beverly.
And it's kind of like an all-ages teen club.
And I just remember when I was reading the book thinking, "What is this?"
And they would go there and there'd just be music videos, like a Duran Duran video,
would just be projected on the wall.
And I was like, "That sounds like a weird club, but I guess that was Rock America."
I mean, there was a club on West 21st Street here in Manhattan.
I can't remember the name of it, but it was just a video club.
And it sort of looked like something out of Clockwork Orange.
It was very modern.
Were they using a projector or they had some kind of big TV?
It was a projector.
Yeah, it was like those old projectors that are like a green and a red circle.
Yeah, like the biggest green TVs.
Yeah, I mean, did it look terrible?
Yeah, well, I mean, to our modern eyes, which are used to high def,
yeah, it must have looked terrible.
I mean, they were projecting sometimes using VHS tapes.
And then more often, like the bigger clubs would use three quarter inch,
which looks better, but it's still nothing like what we're used to now.
But their eyes weren't trained to be that critical about things.
So it was just the novelty of seeing music videos,
especially ones you didn't see on MTV on a big screen.
It was a big deal for a hot second there.
Now the listeners, they know a bit about who Michael is, his books,
his career with Rock America, but now let's go back from the jump.
So you're from New York?
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I was born in Manhattan.
What year?
1961.
'61. And your family lived in Manhattan then?
My parents did.
Yeah. So where'd you grow up?
I grew up in Westchester County, you know, the commuter suburb north of New York City.
And then for a little bit, I lived in Marin County.
Then I came back to Westchester.
Then I went to Columbia College and stayed there ever since.
Stayed in New York City the whole time.
So you're a real tri-state area guy.
Yeah. Or, yeah, pretty much, except for that little sojourn in Marin County.
I'm a New Yorker.
I was also born in Manhattan, but I grew up in northern New Jersey.
Of course, like you, I know many people grew up in Long Island.
And there's always been this New Jersey versus Long Island thing
about Bruce Springsteen versus Billy Joel.
How does a Westchester guy feel about that rivalry?
Because you're neither.
Yeah. Well, let's see.
When I was living, you know, when I was in high school,
Springsteen was just, I guess, he had had Born to Run.
And I think that was, he was kind of considered an exotic New Jersey thing.
And then I think Billy Joel was all over the radio.
So that was, I don't know, that was probably more familiar to us.
But I found out about punk rock really early in, I guess, autumn of 1977.
So, like, my friends had no use for any of that stuff.
We weren't really paying attention to Springsteen, really, or Billy Joel,
except to mock them.
So you were right there.
You were like 16.
Yeah.
And you had a front row seat for like the first wave of punk rock.
Yeah. A friend of mine worked at, that summer, worked at a punk rock clothing
and I guess music store called Boy in London.
He got hip to all the great punk music.
And his friend at work made him a lot of compilation tapes,
which he brought back too.
And his friend was named Don Letts.
Oh, yeah. The famous Don Letts.
Yeah. Don Letts, I think, the cash register at Boy, among other things.
Yeah. I got the straight stuff really quick and I was down with the program.
You were still in high school then? Were you going into the city to see shows?
Both. Yeah. I was in high school and yeah, we'd sneak into the city sometimes to see shows.
You know, you could get in underage to a lot of clubs back then.
It was kind of the Wild West.
Like, I turned seven. I literally turned 17 in CBGB.
I was watching the Dead Boys.
Wow.
Yeah. So that was the kind of thing you could do back then.
That rules.
I don't need any work, don't need no mom and dad,
don't need no pretty face, don't need no human rights.
I've got some news for you, don't even need to do.
I got my damn machine, got my electronic dream.
Sonic the Doozer, ain't no looser. Got my Sonic the Doozer, ain't no loser.
Were you aware of any Westchester punk bands?
When did the suburban punks get started?
As far as I know, they got started with my band, which is called the Monads.
Whoa.
Yeah.
First suburban punk band, potential?
Well, it's the first Westchester punk band that I know about.
We even had a theme song and the chorus was, "I'm a Monad and you're all gonads."
Is this 1978?
Yeah. I think it was '78. Yeah.
And you're on drums?
Yep.
So where were the Monads playing?
High school gatherings. We played the talent show, the high school variety show, whatever.
So someone's doing like Barbra Streisand, The Rose, and then you get up there and you're doing, "I'm a Monad and you're all gonads."
Yes. Actually, close. It wasn't Barbra Streisand. I do remember someone played Just the Way You Are by Billy Joel.
Oh, there you go.
Oh.
Yeah.
But then when Billy dropped Still Rock and Roll to me, you know, hot funk, cool punk, even if it's old junk, did you respect the way he kind of rose to the challenge of punk
with that song?
Yeah. I was so disgusted by that song. What a haughty jackass he was to write that song.
Yeah. By the way, oh, the Monads, by the way, we also played parties and we played one party. I'll leave the guy's name out, but his parents were away and he invited the
whole town to come to his house and we played in the basement.
And we were just playing all night and there was a bunch of people in the basement watching us play.
And then we finished and packed up and walked up the stairs and the entire house had been totally trashed.
Oh, God.
We originally got blamed for it because we were a punk rock band.
Causing trouble.
We had no idea what was going on upstairs.
The Monads were innocent.
Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could take credit for the violence.
Wait, so did you ever, I have to come back to this Billy Joel thing. Did you ever in the last 40 something years, reevaluate Billy Joel at all? Or have you just been
consistent in your view?
Oh, no, I think that I just can't stand that song. He's just sort of a boomer just trying to pull rank and just saying, oh, it's just the same old stuff. It's what we've been
doing this whole time.
But I like that song, Allentown.
I was just going to ask if you liked Allentown. That's a good one.
Yeah, that's a good song. I think, does he have a song called Stiletto?
Yes. On 52nd Street.
Yeah. I remember. I think I liked that song too. I don't know.
Fun fact, I was just reading about when that song came out, there were mixed feelings about it in Allentown. But Billy, he came through and did a show at a stadium in
Bethlehem, maybe that same year, which is right next to Allentown. He opened the show with Allentown, closed the show with Allentown.
Strong.
People lost their shit. He won them over.
Doesn't he end every concert by saying good night and don't take any shit from anybody?
Yeah, that is his like classic line. See, he is a punk rocker.
Yeah, well, he's a feisty, pugnacious guy from whatever, Long Island, Queens.
Yeah, from Long Island. I mean, we've noticed in all the research we've done over the years on this show that the haughty sentiment, you even got it from more kind vibe
dudes like Jerry Garcia.
It was hard for them to like fully understand what was special about punk.
Even Jerry Garcia was like, I mean, you know, it's rock music, man. You know, like maybe because it wasn't immediately apparent to them in the music. What's different
about it? The chord progressions are the same and they couldn't quite lock into the attitude or the texture or something.
I found that, you know, boomers, of course, are the people who said, you don't trust anyone over 30 and they were very tuned into their own youth. You know, that was their
selling point.
As they've gotten older, they've gotten really, I think, uncomfortable with the fact that they are not young.
And one way to deal with that is to dismiss things that younger generations come up with.
And that's why, you know, it's still rock and roll to me. It's like, that's a classic example of what I'm talking about. And he was just dismissing it. It's like, oh,
yeah, I already did that. It's nothing new. I can handle this. You know, I got this.
When in fact, you know, I don't, I don't think he understood it at all. And I don't know, that's just a, it's just something I noticed about boomers. They tend to be very
dismissive of ensuing generations of culture.
Well, we're living here in Allentown. And they're closing all the factories down. Out in Bethlehem, they're killing time. Filling half-horns, standing in line.
But our fathers fought the Second World War. Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore. Met our mothers with the U.S.O. Asked them to dance, dance with the snow. And
we're living here in Allentown.
So are you a very early Gen Xer? You're right on the cusp, I feel like.
Yeah, this is the whole thing. Well, you know, I often see, well, Gen X starts at 1965. But like I say, I was born in 1961. I don't relate to people who watched Howdy Doody
and did like drills, like hiding under your desk for nuclear attack drills and stuff.
Like I was too young to be drafted for Vietnam.
Yeah, you were eight when Woodstock happened.
Yeah, exactly. I actually had a girlfriend who said, "You're a boomer if you were old enough to drive to Woodstock." And so I don't really relate to boomers, as you may be
able to tell. But I'm not quite Gen X either.
And I actually refer to our little cohort, which I think is like 1960 to '63 or '64, as the lost generation. And I know that's already a name for another generation, but we
are this lost little section of people. We're not Gen X and we're not boomers. Obama's a really good example.
Was he born the same year as you?
Yes, he was. He was born sometime in August, I think.
Yeah, it's funny because there's a thing, I'm sure you've heard it too. People always say, "There's never been a Gen X president and maybe there never will be." It's
something people say.
Because, well, Trump, Clinton and George Bush were all born the same year in the '40s, bizarrely. They're all born within three months of each other. And people always
say, "Well, maybe after all these old guys are done, you're going to start getting millennial presidents because they're eligible now."
But yeah, Obama always seemed like this funny exception. You're like, "Wait, Obama's a boomer?" And spiritually, Obama is not a boomer.
No.
That's interesting that you'd talk about this micro generation because obviously Obama is from a different generation than the classic boomer presidents.
Yes. And it's not to say that people my age maybe are kind of boomerish. It really depends on where you are, I think, in the birth order. If I had an older sibling who had
been born in 1957 or something like that, I would have been pulled, I think, into boomerism. But as it was-
You were the eldest?
Yeah, I'm the oldest, but I was enthralled to boomer culture. I was a big fan of the Who and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and stuff like that because that's kind of
all there was, Black Sabbath.
But then punk comes along when I'm 16, all of a sudden, bang, here's music by Ford about people my age. That was awesome. I know that a lot of punk was made by people who are
technically boomers, but I don't consider that a boomer music or a boomer movement or culture.
Yeah, absolutely not. And I think it's the same way that the, I think within generations, you have the people who kind of lay the groundwork and create the cultural
products. And then you have the people who are five to 10 years younger who are there to accept it. So it's kind of like we always talk about all the classic boomer rockers
were all born between 1941 and 1949.
Between 1941 and 1949, you have everybody from Bob, Jerry, John Lennon, all the way to Bruce, all born in the 40s. Now, if you were born in the 50s, you'd be right there to
be a huge fan of those artists. But they were, you know, they're from a different decade.
The same way that like when I think of a lot of the classic Gen Xers that I know, like Jake Longstreth, born 1977. The people in my life who were born in the mid to late 70s,
who I'm close with, they're classic Gen Xers, but they were the people who were there to listen to Nirvana, to listen to Pearl Jam. You know what I mean?
There's obviously a connection, but the people born in the 60s created the vibes and the work that laid the groundwork for the people born in the 70s to enjoy, you know,
so that Jake could be 14 when Nevermind hits. So he's connected to Kurt in that sense, but you know, Kurt was 10 years older than him. Very classic born in the 60s, raised
in the 70s kind of guy.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's, yeah, there was traditionally a lag, but I think with punk rock and I think ever since maybe there's been less of a lag, like sometimes or
more often anyway, the band that you're listening to might be your age, even if you're a teenager.
Right.
So, I mean, obviously I'm like, I don't know, Keith Moon was like 18 when Who's made their first album, but I think maybe it's a little easier to go to a club and see a band
that's exactly your age, even if you're quite young.
Sure. And I suppose these days, even if whatever the pop star, the rapper you're listening to is 10, 15, even 20 years older, you still might be experiencing their music
through the lens of a social media influencer who's exactly your age. Like you're very connected to, if you open TikTok and even if they're talking about, you know,
somebody from a different generation, they're going to have a wide audience and they easily could be 14.
Yeah. Yeah.
So what are the bands that you're getting obsessed with? Late seventies, getting into punk rock. What were your favorites?
Well, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Damned, Sex Pistols, a little later, Suzy and the Banshees.
Ramones?
Yeah. What about the Americans?
Ramones and Dead Boys, mostly, as I recall. But I was mostly, I don't know, because of my friend had come back from England that summer. Like a lot of the stuff we were
listening to was from England. Oh, Buzzcocks also super huge.
Oh yeah. The greatest.
I remember first hearing the Ramones and being blown away by how fast it was. It was like, unbelievably, I couldn't believe how fast it was. And super catchy.
You know what's crazy? Johnny Ramone, born 1948. So he was 29 in '77.
Oh, he was a bit older than Joey.
Boomer.
So what year did you go to Columbia, Michael?
I matriculated in 1979.
So you were there at the same time as Obama. Didn't he transfer in like '80 or '81 or something to Columbia?
Yes. I remember watching one of those conventions. Was it like 2000?
Oh, he made a speech in 2004.
Yeah, it was 2004.
That sort of anointed him unto the state. Yeah.
I remember I was watching him make that speech on TV and I just kept looking at it going like, I have seen that guy before. I know him.
Yeah. And it just kept, it was just really bothering me. And then after like, I don't know, like 20 minutes, I realized, oh, I used to see him on college walk.
Wow.
Yeah. I didn't know his name, but you know, I just, I don't know. I just have a long memory for faces or something, but I just recognized him. And yeah, that was pretty
weird.
That guy.
Wow. All right. So yeah, almost same age, going to the same school. What was Columbia like back then?
It was medievally dark.
Yeah.
I mean, the city was, well, the city was just, you know.
Falling apart.
Falling apart or just coming out of falling. It was maybe kind of starting to collect itself a little bit after those really raw mid seventies years.
But there was a lot of crime, but also Columbia was all male.
Oh, you must've been one of the last all male. It was 84 it became, COED?
Correct.
Whoa.
Yeah. So it was all dudes and there, you know, there's Barnard across the street, but you know, part of the reason that people go to Barnard is, you know, being in an
academic environment that doesn't have many men in it.
So it was all dudes and just like a lot of too much male energy. It was just really kind of a bummer to be there at that time.
It was just kind of, it's just kind of a grim place, but I would go out and see shows and gosh, I wish I could remember all the shows I saw, but, you know, I kind of just majored
in playing in bands and staying out late and going to like, I don't know, Danceeteria or Hurrah or something like that.
Random question. Did you ever see Steve Forbert play?
No, but I often quote his line, you cannot win if you do not play.
That's a great line. I mean, that's a class. I didn't know that was his line. I feel like that's a, an aphorism of just kind of general wisdom.
It's his phrasing.
It might be, I don't know. But he put it that in a song.
Can I just show you on the video screen? We did a Steve Forbert little segment a few episodes ago and Ezra just gave this to me as a Christmas, as a belated Christmas
present.
I'm wearing a vintage Steve Forbert, but he was the guy that like moved up to New York in like '78 from down South somewhere with, he had heard about the punk rock scene
happening in New York and moved up there with visions of, I don't know, something becoming a rock star.
But just a random aside, just wondering if you ever saw Steve Forbert.
Yeah, I remember he played a lot. He played the bottom line and stuff. He played around. I saw it, but I never-
Did you and Obama ever catch a Steve Forbert show together?
Right. Steve Forbert opening for television and you and Barry are knocking back the Miller High lives.
Yeah, perhaps a little herbal stimulant as well.
I was sitting by the road, my head in a cloud, wishing that I had some wings.
Wishing for a student, wishing for a trainer, any kind of moving thing.
Well, I looked at the trees, looked at the sky, I seen it was a lovely day.
I looked at the road, looked at my feet, I picked it up and I walked away.
You cannot win if you do not play.
Who were you studying at Columbia?
I went there, I just tried to take as many different things as I humanly could because I took the concept of liberal arts very seriously.
So, I did physics, I did, I don't know, all kinds of history of religion courses and I don't know, just tons of stuff.
Not just that core curriculum, but just all over the place.
But at some point I had to declare a major and I found out that at the time anyway, Columbia would let you do something called a concentration instead of a major.
And a concentration was way fewer credits.
So, I took a concentration in Latin because Latin came easily to me.
My mother was a Latin minor in college and she would, like all my, a lot of my toys and stuff, she gave Latin names.
So, I was comfortable with it.
So, I took a bunch of Latin and just satisfied the requirement and then just took as many different things as I possibly could.
That's an interesting combo, checking out like cutting edge punk rock music and studying Latin.
I mean, is there, yeah, is there any kind of like connection there?
No, no.
The only connection was it's just, you know, just to, I just took Latin because it came easily.
So, I didn't have to think about too much.
Could you like speak Latin at one point?
Well, no.
I mean, there like no one really speaks Latin except for, you know, Catholic priests.
But you could read it.
Yeah, I could read it.
Yeah.
By the end, quite fluently.
Yeah.
And it's funny though, people say like, oh, wow, you know, that, gosh, that Latin, that has nothing to do with what you do now.
And, you know, actually it does.
I learned, you know, so much about the impact of, you know, of words and the rhythm of words.
I knew the etymologies of words, like the kind of shadings and connotations of them.
There are a lot of things, how to be concise and just the parts of speech and how to write grammatically.
So, actually learning Latin helped a whole lot with my writing, I think.
Sure, I could totally see that.
And obviously, when you study Latin, your source material has to be ancient.
Yeah.
Did reading the ancient thinkers shape the way you look at new phenomenon?
Maybe, although, you know, I was, yeah, I was kind of hamstrung, you know, when I had to write papers and things like that.
I was so hamstrung by the fact that people have been writing papers about these people for centuries.
You know, to circle back to your original question about how I got started writing, I hated writing in college, hated it.
You know, no one had, this is, you know, before computers.
So, you had to type your papers on a typewriter and I didn't have a typewriter.
So, I went to this library called Burgess Carpenter, where I also worked and you'd pop it like a dime in this typewriter and it would like work for 10 minutes or something
like that you type.
And if those typewriters had not been bolted to the desk, I swear I would have thrown them out the window.
Hated writing.
And then I got to rock America a couple of years after I graduated and a very brilliant woman there named Lynn Healy decided that since Michael played in rock bands and
had gone to college, he could write about music for this in-house magazine that rock America put out.
And I resisted at first and then Lynn kind of sweet talked me into it and it came out really well.
I was actually very pleased with it.
So was everybody else. And within easily within two years, I was writing for Rolling Stone on a pretty regular basis.
Whoa.
So, how did that work? Did you like submit samples to Rolling Stone?
Because there must be like 10,000 kids in New York City who are like, I want to write for Rolling Stone.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, it's funny you ask.
I loved XTC and I wrote a review for no reason of their album Skylarking, which is a beautiful record. I recommend it.
My girlfriend at the time said, oh, you should send it into some magazines, see if they'll run it. And I said, nah.
So you just wrote it for your own, just pure, just on your own volition, just to have it.
Yeah.
Just to get your thoughts in order.
Yeah. And bear in mind, I was already writing for Rock America and I was also writing for this giveaway paper on Long Island called the Island Ear.
A guy named Ari Nadboy gave me a break there and I did a lot of writing for them.
And so I sent it into Spin and Rolling Stone.
I called the guy from Spin a week later. He said, hey, you should write like you speak.
And this is a dime a dozen, whatever. And I was sort of like put out, but I didn't see why I should write like I speak.
Writing is writing and speaking is speaking. And I don't know, when I speak, I say like, and you know, and things like that.
So I don't write like that. So whatever.
And then the next day I get a call from a guy who says he's the music editor of Rolling Stone.
And he says, I got your review. I really enjoyed it, but we've assigned that record, but would you like to try something else?
And so I said, sure. And he gave me a compilation of bands from Athens, Georgia called Athens, Georgia Inside Out.
And I reviewed that and I wrote for them, you know, pretty regularly for the next few years.
What year do you think that was?
I think that was '87. And he later said, he said he'd never given anyone an assignment that was, you know, just sort of just over the transom like that, but he just read it
and he thought it was really good.
Wow.
Dear God, hope you got the letter and I pray you can make it better down here.
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer.
But all the people that you made in your image, see them starving on their feet.
'Cause they don't get enough to eat from God.
I'm not complaining.
Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel that I should be loud and clear.
We don't mean a big reduction in the amount of tears.
But all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting in the street.
I can't make opinions mean to bow God.
I can't believe in you.
Did you make disease and the diamond glow?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
In late 80s New York, did you need a secondary income or writing a few reviews?
I was just going to ask, do you remember what they paid you?
Wow. No, I don't remember. It wasn't a living. I mean, you know, like maybe you'd get paid like a hundred dollars for a record review or something like that.
Yeah. But what was your rent?
I think it was maybe like $850 a month.
Wow.
Small one bedroom in Upper West Side.
But you're paying 425?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right. So you needed more than just the-
Upper West Side, you said?
Yeah. So yeah, I'd moved to maybe 30 blocks South of Columbia, you know, just staying up around there.
And so, yeah, I was working at this company that did computer based training.
And so I was, eventually I wound up to be like a content expert and I learned how to work Air Canada flight check system and some Canadian phone company doing their
computerized switchboard.
Was that cool or did you hate it?
Both.
Yeah.
It was kind of cool, you know, just like kind of learning how to do these things that I probably never do myself.
And then somehow figuring out how to convey that to someone else.
I wasn't the only one. It was a whole team of people.
But also, yeah, it was pretty dreary.
And, you know, I was at the same time I was playing in a band and fancied myself as somewhat creative person.
And, you know, it paid the rent.
And, you know, it was in a cool part of town, downtown, Lower Broadway.
A lot of people who worked there were artists and it was pretty fun.
But one day they did their first list issue is the hundred best singles of the past 25 years.
And I got assigned to write about, I think it was 14 singles.
I got paid like somewhere, something like 2000 bucks, something like that.
I don't know.
And it was a few months rent.
And I got that assignment and I quit my day job.
And I just said, I'm just I'm diving in.
I'm just going to go for this full time.
And it worked out.
I didn't have a day job again for, you know, almost 20 years.
And that day job was just editing a music website.
Right. So that was the last time you worked outside of music.
Yeah, it was. Yeah. Yeah. Late 80s. Yeah.
And so this whole time you're playing in bands and you're also just like a music fanatic.
You're following all the twists and turns of post-punk and hardcore and all the things you'd eventually write about.
Yeah. Yeah. You're like a collector.
No, I've never been a real collector type.
I made it my business to know about and listen to a lot of music.
But I wasn't like, you know, madly sweeping up all the, you know, the 12 inch singles with non LP B-sides.
Unless it was Suzy and the Banshees or Echo and the Bunnymen.
Were you part of the zine world at all?
Because you write about that quite a bit and our band could be your life.
Was that part of your world at the time?
It wasn't part of my world professionally because I was I was writing a lot for a rolling.
I was I was actually I think I was the first person to write for Rolling Stone and Spin at the same time.
They were, of course, bitter rivals.
So I was writing professionally. So I didn't wind up writing for fanzines.
I would, you know, check in on them.
And that was always obviously a good source of information about what was bubbling under.
But no, I was, you know, I was deep in the New York Music Magazine world.
Is it fair to say that you were on sort of like the college rock beat?
Yes.
I talked to you about this once before, like how you ended up being the guy to do the Nirvana cover story when they broke in '91 or '92.
And you were like, yeah, I had been I was the alternative, aka college rock guy.
Right. But the thing is, like a lot of the editors there were not into that kind of music.
And they they needed someone to cover that stuff who was psyched about it.
And I was really psyched about it. So I got to write about a lot of the...
Mission to Burma or whatever. Yeah.
Yeah. Or Robin Hitchcock or something like that.
I also was actually early on again, another genre that a lot of the Rolling Stone editors couldn't connect to because they were from a previous world was hip hop.
So I wrote a fair amount about hip hop.
Can you see the gold record over my shoulder?
Yes. What is it?
That's De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising.
Oh, amazing.
And I wrote a little feature about them. I reviewed the album for Rolling Stone.
I did another longer feature for them for the Tower Records magazine.
I was a really huge early booster of theirs.
And so they were kind enough to give me this gold record. But I wrote a fair amount about hip hop.
And then I moved over to more to college rock.
And yeah, and that's how that led up to the... And I wrote it. I did a 1990 cover story on the B-52s for Rolling Stone.
And my second one was that famous cover of Nirvana with Kurt wearing the t-shirt that said corporate magazines still suck.
I love in Come As You Are, the connection that you make between both Kurt and Dave seemingly both being hugely impacted by the B-52s late 70s SNL performance.
And it's funny because just before I read the amplified Come As You Are, I had seen that on social media or something.
I had seen a clip of that performance. Their performance of Rock Lobster is just so cool.
They sound so good. And it's so weird. And I was just like, wow, this is really cool.
But to imagine like those young dudes seeing it, it kind of made me think more.
You know, like who doesn't like the B-52s, you know, iconic, great, great band.
But I suppose I hadn't thought about them as being deeply influential, perhaps.
Oh, totally. B-52s. Yeah. Especially for people who were, you know, not, you know, urban sophisticates, you know, Kurt was in Aberdeen, Washington.
It was a semi-rural logging town. You know, you didn't get exposed to a lot of freaky stuff.
And Saturday Night Live was one of the main ways that a lot of people out, you know, in the provinces got exposed to cool stuff like that.
Yeah. That version of Rock Lobster rocks, you know, totally killed it. And yeah, I'm sure that made a big impression.
I know it made a big impression on both Kurt and Dave, because here was some, it was a band that was, you know, they were kind of, they were freaks, you know, like, like Kurt
and Dave felt.
And they were making this music that they felt they could make too. It was, you know, Rock Lobster's, you know, it's not roundabout.
But yes, it's like, it's fairly simple or just deceptively simple to play. I think the guitar playing is pretty involved actually.
Yeah. You know, there's this feeling of being enabled that I think really inspired a lot of kids out there and the B-52s just really embodied that.
And somehow they had this platform on SNL and it made a huge impact.
We were at a party, dear Lord, fell in the deep. Someone reached in and grabbed it.
What's a Rock Lobster?
Rock Lobster! Rock Lobster!
Okay. So take us into the early nineties. I imagine you were probably aware of Nirvana pretty early.
I went to, I think the 1988 Video Music Awards at Universal City and saw one of the greatest rock concerts I've ever seen, which was Guns N' Roses' Soundcheck for that
show.
But I know when, in one of the myriad after parties, I was talking to two women who were somewhere in the music business and they were raving about Bruce and Jonathan from
Seattle.
They started this label called Sub Pop and they're already awesome and they're going to be huge.
And they were just, you know, I just got the feeling these two women were like serious tastemaker types.
I paid close attention to what they were talking about. And so, yeah, so I started checking out Sub Pop and eventually Nirvana came out, I guess, the following year.
And, you know, I thought they were really good. And I noted that kind of poppy song, you know, that one poppy song on the record.
But I wasn't like thinking like, oh my God, this is, you know, this is Godhead and the next big thing. I just, you know, took note. Okay, cool band.
And then I was also, by 1991, I was working at MTV News and my friend, Carol Candeloro, kept playing this one album, an advance tape of some album over and over in her
office.
And I was just, every song was really great. And I just thought, who the hell is this? This is incredible.
And I just like burst in her door and said, all right, who is this? Who is this? And she said, Nirvana. And I was like, that band on Sub Pop?
And she said, no, they're on Geffen now. I was just blown away. And yeah, Smells Like Teen Spirit came out and we all know what happened after that.
But I was, I was blown away, kind of like sight unseen by Nevermind, first time I heard it.
Well, I would say in the book, you detail the ascent, their sudden ascent, like in painstaking detail. It's a great read.
I just want to say a quick compliment because I read your book in '93 when I was 16 and it was so great to read it the last few weeks.
And I love the format. We were talking about it last episode, the formatting of it, where like 30 years later, you're sort of like reflecting on what you had written and
adding context.
And anyway, it's a very cool format.
Yeah. That's why it's called, you know, this new edition is called the Amplified, Come As You Are, because I'm trying to amplify, you know, what was there already and
illuminate things and have second thoughts and 30 years of insight and stuff like that.
Yeah.
And like, one of the things I think even I noticed is this, is that there's a, you know, it is a dialogue between my, you know, between 1993, Michael and Michael today.
Yeah. I love that.
And you can hear it, like you can really hear it or read it like in the voice, like the writing I think is different and perhaps better.
But it's, you know, it's really, you can, I think part of the, one of the motifs of, I have a lot of motifs in that, in the notes, but one of them is like how naive I was at the
time I wrote the book.
And I think that my modern day amplifications, I think really highlight that. I think the contrast is pretty clear.
I mean, especially with, with his heroin addiction. I mean, you talk about that so kind of movingly in the book of like, you're like, well, I was sort of aware, but I also
didn't want to jeopardize my relationship with the band by like writing about this.
And additionally, what could I bring? Was there a responsible or ethical way for me to like talk about this? I really loved how you kind of like examined your own past
with it and like the ambiguity of the situation you were in.
Oh, thanks. Well, you know, part of it was that Kurt, you know, he was just working really hard to hide his addiction from me because I was supposed to be writing about,
you know, how he'd gotten his life together and he was a great parent and people now have 30 years of hindsight and all kinds of other books and magazine articles about
him.
But at the time it was happening in that moment, there was no resources for me to, to, to verify what was going on. I was experiencing it in real time. Yeah. So that's the
thing that I keep coming back to, you know, in the amplifications and the annotations is how that book was written while the band was still together, while Kurt was
still alive in the moment as things were happening.
And, you know, I didn't have, you know, my heroin dar was non-existent at the time.
Well, I mean, the other bandmate, I mean, Dave Grohl didn't have much of a heroin dar either. I mean, like, yeah, it was fascinating how like once they really got to this
huge superstar level, how like, how disconnected they were from each other.
I think that happens, you know, with a lot of really big bands, they, for whatever reasons, they just get so huge and they, they get sick of each other or they just, you
know, there's so much ego and infighting that they have to, if they want the band to continue, they have to isolate from each other.
But also, you know, obviously if one of them becomes a heroin addict, you know, then, you know, that will separate that person from the rest of the band too, because they
addicts typically kind of become hermits. And that's, that's what happened with Nirvana for sure.
Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be, as a friend, as a friend, as I've known and be.
Take your time, hurry up, the choice is yours, don't be late. Take a rest, as a friend, as I've known and be.
So yeah, take us up to the point where you get the call to write that book.
Right.
Is the first time you wrote about Nirvana that Rolling Stone cover story? Is that, is that the major point of connection that kind of why your name was in the running to
write the book?
Yes, I got that Rolling Stone cover story. Yeah, because I was, you know, one of the main alt rock people.
So I was really nervous to meet Kurt because again, just remember this is early 1992, not a lot was known about him.
Again, we have 30 plus years of hindsight about him and we, you know, we know all about Kurt Cobain, but we didn't know that much in early 1992.
So I was pretty intimidated. And so flew out to Los Angeles, went to the Fairfax neighborhood, knocked on the door.
This woman I'd heard about called Courtney Love answers the door.
She's wearing a, I don't know, like a, that baby doll kind of dress and has a plate of grapes, which she hands to me.
She says, Oh, Kurt's down the hall. And it was this tiny one bedroom apartment.
And I walked down this very short hall, which seems to elongate as I walked down it.
It was like, I kept thinking about the scene and at the end of the graduate when, what's his face? Hoffman is, I want to say Abbie Hoffman.
He's running down the street towards the church and this sidewalk, he never seems to get to the end of the sidewalk.
But anyway, so I'm walking down this hallway and I'm nervous and I opened the door and there's Kurt Cobain lying in bed with his feet sticking towards me and his head
underneath an open window.
And he says, Oh, hi. And I said, hi.
And in that moment, I thought, I know this guy. He's like so many people I knew in high school.
And I was instantly comfortable. And like all the worries went away. I was like, Oh, I, this has got to be fine.
At some point during the book, I told him that I, how nervous I was.
And I just wasn't sure if we were going to get along and things like that and how nervous I was to meet him.
And he said, I felt the same thing. I thought this, you know, this Rolling Stone writer from New York's coming.
And it's the second you walked in the door, I thought this is going to be okay.
And I will never, you know, say that I'm unique in that regard.
Like I guarantee you that millions or maybe even tens of billions of people would have had the same experience had they met Kurt Cobain.
He was just really relatable. And I think that's part of his genius is that he could translate that relatability into musical sound.
So anyway, so we connected and, and I wrote that piece and was, I think it was the best thing by far I'd ever written.
And then later that year, I think in November, early November, maybe the phone rings like around midnight or something late at night.
And I pick up the phone, it's Courtney Love. And she says, we're wondering if you'd like to write a biography of Nirvana.
And I, you know, took a deep breath and tried to play it cool. And I said, Oh, that sounds interesting.
Can I talk to Kurt about it? And she said, sure. And she handed the phone to Kurt and talked about it.
You know, I said, I don't want this to be authorized.
And he knew that's a very specific publishing term that a lot of people don't understand.
Authorized doesn't mean that the subject cooperates. It means that the subject has, in film terms, final cut on the book.
And I said, I don't want this to be authorized. And he said, and this is a direct quote, no way that would be two guns and roses.
And so I said, all right, you're on, let's do this.
You know, it's funny reading the book. There's so much, he has so much animosity specifically at Gene R.
And I was wondering, like, did he draw distinctions between guns and roses and then like Poison and Winger and Warrant?
Because to me, it's sort of like guns and roses is like on a whole other level in terms of those late 80s hair, like LA hair bands, you know?
Gene R is just like head and shoulders above all his other bands.
He must have, come on. I mean, he must have like been aware of that or what, did he care at all or not really?
I can't remember if I ever talked to him about, you know, like the hair farmer bands, but I'm pretty sure Kurt saw Axl as someone that Kurt could have been.
Well, yeah. Both from small towns, as you point out in the book.
Yeah. Metal, like ex-metalheads, you know, except Axl like stuck with metal.
Axl seemingly knew a lot about punk. Wasn't he always like wearing like merch from like punk bands?
Like he kind of liked showcasing the fact that he kind of knew what was up.
Yeah. I guess he was trying to signal that, but he didn't, but he wasn't down with the punk program, you know, like Kurt was, especially like the Olympia Washington punk
program.
Definitely not.
So, I think, you know, I think Kurt was a little obsessed with Axl Rose because like I say, because this is a, you know, a leitmotif of the Amplified Come As You Are is Kurt
trying to leave behind his provincial, you know, to use a perhaps objectionable term, redneck past.
And Axl didn't renounce that past. He seemed to embrace it, you know, and he had that horrible song with all the, you know, racist crap in it.
And, you know, he lived the prototypical indulgent rockstar lifestyle, whereas Kurt, you know, tried to keep it real.
So, I think they were sort of, you know, Axl was like the anti-Kurt and Kurt just really felt he needed to differentiate himself from Axl Rose.
Yeah, no, I did get this vibe of like the Lady Doth protest too much or something. And I think that is like a funny like yin and yang or something.
Yeah.
And even the fact that you talk about that Axl was a Nirvana fan. Guns N' Roses invited Nirvana to open for them on tour.
It's Axl was there with arms wide open at a point before the feud started being like, oh no, I think you're cool. Like, let's be friends.
Yeah, I think maybe Axl, I'm speculating here completely, but maybe, you know, Axl Rose just wanted a little bit of, you know, punk alt rock cred, you know, little, you
know, co-branding by having Nirvana on tour.
Yeah, I could see Cobain seeing right through that being like, you're just trying to leech on our cool cred, man.
Although, yeah, when you talk about the fact that Guns N' Roses were a cut above musically.
They definitely were.
It makes, you could picture Axl appreciating Nirvana in some deeper sense than just the co-branding exercise, although that probably played a role too.
You could imagine Axl listening to that and just be like, this is good sh*t, man.
Yeah.
Just a picture living under the street of a hot cage that's tough to beat
I'm your charity cage, so borrow something to eat
I'll pay you out another time
Take it to the end of the line
Rags and riches are what they say you got
Keep pushing for the fortune and fame
Don't give a word to just the game
You're treated like a pebble on a frame
Everybody's going to jail
Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home, yeah, yeah
Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home
One question I have is, I don't know if you would have witnessed this in your time there, but Kurt and Courtney were living in Fairfax. Do you think they were hitting
Cantor's Deli?
I have no idea. But how could you live in Fairfax and not hit Cantor's?
So that would have been their local 24-hour restaurant, famously G&R hung out there too.
Yeah, they might've sent out for food, you know.
Yeah, they were kind of cocooned there in that Fairfax apartment.
Did people know that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were living in an apartment off Fairfax in '92?
Like, were people in the neighborhood? I know LA is cool. There's movie stars everywhere.
But I mean, that's kind of interesting. Like, it was a big deal.
Like, when did the record go number one? It was like early '92 or late '91?
Yeah, maybe that Christmas of '91.
Yeah, he was like a big, it's just kind of interesting. It's kind of wild to think about, like, Kurt Cobain just kind of like walking down Fairfax Avenue.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know if anyone was aware.
And actually, the whole time I was reading this book, I was like, why did he go to LA?
I mean, I get that they recorded Nevermind there, but I was like, he's like this whole thing of like, I don't want to be Gene R.
I don't want to be a rock, like a typical textbook rock star. But he moves to LA.
Part of it was, I think, Courtney was very comfortable with Los Angeles.
I don't know, maybe it's easier to be a celebrity in Los Angeles.
You know, you can, there's things, you know, there's infrastructure set up for you.
Interesting.
Could have been drugs. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. Maybe there's a really good rehab doctor there that they wanted to be close to.
I just have no idea. I don't know.
So anyway, so they call you late '92 about the book.
Right. So at that point, Nirvana is so huge that, did that like blow your mind? Like this is a game changer, getting that opportunity?
Oh, I'll get to that in a second. Also, by the way, I bumped into Kurt at the 1991, 1992 Reading Festival.
That famous show when they, you know, Kurt showed up in the wig and they played all apologies and stuff like that.
It was a really amazing show. But I was, I was standing in the lobby of this hotel where all the bands were staying.
And I felt this weird feeling of like someone like almost like passing their hand over the top of my head, but not touching it.
And I could feel like the edges, like the top of my hair is kind of being touched.
And I thought, oh, someone's goofing on me. I'll just ignore it.
And, you know, they'll come, they'll come around and say hello to me.
But they didn't turn around, come around, say hello to me. So I turned around to see who it was.
There was no one there, but I don't know, maybe 25 feet away from me was Kurt Cobain staring right at me.
And I only had that feeling once again. And that was from David Bowie also staring at the back of my head.
Yeah. But I talked to Kurt and we hit it off again. We just had a really nice chat in the hotel lobby drinking screwdrivers.
And so I think that also maybe kept the connection going.
I'm just curious when, in a situation like that, when someone contacts you and says, do you want to write a book about me or us?
And you say, OK, can't be authorized. Got it. At that point, it's 100% just your book.
Like it's for you to go find a publisher for you to do the deal. They're giving you access.
But but it's 100% your book. You don't have to work at any financial financials.
Yeah. I'm just curious about how that works. The financials with who? With the Nirvana.
Oh, no, it's 100% understood. We see a value in this for us, but it's your this is your product.
So, yeah, they didn't tell you we want you to use this publisher, this editor.
So, yeah, it's 100% understood. And then, yeah, I think it's a good thing that we're able to do that.
And then, yeah, I think it's a good thing that we're able to do that.
- I know the rush was had to turn in the manuscript in April.
So, the book could come out in June when "In Utero" came out.
- Gotcha. - Yeah.
- And so, you talk a bit in the book about, and I can imagine because the ball's totally in your court.
And meanwhile, Nirvana is the biggest thing on earth.
And you go into detail in the book about all the problems they're having,
especially Kurt and Courtney, with reputationally.
And it's especially a crazy time because they have a baby and dealing with child protective services and the drugs, all this stuff.
So, you talk a bit about having this kind of uneasy relationship with the band's management,
who simultaneously seemingly wanted you to write the book, but also very scared of what the book might be.
Is that a fair characterization?
- Bear in mind that they had, Kurt and Courtney had just gone through this terrible ordeal with a Vanity Fair profile of Courtney
that was, you know, distinctly unflattering and had actually been used to temporarily relieve them of custody of their baby.
So, I think people around them were justifiably wary of any press.
The important thing was that Kurt and Courtney trusted me and everyone else could protest.
But they had to obey the wishes of their client and their client wished that everybody cooperate with me.
- And did you have any fear throughout that process about what if Kurt or the band changes their mind?
It sounds like you wouldn't have any legal obligation to stop your book, but was that kind of delicate in those like kind of chaotic times?
- I never thought about that.
I just never, yeah, I never thought that they would cancel or, you know, back out of the book or something like that
because it was just going along really well.
I just had really great long interviews with Kurt and Chris and then one two hour session with Dave.
And I don't know, I just, it just seemed to be going well.
No one, everyone seemed to get the sense that I was very earnest.
- It was always good vibes.
- Yeah, it was always good vibes.
- Yeah, yeah. I mean, and they could just tell by the questions I was asking.
I was not interested in digging up dark scathing dirt.
I was a fan of the band and writing a book, buying for fans of Nirvana.
And I wasn't trying to do something tabloidy.
I just, I was just a fan and I wanted to write about what the guys in the band were like, how they work together,
what their songs were about, you know, how they dealt with their success
and maybe a little bit of the culture that they came out of.
And that's it.
And I think most of the people around the band, especially Kurt and Courtney and Chris and Dave, understood that.
♪ Underneath the bridge ♪
♪ Tapas from a leak ♪
♪ And the animals I've trapped ♪
♪ Have all become my pets ♪
♪ And I'm living off of grass ♪
♪ And the drippings from the ceiling ♪
It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings
Something in the way, mm-mm, mm-mm Something in the way, yeah, mm-mm, mm-mm
Something in the way
When you think about these other journalists who did write things that you could call more tabloidy
or certainly things that stirred the pot, you're so even-handed and it seems like you write so thoughtfully.
Like, obviously, you had a great deal of sympathy for Kurt as a fan and somebody who knew him well.
You also seem to have sympathy for even some of the journalists who are writing this stuff that drove him crazy at the time.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know. They were just, they were doing their thing.
I was doing mine.
Um, I don't know.
It's just a messy situation, I guess, like, because the truth is there was a drug issue.
So I can imagine that it's not hard to picture the rage he must have felt to have a journalist write things that were then used to have your child taken away.
Just like so awful.
But then also there was a legitimate drug problem.
Clearly a very complicated situation.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And again, a lot of that stuff emerged in hindsight.
Again, I was writing in the moment, like, "Come As You Are" is a time capsule.
I wasn't writing with a lot of retrospection.
I was in the moment.
So a lot of other people had the benefit of subsequent reporting about Kurt and things like that.
But again, I just wasn't digging for that kind of stuff.
It's interesting how open they were, like, having just read the new edition.
Maybe I'm mistaken about what was in the first edition or not.
But even just the fact that Kurt seemed to be talking openly about issues with the other guys in the band.
Like, this is in the original, right, where he's talking about he wanted to take a greater share of the songwriting.
And at first there seemed to be some pushback.
No, man, we're a band.
It's got to be three ways, even though Kurt was clearly the main songwriter.
And he seemingly spoke very openly, even in '93, about just like, "I was telling these guys, like, come on, guys."
Like, it was interesting that he even stuff like, I can, of course, I can understand why he wanted to present a better picture in terms of his family and his child.
But there was even an openness about kind of internal band issues.
Yeah, well, you know, again, it was like 1992.
It was a somewhat less sophisticated time in terms of bands like bands today are so media savvy.
You know, they run their own media in a way.
And back then, I think people were a lot more open.
But also, I think part of that was just punk rock being really guarded.
And media savvy was probably something that was considered, you know, too major label.
Right. Yeah.
Keep it real.
Yeah, keep it real.
I mean, and also, I meant to say that in that first conversation with Kurt about the book, he told me, "Just tell the truth and that'll be better than anything that's been
written about me."
And I think he just really had a lot of faith in the truth and everything would come out in the wash.
Yeah, these days, artists literally, like you said, run their own media.
So, they're more savvy.
But it's funny when you read it, maybe Nirvana has been so huge then, when you read the book and think about they did so seemingly so many interviews all the time, all
around the world.
And we're kind of reacting in real time to feeling misrepresented in the media.
I think, well, you know, before the Internet must have been a slightly better time.
You weren't constantly assaulted by misinformation and, you know, seeing things get twisted.
But then reading about Kurt in the early 90s, it seemed like he felt, even just by traditional print media, he seemed very assaulted all the time, too.
But also, I think that, you know, when bands get really big, sometimes they stop talking to each other and they start communicating with each other through the press.
Right.
But also, I think in terms of like specifically that publishing deal, I think Kurt really wanted to, he was aware that perhaps that position was not too flattering to
him.
And he wanted to try to explain it to people and perhaps to his bandmates.
So, that's why he dug into that.
Yeah, I mean, it did seem like those guys had a really, really hard time communicating with each other.
And I was like, OK, these are like 23, 24 year old guys who, yeah, I mean, sometimes I have trouble.
Their lives have just changed crazy in this insane way.
Yeah, sometimes I've, as a 47 year old guy, I have trouble communicating sometimes.
I can only imagine.
But it was kind of like I hadn't, it was surprising to me how dysfunctional their communication was.
Well, you know, also, as I point out in one of the amplifications, especially at the time in the Northwest, there was this real kind of passive aggressive mode of
communication or lack thereof.
And, you know, people have various theories about it.
Some people think it's because of the, you know, Scandinavian heritage of the area.
Some people think it's because people were, are shut in, you know, for long periods of the year because the rain and stuff.
Who knows? But there is a sort of a, especially back then, there was this kind of passive aggressive personality trait that a lot of people from old school Northwest
people had.
I can see that. I mean, I went to college in Portland, late 90s.
And as a guy, as someone that grew up on the East Coast, I do remember thinking that, that like, I remember thinking East Coast people are more direct.
They're more straight up. They'll just tell you what they think.
And there was definitely like, yeah, especially like in the kind of like indie music community in the Northwest when I was in it, people were just, I don't know, shy or
just afraid of confrontation or whatever.
Yeah. Or they would confront you, but very subtly and you had to be alert to the very subtle signs.
Also, I think, and Dave, again, this is kind of a leitmotif in the amplifications, but Dave very sensibly had avoided a lot of the drama with the band.
So he wasn't getting, you know, into a lot of mix ups and, you know, into the fray of disputes, you know, very wisely.
And, you know, he was, you know, he was the no drama Obama of that band.
He just very wisely didn't get mixed up in that stuff.
So, you know, that I think combined with perhaps the passive aggressive style of the two native Northwesterners, I think may have contributed to that syndrome.
Dave's just thrown on that Primus tape at Kathleen Hannah's house.
That was honestly one of my favorite parts of the book. It's this passing anecdote of Dave Grohl playing Primus at like a riot girl party in 1990.
And that's like, it's funny you mentioned that because I think that's a really prime example of what I was, one of the things I was trying to do with the Amplified, Come As
You Are.
I just kind of mentioned that in passing in the book, you know, but I write a whole note about it, about how like what Primus was, because a lot of people reading this book
are probably too young to understand the connotations of what that meant to put, play a Primus tape at a little dance party in Olympia in 1990 or 91.
So, I spin that out and illuminating that moment, it was actually very telling because Dave was what one Olympia person called a rocker dude.
He wasn't part, originally part of that Hello Kitty cardigan sweater, Olympia punk rock thing.
He was a rocker guy. He played in like a, basically a hardcore band from DC.
And here he was plunked into this whole new milieu and he plays a Primus record at this, you know, super hip Olympia party.
And it showed that was really, I thought it was really important to point out how out of that culture he was and how eventually he learned from it, which is really cool.
I'll say it this way. If I had never been to Olympia, I would be, I would be maybe puzzled by like, what are they on Mars?
Is it really that kind of unique? But it actually is kind of, I mean, I haven't been there in 20 years, but in the nineties, it was still like a very unique particular sort
of subculture there.
This will not come as a shock, but the day I read that Primus anecdote, we had a dinner with two other couples and I told that story, I was like, oh, I'm reading this great
book.
My friend Michael wrote it. And I told the story, which I thought would just crack everyone up about Dave Grohl putting on the Primus album at the Olympia house party.
And the three men thought it was really funny because they knew who Primus was. And the three ladies were just like, what's Primus?
Right. Well, this annotation is for them.
Primus is a very male coded band. Extremely.
Jerry was a race car driver. He drove so fast. Never did win no checkers, flags, but he never did come in last. Jerry was a race car driver. He'd say, "El's off number one."
With a bull seaman sticker on his 442, he'd light 'em up just for fun.
I had a few other questions. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of his stomach problems? Because it seemed like such a defining part of his whole life.
And he seemed to indicate that's maybe why he was so drawn to heroin to begin with. What was going on with his stomach?
Some people doubt that it was real. And he was just using that as an excuse to do heroin. And he wasn't using that as an excuse to do heroin, but it was also real. I'm
convinced.
Chris Novoselic said it was real. His mom said it was real and that she had suffered from a similar thing when she was his age.
I did a bunch of research on that and I didn't put it in the book because I just didn't feel qualified as, you know, not a doctor and play one on TV. But it was this condition
that Mike Mills also had.
And he got surgery for it. And it's something about how there's some pieces of your intestine are connected when they shouldn't be. And it causes this intense burning
pain. His pain, it was real.
I was just surprised that like, especially after they became so successful that he just couldn't like get this figured out. It's like, seems so debilitating to be on
tour and your stomach's all messed up.
And then you shoot heroin to feel better. And it just seems like, good Lord.
Yeah. You would think like a guy that wealthy could afford a doctor who could figure it out. But you know what? Doctors aren't omniscient. They're not God. And there are
still some things that doctors don't know about.
And that was one of them. Although, like I say, I think later on, I think Mike Mills might've had the same thing.
Another thing that I kept, that was a theme in the book that just kept kind of intriguing me was the equipment smashing. Especially before they had a lot of money.
Yeah.
Like how did, like, what was going on there? Like, I don't know. I'm just, it's so alien to me.
I think part of it was, there was some famous party at the Evergreen State College in Olympia where someone, the opening band got in a fight and broke some of their
instruments.
And then Nirvana played and Kurt didn't want to be overshadowed. So he smashed his guitar and it maybe just felt really right to him.
But there's also an annotation in the Amplified Come As You Are where some librarian, I think at Kurt's old high school mentions that Kurt's, I think Kurt's father got
sick of Kurt playing guitar and smashed his guitar.
And so maybe Kurt was kind of acting out retaliation for that. I could see that kind of deep psychology of that. Also, you know, and there, as you know, obviously there's
a tradition of that from the who.
How unusual was that in the kind of the 80s indie punk milieu they came from?
Oh, I don't think anyone smashed their guitars. But it's, you know, it must be incredibly cathartic.
Yeah. I mean, were the replacements smashing their guitars ever?
I don't think so.
Yeah. I just wonder, like, just like logistically, I mean, like, just by the sound of your book, it sounds like they did it like every show.
Or if like they didn't do it, people were disappointed. It became this sort of like almost self-parody of like, well, they got to smash their guitars.
And I'm just like, did they ever do it when they weren't in the mood and do like a half-assed guitar smashing?
And then if so, like, are they traveling with just like 50 guitars?
It just seems like such an insane, like dynamic to add to your touring schedule. And it just seems wild to me.
Well, you know, again, you know, yeah, I have a few notes about this, but you know, part of it is just self-annihilation.
You know, this kind of ritualistic self-annihilation, you know, the guitar was the thing that gave Kurt life and he's smashing it in front of people.
I don't know, read into that what you will.
That's heavy.
But it's also, you know, it's just a way to, definitely a way to signal, okay, show's over.
There's not going to be an encore, folks. This is it.
And then partially it was just this kind of, maybe this is this Dionysian thing where you're just like, you're just out of your mind.
And he was kind of demonstrating how he had reached maybe nirvana by playing music.
And he was just not caring about material things.
And he'd gone to this plane through the music.
And I think maybe that's partly why it's called nirvana, because, you know, there was so much, so much about the music was about transcending physical or emotional
pain.
And so that, you know, smashing the guitar or throwing himself into the drums and the amps was a proof of concept.
This music really works.
Kurt and Christ would put the guitars back together in the van, like on the road, like, well, they're rolling down the highway.
One of them would be, you know, putting them back together and, or they just go to the next town and find a thrift shop or a pawn shop with a cheap lefty guitar and use that
one.
And that's kind of how it went for a long time.
Then they got, eventually they got a really amazing guitar tech named Ernie Bailey, who could, you know, fix anything.
On plane flights, he would take his watch apart, you know, and put it back together just out of sheer boredom.
After a while, they had Ernie Bailey putting the guitars back together.
Okay. So they got the real like high end guy.
Yeah. But for, but that wasn't until like '93.
So for a long time, it was just Kurt and Christ.
That's wild.
Knitting back together. Yeah.
It's wild that they kept doing that even after they became the biggest band on earth.
Well, they didn't always do it.
You know, it was only when the show, either show went really well or really badly, you know, for somewhere in the middle, maybe you wouldn't smash it, but you know,
there's that thing.
Yeah, I'm just picturing like they're playing like the Hartford Coliseum in like 1993.
It's like, are they smashing the guitar? Probably not.
Yeah. Yeah. Probably not.
But sometimes, yeah, probably didn't do it as much later on.
But, you know, there's that famous incident.
I read about it again at the Trees Club in Dallas where he's so frustrated with the monitor sound that he tomahawks the monitor board with his guitar.
Right.
That was a bad show. That was not a good show.
So, you know, I guess there are a few different reasons why he smashed his guitar.
And then he sprays Frank Black with a fire extinguisher.
Kill your idols.
[Bamboo Take Me Home]
Yeah, I never saw Nirvana. So I guess I've just the stuff I've seen is just like, you know, the live at Reading or whatever.
And it was I just didn't just reading your book again.
I was just like, I was really kind of surprised how wild they were.
I just somehow just like, or I just maybe took it for granted.
And then rereading your book, I was like, oh, yeah, I haven't thought about this in a minute.
These guys were like, like as a live band seemed really crazy.
They were acting out.
They were, you know, young and strong and often f**ked up and coping with this ridiculous amount of fame and attention that they were not prepared to deal with.
So they were just acting out.
Yeah, I pity their poor tour manager, especially this one guy, Monty Lee Wilkes.
He's in the book.
Yeah, he's in the book. Yeah. And he's, you know, he got the brunt of it, unfortunately.
Wow. So the next book you wrote after Come As You Are, how much later, like seven or eight years later, 10 years later?
It came out eight years later.
Eight years later, Our Band Could Be Your Life.
And that book, which is a modern classic, is you profile many of the bands that in your phrasing are kind of like the glue between the original wave of punk rock and the
mainstream breakthrough of Nirvana.
The independent American bands who kind of helped build the networks that led to the kind of flourishing of this music in the 90s.
And I guess how do you group those bands, a mixture of punk and indie and well, they're really just all independent, whatever the genre.
Yeah, I mean, they were on independent labels and they were playing punk rock and not punk rock as, you know, in this kind of formulaic format, you know, that it is now,
but more of a punk rock as an attitude and movement.
That book came about because I was watching a Time Life series about the history of rock.
Well, it came about for two reasons.
One was I was watching this history of rock and they got up to Togging Heads and Sex Pistols.
So, you know, early punk rock then jumped straight to Nirvana, completely skipping, not just an entire decade, but this entire community of really influential,
great bands like Black Flag and Hooster Dew and the Replacements, Sonic Youth.
And I thought someone should do something about this.
And in true DIY spirit, I thought, well, maybe I'll do it.
I'll do this. I'll write this book.
And it made sense.
It just made sense all in that moment, because I was thinking about how Kurt Cobain would, you know, plug bands and wear their t-shirts and as a way of, you know, showing
his roots and paying back.
And I think that was very heavily influenced by the same thing that Sonic Youth did the same thing and REM did the same thing.
And I thought, here's my chance to do the same thing with a book that Come As You Are did for me.
In other words, I would write a prequel and pay tribute to the bands that gave rise to Nirvana and made Come As You Are possible.
And so that's why I wrote Our Band Could Be Your Life, you know, kind of paying back, but also filling this gap, this historical lacuna in the rock historical record.
No one had written about this crucial time.
There was a lot of fanzine writing and some commercial magazine writing, but no one had written a book and really installed it, you know, in the canon and someone had to
do that.
And I figured, why not me?
It's a classic.
You know, I just wanted to tell the stories, you know, I just, I bumped into a guy named Legs McNeil who wrote.
Oh yeah. Punk journalist.
Yeah. Yeah. And he wrote a oral history of New York punk rock called Please Kill Me, which is really essential stuff.
And you should absolutely read that book.
But I bumped into him just as I was starting Our Band Could Be Your Life.
I bumped into him at the WFMU record fair and he said, Hey, what are you up to?
And I said, I'm writing this book about, you know, American indie rock in the eighties.
And he got this kind of mock shocked look on his face.
And he said, you're not going to write about the music, are you?
And I thought, oh, okay. Granddad, you know, like your punk rock was better than my punk rock.
All right, here it comes.
Still rock and roll to me.
Exactly.
And, but again, I kind of took a deep breath.
I said, oh, well, what do you mean, Legs?
And he said, just write about the people and the music will come out of that.
That made a huge impression on me, partly because I'd been so frustrated by trying to describe music with words.
And that was just so liberating to me.
It was one of the greatest things anyone's ever said to me about writing.
And I took that and ran with it with Our Band Could Be Your Life.
I only described the music as it pertained to the band's story.
If it moved the story along to describe how the music sounded.
Otherwise, I stayed away.
I tried to describe the people and how they interacted, you know, what the things that they did.
And somehow that's all I want to do is document this missing part of rock history.
And the great thing about creating something is that people take it and run with it in ways that you never expected.
And I know Jake and Ezra, I'm sure you're both intimately familiar with that feeling.
And that happened with this book.
People got really inspired by it.
And people who were quite removed from American indie rock in the 80s just somehow found inspiration in that book to do their own thing.
And wow, that is so surprising to me and so gratifying.
I can't even begin to tell you.
And it's still happening to this day.
It's such an interesting book and it's so cool to get these profiles of all these bands.
I wonder as somebody who's written these iconic profiles of quite a few bands between the two books that we're talking about.
On the one hand, in our band could be your life, you're talking about all the positives of people building networks outside the mainstream,
people doing their own things, people creating community where there previously was none.
But on the darker side, just so many of the bands break up or have interpersonal problems.
Is writing about these kinds of situations so much ever make you like cynical about what can last?
Well, yeah, yeah, maybe things.
I mean, you know, bands, as again, both of you guys know are very complicated things.
You know, you're different people, you know, brought together into the situation and some relationships endure and most don't.
That's just, you know, that's life.
The thing that actually got out of hearing some of these horrible stories is that how candid everyone was about them.
For instance, you know, like Dinosaur Jr.
You know, those guys were all pretty frank about how awful they could be to each other.
I remember that chapter, like talk about bad communication.
Holy cow.
Yeah, but they could talk very candidly about it because so much time had passed.
And I thought that was really inspiring.
Like they'd grown up, they'd become adults and they could look back on that time with some objectivity and speak candidly about it.
And they were comfortable with that.
And that actually kind of inspired me with The Amplified Come As You Are to be as candid as I am in that book about my own shortcomings from 30 years ago.
What's your vibe on, you know, more recent music?
You know, you so brilliantly catalog this time in the 80s.
And in some ways, you know, it's easy to feel like, well, that all culminated in Nirvana.
And, you know, it maybe even, yeah, in some ways peaked with Nirvana.
Like you filled in this amazing gap in the story.
And you can see these like punk rock ideals through the DIY vibes of the 80s into Nirvana, this insanely huge thing ending in tragedy.
But, you know, and then going on to inspire all sorts of music that we may or may not like.
When you look back over like the 2000s where so much has changed about the way networks of music.
And even just you as a human being and as a writer, like what's your relationship to music and like the world of independent music now?
Well, for a long time, you know, up until the pandemic, I was going out to shows, I don't know, two, three, sometimes four nights a week.
I was going out to a lot of shows and not like, not big shows, but like, you know, small club shows seeing smaller bands.
And boy, I loved it. I was so plugged in.
I didn't write about any of those bands. I was just going because I love the community.
I could go to almost any club in New York and bump into someone I know.
That was like, that was my social life and my musical life were so intertwined.
And then the pandemic came along and shows stopped and then I just fell out of the loop.
And yeah, so I'm not so plugged in anymore.
And I still love music that kind of rewires my synapses that I don't understand.
And I listen to it and sometimes I connect with it.
And like, I don't know how you pronounce it. Is it a hundred Jeks?
Oh, it's Geks. Yeah.
It is Gek. I've never heard their name said, but like their music, like rewired my mind.
Like at first I was just like, what the hell is this? And after a while, wow, it made sense.
And I felt like, you know, like I said, actually, I've said this before, like I graduated to a kind of different plane of, you know, consciousness after grasping that
kind of music.
But so I still get a kick out of that, although I don't, I don't see it live.
But I've also been following a really great podcast called the history of rock music and 500 songs.
I've heard that's great. My friend Aaron loves it.
It is great. I savor it so much. And so he starts at the, you know, before the beginning, he's talking about, you know, like Benny Goodman and big mama Thornton and stuff.
And Winoni Harris. And I've been really digging really old music again.
I go through phases in and out, but boy, I went on a big Louis Jordan kick a couple of weeks ago.
I've been exploring really old music too.
And in my early sixties now, I think I'm entitled to, you know, start falling out of touch with, you know, youth culture.
I'm totally comfortable with that. I'm fine with that.
Like I had a good long run and now I have this gigantic catalog of music, you know, on my shelf and in my mind that I can review and enjoy and think, you know, think about.
And it's totally fine with that.
Yeah, that's great.
Amen.
And back to like kind of where we started, you know, do you have any feelings or, you know, personal reflections on like the where music journalism's at now?
It's been said to see some, you know, like layoffs and people talking about, oh man, how many less opportunities there are.
But maybe there's also in this new world opportunities, new ways of writing about music.
Like, how do you feel about the 2024 state of music journalism, which obviously is so different than, you know, when you started in the eighties?
Well, I think it's not just, you know, music journalism.
I mean, there were big layoffs at Sports Illustrated, the Baltimore Sun.
I know people who got laid off at the LA Times and I think journalism in general, every once in a while I'll hear some poll about, you know, how people don't trust
journalists or they trust them even less than they did.
And, you know, I worry about the state of journalism in general.
A lot of journalism I think is in, you know, circumvented by artists like Taylor Swift basically doesn't do interviews.
Right.
And a lot of musicians just speak directly to their fans through social media or whatever.
That puts music journalism in an interesting place just by itself. And then there's a question of whether people want to read it or will appreciate well-written
journalism or journalism that doesn't tow the line that the artist or their people want to tow.
And I guess there are venues for that, but I haven't really found them.
You know, there's probably a lot of independent journalism to be done.
People just writing blogs and interviewing maybe local bands and putting that up that I don't even know about.
And I'm sure that's great. But maybe just people in journalism in general is declining a little bit.
I hate to say something as horrible as that.
That seems to be how many people feel. But I mean, is there any way in which a book like Our Band Could Be Your Life is a model for at least another type of music writing?
You know, we were talking earlier about some books that everybody on the show have enjoyed in the music world.
And somebody said Meet Me in the Bathroom. That's also a chronicle of a time and a place and a group of musicians.
For instance, have you, with the enduring success of that book and the influence of it, have you also thought about writing something historical, which is somewhat
free from the winds of change in the fickle kind of media ecosystem?
No, I haven't. But, you know, it's interesting though, with the advent of the internet, musical communities maybe aren't as geographically oriented.
And there's something about, you know, we are human beings. We are social animals and things happen when we gather in the same physical space.
And when musical communities get atomized or, you know, vulcanized, it gets more difficult, I think, to make something interesting out of them.
I don't know. I don't know. Like I say, I'm starting to fall out of touch.
But I think the thing about Our Band Could Be Your Life is that each band in that chapter represents a particular city or region.
And I'm not sure that musical scenes are quite that regionally organized anymore.
And so, I'm not sure how I would arrange a book like that. I think it would take, you know, maybe a younger writer to recognize like how to put those scenes, for lack of a
better word, into a silo.
Somebody would write an in-depth history of a message board.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah, exactly. You know, there's a younger writer named, I don't know how you pronounce his first name.
I think it's Kieran Press Reynolds, who happens to be the son of two really great writers named Joy Press and Simon Reynolds.
Oh, yeah, of course.
He's writing about like a lot of micro scenes on SoundCloud. And he's, you know, he's a chip off the old block. It's ridiculous. He's really, really good.
And so, he's delving deep into this stuff, but these are serious micro genres he's talking about.
And, you know, probably one or two people from those micro genres might bust out into the mainstream.
And Kieran will probably, you know, have his finger on the pulse of that. And maybe he'll write, you know, that book.
Right.
Or someone like him.
I'm getting a lot of DMs and internet scenes, though. You're not getting a Dave Grohl playing the Primus tape at the party in Olympia Story.
No, no, no.
And then I DM the dude in Madison, Wisconsin, saying, "I like your stuff." And he's like, "Thanks, man."
"It's cool. Let me know if you ever come to Glasgow."
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Hey, Michael, have you ever had any other bands approach you to write an unauthorized biography of them?
Wow. No.
Interesting.
No.
Oh, that's surprising.
Yeah, yeah. No one's ever approached me, yeah, to write a book. I'm not sure that that happens. I guess that happens. But no, it never happens.
Or maybe lightning just strikes once. I don't know. I mean, yeah, you know.
I don't know. I have no idea about that world. It just seems like you've written one of the big ones.
And I could just see, like, I don't know, some band being like, "Oh, we should get him to do it."
Well, Bob Mould asked me to help him with his autobiography. So I worked on that.
So that was by Bob Mould with Michael Azzarad? Was it one of those kind of things?
Yeah, he wrote it. I was his editor. I was kind of his sherpa. I walked him through the process. And we were, you know, I worked very closely with him, but he was, you know, I
would say 95% of the words in that book are his.
And then the rest are like me saying like things like "meanwhile" or "but", you know, just his connective stuff.
I also, I briefly worked with John Legend on his autobiography.
Oh, really?
It was during his second album. And for one reason it works. It was like corporate reasons with the publisher that that book stopped getting made.
But, boy, that guy is really smart and has a really great inspiring story. And he doesn't speak in sentences. He speaks in paragraphs. The guy is so bright.
So it's never come out? His memoirs?
No, no. And I don't know why. I don't know what he's waiting for. Maybe his Senate run. I don't know.
Did you get the sense that he had read your earlier work? Had he checked out Our Bank and Be Your Life?
I don't know. I don't actually, I think my agent, you know, my agent got wind that he wanted to write a book and put me together with him and that just worked out. But he was
such a joy to work with. I really hope he writes that book. He's got a good story.
What would I do without your smart mouth Drawing me in and you kicking me out
You got my head spinning No kidding, I can't pin you down
What's going on in that beautiful mind I'm on your magical mystery ride
And I'm so dizzy Don't know what hit me But I'll be alright
My head's underwater But I'm breathing fine
You're crazy and I'm out of my mind
'Cause all of me loves all of you Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections Give your all to me I'll give my all to you
You're my end and my beginning Even when I lose I'm winning 'Cause I give you all of me
Also, you know, a lot of the books have been done. Like who's left? Like Neil Young did his book. Pete Townshend did his book.
I'd like to read the Michael Azarad story of Ween.
That's a good call.
I would love to read that book.
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of bands.
I don't think there's a pavement book. Maybe there is, you know, just throwing it out there.
Yeah. Yeah. Like sometimes I wonder though, like pavement, you know, fantastic band, but like, I wonder if they have a story like it with a,
Our Band Could Be Your Life, you know, the essence of myth, you know, you need the protagonist and the antagonist.
And these guys were, and they're mostly guys, had antagonists. You know, they had a force that was opposing them that they overcame.
That's a great story. And pavement-
They're college boys.
They're college boys, but the indie rock infrastructure was largely put in place by the time they came along.
So, there wasn't a whole lot of antagonism, at least from the outside world.
And I think within the band, I don't know, they seemed like a bunch of jolly fellows.
That's a good point. Right. Is there a struggle? Is there a story?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's a good point.
That's what I kind of look for. So that, you know, people sometimes ask me, well, why didn't you write a 90s version of Our Band Could Be Your Life? And, you know, that's
why.
Yeah. Respect. And that was the last time you wrote a book. Is that correct?
Well, I wrote a jokey little book called Rock Critic Law.
I remember that. Yeah.
And I don't have a copy of it around here, but yeah, that was just like a jokey illustrated book. But yeah, Our Band Could Be Your Life was, yeah, that was my last real book.
Yeah.
And you just wait and you'll, if the right thing comes along, strikes your fancy. Well, obviously you haven't felt some crazy pressure like, oh, okay.
Like with the, sure, you could have written the 90s one, but you didn't quite feel the pull. So you didn't.
Right, right. Yeah, exactly.
You know, my agent actually filled me in. She said that a lot of authors, you know, will just bang out books. And she pointed out to me that like I throw myself into my books
and I work very hard on them.
I work on them, you know, from the moment I get up until the moment I can't keep my eyes open anymore at night. And they take a lot out of me physically, you know, mentally,
socially.
And I know that if I, I'm only going to commit myself to a project that I want to, you know, do all those things too.
So, yeah, I probably could have banged out a lot more books, but I just, I just want everything, every book I do to be just as good as I can possibly make it. And I gotta, I
have to love it. If I don't, I'm not going to do it.
He's a Stanley Kubrick of rock journalism.
That's funny. I was about to say you're the Robert Caro.
Okay, yes, exactly. Nice.
And also, you're batting a thousand. So even now, almost 20 years, 20 plus years after Our Bang Can Be Your Life, if there's another book to add, you're still not sure
what it might be. You're still waiting.
Yeah, yeah. I'm still waiting. I have a couple of smaller projects that might pan out this year, but they won't, I don't think they will require, there'll be
collaborations with someone else and they won't be, you know, the gigantic all-consuming thing that my other books have been.
And I guess a good note to end on, last question, because this is your most recent work that's out there, The Amplified Come As You Are. How long did that take you to put
together this new edition with all that additional writing and reflection?
That took maybe two, two and a half years. That was a full on pandemic thing. It started, there was just a couple of things I wanted to say. I'd always wanted to say about
the book and I wrote them down.
And then I thought, well, maybe there's some other stuff in the book. And I went to the page one and I thought, oh, I got something to say about that. And I wrote that out.
And then I turned the page and, oh, I've got something to say about that. And, you know, and I started to realize that there was so much to say about Come As You Are because
it was written in the moment.
And as you say, it was a rich text. There was so much to illuminate and explain and 30 years of, you know, insight and regret and corrections.
And one of the first notes I wrote was about how Kurt kind of had bamboozled me about how dreary Aberdeen was. And I, you know, I looked into it and I thought about it and
there was actually a lot to say, you know, a lot of great things to say about Aberdeen.
And there was a lot to say about, you know, in passing, I mentioned the spotted owl. Well, God, I mentioned the spotted owl. The spotted owl was on the cover of Time
Magazine.
And people knew that at the time, but in 2023, people might not remember the significance of that and how that shone a light on Kurt and the place he grew up and came out of
and tried to leave behind.
And so, and a lot of that gave birth to a lot of the book was this motif of Kurt trying to leave an Aberdeen of the mind.
And so, yeah, and I just kind of spun that out, spun that out over and that and a few other themes over two, two and a half years.
And by the end I had done the entire book and I offhandedly mentioned to my agent that I'd done this and he said, "Oh, you could probably sell this."
And I had just done it just as a labor of love, just to pass the time to drown out the sounds of the freaking ambulances every two seconds.
Love of the game. That's amazing. You're just doing this during the pandemic just to do it.
To do it. And like I say, out my window, I could hear ambulances taking people to the hospital constantly.
And I wanted to keep busy at something to drown that out. And this is, it was so absorbing.
There was just, every time I turned the page, it was like, "Oh, I got something cool to say about that." And that passed the time and boy, passing the time was really
important at that moment.
Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Well, thanks so much, Michael. It's so sick to hear your story. Everybody, Amplified, come as you are, story of Nirvana in stores now.
Our band could be your life, of course. Also, thanks so much for coming on Time Crisis, man.
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Ezra. It was a really great chat and great seeing you both, Jake and Ezra.
Yeah, likewise. Hope to see you in person soon.
Cool. All right. Yeah. See ya. Bye.
See ya, Michael.
Bye, Jake.
Nick and Seinfeld's still there.
I was compelled. I was just here as a listener, as a fan.
I did not find out you guys were doing any other stuff during that. Checking Instagram.
I did say there was a point about 20 minutes in where I was like, "I don't know what he can see or can't see, but I feel if Seinfeld or I chime in now, you might not know what the
actual quote was saying."
Respect that you guys stayed on.
Yeah. That was great.
Just out of nowhere, hour 15 deep. All right, Azarad. Mr. Azarad Seinfeld 2000 here.
Yo, but I did want to know what Nirvana would be like today. I thought that would be... But then again, it's kind of a bummer question.
That's why I didn't want to go there. I thought you meant it in a way of like, in Seinfeld 2000, what would Seinfeld be like today?
No, I think that is what he's...
Initially, yes, but it is interesting to think about.
I could totally see you be like, "Mr. Azarad, Seinfeld 2000 here. Just a question. What do you think Nirvana would be like today?"
And he starts giving a really thoughtful answer. "I mean, what we know about Kurt and what we know about Dave, I think..."
And you're just like, "Kurt get iPad?" And he's just like, "What?"
And he's like, "You mean what their music sound like?" "I mean, no, like Kurt get iPad?" And he's like, "What the f*** is this?"
That's really funny. For some reason, it's never occurred to me the comedy of it around any time we do an interview tour.
Has Seinfeld ever done where he goes, "Excuse me, Mr. Azarad, I just have a question. What would Seinfeld be like today?"
Well, I've said it before, but I've always regretted not asking Larry David. I was too dear in the headlights. I was so starstruck.
Oh, I mean, I honestly, I'd be mortified.
Yeah.
Thanks so much to my guys, Azarad. Time Crisis will be back in a couple weeks.
Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
(electronic music)
View on TCU Wiki | Download Episode | Download CSV | Download Transcript