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Status: Needs Review

an interview with rock critic
JOE GROSS

I am from Falls Church, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, DC. There
are a couple of places on the net for various bios where it's been described as
"The Chocolate City's most vanilla suburb", and I can't think of a better
description of it. It's a very strange place because it's an independent city -- it's two square miles. It's got its own school system and everything. You're right
next to a metropolis, but my high school graduating class was like 89 people.
Many of them I had known since I was five. This is not tremendously conducive
to dating. I really couldn't have left high school fast enough. Horrible isn't the
word.
S: I was going to say, like most rock critics, you seem like you were incredibly popular in high school.
It's true, yeah.
S: Did your parents work for the government?
My father is an attorney with the Department of Justice and has been for about
30 years. My mom is the associate director of a program called Community of Caring, which is a subset of the Kennedy Foundation.
S: Do you have brothers and sisters?
I do. I have two brothers, one who may be coming here for law school, actually.
His name is Will. He lives in New York right now. Both younger. And I have
another brother named John who still lives with my folks.
J: Because he's young or because he's a loser?
No, but because he's retarded.
J: Oh, no. Wow. And he's much younger or were y'all close when you were growing up?
I'm four and a half years older than Will and about seven years older than John.
We got along fine, but I can never interest Will in the same things I'm interested
in. I kind of blew it with Will and punk rock, I just shanked it. We're both
heavily involved in music, him in a much more mainstream way. Like a capella groups in muisic.
S: Really dorky music.
He was incredibly good at it when he was like their arranger. He knows funda-mentally -- technically he knows a lot more about music than I do, we just have completely different interests.
S: So did you write for your high school newspaper?
Absolutely. My folks were literal baby boomers, they were born right after the
war. So rock from the 1960s was always in the house, it was always present, and
not just in some dumb hippy way, it was just around. I listened to Buddy Holly records when I was young, my father was a huge Creedence fan. My father
Spring 2003

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