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the gay crowd. We did that for a while, and then I moved to Albany, NY with a girlfriend. I did work for like, the New York Rocker, a lot of free publications, various music publications, Slash, I would do various articles for these magazines when I was in my late teens, early twenties. When I moved to Austin, I started writing for the Chronicle almost right away. It was nonmusical stuff first. The first big article I did was called "Musical Like Me," and it was about how I'd just moved to town and I told everybody I was a musician to get women. It was this really cheesy article. It went over really big, it was really funny. It was kind of a takeoff on the whole loser musician lifestyle and why women like these cads. I started doing a column in the Austin Chronicle in 1985 and it was called "Don't You Start Me Talkin'." It was a gossipy satire music column, but it encapsulated the whole music scene. At first, people were wanting to beat me up. A lot. I had a lot of threats, like people looking for me and this and that, for about six months I was terrified. The skinheads were looking for me because I did this article, "Why Dragworms Are Better Than Skinheads."
Is this something that you would be proud of?
Not really. When skinheads look for you it's a little different than angry letter writers. I wouldn't say that I get off on the negative attention, but I get off on the attention. I think it's good that if your business is critiquing others, I think it's really good that you go under some criticism too. As hard as I criticize bands or other people, I should be criticized too. Probably the only thing that bothers me is when people write that I'm a lousy writer. I don't mind so much when they say, "He's an idiot, he doesn't know music, he doesn't know what he's talking about," but when I get letters about how I'm just a dreadful writer, that's the only thing that bothers me, because I think that's the one saving grace, that's the reason I can get away with what I do, is that I put a lot of time and effort and energy and creativity into what I do, and so I think I'm allowed a little more room to criticize others. It was really important to me, once I reached the point where I thought I was the equal of the musicians, because when you start off it's all stacked, like they're the gods and you're the media, you're the person who stuck a microphone in front of their face, following them around and basically sniffing up around musicians, but once I got to the point where I thought, "Wait a minute, what I'm doing is as creatively viable as what they're doing," I got a lot of confidence in my opinion. I thought, "I have as much right
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to say what I want as anybody else does." I don't have to keep kissing people's ass because they're on a stage and everybody's cheering. I can go to a concert and 18,000 people are standing up - like the Kiss concert - I can go to a concert where everybody's cheering and still go, "This sucks!" But you really have to have a lot of confidence to do that. It's really easy to fall into the idea of, "Oh, well, it must be good because everybody likes it."
Do you think you attained this "equality" just by reaching out and grabbing it?
You gotta earn it. It's a craft, just like music is a craft, writing is a craft. You have to go after your craft with the same intensity and commitment that musicians do. And they're intense — this is what they've wanted to do ever since they were sitting in their bedrooms when they were twelve years old playing guitar to REO Speedwagon records.
[Tape Flips]
Why don't you talk about Oasis for a little while?
I didn't like them at first. A lot of bands that wind up becoming my favorites, that's the way it starts. Bruce Springsteen I didn't like at first and he's probably my all-time favorite now. The Velvet Underground I didn't like at first, Mott the Hoople, the Ramones I didn't like at first. AC/DC I liked right away., but all my other favorites I didn't like so much at first, because it's like active listening. It's not like background music, you have to really be into it. So Oasis, this publicist was trying to get me to do Oasis, to interview them. They were coming to Dallas for the first time. And I heard that one song on the radio, which I didn't really like, it was called "Supersonic." I didn't like that song at all. So I was like, "Well, I don't know." She was like, "They're really great." She was a publicist who was married to one of the Pixies and she knew really good music. If she said something was good, you sort of had to take note. So she said, "They're really great live, this is their record, blah blah blah." So I said, "All right, I'll do the interview as a favor. I don't really like this band, but I'll do the interview just 'cause you're so cool." So it was four o'clock in the afternoon, I get a call from her and she's got Noel Gallagher there on the line, and I didn't know what to ask him and I'm really bad at interviews anyway, so I only had 3 or 4 questions prepared. I knew he was from Manchester, so I went ahead and played up the Manchester thing and I was going, "The thing about the Manchester bands was, they made great records, but when you saw them live, they were never that
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good. He says, "I totally disagree. They never made good records. There was never a band worth a shit from Manchester." And plus he was really drunk. You could barely understand him and he was so negative about everything. I just thought, "Wow, that's pretty cool. I like this guy's attitude." As soon as the interview was over, I went back and listened to the record, because I was like, "Wow, that was amazing!" It was just twenty minutes of some drunken psychotic person screaming about how every band sucks and his band's the only one worth a damn. So with that in mind I listened to the record and it blew me away. For some reason, having this personal encounter with him where I really sensed he was the real thing - I noticed a lot of things. For instance, the singer's got the most impeccable timing since Frank Sinatra or Johnny Rotten. He's just an amazing singer. Liam Gallagher could sing anything and make it sound good, and Noel Gallagher writes great songs. And then the band came to town, Oasis came to town and I went backstage to meet them and they were totally rude to me. I met them at soundcheck. And then that night they did a show that just completely blew me away. It's a big swirl of sheets of guitar and all these chaotic sounds all around, and then right in the middle of that is the control of the songwriter and the singer — they bring chaos to order. On every song they bring chaos to order. To me that is what an artist does. Whether it's a writer or a painter or anybody, they take whatever chaos is in their mind and they bring it to order on a square or a three-minute pop song or on a piece of paper. That's what art is. And that's what they were doing. It was just phenomenal to me that they had all this stuff going on and they hit me on so many different levels. I think it does suck that they got so popular and now they're newsmakers every other day — they're breaking up, they're not breaking up, he's on drugs, he's off drugs, he's with this girl, he's with that girl, they've turned into this kind of ridiculous kind of Hard Copy band. But still, musically, like last night at 3 am I had my headphones on and I was listening to What's the Story, Morning Glory? anad I was remembering how when they played that song at the Austin Music Hall, it was one of the highlights of my life. It just filled me up with so much pure love for everything that was going on. It was really like a drug. It was like Ecstasy or something when they played. When they're there, when they're playing, forget about the stuff that goes on offstage. They're just gorgeous, they're beautiful. I love them. Although
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it does get a little hard to take the crap that comes with them, musically they're the best band in the world. I think "Morning Glory," when they have that helicopter sound, it really does sound like an airlift. And then right in the middle of that, you realize that when the helicopter's gone, when it's lifted all the wounded up, you're in a gorgeous jungle in Vietnam or somewhere. Even in the middle of all this horrible shit that's going on in the world, there still is beauty, you know? And to me that's the profound meaning that I get out of Oasis, that there is beauty in the muck of everyday life. So they'll always be dear to me.
[Photo: man in suit with a costumed woman to each side - angel on left, devil on right]
What kind of man reads Geek Weekly? He sold his soul to the devil, but it didn't do him any good. He donates $14.5 million a month to fringe religious cults to try to get it back.
