How I Did It

Interviewing Ivan and Zoltan from Five Finger Death Punch at Epicenter Festival, 2011

Someone recently asked me about how I started writing for magazines. It was luck and persistence, but mainly the latter.

It must have been around 2007. I was coming back from Cabo, ascending a flight of rickety metal stairs to get onto my homebound puddle jumper when I received a text from my college roommate. Would I like to interview Frank Black (Pixies) for SPIN magazine?

Rewinding a bit, my first real bit of music writing — not journalism at this point — was writing a promotional biography for the Rugburns sometime back in the early-90s. At the time they were starting to receive major label attentions for their ultra-hooky blend of folk rock and garage punk and they needed a short bio that captured their exceedingly unique and endearing vibe. The band had read some of my posts on the AOL message boards and found my crude, undisciplined style entertaining enough to ask me to write their promotional bio. I’d never read a music bio before but somehow I got up to speed and whatever I knocked out for them worked — they used it for years and I subsequently wrote several others for the band and their frontman, Steve Poltz.

The Rugburns’ manager asked if I could also do a bio for one of his other bands - The Bent Scepters - and their label later asked me to write bios for some of their other bands. In the ensuing years, I wrote band bios for labels and publicists who found me by word of mouth. Though there have been a couple of times when writing was my sole career, those periods were short-lived; I’ve pretty much always had a day job which has allowed me to be selective in my writing assignments. This has its pros and cons and I’ll save those for another day. My freelance work was enough to keep me connected without ever feeling like an unwelcome obligation.

Frank Black played an intimate acoustic show at the Belly Up Tavern, in Solana Beach, California, that fall and I interviewed him backstage, along with Warren Zanes (the Del Fuegos), who interviewed Frank onstage between songs. A photographer was there and I’m pretty sure there’s a picture of me with Frank and Warren, but I don’t have it. The evening was a blast and I particularly enjoyed talking about Boston with the two guys, whom I remembered as fairly high-profile dudes on the Boston music scene in the 80s.

After that, I looped in with a couple of culture sites - The Nervous Breakdown and The Weeklings - in succession. TNB gave me a platform for writing about whatever I wanted and at the time, I wanted to write about music. Eventually, with the support of editor Brad Listi, I became the site’s music editor, which was my indoctrination into working with publicists, labels, etc. on a regular basis. I also worked with a lot of publishers at the time; given that TNB was primarily a literature site, music bios fell squarely within the site’s purview. More importantly, my position came with the agreement that I was 100% responsible for the music section and that I needed to publish one feature a week, including making a cover slide for the feature header. Looking back now, it’s wild how much I was churning out back then, all the while maintaining a day job and personal life. It was unpaid, too, which I never resented. To me, implicit in the agreement was that I was providing TNB with valuable content (I ended up scoring some fairly big, newsworthy interviews), and in return I was getting a platform and plenty of experience. I eventually resigned from that position when my outside obligations began piling up to the point of unmanageability. The Weeklings approached me six or so months later and offered me the music editor position there with the promise - that they always fulfilled - of providing me direct, ongoing support in the way of content and editing. I wouldn’t have to submit a weekly feature - they had plenty of writers who would do that - and Greg Olear and Sean Beaudoin, the editors, graciously edited my works when needed.

It was somewhere during that period of online writing that I decided that I wanted to write for magazines — real, hardcopy magazines. If luck was my college roommate offering me the Frank Black interview for SPIN, this is where the persistence piece came in. I would drive over to Barnes & Noble and, notebook in hand, I would examine nearly every music magazine even tangentially relevant to my interests, and write down the editors of each. Certainly I was looking at Metal Hammer, Revolver, Kerrang!, Outburn and other rock and metal bastions, but I was also looking at magazines about Celtic music, ukuleles, keyboards and music production.

Some of the magazines contained email addresses for these people but most of the time, I’d go home and stalk the shit out of every name I found until I tracked down an email address. Then I’d sit down and email every single person on the list with an introduction, links to writing examples and often, though not always, a pitch. I did this every month for a year.

The hardest part was the no-response thing. In the music and publishing world, it’s rare that you get a “No thanks,” “Not interested,” or anything along those lines. Occasionally I received kind responses from editors who could see that I was passionate and motivated but who didn’t have the room for a new writer. Kory Grow, from Revolver (now at Rolling Stone), comes to mind. And I received the odd shitty reply, too. The editor of MOJO, one of my all-time favorite magazines, replied to a Noel Gallagher live review pitch with a snide, condescending note about how they’d only recently done a cover on him and it had sold poorly and generally implying some sort of ignorance on my part for not mentioning the former and not knowing the latter.

I sent Metal Hammer a pitch almost every month. Never received a reply. I was considering printing out copies of articles I’d written and mailing them to their editor, Alexander Milas, when one day I received an email from Jonathan Selzer, the reviews editor. The subject line was “Re: Alice Cooper.” Alice was playing a show at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, up in LA and I pitched coverage. To my delight, this was the one that landed. He asked me for a 350 word review, which I produced in a couple of agonizing days. Upon receipt of my copy, he asked if I could cover a Five Finger Death Punch in Irvine that weekend. Of course, I replied, and when I looked up the show for a set time, I realized it was the Epicenter music festival and they were one of many big acts running up to headliner Limp Bizkit. When I emailed the Jonathan for clarity on how to format the piece, he asked if I could instead do 2000 words on the whole festival.

It was within a month that Classic Rock reached out to me to cover a show for them. At the time, Classic Rock and Metal Hammer literally worked together in the same room every day and when CR needed someone in California to cover a Howlin’ Rain show, the MH guys at the other end of the room gave them my name.

I think I’ve contributed to nearly every issue of Metal Hammer ever since. And I write for Classic Rock every now and then, along with regular work for Bass Player. It’s as if passing the cut for one of the outlets opens the door for the others. I’ve since written for Men’s Health, Outburn, Guitarist and a pretty large number of print and online outlets. I’ve researched and contributed to books and even written features for foreign language magazines which were translated by their editing teams.

I never take for granted the immense privilege in getting to write for Metal Hammer or any of the other magazines that I used to read in high school and college. And while I’m as susceptible to negative self-talk as the next guy, I always draw massive pride in the hard work I put in to get here. 90% persistence and 10% luck.