Steven Rosen Interview
Steven Rosen with Ozzy circa 1974
Steven Rosen is a familiar name in music journalism. An historian, collector, writer and fan, he has written about music for over 30 years. He’s contributed to Rolling Stone, Circus and Creem et al and has interviewed just about every major rock band from Sabbath to Aerosmith, Free to Zeppelin. He’s also written books on Free, Jeff Beck, Springsteen and Sabbath.
First of all, can you tell me about your career in music writing?
I was a freelancer from about 1973-1979. I truly measure my career as a music writer as having its real beginning with my first Guitar Player story. So, I remember this moment pretty clearly: It was 1972 and I was in a library somewhere (I’m a big fan of libraries) and I saw someone reading a copy of the October 1972 issue of GP. Dickie Betts was on the cover. I think the copy belonged to the library because when this other fellow was done reading it, I picked it up and looked through it. I perused the Betts story and in my young naiveté and foolishness, thought, I can do this. I know about guitar players. I can write about them.
I found the magazine’s address and sent them a story; I wasn’t even doing interviews then, I had no connections, so I probably sent some inane album review or some write-up of a concerted I’d attended. I’d enclosed a little memo that read: “Dear Sirs, Hope you can use article. If you do can you get in contact with me and let me know what issue it will appear. If not, please return in stamped envelope. Thank you, Steve Rosen.” This is precisely how it read (without commas and question marks); I still have that letter. It was returned to me with a brief handwritten note from editor Jim Crockett: “Sorry, Steve. Good piece, but not at all guitar-related. Jim Crockett.”
I mean, the magazine was called Guitar Player, don’t you think I would have sent something remotely connected to that subject? No. It was a live review of this local band called Marquis de Sade. So, I was disappointed but encouraged. This Mr. Crockett had used the word good in describing the story, so I kept the faith.
I kept writing for other magazines; I was doing some piecemeal work for Sounds, the English publication, sending them interviews and reviews of shows and such. And then in 1973, I was introduced to the person and the people who would change my life. Gibson & Stromberg were the first rock and roll publicity company. This is back in 1973 and at that time they handled the Stones, Black Kangaroo, Hurricane Smith, Steely Dan, and Jeff Beck. They took me under their wing, this sort of hapless writer with all the right intentions and none of the connections. Lydia Woltag was one of the publicists there and she really provided a lot of help. She made all of her artists available to me and when she asked if I wanted to interview Jeff Beck, I almost swallowed my tongue. I remember I was in her office– the building was situated on Sunset Boulevard, across the street from Tower Records, and right where Holloway hits Sunset (for those of you who know Hollywood geography)–when she asked me. I said, yes, of course. Somehow Guitar Player magazine was mentioned; Lydia must have brought it up because I would have been too intimidated to even utter the magazine’s name. Lydia called them and I think she spoke directly to Jim Crockett. I know that Jim (or whomever she talked to) said he’d like to see the interview with Jeff Beck when it was completed.
I mean to tell you, I experienced every sort of rapture. For me, GP had been one of the reasons I started writing. I loved the magazine and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted my name on those pages. That would have truly been an honour for me.
So, I did the interview with Jeff sometime around April or May of 1973. I met him at the Continental Hyatt House, the infamous Riot House on Sunset Boulevard, where all the traveling rock bands stayed. Jeff was gracious and open and charming and I was so nervous I could barely speak. In fact, I’d forgotten to hit record during one portion of the interview and when I realized it, I muttered a silent curse and truly felt my career was over before it even started. Jeff saw the mistake, gently chided me about it, and invited me to come back the next day. I did. We revisited the material and I even brought along an all-maple ’73 Fender Strat I had for Jeff to look at. He loved the instrument and I was about three seconds away from giving it to him.
I wrote the story and mailed it in. And then I received the letter from Crockett: “Dear Steve, The Beck interview is perfect! Here’s a check. I’ll send copies when it comes out. Has a good chance for a cover in Dec. or early ’74. I’m certainly interested in pieces on English rock guitarists. Either feed me queries or use your own excellent judgement. Keep in touch with other pieces.”
Holy God! Not only did he like it but also it had a chance for a cover. And in December 1973 that’s what happened. Honestly, I was astonished. I thought it was a good story, I thought I had connected with the great guitarist, but you can never be sure. When I finally received the copies and saw my by-line, I was, well, moved to tears. Maybe other writers don’t react like that but I did. It established me as a legitimate writer in the field of rock journalism and opened up a lot of other doors for me. But more than anything, it confirmed, in me, the notion that I really could be a writer and make some sort of living at it.
I’d go on to write a total of 16 cover stories for GP in about a six year period. Which meant that out of a total of 72 covers, over 20% of them were mine. Additionally, I write a lot of features including a story on the Marshall factory in England and a piece about my guitar pick collection (that garnered a lot of interest from readers).
As a freelancer, I didn’t really know any of the staff writers –or even the other non-staff scribes. Certainly I started seeing Jas Obrecht’s name quite a bit. In fact, that was the beginning of the end for me. I had an amazing run from about 1974 through 1979 and then I could tell the well was going dry. Many of the stories I thought I would have done–the English classic guys–were now being written by Jas and other staff people. Budgets were tightening. Why pay an outside writer to do a story when we can do it in-house for no extra money? I’m not castigating anyone or placing blame at all. I understood. It hurt, but I understood.
And I have to admit, these pieces being written by the staff personnel were really well-executed. They were stylish and focused and certainly more journalistic than the pieces I was writing. By that I mean my stories were probably a bit more just let the guitarist talk and see what happens; a little more stream of consciousness. These staff-written pieces covered all the style elements that every GP story was required to contain, and they were truly remarkable stories.
From Guitar Player, I made a connection with Player, Japan’s equivalent of GP. I write for them to this very day. I also began doing some writing for European publications like Fachblatt (Germany) and later, Guitarist, Total Guitar, Mojo, and others.
Being a music journalist was like connecting the dots – you’d meet one person and they’d introduce you to the next person and so on. And hopefully, you keep moving forward and at the end of the day, you’ve created some kind of a picture – a career – for yourself.
When was your first experience with rock n’ roll?
Well, as a journalist some of the earliest pieces I wrote were for a softcore porn newspaper called the L.A. Star. I went to England the summer after I graduated high school and I used to send stories back to the States. The very first interview I ever did was with Joe Cocker; I was scared to death, let me tell you. But I was listening to rock n’ roll when I was younger. I loved the Beach Boys and the sound of surf guitar; the sound of reverb on a Fender Stratocaster on songs like ‘Walk Don’t Run’ and ‘Pipeline’ were my anthems.
What inspired you to write about music?
I loved to write and I loved music. I played in bands and was a decent guitar player and a songwriter. I thought guitarists were the most creative artists in the world. And songwriters. In a great song, you must be a great wordsmith (lyricist) and a great creator of melodies and chords and rhythms. There is not another person in the entire world who could have written ‘California Girls’; in three minutes, Brian Wilson created a magical sound that lives to this day. I wanted to do that myself (as a guitarist/songwriter) and I figured if I couldn’t actually be doing it, I wanted to write about the people who were doing it.
Which artists have given you the most interesting interviews?
Ah, if that isn’t a loaded question! How do you define “interesting?” Stevie Wonder was astounding. I had lunch with him (and a couple other writers though he spoke mainly to me) and he talked so profoundly and honestly and openly about his life and his music. He’d take on these different personas and speak in these different voices. My first interview with Jeff Beck for the cover of the December 1993 issue of Guitar Player Magazine was amazing because, I believe, Jeff sensed how desperately nervous I was. He coaxed me along and gave me a brilliant interview. As you can read above, I actually erased part of the interview but he was gracious enough to allow me to come back the next day. There are so many more terrific conversations: Pete Townshend; Jack Bruce; Keith Moon; Edward Van Halen. I spent like two hours talking with John Cippolina (Quicksilver Messenger Service guitarist now deceased) about the history of music in San Francisco; talking with Peter Frampton about Humble Pie and his love for Steve Marriott; and of course, Jimmy Page.
Page holds a special place in my heart. I interviewed him when I went out on the road with Zeppelin in ’77 and spent 11 days hanging with the band. I had two sessions with Jimmy – one in his hotel room that sported a broken telephone and a gaping hole in the wall and the second one on the band’s private plane as they flew back from a show. He was strange. Aloof. Angry. More than anything though, I remember it because the interview wasn’t as good as I knew it could have been. To this day, that interview (the cover of GP 1977) receives more attention than any other story I’ve ever written. And I’m reminded every single time how I wish it could have been better.
And the least?
There have been a few of these. I once did a phoner with Ginger Baker. I was a huge Cream fan and I’d always wanted to talk to Clapton about the band. But I never interviewed Eric so speaking with Ginger was probably about as close as I was going to come. I started the conversation (this was circa 1975 and he was then in the Baker/Gurvitz Army) by asking him about Cream - that was my first and last mistake.
“Why the fuck do you want to know about Cream?” Ginger exploded.
“Well, I, uh, I really loved the band, and I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” I muttered back.
“That was such a fucking long time ago, why do you want to know?”
Anyway, 15 minutes later our conversation was over.
Frank Zappa gave me major grief on several occasions and treated me with sarcasm and disrespect.
Todd Rundgren didn’t want to talk about guitars when the interview was for a guitar magazine.
Ritchie Blackmore spoke in this weird, English doublespeak and made fun of every question I asked him.
Robert Fripp took the typed pages of questions I’d prepared. He took them from me and read the question and then responded to it. He was both interviewer and interviewee.
And then there was Michael Jackson. I believe this was just prior to Off The Wall. He was huge but not quite a legend. I sat at a table with Michael, LaToya, and one of the brothers. I asked Michael a question like, “What is it like working with Quincy Jones?” I’m sitting two-feet away from him, mind you. LaToya then turns to Michael and in that little sing-song voice of her’s, says, “So, Michael, you’ve been working with Quincy Jones. Do you like working with him?” Michael then responds back to LaToya (looking directly at her and never even glancing at me), “I like Quincy.” LaToya pivots in her seat, faces me and says, “Michael enjoys working with Quincy Jones.”
As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking, “OK, this is pretty funny, let’s goof on the journalist.” But then, my next question is fielded the same way by LaToya, relayed to Michael, sent back to LaToya, and tossed back at me. This went on for about 20 minutes and to this day, I don’t know if they were simply making fun of me or if Michael truly wouldn’t talk directly to me. Or maybe LaToya was boning up on becoming a journalist herself.
In any event, following the interview, Michael got up from the table and was kind of dancing around the room (one of the larger conference suites at Columbia Records) and when I asked to take a picture with him, he kindly obliged.
Would you call that “interesting”? Or simply strange.
Do you have any exciting anecdotes to tell from interviewing bands like Aerosmith and Sabbath?
There are so many! You mention Aerosmith here – I interviewed Joe Perry when he had quit the band and was assembling his Joe Perry Project (a horrific ensemble by anyone’s measure). He was staying at one of the nicer hotels in West Hollywood. I had never met Joe but had certainly had about his propensity for indulging in various things. While I sat there and talked to him, he literally finished a bottle of Jack Daniels by himself. But that wasn’t even the most impressive part. Sitting in a mound in front of him that must have measured 3” high and a circumference about the size of a small dinner plate was a quantity of coke the likes of which I had never seen before. This was Scarface guitar-style. He snorted these enormous lines – gargantuan, mutated rails – and then swigged the JD. And never seemed to be out of control. In fact, he was a truly sweet guy.
I was in St. Louis in 1974 to interview Sabbath. After one of the concerts, a couple of the guys (hard to remember exactly who they were but I’m pretty sure it was Tony and Bill – Ozzy may have been there but probably not) came to my hotel room and destroyed it; dismantled it; re-organized it to resemble a third world ghetto. They set the couch on fire and ripped the television set from its (ostensibly) permanent stand and put it in the elevator. They broke open the emergency fire alarm glass door in the hallway, pulled out a fire extinguisher, and … well, you can imagine. And then they all left and there I was sitting in the burned-out husk of a hotel room and thinking, “Oh, man, how am I going to pay for this?”
When I went down to the checkout desk the next morning, looking sheepish and embarrassed and sleep-deprived from nerves, I told the clerk my room number and waited to hear the total. He tallied some figures, looked up, smiled, and said, “Thank you. I hope you enjoyed your stay.”
I gasped, caught my breath, did an about face, and retreated as quickly as I could without drawing attention. I learned later that the band had picked up the tab for the destruction. I would later interview Ozzy and Tony multiple times over the coming years and that death of a hotel room would forever be a bond between us.
There are so many more stories: Beating up Yngwie Malmsteen at a Dio party; taking Paul Rodgers to an Elvis Presley concert at the Inglewood Forum in my beater Triumph Herald and watching him watch Elvis in silent awe; loaning Steve Vai my Marshall amp for the Alcatrazz album; staying at Billy Gibbons’ home in Santa Fe, New Mexico and finding my Guitar World cover story in his closet; going to Japan with Humble Pie in ’73 after I’d only been writing for a few months.
I really have to mention Paul McCartney. I had gone to England with my buddy right after graduating high school. We were doing the Jack Kerouac On The Road/backpack thing. Remember I talked about the L.A. Star earlier? Well, the music editor of that lousy little newspaper gave me the names of some publicists and managers to talk to when I was in the U.K. It turns out, one of the names he gave me was Tony Brainsby. Tony was a music publicist working with Fleetwood Mac, Curved Air, this new band called Queen, and Paul McCartney.
To make a long and amazing story shorter, one day Tony asks me, “Would you like to go see Wings play in Birmingham and then interview Paul?” This was like the third or fourth interview I had ever done (Cocker was first). What do you say? “Gee, Tony, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not like Paul’s in the Beatles anymore or anything.”
So, I take the train to Birmingham, watch Wings perform, and then go backstage. There were several other writers there and I think I only asked him one question: “What about a Beatles reunion?” Genius, huh? Linda was there and Henry McCulloch was there (now both gone) and Paul was there and I was there. I was so absolutely terrified. What struck me was how these other journalists (all English vets from Melody Maker and Sounds and stuff) acted so seemingly nonchalant. Like this was just another singing bass player who wrote songs. I thought, and I really do recall this moment, “Will I ever be so totally together and so professional as a rock music writer that I’ll be able to sit in front of the world’s most famous artists and not let them know how perfectly petrified I am? Will I ever be as good as these other writers?”
A voice hollered in my head with a resounding, “No.” I would never achieve that level of professionalism. And that’s maybe the reason why I was able to survive all these years (see the question below about advice for new scribes to better understand what that voice in my head was really trying to tell me).
You’ve written about music for over 30 years; how does current music journalism compare to, say, journalism back in the seventies?
That is such a difficult question to answer. Truthfully, I rarely read stories by other journalists. The way I would answer this is the same way I’d answer it if you’d asked me about the music – how does current music compare to music back in the seventies? Musicians today have more technique, more chops, and a greater understanding of music theory and composition. But the music is nowhere near as good because it doesn’t have the heart or character or singular uniqueness of music from back in the day.
And the same is true with journalists – there are profoundly wonderful writers working for Mojo and Rolling Stone and various other magazines. But there is just some missing piece, some element that was present in stories from Guitar Player and Circus and those types of magazines. Most of those features – mine included – weren’t particularly scholarly or professional. But you understood what the writer was saying about an artist. There was something simple in the language. I don’t know; it’s a difficult one to answer.
One of the main pieces, as I’d touched on earlier, is the music. Yes, U2 and Radiohead and Mars Volta and a lot of other bands are remarkably creative and melodic. But most of it is cookie cutter and even if John Steinbeck was writing about some nameless, numbingly boring metal band, he wouldn’t be able to put together a piece worth reading.
Can you tell me about your personal archives (including record collection and magazines/books)? I assume you’ve amassed quite a lot over the years?
Oh, God, some of the best moments in my career was receiving albums in the mail. I remember writing to every record label I could find and asking them to please, please, put me on their mailing lists. It took forever but finally albums started coming from Warner Bros. (Deep Purple and Sabbath records and some unknown female singer named Bonnie Raitt); A&M (Humble Pie and Supertramp); Columbia (Toto and Boston and Jeff Beck on the subsidiary, Epic Records); ABC; Elektra; Asylum; RCA; et al.
At the pinnacle, I had about 9,500-10,000 records. I had a pretty small guesthouse in Laurel Canyon and in my bedroom; all four walls were lined with shelves. If there had ever been an earthquake, I would have been squashed like an insect. I had this little hallway and along the floor, there were probably about 300-400 records. Friends would see those and go, “Wow, man, nice collection.” I’d quietly nod, take them back into the bedroom, and watch their mouths drop and eyes widen when they saw the body of the beast.
I had a bad habit (that I got from my mom) about having to collect everything by an artist even if I only liked one album – or one song. I loved the idea of archives and having records there to be pulled out and handled and gazed at. And listened to? Well, not so much. I had a turntable but I hardly ever put on an album. Strange, I know. If I had an interview to conduct, I’d of course, put on the artist’s most recent release and then go through the back catalogue.
Honestly, one of my great joys was showing off the collection. I loved loaning records to friends. One time, Billy Gibbons came over and I showed him all my stuff. We started going through everything and I gave him a few dozen records to take with him. I loved that.
It was truly a remarkable collection. I moved and sold the collection to several major buyers (one German guy who owned a record store in Munich or somewhere). I miss those records terribly. Now, I have my 3,000 favourite songs in my Zune and it takes up no space whatsoever.
Magazines? I had: Rolling Stone; Creem; Circus; Raves; Zoo World; Los Angeles Free Press; Sounds; Melody Maker; Guitar Player; Guitar World; Player; Fachblatt; Crawdaddy; and hundreds of other titles. Thousands and thousands of them. Every issue (or virtually every issue). Again, I moved and simply had no room and sold them.
I do have a pretty cool music book library. Thousands of reference books; biographies; collections; instrument histories; picture books; et al. I love being surrounded by them though the truth is, I could probably get by with just a couple dozen reference books. The amount of information available online is astounding.
Who are your favourite music writers?
I touched on this earlier when I mentioned I don’t really read other music writers. I read fiction (Tom Robbins; Christopher Moore; John Steinbeck; T.C. Boyle) but not much written by straight-up music journalists. That being said, Barney Hoskyns is amazing and David Fricke from Rolling Stone.
And your favourite music books?
Other than my books on Sabbath and Free/Bad Company? Just kidding, really, just kidding. Again, I collect music books but I don’t really read them. Some of Chuck Klosterman’s books are tremendously funny but even some of his observations miss the mark occasionally.
What advice would you give to aspiring music scribes?
It is such a significantly different world here in 2009 than it was in 1999 – not to mention 1979. The economy has made it much more difficult for a freelance writer to get published in a music mag (many publications have cut way back in the number of outside pieces they use and try to keep stuff in-house). There is less of a sense of community. Back in 1979, for instance, a label would fall over themselves making their artists available to writers. I’d receive calls from not only the label but managers and PR people all asking me to interview their bands and go review their shows and listen to their new albums. Publicists at the labels knew your name, knew who you wrote for, and respected what you did. They were rooting for you. They wanted you to go on the road with Jethro Tull and do a story for Circus. They worked really hard to put that together and when they saw that feature published, they felt like they were part of the process. And they were. I spoke earlier about how Gibson & Stromberg, the first of all the rock publicity companies, made phones calls on my behalf, contacting magazines and record labels and anybody else they could think of.
With all of that being said, and bringing into play my little internal head game anecdote that I mentioned above regarding the McCartney interview, the advice I’d give to a new writer is to find something that you can do that’s not necessarily better than what anyone else can do but brings a new wrinkle to it.
In that second, surrounded by major heavyweight journalists, I knew for a fact that I would never be on the staff of any magazine, that I would never be an editor, and I would never be a member of the mainstream musical aristocracy (Rolling Stone; Melody Maker; Crawdaddy). The elite.
I also learned, by listening to these questions, what I could bring to an interview that other writers might not be able to. I was a guitarist (not very adept but I knew how to play and understood techniques and tones and how to hold a pick and how to write a moving vocal melody over a set of chord changes). That was the wrinkle – approach the musician as another musician who just happened to be recording the conversation and would later transcribe it for a magazine article.
I was a guitar player and I wanted to know how Paul Kossoff played the chords for ‘All Right Now.’ I played them in a cover band they never sounded right; I’d heard dozens of other guys strum those changes and they never got it right. So, wouldn’t it be cool if a guitar player had a chance to sit down with Koss, get it right from the man himself, and then tell other musicians about it? I thought it would and that’s how I found my way in.
What advice would I give to you? Look at the magazines for whom you want to write. Study them. I never did that (well, you read about that earlier). Find a variation on the theme. It doesn’t have to be anything profound; just some angle to make your work stand out.
The availability of all the online sites provides a wealth of possibilities. Virtually no one will pay you but you will be able to develop and hone your skills in the real world. People will read your work. Blogs and fan sites; news sites; music appreciation sites; homespun rock magazine sites; music reference sites; CD/concert review sites. Contact your local paper and tell them you’re going to attend the next Springsteen concert and you’d like to review it for them. Contact the labels and tell them you’re writing for various online music sites and would like to review CDs from their artists.
The computer also gives you access to virtually every editor and publisher and magazine address in the world. Send emails to editors. Pick up a magazine and look at the staff page; look for a feature editor or an assignment editor. Don’t send it to the name at the to of the masthead; send it to name at the bottom, someone whose likely to respond to you.
Send a short email – no more than a paragraph. Pitch an idea. Be clever; be charming. If the contact’s name is John, use his name in the body of the letter. “And I’d like to thank you, John, for your time and interest.” Personalize it all you can in one paragraph.
You’re going to be turned down. Again and again and again and again … I mean, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’re a graduate of Oxford University with a Masters in English and a personal charm so overwhelming it oozes from the monitor. I hope so. If not, keep trying. I know one thing: Quit and it will never happen.
Connect the dots. Use a little news piece you’ve written for one site and make that part of your resume. Tell the next guy you’ve been published and you have some terrific ideas for him. And then reverse it. If a site runs CD reviews, see if they’ll send you some CDs to review. At least you’ll have some scored some free swag, no?
The advice is: There is no advice. There are no hard and fast and road tested rules. Write as much as you can. If you’ve already written some pieces, approach the proper magazines and ask them if you can send them a story? If they say no, ask them if they’re looking for anything at the moment? If not, can you contact them in a couple weeks time?
If you love a particular writer, dissect his work. How does he make that intro so engaging? How does he work the quotes into his feature? And how can you take what he/she has written, add a little shade, a little light, and make it your own?
You’ve written books on Free and Black Sabbath. How do you approach research for a book?
I’m not great at researching. Though it can be pretty cool when you track down something no one knows, it’s pretty hard work. The bulk of the research comes from personally-conducted interviews. Most writers do hundreds of interviews for books; I do quite a few but I never do that many. The information available online is staggering. It makes writing an infinitely easier proposition. I should say, it makes gathering facts much easier – the writing part is still hard.
Which contemporary music magazines are you a fan of?
Again, I don’t really read many music mags. Back in the day, I loved Guitar Player and Circus. Classic Rock is wonderful because it contains all the bands I love.
What can you tell me about writing for magazines like Creem, Rolling Stone and Circus? It doesn’t get any better than that does it?
No, it doesn’t get any better and it never did. I think I first got a piece in Circus, then Creem, then Rolling Stone. For me, they were amazing moments. I used to look at Circus and see those stories on Purple and the Who and I was dazzled. I wanted to see my name in there so badly. And I finally achieved that. Rolling Stone was a real pinnacle; it took a couple years worth of phone calls to get my first (of three) stories published. I did a piece on Bad Company and man, did I feel like king of the world. Every issue that came out back then, of all of those magazines, was like a special moment. You looked at every page and the photos were great and the bands were incredible. I used to go and hang out at Rolling Stones’ local L.A. office. They let me go through their back issues and pull out stuff. I’d call over there and suggest ideas and kept at it and they kept turning me down. Finally, I convinced them that this new band Paul Rodgers had assembled was going to be huge. And I was right. Bad Company hit a homerun and I wrote one of the first major pieces on them as my debut in Rolling Stone.
Who are your favourite artists?
Well, I don’t know if I can tell you who they are, but I can tell you when they were. Mid-60s to early 70s. That was my favourite period. No big surprises: Beatles; Stones (though nothing after Exile … really); Yardbirds (Jeff Beck period); The Who; Zeppelin (first, second, and forth albums); Traffic; Procol Harum; Beach Boys; Jeff Beck Group; Spirit; Simon & Garfunkel; Love; Cream; Supertramp; Jethro Tull (I know, that will get me lynched but the truth is Ian Anderson is a wonderful songwriter/musician); Free. Opeth are an amazing band. Stevie Wonder; Humble Pie and early Fleetwood Mac. Jimi Hendrix, of course. There just aren’t many modern bands that thrill me.
And your 10 Desert Island Discs?
(In no particular order):
Who’s Next
Sgt. Pepper’s
Revolver
Best Of Traffic
Crime Of The Century
Simon & Garfunkel Greatest Hits
Beach Boys Greatest Hits
Spirit (first one)
Axis: Bold As Love
Aqualung (I know, I know …)
Are you working on any projects at the moment? Can you elaborate?
I just finished a History of Rock for children for an English publisher called TickTock Media. It should be out maybe in February of this year. It’s written for children who have problems with reading so the entire book is pretty simply and is only 1,200 words long. But that was great, picking and choosing the music and artists I think were important in the development of rock music.
I’ve been licensing my interviews to various companies who put together documentaries and DVDs. They might be doing a project on Black Sabbath, for example, and they’ll come to me to use some of the actual audio portions of my interviews with the band from way back then.
And my true first love is songwriting. I’ve had a few cuts on albums and did a world music project called Spirit Nation. It has sold about 50,000 CDs which is huge for that type of project. That originally came out on V2 Records and for about eight seconds, we actually outsold Moby. You can still find those records (there are two of them) on Amazon.
I’m potentially writing a script for this combination real person/animated film. David Seuss, a relative of Dr. Seuss, is an animator, and I’ve been in contact with him for sometime now. He’s looking for investors and it looks like he might have some funding. So, I’ll be writing this script for these two characters he’s created called WooLee and LeeBor. That would be a wonderful project to do.
Anyway, I hope you’ve gotten something from all of this nonsense. I appreciate you reading it.
Interview by Neil Daniels 2008
