Everett True Interview

Legendary music scribe Everett True worked on the NME and Melody Maker in the eighties and then in the nineties he was the music editor at Vox and The Stranger. He is currently the Publisher-At-Large at Plan B which he founded after the collapse of Careless Talk Costs Lives which he founded in 2002. He is also the author of biographies of Ramones, The White Stripes and Nirvana. Perhaps his most well-known work is Live Through This: American Rock Music In The Nineties. Visit www.planbmag.com.

 

Why did you become a music journalist? Was it something you planned in your teens?

I would dance at the front of concerts. It frustrated me that others didn’t, so I decided I would try and do something about it, try and communicate the excitement I felt. This diversified into writing 200-word reviews of new bands for NME in the 80s that the more ‘established’ writers would pick up on four weeks later and pretend they’d ‘discovered’.  Lesson one: no fucking critic has ever discovered anyone. The band or artist already exists. I was mostly fuelled by exclamation marks. I couldn’t string a sentence together and was brought up to distrust the music press, any large corporation, anyone trendy – it certainly wasn’t a ‘career’ choice.

 

You’ve worked on a number magazines, including the NME and Melody Maker. Can you give me a brief outline of your career in music journalism?

At Communication Blur, I wandered star-struck through Hyde Park and dreamt of releasing a seven-inch single. At The Legend!, I stood by the entrance of the Hammersmith Clarendon with my Polish shopping basket as streams of would-be hipsters accosted me. At NME, I danced, and every touring band (of a certain size) slept on the floor of my shared Cricklewood house. At MM, I danced and drank and flew to America at every available opportunity, where I would deliberately miss planes back home and regularly be protected from surly brawlers by laughing, scrawny musicians. At VOX, I sulked and rarely ventured out of my corporate office. At The Stranger, I danced and drank and didn’t need to pretend to miss planes back to the UK as I was already in America. At The Age, I wrote stories about public transport and my gambling addiction. At Careless Talk Costs Lives, I fell passionately back in love with music and the mysticism of writing, and felt like I was creating history every time I sat in front of a computer or drank heavily. At Plan B, I acknowledged my own limitations. In between, I’ve been a cleaner, a screen-printer, an advertising copywriter (that is what they call those Amazon editorial ‘reviews’, right?) and am currently a student. I have written a handful of books, best ignored. I am certainly not a journalist. I am a tastemaker and, more importantly, an institution.

 

What was your first paid published piece?

It was a 150-word review of ace cartoon trash-psych band X-Men for NME’s ‘In Brief’ live section, starting with the words, “Like ice cream on a hot summer’s day…” It was typed up on the back of reject photographic paper, and delivered to the front desk of the NME’s Carnaby St offices with all the casual arrogance of the young. X-Men guitarist Tom went on to form Th’ Faith Healers, a fine Camden ‘lurch’ band.

 

In the early eighties you created your own fanzine called The Legend!. Why did you do that?

If I hadn’t, no one else would’ve done. It was called The Legend! because that was my stage name, and I already knew from bitter experience that I was not charismatic, talented or interesting enough for anyone else to write about me so I would have to. It deliberately contained no interviews, because even back then I already instinctively knew musicians are a fundamentally boring breed – lovely to bed and to brawl with, but let’s all realise our limitations, shall we? The second issue contained a fine impassioned diatribe about the fact I was still a virgin (at the age of 22) which later led to a sweet kiss from a punkette down the Ambulance Station.

 

When you worked at Melody Maker you were sent over to Seattle to cover the grunge scene in the late eighties. What were your initial thoughts on the music scene in Seattle?

Loud, fun, drunken, fun, loud, Jesus so this is why all those metal fans go see their favourite bands, it’s fucking insanely great fun to carve a groove into the floor with your head (I actually did that once, watching Mötörhead at Hammersmith Odeon) and drink cheap Mexican beer and whiskey on the Puget Sound waterfront with all these sardonic, smart-ass, long-haired American musicians. Pretty much the first thing I did when I arrived was to go down the fish market and get all my hair cut off. I’d been brought up to believe that hard rock was wrong somehow: but fuck! Sub Pop certainly and surely and irrevocably changed my attitude about that.

 

You moved back to Seattle in the late nineties and became the music editor of The Stranger. What can you say about that period of your career?

It was the best job I’ve had, short of the five or so years when I was rampaging hard at Melody Maker in the early 90s. I lived five minutes walk away from the office, where I’d show invariably suffering from the night before and way late in the day, do the week’s work in about 30 minutes, wander out down some random music venue or bar, and start all over again. One musician tried to shut the paper down with his lawyer in tow if I printed an email conversation we’d been having. Another is still talking 12 years on about a 100-word review I gave his mediocre, very average rock band the week I arrived – like somehow it’s still the highlight of his life. Hip hop crews offered me gun protection. Our intrepid receptionist Mike Nipper pissed off Courtney Love mightily. At the Christmas party, the editor of Punk Planet – who was playing in my toy instrument pick-up band at the time, covered with beer and spittle – was heard to remark that our performance was the most punk thing he’d ever done in his life. I started a regular weekly column – rival papers wrote news stories round its contents, usually when they were total lies. A taxi driver nearly crashed his cab one time upon discovering who I was. I was banned from the Crocodile Café (no mean feat) and walked like a God once more.

 

How had Seattle changed over the years while you were gone?

It has more roundabouts, more Starbucks outlets, more fancy skyscrapers, not quite as many hookers (certainly not downtown), same amount of junkies and the same amount of rain. I did finally get to see Mount Rainer, though. All the fake grunge kids who’d moved up from LA to be part of some music ‘explosion’ or other had moved back down again once it was apparent the golden carrot had been withdrawn. Sub Pop had larger offices, but without the view. No one knew my name anymore.

 

Of all the articles and reviews you have written which ones are you most proud of?

Um. There’s a Dirtbombs cover story in Careless Talk Costs Lives that seems OK in places and contains a nice defence of rock music, utilising dance. (Incidentally, what is so wrong with dancing about architecture?) There’s a downbeat Young People cover article in a later issue that I used to quote from on stage, because the idea was it was helping me cope with the concept of death (it didn’t). I enjoyed meeting Electrelane, and enjoyed hyping Huggy Bear to the point of national irritant. There was a review of Smashing Pumpkins live in Chicago – of course I didn’t actually watch the show – that caused the cancellation of tens of thousands of pounds of advertising revenue in MM and the undying enmity of their slap-headed singer. Bono once sent me a hatchet, inscribed with the words, “Do your duty”. I tried. I pretty much single-handedly created Courtney Love’s whole persona in the space of a 350-word review. I’m best when I’m setting out my stall.

 

You’ve written number of books, including biographies of the Ramones and The White Stripes. How do you go about researching a music biography?

Sit around for months on end, feeling dreadful because you haven’t started even fucking researching the book yet. Sit around for a few months further. Randomly phone up a few folk who might’ve heard your name once upon a time, and hope they’re going to be enthused by the idea of talking to you. Failing that, just latch onto a couple of die-hard fans and get them to tell the story for you. I hear tell that the Internet is a fairly useful tool these days. Both the Ramones and White Stripes books were based round one major interview with the artists in question – strung out and hopefully made a little more colourful by a couple of weeks spent drinking and hanging out in the artists’ respective home towns. I slept on Meg White’s floor but she didn’t speak to me for the book.

 

Your tome on Nirvana was personal because you had a personal connection/friendship with Kurt Cobain. What kinds of emotions did you go through when writing the book? How long did it take to write?

See above. For most of the time it felt like I was attending AA meetings or traversing with the ghosts of the past. It’s weird how people get round folk they consider ‘famous’: now I’m a former close personal friend of Kurt Cobain’s. I don’t ever recall at the time that being the case. I knew his wife, certainly. I wish I’d spent more time in Olympia while I was researching it, and I most certainly wish that I hadn’t partaken in that night of revelry with Bob Whittaker (who I plumb forgot to interview for the book) which led to me being laid up ill in bed in a Seattle basement, while my wife was going through her second trimester of pregnancy thousands of miles away.
It took close on three years to write, but at least 2/3 of that was me thinking that I really ought to start writing it one of these days. It’s a sloppy piece of shit, as well.

 

You’ve been a music journalist for over 20 years. How has music journalism changed in the UK over the past three decades?

I’m not sure it has, except to solidify and congeal and become set in its ways, the way all art forms do once they’ve been around for a certain while. Is this a good thing? You tell me. I’ll tell you one goddamn thing though – those kids at Pitchfork don’t understand shit, for all their fancy college degrees. For as long as I can remember, those people have always been the enemy.

 

What differences, if any, are there between US and UK rock journalism?

It depends where you look. In the mainstream, I’d imagine it’s the same boring old shit everywhere. In the slipstream, I would hope that folk feel free to follow their own path, free of peer encumbrance…the main reason they don’t is because most people don’t have any fucking ideas or imagination when left to their own devices.

 

Are there any contemporary music magazines you’re a fan of?

The only ones I’m fans of are the ones written in languages I don’t understand ­­– Bant from Istanbul, for example. To be quite frank, I’ve never really been a fan of music critics.

 

In 2002 you set up the magazine Careless Talk Costs Lives. Why did you decide to create your own magazine?

See above (answer about The Legend!) – no one was offering me a voice so I had to create my own platform once again. Um, that’s not entirely true. First, I was writing heavily on the web at the tail-end of the dot.com boom and fed up with reviewing the same six albums every week for five different places. I was making plenty of money, sure, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated at the fact there was all this great, great music going ignored by the corporate editors – is you go to www.tangents.co.uk all of this is quite well documented in my archived journals. Second, crazed genius photographer Steve Gullick asked me to come in with him. It was his idea. I supplied the grunts.

 

Can you tell me about Plan B, its history and aims?

CTCL started at issue 12, counted down to issue 1 and stopped, firmly of the belief that all art should be finite. The week it stopped we got through our visas to go live in Australia and that would’ve been that except that the week it stopped my wife also got offered a much better paying job and so we stuck around. So there I was. Steve was having too much fun to stop, so he kept going with the classy Loose Lips Sink Ships. I had this weird-ass community that I’d unwittingly built up from nowhere, so I figured I might as well do something with it. Plus, CTCL had been a full-time job for over two years – entirely unpaid – and I kind of wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to create a great music magazine and still earn a living from it. It took a while, and no one gets paid bugger all really, but Plan B does employ around six-eight people, office in London, monthly, still going…and all from nothing but the enthusiasm of our staff, contributors, advertisers and readers.

 

Of all the interviews you’ve done over the years which artist did you most enjoy interviewing?

Yoko Ono at the Dakota comes to mind, but that’s only when I want to impress the part of myself that is still vaguely impressed by the fact I’ve met someone that someone else might have heard of. Likewise, Joey Ramone in his NYC apartment – both musicians were very sweet to me as well, which really added to the experience. There have been a couple of interviews where I’ve been propositioned, but I won’t name names. Kim Deal is always good value. I’m listening to M. Ward right now so I’m remembering the night I spent at his house in Portland. On the whole, I prefer to interview folk that no one knows beyond a select few.

 

And the least enjoyable interview?

Fairly much anything conducted on the phone…but not always. I guess it’s the ones where the artists couldn’t give a crap about talking to you: Martha Wainwright, The Bell Rays, Ice Cube, all spring to mind. Fortunately, I’m very rarely in those situations as it runs contrary to my whole life to be talking to folk who couldn’t give a crap.

 

Can you recall some of the best gigs you’ve been to?

No. Not really. If I started listing some that would be totally wrong to the other 3 or 400 I missed out. My first was Buzzcocks supported by Subway Sect at Chelmsford Odeon, and I was that naïve I didn’t understand why everyone didn’t leave after Subway Sect played. I’ve seen a whole slew of great shows up here in Australia recently – Laughing Clowns at ATP, Mount Buller, Afrirampo and Harmonia and Michael Gira in Brisbane, Robert Forster, The Drones, The Young Liberals…some of my real favourite shows have been when I’ve been performing myself.

 

Who are your favourite music scribes?

I have some that I number as friends, but sorry – I really don’t read music criticism. In recent years, I’ll allow for Miss AMP if she’s on song. Photographers, on the other hand…Steve Gullick, Charles Peterson, Stephen Sweet back when he was on song, Kevin Westenberg, Stuart Dayman, Cat Stevens…

 

And your favourite music books?

When I was younger I can recall enjoying Gerri Hershey’s Nowhere To Run (though I’m not sure I would now), whoever wrote Sweet Soul Music [Peter Guralnick] and a Greil Marcus tome…but again, this really isn’t my chosen field.

 

Who are your favourite artists?

Young Marble Giants. Patrik Fitzgerald. Dexys Midnight Runners. Ramones (up to, and including, half of Too Tough To Die). Nina Simone. The Raincoats. The Slits. Sonic Youth. Elvis Costello. Tom Waits. The Laughing Clowns. Billie Holiday. Chris Connor. The Ronettes. Scout Niblett. To be honest, I go more for individual songs – particularly anything where the individual voice shines through (early 20th Century folk and blues and chant-song: 60s soul and funk: 70s punk: 90s and 00s hip hop: lo-fi, for want of a better word).

 

Do you have any projects planned? Can you elaborate?

I’m currently working on a Daniel Johnston biography, due out through Omnibus later this year (ha!). Unfortunately, all the interviews are having to be conducted on the phone or via email…Interview by Neil Daniels, 2009.

 

Interview by Neil Daniels 2009