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Running Away With the Circus (V) Kurt Loder
By Steven Ward Kurt Loder is probably best known as MTV's senior news correspondent. Before that, Loder was one of Rolling Stone's most talented and prolific feature writers in the '80s. Loder probably never would have gotten his job at Rolling Stone if it wasn't for his time working for Circus in the late '70s. Below, Loder goes into detail about that magical period... "I had been living in Europe for some time, and returned home to New
Jersey at the end of 1972--my first trip back to the States in nearly seven
years. Worked for awhile at a dreadful local 'community' newspaper, then
hooked up with a little magazine that was being started in my hometown of
Ocean City by the sister of noted writer (and fellow Ocean City homeboy)
Gay Talese. In the summer of 1976, really weary of life in the sticks, I
spotted an ad for a Long Island freebie rock weekly called Good
Times, located in the self-consciously quaint sort of town called
Roslyn. Drove up, interviewed, got hired for 200 bucks a week--shit, I
thought I was gonna get rich!--and after a while, David Fricke, then
employed at another rock rag, in Philly, applied for a job and got hired
too. David's truly encyclopedic knowledge of virtually every genre of music
was, and remains, hugely impressive. Fairly classic music geeks, we've been
best friends ever since.
"David and his wife got an apartment across the street from me and my
wife in Queens, and the two of us began driving into Manhattan virtually
every night to wallow in the flourishing punk rock scene at CBGB's, Max's,
etc. This was, fortunately, cool with the wives. I mean, we'd still be
sitting upright at four in the morning through fist fights, mass nod-outs,
and sets by bands with names like Blinding Headache, played to audiences of
three people, of which we'd be two-thirds. I don't think I can quite convey
how great days those were.
"Anyway, somehow, in 1978, David and I got wind of job openings at
Circus which had the great, glittering virtue of actually being
located in Manhattan. Also, it was known to be--along with
Crawdaddy!--a sort of farm team for Rolling Stone, which
was really the only place to work if music was what you wanted to write
about--write seriously, that is.
"I went over and interviewed with Gerry Rothberg, got the job; David
interviewed maybe an hour later, as I recall, got hired too, and suddenly
we were Manhattanites. It was all very exciting.
"The Circus offices were in a chi-chi sort of building on eats
57th Street called the Galleria--a towering atrium in the period style,
mini-jungles of discrete greenery splashed about the lobby. Gerry was...an
unusual sort of guy. The mag was strictly business to him (he could have
been in the rag trade just as convincingly), although I think he was also
under the impression that it made him a player in the big Manhattan
media/show-biz game. A nice guy, though. Gerry had long and elaborately
swept-back hair, the face of a lightly debauched cherub, and a wardrobe
that ran to frilly lavender shirts with long, built-in scarves for collars.
I understood he'd previously run a mag called Clyde, which was
devoted to...horses. Whatever was said to be 'happening' in commercial pop
music was what Gerry would want on the cover of Circus. Disco? Run
with it. Shirtless teen popsters? Put 'em on the cover. (He had a, shall we
say, ardent enthusiasm for pix of nubile youths.) Metal, of course, was
really the mag's meat.
"I believe I was officially an editor at Circus although the
memory's dim. Like everybody else, I churned reams of copy on a daily
basis. The rest of the staff when I arrived--funny writers like Ira Wolfman
and Mark Mehler; talented pros like Al Rudolph, the art director;
semi-legendary freelancers like John Swenson (a friend of Lester
Bangs)--tended to see their lives at the mag through a thick scrim of
cynical wit and deep irony. As an unpretentious, commercial prone metal
mag, Circus was actually a lot of fun. But it was a foregone
conclusion that writing of any technical ambition, about new acts of any
real excitement or interest, would make it in the mag only by the sheerest
accident.
"We did our best to slip stuff by, of course. I remember when Vladimir
Horowitz, the renowned classical pianist, actually made it onto the
Billboard pop chart with one of his albums (forget which one), and
I somehow managed to turn this into a Circus assignment. Horowitz
and his RCA handlers were no doubt bemused by the interview request; but we
did it and the story ran in Circus with the cover line: 'Vlad All
Over.' Why not?
"Although Gerry sat in an office denoted as that of the Editor, he was
an actual editor only in the most notional sense. (At least compared to
Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, who was a born editor of frequent
brilliance.) One deadline day, he was in the art department reading through
typeset copy that was being pasted onto boards for the next issue, when he
came across a pull quote--I believe it was by David Lee Roth of Van
Halen--that contained the phrase 'kinky shit,' I think. Gerry was all
a-fluster about such rude language being so prominently displayed in the
mag, so he stopped to the floor and began searching the carpet for
discarded lines of type in the same large font till he came upon the word
'turns,' which--he checked it--would fit right into the space now being so
objectionably taken up by 'shit.' So he had Al Rudolph--to his great
dismay--paste it in, and that's how the David Lee Roth quote ran: 'I don't
go for this kinky turns.' Brilliant, in a post-textual way.
"The atmosphere at Circus then was informed to a significant
extent by beer-fueled lunches at various of the neighborhood's tacky chain
eateries (and by regular after-work drinkathons as well). Such pissing and
moaning...
"I don't recall that anybody onboard at the time thought that
Circus was much more than a second-or third tier music magazine,
despite the full-color, glossy format--a publication of even the slightest
distinction only in the elaborately coiffed head of Gerry Rothberg.
Perversely, however, we were living in exciting times: punk and new wave
music were in the air all around us (there was a great new punk dance club
uptown called Hurrah; I was there one night when Sid Vicious broke a beer
bottle over the head of Patti Smith's brother), and the tiresome disco
boom was about to hit an enormous wall of consumer sales resistance. (I
remember a Circus ad guy--an habitue of the disco scene--telling
me very seriously one day that rock and roll was dead; that disco was here
to stay, and it was time for all of us editorial drones faced the fact.
Asshole.)
"Circus wasn't really a big drug den, but I do recall a brief
infatuation with a substance called 'Locker Room,' for which one or two of
us would make regular trips to a nearby corner newsstand, where little
bottles of the stuff were doled out right over the counter along with
cigarettes and skin mags. 'Locker Room' was an inhalant along the lines of
'poppers' so prized on the gay disco scene--take a whiff or two and your
heart started whomping against your ribcage in an effort to leap right
through your chest. As I say, this infatuation was brief. One night after
work, I was sitting in a bar (of course) with another staffer and fellow
'Locker Room' aficionado. Noting a sudden look of alarm on his face, I
gazed down and realized that blood was gushing spontaneously out of my nose
and down onto my shirt. After that, it was pretty much back to beer for the
both of us.
"In the spring of 1979, Fred Schruers, another Circus escapee,
having completed his requisite two years of running the Random Notes
section at Rolling Stone, just up the street, was getting ready to
move full-time into writing features for the magazine. A replacement was
needed. It was Fred, I believe (and/or maybe Jon Pareles--another
RSNY Times), who suggested
me. After writing a try out piece on Poco (!), I started a nine-year hitch
at Rolling Stone in May 1979.
"David (Fricke) lingered a bit longer at Circus, but eventually
he made the big RS jump too, and remains one of the mag's
preeminent oracles to this day.
"The idea of Circus being looked back upon now as some kind of
classic rock mag is a little disorienting to somebody who worked there at
the time. (You mean people were actually paying attention?) Maybe this is
just the way history works. Some very good writers did work at
Circus over the years, and they managed to get in some memorable
licks against pretty tall editorial odds. For me, the whole
experience--inextricable from the rich and exciting New York time in which
it took place--was great fun in a way that I suspect it couldn't be today
in quite the same way.
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