By Steven Ward

Anthony DeCurtis never liked the rock writing of Lester Bangs. He never read Creem. After 20 years, DeCurtis still writes for Rolling Stone and still loves and defends the world's most famous rock mag. DeCurtis hates Captain Beefheart.

DeCurtis is unapologetic about working for the world's most criticized rock magazine. In fact, DeCurtis said working at Rolling Stone changed his life and gave him exactly what he wanted as a rock writer: an audience. Possibly, the largest audience rock critics have ever known in its short history.

Steven:   The first thing that pops into my head is, what is a guy with a Ph.D. in American Literature doing writing about rock and roll?

Anthony:   I did set out to be an English professor, but I was always a big music fan. I guess in the back of my head I believed, or hoped, that I would write about music as part of whatever I did. In my dissertation I wrote about contemporary American fiction, things that were written after 1960. Since I was doing this in the 70s, that was pretty recent. I liked the idea of tangling with contemporary culture. I went to Catholic schools for grade and high school, and by the time I got to college I was envious of some my friends and their ability to think freely. I felt like I was disciplined and learned well but I always seemed to be waiting for someone to tell me what to think. When I got to college and grad school I opened up a lot and that all changed. There was an exhilaration about writing about contemporary culture, because very little had been said about it and no one could tell you what to think. That freedom translated pretty easily to popular music. But it's actually a long, gory story about how I made the transition from academia to writing about pop music.

Steven:    You were a grad student at Indiana University when you first started writing for the little town paper, The Bloomington Herald Telephone. How did that come about?

Anthony:    Through one of my friends in grad school, who is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon. His name is David Shumway. He was working at the paper as the pop music critic. He had to leave town because his wife got a job and they asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested. He said, 'I think my friend Anthony would want to do it.' So that's how I got that gig. They asked to meet me. I talked to them. They asked me to write a review, and I wrote about the first Cars album, actually. I brought the piece in. They said, it's good and they took me on. They let me write about whatever I wanted. The only time they ever complained was when I reviewed Gimmie Some Neck, the Ron Wood solo album. There was a track on there called, "F.U.C. Her." I rendered that title in the paper and the editor, an older woman, just kind of pointed at it to indicate to me that I was not supposed to do that.

I wrote about The Clash, Lou Reed. I did mostly record reviews but I did some overnight reviews. Bloomington was a cool town. It was on the way to Chicago, so someone like Luther Allison would play there regularly. The music school there is good, so jazzbos would come by a lot. I wrote about Dexter Gordon and Sun Ra, who both performed there. If someone was passing through town--like Weather Report, I got to meet Jaco Pastorious--I would review them. I reviewed Elvis Costello and B.B. King. I mean, the job was nice but it was ridiculous. I got paid $12.50 a story, which at the time was a nice addition to my meager income as a graduate student. The job market for English Ph.D.s was shrinking, so the notion that I might have something else in my pocket was inviting. I was then hired to teach for a year in the English Department at Emory University in Atlanta--freshman writing courses, surveys in poetry and fiction. I taught a seminar in Thomas Pynchon. While I was down there, the whole Athens thing was going on. When my year at Emory ended, I stayed down South and I was looking around for work. I sent a letter to Jim Henke, who was an editor at Rolling Stone, and asked him if I could write about the B52s who were coming back to Georgia to do their first shows after becoming successful. I wanted to write a concert review. I didn't send him any clips--just a brief, three-paragraph note. He called me up one day and said, "Look, I don't know who you are or what your writing is like, but it's a good idea, so go and review the show. If your piece is good, we'll run it."

Steven:   Too bad those days are over.

Anthony:    Yeah. I was too naive to know that you were not supposed to do that. But I got the assignment and I began to cover that scene a bit, both locally and nationally.

Steven:    That was before you started working at Record, right?

Anthony:    Yeah. Writing for Record was the breakthrough for me; I think that was 1982. I got the Rolling Stone assignment in 1980, and did one other piece for them. While all this was going on, I got a job as a business and technical writer at Georgia Tech to make money. But I also started to do more journalism and a lot of that was music writing. There was a little monthly called Muzik! that I wrote for--for free of course. I was trying to pick up experience, to get my work out there. I felt that I was good and if people saw what I could do I would get other opportunities. I wrote for Musician through the recommendation of the now legendary Andy Slater, who these days manages and produces The Wallflowers, Fiona Apple and Macy Gray. Andy was a writer back then in Georgia, and we were good friends. He got an assignment from Musician to review a Clash show, but he couldn't do it, and he recommended me. I got a few assignments from Musician subsequently. But at Record, this guy David McGee really took a liking to my stuff, and that's where I did my first big stories. I did a David Byrne cover, a Go-Gos cover. Getting that regular work and that platform gave me the courage to move back to New York City, where I grew up. That was in 1984. I got hired at Record in 1985.

Steven:    Who were some of the other staffers at Record?

Anthony:    There were not a lot of us, believe me. McGee was the editor. Wayne King had been there but he left just when I came on. John McAlley, who is now the music editor at Entertainment Weekly, was the photo editor. Joe Dizney, who is now the art director at the Wall Street Journal, was our art director. It was an extremely small staff. I think there were four full time edit people.

Steven:    Record was some kind of music offshoot of Rolling Stone, wasn't it?

Anthony:    Around 1980, Rolling Stone began to cover other aspects of popular culture more energetically than music. Music was not really happening at the time on that mainstream level. There was a sense that Record would become the full-on music magazine and Rolling Stone would be this pop culture publication. The demise of Record came about because Rolling Stone started moving back to covering music aggressively and because Jann bought US magazine. We were always like Rolling Stone's bastard kid brother anyway. Rolling Stone would be jetting people all over the place for stories, and we would have to beg for $500 to touch up a photo for our cover. I mean, Rolling Stone would kill photo shoots that would have cost our entire photo budget for the year. Record was definitely run on a shoestring. But it was great for me. I got a lot of experience there and not incidentally, the guys at Rolling Stone saw my work. Jim Henke was the music editor at Rolling Stone then. So when Record folded in 1985, I gave him a call. I said, "Hey, I'm looking for work. If you have anything for me to do, I would love to do it." I had been reviewing pretty regularly for Rolling Stone while I was at Record. Jim said they were a little short-handed and he started giving me stuff to do. A month later he hired me. And that was the total breakthrough.

You know I tell this story in a fairly offhand way but all of this was very emotionally charged for me. I was in my early 30s by this time. In all modesty, it had always seemed like I was going to do something big, but nothing ever seemed to work out. Because of the job market, my academic career was a crushing disappointment. I left that world with the greatest reluctance, and I was unprepared for anything else. The transition to journalism was not easy. So when I was first hired at Record, it was a huge thrill. I thought, finally I got a gig. But then Jann folded Record within a year of my getting there. So when Rolling Stone hired me after that, I mean, that was unbelievable. I got the job at Rolling Stone because I had been offered another job--a time-worn path to getting anything beneficial at Rolling Stone, as I was later to learn. After Record folded, I was freelancing and then the Westchester-Gannett newspapers, a string of 10 newspapers in the suburbs north of New York City, wanted to hire me as a news feature writer. I thought, "Great, I can do the newspaper thing." But Jim had asked me, in this very mysterious Rolling Stone type way, "What's going on with you?" I said I was looking for a job. He said, "Don't do anything until you talk to me." So when I got the newspaper job offer, I told Jim about it. Jim said, "Let me talk to Jann." So he did and they made me an offer matching--though not exceeding--the Westchester Gannett salary, another aspect of Rolling Stone that I would come to know. To their credit, Westchester stepped up and offered me a couple of grand more--$29,000. Rolling Stone held firm at $27,000, and I took it. I walked in there to accept the job offer and Jann came into Jim's office. Jim said, "Jann you know Anthony right? He's come to work for us." And Jann said, "Yeah. Hi Anthony. Welcome aboard...again."

Steven:    Tell me about your favorite non-music writers?

Anthony:    Don DeLillo and Martin Amis are probably my two favorites. Both have a vision as well as a style. The writing, in both cases, is particularly strong. Amis is a little easier match to what I try to do, though I'm not as much of a smartass. But he can do the high style, while also doing the slang and the hip stuff. DeLillo is a little more enclosed although his characters play around with some of the goofier aspects of language. But both those guys are models for me.

The often overlooked and un-discussed aspect of music criticism is that--it's writing. It is not the music, and it is not your version of the music. It's writing. So, you want to have a style that makes sense for what you're writing about. This idea that writing reproduces its subject is ridiculous. If someone wants to feel the effect of the music, they need to go listen to the music. That's what the music is for. But rock critics are supposed to be writing, and what they do has to succeed as writing. I really believe that, but I'm not sure that many other critics do.

Steven:    What rock mags did you read when growing up?

Anthony:    The first rock criticism I read was in the Village Voice. It was by Annie Fisher. Her stuff was really good. I read Richard Goldstein. I remember the semi-famous piece he wrote on the Rolling Stones when they were in NYC in 1966. It was great. I remember sitting in Downing Street Park on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, which was where I grew up, and just devouring that piece. The Voice was also important to my political coming of age. I grew up in the Village, but it was an Italian neighborhood then and it might as well have been some tiny town outside Naples. It was very enclosed. People spoke Italian and the Catholic thing was in very full effect. It was almost medieval. But I grew up in an apartment at the corner of Bleecker Street and 10th Street, and so all I had to do was walk outside and there were alternatives. The Voice offices were right around the corner, literally two blocks away, and reading the Voice was where I learned about politics when I was a kid. It was transformative. It made a huge difference to me in terms of pop culture and it gave me a larger way of thinking about issues like the Vietnam War.

Creem meant nothing to me. It just seemed like a magazine for kids and geeks. Rolling Stone made a huge impact. That was gripping. It was something I really wanted. What Jann meant it to be, is what it was--sort of a news magazine for the counterculture. It covered those things very seriously. They would take Pete Townshend...

Steven:    Pete Townshend is my hero.

Anthony:    Yeah. Jann would do a 10,000 word interview with Pete Townshend. I can still quote from that piece. That's what I wanted to read. That made a big, big impact on me. Fusion was a good magazine. I actually sent them some stuff when I was 17. I sent them a review of Beck-ola, the second album by the Jeff Beck Group. I got a letter back from an editor saying, "I already assigned this to someone, but please send us more record reviews." I just thought that was the kind of thing he must say to everyone, so I never sent anything else to him.

Steven:    You touched on this already, but what other rock writers did you like and which ones might have influenced your writing? I know Lester Bangs surely did not.

Anthony:    Yeah. Lester was the counter influence--what not to be. But John Mendelssohn, who I later had a bit of a falling out with when I was at Rolling Stone, was a guy whose writing I liked a great deal.

Steven:    Really? He was sort of lumped in the Bangs/Meltzer camp

Anthony:    Yeah, but he was better than either of those two I think. I also used to read Crawdaddy! Paul Williams was someone I liked. It's funny because I can remember buying a copy of Crawdaddy! in this little record shop on Bleecker Street. It was stapled together and had a picture of Donovan on the cover--from his Sunshine Superman period. One issue had, like, a 10-million word interview with Brian Wilson. Nothing could have seemed less hip at the time. Things like The Stones and Dylan seemed dangerous and scary, but--Jesus Christ!--Brian Wilson? How could he be taken seriously? But how prescient that was. That was the first piece I ever read that took the Beach Boys seriously. Paul really understood what was happening with that. As for other writers who influenced me, I should also mention John Rockwell and Robert Palmer, who was a friend and my absolute favorite music writer.

Steven:    What about Robert Christgau? He's a fan of your writing, from what I understand. Did he have any kind of influence on you?

Anthony:    Christgau made an impact on me a little later. When punk happened, he came alive in a really compelling way in the Voice. Especially then, when there was no Internet and it was hard to get information. In 1977, was cable TV even around? Mainstream media would never touch the punks. So these pieces Christgau was writing and assigning week after week made a tremendous impact on me when I was in Bloomington and later in Atlanta. When I began to hang around the music scene in Athens and Atlanta, I began to understand how a mention in the Voice could mean everything to people. Bands would live on it, and it could really help energize a scene. I interviewed Bob once for a fanzine in the early 80s, and he was very gracious and generous with his time. He took me seriously. He asked me to vote in the Pazz and Jop poll which, to me, was a big deal. He never asked me to write for him in the Voice--I pitched him once or twice--but he was even gracious about that.

It's funny that you say he likes my writing. I had the impression that he liked my writing reasonably well, but thought that it was just not right for the Voice. He recommended me to others and made suggestions. He was a total pro and seemed like a nice guy. One person he recommended me to was the sainted Billy Altman, whom I actually know a bit now. Billy sternly lectured me about calling him at home. He was working for Creem. Christgau gave me his phone number. So I sent Billy some stuff and then I called him. I got this very severe, "Why are you calling me at home?" He had enough writers, he said, and didn't need any more. Years later, one night at the Bottom Line, he apologized for it. I was struck that he even remembered it, because it was a five-minute conversation. I remembered it, but you tend to remember anyone who is cruel to you while you are coming up. A particularly notable asshole I remember was the equally sainted Ira Kaplan, who is now in Yo La Tengo. He was an editor at New York Rocker. He edited a story of mine and ended up killing it so that he could reassign it to one of his friends. He sent these scathing, incredibly condescending comments back to me about the piece. Purely coincidentally, of course, Yo La Tengo never got much coverage in the review section at Rolling Stone while I was editing it.

Part 2 of Anthony DeCurtis interview