What has happened in the real world as a result of reviews you've written?

And I won't say which band as I still feel quite guilty about it.

(Though, you really have to wonder about a band with such fragile egos that a little bit of message board heckling could break them up...)

I met my wife at a performance by a band she'd discovered because of a very positive review of them I'd written.

This is cool.

The band was pretty psyched and I would imagine it had something to do with them eventually getting signed. Now I hear they are pretty big in the UK, of all places. I haven't heard anything from them since... it was pretty vapid pop-punk, but had more hook than a tacklebox.

But... is this a non-bad thing?

Back in 1991 or so, I'd written up an article on local faves, Cop Shoot Cop for a freebie weekly called NY PERSPECTIVES. Sometime shortly afterwards, I was drafted to do some writing for lamentable fashion magazine, IN-FASHION (an advertisement-driven pile of dreck that basically resembled a garish C+C Music Factory video, with just as much depth). In any event, they wanted me to contribute to a section called something like "Chillin' in The `Hood" (or something equally embarassing like that) wherein you'd profile an artist hanging out on their home turf, talking about how great it was, etc. etc. So, being that I'd recently chatted with the C$C boys with a mutually beneficial outcome, my editor suggested getting them, since they were "edgey", etc. Despite my protests that the band would probably not want to be profiled in a magazine devoted to fashion, the editor pushed. Somehow, C$C's publicity representative (Formula, I believe) thought it was an equally marvy idea. I was to go hang out with Cop Shoot Cop again in their then-home base of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (this years prior to its current electroclash rennaissance). In any event, when the band actually got word of this, as predicted, they were less than exactly tickeled. I was told to meet them at a diner a few blocks from Peter Luger's steak house in Williamsburg. I later learned that they'd initially planned to slaughter a lamb and splay it's rib cage apart across a table with the legend: "FUCK YOU IN FASHION" pinned on it (which would've been both suitably shocking and somewhat amusing). But, rather anticlimactically, they merely showed up and played along dutifully, resulting in some lovely photographs and a savagely edited piece that didn't even get a mention in the table of contents of the issue it eventually appeared it. Hooray again.

The funniest thing that ever happened regarding a review I wrote was in '96. I reviewed an Everclear show for my college newspaper and I wrote about two senteces slagging the local openers Magneto USA. The band flew to Los Angeles the next day to start recording an album. They also changed they're name... to Fastball. Not that I really had any effect on that, but I still thought it was funny.

Also, I got a letter vehemently disagreeing with my negative review of an Erasure album once.

Maybe it's just the idea that a band called Bowling for Soup must be from Canada. ;-)

I lost a lot of friends over that one, but gained one awesome co-conspirator.

According to some friends who went, 311 never mentioned it but opening act Sugar Ray (who were shilling for the Floored album) were mad about it. Mark McGrath was stomping around the stage talking about the know-nothings who ripped on 311 in the paper. The irony of course being that after the weak-except-for-"Fly" Floored album, I've become a big Sugar Ray fan, especially the self-titled album.

Like someone else who posted before, I also got invited to join a band I wrote about (this was for a local paper in Rochester about 10 years ago). Their drummer quit right around the time my review came out, and they liked that I mentioned Big Star in my review, so they asked me in. I played with them for about a year, culminating in a horrible drunken gig (on a mixed bill with a rap crew and a funk band) in which our barely-standing singer-songwriters broke all their strings in the first two songs and spent the rest of the set hurling books they'd stolen from a chain bookstore where one of them worked into the audience. I think they thought it was a populist gesture -- literature for the masses! -- but people were getting hit in the head, spilling their drinks, etc. So I'm not really sure if the whole thing qualifies as "not a bad thing" or not. I guess it was fun.

Come to think it, that was the last music review i ever wrote.

In other words, exactly what I've wanted for the last 18 months - a really good friend who's close at hand. And all because I wrote about her on my weblog.

And to think, if I'd done anything stupid last summer, I would have missed all of this...