Rolling Music Writers' Thread

Almost all of my gig reviews have a deadline of 6:00 am the following morning, so I have to write them as soon as I get home. As a natural procrastinator, I find this concentrates the mind wonderfully. (It also means that none of them are written stone cold sober, but I found my optimum level of consumption quite early on.)

yeah, i used to do gig reviews for a daily paper, with a 3am the next morning deadline, which i actually really loved - it focused my mind, and meant i didn't have any 'homework' hanging over me.

otherwise, though, i think i spend the time between 'finishing' a piece of work and the deadline just honing and fiddling with every detail. i had a relatively quiet week last week, and spent five straight days polishing every line of a 1000 word blog piece for MOJO - but i was aiming for being 'funny', which i don't do terribly often, and whcih, for me, is always a matter of swapping a dozen possible jokes in and out of every line.

xp Actually, that raises another question. Somebody just mentioned to me last month that they write for a publication where the policy is that critics are not allowed to consume alcohol at the concerts they're covering. There's some logic to that rule, I guess, but I'd honestly never heard of it before. (And it's hard to think of a show I've been to, including ones I've reviewed, where beer was available that I haven't had some. Also, since it's likely that most people don't watch shows entirely sober, I'm wondering whether not drinking might unfairly skew opinions about the music.) Anyway, I wonder how rare this policy is.

can someone email maura@idolator dot com and tell her what publication that is?

Wow, that's unimaginably harsh! For me, the right amount of booze helps rather than hinders the review - easing me over the initial hump, so that the words start flowing more freely. My regular intake: two pints of ordinary lager. Not a drop more, not a drop less. I've become quite superstitious about it.

There's been one recent change, which for me has worked out very well: about a year ago, my newspaper lifted the word count restriction for the web versions of gig reviews, retaining it just for the print versions. So we're now asked to "write freely" for the web version, and to submit an edited print version at the same time. This has improved my whole attitude to the editing process.

the number of offices i've worked in where intoxicants much stronger than alcohol seemed to fuel the entire production team...

Somebody just mentioned to me last month that they write for a publication where the policy is that critics are not allowed to consume alcohol at the concerts they're covering.

I would think sports writers would find the idea of such a 'restriction' hysterical.

And how does one enforce it, other than having a snitch who know what you look like and is near you at the show?

Now I'm curious. The name of the pub needs publishing so that we can be supercilious with those willing to work for a fifteen dollar or less review and be teetotal.

Let's just say it's a daily in Texas. Don't want to get any more specific than that without actually verifying the rule first-hand -- sounds really far-fetched to me, and I'm still kind of incredulous.

And yeah, apparently the theory is, if you drink at a show, a friend of your boss's might see you there.

Let's just say it's a daily in Texas.

Now you know -- in Texas (!?), of all places -- that is just wrong and anti-'Mercan. How would anyone survive during college football season?

concert reviewing: the last bastion of socially accepted drinking on the job (bartending excluded)?

I don't drink, so I get a few editors assigning me for festival coverage because they like how I have the energy to stay on my feet and watch bands for 10 hrs at a time

I don't drink either, and I find it can occasionally make concert reviewing difficult, because most acts don't have a solid 75 minutes in 'em, frankly, so by around a half hour into the headliner's set I'm usually thinking, "get me the fuck out of here already," and maybe if I was slightly drunk I wouldn't feel that way.

Nah, you'd feel that way anyway. Or at least I probably would. But then, that's part of why I've never done many live reviews.

Actually, one of the few times I got chewed out by my bosses in my decade at the Voice was when a writer said in a Sound Of The City review that they'd left the show they were reviewing before the encore. Seemed like a valid response to me, if the band was sucking, but my bosses thought otherwise.

what if you bailed early from one of those zoning-board meetings you covered as a cub reporter? what if something HAPPENS during the encore. doesn't a reviewer have some responsibility toward the readers or is all about yr vaunted tastes & opinions.

at least r. meltzer making things up in a concert review represents some attempt at, you know, being entertaining. writing that you left a show early because the band sucked is pretty fucking arrogant IMO. yr bosses were correct.

It depends on the show. I walked out of an Eagles concert I reviewed in 2003 when the band showed no inclination to stop playing after two encores and three hours.

meanwhile every Pearl Jam concert I've attended has pulled out some weird, unexpected shit in the last third (the first time I reviewed them though was when Sleater Kinney opened for them).

Well, I'm not really saying my bosses were wrong, in retrospect. Just saying what my thoughts had been when reading/editing the review (in which the leaving-of-show was entertaining, until I got called out on it.) (For what it's worth, I've never personally left a concert I was reviewing before it was done, no matter how much I hated it. And I'm pretty sure I've never reviewed an album for publication that I hadn't actually listened to all the way through -- though there's a Nirvana album in my metal book I didn't have a copy of on hand when I wrote the review. But I've definitely written show previews of bands based on just a few songs.)

didn't mean to come off like moses up there. an embarrassing number of albums i reviewed in the old RS record guide got only a cursory listen or two. a classic case of biting more than you can chew. previews or listings are exempt from review standards.

I've walked out early from two shows that I've reviewed (from a total of around 150), because a) I already had all the information I needed and b) I couldn't stand to be there a second longer. One was Seasick Steve, and the other was (to my surprise) Manu Chao.

you have to be some sort of wizard to get me to read a review of a live show. so, hats off to the people who have to write them. (i can think of maybe one in the last decade that was actually memorable. greg tate's springsteen show thing in the voice.)

(but then my gold standard might actually be bukowski's stones review in creem: http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/charles-bukowski-jaggernaut-wild-horse-on-a-plastic-phallus-1975/)

i always stay till the end of a show. what if someone died?? also, i like concerts.

Well, there must be daily papers that still, at least on occasion, run reviews the morning after certain "important" shows, right? Which might well mean pages close early enough to require reviewers to file before shows end. (The dailies I read most seem to stick to the two-or-even-three-days-after rule, but I get the idea that that's a convention that's evolved over time. I could be way off on that, though; never tracked it very closely.)

And Scott is right -- of all the kinds of music criticism, live reviews are probably the most boring to read, and almost definitely the most boring to write (and to edit, which is why I delegated Sound of the City to sub-editors when they were available.)

Well, in the Lehigh Valley they didn't sell beer at the big venues, so you could maybe have a
soda. Since many of these had to be filed for publication in the morning newspaper, and they occured at night, they often mandated that the reporter had to leave the venue -before- the show was over.

This was before well before you could have a laptop with you and file wireless. Hard to imagine, but yes, lots and lots of people did it this way.

Anyway, the small clubs in the area were fairly dire. Most of the time the newspaper was interested in reviews of locals for special section on Saturday which would publish an anthology of reviews from the seven days +1 previous. Then you could always stay until the bitter end. This led to many situations in which having a beer was one way to get through the night. I recall one time being assigned to cover stand-up comedians performing at a local club, one in which the promoter had neglected to inform them was gay. One of the comedians, who was rather inobservant, had a routine based on gay slurs and homophobia.

It takes little imagination to realize ordering a drink in such a situation is the human and rational thing to do.

xhuxk you've blown my mind with this no-alcohol policy.

xpost: I mostly write for a regional "evening" daily (which actually appears around 10am), and we run all live reviews - no matter how big or small - on the website the morning after. Until around 6 months ago they also ran in print the day after, but that's now slipped back a day. And, um, live reviews are easily my favourite to write!

I don't drink, so I get a few editors assigning me for festival coverage because they like how I have the energy to stay on my feet and watch bands for 10 hrs at a time

is this something you've been told or something you're guessing?

or maybe a little of each (probably the correct answer)

i wanted to revive this, but perhaps kind of ironically, i don't know what to write...

well i guess that's a fair enough question - when you're deciding to pitch an idea, how do you decide what to cover? if it's reviews etc, do you just have a look at what you've been sent that month from the flacks and pitch those, or do something else?

That's usually how it goes, or I call an editor and threaten to kidnap his cocker spaniel if he won't publish me.

music writers (especially for free weeklies), what is the worst pun-based headline you/your colleagues/your editors have committed to print?

another question please: how many listens to an album in average before writing a review?

oh god i've cranked out so many weak headlines -- don't know if any were particularly outrageous puns but i've had some dogs to be sure

another question please: how many listens to an album in average before writing a review?

Ha -- I just wrote a single review after listening to 1:30 of the song.

it's probably pretty shitty ?!

Zeno - for me it really depends on how much I like the album to be honest. If I've got, say 5 albums to review and 2 of them are awesome, one is just fine and 2 of them are shit then it's only normal that I listen to them as I'd listen to CDs normally. Biased? Maybe so. But I always always try to give even the most awful stuff at least two full listens. That said, if the PR company can't be arsed to send me the CD until a day before deadline then that's just tough.

but there are lots of albums where it takes a number of listenning to figure out if you like them or not.
it's probably very hard on a deadline (and with a potential of regreting what you wrote later on)

I'm not a big 'repeat listener' as a music fan in general -- putting something on more than once in a week is considered heavy duty listening by my standards. With a tight deadline I might listen to it a couple times in the space of a day, if I have a week or more it'll be at least 3.

it's probably pretty shitty ?!

lol weezer

related to puns, but how about using lyrics from other bands (or even other genres) to headline a feature story -- like say "the kids are alright" for Kriss Kross or Smoosh? any confessions?

if i was writing reviews i would probably regret at least a little of them because of those traps:
Holy Crap, this is amazing! Actually, no hold on.. it's shite!
vs. the opposite

i have used lyric-based puns more often than i care to admit

haha since so many of them post here i almost feel like asking my former stable of writers to chime in on the worst punning headline i ever inflicted upon them.

lol i'll have a look and let you know if i find anything

i wrote one a bit back that is so stupid: Poker Flat Lets the Chips Fall .

god. headsmack.

Pun-wise, probably my review of A Grand Don't Come for Free: "Whither Thou?"

another question please: how many listens to an album in average before writing a review?

yeah, this tends to follow how often I'd listen to the album anyway. You can recognise a really terrible record in a few songs, so I once reviewed an album based on two half-listens (because I couldn't bear to get through the whole thing / the second half-listen was for specifics while I wrote). I'll want to keep listening to a good record anyway, and the time it takes me to get bored of it is relevant to "how good" it is. Usually 4-6 times for a decent record, 8+ times for a really good one.

I've got a techy question... I'm going to be conducting a phone interview soon. What are the ideal ways to go about recording the intervew? I've heard some people use Skype, others use adapters to hook up a recorder to a phone (I only have a cell phone... is there such an adapter?).

I do it real low tech holding the tape recorder up to my cell on speaker -- not the best way to do it (and you get that weird clicky noise that happens anytime a cell phone's near a recording device), but in a pinch it works.