While having a conversation with a buddy of mine, he asked me, “Don, why do you do what you do? You put all this work into your blog yet you make no money.” I didn’t even need a second to think about before answering him. I think about this every day that I wake up, log in to my blog and start setting up content for the week. I love doing this. I am getting to do something that I could only dream about as young man. Back when I was a kid there was no Internet. Imagine that. There was no YouTube and even MTV was a luxury that not everybody had in their house.
I grew up reading Hit Parader, Circus, Faces Rocks, Rip and Metal Edge magazines. These magazines were my ticket backstage and behind the scenes where I could learn anything and everything about my favorite bands. What kind of cigarettes they smoked, what kind of beer they drank and who they listened to were just a few of the many questions that would be answered for my young, heavy metal inquiring mind. The only thing frustrating to me was when I had questions that wouldn’t get answered like, “What is [insert song title here] about?” and “If you could play music with anyone, who would it be and why?” were just a couple of the many questions that I wanted to know. I wanted to know anything about these fascinating people that were without a doubt the soundtrack to my life.
I think back to when I used to watch Headbangers Ball every Saturday night. The host, Riki Rachtman, just seemed to have the coolest job ever yet he never managed to make it look like work. He was more than just a correspondent doing interviews. He was genuinely a fan of hard rock and metal music and his approach to these bands seemed to be more of a buddy than just some hack from the press. The bands would totally mess with him, goof off and they seemed to enjoy hanging with him as much as he did hanging with them. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be Riki Rachtman.
25 years later, here I am living a lifelong dream but it didn’t come easy. I worked really hard to get to this point of being able to interview some of my favorite artists. I started out doing mainly local acts and found them to be just as fascinating. I finally threw it to the wind and asked a friend of mine to help me get the contact information for Lacuna Coil’s press people. I reached out to them and low and behold had my first phone interview with lead singer Cristina Scabbia. I was a nervous wreck but right away I feel right into the groove and made that connection. She laughed at my questions and gave me some really insightful answers. I learned so much more about her than I thought I would but the real testament to how successful this interview went was to hear it from the fans. When it was posted to the Lacuna Coil message board, I received many emails thanking me for doing such a great interview with her and that they felt they learned some things they never knew. This was when I knew I was heading in the right direction.
My goal as an interviewer is to try and engage the person I am interviewing. I don’t want to ask them the same questions they get asked over and over again. Some questions are necessary to ask like when are you touring, when is the album coming out, etc. These questions help to promote the artist and to spread the word of what is coming up. In addtiion to these “stock” questions, I like to ask them fun questions that at one point show off a little bit of my “dork fanboy side” and another point is to give them something fun to do. One of my favorites to ask is “If you could be in a band with anyone alive or dead, who would in it?” This question never ceases to engage them and they always seem to have fun with it. Besides, it’s so much fun to read people’s different answers. Would you ever imagine that the drummer from Megadeth would like to have Rush as his band and he would just play tambourine?
I have had an amazing opportunity to interview so many of my favorite artists. Some legendary and some on their way to being legendary. I’ve been lucky in the sense that with everyone I’ve interviewed I felt a real connection with each of them and it was also obvious on their end that they were connecting as well. This is where I feel I’m truly doing it right and doing it the only way I know how to or want to. I’m not a journalist. I’m just a fan with a million questions and I feel that this tends to make things more engaging and entertaining for both those reading and the ones being interviewed.
I have had some amazing experiences. I’ve interviewed bands that I have admired and respected for many years such as Megadeth, Exodus and Gwar. I have also interviewed artists that I had never heard of and am now a huge fan of such as Axel Rudi Pell and Graveyard. I am living the live that this once teenage kid used to dream about as he sat on his bed watching Headbangers Ball and reading his stack of rock magazines. I’ve been on the busses, I’ve been backstage and I’ve laughed, shook hands, hugged and drank with some amazing musicians. So this is why I do what I do. Yeah, there’s no money in it but at the end of the day, you can’t put a price on doing this kind of thing. Living a dream: PRICELESS.
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