Van Cliburn Punched Me In The Mouth
A Veteran Music Journalist's Adventures, Insights & Interviews
"Asking questions always relaxes me.” — Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With Andre
In the summer of 1973 I did my first interview as a professional journalist. I’d been hired days before as a “combination typist” at the Austin American-Statesman, a job that involved retyping syndicated copy on a brand new IBM Selectric, so that an optical scanner could translate it into print.
On this particular day, there must have been a shortage of reporters in the room, so when someone called to report a fire at an apartment complex, an editor hollered at me to cover it. I sprinted out to my 1966 Chevy El Camino, rushed to the blaze, grabbed my notebook and pen, ran over to a knot of residents staring forlornly at the smoke and the gaggle of firefighters and … and …
… and then what? The only thing that came to mind was to tap one of these poor souls on the shoulder and say, “Hi! I’m with the American-Statesman. What happened?”
So I did. And with that I began that long trek that would lead me into nearly half a century of asking people questions for a living.
Of course, the process extends beyond that, into getting answers … answers that would fuel a more involved process piecing bits of information together, seeing if they reveal some bigger, more compelling picture, researching, learning to write vividly yet economically, editing and fact-checking and much more. But the interview is the point on which all these other elements balance.
That’s true especially if your path skews from hard news into personality-based journalism, as mine eventually did. At the American-Statesman my focus was soon shifted from putting Linotype operators out of work as a “combination typist” to writing about artists and in particular musicians. I’d played plenty of gigs with bands in Austin during my college years and before that in high school, so editors reasoned that my talents were better suited to covering the arts than interrogating people as they watched their homes incinerate.
After about a year at the American-Statesman, I took a little time off to concentrate fully on playing music. A dreary lounge act hired me as their keyboardist. Playing to mostly empty houses in hotel bars from Ramada to Holiday Inn, from San Diego to Fargo, I learned a few lessons along the way, the most important being that writing stuff wasn’t such a bad way to pay the rent after all.
This led me to a job in Washington, D.C., with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Ralph Nader-like operation staffed by young idealists eager to battle the food industry’s dark legions. As assistant editor of Nutrition Action magazine, I railed in print against Red Dye No. 2, nitrosamines, McDonald’s and other abominations. Once I accompanied my boss Michael Jacobson to a press conference with Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, which we disrupted with theatrical Yippie zeal; we even chased Butz out of the room and down the corridor outside. And I did write one real exposé, about an industry-friendly publisher obtaining government money under suspicious circumstances from the Republican USDA, which was solid enough to be picked up in Jack Anderson’s muckraking “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column.
But the thrill of that gig eventually paled. The expectation that I was to advocate rather than impartially investigate issues wasn’t a natural fit for me. So I began looking at other options. One was to apply to graduate study at Columbia University’s Journalism School, arguably the country’s best. But then my brother Andy got in touch; it seems that Tom Darter, his music theory teacher from the Roosevelt University’s College of Performing Arts, had just accepted a position as editor of Keyboard Magazine, a new monthly publication for keyboard players — i.e., people like me. They were looking to fill their assistant editor position. Was I interested? Absolutely! So Andy hooked me up with Tom, who began assigning me freelance work as a first step in sizing me up.
My first Keyboard interview was with Virgil Fox, a flamboyant classical organist known for florid romanticism and illuminating his concerts with psychedelic light shows. Virgil turned out be a geyser of colorful, quotable information: He was one of those artists for whom you just hit “Go” on the recorder and he takes it from there. I would interview him again several times in upcoming years, the last time in the home of an admirer in San Francisco who had installed an electronic organ in his living room. Its mechanism was in the basement. After a while Virgil swept through the front door, his velvet cape flowing behind him. He was maybe half an hour late, for which he apologized and then treated me to a private . I remember the sound when he switched on the gigantic instrument; from two floors down I could hear the thing engage, with a crack that sounded like a gunshot.
My second freelance interview was for a cover story on Billy Preston, a tremendous entertainer, bandleader and session player for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other rock glitterati. I drove to New York for the interview, where what had been promised to me as a private one-on-one turned out to be a small press conference, with three or four other reporters.
Even more distressing, Preston was the total opposite of Virgil: probably the worst interview subject I’ve ever encountered. His gleaming smile notwithstanding, Billy answered questions with just one or two words; it was a Sisyphean ordeal to drag a full sentence from him. I salvaged barely enough content to fill a two-page spread, a chore from which I learned two essential lessons in interview technique: Ask questions formulated in ways that make it easier for the subject to answer at length. And be ready for the possibility that the terms of the interview aren’t exactly guaranteed when you show up for your chat.
All of which led to a day I’ll not forget. I was at my desk at Nutrition Action, staring blankly at the wall and wondering if I could rouse myself for yet another attack on food additives, when my phone rang. Tom Darter was calling to ask if I would be willing to take a full-time position at Keyboard. Elated, I left the office early and walked back home, where I found a letter from Columbia University, accepting me into their program and offering a scholarship I hadn’t even applied for.
For several days I oscillated between the two options until I realized that once I would have earned my M.A., I would have sought the kind of job Tom was offering to me right then and there.
With that, I gave my notice at Nutrition Action. Two weeks later, I loaded my possessions into my car and headed west to my new life in California’s Bay Area.
###
From my first day at Keyboard Magazine, in April of 1977, to my last as editor of the Country Music Association magazine in March 2015, my career sharpened my skills in researching, writing and editing, while adding responsibilities that came from a more administrative position as editor of Musician Magazine in the late Nineties. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, especially when dealing with red tape, office politics and a few really odd people along the way, like the corporate overseer who insisted on rearranging my staff’s offices according to the dictates feng shui. How can I forget the famous band member who, having read something I’d written about him years before, greeted me at our interview with, “I don’t know whether to shake your hand or slug you.” Or the company CEO who consulted with saffron-robed Buddhist monks in his office and hired a Russian ex-KGB member to head our tech division. (These folks will remain nameless here, for lots of good reasons.)
But there were some whose identities I can share: Stevie Wonder, who had just flown in from a full day of doing press in Europe and kept falling asleep as we spoke in the Plaza Hotel penthouse … Peter Wolf, stumped over why I was the only attendee at the J. Geils Band’s post-concert party who passed on doing cocaine (“But it’s really good!” he kept insisting.) … Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, who as I walked into her Laurel Canyon home put me to work chasing and caging her macaw, who was flapping in terror around the living room … Willie Nelson, whose generosity in sharing some potent weed slowed our conversation into a happy stupor as we grinned goofily at each other … Bonnie Raitt, who was so argumentative during our interview that I nearly hung up on her — and later she called to apologize and thank me for delivering a “perfect” bio … Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who saw me backstage after a show, rammed me against a wall, demanded his money, then laughed, gave me a hug and moved on … Ravi Shankar, who saw that I was battling a bad cold when when I arrived at his hotel and he had his daughter — either Norah Jones or Anoushka Shankar — brew up some medicinal tea for me … Keith Emerson of prog-rock giants Emerson, Lake & Palmer, taking me aside one night in San Francisco and confessing he was terrified that nerve problems in his right hand would force his retirement as a player (they didn’t) …
These episodes fed into the broader current of my education. With this book, I hope to condense these lessons and experiences down to a few rules or recommendations that might help others who are plan to follow the same road themselves. I have no idea whether I can do this … but if I don’t make the effort I’ll never know. So here goes.
###
An interview is not a conversation between equals. True, you and your subject might have built an acquaintance through previous encounters. Certainly it’s tempting to imagine that Superstar X is your true-blue bestie. It is not at all unusual for music scribes to show off photos of themselves with celebrities. But most of the time, these pictures are more like images of your kids with Mickey and Minnie at Disney World, than evidence of genuine friendship.
That’s not to say that one should approach each interview apprehensively, especially if you’ve done your preparatory homework. And it doesn’t hurt if your reputation precedes you (depending on the reputation, of course). When I confirmed an interview with Ronnie Milsap for a CMA Close Up, I assumed he wouldn’t know who I was, since I hadn’t been in Nashville as long as more established country music journalists. So I figured I’d connect with him, put him at ease as set up my recorder. I said to him, “You know, Ronnie, I noticed something in your new album that I haven’t heard for a long time in country music.”
That piqued his curiosity. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Diminished chords,” I replied, referring to a harmonic structure scarcely heard in the stone-simple voicings of country music. That one comment showed Ronnie I could speak his language in ways that most of the genre’s journalists couldn’t, thereby making him feel at ease when we began. Even better, it made him laugh. I could tell by the time we began I could tell he knew he was in trustworthy hands.
On the other hand, when real relationships do develop, they can impede as much as enhance the interview process. When you’re tasked to write a profile of someone, in music or any other endeavor, you are there to pull from that person whatever you need to complete your assignment. Unfortunately, based on what I’ve read or watched, this responsibility is often superseded by that hunger, which can contort the article into a stream of self-congratulation.
Experienced writers are no less susceptible to this flattery than young hopefuls fresh out of college. Actually, they may be more so, since they’ve had more time to decide they deserve to be stars themselves within their profession: the next Lester Bangs, so to speak.
Case in point: When I was hired to edit Musician in 1995, I was thrilled to have access to writers whose work set the bar for the industry and had inspired me as a reader for years. But on one of my first days behind the desk, I picked up a back issue that featured Paul McCartney on the cover. The author, one of our most renowned contributors, opened his article with something like this: “Here I am, waiting for Paul McCartney to pass through the door. I couldn’t believe that I had reached this point in my career …”
This writer-centric approach was well established at Musician as it had been at Rolling Stone, Spin and earlier publications. But was there really no other way to begin other than self-referentially? Was the goal of the writer to steal some of the spotlight from the artist? Doesn’t that risk skewing the reader’s attention or even subvert the meaning of the story? All my life I tried to minimize or even erase myself from the content of the story, so that nothing stood between the reader and the artist.
Even so, there were times — I can count them on less than five fingers — when it was essential for whatever reason. For example, I was elated to be able to begin one story for Keyboard with these words: “Sirens wailed in the streets of San Francisco as Van Cliburn punched me in the mouth.”
What had happened was that, after welcoming me to his suite at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, the celebrated classical pianist invited me to sit on a couch at a right angle to the chair he chose for himself. Cliburn was a Southern gentleman, courtly and courteous. “May I offer you a drink?” he intoned in his silky baritone. I accepted a soda from him, set up my recorder on the coffee table between us and then paused. “Van, the windows behind the couch are open, so I’m getting a lot of street noise, especially sirens outside. Can we close them?”
“Of course!” With that he sprang to his feet, his arms flailing from his sides as he lunged toward the window, the right one smacking me right below my lower lip with the force he ordinarily summoned for the opening chords in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. As I crumpled onto the couch, blood trickling onto my chin, the poor man, this genteel soul, panicked. “Oh, my goodness! I’m so sorry! What did I do?”
I assured him not to worry because in that instant, the lead to this article popped into my head. And, being an essential character in this incident, I had to write the lead in first-person. I couldn’t have done it any other way.
###
The longer you persist in journalism, the more you accumulate these sorts of recollections. News reporters might regale their grandkids some day with tales about their adventures with world leaders. Sports columnists might plaster their offices with autographed shots of boxing champs and Cy Young Award winners. The further your field is from what we might call hard news, the more prominent these brushes with stars become.
None of this concerned me at first, mainly because I never was interested in collecting celebrity memorabilia. Rather, my goal was always just to get what I needed for the story, hurry back to my office and start writing. Even as a teenager, when my periodical of choice was Playboy, I would turn to the featured Q&A interview up front after perusing the magazine’s other attractions to see how the pros steered their conversations with everyone from Jimmy Carter to Fidel Castro to renowned murderer Gary Gilmore. Most of them began with an italicized description of how long the writers got to hang out with their subjects. Why did they need that much time to have to put together a Q&A with these people?
I can’t really say why never felt the need to enhance my own “brand” by collecting proof of “friendships” with celebrities. Sure, there are a few photos of me with well-known artists, but most were taken at “grip-and-grin” press days. For example, the room where I interviewed Reba McEntire was set up so that I could not exit without letting her photographer take our picture together — not that I hated standing next to her for the shot, but I wouldn’t have complained if a photo op wasn’t part of the arrangement. By the way, the publicist sent that photo to me as a courtesy, which I appreciated and filed immediately in a folder I rarely visit.
Instead of souvenirs, I collected insights into the celebrity interview and its effect on society. In contrast, political interviews are by nature confrontational to one or another degree; if not, the credibility of the story and its author might be called into question. To work effectively in this arena, the journalist needs to be tactful yet confident, beginning from the presumption that both parties, questioner and subject, are equal in authority.
On showbiz beats, though, interviewers are often — I’d say too often — supplicants. They and their subjects both understand who steers the boat. Terms are agreed to beforehand, though you might break from those terms if you sense the artist wants you to. I learned early in my Keyboard Magazine fun, when assigned to interview pianist McCoy Tyner. His publicist made sure that I understood we were not to talk about his emergence years before as a member of the iconic saxophonist John Coltrane’s band. “He’s tired of talking about those days,” the publicist warned. “And he’s concerned that any mention of Coltrane takes the focus off of him as a unique artist in his own right.”
These instructions were uppermost in my mental sketch of where I could and couldn’t go. At least they were until about five minutes after we shook hands, sat down and began the interview, when Tyner began talking voluntarily and in detail about what he learned from his former bandleader.
The point of this story is that in feature journalism, the star isn’t on the hot seat but rather on the throne of celebrity. Further, unlike senators being grilled on some scandal or gaffe by reporters in the Capitol, superstars bring their publicists along to squelch potentially damaging queries. Many provide bullet points or even complete questions in advance to writers; those who stray beyond them risk having the publicist abruptly shut the dialog down.
If they managed not to offend anybody during their time with the artist, the interviewer floats back to the office on clouds of gratitude and maybe a grip-and-grin photo. Many see these souvenirs as confirmation that they have a “relationship” with the person next to them in that photo, as if that were the real target of the assignment.
Want to see an example? Watch the red-carpet exchanges that precede pretty much all awards show, except possibly the Nobel Prize. God knows, I did plenty of this myself to varying degrees, so that by the time I was hired to edit CMA Close Up, celebrity journalism had lost whatever allure it once had for me specifically because it meant extinguishing whatever inclination one might have to take a more investigative approach.
Why? CMA’s prime directive is to trumpet its many successes while serving its members’ interests and keep them committed to pay their membership dues. To avoid offending anybody, we even sent every final draft to the artist for review and approval. This is definitely not the norm in major-league journalism, except in extraordinary situations. I did this only once in my pre-CMA days, after finishing my conversation with Prince. I’ll explain why when I make that interview available here.
More broadly, I seldom challenged the celebrity interviewer’s main priority, of lobbing softball questions. But when I did, I had good reasons for it. For example …
In 1986 the pioneering minimalist composer Philip Glass released an album, Songs From Liquid Days, which deviated dramatically from his previous work. When writing for singers, Glass had up to that point created librettos consisting only of numbers or solfège: do, re, me, fa and so on. He had even promised that he would never use actual words for vocal parts because they distracted listeners from connecting directly to the notes.
So as I drove to my appointment with Glass in San Francisco’s Inn at the Opera, I knew that I would open by referring to his vow and then observing that nonetheless Songs From Liquid Days was conceived as a marriage between his music and original lyrics by Paul Simon, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega. Then came my Perry Mason moment: “So how do you explain this?”
He shook his head solemnly and said, “It just goes to show you: You can’t trust Phil Glass.”
I love his answer, which owed to the fact that I had put some thought into my preparations. In other words, I came up with a (very gentle) confrontational opener, which cued a clever punch-line response and sparked a substantive give-and-take conversation.
###
From my very first bylines in the University of Southern California’s Daily Trojan and University of Texas’s Daily Texan, I knew that the odds of writing effectively improve with research. At Keyboard, in the pre-internet dark ages, this usually meant I would drive from our office in Cupertino up to Stanford University’s Music School library, where I would access a periodical guide called The Music Index, a compendium of articles about musicians. These were printed monthly, then hard-bound into ponderous volumes that numbered hundreds of pages. I would sometimes spend two days going through them for background on some upcoming interview and then scribbling requests for a librarian to descend into the archive and retrieve what I needed. For older artists, this meant combing through every annual all the way back to the earliest one, from 1949. Though arduous, these expeditions gave me background that less obsessive colleagues might not have the patience to retrieve.
As years passed, I eased up on this routine, partly because I had learned that over-researching can drain spontaneity and personality out of any interview. It could also lead you to rely too much on pre-arranged questions and not enough on your conversation with your subject. Eventually I established an approach that was maybe 20 percent research and 80 percent listening. Inevitably, this invested the article with a stronger sense of the subject’s character, quirks and knowledge.
Put another way, being alert, rather than just sticking to even well-researched questions, makes all the difference between adequate and exceptional results.
###
At this point, I think it’s best to get to the real reason you’re reading this: the interviews themselves. Here’s just a bit of background to make clear to you what they are … and are not.
First, these are not published articles but rather transcripts I made of my recorded interviews. Some of these I conducted as a freelancer, the rest as a staff writer. Per standard agreements, I own the rights to stories I wrote on assignment for publications that weren’t paying me a salary or retainer. For the rest, I obtained permission from those who currently own what I wrote for them as an employee. (The only denial I got was from the Country Music Association.)
Finally, you’ll find only one transcript here from an interview conducted for a promotional bio. I’ve written hundreds of them for record labels, publicists, independent artists and so on. On each one my job was to get media folks interested in covering the artist I was extolling: The record labels, publicists and independent artists I worked for trusted me to provide clear and accurate background information for their clients with enough style style to lure them past the lead and keep them engaged to the last sentence.
Thus I’ve written bios for Art Garfunkel (who provided a “mission statement” on what he wanted from me), the Doobie Brothers, Tony Joe White, Sheryl Crow, Victor Wooten, Sonny Landreth, Robert Cray, the North Mississippi Allstars, the Last of the Breed (Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Ray Price), Randy Travis, Michael McDonald, the Pixies, Cyndi Lauper, Weezer, the actor John Lithgow … the list goes on. After a while much of my income came from doing bios, ranging from $600 more than a decade ago for Bonnie Raitt to a burger and fries that I accepted as payment from a street singer on Nashville’s Lower Broadway.
Yet none of them okayed my use of their bio transcripts for this project, even when I offered them the rights to review and edit before publication … except for one, who acceded immediately and without condition got my request. You’ll see who it is when you get to it.
But enough already! Let’s hear what some very interesting people had to say — and how I helped them find ways to say it.