Jim DeRogatis

Av: Magnus Gustafsson
Jim DeRogatis från Chicago är förmodligen helt okänd i Sverige. Han har sedan tidigt 80-tal skrivit om musik i amerikanska tidskrifter och dagspress. Sedan några år tillbaka så jobbar han också med radio och ett program som heter Soundopinions som helt enkelt handlar om musik. Dessutom kände Jim en av Riotbrains absoluta favoritjournalister - Lester Bangs - vilket gör Jim till en av de tuffaste killarna som någonsin funnits.

Vi kontaktade Jim för att få veta mer om honom och hur man som musikjournalist ska förhålla sig till den musik man lyssnar på. Det blev en ganska intressant konversation.

Vi publicerar intervjun på det språk den gjordes.

Did you choose music or did music choose you?
I suppose music chose me. I have always felt the same way about it as Lester did. When I was a senior in high school, and I interviewed him for my journalism class – rock writers were even bigger heroes to me than rock musicians – he told me he had always been a fanatical fan with fanatical opinions to inflict on people, and that’s why he became a rock critic. I feel similarly. From high school on, I have obsessively collected albums, played music on the radio, gone to shows, played in bands, and written about rock ’n’ roll. It has all been part of the same function, and that is first and foremost being a fan.

When did you decide to become a rockwriter?
That long afternoon in April, 1982 spent interviewing Lester Bangs pretty much cemented the deal for me: I wanted to do what he was doing. It would be quite some time before I managed to pull that off, and I am not saying I am half the writer Lester was, but I am proud to be following in his footsteps, and I will never stop appreciating the encouragement he gave me at age 17.

I’ ve been listening for a while now to Soundopinons on the web. How do you decide what you are going to talk about?
Basically, my partner, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, and I both have to cover the waterfront in terms of pop music – everything from indie rock bands to mainstream hypes. We try to talk about things that are timely and newsworthy, little-heralded discoveries we’ve made that people should know about, guests we’re interested in talking to and having perform… basically, whatever intrigues as music listeners! We’re tying to do it all, and it’s great to have a forum where we can actually PLAY the music instead of just writing about it.

You knew the legendary Lester Bangs. For can you explain the greatness of this wonderful writer? What was it that made him so special?
I think the single biggest factor that makes Lester’s work endure is the fundamental honesty at the core of it. You always felt as if he was telling you some greater truth, and really speaking from the heart. He never pulled his punches, and always tried to communicate exactly what he thought. As a result, he was never writing only about music, but about life and all of the challenges all of us face.

Lester got a small revival after Cameron Crows briliant movie “Almost famous”. How close did Philip Seymour Hoffman get to the real Lester Bangs in your opinion?
I think Hoffman did an excellent job; that was the Lester Bangs I met, and the one director Cameron Crowe met, too. I was 17 when I interviewed Lester in 1982; Cameron was 17 when he met Lester a decade earlier in 1972. We have always bonded over that fact, and I am proud to say that Hoffman was walking around the set during filming listening to a tape of me interviewing Lester on his Walkman, so he could get Lester’s speech patterns down. I think he did a great job of it.

You wrote the great biography “Let it blurt” about Lester. Was it hard to do it and did you discover something about him that you didn’t know before?
LET IT BLURT was probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done as a writer, but as hard as I worked for about four years, I honestly enjoyed every minute of it. It was a labor of love. And yes, I learned countless things about Lester that I didn’t know before. But on reflection, I suppose that all of the most important things about him had already been addressed in his own writings. I just help connect the dots, and hopefully my book gives readers a way to understand and appreciate him even more, and a map into reading his own work.

You have been writing about music for many years. And people often say that it was better in the past. Is that true?
That’s nonsense. There is always great music being made at any time, as well as a lot of crap. The music of 1967 was no better than ’77 or ’87, and 2007 may be the most extraordinary year of all time. Who knows? To think otherwise is to fall prey to the single most destructive enemy of all great art: Nostalgia. There is no such thing as “the good old days”; great art is made of the moment, in the here and now.

I pressume that you have a shitload of records at home. This is a very nerdy question but in wich order do you keep them on the shelf and why?
I have to keep all of my CDs in strict alphabetical order, otherwise I can never find anything! I actually don’t have all that much vinyl anymore, because I have moved so many times over the last decade that I’ve gotten rid of a lot of it after replacing it on CD. I am not precious about collecting recordings – I own them to listen to them! I kind of like the idea of having one big hard drive some day with all of my music on that. Who needs the rest of it? It just makes it harder to move!

What is it you are looking for in a record? What is it that makes a song or an album great?
Pure and simple, great rock ’n’ roll is something that makes you feel alive.

What three advices would you give to an young rockwriter who wants to get in to the dirty deed of writing about music?
Basically, you have to write, write, and then write some more! That’s really the only way to do it. You can’t worry about who’s reading you, you just have to do it, and the more you do it, the better you get. Also, there’s no such thing as a great writer who isn’t also a voracious reader. You have to read everything you can get your hands on, and not just about music; you see what works for other writers, and you try those things yourself. Then you go write so more.