So, here's a story. The person I interviewed yesterday was Jason Forrest. Basically, after the show on Friday, I Googled him and sent him an email, told him where my work generally appears and asked if he was up for an interview. He responded an hour later.
We end up at House of Pies chatting for an hour or so and realized that we have three mutual acquaintances-- one here, one in Chicago and one in Berlin. There might be more, but we didn't get that involved in the six degrees game. That said, we started talking about how tiny the music community really is. I told him that, when I was a kid, I thought musicians were these inaccessible beings that would never be any closer than a pre-recorded voice coming through a speaker or an image roughly 100 feet away from me, separated by people with better seats, a rail and some beefy security guards. It's a misconception about music that I think, a lot of people believe, which is why I wanted to mention that here.
Even when I started working at KXLU back in 1995, the music seemed so far away. Once in a while, a band would show up for an interview or a live set, generally set up through various connected people, but this sort of stuff didn't happen on my show. As I started going out more often, started developing what would ended up becoming the sound I was then known for playing (think Joy Division, Bauhaus and Soft Cell influences in the midst of the post-grunge fallout), I just randomly asked people for music. The first band that I asked handed me a 7". When I moved up to the early-morning drivetime shift, they came in for an interview (the first one I ever did). When they asked why I hadn't been to any of their shows and I explained that I couldn't get in because I was 19 and lacked a fake ID, they snuck me in with the equipment.
When it comes down to it, I'm a pretty shameless person, so it never occurred to me that anyone might think that I was full of shit because I was this nineteen-year-old girl with the graveyard shift at the local college radio station, a station that any band outside of LA proper most likely could not hear. I'm not sure that the bands even realized that, though, because everyone of them gave me something and every one of those pieces of music were played on my show. Some of them eventually became friends, some fell out of contact over the years, but the point is that musicians are some of the nicest people you will meet. Okay, some are jerks, but those are rare and not really worth the mention.
Over the past few months, I've averaged three band interviews a week, which, for me, is a lot. Some of those bands are pretty big, like, #3 album in the country big (that one comes out on Thursday). The one thing I have learned from this experience is that a lot of people don't lose that appreciation for the people who believed in them before they went from musicians to rock stars. The excitement with which I have heard many musicians discuss meeting new fans, chatting with old ones and responding personally to My Space and chatboard messages is really inspiring. It makes me rethink music and fall in love with it over and over again.