Death Of An Indie Bible (or, Adventures with Option Magazine, Pt. 2)

By Johnny Mnemonic

In my last installment of Music Journalism 101 I outlined my misadventures in the land of grunge and honey circa 1991 and how a proposed story on Sub Pop lumberjacks Tad got deep-sixed, frustratingly, by Option. The magazine operated from 1985 to 1998, publishing 81 issues overall, and at its 1995 peak, according to Wikipedia, had amassed a circulation of 27,000. That's not quite at Spin level, and not even in the same universe as Rolling Stone, but still damned respectable for what was known in its time as the indie underground's bible.

People tend to remember Option rather fondly, and I'll be the first to admit that I was proud to write for it even though the pay, if adjusted for inflation, probably wasn't any better than writing for online publications nowadays - which is to say, negligible. Those of you reading this who also reviewed records for the magazine back in the day will recall that reviewers, in lieu of actually payment, got to keep the albums and cassettes sent to them by the editors. But the free music (plus free subscription, of course) combined with the ego-buzz of seeing one's byline in print was enough when it was a magazine whose mission you believed in.

Respect from the music community aside, editorially speaking, Option was pretty disorganized, and it was hard to get a handle on what, if any, editorial "stance" the publication took other than "if it's independent, we cover it," which meant one issue you'd see, say, Patti Smith on the cover, an African world-beat artist the next and an obscure British folk artist attempting to make a comeback the next. Cool, but in the long run, not the smartest strategy to employ when trying to make headway at the newsstand. Subscribers are one thing, and I suspect the magazine had a fairly loyal subscription base that re-upped each year. But the habits of newsstand browsers are different, and nowadays even the lowest-circulation fanzine knows to put a known quantity or semi-familiar face on the cover (along with names of main feature artists listed on the left-hand side of the cover, not the right, due to the way magazines are displayed); otherwise you risk nobody even picking the damned thing up in the first place, and you can't build a brand in a vacuum. Option, to its credit, wised up about this considerably during its 13-year run, but I still hear people make the occasional comment about it being "too eclectic for its own good."

As a writer, contending with Option could also be confusing, as one's story pitches seemed to be accepted or rejected on such a random basis that you imagined the editors taping ideas to a giant roulette wheel, spinning it, and making assignments based on where it stopped. Worse, it wasn't unusual to get an assignment, turn it in, and then wait for it to be published... and wait... and wait... or in the case of the Tad piece, call up the editor only to be told, "Oh, we didn't have room to run it, and now it's too old..."

Too, the head-in-sand quality I alluded to in the Tad story could sometimes be perplexing. For all Option's so-called championing of the music underground, Amerindie and otherwise, it "overlooked" (or conveniently ignored) anything that didn't quite measure up to the editors' rarified notions of what was hip. Ergo, the Seattle snub; grunge bands were kinda ratty-looking, presumably blue collar or worse (we now know that grunge's early white-trash image was a marketing ruse foisted upon the public by Sub Pop), and - shudder! - borderline heavy metal, therefore very uncool. Option played favorites; for example, you'd always see some avant-garde Independent Project Records band or shambling K Records artist being featured (one of this blog's comments, below after the Tad entry, makes a similar observation), but only occasional lip service would be given to the skronk/noise groups of Amphetamine Reptile, Treehouse and Touch & Go. (For some reason the gnarly, noisy, long-haired outfits on the SST label were mainstays of Option-land, but hey, SST was headquartered just down the road from the Option offices in L.A.) Additionally, a pervasive politically correct streak, editorially speaking, was impossible to miss; there's nothing wrong with covering females and persons of color, but that sort of lingering Great Society mindset sometimes trumped notions of actual musical worthiness at Option.

This myopia-bred snobbery extended to the Option choice of cover subjects. Certainly featuring the likes of Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets early on was admirable, and it wasn't unusual to see (as noted) Patti Smith or Frank Zappa staring out at you from the newsstand down at your local record store where Option was typically sold. (Good choices from a circulation point of view, by the way.) As that Option Wikipedia page points out, however, the frequent dialogue among staffers ran along lines of, "Is this artist too popular to be worthy of a cover?" (What do we do if Sonic Youth leaves SST and goes to DGC?) Such navel gazing further resulted in an almost formulaic rotation of non-rock cover subjects to ensure that Option was never perceived as "mainstream" or, heaven forbid, "rockist" (more p.c. groupthink there). The comment above about being too eclectic aside, part of Option's appeal, certainly, was how it wore its eclecticism on the sleeve, that between its covers nearly all genres were considered equals (again, see the Wikipedia entry for more details). But to many who discovered the magazine late during its tenure, it's likely that it did indeed have a somewhat schizophrenic reputation.

The fact that it often relied upon less-than-seasoned writers to provide the bulk of its content didn't help its case either. Nobody who picked up Option was necessarily expecting The New Yorker, but I distinctly recall getting my copy in the mail from time to time, reading an article, and wondering to myself, "Did anybody even fact-check this?" Plus, the magazine had a tendency to favor certain "pet writers" of dubious talent beyond that of extreme self-promotion. Without a doubt one of the most annoying music journalists the ‘80s and ‘90s ever produced was Gina Arnold, whose solipsistic wet kiss to alternative rock, 1993's Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, remains a low literary point of the era; Arnold penned feature after feature for Option despite all extant evidence that her reporting skills were nil. Having edited publications in both L.A. and NYC myself, I understand how thousands of writers are out there clamoring for work, and how as a result one tends to rely on a small pool of trusted freelancers, folks who turn in clean copy, and on time. But they also have to write coherently and cogently, and they need to be mindful of the fact that their readers aren't interested in their personal diary scribblings (which is how Arnold's pieces invariably came off).

Option began life in ‘85 as an outgrowth of/successor to the late, great OP, which had enjoyed a healthy 26-issue run in the early ‘80s as the first indie music bible prior to founder/publisher John Foster imposing a built-in obsolescence rule. Two music publications sprung up in its wake: Sound Choice, a kind of anarchist/collective-minded mag published by the extraordinarily grumpy and no-business-sense-whatsoever David Ciaffardini; and Option, founded by Scott Becker (publisher) and Richie Unterberger (editor). I'd subscribed to OP (among scores of music fanzines) and faithfully sent in my money to Sound Choice and Option, too. It wouldn't be too long before I offered my services to Option, because while I'd already been reviewing records for Spin and Circus (for pay), I greatly liked the magazine's DIY spirit, and anyway, it was hard to place more than one review every few issues in the other two because the competition among freelancers was so fierce. Option seemed to be a welcoming group of peers.

That "DIY spirit" could be a double-edged sword, however. Publisher Becker reportedly had an iron-clad rule that his magazine would not accept pitch calls from record labels' publicists. A pitch call is exactly that: the p.r. agent rings up an editor in order to hype a client or follow up on a record that had previously been mailed to the magazine. In order to increase the chances of landing coverage in the magazine, sometimes the label would also provide what's known in the industry as "swag": free teeshirts, coffee mugs, shot glasses, promotional-only releases, and just plain bizarre gee-gaws with vague thematic tie-ins to the artist or the record. (Swag is far less abundant in 2009 as the labels have realized they're just giving editors and writers free eBay fodder.) I personally never saw Becker's rule being implemented during the times I visited the Option office, but I heard enough complaints from publicists who knew I wrote for Option and were begging me to pitch their artists to the magazine that I have no doubt it existed in some form or another.

So you can add a measure of hubris to the aforementioned snobbery when tallying up the Option score. Virtually no magazine in the history of entertainment coverage ever enforced such a strict mandate, for while a moderate separation between the editorial and advertising departments is generally considered good for a publication's ethical health, we're not exactly talking about someone ringing Option up and offering, payola-style, to purchase the back cover ad space in exchange for a ten-page feature. In all fairness to record labels, their viewpoint tends to be that they advertise in music magazines where their products will get the most visibility, and there's an expectation that at least from time to time those products will be covered. They don't necessarily expect a positive review (some do, actually), but they still want a fair shot at coverage. That's just the way it works. Imagine someone calling up Option: "Did you get our check and the artwork for the Johnny Mnemonic Blues Band ad?" "Yes we did, and thanks. It will run next issue." "What are the chances of the Mnemonic album getting reviewed?" "CLICK!"

For a magazine in the early ‘90s to play the gatekeeper card to the extreme that Option did, trying to remake the rules in an industry where back-scratching and favor-rendering is not only business as usual but, when done properly, an efficient and mutually beneficial process, was ludicrously out of sync with reality. That, an inability to see the music magazine milieu through the eyes of the aforementioned newsstand browser (it's no coincidence that Mojo came on the scene around this time and, with its regular rotation of Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, Stones, Springsteen, etc. for its covers, was wildly successful due to its sheer predictability), and a series of unfortunate business decisions (notably the launching, in 1995, of sister publication UHF, a glossy "alternative fashion" magazine that was a massive, money-sucking flop and embarrassed everyone associated with it), all conspired to doom Option.

In mid-'98, we writers received a letter from Becker indicating that Option was temporarily suspending publication. At the time it was suggested that Option would eventually reincarnate itself as some sort of combined digital-print entity, although Becker's plans were pretty vague, and nothing ever materialized. The July-August 2008 issue was the final one.

In light of all the recent music magazine shutterings, the Option story probably isn't that unusual. It's even likely that, as consumer habits change and markets shift, most if not all magazines will enjoy a finite lifespan; only one in several thousand ever has a shot of lasting long enough to be considered "an institution" like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair. But it did last for 13 lucky years, and a lot of folks, myself included, loved it dearly, which is why being privy to Option's numerous eventual missteps was so frustrating. In all my conversations back in the day with the editors I don't know if I ever leaned across the desk and asked, "Why are you doing this? Have you considered this instead?" - mainly because it wasn't my place to do so. It was their magazine, after all, and they were supposed to know what they were doing.

 By the way, I never got a kill fee for the Tad story, dammit.

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Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.

My Dinner With Tad (or, Adventures with Option Magazine, Pt.1)

By Johnny Mnemonic

"You finished with that?"

Tad Doyle, lumberjack frontman for his eponymous Seattle band Tad, comes into focus as my head slowly swivels to the left. Flecks of pasta and spaghetti sauce decorate his thick black beard like the glittery remains of a visit to the dance club. This ain't no disco, however, and he ain't foolin' around, either: Doyle is poking a Cuban cigar-sized finger at my half-eaten plate of lasagna, and the look on his face is the same kind of look a Looney Tunes wolf gets when it's gazing at some potential prey and doesn't see a duck or a bunny at all but a steaming, home-cooked meal smothered in tasty sauces.

"Um, yeah, uh, I, uh, guess so," I stammer, and with a bright, "Cool!" Doyle reaches across, picks up my plate, and summarily dumps the remains upon his plate, which has already been so scrupulously cleaned of every last crumb that to the casual onlooker it would appear Doyle hadn't even received his initial order yet. My hand reflexively shoots out to grab my soft drink before it, too, can pass into the public domain.

In our dining party: the entire Tad band, plus their roadie/driver and a photographer friend of mine. The 2 a.m. wares of this 24-hour Italian-Greek diner located a half-mile away from L.A.'s Sunset Strip appear to agree with everyone, not the least of them being Doyle, who I swear is now eyeing his bandmates' plates, too. Bassist Kurt Danielson chuckles at my discombobulation, winking knowingly at guitarist Gary Thorstensen as if this is just another on-the-road mealtime ritual. It might not be a coincidence that Danielson, Thorstensen and drummer Steve Wied are rock-star thin, in striking contrast to Doyle, who to my untrained eye clocks in at around 300 pounds.

The occasion of this late-night pasta picnic is an assignment from Option magazine. It's the spring of 1991 and Tad's second full-length, the Butch Vig-produced 8-Way Santa, was released a few months ago by Sub Pop, and everyone from the label to the music press to the musicians themselves is counting on this to be their breakout record. Option, while having positioned itself over the course of its half-decade tenure as a kind of indie music bible, somehow managed to discount the subterranean rumblings emanating from the Northwest over the past few years, and as a result early Sub Pop acts like Green River, Mudhoney, Afghan Whigs and even Nirvana all got short shrift from the magazine. Now, though, with even mainstream publications starting to turn their gaze towards Seattle, Option can't afford to remain behind the curve so the Tad piece is essentially the magazine scrambling to play catch-up.

(Truth be told, Option, in its drive to become a musical tastemaker and a so-called alternative to the alterna-likes of the ‘mersh-tilting Spin, has gradually adopted a somewhat provincial attitude towards the more hirsute, blue-collar, hard-rock leaning elements of the Amerindie underground. This development is both a source of mirth and frustration among the magazine's pool of mostly unpaid writers. There's a lot of really, really great heavy-ass music cropping up all over the country and not just in Seattle, but much of what we're sent by the magazine to review is of the twee/K Records and home-brewed "cassette culture" variety. The upside is that a number of the writers have started up their own fanzines and writing about what they're really into. But that's another story, for another day.)

At any rate, earlier in the evening I witnessed Tad positively slay a normally jaded Hollywood crowd, testimony that the so-called "grunge explosion" isn't just hype. Little does anyone in our dining party realize that before 1991 is out, "hype" is going to be an operative term as regards Seattle - next year, a documentary will anoint 1991 as "the year punk broke," and filmmaker Cameron Crowe will release his romanticized take on the Seattle scene, Singles - thanks to Tad's scruffy labelmate, Nirvana. The Nevermind album will blow across the music universe like a typhoon, randomly raising and capsizing many of Nirvana's contemporaries; in the latter category will be Tad, who despite landing a major record deal during the ensuing bidding wars won't be able to live up to the aforementioned hype, sales-wise, and after a series of label and lineup shuffles, will split up in 1998.

The Tad Option piece never happens, which in hindsight is a lot less annoying than it was at the time since I now view the situation as emblematic of Tad's career - a doomed trajectory also foreshadowed by the band's unplanned legal woes (a lawsuit filed by Pepsi over Tad's unauthorized use of the cola giant's logo for the "Jack Pepsi" 45; another suit on the part of the guy depicted on the sleeve of 8 Way Santa grabbing his girlfriend's boob, the gentleman having subsequently become a born-again Christian and not exactly digging the fact that a long-forgotten photograph from his former life had resurfaced).

My Tad story was actually an extremely solid one, full of colorful, telling details about the band and the region that spawned it, not to mention some pretty funny quotes collected at the meal. And I filed my copy on time, too; as this was still the pre-Internet era, I personally delivered it to the Option office along with a bundle of photos and negatives the photographer had taken of Tad (my favorite was of Doyle in the middle of a dumpster, glowering, while his bandmates chucked in bags of trash).

But by the time the issue containing the story would have appeared on newsstands, Nirvana was blowing up nationally. The editors, not wanting to make the magazine's bandwagon-hopping appear too obvious with back-to-back Seattle-themed pieces, canned the Tad feature and hastily located a writer to do something on Nirvana.

Of course, this story isn't really about Tad, or about Nirvana, or even about the grunge era - since the name of the blog you're reading is "Music Journalism 101," this story is about Option.

To be continued...

***

Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.

Running amuck (adrift, actually...) in the magical Land of Oz with a big-boobed, coke-sniffin' bimbo and assorted loonies.

By Johnny Mnemonic

I am a man adrift.

Prior to my current existential state of affairs, however, I was a staff writer for what I presume most people considered to be highly-regarded national music magazine. I hasten to emphasize my phrasing being in the past tense, as the publication recently folded, the victim of all those things you've been reading lately, with alarming frequency, about music magazines (and the print world in general). I won't bore you with all the mundane details of my dismissal and its demise - yet - other than to say the basic law of the jungle was in effect: if a business ceases to continue making money, and this goes on for month after month despite (or owing to) the regular influx of meddling new investors, hapless new editors and inane new marketing strategies, etc., soon enough, something's gotta give.

Ergo, I am a man adrift, with no immediate, regular source of income. I will certainly be offering up my freelance skills to other highly-regarded national music magazines, perhaps even the one whose website you are reading this very moment, but the terms "freelance writer" and "regular income" remain mutually exclusive. So while I drift, in between resume-mailing, LinkedIn networking and Velvet Rope-lurking, in order to keep my mind from atrophying from a steady diet of satellite TV and internet porn I've accepted an invitation from the editors of Blurt to author this blog.

"Music Journalism 101" is to be part-memoir, part-exposé and part cautionary tale. On that first count, I'll draw upon my experiences as a music writer and introduce you to assorted denizens of the musician community ranging from the sweet to the sour, from the supremely gifted to the astonishingly clueless, and from the types who help make the world a better place with their artistry to the walking/talking chunks of human feces who in a sane, just world would be lined up next to a mass burial site in some godforsaken corner of what used to be Yugoslavia and summarily shot and tossed into the pit. As far as the exposé part is concerned, don't necessarily take that term literally (don't want to get your hopes up), although I will be tugging the curtain back to give you glimpses of what goes on in the lives of music writers, their editors and publishers, their peers and significant others, their hookups and drug dealers, etc. Just to give you a teaser: for a week in 1989 I joined the touring entourage of a former college rock band-turned-MTV-darling - for the purposes of this blog, I'll refer to them as "Dream Response" - in order to do an on-the-road profile. This gave me access to the after-show activities, although there was an unspoken understanding that I'd use discretion in reporting any behavior that might prove upsetting to the quartet's fairly vanilla fanbase, or for that matter, to the members' wives. From the band's point of view, that unspoken understanding probably served them well when it came time for me to file my report. I quite diligently did not recount the scene in which I wandered into one of their hotel suites' bathrooms only to find the lead singer - let's call him "Frothy Bryson," after his unnerving habit for literally foaming at the mouth in the middle of one of his onstage "poetic" rants - ankle-deep in the chunky, dark-haired, big-boobed local radio personality who'd turned up at the show to record station I.D.s and was invited to stick around for the party. After a few healthy toots of Peruvian weasel dust and three or four stiff vodka-and-7-Ups, she'd apparently been ready to take more than just airchecks from the group. I can still hear her horsey-like, pack-a-day wheeze of a laugh (how do these obnoxious gals get their radio gigs? oh, right...) as she was grabbing for the straw... and if I squint my mind's eye just right, I can still see - no, please God, not again - Frothy's hairy, boil-studded ass.

But don't think that life in the music journalism business is a merry old yellow brick road stroll into the Emerald City, where vials of coke dangle from trees like sugarplums and nubile munchkin lasses beckon seductively from shop windows like Amsterdam hookers. This is where the cautionary tale aspect comes in. "The biz" has a boundless supply of headaches, frustrations, diva- and asshole-like personalities, and just out-and-out lunacy, not to mention a deadeningly mundane side to it (you know, hours upon hours trapped in a cubicle pounding away at a keyboard while your head pounds from all that free booze you swilled the night before at the Metallica album listening party at Arlene's Grocery). It's not all that different from used car sales, actually. So my hope is that after reading this blog, at least one aspiring music journalist out there, having gotten a sense of how the sausages are made, so to speak, will plot a beeline straight to his or her college counselor and switch majors to, say, Astronomy, or perhaps Botany - any discipline where one's native talents can be nurtured and turned into a bankable commodity in the employment marketplace. Because if you believe being a rock critic is a viable career path, I have some stock shares in Madoff, Inc. I want to sell you. At this juncture in life, it's probably too late for me, but it's not too late to prevent one of you from making a huge mistake. Don't wake up one morning to learn that the business you've chosen to work for is sinking faster than a GM truck with cinderblocks chained to each axle, and that you have no tenure, no seniority, no job security, no marketable skills, no nothing, really, plus the additional stress of a pending loss of health insurance benefits when your COBRA coverage expires. Now's the time to consider that offer from your father about taking up the family business, in other words.

Above I mentioned that the editors of Blurt invited me to become one of their bloggers. Technically, I approached them with the idea. (I could swear I detected a shrug on the other end of the telephone, but as the answer was "sure," that's good enough for me.) Still, my ego can only take so much battering in a compressed period of time - losing that highly-regarded national music magazine gig and all - so it does me good to create this fantasy in my mind that my arch prose remains in demand by my peers and, hopefully, will be admired by Blurt readers. I may be a man adrift, but that doesn't mean I can't still spout off with the best of ‘em.

My friends tell me I'm actually quite good at spouting off, especially after a couple of whiskey sours. (I know, I know, a girlie-girl drink, but - and here's the first of what will be many fascinating insider tips from the world of music journalism - you can casually sip whiskey sours all night without getting too plastered, which greatly enhances your chances of getting some juicy backstage or behind the scenes stories, since the bands themselves tend to really bring it on, post-gig; I think we already covered that part three paragraphs earlier.) I promise to write most of these entries in a relatively sober state of mind, of course. Well, that is unless I feel, in the interests of accurately recounting some of those juicy stories culled from my fabulous career in music journalism, I simply must recreate the semi-sober state of mind I was experiencing at the time of the original incident.

Did I mention that my friends also tell me I have a pretty fucking spot-on memory? I may be a man adrift. But I know where the bodies are buried.

Guarantee: many of the names, places and entities outlined in this blog will be changed to protect the innocent along with the not-so-innocent. And also to ensure I don't burn so many bridges I can't get hired again by some highly-regarded national music magazine. Not that there are any left.

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Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.