My Long History with the Journal

The Richmond Music Journal was hatched in the summer of 1993. From 1989 until then, I had worked on Night Moves, Richmond Along the James, Livewire, Focus, Oh!, and various other free distribution entertainment tabloids that collapsed within a year or two due to various mismanagements. Inevitably, more money was spent than made; no one ever wanted to do the dirty work of selling ads; the writers were never paid; the writers were never edited; no one knew anything about basic journalism; and too many copies were printed. At one paper, no one wanted to drive around town distributing the paper. The copies sat in the office!

So when the dust settled once again in ’93, I decided I would do a paper myself. To make it easier to sell ads, I would focus on a single topic. I had been a book, movie and restaurant reviewer at various times of my career, so the unlikeliest direction was music. Besides, I had a crush on a musician who had stopped seeing me, the now deceased Frank Daniel, and I thought this paper would peak his interest again.

It didn’t, but I met another musician and lived happily ever after anyway. (Or as happy as anyone gets.)

In case anyone ever wants to start a paper, here's the secret. The paper was planned for three months before the premiere issue came out in November 1993. I sent out an information packet to every likely advertiser and was amazed to get 12 ads for the first issue from that mailing. I put up $250 as a starter fund. I originally had a partner who was also going to put up $250, but he didn’t, and that was the end of him. I never had to use my own money again, and over the years the paper paid for my computer software and occasionally even paid the rent or a utility bill.

My short-lived partner wanted to call the paper Core. I opted for the Richmond Music Journal because it made short work of explaining what the paper was about. It would be a journal, a diary, of Richmond music. We would not do “pre-shows,” which are interviews with bands before they come to town. That, I’ve always felt and still believe, is the purpose of advertising. We would only review. That hurt us, advertising-wise, although it’s also been my experience that 1) if a band can get a pre-show article, they’re even less likely to buy an ad; and 2) bands won’t buy ads anyway. They’re always too broke, too business-stupid, or too arrogant.

I had two great influences when creating the Journal. The first was ex-Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s book Stone Alone, in which he wrote about the little music newspapers in England and their popularity polls. He kept an eye on how he was doing in the Best Bass Player rankings. I would always have some kind of popularity poll, and I would focus on local music.

The second influence was the New Yorker magazine. The Journal layout and design was very similar, columns of straight text with only the occasional photo or cartoon, simple, readable and clean. The emphasis would be, like the New Yorker, on analytical commentary and review.

The quality of writing has not been consistent over the years since I’ve gone through dozens of writers—some better than others—but I seldom flat-out rejected anyone’s submission. With some editing, anything can be shaped into a readable piece that at least vaguely resembles analytical commentary. The articles I never got around to using were inevitably about a regional or national musician or band. I put the local material first, a practice I think would save the Richmond Times-Dispatch, but they refuse to believe it.

Having been a freelance writer for 20 years before starting the Journal, I know how frustrating it is, and I decided to try to publish everyone who submitted work. And I would pay them, even if it was just $5. And I did. Some writers have waived payment, which helped our bottom line, and I thank them for that. Some wrote for advertising credit. One band paid me in Mac software and that was a tremendous deal. Doing this paper taught me how to use QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and those skills enabled me to get progressively better paying day jobs.

Not only did I improve my marketable skills, I met my husband in 1996 through the paper. I missed meeting him in 1993 because I never got around to seeing the band Stiff Richard when it played the Metro. Copies of their CD came in and the paper reviewed them unfavorably. Around then I met Peter Bell, formerly of Ten Ten, who was eager to write and be written about. And when he formed the band October, he brought to my attention that one of his guitarists looked very much like Frank Daniel, the musician who had inspired me to launch the Journal. I went to a show at Jimmy Ryan’s and saw that he did, but he was also much too young for me. Journal reviewers consistently panned October so I kept a discreet distance, although I went to every show I could just to look.

Fast forward a year. I had met Keith MacPhee when he was in Joe America, and when he moved on to Grumbledog with Keith Clarke, they invited me to a show. The band was just a three-piece when I saw it at Twisters, but in the summer of 1996 when I saw them again at the Sunset Grill, they had added a guitar player, the same guy who used to be in October. With shorter hair and a goatee, he looked older. I dated him through Grumbledog, the great Thelma Shook, Bobby and Greg, the Colossal Eds and Mozo.

For a long period, he ran sound more than he played, especially a long standing regular gig with Whistler's Mother, but I'm sure that was frustrating for him not to be playing, and on a few colorful occasions, he was royally stiffed by young, arrogant, asshole little kid bands that didn't want to pay him after contracting his services. I had to declare war against them in the Journal because I'm Italian and that's what we do. Sometimes it shook the money loose and sometimes it didn't.

My relationship with this musician became a problem as far as the paper was concerned. My friends became his friends and band mates. He brought new people into my circle, and all of them were musicians. I was now fatally compromised. It would be very difficult to maintain a peaceful relationship with him and his friends and bandmates and still write honest reviews of their bands. Even good reviews would be suspect. I continued to serve as publisher, editor and sole ad salesman for the Journal, but I stepped down for the most part as a writer. It got to the point we only went out to see his friends play, and then to the point where we only went out when he was playing. The paper got smaller.

We were married in 2001, despite the age difference, and he went on to play with CBJ with Cy Taggart and John Leedes, the Harrison Deane Band, Us, B2B, and various smaller units that came and went quickly.

In the end, the Journal was good to me personally. It never became huge, but it also never collapsed into debt-ridden ruin like Pulp Radio, Punchline, and other similar papers that have come and gone. At its height, which was around 1995, the Journal was sometimes 48 pages. That's a big paper for one done on a kitchen table by a single person. Summers were especially fruitful with full-page ads for big touring shows at the Landmark and Classic Amphitheatre.

I would normally go out four or five nights a week, hitting three to five clubs each night, seeing and photographing as many as 12 bands a night, and doing more than half the writing myself. Staying out until the bars closed was routine. One night I even got beat up and robbed in front of Main Street Station, my reward for being the last person in the Bottom on a Friday night after a Suzy Saxon and the Anglos show at Alley Katz.

It was easier when the clubs were clustered. There was a time when the Grace and Laurel corridor near VCU would have at least three live music clubs within walking distance. Then the Bottom opened up, and you could literally walk around one block and catch sets in five or more different clubs. West Main through the Fan was a corridor of clubs for a short time, although you couldn’t visit them all easily without moving your car. They are all just restaurants now.

Live music spread into the suburbs. Parking is convenient and free, but you have to commit to one club per evening. You can’t go elsewhere during the break and then come back without a lot of driving.

The other problem is burnout. Every band interview sounds so similar to every other band interview, you feel like a hamster in a wheel when you've been writing for even just a few years. There’s seldom anything new to write about the continuing struggle of bands to get a record contract. When they succeed, it’s essentially the same story, and when they fail, it’s even more the same story. That’s why the paper always needed new writers who hear this story with new ears and write it up like it’s never been written before.

As the years passed, and I actually started getting day jobs, it was hard to go out even one night a week. The Journal continued, though, due to the faithfulness of a couple of writers, Walter Boelt and Robert Stutler, and advertisers who still supported it like the Boulevard Deli, A Major Music and Oasis Duplicating. Then the Boulevard Deli closed. The math was no longer there to pay the printer.

I still enjoyed doing the calendar, the polls, and compiling the always interesting and funny letters and comments, so I gradually began moving the paper's content to the Internet, bit by bit. I was printing 1,000 copies of the paper, but getting up to 2,000 hits a month on the website. It seemed more people were reading it online. That was verified each month when I brought the paper around to the record and equipment stores and found too many old copies were still around. It was time to stop the print edition in the spring of 2005 after a few final bimonthly issues.

I wasn’t sure until it was over when the last issue would be, so it was never announced in print. There was very little outcry, and not even a mention in the other papers that we had ceased, when the deaths of less successful papers had been reported. That has always bugged me. Eleven years of nonstop publishing should have been noted by someone.

Maybe that’s because we’re not really gone yet, but we’re certainly a shadow of our former selves. The print edition ended without debt. In fact, there was a little money left over. To me, and probably only me, it was a great success.

For the past year or so, I've been watching another paper, Brick, make all the classic mistakes, and struggle for an audience, even with the backing of Media General. It shouldn't be this hard to do a good local paper. It is hard, but that's the trick, not taking the easy way out by using too much syndicated material. Local stories and many local photos are key. If you make your readership your story, you have faithful readers because we like to read about ourselves and people we know. (This would become by 2012 the multi-zillion dollar basis of Facebook.) Putting a town on the map for arts and music requires a very intensive coverage of the local arts and music. Otherwise, what's the point of a local paper?