Ray Bonis of the Cabell Library archives at Virginia Commonwealth University wanted some background information as the library prepares to put all the Journals online. He asked a few questions. I gave a few very long answers. He said he couldn't include all of it on the library website. I said, but I can include all of it on my blog!
I found the post you did about the history of the Richmond Music Journal. That was helpful but I have a few questions for you. I know you graduated from VCU with a BS in journalism in 1973. Any other schooling?
No. When desktop publishing started and computers replaced typewriters in offices around 1989, I bought books and taught myself. College really didn’t help me at all. I would have been better off just getting a job doing anything at a newspaper out of high school. Then I would have been a few years ahead of Watergate because that made reporter an impossible job to get. Before Watergate, it was a lousy job, low pay, worse hours. Nobody wanted it.
You were the editor of the Commonwealth Times (VCU's campus newspaper) for at least one semester and that you were a frequent contributor to Richmond publications in the 1980s and 1990s including Style Weekly. What other work have you done or were you always a freelance writer? Always in Richmond?
I was an editor of the Commonwealth Times my sophomore year. The last thing I did as editor was take my issue to the printer downtown. The next morning I went into labor and had a baby. From that point on, I was an evening college and summer school student and did not live on campus or participate in any extracurriculars or internships.
I was a book reviewer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch for 17 years. My topics were women’s issues, feminism, women’s lib, and Hollywood celebrities. I really learned how to write by taking note of how my reviews were edited and writing them to suit. Ann Lloyd Merriman was my mentor there. I was a paste-up girl at the paper, and asked her if I could do it, and she gave me the opportunity because women’s lib was a thing and she didn’t have any women reviewers. That ended when the Sunday book review page was discontinued. It paid nothing. You kept the book.
I left being an administrative assistant at the Associated Press to be editor of a cable television weekly called Tube. This was in the early 1980s when cable was new and exciting. The magazine was financially mismanaged and went out of business pretty quick.
I was a frequent contributor of back page essays to Style Weekly during the ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s. Rozanne Epps was my mentor there until she died. The essays were often reprinted in similar weeklies in Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Virginia Beach, and Jacksonville, Florida. An alt-weekly syndicate picked them up and I used to find them online all over the country, but payment never seemed to reach me. I had one cover story for Style about the National Enquirer sending a team to Richmond to spy on former Miss America Gretchen Carlson having an affair with a married channel 8 news anchor. I got that gig because my brother worked at the National Enquirer at the time and arranged for me to ride along as a guide the week they were in town. Between the fee from the Enquirer and the alternative weekly checks, that was the most money I ever made writing.
I freelanced for a variety of local street papers in the late 1980s and early 1990s when desktop publishing on Mac computers became a thing, including Night Moves, New Age for Seniors, For Kids’ Sake, and Livewire. I was a restaurant critic for a year on Night Moves until the owners got angry that I was too critical. They paid little to nothing.
I was editor of the Mechanicsville Local from 1999-2001. They paid me $5,000 less than they had the male editors before me. Maybe even less than that. I was also the only reporter, did the layout every week, wrote the editorials, edited the letters and calendar, and took some of the photos. I shared a photographer and sports writer with the Goochland paper.
And I did my own paper, the Richmond Music Journal, for 11 years.
Why start the Richmond Music Journal? When you started it how long did you think it might last?
1. I was aggravated by the financial mismanagement of all the free papers. Also, I knew you couldn’t do a paper people would look forward to reading if you lived in fear of losing an advertiser and only ran positive stories. You had to be willing to make some people angry. It was a time in my life when I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose, and could risk it all.
2. I fell in love with a guy who was editing an alt-paper, but he didn’t love me. When his paper failed, I thought I could stay in touch with him by starting one myself and he could write for me. It didn’t work. I picked local music as the topic because he was a musician, and I wanted to focus on just one area of local entertainment --- not try to cover it all as other papers tried and failed. I figured it’d be easier to sell advertising that way if I could deliver a targeted readership. I actually know nothing about music. I approached it like anthropologist Margaret Mead going to Samoa. I was going to write about the hopes, dreams and lifestyles of struggling musicians.
I thought it would last until I got a full-time job and then I wouldn’t need it and wouldn’t have time for it, and even then, thanks to a few other people who took over the writing and a few advertisers who continued to hang in, it lasted four more years, but I don’t think it was the best four years. The paper kept getting smaller. I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and I had to excuse myself from reviewing his bands, then all his friends’ bands, and then put up with accusations of favoritism anyway, so I had to step away from the writing. I became a cat lady, but no one wants to read about cats, even though I wrote a whole book about the mental illness of being a cat lady and put it up on Amazon.
The RMJ documents the music scene in Richmond from 1993 to 2005. What do you think was the most significant Richmond music history events from that time period (certainly there were a large number of venues for people to play and LOTS of bands)?
It was an era of transition from desperately wanting record label deals as the only route to success and recording to making and selling your own cassettes to making and selling your own CDs. The technology changed so drastically. Dave Matthews Band overshadowed the scene – they played the Flood Zone every Wednesday -- and influenced many – more than Gwar, which was a gimmick art school band. More like an interactive play than music.
There was a constant tension between being a good band that played covers and got all the bookings and made serious money and an original band that had to struggle because people weren’t familiar with the music, but had a remote shot at becoming national stars. It was between being successful as Dave Matthews or being successful as Boy O Boy/Fighting Gravity, which never broke out of the college circuit. Or being successful as The Fredds, which had no shot at all at a record deal because they just played covers, but they made the most money locally and got all the high-profile, top dollar bookings.
I digitized the best photos and put them on the Richmond Music Journal Facebook group page where I guess they'll live forever, but I didn’t keep all the negatives. It was too much. I went through so many rolls of film a week. There were just shoeboxes full of them.
I stopped doing the paper because I had to take time away from my day job – once I got one -- to pick up the paper in Ashland. It was too much work driving it all around town to the music stores, only to discover when I got there that another paper was on top of mine in my rack and my papers weren’t being seen.
Also, Guitar Center and Sam Ash Music came to town, and that wiped out a lot of the little music stores and some of my advertising base since I didn't know how to get ads from the big guys.
Everything was going to the Internet by then, so I decided instead of paying to print it and driving all over town, I would just upload the pages. That would save me time and money. I wouldn’t even need to sell ads anymore. So the paper continued online for another year or so after it ceased publishing, but the web page was never that popular (that I could tell) and I lost interest in updating it. It was no longer my writing anyway, and with no advertising coming in, I couldn’t pay the other writers. The scene I knew had faded away as we all aged out of it, and I wasn’t interested in the young bands coming up. So it eventually shrunk down to just a blog about what happened to the old guys that used to be. They started dying off. Lots of obituaries in this blog.
And in the end, I really just loved doing newspapers. Any kind of newspaper. I only wanted to work on a newspaper you held in your hands and turned the pages. And that's gone.
Two hubs supported the scene, Grace Street and Shockoe Bottom, making it extremely easy to take in three to five bands a night going from club to club on foot. And this was seven nights a week. Where is the scene now? I don’t even know.
How in the world did you cover all that you did? Could you do this full time and make money or was it an issue by issue basis?
I went out almost every night from around 9 pm to 2 a.m., photographing and reviewing bands. Because the scene was so compacted into two areas, I could get a lot done. I’d watch a set and move on, often circling back because some clubs booked three bands a night. Once the paper was well known – which happened fast – the doormen would just wave me in. I never paid a cover, which made me very mobile. I did band interviews in the early evening or during the day.
I had part-time jobs throughout, in call centers or through temp agencies, any kind of job. I qualified for food stamps twice. I ran up a lot of credit card debt for living expenses and car repairs that took 20 years (literally) to pay off, but the paper always paid for itself. That budget was separate and I never borrowed or went into debt for it. It was issue by issue. The only time the paper ever paid my rent ($350 a month to live above a store in Carytown) was one summer when I had a lot of full page ads from music stores and music shows at the Classic Amphitheatre at Richmond International Raceway and the Landmark Theatre (I even got free tickets to see Marilyn Manson). A full page ad was only $100. The back cover was $120. I priced them low so they’d be easy to sell since I’m not a good salesman. An 8th of a page was $12.50, and even then, sometimes I had to wait at the bar for an hour to get someone to come out from the back and pay me. It wasn’t easy collecting the money, and I think being an older woman actually helped there. They had pity on me. So I was never going to make any real money. My printer, the Ashland Herald Progress, got it all.
Did you have any paid staff? Were most of the images by you? Why did you stop?
No, I never had staff. I had contributors. I paid them $5 an article. And usually they could get into clubs for free or could get press passes to get into bigger shows. I sold the ads. I paid the bills. I drove the paper to all the distribution points. I did the layout. I designed ads if they didn't have one. I learned how to do a lot of things that eventually got me real work later on, jobs that had pensions and health insurance.
Most of the local band photography is mine. I put photo credits on all the photos, so you can tell. Some old-timers from the ‘70s and ‘80s music scene gave me photos of the local bands that were big back then. Readers enjoyed seeing the old photos.
How in the world did you cover all that you did? Could you do this full time and make money or was it an issue by issue basis?
I went out almost every night from around 9 pm to 2 a.m., photographing and reviewing bands. Because the scene was so compacted into two areas, I could get a lot done. I’d watch a set and move on, often circling back because some clubs booked three bands a night. Once the paper was well known – which happened fast – the doormen would just wave me in. I never paid a cover, which made me very mobile. I did band interviews in the early evening or during the day.
I had part-time jobs throughout, in call centers or through temp agencies, any kind of job. I qualified for food stamps twice. I ran up a lot of credit card debt for living expenses and car repairs that took 20 years (literally) to pay off, but the paper always paid for itself. That budget was separate and I never borrowed or went into debt for it. It was issue by issue. The only time the paper ever paid my rent ($350 a month to live above a store in Carytown) was one summer when I had a lot of full page ads from music stores and music shows at the Classic Amphitheatre at Richmond International Raceway and the Landmark Theatre (I even got free tickets to see Marilyn Manson). A full page ad was only $100. The back cover was $120. I priced them low so they’d be easy to sell since I’m not a good salesman. An 8th of a page was $12.50, and even then, sometimes I had to wait at the bar for an hour to get someone to come out from the back and pay me. It wasn’t easy collecting the money, and I think being an older woman actually helped there. They had pity on me. So I was never going to make any real money. My printer, the Ashland Herald Progress, got it all.
Did you have any paid staff? Were most of the images by you? Why did you stop?
No, I never had staff. I had contributors. I paid them $5 an article. And usually they could get into clubs for free or could get press passes to get into bigger shows. I sold the ads. I paid the bills. I drove the paper to all the distribution points. I did the layout. I designed ads if they didn't have one. I learned how to do a lot of things that eventually got me real work later on, jobs that had pensions and health insurance.
Most of the local band photography is mine. I put photo credits on all the photos, so you can tell. Some old-timers from the ‘70s and ‘80s music scene gave me photos of the local bands that were big back then. Readers enjoyed seeing the old photos.
I shot black and white film stock on a small compact Nikon with a tiny flash that I could fit in my purse. That was important because there was often a no-photography rule for touring shows, so I had to be sneaky and then outrun the bouncers. Imagine having a no photography rule now in this age of cell phones. It’s amazing how well the photos came out. Black and white film is so crisp and pristine. The photos of national acts were mostly taken by a Chesterfield policeman named John Church who liked to take photos at major music shows and he got in free because of the paper. If you had a photo pass, you would be put up front for the first three songs of a show. Then the camera had to be put away. (The lead singer or star guitarist would do something to change their costume, like take a hat or a scarf or a jacket off, after the first three songs, so if you published a photo of them taken later on in the show, past the first-three-song limit, the promoter would immediately know you had violated the rules.) John got backstage a lot, too, and would get photos of famous musicians holding up the paper.
I digitized the best photos and put them on the Richmond Music Journal Facebook group page where I guess they'll live forever, but I didn’t keep all the negatives. It was too much. I went through so many rolls of film a week. There were just shoeboxes full of them.
I stopped doing the paper because I had to take time away from my day job – once I got one -- to pick up the paper in Ashland. It was too much work driving it all around town to the music stores, only to discover when I got there that another paper was on top of mine in my rack and my papers weren’t being seen.
Also, Guitar Center and Sam Ash Music came to town, and that wiped out a lot of the little music stores and some of my advertising base since I didn't know how to get ads from the big guys.
Everything was going to the Internet by then, so I decided instead of paying to print it and driving all over town, I would just upload the pages. That would save me time and money. I wouldn’t even need to sell ads anymore. So the paper continued online for another year or so after it ceased publishing, but the web page was never that popular (that I could tell) and I lost interest in updating it. It was no longer my writing anyway, and with no advertising coming in, I couldn’t pay the other writers. The scene I knew had faded away as we all aged out of it, and I wasn’t interested in the young bands coming up. So it eventually shrunk down to just a blog about what happened to the old guys that used to be. They started dying off. Lots of obituaries in this blog.
And in the end, I really just loved doing newspapers. Any kind of newspaper. I only wanted to work on a newspaper you held in your hands and turned the pages. And that's gone.
