Re-listening to the tape of my interview with Kate Bush this morning over coffee. Im thinking that one of the threads through my journalism career has been that Ive been able to land interviews with artists who rarely grant interviews (e.g., Andy Partridge, Kate Bush, Roman Polanski, Fela Kuti, Woody Allen, etc.). Another thing Im thinking is...I conducted the Bush interview in December 85 and had been hired as a staff writer/reporter at Cash Box in late August 1985. So Id been on the job for all of four months. Yet look at the high quality of the interview. In those first four months at the magazine, Id already written the article that got unsigned band The Smithereens their recording contract with Enigma Records; I had already written the article that led to They Might Be Giants recording contract. And I was doing interviews, like the Bush interview, that broke new ground about major artists. But because I didnt have an uncle or any other relative in the music or journalism business, I had to wait until I was 27 to be hired to do this sort of work on a full-time basis. Oh, I had been working full-time in New York City since I was 21 years old (and for many years before that outside NYC), but mostly in vastly underemployed positions. And I had to watch the nephew or daughter of some Fox executive (or some rich dude) get such a plumb job right out of college. Those years, my twenties in NYC, taught me so much about capitalism. I saw that people with world class talent (but without family connections) didnt get the jobs that the underserving Jenna Bushes get. (Or whoever her equivalent was in the 1970s and 1980s.) True, I also saw entrepreneurs in my age group coming from nothing and making it. Still, too few cases of that -- and too many cases of nepotistic advantage. huffingtonpost/paul-iorio/the-great-lost-kate-bush-_b_5009516.html
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 14:54:37 +0000
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