Four Decades in the Game
I recently went through some old boxes in storage.
I kept of a lot of my old writings from the alternative press. But I was surprised to find that I had saved a copy of the very first paid article I had published in a newspaper.
It ran 40 years ago this week in the Baltimore City Paper. December 13, 1985.
I have known in my head that I have been writing criticism (and a few years later, journalism) for money for a long time. Though in 1985, it wasn't that much money.
But to see it again in black and white was startling. And a bit sobering.
It was a review of 10,000 Maniacs' first major label record on Elektra: The Wishing Chair. I had bought the band's indie records in the big HMV shop in London in June. (They were already making waves in the UK.)
John Strausbaugh was writing for City Paper back then. In coming years, he would blaze an illustrious career as an editor at New York Press and as a renowned author.
Strausbaugh brokered it. Kicked open the door. (Quote: "We don't have anyone under the age of 30 writing music for this paper.")
I sent him a draft. He sent back the smartest and most useful notes I have ever received on a piece of writing. Brutal honesty with one goal: getting it in shape to be worth running in City Paper.
It worked. The review came out just before Christmas. At the end of my junior year at a local university.
I kept writing for City Paper - once a month or so - until I swapped Baltimore for St. Louis and grad school in 1987. A couple years later, I had a staff job at The Riverfront Times. The legendary Julie Lobbia (later at The Village Voice) taught me how to write a news story. She pushed me hard in all the best ways. Another person in the game who demanded that I do it right. (I think she rejected roughly 13 cover story ideas in my first two months.)
I have been very lucky in the mentor department.
Old-timers (and I guess I am one now) will jawbone you to death about how journalism ain't what it used to be. Everything that has been lost.
In the currents of making a career in news, there is so little time to pause. (Hell, I started out as a paperboy at 13; I've had inky fingers most of my life.)
I typed out that article on 10,000 Maniacs and handed in a paper copy in 1987. Putting stories on one of those large square floppy discs with a hole in the middle a year or so later was a gargantuan leap into the future. The way past cool people in the art department used to lay things out. There were exacto knives and glue.
And on Thursday? You waited for the bundles of papers to drop. And snapped one up as soon as you could.
The technological shift in journalism over 40 years has been dizzying. I have edited web publications at this point. Mastered so many skills past reporting and writing. But holding this Baltimore City Paper from 40 years ago and leafing through it brought all of the first moments of doing this job back to me in a rush.
This paper is stuffed with ads from restaurants and nightclubs. The calendar listings are comprehensive. (That might be the thing I miss the most.) Lynda Barry and Matt Groening and David Lynch are doing their thing with pen and ink in the back of the paper with the classifieds.
It is impossible not to feel the distance between then and now.
Plus: My fingers got a tiny bit black again. Forty years on.
Not a subscriber to Stage Write? Sign up here. It's free – and will stay that way.
Read more about my work at my website.
