A Fake Fatherly Advice Column

University of Detroit, where I did my first year of college, was a Jesuit school; the only A+ I ever received in a class was Philosophy 101, taught by an amazing Jesuit priest. Every issue of the Varsity News featured an advice column called “Dear Abbot,” answered by the head of the monastery. In the…

Singles reviews, 1982

As far as I remember, the first singles roundup I ever wrote – for my college paper, senior year at University of Missouri-Columbia. Callow and corny, but my once-new wave tastes are already stretching across the map — including to protest rap, months before “The Message.” maneater, 1982

Fake Letters to the High School Editor

Fairly certain these ran in an April Fools’ issue of my high school newspaper in suburban Michigan, for which I was the editor at the time. Not only did I write all of them; I typed them into columns on an actual typewriter, picked the headline fonts, conjured the artificial adverts, designed the page, and…

REO Speedwagon live review, 1980

I may have told some tall tales over the years about this college-newspaper review inspiring threats on my life that let me know writing about music should be my life’s calling, seeing as how no other writing ’til then had merited such a response. More likely, I just got an irate phonecall or two in…

A 1981 Top Ten — from 1981!

One rock-critic task I was never crazy about was when magazines would ask me to blurb a few of the “best albums of the year” for their year-end issues. The point of criticism isn’t to justify why a thing’s “good”; it’s to talk about what a thing does. So my prose, in those instances, would…

On Racist College Radio Playlists, 1981

Wrote this for my college newspaper (the weekly extracurricular not daily Journalism School one) about University of Missouri-Columbia’s student-run radio station when I was 20. Sometime before, I’d been invited on as a guest of KCOU’s Sunday night new wave show and for some reason the host didn’t show up, so I wound up spinning…