Bob Ruggiero Interview
Bob Ruggiero is a freelance music journalist who has been writing for Houston Press since 1997. His new book is The Classic Rock Bob Reader: Selected Interviews 1989-2023, which brings together 130 musician interviews conducted over the past 35 years.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I started doing musician interviews and concert reviews while on the staff of The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. The city’s famous music scene gave me a lot of chances to talk to both local acts and national acts on tour, and learn how to set up, prepare for, and conduct an interview, then turn it into an article. After graduating with a Journalism degree, I spent five years in Savannah, Georgia as the editor of the alt-weeklies Good Times and Creative Loafing. Since music was my primary entertainment interest, I made that a focus of my coverage.
After returning to my hometown of Houston, Texas in 1996, I wrote as a freelancer for a variety of online and print publications, including The Houston Chronicle, Texas Music, The Village Voice, and ClassicRockRevisited.com. But my primary outlet for the past 25+ years has been The Houston Press. That has afforded me so, so many opportunities, and the bulk of the book comes from articles that originally appeared there.