Michael Azerrad Interview
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. Click here to subscribe!
Michael Azerrad is a longtime music journalist and the author of The Amplified Come as You Are. It’s a “30th-anniversary deluxe edition of the iconic bestselling biography of Nirvana, updated with exclusive new content exploring the personal and cultural forces that inspired the music.” (Full disclosure: Michael is my old boss at eMusic and Nirvana is a band that I work with at my day job at Universal Music.)
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
My dad brought home Sgt. Pepper the week it came out and I proceeded to play it over and over; I was just a little kid but at that moment I realized I was a rock person and I wanted to make it my life. Fast-forward many years to the mid '80s, a year or so out of college, and I found myself working at a little company called Rockamerica that distributed music videos to nightclubs. They published a little music/video magazine that they sent to music labels, management companies, production companies, etc., and the editor decided that since Michael played in bands and had gone to college, he could write about music. I protested: I hated writing. HATED it. But the editor talked me into and I wrote a review of a compilation of Gumby videos—everybody liked it and, I grudgingly had to admit, so did I. The first musician I ever interviewed was Robert Smith from the Cure and that went really well. (Little did I know that he's just a great interview and whatever talent I had, had little to do with it.)