I knew I wanted to be a writer after seeing Almost Famous.
That movie came out in 2000, but I came across it the next year, when my middle school career was just barely burgeoning. In one scene, the character Penny Lane tells William Miller to light a candle and listen to Tommy by the Who if he wants to see his entire future. I literally followed her advice, and from that moment on, was determined to carve out a living writing about bands.
Diving further into the career of Cameron Crowe lead me to the hilarious and unhinged ramblings of Lester Bangs. At the same time, in the world of fiction, I began exposing my developing brain to Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was already writing for music magazines. When I finally got to college, I was shown the treacherous and exhilarating terrain of a lesser travelled path.
I found the works of Hunter S. Thompson and fell completely in love.
To this day I’ve never read anyone else like Thompson. He wrote like he was attacking the page, brilliant and totally uninhibited. Thompson clearly knew all the rules for writing proper news stories and deliberately disobeyed them. Whatever MacGuffin masqueraded as the subject of the story was merely a ruse because Thompson was always the real subject. Even then, though, it was obvious to me that nothing was more sacred for him than the writing itself.
I worked diligently to read everything I could find and become a Hunter S. Thompson clone. There are some truly cringey examples of my early attempts at Gonzo journalism in the pages of the Red & Black student newspaper. Eventually, of course, I knew I would have to let him go and figure out my own style.
But, somewhere along the way, I got lost.
…
The Review
Chappell Roan
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
2023
To paraphrase Jon Landau: I have seen the future of popular music, and its name is Chappell Roan.
“HOT TO GO!” is such a perfectly sticky and dynamic pop song that it feels like it was supposed to be a one-hit-wonder in an alternate timeline. I heard that song at work one afternoon and listened to it on repeat until I went to bed that night. When I presented it to the woman I was seeing at the time, as if I were Indiana Jones presenting the holy grail, she said “Where have you been, that’s the song of the summer!”
Shortly thereafter, I was enjoying a sloppy chicken sandwich on my punishingly brief lunch break when I first heard The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess begin properly from track one. I was intrigued by the genuine whimsy of “Femininomenon.” By the time the final notes of “Red Wine Supernova” were ringing out, I had been baptized a true believer in the waters of Chappell Roan, right there in the parking lot of the McFarland Hill Baptist Church.
It’s a nearly perfect pop record, and it’s her debut. This should be the seminal masterpiece she released 10 years into her career, but instead, she knocked it out of the park her first time at bat. I’ve spent most of my life digging through the history of music, so trust me when I tell you, that’s an almost-impossible feat.
On a personal level, what I love so much about the album is how it’s so wildly free.
The lyrics sound as if they were written in sharpie on a bedroom wall through all five stages of grief after a breakup. It’s laugh-out-loud hilarious, unapologetically horny, and yet simultaneously genuinely moving. Records like this are what reaffirm my belief that the music industry is going to be OK.
In a 21st century modern romantic landscape of situationships, it’s impossible not to relate to a song like “Casual” or “My Kink Is Karma.” Hell, even I want to throw it all away and become a dancer at the “Pink Pony Club.” Even the singles that followed her years-in-the-making overnight success, like “Good Luck, Babe!” and “The Giver,” continue to impress. At the time of my writing this column, she is fresh off the heels of a number one hit on the country charts. How bizarrely rad is that?
Perhaps the most magical spell this record casts is earning my undying allegiance, when I could not have fallen less into its demographic. I’m a beard havin’, pickup truck drivin’, boot wearin’, straight white boy from the mountains of Appalachia. Yet, somehow, I can’t stop spinning it. That’s the thing about great music; it makes you feel something, regardless of your place in the world.
Kayleigh Amstutz donned her drag apparel and became Chappell Roan. She found her voice and made an undeniable statement. I spent years of my writing career trying and failing to do the exact same thing.
…
The Tale
This is the story of the meanest review I ever wrote.
When I began writing this series, I knew that at some point I would have to come face to face with this moment. I’ve been avoiding it because there’s no way to tell it where I’m not the villain. I pride myself in leaning towards morality whenever possible, in trying my best to be a good man. It wouldn’t be fair to present myself as anything other than a flawed, three-dimensional human being, though. Like everyone, there are things from my past that I’m not proud of, and this one features prominently in the highlight reel playing through my brain on my worst days.
In the summer of 2014, I was living in California and barely making my bones as a writer. I was working regularly, but wholly unsatisfied and dreadfully poor. Sometimes in life, the dream becomes reality but simply doesn’t match the image you built in your head. The hope is that your creative endeavors will be so immediately impressive that the documentary will start writing itself the moment you finally reach your audience. Instead, most of my pitches were immediately rejected. The ones that were accepted never truly came out the way I wanted.
It wasn’t long before I fell into desperation.
My entire life had been building to this crescendo, but the band hadn’t even started tuning up and I was a year into it already. The dreary days in the gray cubicle at my day job in marketing were growing longer and longer, with no end in sight. It was time to shake things up and make a move, dig down deep and pull something out that would make everyone pay attention.
While beating my head against the wall trying to find the source of inspiration for my opus, an opportunity inadvertently presented itself. My good friend Coolo was playing a show in Fullerton with his band, and I had been invited to check it out. The promise of brief reprieve from my self-inflicted exile was too good to pass up, so I rode down to check them out.
We were in the back of a bustling bar in downtown Fullerton, in a room whose rear entrance opened onto the sidewalk. The atmosphere was bright and cheery, mostly attended by friends and family of the group. It was a low-pressure situation, the perfect recipe for a pleasant summer evening.
Never having heard Coolo’s band, I had no idea what to expect. Coolo was a solid drummer; I knew that from seeing him play on tour with the Scarred a couple years before. All I knew for sure was that the band he would be performing with this evening wasn’t the usual punk fair I had seen him play before. He was my blood brother, though, a relationship forged in the fire of a true trauma bond, so I was down to support whatever he was doing.
When the band started to play, however, I had an unexpectedly adverse reaction.
See, back then, we were in the heyday of the modern folk pop revival. You could hardly tune your radio without hearing a band stomp, clap, and “Hey!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but at the time, it burned me up. I was a self-important Southerner who took roots music entirely too seriously. As such, music like that was disingenuous—and by extension—insulting to me. It was a ridiculous opinion to walk around with, but it was mine, and I had it.
It didn’t matter that this admittedly talented group of musicians had every right to pick and grin as much as they wanted. If I had asked them, it’s likely we even had several of the same records in our collections. All I knew was that they were from Orange County instead of Appalachia, and that’s all my bitter Southern heart needed to start palpitating.
Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning striking the Hill Valley clock tower; I could write about this! I could use this band as an example and say everything I wanted to say. There would be no need to continue my fruitless search for a statement piece when the perfect one was staring me right in the face.
I should have taken a moment to remove myself from the situation and consider the Coolo of it all, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have been a bad idea to remember that this was just a collection of buddies creating something they enjoyed together, and laying my feelings about the genre at their feet was deluded and obnoxious, but I didn’t do that either. Instead, I immediately began mentally structuring paragraphs.
There is no excuse for what I did. It was a dirty, rotten thing to do. I carry the shame of it with me to this day, so much so that it took me months to build the courage to write about it now. Still, if you’ll allow, I want to provide some important pieces of context:
- I was fresh out of journalism school. I believed in my bones that it was my responsibility to write the truth no matter what, friends be damned. Ask anyone who knew me back then, I treated the oath between journalists and readers like it was scripture.
- I was starving to death. Not literally, but also not completely hyperbolic. I had to write whatever I could to pay the rent and feed myself. Most of my pitches were getting rejected, like I said, and I knew this one wouldn’t. That leads me to the third, and most dishonorable, point.
- I knew I could write the ever-loving shit out of that review. I could be Ahab, and that folk pop band would be my whale. I could summon the strength of my influences and give the people something to talk about. After all, what would Hunter Thompson do?
So, I did it.
As soon as I passed the threshold into my bedroom that night, I started feverishly putting words to the page. By the time my head hit the pillow, I had a finished draft. The next day, without taking the time to reevaluate my decision after having literally slept on it, I submitted it to my editor. Unlike the usual scenario, where I paced the floor awaiting rejection while my editor gingerly took their time to acknowledge my existence, this time they bought it from me after their first read-through.
This is the point in the story where I would like to shift the blame to the faceless higher-ups at the magazine. I want to tell you that there was a long notes process where they forced me to make my manuscript as hardcore as possible. The truth is, they made suggestions, but all the choices made were ultimately mine.
I would also like to provide the reader with a small sense of relief concerning the fallout with Coolo. Surely, I called him ahead of time, maybe even took him out for pizza and a beer and found a way to warn him about what was coming. After all, given what I had done, I at least owed him that. Well, friends and readers, I didn’t do that, either.
It’s hard to even type this out, but the disgusting truth is, I was proud of the writing. I shared that thing around like I was doing anyone who read it a favor. Like the story of the monkey’s paw, I got what I wanted, and all it cost me was my very soul: It became the biggest article of my career.
The reality of the situation finally hit when I read the utter betrayal on Coolo’s face the next time we saw each other. We had been through a lot together, the two of us. I had broken bread with his family, swam in his pool, hyped him up to his girlfriend when he introduced her to us for the first time. He was my friend, and I destroyed his trust. I exploited him and sold him out for $50 and the wrong side of notoriety. Even worse, everyone in his life had read it too. The kind and loving folks who had treated me like family took the time to read my awful words in print, for all the world to see.
I’ve never felt smaller in my life.
At first, for a moment, I stood by my actions. Some part of me still believed I had done the right thing, from a journalistic standpoint, but that principle was misguided and rapidly eroding. The truth was coming up from the ground to meet me as I reluctantly plunged toward it from atop my ivory tower; the band hadn’t deserved it. They were fine, good even. I was just too blinded by my own bullshit to see them clearly.
Things came to a head for me at Coolo’s wedding, right before I left California. I went alone and took way too long to realize that I didn’t belong there. It was a truly beautiful event, one I still think about, but I didn’t deserve to participate in the ceremony of that celebration, not anymore. When I made eye contact with the singer from his band at the reception, I was struck by what I saw. There was anger in his expression, of course, but what loomed larger was the unshakeable feeling that he couldn’t believe my audacity at having shown up at all.
I found Coolo, hastily shook his hand and headed for the door. Not long after, for completely different reasons, I left California forever. Even though I was gone from the state, and the magazine, the memories of that article continued to haunt me.
It was time to take a break from writing until I could figure out how to find a better voice.
…
The Aftermath
I didn’t write for years after that.
Call it an overreaction, penance, whatever you like, but I didn’t put pen to paper for a decade. Every time I tried, the pit in my stomach turned to lava. I felt like I had disgraced the thing I loved most in the world, that I had used my powers for evil and didn’t deserve the peace and fulfillment I’ve always found at my writing desk. Worst of all, I was sure that, somewhere out there, spiritually, I had let Hunter S. Thompson down as well.
Even when I apologized to Coolo, who completely accepted it and forgave me, it didn’t work.
Writing was something I decided to bury in my past alongside my stretch jeans and aviators. I got a job completely outside of the industry, of my degree even, and built a new life. When I needed the discipline of a hobby, I pulled my guitar out of its case and started working on songs again.
Whenever someone asked me if I was still writing, I always joked that there wasn’t any money in it. Often, I would say that I still wrote for fun, for me, but that was a lie. Some half-hearted attempts were made, usually after a glass of whiskey, but nothing stuck. Then, out of nowhere, two friends pulled me out of the mire and back onto my feet.
Remember Ramona, from that earlier Tales From the Underground column about mixtapes? She started assigning me records to review, just to see if I could still do it. She had heard all these stories of my writing days without ever getting to experience any of it. Slowly, she began assigning me records by Eric Church, Reba McEntire, Savage Garden, and several other artists who existed just outside of my wheelhouse. Writing those reviews got the wheels turning again.
Then, in the middle of that, my friend Justin wrote a book.
After Justin finished his manuscript, he asked me to edit it for him. That was my first time playing around with the rhythm and melody of writing earnestly since my days in California. Over time, I started hearing the music again. When it was over, and the draft had been finalized, he asked me to write an introduction and include my own page of acknowledgements.
I know Justin well enough to know that he did all of that to get my writing engine rumbling once more. As much as this week’s Tales From the Underground is an apology to Coolo, it’s also a big fat thank you to Justin and Ramona. Without them, I never would have realized just how much I missed and truly needed my first love.
It’s OK to make mistakes; I’ve made more than anyone. Just ask any of my exes. At some point, though, you must pick up the pieces and mold yourself into something better. If not, you’re just being an asshole in a vacuum. I’m not the punk rock teenager anymore, or the Hunter Thompson wannabe, or the guy from that YouTube show. I’m Tyler Evans, rock journalist.
I want that to mean something.
