I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews
As a pop music obsessive, much of my career in journalism has been focused on speaking with the writers, performers and record-makers whose work lit a fire under me. I’ve interviewed hundreds of musicians over the years; the ones includes here are those that meant the most to me personally.
In other words, this book is a collection of my favorite long-form interviews from the 1980s, ‘90s and early 00’s. When possible, I went back to the original cassette recordings and transcribed them from beginning to end, because sometimes – particularly when the interview was being done for a newspaper – you’d only use a quarter, or less, of the material in the print product. That’s why I called them “lost” interviews.
Some were conducted for the music magazine Goldmine, which in those days gave you a very high word count, because it was for my fellow obsessives, who liked to read everything. A few of those have been re-transcribed; still others appear just as they did in the pages of Goldmine all those years ago.
I stuck in the interviews with actors Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall because they go into some interesting detail, and frankly because I just thought they were cool.
Think of these interviews as snapshots. Ghosts in the flashbulb pop. We were all so much older then. We’re younger than that now.
Tom Petty (conversations from 1984, 1986, 1989 and 1993)
Neil Young (conversations from 1985, 1997)
Sir George Martin (1993)
Merle Haggard (1999)
Bo Diddley (2003)
Linda Ronstadt (2003)
Emmylou Harris (1996)
Jethro Tull (2002)
PLUS Stephen Stills; The Bangles; Rodney Crowell; Guy Clark & Susanna Clark; Dave Mason; Rosanne Cash; Seals & Crofts; Mary Hopkin; Gregory Peck; Robert Duvall
Published by St. Petersburg Press