Ray Van Horn, Jr.: Depending on how long I’ve been up the night before, I try to get up in the morning somewhat early and sift through emails, update my blog and work on assignments. I always take a small handful of promo CDs with me to listen in my truck, as well as at my desk at work, though honestly, at work I only get a flavor of what I’m listening to because my industry is noisesome, fast-paced and detail-oriented, but I always figure if I get a subliminal flavor of the disc, that’ll help me when I’m isolated on the road, at my home desk or in the basement with the stereo.
Because I can get home in the dinnertime hours or into the witching hour, depending on the time of the month, which gets absolutely intense in the last week, I can only work on my assignments when the time is there. If I’m lucky to catch my wife at home for dinner, we’ll usually eat—sometimes in a hurry when I know an interviewee is about to call—and relax a little bit. I try not to hole myself up in the office all hours at home so as not to ostracize my wife. She’s extremely supportive of what I do in my spare time, but she needs attention too. Often she’ll interrupt me to help her with things anyway, so I’d rather make myself available instead of grunting when I get stopped in the middle of something I’m writing.
Often in the late evening I’ll be doing the same things as the morning, or I’ll be in the basement reviewing DVD releases, which are the most time-consuming promotional material I’m privy to. My backlog of promo CDs is absolutely insurmountable; I have an easy six stacks piled high. I’ve learned not to chastise myself for this ridiculous queue; I’m only human and would rather spend an appropriate amount of time analyzing each disc than just blow through them by sampling each track then writing a bogus, uninformed review, as I’ve heard of some journalists doing. I figure I’m here to do the music business a service, especially the musicians themselves; I owe them my devotion, even if the material sucks.
Who was your favorite interview?
Without a doubt, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. The man is an expert interviewee, much less performer. I think any of my peers who have interviewed Dee will tell you the same; all you need do is ask an intelligible question and then Dee is off to the races and will likely cover two or three of your next questions in succession. Dee is passionate, exuberant, rowdy, hilarious and still bitter that Twisted died ahead of its time. Love is for Suckers is not how the band should’ve exited in the eighties. I have a tape from a message that Dee left on my recorder when I missed his initial call and I laugh myself silly when I play it back, particularly at the “Are ya there, man? Are ya, huh? Are ya, huh? Are ya, huh?” The man’s a legend for all the right reasons.
Who was your least favorite interview?
I can’t remember the actual band member because I just like to block the memory of this rotten interview, and it wasn’t the guy’s fault, but when I interviewed Amorphis, I thought I was getting one of the original band members, but on the day of the interview, I got one of the new recruits at the time. I vividly recall traveling to Philadelphia to interview Crisis again and sitting in Talk of the Town on Broad Street with all of Amorphis’ discs spread out in front of me while I prepared my questions for the interview that was taking place over the phone the following day. I worked pretty hard on those questions, and it would’ve been a meaningful interview to those in Amorphis way back. Needless to say, I felt caught with my pants down. I had a small audience of people sitting with me because they wanted to see me in action. Jesus, what a fiasco! They were impressed I was receiving a call from Finland, but the reception was dreadful, and as I asked my questions in the hope my guest was schooled in Amorphis’ history, all I got was one liner after one liner after one liner, so bad that even the questions relevant to his time and place in the band garnished a couple of one liners with no depth or detail. Maybe his English was limited, but I pretty much think it was because he had just joined the band and here he was, put in front of the firing line with no historical reference. Needless to say, my editor scrapped the story.
Who was least like you thought they would be?
Dylan Carlson of Earth, and it was to the good. I was so moved by his more recent album Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method that I leaped at the opportunity to interview him, realizing that I would have to tame down any questions about his friendship with Kurt Cobain, also keeping in mind some sicko conspiracy theorists have tried to link Dylan to Cobain’s death. In my preparation for the interview, I found that the press mercilessly crucified Dylan and his girlfriend Adrienne Davies who plays drums for Earth these days. These yellow journalists hacked all over Dylan’s slow, drawn speech and tried to make him out to be a wasted burnout, plus they crapped all over Adrienne for her turtle-paced drum patterns. Considering that Earth’s music is slow, ambient doom and dirge music, the fact that Adrienne can meticulously keep a perfect and deliberate rhythm is impressive to me. She knows exactly how much to drag her high hat clatter to give Dylan pinpointed measures from which to pluck his Duane Eddy-esque reverbs. When I interviewed Dylan, I was expecting (thanks to these bozo writers) that Dylan was going to be a chore to converse with. Indeed he was a bit slow on the trigger when we started, but I think I won him over and his speech timing rolled more fluidly and normally. We had a terrific talk and found a lot of common ground outside of music to mull over. My theory is that Dylan is mistrustful in general of the press but if you get on his good side, he’ll warm up in ways you’re not expecting. When I went to see Earth play live in Baltimore, Dylan gave me a free t-shirt, which, as you all know, merch is a band’s lifeblood! A class act.
