About Me

My professional life, I recently realized, evolved from twin passions I picked up in high school: jazz and “The New Journalism.”

My intro to jazz came at age 15, when a friend’s elder brother drove us somewhere and had John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra blaring in the car. That soon led me to albums by Miles Davis and many of the other great musicians associated with Miles, a subscription to DownBeat magazine, and, once I began driving, to many trips to the Amazingrace in Evanston for performances by the likes of Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, and Pat Metheny

The New Journalism connection came a year to two later, set in motion when a fellow busboy — like me, also a staffer on our high school newspaper — scribbled the names of several writers he admired on a napkin during a lull at work. Among them were Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Phil Caputo. Soon thereafter, I checked out The New Journalism, a 1973 anthology co-edited by Wolfe, from our local library.

Wolfe and Thompson each contributed two of the 23 works anthologized. Talese had one of his stories included, though Wolfe also mentioned another piece of Talese’s — a 1962 profile of the retired world heavyweight champion Joe Louis in Esquire — that Wolfe cited as the first time he noticed this new approach to magazine feature writing. “The piece didn’t open like an ordinary piece at all,” wrote Wolfe. “It opened with the tone and mood of a short story, with a rather intimate scene; or intimate by the standards of magazine journalism in 1962, in any case.”

Breslin, Hamill, and Caputo had nothing of theirs included, but Breslin appeared prominently in Wolfe’s series of introductory essays, which also credited Hamill with having pitched an article he called “The New Journalism” to Seymour Krim and Nugget magazine in 1965, thereby possibly having coined its name. (Wolfe had already noted elsewhere in the book’s introductory essays that Krim, primarily known as an essayist with ties to both the Beats and New Journalism, had written a confessional piece for Playboy in 1969 about his failure to become a novelist. Wolfe and Krim had also worked together for several months at the New York Herald Tribune, from Krim joining the paper as a reporter in December 1965 through its demise in April 1966.)

I greatly admired many of the stories in the anthology, but Wolfe’s essays had at least as much impact on me. Wolfe argued that the abandonment of social realism by American novelists in the 1960s opened the way for journalists with literary ambitions to supplant them as the most important chroniclers of the times. He identified four techniques, borrowed from realistic fiction, that the new journalists were exploiting to energize their magazine articles and books. It sounded like fun. And Wolfe made it seem as if the hard work of reporting was as important to doing it well as the writing itself. Hard work I could handle. Maybe I’d attempt new journalism myself someday.

But first came college. I majored in English, and found a great professor at the University of Illinois who made British and continental literature come alive in the classroom. I decided to pursue a master’s degree in English at the University of Chicago. A mistake: I realized very quickly that I had no interest in literary theory or writing scholarly papers. One day I encountered my busboy buddy, who had put off college for a few years to work as a Tribune copyboy, crossing the U of C quad. He was now an undergraduate there. I told him I was thinking of dropping out of grad school. He told me about the City News Bureau of Chicago. I quit school before the fall quarter ended and started work at City News.

The vibe of the bureau’s Randolph Street office would have put me in mind of the second paragraph of the first of Wolfe’s New Journalism essays: “God knows I didn’t have anything new in mind, much less anything literary, when I took my first newspaper job. I had a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea . . . Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn . . . .”

While I was working there, City News would relocate to more modern digs in the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive, directly across the river from the old Daily News/Sun-Times building (now, alas, the site of the Trump International Hotel & Tower). But the Randolph Street office, where I began as a copyboy (and was promoted to reporter a month later), was gloriously grimy. Our stories were delivered to the Tribune and Sun-Times (the Daily News had folded in 1978) via pneumatic tubes. Supposedly, staffers at those papers occasionally pranked the City News kids by sending dead mice back through the tubes. By “kids” I mean reporters in their early twenties, City News having become renowned as an incubator of fledgling journalists. City News is where the newspaper adage “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” originated.

Years later, Seymour Hersh told me that he had dropped out of law school at the U of C to become a City News copyboy. Other well-known City News alumni include the playwright/screenwriter Charles MacArthur (co-author with Ben Hecht of the 1928 Broadway hit The Front Page, which inspired two films of that title as well as the classic 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who mentions the experience toward the start of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the great Chicago columnist Mike Royko (who wrote the intro to A.A. Dornfeld’s Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago), and — shortly after my own departure — New York Times columnist David Brooks.

During my couple of years there, I worked my way up through several night and overnight shifts in various roles: police reporter, rewrite man, radio editor, and weekend editor. We covered the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor (and the subsequent all-out resistance to him from a coalition of 29 white aldermen). A gubernatorial election. A railroad strike. The usual run of murders (including a couple of mob hits, this being Chicago), 4-alarm fires, drug busts, and so forth. Most notably, my colleague John Rooney won a Peter Lisagor award from the Chicago Headline Club for breaking the Tylenol poisoning story.

The pay was lousy, but I learned a lot. And I got a good dose of the gritty, real-life shenanigans Wolfe had imagined immersing himself in after the five years he had endured at Yale earning his Ph.D.

For instance: Racing to the scene of the city’s first shooting death of 1983, I ran a stoplight and nearly hit a squad car. Because I was driving on a speeding ticket, so had no driver’s license to surrender in lieu of bail, I was put behind bars briefly, until I persuaded the Sun-Times reporter who was in the car with me to help post my bail.

It turned out that the police themselves had done the killing. A fool had been shooting a gun into the air to celebrate the new year. The man made the fatal mistake of lowering his gun and pointing it in their direction.

I’d done only a couple of months of grad school, so hadn’t come to loathe it the way Wolfe did, and decided to return to it elsewhere for a single academic year.

I left City News because it had been replaced as the primary feeder system to the Chicago newspapers by the papers’ internship programs. I headed to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism with the blessing of my boss, Bernie Judge. Judge had launched his own career at City News, gone on to win two Pulitzer Prizes directing investigations for the ChicagoTribune, and returned to the bureau to run it early in my tenure there. I retain a sheet of stationery with his name on it, on which, during what amounted to a sort of exit interview, he had me write the title of a book he recommended I track down before starting at Columbia: William Zinsser’s now classic On Writing Well.

A couple of months later, I interviewed Zinsser for my master’s thesis, “Whatever Happened to the New Journalism?” I thought of Zinsser, then the executive editor of the Book of the Month Club, as a more traditional journalist. But I also interviewed four writers from Wolfe’s anthology — Wolfe himself, Thompson, Talese, and George Plimpton — as well as a handful of others.

I also interviewed three editors closely identified with early New Journalism: Harold Hayes (Esquire), Clay Felker (New York), and Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone). Hunter Thompson helped me set up my meeting with Wenner after Rolling Stone’s managing editor ignored my request for one. When I sought an interview with Lee Eisenberg, the top editor at Esquire at the time, I was redirected to an associate editor not much older than myself — Adam Moss, who went on to have a career nearly as storied as those other three editors, primarily at the New York Times Magazine and New York.

The most influential journalism course I took at Columbia by far was a column-writing class, titled “Personal and Professional Style,” taught by film critic Judith Crist, who had been a colleague of Tom Wolfe’s at both the New YorkHerald Tribune and New York magazine. (One of my classmates that semester was Adam Platt, who went on to become the longtime restaurant critic for New York.) Michael Massing’s Magazine Writing course was another I found especially valuable. (Massing had to cancel class one week to cover the US invasion of Grenada for The Atlantic Monthly. He later became a MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient and wrote a handful of books, most recently the magisterial Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind.)

I also talked my way into an elective course outside the journalism program, Creative Nonfiction, taught by none other than Seymour Krim. One of the stories I wrote for Krim was a sort of narrative spinoff from my thesis focused on my interview with Wenner and Thompson’s role in making it happen.

The Wenner story proved fortuitous when I was job hunting after graduation. So did my high school subscription to DownBeat, because I recognized the magazine’s mailing address in a classified ad seeking an editor for a music publication. The ad turned out to be for a trade magazine also owned by DownBeat. When I went in for my interview, the company’s owner and publisher, Jack Maher, told me of once having made a sales call to a record label executive the same day Wenner was doing likewise for Rolling Stone. The executive had had the two of them make their presentations in front of each other. Maher told me that he was impressed by how well my story for Krim’s class had captured Wenner. He said he expected to have a job available at DownBeat in a few months and asked if I’d be interested. Several months later I became the magazine’s associate editor.

I stayed put for a couple of enjoyable years, a highlight of which was flying to New York to interview Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones for a cover story. I oversaw the front and back sections of the magazine, wrote a column every other month, and was the second set of eyes on everything else that went into the magazine.

But I never intended to focus exclusively on jazz for a living, so moved on to other magazines as a writer (which I preferred) and/or editor (which paid the bills).

I did both for the in-flight magazine of American Airlines, which in those days was surprisingly good. Robert Draper, Mark Seal, Ed Ward, and Geoffrey Norman were regular contributors. It helped that we could send writers wherever the airline flew for next to nothing. When American was opening a route to Tokyo, I tracked down Bruce Jay Friedman to see if he’d like to revisit the city in which his novel Tokyo Woes was set and write a travel story. He laughed and said he’d never been, but would love to go. So we sent him. I approached E. Jean Carroll (yes, that E. Jean Carroll), whose book Female Difficulties I admired, to see if she’d be interested in writing for us; she wrote back that she was overbooked at the moment but was impressed by the sample issues I had sent her and loved to travel, so hoped to do something for us in the future. I wrote profiles for the magazine myself, mostly of authors and media types, eventually becoming a contributing editor and alternating a bimonthly book review column with Norman.

I later put in two years as a senior editor for Men’s Journal, another of Jann Wenner’s magazines, where my job was to assign and edit “good reads.” That included bringing in new writers. One I approached that didn’t pan out was Larry L. King, best known for his hit musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas but previously one of Willie Morris’s big guns at Harper’s Magazine during New Journalism’s late ’60s heyday. (David Halberstam was another, and Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book The Armies of the Night — excerpted in Wolfe’s anthology — began as an article there.) I particularly admired King’s classic magazine piece “The Old Man” and his 1986 memoir about his freelance writing career, None But a Blockhead.

My bosses weren’t interested in King’s story ideas, but our correspondence included King poking fun at Wenner, our oversized and ad-filled magazine, and bar tabs at the renowned writers’ watering hole Elaine’s. It also contained King’s endorsement of my mentor Geoffrey Norman. I’d brought Norman to American Way by suggesting an assignment for him at the first story meeting I attended, but he was already an experienced writer and editor for Playboy, Esquire, Outside, and other magazines, the author of both novels and nonfiction books, and was writing for Men’s Journal as well by the time I arrived there as an editor. There was a story of his in the stack of Men’sJournals I sent as samples to King, who wrote back: “I’ll look forward to wading into the pieces, especially Geoffrey Norman’s, on account of I think he is one of the best — and most under-rated, or neglected — writers to come down the pike in my time.”

My pivot to teaching began about a year after I left Men’s Journal, with a visiting professor appointment to teach magazine journalism at Ohio University. I discovered  that I liked teaching, and that it gave me more time for writing than my editing jobs had. I also spent six weeks overseeing a handful of OU students in a summer session in Lebanon. My colleague Terry Anderson, the former hostage, had set up the course at the American University of Beirut. But before it got underway, Anderson sued Iran for its involvement in his captivity, and the university, worried about repercussions, disinvited him from its campus. So he tapped me as his replacement.

I liked Beirut, which had suffered Israeli bombing mere weeks before the students and I arrived there, better than Athens, Ohio. There wasn’t much to do for a single man my age in that otherwise charming college town. So I wound up leaving the visiting professorship a year early. A few months later, I started work at Boston magazine, where my main role was editing feature stories. But I also wrote several of them myself that I remain proud of.

When that job ended, jazz reasserted itself in my career. I began freelancing a weekly jazz column for the Boston Globe, generally profiling a musician performing in the city that week. I also began teaching feature writing part-time in Boston University’s journalism department. My Ohio University experience helped me land that, as did my having met a BU journalism faculty member while reporting a story for Chicago magazine about the 50th anniversary of the publication of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow’s breakthrough novel, The Adventures of Augie March.

In those early Boston years I met my wife, we moved to the city’s North Shore, and started a family. While our second son was on the way, I was hired to teach magazine publishing full time at Emerson College. I’m still there nearly two full decades later, having never worked three full years at any of my many previous staff jobs.

Two books I’ve taught from every year I’ve been at Emerson are Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism, the latter a compilation of interviews Boynton conducted with 19 outstanding writers of longform narrative journalism, many of whom acknowledge having been inspired by Wolfe and other writers associated with the New Journalism.

Meanwhile, after settling in at Emerson I eventually resumed covering jazz occasionally for the Globe, and have written several features for Boston magazine, DownBeat, and JazzTimes. My first book, Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century, earned me tenure.

So yes, jazz and the New Journalism set this peripatetic career of mine in motion while I was still in high school and have grounded it ever since.

Which puts me in mind of something I included in my book. Early on in my jazz coverage for the Globe I wrote a story about the pianist Jason Moran and discovered that his father and an old friend of mine from Chicago were first cousins. The cousin, Tony Llorens, played keyboards in the great bluesman Albert King’s band, and when the band passed through Houston Tony would come by the Moran home and teach young Jason piano licks. That and hearing his parents playing Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” while mourning the passing of a friend played formative roles in sparking Moran’s career. And he paid tribute to Llorens by covering King’s “I Will Play the Blues for You” on his 2005 album, Same Mother.

Years later, Jason gave me his version of their encounters for my book.

“Tony would sit at the piano and play stuff, and I would be shocked,” he recalled. “Because it never sounded like that when I played. I wanted to play like that. He was always having fun when he played the piano, and I was not. Then as I got better and better, I would check in with him to see what he was thinking. And then, I guess the biggest compliment, he heard ‘I Will Play the Blues for You’ from my version on the radio in LA. And he says, ‘Who’s this? They doing this shit right.’ And then he heard it was me.”

Tony had already told me his side of hearing the King cover for my article. I ended my Globe story with a quote from that and will end this personal history with it as well. The final two lines strike me as particularly relevant.

“When he took his solo he played all these tremolos on it. He told me I taught him to play that. Ain’t that something? You never know what a child picks up.”