newspaper writing | Writing on Music

During the first part of my music writing career, which lasted from the late ‘70s to the mid-‘80s, I worked at two different daily newspapers, and wrote a lot of concert reviews on deadline. This usually meant writing the review the same night as the show, sometimes while I was still at the concert venue, and getting the review to the newspaper’s editorial offices so it could go into the next day’s newspaper.

At that time, there were no cellphones and no portable computers, which meant that filing a concert review from outside the office was always an adventure. To illustrate what this was like, I would like to share with you a story of one such adventure: the night I didn’t meet David Bowie.

To set the scene for this story, Continue reading →

This is a blog post that I didn’t think I’d be writing.

On December 27, my friend Tom Harrison passed away at the age of 70. We were friends for more than 40 years – a number which astounded me when I calculated it. We met in the late 1970s when he was the music writer for The Province newspaper and I was the music writer for The Vancouver Sun, but it honestly doesn’t feel like that long ago.

I knew who Tom was long before I actually met him. Any music lover in Vancouver in the 1970s knew who Tom was, from his writing in the Georgia Straight weekly paper and also from the pioneering music video show Soundproof that he co-hosted on cable TV. But a lot of people didn’t know that Continue reading →