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Kurt Loder
By Tony RettmanPhoto By Adam Amengual
To the mere commoner, Kurt Loder is a smoky blip on the ‘90s cultural radar, the clever older gent on MTV News reporting about the New Kids on the Block and their stonewashed sweaters with a raised eyebrow and almost visible scorn. Not many know of Loder’s prior work in the pages of Rolling Stone and Circus that bristled with incisive intelligence and droll humor. His tight wordplay was far from the rambling pontifications of rock übercritics of the day like Lester Bangs or Richard Meltzer, but it still questioned and prodded its subjects. One read of Loder’s interviews with people as diverse as Don Johnson and Captain Beefheart tells you this is a man who knows when eggs should be laid and when they should be cracked.
Loder grew up in the bland surroundings of Ocean City, New Jersey, listening to the radio under his bedsheets and picking up new and exciting sounds. “There was one radio show I picked up from Gallatin, Tennessee, named Randy’s Record Shop,” he recalls. “Late at night, you could hear it all the way up the East Coast, and they would play all this strange, sloppy Black music. It was quite a revelation, considering I grew up in this rather dull white neighborhood.” Somewhere in the mid ‘60s, Loder joined the Army and was stationed in Germany, where he took a four-week course in journalism. Soon after, he got a writing gig with a German tabloid. “I was covering everything from murder trials to pop acts and movie stars. It was pretty wide-ranging work, but very hard work as well.” While in Europe, Loder also managed to see the mindblowing original lineup of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and auditioned for the legendary German avant-rock outfit Amon Duul 2. “I failed miserably,” Loder says as he lets out an unrestrained chuckle. “But I guess since it was only Amon Duul 2 and not Amon Duul 1, it doesn’t really matter.”
Loder returned to the U.S. in 1972 after seven years abroad. “I had absolutely no connections whatsoever since I was away from America for so long, so I ended up going back to Ocean City and working for this local weekly paper, and that was just dreadful.” In 1976, Loder scored a spot writing for Good Times, a rock mag out of Long Island. It was there that he met good friend and current Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke. Loder and Fricke toiled away at Good Times for a year or so before they heard that Circus, a secondtier version of Creem, was hiring. Both were hired immediately and started churning out reams of copy at a backbreaking pace. “Working for Circus taught me a lot, as far as working on firm deadlines and the general rhythm of magazine work,” Loder recalls. “One strove to get stuff in the magazine that one thought was worthwhile, but it was tough. Circus was more or less a pop metal magazine, so some things I wanted in there just didn’t fly,” including cover stories on the likes of Patti Smith and The Ramones. The closest he got to bucking the Circus system was doing a cover piece on classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz with the cringe-worthy title “Vlad All Over.” In the spring of 1979, Loder got a call from Rolling Stone asking if he was interested in jumping ship from Circus. After doing a “tryout” piece on the Southern California-based country-rock outfit Poco, Loder was asked if he would be willing to take over the gossip-laden “Random Notes” column for the magazine. Loder, of course, leapt at the opportunity, and spent two years attending record release parties and other such decadent events before graduating to fulllength features. Loder found working at Rolling Stone to be a far more rewarding experience than Circus. “Everyone who worked there knew there was great stuff happening at the time and wanted to get it in the magazine, but they also knew there was more popular stuff that needed to be covered as well. We got the Sex Pistols on the cover and there was the feature we ran on The Ramones where we learned all their real names, which was a real breakthrough,” Loder says coyly. Eventually, he became an editor at Rolling Stone, and then co-wrote Tina Turner’s autobiography, I, Tina. “Doing that book was really hard because she didn’t remember anything. I had to dig up these obscure session musicians down South. It was fascinating, but certainly a wild goose chase.”
In 1988, Loder was approached by MTV about becoming chief correspondent on a new half-hour show called The Week In Rock. “I knew nothing about television,” recalls Loder. “I didn’t have cable. I never saw MTV. It vaguely sounded like a bad idea.” Nonetheless, he took the position, and was soon beamed into a million houses. It seemed strange to some that a champion of some of the more left field musical artists of the day would be content reporting on the benign musical wasteland of the early ‘90s. “I made my peace with the Top 40 radio mindset a long time before that,” says Loder. “I think we got a lot of good stuff on the show. We had Pere Ubu on there, and we had The Ramones play live in the studio. You do what you can. If you feel dismissive about something you’re reporting on, you can usually communicate that in there, no matter how slight it might be.” As the years rolled on, Loder published a book of his Rolling Stone interviews, entitled Bat Chain Puller, and continued to both write and host a number of MTV News specials, the gem being “Abducted,” a farcical report on the numerous alien abductions of American teenagers.
These days, Loder still writes scripts for MTV and contributes movie reviews to their website. He is working on an autobiography of his exploits in rock journalism, but failing miserably. “My memory is so bad that it’s really hard to do! I wind up going over to peoples’ houses I’ve known for years, asking, ‘What happened?’ and when they tell me I say, ‘I don’t remember that, you’re lying!’ I don’t know – it sounded like a real interesting time. I wish I was there more completely.”
Although Loder seemingly lived in the lap of luxury during his tenure of rock reporting, he has a serious disdain for the lifestyle perpetuated by the artists commonly seen on MTV these days. “It doesn’t seem to be a strikingly great time for music right now. These people seem real obsessed with that whole champagne lifestyle, and I hate it all. I guess I would like it more if I was actually a part of it like everyone thinks I am, but I’m really not.” Though he doesn’t get caught up in the glamour of it, Loder’s enthusiasm for music both new and old shows he’s still the same kid under the covers twisting a proverbial radio knob for those knee-weakening sounds. Right on.