Writer’s block

Sharing the love (of music)

Sitting in on a live taping of ‘Sound Opinions’ helps gain a further appreciation for local music critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis

By Jeremy Schnitker

I don’t really know what I would have done had the circumstances been any different. Perhaps I would have shaken his hand. Given him a high-five. Maybe I’d have name-dropped some completely obscure band that I thought put out the best album in 2006, or told him how much I agreed with his highly cynical assessment of this year’s Lollapalooza (even though I really didn’t at all).

But as it was, the first contact I had with Jim DeRogatis, renowned rock critic for the Chicago Sun Times, former Rolling Stone magazine editor, author of “Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Legendary Rock Critic Lester Bangs” one of my favorite all-time reads — is in a men’s room. He walked up to the urinal right next to me, and in a fit of nerves, I end up sulking out of the room without a.) meeting him or b.) finishing the — ahem — job.

This is how my night with two of Chicago’s top rock critics began.

It wasn’t just my night with them, I should clarify, as technically there were over 100 people in the crowd. It was Jan. 25 at the Chicago Cultural Center, and my roommate and I were at a live taping of “Sound Opinions,” the “world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show,” which has been hosted by DeRogatis and Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot for the last eight years. The show was celebrating the year anniversary of its move to American Public Radio by inviting a live audience to watch the taping of the annual Valentine’s Day show.

Being a bit of a music nerd and having done a decent amount of rock writing throughout my journalism career, I jumped at the opportunity to spend a night with two of Chicago’s most well-known culture scribes.

I wanted to see who these guys I’d read so much about were in the flesh.

My main source of intrigue with these two writers comes from the fact they have jobs that I would die for, and also because they seem to get along so well. I remember when I first heard the show, I was so surprised that these two even got along at all, let alone well enough to host a radio show together. Historically, rock critics have been an arrogant, self-righteous and competitive lot, so the fact that two guys who write about essentially the same events and albums for competing daily newspapers in the same city can host a radio show together is surprising.

But I realized as soon as they kicked the show off that they do genuinely have a great rapport with one another, one that almost would suggest they were friends before all this, and it just happened that they wound up working for the two major papers in Chicago. (I can’t seem to find anywhere if they were actually friends before being hired by the respective papers, so this theory is merely editorial.)

The other surprising thing about these two is that if you saw them walking down the street, the last thing on earth you’d think they did for a living was serve as semi-famous rock critics. They look more like bashful I.T. nerds than people who write insightful pieces pop culture criticism and do much of their work amongst hipsters at rock concerts.

Neither has a particularly astute sense of style (and that’s being polite), which is surprising as well. I don’t know about anybody else, but whenever I think of what a rock critic should look like, I think of David Fricke (the oft-pictured columnist for Rolling Stone), who’s got a hippy, literary vibe going. DeRo is bespectacled, short, quite a few pounds past pudgy and looks like he buys his clothes at Target. Kot is rail thin, awkward and stares at the ground almost entirely throughout the evening.

As I looked at them preparing their notes before they went live, they both seemed too shy to be able to muster out anything resembling an interesting program. Once things got rolling, though, you realize they’re both quite comfortable behind the microphone. And as you would expect from rock critics, their wits are razor sharp and their sense of humors are keen. And they really seem to enjoy dogging one another.

At one point during the taping, DeRo mentions how overrated he thinks the Pixies are, and Kot immediately throws him and incredulous look, says something to the effect that he doesn’t know what rock DeRo was living under during the 1990s. DeRo shoots back that he saw them before they were big at some tiny, now-defunct club, and that they’ve sucked ever since. Kot then snaps back (I’m paraphrasing) “What? You saw them at their first rehearsal, and they’ve gone downhill ever since? You’re such a rock critic.”

The audience bursts out in laughter. There’s something undeniably hilarious about one rock critic slamming another for being too much of a cliché rock critic.

Such candor is rarely heard of in the pretentious world of music criticism, and that’s sort of the mantra with these two: They’re not at all what you’d expect rock critics to be, which is what makes the show so refreshing and also makes it accessible to the people out there who don’t sit around and listen to cutting-edge music all day.

As mentioned before, it’s the Valentine’s Day show, and the show is set up into three segments: love songs, love stinks songs and lust songs. Audience members were allowed to e-mail their suggestions in ahead of time, and DeRo and Kot invited local folk musicians Robbie and Donna Fulks to play some of the songs picked live. The combo served as a comical choice in guests, especially when it came time for them to attempt a folk interpretation of an angsty Mudhoney song, which was one of DeRo’s picks for the heartbreak category.

Other songs ranged from Extreme’s “More Than Words” (obviously not one of the critic’s picks), The Pixie’s “Gigantic” (not for the category and reasons you think it’d be) and The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” (DeRo’s pick for love the stinks portion).

As the show winds down, DeRo and Kot allow members of the audience to suggest their favorite Valentine’s Day songs. Some people, you could tell, were trying to impress the critics with their esoteric tastes, and some just had downright bad tastes, so bad that you were waiting for DeRo and Kot to laugh them out of the room.

But they never did, and that was what impressed me the most about these two guys. They never seemed to ultimately judge anybody’s taste (even the girl who suggested the Extreme song). They’d just laugh, shrug their shoulders and look at each other as if to say, “Well, that’s one person’s opinion.”

I distinctly remember DeRo at one point telling the crowd that everybody’s a critic, and he’s totally right. That’s part of the joy of music. That’s what makes listening to a radio talk show about music so much fun. Because we all have opinions, and when it comes to music, there’s really no such thing as universally good taste. Music wouldn’t be all that much fun to talk about if there was, and it was nice to see two critics who felt that way.

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