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Scarien Nation Now Be One
In 1993, I discovered The Scariens through The Weakley Whirl Knews. I was in awe of this free distribution paper because it had no real ads in it and they published more copies than I did. I had to...
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They Hated Us
From the very beginning, we were hated. Our slogan was, "Everybody hates us. Everybody reads us." In chronological order, the Hate Parade:1. The first to hate us was the club managers in the Grace...
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Pump Down the Volume - 1994
“John and I were working in his office and there was a record on the turntable and it was turned up LOUD. The director of the film walked in and asked John to turn down the music. I think only people...
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Bands We Shall Not Name
Most of the bands we interviewed the first winter of the paper in ‘94 turned out to be problematic.There was the band that won the Yamaha TicketMaster Flood Zone contest in 1993, but I doubt that meant...
View ArticleLetters, We Get Letters
Several months into the first year of the paper, the letters to the editor section was rocking, and it stayed rocking almost until the end of the paper’s run. We’d often have two full pages of them,...
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When Harry Met Sally
Women who aren’t married and want to be sometimes ask me how I met my husband. It was a long path through a chain of bands, which could have gone several different ways – and in that sense, it seemed...
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Brushes with Greatness
In the first year of the paper, we covered some Brushes with Greatness. When David Letterman had the good late night show on NBC, not the one he has now on CBS, he would go into the studio audience...
View ArticleHeavy and Light
TheVapor Rhinos were a fun band that always put on a show, but because all their songs were comical and rudely off-color, other bands didn’t seem to appreciate them. Our lavish coverage of the Vapor...
View ArticleTell Me Something New
This makes me sad because I don’t want to come off as sounding snarky, but we really need to control our enthusiasm, at least to reasonably normal levels, when writing about bands. During the newspaper...
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A Trip to Grandpa Eddie's
Anything with the name “grandpa” in it seems like it’s not going to be what’s happening now, but I kept hearing about bands getting gigs at Grandpa Eddie's , so off we went.I thought we’d find it at...
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Hollywood Grill
I admit it. Oregon Hill scares me. I used to have a friend who lived on S. Pine Street, known as “the spine” among the ancient, formerly cool people. I liked going to see him in his dollhouse...
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Christine Gibson
Here's the obit from the Times-Dispatch website. Since it is going to disappear from the site after Dec. 13, I've moved it here so it never disappears.Christine Ann GibsonGIBSON, Christine Ann, 55, of...
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The 1995 Musician Quiz
We ran a variation of this quiz in a 1995 issue. All the girls I met who had dated musicians had the same stories about how these guys lived, and a pattern developed.You have seen every episode of “Ren...
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So Much Music in So Little Time
By spring of 1994, I was a curious bystander to the meteoric rise of The Ernies, based on their ska appeal and following in Boy O Boy’s big footsteps. They went from gigs at Crazy Charlie’s and Buffalo...
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Suzanne Rathburn 1962-2008
When Suzanne called last August, she knew something most of us don't know, how much time she had left to live. Two months to a year. Fate compromised and gave her five months.At the time I wanted to...
View ArticleA Few Thoughts at 9 p.m.
My theory, and a good one it is, had always been that the music scene catered to one core audience -- mall and restaurant workers. There was no other theory to account for why the crowd didn't arrive...
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Morality in Chesterfield County
Many years ago, there was a man living on the Southside who decided the Richmond Music Journal was offensive to his children, although I think he was actually divorced and not living with his children...
View ArticleGary Gerloff
Gary Gerloff was one of my telephone buddies back in ’93, ’94 when I first started the Richmond Music Journal. I don’t recall if we ever actually met in person and talked, and I’ve only seen him play a...
View ArticleSocial Media and Art
I (Twitter address @MarianeMatera) went to the December Social Media Club Richmond VA (@smcrva) meeting at the Firehouse Theater (@firehouserva), which afterward dispersed to The Camel (@TheCamel) a...
View ArticlePermission to Kill Yourself
In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, there is a fascinating study about how suicides of prominent personalities set off chain reactions of suicides, as if the first gives permission for the others...
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