Writer’s Workshop: Rob Mitchum

I never anticipated Pitchfork was going to become the juggernaut it is today – like I said, I could have ended up on the staff of 9 different sites that fizzled out in 2003 instead. But Ryan took a chance on an inexperienced writer, I got in the door, and I’ve been along for the ride ever since.

HT: Can you take us through your personal process for reviewing an album with all the gritty details? Where do you generally listen? How many times? Do you take notes? How long do you generally spend tweaking a word here, a sentence there?

RM: To be honest, I’m not very methodical about it. Once I get the record, I put it on my iPod and my computer, and just listen to it until I reach a point where I have enough thoughts to fill out a review. I usually have a very long public-transportation commute, so I do most of my thinking about a record staring out of bus and train windows. I’d say I probably get through each record about 10-15 times before I sit down to write about it, and once I do, I generally have a pretty good idea of where I want to go with the review. I usually write down the jokes first, and then fill in the serious analysis later, heh. It also takes me as long to come up with the last line as it takes to write the entire rest of the review. Pure agony.

HT: It’s no secret that Pitchfork, which certainly has its legions of loyal devotees, also has a pretty mean posse of haters. Just in preparing for this interview, I came across one article in the Atlantic that called you out by name in its complaint that the site has too much sway in the making or breaking of emerging artists, and another on Flavorwire that pinpoints the ten meanest things you ever said about Weezer. I guess you have to be able to take what you dish out, but do the haters ever get to you?

RM: Yeah, there’s a certain amount of haters gonna hate, and I guess I’ve developed pretty thick skin about it. I realize that a lot of people (like I once did!) still think Pitchfork writers are the most pretentious hipster people ever, like the Record Store Guy From Hell, and that influences how they read and interpret everything that runs on the site. So usually people are more upset with “the Pitchfork stereotype” than they are with me personally, and it’s pretty easy to let it roll off. (In truth, Pitchfork writers are very friendly, geeky people – who else would sit at home and write about records several nights a week!?)

In other cases, people are just disagreeing with me, and that’s fine. My critical philosophy is to be totally honest and up-front about the fact that my review is just one man’s opinion, and if somebody has a different opinion, I’ve got no problem with it. Some people think Weezer are better today than they ever were, I disagree, and neither of us are “right” – there is no “right.” The problem is most people don’t read beyond the number, or don’t realize that I’m speaking as me and not as the mouthpiece of some Almighty Pitchfork Infallible Opinion Hivemind.

That Atlantic article is a perfect example of that misunderstanding, actually. Those two Rainer Maria reviews I wrote give you all you need to know about my relationship and history with the band, it’s full disclosure. This dude uses all the background information to hang me, but wouldn’t it be worse if I hadn’t been honest about how I feel and felt about the band and I just slammed the record with false, faceless authority? He writes that their new record “is every bit as good as their earlier work.” To who? To him? He’s stating his opinion as fact, I’m stating my opinion as opinion. So it doesn’t bother me when I’m attacked for it, I feel like I’m on more solid ground.

On the other hand, even way back in 2006 that dude was making a semi-valid point about whether the “power” of Pitchfork changes that equation somewhat, and that’s even more true today. To be honest, I am a little uncomfortable about where my style fits into the site now that it wields this supposed power of making or breaking bands. But at the same time, I don’t want to write reviews that are a consumer guide, an 800-word version of “Buy This” or “Don’t Buy This,” even if that’s how it’s used by a lot of readers (most of whom, again, don’t read past the number). I want to be a piece of the conversation with my reviews, and the best way I know how to do that is to give you my honest, personal opinion, hopefully written in a way that’s entertaining to read.

HT: So, I can totally vouch for your hipster cred. I remember back in 1999 when Phish covered Gold Soundz, the traders@umich list (ed. note: this was an early email group of tape traders at the University of Michigan that Rob and I were both a part of) was all about Pavement, and a bunch of us had just seen them play St. Andrews Hall on June 12th, a month before, during which they did play Gold Soundz. It was pretty cool, because everybody on the list was kind of buzzing about Pavement before Phish introduced them to the masses. I think you were one of the real early drivers of the “Pavement pounding,” no?

RM: I probably was; Pavement has always been one of my favorite bands. The three musical landmarks in my life were getting a dubbed copy of Nevermind in junior high, buying Crooked Rain Crooked Rain on a church choir tour my freshman year of high school, and receiving the 4/16/92 Phish tape my sophomore year. Pavement kind of finished what Nirvana started, which was pushing me down the path toward underground/indie/college rock when I was in high school, and that was always what dominated my listening… other than Phish.

So when it became common knowledge that Trey was big Pavement fan (through the Schvice, maybe?) that was a big thing for me, a rare connection between the two worlds. It definitely made me respect Phish and their fans a bit more, because where a Phish fan would be happy to give Pavement a try, most Pavement fans (to this day) wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Phish. Even though some of those Malkmus & the Jicks records are essentially jamband material.

Anyway, I happened to be at the Star Lake show where Phish busted out the “Gold Soundz” cover, and my friends and I basically spent the whole song screaming our heads off. It was pretty funny, because I would guess maybe a few dozen people out of the 20,000 at the show knew it? After the song ended, I had like ten setlist-keepers run over and ask me what it was. Having now listened to the tape a bunch, it’s actually a pretty lousy version of the song, but still a big moment for me. Major déjà vu this past summer when they played “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” which is another one of my favorite records of all time and something I never would have imagined they would play. Again, their cover is pretty terrible, but symbolically I think it’s great that the band is open to indie-rock influences and that they turn on their fans to new sounds this way.

HT: What’s the most absurd degree to which a publicist or a band ever went to try to get their album reviewed?

RM: I actually keep myself pretty walled off from the publicity world, so I don’t have any really crazy stories along these lines. It’s always made me uncomfortable along ethical lines having to ask for promos and for guest list spots and all that; I don’t want to feel like I owe anyone anything, and as far as live shows go, I like to put some money in a band’s pocket. The more you get involved in the world of publicists and guest lists and SXSW/CMJ and whatever, the farther your perspective drifts from the people you’re writing for. When I left music writing for a couple years (I was working for the Chicago Tribune, and they didn’t allow freelancing), I fell completely off the publicist radar, and I loved the peace and quiet when I came back. But then I went and got a press pass to Lollapalooza, and now they’re all back. A couple have pitched me records over Facebook, which I find really creepy and annoying (hey publicists, don’t do that), but no good stories, sorry.

HT: Did you grow up paying a lot of attention to music criticism? Who would you point to as some of your favorite music writers?

RM: Growing up outside of Chicago, I learned how to approach music critically from reading Greg Kot and Jim Derogatis. Which made it kind of weird when I began operating in the same world as them, because they’re still out there doing it. I definitely don’t agree with them a lot on matters of taste and style now, but they were definitely a huge early influence.

As I said earlier, Richard Meltzer was by far the largest influence on me. The thing that had always bugged me about music writing when I did the first time around for the Daily was how formulaic it tended to be, and the false objectivity of declaring something good or bad. Meltzer’s insanely subjective and experimental way of approaching records, to the point of sometimes just making shit up, really inspired me to jump back in – I didn’t know you could do that. And to a certain extent you can’t, I would never cook up outright falsehoods about a record, but it impressed upon me that a listener’s subjective interpretation of a record is just as valid a thing to write about as the dry facts. That’s something you can get from Lester Bangs too, but Meltzer always seemed a little more dangerous and vivid to me.

Of course, that dovetailed with the anything-goes style during the early days of Pitchfork, before I was on staff. I still think Brent DiCrescenzo had as much to do as anybody with establishing the site as a cut above all the other music sites of the time; the reviews he was writing in the late 90s/early 00s were just unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Since joining staff, I’ve been very much influenced by the wide array of styles there: the creativity of William Bowers or the insightful analysis of Mark Richardson or Nitsuh Abebe. It’s been a pretty amazing crew of writers to be around these ten years, and sometimes it feels like almost everyone doing music writing today has been through our ranks.

HT: You mentioned in the article in the Washington Post the other day that you used to be sort of embarrassed by your Phish fan-hood, which I think is something to which we can all relate. What changed your mind to come out of the closet so-to-speak?

RM: When I started writing about music seriously, Phish was on their first hiatus, and I found myself listening to them less and less. So it wasn’t really that I had to hide the fact that I was a fan, because I was starting to drift away from them, and starting to think of them as a phase I had moved beyond. By the time they came back at the end of ‘02, I really had no desire to see them or listen to the tapes, I’d  moved on. So when I brought up that I had been to 30-some Phish shows with people from Pitchfork or at indie shows or whatever, it was always kind of a sheepish confession sort of thing, with a “that was fun, but I’m over it” sort of attitude.

But then, like a lot of my friends, I relapsed hard in the run-up to the Hampton comeback. All of a sudden I found myself listening to the old tapes more and more, and discovering this whole new world of internet streaming and downloading that just makes it even more addictive than ever. I started wanting to talk about the band again, and to write about them, especially now that I was equipped with some experience in writing about music and something of a soapbox. At some point, it was impossible to keep from blabbing about it with Pitchfork peers and other people who wouldn’t have pegged me as a Phish fan, though for a while it was kind of with a blushing admission that I’d fallen off the wagon, so to speak. And then…

HT: Along those lines, you came bursting out of the closet; starting a Twitter feed aimed at reviewing every single Phish show since 1993. So, at 788 shows and counting, which by a conservative estimate of 2.5 hours per show puts you at about 82 solid days of listening to Phish; think you can do it?

RM: Yeah, so I was able to channel that drive to write about Phish into twitter, because I needed something to do on there other than talk about my lunch or the same Arcade Fire record everyone was talking about. The fact that literally every show in circulation can be listened to in a couple clicks, combined with my renewed obsession, and a sort of mischievous desire to freak people out by being “the Pitchfork writer who likes Phish,” resulted in this crazy project, which has gotten way more attention than I expected. I thought most people would think it was a bad joke, to be honest.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever finish it, but that’s kind of beside the point. It’s a way for me to work through a lot of the thoughts I’ve had about this band, but never really had a place to write them down. I also think one of the greatest things about Phish is how they’ve evolved and changed over the years, and I’m really excited to methodically chart that evolution show by show from ’93 on, when I think their progression really kicked into high gear. It’s also unexpectedly become a way to connect with other music writers who harbor a secret or not-so-secret love for Phish, and to, I guess, demonstrate that it’s okay to like them, and that they are a band as worthy of critical analysis as anyone.

HT: Do you have a particular piece of writing that you are most proud of?

RM: My ultimate goal is to figure out a good way to bring my science background and my music writing habit together, and I think the best I’ve done so far is Please Mr. Pharmacist, a feature I wrote for Pitchfork and Litmus, a science webzine I was running at the time. It’s a feature on “the new drug song,” bands writing songs about prescription drugs (mostly anti-depressants) instead of recreational drugs. I keep threatening to start a blog of music-science crossover writing, but have been too chickenshit so far.

HT: And finally, what are your two favorite all-time Phish shows – one you attended and one you’ve always loved listening to the audio?

The best show I’ve ever attended by any band ever was the 12/6/97 show at the Palace in Auburn Hills. I’ve never had a more powerful musical experience than in that second set, and it still gives me chills to listen to it today. And just to be a total Fall ’97 dork, I’ll say 12/7/97 for favorite tape – if you grafted the first set of Dayton to the second set of Auburn Hills, I think you would have the perfect Phish show.

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8 Responses

  1. This was a really great read. I also review music, for http://www.seizurechicken.com/author/avanhizzle/, and am also a huge Phish fan. I’m not quite sure what it is but I have also been rather reluctant to pledge my loyalty to a band that has meant and continues to mean so much to me until late. Good music is good music and people’s opinions are what they are. Thanks for covering 93′ Rob. I’ll keep reading….

  2. Great article. I like this guy’s p.o.v. and now want to read his writing now. Well, I like any music writer who understands the Golden Rule that one can only rate/review something against their own perspective and values. “Art cops” trying to help and save people’s tastes for their own good are turds.

    And “coming out” to admitting how great Phish really is. Good for him.

    I was at that same Palace 97 show. It was incredible.

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