Steve Knopper | Appetite for Self-Destruction

September 19, 2009

Interview with Steve Knopper [21:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Steve Knopper covers the music business for Rolling Stone magazine. His next book, on the record industry in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in January 2009. He is a Denver-based journalist who has written for Spin, Details, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic Traveler, Wired, New York, Chicago, Backpacker, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Miami Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and many books and websites.

He is the former on-air technology correspondent for Fox News Chicago and has appeared as an expert source on CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, WNYC-FM in New York, WXRT-FM in Chicago, and G4: Attack of the Show as well as in print publications such as Reuters. He has written or edited several books, most recently Moon Colorado, a travel guide. He also co-wrote, with rock-band manager extraordinaire and northwest Denver neighbor Mark Bliesener, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band; it contains a foreword by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. For three years, he wrote the Daily Net Buzz column for Yahoo! Internet Life until that magazine folded in 2002. Steve’s specialty is pop music, but he writes about a range of other topics as well.

Born in Livonia, Mich., he moved to Boulder, Colo., at age 13 and wrote his first-ever story for the high school newspaper about students’ tastes in music. (Dig the extremely strange Patament reference.) After attending the University of Michigan and working for The Michigan Daily, he spent a year on the 5 a.m. obituary desk at the now-defunct Richmond News Leader in Virginia. After that, he became pop music critic and feature writer for the Daily Camera in Boulder; within four years he’d moved up in the Knight-Ridder Newspapers chain to the (Gary, Ind.) Post-Tribune, where he wrote about truck-stop prostitution, mob-style triple homicides and wigs. He quit the paper in January 1996 to become a full-time freelance writer, and has been happy that way ever since.

Steve lives in northwest Denver, with his wife, Melissa, and daughter, Rose. He has occasionally been known to rock.