20 Questions: Kurt Loder

As a child growing up on the New Jersey shore, Kurt Loder would tuck a radio under his pillow at night and tune in to a Tennessee radio station that played black music. "It was like something from another planet," he remembers. "A planet you would like to visit and perhaps establish residency on. I've been able to do that."

MTV's news anchor, who presides over "Day in Rock" is hardly a creature of television. After serving as an Army journalist in Europe, Loder remained an expatriate before returning to the U.S. to write about music--his passion--for small rock magazines. A nine-year stint at "Rolling Stone" followed. His fascination with the sounds of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta served Loder well. He collaborated with Tina Turner on her autobiography, "I, Tina," which inspired the hit film "What's Love Got to Do With It."

Despite a bad attitude and what he insists is problem hair, Loder was recruited by an MTV vice president looking to expand the network's programming beyond rock videos. His stock in trade is reporting on rock and roll and the not always unrelated issues of politics, race and freedom of speech. Last year he wrote and reported "Straight Dope," MTV's hour-long special on the drug problem. He has also guided viewers on a tour through Madonna's wardrobe (lingerie included) while she was shooting her "Take a Bow" video in Spain.

Warren Kalbacker met with Loder for several hours. He reports: "Loder had a lot to get off his chest about such minor topics as music, culture and television. Of course, my first question asked itself."

1.

[Q] Playboy: What's the latest on sex, drugs and rock and roll?

[A] Loder: Sex has not gone away. It's still here and people are still having it. Not in my bailiwick recently. Kids are listening to hard-core metal and rap that's as violent as possible. When you are a kid, you're angry. So you want to see somebody get offed. When we were younger, we just wanted to get a date, but now they want to see the bitch killed. Don't you wish you were young now? I could really get into it. My son has a difficult time because I'm often turning him on to records. He would like to shock me, but it's hard. The idea of rock and roll--being 15 years old and wanting to get fucked up and go wild--always made perfect sense to me. Then you wind up middle-aged with some of the world's worst habits.

2.

[Q] Playboy: From the vantage of a rock-and-roll historian, what's your take on rockers' ability--or lack thereof--to handle fame and fortune?

[A] Loder: It's changed, Kurt Cobain was a really talented guy who felt burdened by fame. This is the new generation of kids--the sensitive generation. The older guys weren't like that at all. They wanted to be famous. They wanted the money, the drugs, the sex. And they got it. They still have it. And they have much younger wives. You can't imagine Mick Jagger killing himself because he was too famous. That just wouldn't have happened.

3.

[Q] Playboy: As MTV's news anchor, do you feel you're accorded the respect due a broadcast journalist with a national audience?

[A] Loder: They pay me every two weeks. That's pretty much what we ask, right? I work. You pay me. Dan Rather and those guys are real reporters. I'm not telegenic, but we worked on that. A monkey can do this. You just get comfortable so you don't look like you're in pain, which tends to put people off. I learned journalism in the Army. The Army taught us journalism in two months. That's little too long because the basics of journalism take a month to learn. It's amazing to me that you can study television in college. What do you study? What would you know at the end of the course? I don't get it. Call me old-fashioned.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Do you advise MTV viewers to supplement your news coverage with C-Span, subscriptions to The Economist and Foreign Affairs and the study of Richard Nixon's postpresidential writings?

[A] Loder: I generally don't tell people what to do. But if you're getting all your news from television, you're not getting the news. You can't be well-in-formed without print. In fact, print is the source of all the stories you see on television. Television is good at immediacy, but the depth of coverage that you get from print will never be duplicated. It won't be replaced, either. The other day at a Rolling Stones press conference, some guy from one of the networks asked me what I thought. And I said. "It just proves that you can take lots of drugs and have lots of sex and still be making money at the age of 50." And the guy said, "I don't think that's the message we want to send." I said, "When did news become a matter of the message we want to send? I thought it was the facts we wanted to send." So the idea that people in television are curators of journalistic ethics is true. Thank God for print. To me that's real journalism. If you're not reading, you're not informed. Even if you're listening to me.

5.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us something surprising about your colleague Tabitha Soren.

[A] Loder: She has a deep punk-rock background. I hesitate to go further. There's nothing scandalous, but she has a real music background. She was a fan and she's not a fake. Her real name is Sorenberger, and I think it's Norwegian. One of those Scando countries. She's great. I love Tabitha. Very smart, very ambitious, very sweet. Real cute. She's 27 now. Wow! She's sprouted right up. She really researches her stuff. She's better than most of the people we see on networks. I guess we'd have to say she's a credit to her generation. That's a terrible thing to say.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Comment on rock and roll as a revolutionary movement.

[A] Loder: Rock and roll was never revolutionary. There was nothing done in rock and roll that hadn't been done by R&B. The great thing about early rock and roll is that it created a new social mixture of black and white people. Rock and roll was a new way of looking at the world and saying black people have great talents and are pretty cool. Some white people thought they would like to be black. I remember feeling that way. It's a shame to see that breaking down now. Yet the biggest audience for rap is white kids with their baseball caps on backward. Rap brings races together without preaching. You hear this music and you say, "That's cool." I'm white, but I'd like to be cool anyway and escape being just a white person. Perhaps we were allowed to become white with soul or aspirations to soul. And our lives were much improved by it. You can't believe a word Jesse Helms says after you've heard Otis Redding. You just can't.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Is rock and roll humanity's last best hope?

[A] Loder: For me it was everything in life you wanted to be. Anybody who grew up in the Fifties or early Sixties remembers how dull and preposterous those times were. I wanted to cut loose and do things the beatnik guys were doing. The beatniks were really cool, but they didn't have rock and roll. They had jazz. Jazz is good, but you can't dance to it. So rock and roll was perfect. It was stupid, it was universal and it was brilliant and beautiful. Doo-wop songs are beautiful. Louie Louie is beautiful. I think the FBI studied it for a while. If you can picture those guys siting around listening to it. The words are easily available, but in the recording done by the Kingsmen, no one could understand what was going on. Not even the guys who were singing it. It could have been dirty. Can we imagine a time when people cared? It was a much more innocent time. I'm sure there are conservatives who wish we had Louie Louie back again and that Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg were some-where else.

8.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that Tina Turner changed your life. Describe what she did for you.

[A] Loder: I was a white kid growing up among white people--this is like 1960. Ike and Tina records had come out and this stuff was just pow! Recorded on one mike and in one take. It was so hot. It just spoke of another world, to a white kid surrounded by people in lime green polyester clothes, drinking scotch. And it made you want to go out and find it. It changed my life. Music really shaped my life. Without music, what would I be? Tina's an incredible force. I don't think she realizes how powerful that gift is when she sings. The first thing I said when I met her was, "I love those early records. They are brilliant." But she told me she hated singing those--she thought it was screeching. My heart was broken. She hated working with Ike Turner. We were going to do this book and she had forgotten her life story, just blotted the whole thing out of her mind. She'd forgotten who was in the bands and what they did. So to re-create the story, I wound up trudging through Mississippi, finding old saxophone players who were out fishing. Tina was really inspired by white people, which is the other side of the rock-and-roll dream. And she was the first to say that the white people she worked with gave her an idea that there was a world of class and manners. And now she lives in the south of France. So she got where she wanted to go. I wound up where I am.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Do you miss vinyl discs?

[A] Loder: You can't roll joints on CDs. They're too small. You can't do any drugs on them. That's really a drag. Nobody misses turning the record over. But I miss good sound. I miss the fullness of the sound. There's a whole generation that's not hearing it. Ike Turner used to work with these sharpsters from Chicago, and they'd drive around Mississippi with a huge Magnavox tape recorder in the trunk of their Rocket 88. They'd stop at the local electronics repair shop and record Homesick James. This stuff was really low-fi, but it's just rocking music. You can't reproduce the effect of a mono record, which is everything coming at you from one point. That experience is lost. Everything is stereo now. The sampling rate that was established with digital sound is so low that you're not hearing the information you would hear on a record. You're hearing a distilled version of it. That's why people complain that CDs sound so icy. There's something missing. The sampling rate should be much, much higher. And it could be. Sampling rate means how often the machine takes a cutting sample of the music being played. It takes only one from here and one from there. Nirvana and Pearl Jam put out their records on vinyl first. If you listen to the Nirvana album, their latest one, on vinyl, it's a different record. And that's why all the high-end audio people swear by vinyl.

10.

[Q] Playboy: So, how nasty are the gangsta rappers?

[A] Loder: As nasty as they want to be, as they once put it. People get upset when black people understand the game. They understand the game. They understand it'll attract more people if they say, "Hey kids, this shit is nasty, it's about sex and bad shit." And underneath all that, some of the greatest record production in American history is going on. Dr. Dre is a great, record producer. The stuff that's going on in his tracks is phenomenal. They're using sounds that have never been used before. Some of it is synthesized and some of it is sampled--electronically taking phrases and putting them into a song. These ghetto kids--these bad Negroes--have mastered this stuff. What you have here is a flowering of great musical talent from the black community. Rap is a generational thing. If you grew up on Otis Redding, you're not going to listen to rap. But that's the point. You're not supposed to.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you quite a fan of what you once described as "dirty music"?

[A] Loder: There's a grand tradition of dirty music. When people decry rap music, it's bracing to go back and see that there were songs like I want to Put a Banana in Your Fruit Basket made around 1930. It's tremendous. People were thinking of sex and were thinking of women as sex objects. Particularly men. I don't know why that was. At the time, only these crazy Negroes were interested in this obviously degenerate shit. So this stuff could be made, recorded and sold to the audiences it was intended for, and white people had no idea. Sex is good and it hasn't disappeared. AIDS is a terrible disease, but AIDS hasn't wiped out sex. I hate to see AIDS used by right-wingers as a way to persuade young people not to have sex. Because that's generally what they use it for. Rappers talking about sex are young men talking about sex. Whoa! The nation's fate is obviously at stake.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Don't we detect some editorializing in your on-air body language?

[A] Loder: I'm all in favor of editorializing. You should present both sides of every story, as we do. But I'd rather read someone's reporting knowing what their opinion is. I'm not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes, but kids, there's a lot of shit out there. The older I get the more appalled I am. What's going on with Michael Jackson? He is someone whose music has never moved me. His music is the definition of over-producing. Michael Jackson's minions sent around a note saying that from now on, they wanted the press to refer to him as the King of Pop. MTV News, I can tell you, refused. Because he's not. But imagine the hubris of someone sending around that note. What kind of person wants to send that note? The music industry is built on that kind of hype. We try to fight back as best we can. I was hoping to see the pictures of Jackson's penis, but they were never released. Maybe Clinton's penis pictures will be released. I don't know. I see a trading card series.

13.

[Q] Playboy: Do you attach any special significance to the fact that when you appeared as an extra in the movie The Paper, director Ron Howard assigned you to peer at Glenn Close and Jason Robards from over a toilet stall?

[A] Loder: Yes, I took it as my due. It made perfect sense to me. I winged it. I improvised. Felt the character. That lasted ten seconds. I had to be pointed out to myself. didn't see it. My son saw it twice. According to the technicians, they spent an entire day cleaning the men's room at Radio City. It's a nice men's room. Everybody was there.

14.

[Q] Playboy: Have Nirvana and Pearl Jam restored a purity to rock and roll that had been missing for a while?

[A] Loder: There was so much slick shit going on. But disco is rock and roll too. Rock is not just a style. It's a way of looking at stuff. Jeff Beck can play with jazz guys or rock-and-roll guys. He's still Jeff Beck and he's still exciting. He has no idea how talented he is. Richard Thompson is a great, gifted guitarist and songwriter. He's perceived as a folk guy, but he's definitely a rock-and-roll kind of person. Rock is inclusive. I thought Abba was a great pop act in the tradition of the Phil Spector groups. They're Swedish but they have that echoey Phil Spector sound. Listen to Abba records and you'll hear arrangements you can't believe. They're so clever. They wrote the first women's lib song, Hey, Hey Helen. I miss Abba a lot.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Defend the Sixties as the golden age of rock.

[A] Loder: It was just one of those periods when some massive shift was happening in popular culture, and that had to do with technology and communications. And being young is the most important part of appreciating pop culture. You hear things when you're 15 years old that make an impression you can never imagine. I remember hearing stuff when I was 15. Wow! Amazing! All the great records that were made in New Orleans. All the Little Richard stuff. All the Hank Ballard and the Midnighters stuff. And yet you have to be that age to have it make an impression on you. It's a biological thing. The people who say the Sixties were so great are people who were 15 at some point in the Sixties. On the other hand, they really were great. There's no songwriting group like the Beatles. There's no scene like swinging London. Everybody seemed to feel better. It was, "Let's go out and get high! And wear really loud clothes! What do you say?" Who's going to argue? These days everything is so freighted with sociopolitical bullshit. You just don't have that simple, positive pleasure anymore.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Dig deep into your files and find some underappreciated music.

[A] Loder: There's so much. I wish more people could hear Yma Sumac. She's a woman who claimed to be a sun princess from the Inca valleys. She probably was from Connecticut. Yma Sumac was not related to any folk tradition. No way. Her music is ridiculous. Wonderfully ridiculous. There was a kind of exoticism in the Fifties, this tiki consciousness, like the Mystic Moods Orchestra doing It's a Rainy Night in Hawaii or something. Whoa! It's really exotic. Pretty good music. Absolutely. In the music business, you're inundated with records. And most of them are garbage. So it's a pleasure to go to a record store and drop a couple hundred dollars and just find stuff. It renews your enthusiasm. Go to the New Age section. You might find Brian Eno there. There are odd record labels run by possessed people who think the world needs to hear more. You'll find ECM, a label with a strong German-Scandinavian orientation to solo, austere guitars. You have to hear it to understand it. There's a band in Texas called Brave Combo that does polka versions of Jimi Hendrix tunes. Really well.

17.

[Q] Playboy: MTV programs for a young audience. You wouldn't be worried about losing touch with viewers, would you?

[A] Loder: No. I just sort of turned 50. Never tried to pretend I was 15 years old. Never tried to set myself up as an arbiter of young people's music. The kids can do that by themselves. I just try to do what I do as nonstupidly as possible. There are intelligent people in every age group. That's an overlooked fact. My son is always trying to find a way to be different from me, but it's hard. I love the latest Nirvana album too. Whoa! I'm not a big fan of the new Pantera album, but that's a minor point. The official MTV demographics are the ages of 15 to 35 or something. Demographics are made up all the time. Who knows what they are?

18.

[Q] Playboy: This is supposed to be the age of the short attention span. Have you adjusted your own in an effort to hold on to the viewer who has the remote in hand?

[A] Loder: I have no attention span. Well, I can read a book. There's no reason to have a long attention span when you're dealing with television. Why would you? You have to pay attention to hours of garbage. Same with computers. They're supposed to be intuitive. There are so many things you can skip in life, as well as in technology. Don't you wish you could have skipped adolescence and gone right to getting laid? Wouldn't that have been great? So there's something to be said for short attention spans. But it's bad when people don't read. We may be losing that to a certain extent.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Do you resent the ratings success of your animated MTV colleagues Beavis and Butt-head?

[A] Loder: No. They get really big ratings. Beavis and Butt-head are perfect. They're the greatest rock critics of all time. They are! Anyone who was 20 years old at any time in the history of the world would love Beavis and Butt-head. They say, "Butt munch." They say outrageous things. They look at stupid videos and say, "This is really stupid. It sucks." And it's so true. They're eloquent that way. It's offensive to parents. It's offensive to the common values we all hold dear. It laughs at things that you're not supposed to laugh at. Hey, do we love it or what? How can I compete with that? I rejoice in their shadows.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Fess up. Are any Sixties-style tie-dyed boxer shorts beneath those black suits?

[A] Loder: No. I was never into that. And I grew up in the Sixties at a time when you couldn't buy any pants that weren't flared. I used to have long hair and occasionally still do. I look bad with long hair. My hair is really thin. I can't do anything with it. With stupid hair and flared pants. I didn't make a good impression. So the Sixties weren't a good period for me. Now is a better time for me. The things I loved the most about the Sixties were music and drugs.