Janiss

Writer, author, sometime photographer and adventuress. I hate bores, so if you wanna complain about how shitty your life is, your bad relationships or your health, just please go away. If you want to put the same thoughts into really loud, abrasive rock 'n' roll, however, I just may listen. I really wish I was only as old as it says on my MySpace profile, but the truth is I've been banging around the Los Angeles/ New York/ San Francisco rock scenes since late 1984. Before that I was briefly a film student and worked on the classic cult film Repo Man. I started off my rock journalism career as a photographer. It turned out that I had a knack for photographing musicians, especially when they were onstage.But what I really wanted to do — since I was seven, as a matter of fact — was write. As luck would have it, one night I was shooting a Nils Lofgren show for Music Connection and the reviewer didn't show up so I got to write it up. Bud Scoppa, then the magazine's editor, loved my review and urged me to write more. And so my career took off. My beat morphed into the loud rock and metal genres, although I've always been an altrock girl at heart (in 1992, when Nirvana blew away all those hairspray bands, I was frankly relieved). I wrote for local rags like Rock City News and its higher-quality competitor, L.A. Rock Review, the L.A. Weekly, Cashbox and the L.A. Times (they needed a metal writer in 1988, and Bud recommended me for the gig). I also wrote for a number of rock magazines, including RIP, which back then was the premier heavy rock mag. It may not have had the sales of, say, Hit Parader, but the quality of photography and writing was about a million times better. (Well, it was!) In 1989, RIP executive editor Lonn Friend hired me as senior editor — a title I held until 1996, and when I quit, they retired the title. I also continued to write for other magazines, most notably Entertainment Weekly, Hits and BAM.While I was with RIP, I traveled all over the world and interviewed dozens upon dozens of bands, most of whom were a pleasure to know. Sometimes I'd talk to the famous guys like Nikki Sixx or Gene Simmons (he became a fan of mine while I was writing for the L.A. Times because, he said, unlike the other critics, I sounded like I actually liked rock 'n' roll). But the most fun I had was interviewing the young, up-and-coming guys (and gals) who were broke and on the cutting edge both emotionally and talent-wise — like me! I churned out a load of articles, and my goal was always to tell a story that was interesting and not typical. More often than not I was successful. Recently my friend and ex-Circus senior editor Corey Levitan said he thought of me as the Cameron Crowe of heavy rock journalism. I'll take that title! Especially from a guy who I consider to be the George Plimpton of the 21st Century . After I left RIP, I wrote for Launch (before the site became associated with Yahoo.com), Option and for a while in 1997, I had my own internet rock 'zine. I also collaborated with Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister on his book, White Line Fever (the autobiography, in fact, was my idea). After a while I got distracted by other things (writing about silent movies and the Three Stooges for the Allmovie Guide being one of them), and when my boyfriend stopped being a freaky drug addict, I got into fitness and wrote about that for a few years. In fact, I still have a great exercise DVD review site called yourexercisedvds.com . Then my cat got a website, sparklecat.com and her own MySpace profile and started becoming way more famous than I ever was. Sparkle even has her own book out now. As for me, I was feeling sort of lost for a while and not really sure why. When I found my dream house in the summer of 2006 and moved in, the answer became clear the moment I started sifting through all my old RIPs and other rock magazines — there was all the magic I had been missing, and it all had my byline! I'm a storyteller at heart (I mean, how can I get all that excited telling teen girls how to get abs like Jessica Simpson? Yuck), and I realized I needed to get back to that, if not in rock 'n' roll, somewhere, anywhere! In the meantime, I felt it was really criminal to have these cool rock 'n' roll stories and fun bits of history hidden away in boxes, so I decided to take the best of my articles and reviews from the magazines that no longer exist and put them on line. You can find them at janissgarza.com .