A conversation with Dan Ozzi
On book publishing, selling out, poking around a ghost town, and more.
Dan Ozzi is a writer I have followed for a number of years. I might not always agree with his takes, but he’s had a large platform to talk about bands that most outlets don’t care to cover. From classic to modern pop-punk, post-hardcore, and emo bands, plenty of worthy bands have received great recognition through his writing for Vice.
He has a new book out called Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007). I cannot hide my bias here. I’m a fan of this book, as I genuinely enjoyed the advance copy I read a few months ago. With chapters devoted to My Chemical Romance, Thursday, At the Drive-In, and Rise Against, it’s right up my alley.
And it means a lot to me that he cited my little self-published book Post in the bibliography.
I recently spoke with Dan about things that are of interest to me, and hopefully, you will enjoy our conversation. You can order Sellout from practically every retailer and it’s available now.
How did you get a book deal for Sellout? I have stories about how I tried to get a book deal for Post and they’re kinda heartbreaking.
I feel very fortunate in that my agent -- right before Christmas -- sent my proposal out. I’ve worked in book publishing before, so I had assumed everyone would be home for the holidays. So basically for that week I had to go to three different publishers and do my little dog and pony show. I just got really lucky in that all three were interested. I felt like I had siphoned out the punks in publishing. I found the stray punks who worked in book publishing and piqued their interests. I feel really lucky in that regard because in another parallel universe, probably nobody would care about it. [Laughs]
My agent really championed Post, but St. Martin’s Griffin was the only publisher that was interested in the topic. The editor read the Braid chapter and thought it was boring. I was asked if I was interested in gutting all of the human interest angle of the people behind the music and just focusing on the scenes themselves. I said no because I had gained the trust of all these people that the book was going to be what I pitched them. I didn’t want to go back on my word. About a year or two later, I was at a bookstore and I saw the book that St. Martin’s wanted on the shelf. It was Wish You Were Here by Leslie Simon.
I had one editor that I met with and he was like, “I think it’s a cool book. I like it, but maybe it doesn’t have to be structured the way it is, where each chapter is a different band?” I was like, “No, that’s the book.” [Laughs]
That’s what I really enjoyed about Sellout. If I wanted to read the full story of Rise Against forming out of the ashes of 88 Fingers Louie, all the way to working with DreamWorks, I got that story. Instead of a paragraph in a jumbled-up storyline. When you have a lot of information you want to explain to people -- especially people who have no idea about the bands you’re writing about -- if you base it on a human level interest, that tells a much deeper story than what’s the better record, Siren Song of the Counter Culture or The Unraveling.
I read a lot of books for research, including yours. I remember reading Nothing Feels Good . . .
Oh god. [Laughs]
To Andy Greenwald’s credit, he was writing in real-time. It’s one thing for me to look back with hindsight and have that bit at my disposal. I read that book and I’m like, “What is this?” You’re reading it and it’s like, we’re going to talk about girls and emo, and then a mini-profile on Jimmy Eat World, and then we’re going to talk about the Drive-Thru Records catalog. What is the lens of this? It seemed very jumbled to me. There were things that were helpful to me overall, but as a reading experience, I didn’t like it. Also, he spelled Blake Schwarzenbach’s name wrong in every instance. [Laughs]
Word was, that was his editor’s fault. That was the book that partially inspired me to write the book I wrote. I thought if somebody could get a book deal and write something that reads very amateur-ly, childish, and juvenile, then somebody who had absolutely no writing background could at least try to do something. I saw people complaining about how terrible that book was. I didn’t think it would be that bad. Then I read it, and I know this is very emo, but I got halfway through and I threw it across the room and went back to work.
There’s a lot of books about either emo or pop-punk wherein the subject material is treated almost as a joke or winky. Or something that was a fad or a trend. I despise that. I’m very fortunate that my editor understood the tone. I don’t think Sellout is so gravely serious. I mean, there’s a chapter about blink-182 in it. At the same time, I approach the subject and these bands with a certain reverence because why would I be doing it otherwise? Don’t get me wrong. I love to be a ball-buster, but it just didn’t seem right for this type of book. It was like a history book, in a way.
What I really admire is that it came out on a name publisher, so people will pay closer attention to it and take it seriously. I still feel the pushback of self-publishing a book 12 years ago. People can rightfully say, “Well, obviously it wasn’t good enough for a publisher, so why should I read it?” When you’re dealing in an industry that would prefer to publish more books about what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were doing 50 years ago, you have this uphill battle. And then when you have a book like Sellout or Meet Me in the Bathroom come out, which touches on stuff that happened in the past 20-25 years, it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s proof the book industry is starting to turn around and realize punk rock didn’t die with Nirvana.
My editor and I talk about that all the time. We really feel like we’re planting a flag in the sand. We’re moving book coverage of this genre into the next era. But to your point about it not being sale-able, were I writing a book about my 11 favorite bands in the world, I’m sure I would not be able to get a book sold to a major publisher if I was writing about Avail [Laughs] and Hot Water Music, with no disrespect those bands. Those audiences are a bit more limited.
I get that the subject sometimes feels niche and that my mom has no idea what I’m talking about. But at the same time, we’re talking about 11 bands who collectively have tens of millions of followers. That really helped me in making it a sale-able proposal.
Were there any people you wanted to interview but for whatever reason, they were not available?
Yes, and I tend to not name names. When I look at it, that’s the book’s weak spots. I tend to not openly reveal those. But I will say that if somebody didn’t want to talk to me, it was usually polite and I didn’t take offense to it. But I did say, “OK, well, if I can’t have you directly, I’d like to talk to two of your friends or three people who worked with you.” It motivated me to dig deeper. I wasn’t trying to uncover dirt, but I had to compensate for the fact that there was a very weak spot here. There are about 150 people in the book, but there’s 200 people mentioned in it. After a while, I had to let go of the book being a completionist history, because some of the people are longer with us. I couldn’t possibly talk to everybody in the book, as much as I would like to. It was up to me to figure out how not to let that drag down the book.
The At the Drive-In camp was very hard to infiltrate when I did my book. A friend of a friend did me a solid and put in a good word with Jim Ward. I had a great conversation with him before Sparta played in Dallas and I briefly spoke with Paul and Tony. But at the time, Cedric and Omar were in full anti-At the Drive-In talk.
Aside from the band members, it seems like everyone who ever worked on that band is on some other planet, in a weird regard. Usually, band members are your primary sources and those are the hardest ones to get to. And then you have supplementary ones -- and those are usually pretty easier -- like managers, publicists, and A&R guys. People who get interviewed very often. They’re usually happy to talk to you. I don’t know why, but when I went poking for At the Drive-In sources, people were just so weird about it. Even people who had been tour managers or photographers. I felt like I was poking around in a town that had been haunted [Laughs] or something like that.
Was there ever a time where you were afraid a band was a sellout for going to a major label?
Um, yeah. That was pretty much the life I lived at that time. It happened all the time. It was funnier to goof on a band if they had a song on a commercial. Even if they didn’t go to a major label. If you heard their song on a Carnival Cruise line commercial, you dunk on them among your friend. And now I feel like, “Well good for them! They’re not going to get paid otherwise.”
Explaining to teenagers now about staunchly anti-major label attitudes were in the 1990s might be hard.
I’ve been thinking about how teenagers will react to this book if they read it. I don’t know. I would love to know because a lot of it must seem so alien. Some of the entire premise might seem so alien. So, we’ll see. [Laughs]
Do you want to write another book?
Yeah! I don’t have any marketable skills, so I’ll have to do this forever. Like I said, I feel I got really lucky in that I was able to translate my otherwise esoteric interests into something marketable. I got away with it this time, but I’m like, “Hmmm. What else do I know about that people would purchase?” [Laughs] And I’m coming up with nothing at the moment.