 Sound
RIDER! @ 10
PART 10: Creating Content
Having spent 25 years in the music business, twenty of them were spent
working for music companies by day and playing in bands some nights and
weekends. During that time, I recorded two full albums and hundreds of demo tapes
of songs I had written. The albums were done with my band, but many of the demo
tracks I recorded alone, playing all the instruments myself.
Each month now I feel like I’m making a little album with various stories
coming in from other writers, composing my own and arranging it all just so. In
recording, you mix down the tracks to get the final master and that’s
essentially what I’m doing toward the end of the month in the layout process to
complete each issue of Sound RIDER!
Other than what I learned in elementary, high school and my first few years
of college, I have no real formal training in the English department. I didn’t
take writing courses or study the great writers of the ages. I recall a moment
in the sixth grade when I wrote an essay on the documentary movie, The Ra
Expeditions. The teacher handed it back to me and said “This is not your work.
You copied it from some magazine. Go back and write your own now.” It was mine
all from scratch.
When I was thirty, I started traveling a lot and read whatever I could get my
hands on or intrigued me. The newspaper, lifestyle magazines and a healthy dose
of the weird was my diet. I enjoyed books by the greats - like Jack Kerouac,
Charles Bukowski, John Waters and Hunter S. Thompson. I also admired certain
publishers who had the balls to take a chance and won. William Randolph Hearst,
Hugh Heffner and Larry Flynt all had my attention. But it was all just intrigue,
I never fancied myself as a publisher back then.
In the music business, I ended up writing numerous bits of ad copy, sales
copy, press releases and artist biographies, then laying them out on a desktop
PC for final production. All this eventually led to my ability to create content
from start to finish. When the web came along, I was pretty well developed in the
desktop publishing department and I jumped right in.
 GETTING THE STORY
Coming up with story ideas for Sound RIDER! has never been a problem, and
after ten years I think there’s an endless supply because we’ve never written
the same story twice.
Of course the obvious stories come to mind such as reporting on the upcoming
motorcycle show or events. Other stories walk in as a result of legislative
changes, changes in the weather and changes in people and companies who make the
business go around. And being a local magazine, there will always be ride ideas.
Photo: From the 2005 ORV Rally on the steps of
the capitol in Olympia. We choose to move the shot into black and
white which was the obvious format when various protests were going
on in the 60s.
But the stories I enjoy running the best are the ones that are born from a
particular experience or situation. It’s one of the reasons I like working with
David Hough so well. He does this in his own writing where he tackles a topic no
one gives much thought to and by putting it under the microscope for a thousand
words, a revelation is introduced to the reader and it gives them a new
perspective on their riding experience.
There was this point in 2006 when I looked at the other magazines in the area
noted that several were running listings for “biker-friendly-bars.” Meanwhile,
the DOL in Olympia was feeding back the Washington state death rate stats noting
that 60% of the state’s motorcycle deaths are alcohol related. Well – imagine
that! I decided to bust the others on it and crafted up a story that was
entirely factual and left the thinking to the reader. When I had it nearly
done, I emailed it over to David Hough for a look. He fired back the final
version and added a little of his own candor, like the line “Meanwhile
(thump) another round of local cruiser lifestyle magazines hits the floors of
dealers, each loaded with a guide to ‘Biker Friendly Bars.’” People went
nuts! They either loved the piece or hated it. I collected all the emails that
came in and assembled them for a response piece the following month. In the
meantime, David came up with his own response and I placed it as a closing
commentary in the follow-up. Of course the other magazines were less than
delighted and threatened legal action. I consulted with our attorney who gave
the article a green light and two thumbs up saying it was news and that made it
legal to run images of the others magazine covers in the article under US
copyright law.
Dave Preston is another example of someone who connects two things together
to create content no one is typically thinking about, but feels enlightened
having read it. And for this reason I generally take what Dave sends over and
run it. In the beginning, I tried meeting with him about content, but he just
kept flying over pieces that had little to do with what we discussed. The
readers loved it and so I gave up on trying to direct Dave. In nine years, I
think I’ve sent him back to the drawing board twice.
Another story I enjoyed working up was the Mountain Pass Mentality article.
Ever since I’ve lived in the Northwest, I hadn’t been enjoying riding over
Snoqualmie Pass. Dave Preston and I had discussed our disdain on the way
toward it one summer day. The more I thought about it, the more I collected my
thoughts on what I didn’t like about it. The next few trips over, I tried a few
ideas I had come up with and discovered a few ways to make it a smoother trip
mentally. Eventually, I sat down and wrote the piece putting the whole scenario
of riding mountain pass interstate sections under the microscope. The responses
were positive and I knew I'd had an effect on peoples' riding experience –
which is exactly what I wanted Sound RIDER! to be all about.
Reading our monthly web stats provides several useful insights to what’s
going on with the content and what people are looking for story-wise. Keywords
like ‘sound rider’ ‘sportbikes’ and ‘used motorcycles northwest’ are common.
Others stand out as interesting oddities. In the winter, we get a lot of traffic
from readers searching ‘heated motorcycle gloves.’ Our feature on Gerbing’s
Heated Clothing gets them reading the magazine. Another popular word combination
is ‘dual sport motorcycle.’ The web spiders seem to like John Scofield’s ‘Buying
a Dualsport Motorcycle’ which he wrote back in 2000. From this information, we
can see what the popular topics and stories are and know better what to create
or freshen up from time-to-time if we already have it on record. You just gotta
love technology!
 TAKING PICTURES/MAKING PICTURES
When I was a kid, we had a lot of camera gear around the house. My father
liked to shoot, my brother liked to shoot and I became intrigued with their
cameras. Eventually, I got my own and started experimenting. Shooting in color
was easy, but I couldn’t get around the inability to see in black and white and
was rarely happy with what I got in that format. When I was 16, I bought my
first 35mm SLR – a Pentax K1000, along with a few lenses, flash and filters. I
took an old suitcase and carved out a sheet of foam to fit inside and protect
all the gear. I drove around with that case in the back of my Volkswagen Rabbit
for several years.
Photo: Dave Preston washing a VRod during the Motorcycle 101
shoot.
The first job I ever got shooting was for the Pasadena Showcase House
organization. They hired me to shoot the interior of that year’s showcase house
and paid me. Wow – cool. I got paid to shoot. I used the money to go buy some
darkroom gear. But my mom wasn’t going to have me set a darkroom up in our house
– all those chemicals and all. I had a neighborhood friend who also shot. We set
the darkroom up at his house in his basement and the fixer flowed, shall we say.
 I never had formal training. It was all shoot, develop, print and learn over
and over again. I finally got the black and white down when I started to study
Ansel Adams' work.
When I was 18, I came back to the car from a backpacking trip and
noticed it had been broken into. The suitcase was still there, but all the gear
was gone. My parents were getting ready to move to a retirement community and my
dad handed over his entire 35mm Minolta outfit to me. I was floored!
Photo: Norm Gerlich at his restoration shop in Seattle in
2000.
In 1997, I bought a digital camera and never shot film ever again. My daughter
enjoyed shooting and she had taken classes for it in high school. When she’d
visit, we’d go out on little field trips with our cameras. Sometimes around the
Cascades, into The Gorge or out to the race track.
 In 1999, when we started up Sound
RIDER! it became apparent quickly that we were
going to need a deep archive of images. I spent countless hours shooting
motorcycles and still do to this day. In addition, I’ve worked with other local
photographers to use their shoots in stories and marketing materials. In 2008, my
brother joined me at the Rally in The Gorge. Between the two of us we had 2,500
shots from that week. But because bikes change, we’ll always need to be shooting
at the events to keep the imagery up to date.
Photo: A Ducati ST4 rider shot on Maryhill Loops
Road during Rally in the Gorge/Sportbike Northwest.
And then there are the book projects which require another dose of photos
specific to them. Patrick Duff and I spent several weeks in 2006 working up all
the photos used in Packing Light Packing Right. And it wasn’t just getting the
shots, but all the post production work that had to go into them afterward, like
cropping, shadows and grey scaling. Patrick’s crash course in photo and book
production with me that summer landed him a job at a local publishing house. I
secretly hope that one day we can work together again.
Doing the photo shoot for Dave Preston’s book was a lot of fun. I
particularly enjoyed making the photo of Dave washing a Harley-Davidson V-Rod.
Each year we look at the archive and decide where we need to load it up. We
spent a lot of time at the Cycle World Motorcycle Show in December 2008 pulling
together some stock shoots of the displays, vendor booths and attendee activity.
This last summer, I spent a lot of time shooting down in Central and Eastern
Oregon, an area that will get some special attention in 2010.
You'd think that after 10 years you would have published and shot it all, but every day
is new and I'm looking forward to whatever the next 10 years has in store!
But to come up with good stories and photos you need some great people to work
with...
... to be continued
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