CR 040: Adem Tepedelen on Music, Memoirs, and Writing ‘A Fabulous Disaster’
The journalist and author discusses his latest memoir, co-written with thrash metal icon Gary Holt.
Adem Tepedelen has worked in and around the music industry for more than 30 years—as a musician (playing guitar for the ’90s rock band Stymie), editor (of the biweekly music magazine The Rocket), and writer (contributing to Mojo, Seattle Weekly, Revolver, and Decibel, among others). A full-time freelancer since 2002, Tepedelen continues to work in the magazine world, though in recent years he’s put most of his focus on co-writing memoirs with rock stars.
His first experience co-authoring a memoir was 2023’s Mud Ride: A Messy Trip Through the Grunge Explosion, which he wrote with Steve Turner of Seattle’s legendary grunge band Mudhoney. It was, he says now, a pivotal learning experience. “I’d never written a memoir,” Tepedelen says. “I didn’t really know how to write a memoir. I just winged it. The editors seemed happy enough. They offered some input as to how to improve things, as editors do. But generally, I think it went pretty well. When I realized that there was an end point to that particular job, I was looking for the next thing, scouting people I knew through interviewing or people I just thought had interesting stories.”
One of those people was Gary Holt, guitarist and songwriter for the bands Slayer and Exodus. Together, the two wrote A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden, the Hard Way, a deeply personal exploration of Holt’s life and career, warts and all. Released earlier this week, the book, Holt says, is his “pride and joy.”
Tepedelen recently took a break from working on his current project—an upcoming memoir he’s co-writing with Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil—to chat with me about his most memorable experience as a journalist, what he learned from writing Steve Turner’s memoir, and his advice to aspiring writers.
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SANDRA EBEJER: I read an interview you did where you shared that you had a metal fanzine in high school. When did you know you wanted to be a journalist?
ADEM TEPEDELEN: I don’t think I wanted to get into writing. I was just incredibly enthusiastic about the music and what I saw was a way for me to be more involved in the music. It was a really fertile time in the metal world and the punk world in the early ‘80s. I saw people putting out their own fanzines. At the time, I would have loved to have been in a band being covered in these fanzines, but it just wasn’t realistic at that point in my life. So one way for me to get involved in metal was to start writing about it. I’ve always been good in English, much better than math. It came easily to me. So I thought, “Well, if other people are doing this, I’ll do this.”
I’ve been very good over the years at creating my own jobs, and that was the start of it. I put out the first issue entirely on my own. And as a consequence of doing that, I met other people in my general area of Oregon who were as excited about it as me. There was no thought, like, “I want to start writing.” It was more that I wrote because of my enthusiasm for the music, which I think is why a lot of people write about music—they’re excited about it, they love it, and they want to express themselves that way.
You’ve worked in music journalism for many years. Is there an article that you’ve written over the years that really stands out in your mind—for any reason, good or bad?
I do these stories for Decibel called the Hall of Fame. Each issue, they induct a classic metal album, or what they would call an extreme music album, into their Hall of Fame. What that entails is you contact all of the members that played on the album. So if it was recorded in ‘79, you gotta track these people down and get them to agree to an interview, which can be challenging because sometimes people don’t remember, don’t like each other, whatever.
Anyway, one that I did in 2017 was Soundgarden. We had been trying to get Soundgarden to agree to do one for years. It wasn’t like the band was opposed to it, but their publicists were being kind of fussy about the whole thing. They were like, “Well, we’ll do it when this album is having its 25th anniversary” or something. But I never give up. You just keep checking back in. Maybe they have a different publicist; maybe their circumstances have changed. But with Soundgarden, in 2017 they were reissuing their first full-length release, Ultramega OK. And since they were doing it through Sub Pop and I had ins at Sub Pop, I thought, “This is perfect. We’ll induct this album.” So we contacted Sub Pop and, lo and behold, the band was receptive.
That was the first interview I did with [Soundgarden’s guitarist] Kim Thayil. I finally managed to connect with all the members and had great interviews. And then this issue hit the newsstands right when [Soundgarden’s lead singer] Chris Cornell committed suicide. It was heartbreaking. It was really upsetting to me in a lot of ways, as a person who’d lived in Seattle and loved these bands for years. It really shook me up. I could have been one of the last interviews he did.
It ended up being the cover story on that issue of Decibel. They didn’t know, obviously, this was going to happen. It was just a weird circumstance. Very sad, but also bittersweet for me. It led to my current project with Kim, because that’s the first time that I had contact with him, and we had a good conversation. A couple years later when I came back at him to possibly work with him on a book, he was receptive.
That leads into my next question. You’ve become a co-writer on music memoirs over the past few years. How did this part of your work begin?
Getting back to what I was saying about [how] I’m good at creating jobs for myself—I’ve done that so many times over the years. If you’re a freelance writer, you have to be super flexible and willing to do whatever you need to do to survive because things change that are completely out of your control. In the early 2000s, [I was] writing for a variety of different magazines. I was writing for travel magazines. I was writing about beer and wine. I used to do some work for REI, the outdoor gear company. When the economy tanked in 2008, all these companies brought everything in-house. They weren’t hiring freelancers anymore, so a large portion of the money I was making annually evaporated.
I had to reinvent myself, and I started writing for ad agencies. I did that for a while and then ended up creating a job for myself at a local liquor store. I became their website and social media person. When I got laid off, it wasn’t too long after that the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, I realized I needed to stop drinking, but what I’d been writing about, predominantly, for the last 8 to 10 years was alcohol. So I had to reinvent myself again. I went back to [writing about] music.
I had some experience writing books. I’d written the Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers and contributed to a wine book, Island Wineries of British Columbia. I thought I would write a memoir about my time in Seattle during the grunge explosion, but no one was really interested in me. [Laughs] So I figured I needed to write somebody else’s memoir. The initial person I reached out to was Kim Thayil, and he was interested. We were supposed to meet up in March 2020 and it didn’t happen. Because I live in Canada, the border closed, so I couldn’t go down to Seattle, where he lives. I said, “We could do this over Zoom,” and he was not interested in doing that.
I pivoted to other people, [including] Steve Turner, who I thought would be a perfect candidate. He’d always been one of the main voices in Mudhoney and his musical experience went back to Green River, who were a pivotal band in Seattle. I felt like he’d have the great story of grunge’s beginnings. He was super receptive, willing to do it all via Zoom. So that’s what we did during the pandemic those first couple of years, just Zoom every week. We created the narrative, and he provided me with a lot of great information.
How did the Gary Holt book come about?
I had something of a professional relationship with Gary in that I’d interviewed him three or four times over the years. I’d written at least two cover stories for Decibel on Exodus. Also, I had met Gary in person backstage at some Slayer shows and I found him to be an interesting, personable, cool guy. I literally dropped into his DMs on Instagram, and we started a dialogue. He said he had been thinking of doing [a memoir]. His initial thought was he wanted to write it, but he thought he could use some help. I said, “It’s cool if you want to write it yourself, and I’d be happy to help you.” I basically just made myself available. We had some conversations about how we’d go about it and then put together our proposal and went from there.
He was great to work with, so open and forthcoming with really difficult stuff. I admired that about him. The only line he drew was, he’s very happily married, and he didn’t want to open up the sex part of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He was very sensitive to certain things like that. Also, he knows everyone in the metal world. He always said he knows where the bodies are buried because people tell him stuff. And he said, “I’m not going to spill stuff people have confided in me.” He told a lot of stories, and a lot of them make him look bad. He’s okay being the antihero and taking responsibility for his bad actions. He was great to work with, and we had a great editor at Hachette. It was just the smoothest process.
I interviewed Steve Turner about the memoir you wrote with him, and while he’s incredibly nice, he doesn’t seem like the type of person who wants to talk at length about himself. With any of the books you’ve worked on, were there moments where you really had to push to get the artist to be more forthcoming with details? And how did you go about that?
That always happens. That always should happen, really, because a lot of times your subject may not know what you’re looking for or what you’re trying to get from them. I probably was less good about that with Steve because, as I said, it was my first time doing this. I had certain assumptions about the process that were probably not well founded, and I could have certainly improved on that. The other thing is, with Steve, it was more like talking to a history professor. I didn’t get as much of the personal stuff out of him that I would have liked to have. I think that’s because he’s not forthcoming in that realm. He doesn’t feel as comfortable as, say, Gary did. He didn’t prevent me from going there, necessarily, but I didn’t know I should be doing that a little bit more. With Gary, one of the things I said up front, because I realized this is something that I lacked in Steve’s book, is “I want a certain amount of things coming out of your mouth that start with ‘I felt.’ Something a little deeper than just an explanation of this tour and that album.” He was good with that.
With my current one, I would say I have a wealth of material to choose from. [Kim Thayil has] been very forthcoming with a lot of stuff. It is something that I’m much more mindful of now—what it means to tell a good story, not just a recounting of a history. That’s what a memoir should be. It should be something that reveals emotional things about the person, as well as things they did.
You mentioned that with Steve’s book, you had some assumptions about the process that turned out to be incorrect. What assumptions did you have?
I went into it not knowing what the heck I was doing. My assumptions were you get the person to tell their story, and you talk about it. I was asking questions, but when it came to assembling it all and telling the story, I was less cognizant of creating an emotional arc. I think part of that had to do with Steve. As I said, he was less forthcoming with that kind of thing. If my first book had been Gary’s, I think that would have been a little different. With all of them, we start with an arc. We [decide] how the story is going to flow, the points we’re going to hit along the way. You establish this with the person you’re writing the book with, and then you use your interviews to fill that in. But [with Steve’s book] I wasn’t as focused on the emotional part of it, the more human part of it, the stuff that anyone could relate to, whether or not they are a fan of Mudhoney. Because he had a life outside of the band, and you need to include that kind of stuff to create a fuller picture of that person.
Steve, Gary, and Kim are very different musicians, in terms of their styles and genres. When it comes to co-writing a memoir, how do you decide which projects to take on?
There have been a couple things that engaged me about all three of these guys. One of them is, does their story begin in a fertile era? Both Steve and Kim were the creators, in a way, of this Seattle scene. They were hugely important. To me, that’s a big thing. It was the same thing with Gary. Part of what makes him a notable musician is the fact he helped create this genre that became really big.
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily just look for what music scene I can explore. It’s not just about that. I’m just using that as an example. And Gary’s pointed this out—the same way with Steve Turner—neither of them had the kind of monetary success that, for instance, Kim had. In Gary’s case, he had a decade where he wasn’t even playing music and was doing really crappy, menial jobs. So for him to go from that to picking Exodus up off the floor and making it viable again and then getting this gig in Slayer was pretty remarkable. When I was looking at his story, that’s what I saw. It wasn’t rags to riches. It was influential, nosedive career, and then manages to resurrect it into something where he’s an elder statesman in the metal world. That’s a cool story. Steve’s story was largely sold based on that he could tell the origins of grunge. He can talk about people that he’s known since he was a teenager, members of Pearl Jam and all these people. So it just has to be something beyond “this is a famous person that has a story to tell.”
Is there an artist that you’d love to co-write a memoir with?
I’d love to write [Metallica’s] Kirk Hammett’s book, because I already know the beginnings of it. You can see parallel paths between Kirk and Gary, because they started pretty much in the same exact spot. Kirk had a bit of a head start on Gary, playing wise. But you see where [in the] early, mid-80s their paths diverged significantly. Obviously, Kirk became one of the most successful musicians in rock, so I think there’s so much there that’s interesting. I tend to fall back on the bands and people that I’m personally interested in because I feel like I’m going to tell the best story if I already have a baseline interest and knowledge there. So, yeah, I would definitely like to write his memoir, for sure.
Are there any writers who you really enjoy reading right now, or anybody who inspires or influences your work?
I can’t say that there is, and I feel lousy saying that, but I’ve never been that kind of writer. Early on, when I was first starting to write, CREEM Magazine was what influenced me. They had this great combination of writers who were super smart. They knew their material, but they were a-okay with poking fun and not taking it all too seriously. I always thought that was important because it’s rock and roll. It’s not anything that we need to put up on any sort of pedestal. I always like that kind of irreverent rock writing.
When I first started writing for Decibel, there were fellow metal writers that I was super impressed by. They had this guy, John Darnielle, who was in The Mountain Goats, this very popular band. He wrote a column called South Pole Dispatch that was just hilarious. So well written. And in addition to playing in The Mountain Goats, he’s written several novels, and I always thought he was a fantastic writer. There were a couple other fellow writers at Decibel who I thought were great music writers, because they did have that willingness to poke a little fun and have some levity in their writing and not conform to typical rock journalism cliches.
You’ve been working as a freelance writer for a long time, and you’ve seen first-hand how the industry has changed. What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Well, don’t expect to make a lot of money. But I do think there is a lot to be said for creating work for yourself. Honestly, I would steer people clear of writing for magazines because it’s really difficult. They don’t pay much, and because there are fewer and fewer magazines there’s so much competition for the work. There are just so many discouraging things about that aspect of it.
The only advice I can offer is in the book world. If you’re imaginative and passionate and you are willing to do the hard work of finding out what might be a marketable book, that will carry over to potentially finding an agent, then finding a book deal. I’ll give you an example: My first book, Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers—I was doing a beer column for Decibel, a metal magazine, which was weird at the time. That was the great thing about Decibel is you come at them with a weird idea, and they’re like, “Yeah, sure.” [Laughs] I ended up writing that for almost 10 years, every month. That was, again, something I created for myself because it was a ridiculous idea. Why would they want a beer column in a metal magazine? It’s a full page they’re giving up for some dude to write about beer. But I realized, after doing that for maybe four years, that it was very popular. So I thought, “Well, let’s make this into a book.”
I happened to know someone at an agency, and I said, “Here’s my idea.” There was a junior agent at that agency who said, “I like that. I think that’s marketable.” She became my agent, she helped me put together my proposal, and we got a book deal out of it. And that literally came from me being excited about this thing and thinking that it was original, that no one had done it before, and that people would be interested in it.
Book publishing is still a viable thing. There are lots of really interesting books being written about all kinds of different subjects. So if you have something that you’re super interested in and passionate about, and you think there might be a good book idea there, pursue it.
To learn more about Adem Tepedelen, visit his website.
To purchase A Fabulous Disaster, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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