Kurt Loder

Loder was born in Miami, Florida, and lived in Peru before his family settled in Ocean City, New Jersey. He graduated from Ocean City High School in 1963, and attended two years of college at Oklahoma City University and Temple University, which he "just hated." Loder then joined the United States Army and graduated from its journalism school.Loder stated that he "just fell into" his field, elaborating that his "entire journalism background is four weeks... That's it. Nothing else. You can learn journalism in four weeks. It's not an overcomplicated thing. It's very simple." Loder lived in Europe for the next several years, doing what he later called "scandal sheet" "yellow journalism." He returned home to New Jersey at the end of 1972 and worked with a local newspaper and then an Ocean City-based magazine run by the sister of the city's famous writer Gay Talese. He left in the summer of 1976 to work with a free Long Island rock weekly called Good Times. He received about $200 a week. After meeting a fellow "music geek," David Fricke, "the two of us began driving into Manhattan virtually every night to wallow in the flourishing punk rock scene at CBGB's, Max's, etc. This was, fortunately, cool with the wives. I mean, we'd still be sitting upright at four in the morning through fist fights, mass nod-outs, and sets by bands with names like Blinding Headache, played to audiences of three people, of which we'd be two-thirds. I don't think I can quite convey how great days those were". They both joined Circus in 1978 and moved to Manhattan. Loder went on to become one of its official editors. The staff had a fun, relaxed atmosphere and considered the magazine to be second or third tier. Loder later said that "Whatever was said to be 'happening' in commercial pop music was... on the cover of Circus. Disco? Run with it. Shirtless teen popsters? Put 'em on the cover... a, shall we say, ardent enthusiasm for pix of nubile youths. Metal, of course, was really the mag's meat." He also remarked that "it was a foregone conclusion that writing of any technical ambition about new acts of any real excitement or interest would make it in the mag only by the sheerest accident." Loder started a nine-year run at Rolling Stone in May 1979. RockCritics.com has called him "one of Rolling Stone's most talented and prolific feature writers." While at Rolling Stone, Loder co-authored singer Tina Turner's 1986 autobiography I, Tina. He then contributed to the screenplay adaptation for the film What's Love Got to Do with It. Loder joined MTV in 1987 as the host of their flagship music news program, The Week in Rock. It was later expanded and renamed to MTV News in which he was an anchor and correspondent. Loder was one of the first to break the news of Kurt Cobain's death; he interrupted regular programming to inform viewers that Cobain was found dead. Loder authored a 1990 collection of his Rolling Stone work called Bat Chain Puller. Loder has guest-starred as himself on Kenan & Kel, the "That '90s Show" episode of The Simpsons, Girlfriends, Duckman, Saturday Night Live, and Portlandia. He has appeared in several films. He was also parodied in the South Park episode "Timmy 2000". In 2011, St. Martin's Press published Loder's The Good, the Bad and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews, which collected his film reviews from MTV.com and Reason.com. In 2016, Loder began hosting the music-based radio talk show True Stories on SiriusXM.