/Interview/ The brains behind: Cooking With Rockstars
19/08/2008 | Filed under Discover > Interview
If indie rock gives you an appetite, you’ll love this web TV show. We chat to founder Jennifer Robins about how music really is the food of love
.net: Why did you start Cooking with Rockstars? As you say on your site, in 2002 there wasn’t much web video, so did people think you were a bit mad to be embarking on a project like this?
JR: I’d been writing about music, food, arts and technology on my personal site, Jenville.com, for a while so my friends encouraged me to turn it into a cable access TV show. I didn’t know a thing about television production, but I did know how to make websites. So I limited the scope to just ‘Cooking’ and ‘Rockstars’ as a way to combine my two strongest interests. I just grabbed my little consumer video camera, started talking to some musicians that I knew, and posted little QuickTime videos to web pages. Thus, The Jenville Show (later renamed Cooking with Rockstars) was born.
As for people thinking I was mad, no, nothing like that. But then, I run with a crowd of web innovators who are always finding new things to do on the web (you may have heard of some of their pet projects like Blogger, Flickr, and Twitter). So I’ve always had lots of encouragement to play around with the web as a medium.
When I started in 2002, you had to host your videos and pay for bandwidth yourself: there was no YouTube or Blip.tv to handle distribution for you. It was definitely YouTube that really brought web video to the masses. They made it so mindlessly easy – no web knowledge required – and they picked up the tab on hosting! That changed everything. I was active in the web in 1993 (I did the graphic design for the first commercial website, Global Network Navigator at O’Reilly) and remember the excitement as it exploded in popularity and usefulness. What’s going on now in web video and entertainment reminds me of those days with everyone trying new things but nobody having it quite figured out yet.
.net: You’re a writer and graphic designer, and run other sites too – what proportion of your time do you spend working on Cooking with Rockstars, and is it difficult to juggle everything in your life?
JR: You forgot to mention that I’m also the mother of a four-year-old boy! That’s where the vast majority of my time is going. These days, I’m focusing all of my work time on Cooking with Rockstars and its spin-off, Parenting with Rockstars. Now and then, I also post something to Jenville.com. All of my books (Web Design in a Nutshell, Learning Web Design, and (X)HTML Pocket Reference, published by O’Reilly Media) are up to date now, so I’ll have some years off from the writing, and the only graphic design client I have right now is myself. But there are never enough hours in the day for a Mom/New Media Producer.
.net: You’ve chatted to quite an eclectic bunch of musicians: how do you choose whom to interview?
JR: Cooking with Rockstars is a labour of love, so I only interview bands whose music I really love and believe in. I enjoy turning people on to new music – in fact, I’ve been making end-of-the-year compilations for my friends for a decade now for just that reason. I started Cooking with Rockstars primarily as a music showcase. The idea was to attract people to the site with well-known bands, then hopefully they’ll check out some of the up-and-comers while they’re there.
When I first started the project, it didn’t occur to me that bands might come to me and want to be interviewed, so I’ve had to say a few polite ‘no-thank-yous’. For the time being, I’m keeping a tight curatorial hold on the content so it reflects my personal musical tastes.
.net: Who’s been your favourite interviewee?
JR: Well, I’ve had loads of fun at pretty much every interview I’ve done. But I can say the Cooking interview that had the biggest impact on me personally was with Robyn Hitchcock. Robyn provided the soundtrack to my college years and many years thereafter, so it was quite a thrill to get to meet him. I remember at one point in the interview, he was speaking and I had a moment where I thought “Oh man! I’m looking straight into the eyes of Robyn Hitchcock!!” and it just felt so random that I could have ended up in that place. I think my star-struck inner 19-year-old came with me to that interview.
For Parenting with Rockstars, however, I recently had the honour of interviewing Ringo Starr. You don’t get much bigger in the rock world than a Beatle!! He’s such a warm and laid-back guy that I could have sat and chatted with him for hours. That was a life experience that I’ll really cherish. I feel like that interview was a true gift.
.net: Have you personally tried all the recipes on your site? Which is your favourite?
JR: I did in the early days, but I confess that once my son came along, I stopped doing much cooking from recipes. I have tried the simple ones, like Jack Black’s Dorito Burrito, which is actually not bad – it’s got that warm, chewy plus crunchy thing going for it. I’m definitely looking forward to trying the Coconut-Corn Chowder submitted by Jona Bechtolt of YACHT and the Lamb Tagine recently submitted by Martin Hederos of the Swedish band The Soundtrack of Our Lives. If I find myself with a lot of time on my hands, I’d love to try the Chocolate Caramel Tart with Sea Salt that was sent to me by Will Sheff of Okkervil River.
.net: Who would be your ultimate interviewee?
JR: Well, where do you go from a Beatle?! I’m going to stick with the indie rockers for Cooking with Rockstars, who tend to be pretty accessible. However, I have a much loftier wish-list for my Parenting project, including Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz (Talking Heads), Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Jack White (White Stripes), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters), Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), and many others. So wish me luck!!
.net: How involved in the technical side of the site are you? Have you had any major technical problems over the years?
JR: I’ve always been pretty involved in the front-end technical aspects (HTML, CSS) for my sites. From 2002 to 2007, CookingwithRockstars.com was just a static HTML/CSS site, so I was able to do the entire thing myself. But in late 2007, we moved the site over to Drupal (an open source content management system), so I didn’t do the actual configuration of the site this time around. I did the design, the HTML templates, and style sheets, but then handed it over to be set up in Drupal. Luckily, I am married to a Drupal expert (Jeff Robbins of Lullabot), so I have in-house development and tech support for the site. Drupal makes it very easy for me to maintain the site myself and we haven’t had any problems with it at all.
.net: How do you see the site developing in the future? Have you been offered a mainstream TV slot, and would you take it if you were?
JR: I’d like to do more actual cooking with my guests. I have three cooking episodes in editing, so I’m on the right track. I’d also like to find the right sponsor so I can stop paying for it out of my own pocket.
As for mainstream TV, I’ve heard from some smaller and on-demand channels about syndicating my content, but no TV show offers. The feeling among my web producer friends is that there isn’t a lot of incentive to do a television show because you give up creative control and most of the revenue, and that Big Things are poised to happen right on the web. So the only real incentive to go the TV route is if you want to be a television personality, which I don’t. I’m just happy getting to talk with musicians I like and sharing it with people online. It would be nice to make a modest living off it one day, too.
.net: What do you enjoy most about Cooking with Rockstars? What do you like least?
JR: The best part, of course, is getting to meet and get to know my favourite bands and artists. What surprised me was how much you get to know about their core personalities when you talk about food. Since I don’t ask the same-old questions about the band and their music, I don’t get canned answers. You’d be surprised how many start talking about their grandmothers (I think I’m going to put together a Grandma Special!). It’s really charming. I feel like I provide a rare opportunity to see indie rockers just hanging out and talking like people.
What I don’t enjoy is the tedium of logging video footage and trying to narrow it down to a five- or six-minute video. For some reason, my patience for doing graphic design at the pixel level doesn’t apply to the frame-by-frame attention required in Final Cut Pro.
My brother, Liam Lynch, who is a director/producer/editor, calls editing ‘monk’s work’. I completely agree, and I think I’m just not cut out for it. Fortunately, I’ve been working with a great producer, James Holland, who handles the final editing for me after I sketch out the broad strokes, either on paper or in FCP.
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Comments
Joanne pecoraro / 29/09/2008 / 15:43
Would like to have my own cooking t/v show.
best of classic rock / 04/04/2009 / 17:15 / http://bestofclassicrock.com
Great idea- two of my favorite things- Rock Music and Great Cooking! Nothing better than turning up the stereo and rocking out to some great tunes while preparing a gourmet feast. If they neigbors complain, just invite them over for dinner!
-RickD
http://bestofclassicrock.com
