Early Years
Loder was born in Ocean City, New Jersey. He graduated in 1963 from Ocean City High School in Ocean City. He spent two years in college "and just hated it". He was drafted into the United States Army and joined its journalism school. He later said 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, very simple." He was in the military for three years.
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 only 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 briefly experimented with inhalant based drugs at Circus; he stopped after experiencing a "gushing" nosebleed without any feeling left in his face.
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