“No one really understands how simple and plain and predictable I am

“Because all I ever wanted to do was to play guitar in a rock and roll band”

— Everclear, “Short Blonde Hair”

I was 12 years old, flipping through the channels when I landed on MTV and the video for Everclear’s “Father of Mine” came on.

I heard in frontman Art Alexakis’s lyrics my own biography, nearly word for word, and felt connected to the sharp hooks and heavy beat of the song that sounded exactly like I felt.

I bought the album the next day, and found myself in nearly every song on the track list. I later bought Everclear’s previous albums and heard myself there, too.

Alexakis said for me in words and sound what I couldn’t always figure out how to say for myself.

Since then, I’ve purchased every album the band ever put out, and I’ve seen them in concert four times.

In New Buffalo, I watched from the front row and collected one of Alexakis’s guitar picks he tossed into the crowd. We were so close that, during the opening act by Eve 6, my wife reached up and played the frontman’s bass.

In short, I’m a fan.

So I geeked out like a kid on Christmas when, in 2008, I got the chance to interview Alexakis over the phone.

“The Vegas Years,” the band’s album of covers, had just come out. The lineup that had produced the band’s biggest hits had broken up, and Alexakis — the founder, writer, and producer of the band — played with a new crew.

We talked about everything, from Woody Guthrie to the success (or lack thereof) of cover albums to playing live to how he got along with his new bandmates. My favorite moment came when I told Alexakis I’d always thought the collective message of Everclear’s music was that the world sucked but we’d make it out OK, and Alexakis told me I was right.

That’s the kind of stuff I got to do as a rock columnist for the Battle Creek Enquirer.

My first journalism gig was archiving the paper at the Enquirer. My first full-time writing gig came when the editor of the Enquirer’s weekend entertainment tab asked me to write for her, profiling local bands and previewing their shows.

I eventually talked her into letting me also write a column about music. My only credentials were that I played guitar and sang in a band that did some local shows, so I knew a bit about the scene.

That gig brought me all kinds of excitement.

I would look at the weekend schedules of the local clubs, find Battle Creek- and Kalamazoo-area bands on the lineup, and reach out to the bands to ask if I could profile them. They almost always said yes.

I would meet them at their practice spots, interview them about their influences, style, and the messages of their music, and then I would shoot a video of them performing one of their songs (I always asked for the song with the fewest curse words). I would shoot the performance twice, once with the camera static so I could get the baseline soundtrack, and then a second time with the camera moving around for closeups and exciting angles. Then I would edit the two videos together to make one seamless production that always made the band look like rock stars at BattleCreekEnquirer.com.

More than once, a band offered me drugs during my visits. I always declined.

But once, when Barack Obama came to Battle Creek during his first campaign for president, one of the Enquirer’s editors got held up by Secret Service because the drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs paid extra attention to a laptop bag I sometimes carried with me to those band visits. They found nothing, of course, but the editor was peeved by the delay.

During my rock columnist career, I crossed paths with plenty of celebrities. I interviewed, for example, the lead singers of the bands Filter, Disturbed, Godsmack, Buckcherry, and the Black Label Society, the latter of which is fronted by Zakk Wylde, onetime guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne.

I had a hard time getting quotes out of my interview with Wylde because he dropped an f-bomb every other word. We spoke on the phone and my first question was, “What are you up to?” He dropped an expletive while telling me he was doing the dishes, and it never let up from there.

Wylde later threw me out of his show at the Kellogg Arena because the arena staff let me and my photographer go between the security barricade and the stage and I leaned my elbow on the stage while I watched. Wylde didn’t like that.

My second-favorite interview was Jen Chapin, daughter of Harry Chapin, of “Cat’s in the Cradle” fame. She was lovely, charming, intelligent, courteous. She invited me to her show at a little, intimate club in Richland. I bought a CD from her and she signed it and we had beers together.

The celebrities were fun, but I really loved talking to local bands.

All those talented guys and gals making music together — real music, good music — that spoke of the angst and anxiety and pleasure and joy of growing up in Midwestern towns shortly after the turn of the millennium, during the Great Recession and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Some of the bandmates had lost jobs, others had lost friends to the wars.

All that showed up in their music, plus all the classics of love and parties and heartache and healing.

I loved to be a part of that, to help them tell their story.

I miss that work, sometimes.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.