Photo by Mary Manion
David Luhrssen
David Luhrssen
In 2008 David Luhrssen spoke about “The Meaning of Survival: 25 Years of the Shepherd Express.” Today, 16 years down the line Luhrssen celebrates his 30th year with the now-monthly magazine.
Luhrssen also co-founded the Milwaukee International Film Festival, played lead typewriter with Violent Femmes and wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from The Vietnam War on Film to Brick Through the Window: An Oral History of Punk Rock, New Wave and Noise in Milwaukee, 1964-1984.
He also held academic positions at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and Milwaukee Area Technical College. A perennial topic of debate is if Luhrssen ever sleeps.
Sidestepping nostalgia, in a relaxed conversation Luhrssen took the time to connect the dots on his winding path from street zine writer to chronicler of film’s shadowy alleys to the importance of independent journalism in the 21st century.
Tapping the keys
In pre-pandemic times, Shepherd Express hit the street as a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 60,000. Luhrssen’s archaeology with the publication goes back to 1978 when he cofounded with musician Kevn Kinney the music zine X-Press. Luhrssen exited that publication after it morphed into Express, which merged in 1987 with Crazy Shepherd.
Luhrssen return to the renamed Shepherd Express in 1994. As managing editor of the magazine and website, he continues to write about a variety of subjects and serves as cat herder over a large crew of freelancers.
Backstory
Luhrssen can point to experiences that, in hindsight, guided his career. Growing up in Milwaukee’s Northwest side, his family had two magazine subscriptions, Reader’s Digest and Soviet Life. He says that his overseas relatives led a “more cosmopolitan way of life” which gave him a different way of looking at the world.
That perspective allowed him to view things from the outside and identify himself as an outsider. “Which in turn lead to punk rock which originally was a gathering of outsiders of one kind or another,” he says.
The summer of 1977 at age 16, Luhrssen traveled to Amsterdam to visit family. He stayed at the Columbus Hotel. “It reminds me of the Plaza Hotel in Milwaukee. It was built in the 1640s, long before there was even an America. My favorite coffee shop, Rochambo, looks like Amsterdam in the late ‘70s,” he says.
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“That’s where I heard British punk rock for the first time. I could pick up Radio London—the pirate station—in my hotel room. It was one of the very formative experiences that I had.”
That brief immersion in another way of life struck him with how different was the world was than Milwaukee at the time. Here, Luhrssen pauses to stress a point, “Milwaukee has changed a great deal since those days. It is a different place—it is more like Europe.
Writing, reporting, reviewing
As an eight-year-old, Luhrssen was intrigued by news reports of Milwaukee’s “underground newspaper,” Kaleidoscope. “I wanted to know what that word ‘kaleidoscope’ meant. I read through my parents’ dictionary quite a bit as a kid. ‘Underground newspaper’ seemed like the coolest possible thing in the world,” he recalls. “I knew I wanted to do something like that.” At age 16 he got his first check for writing from the Bugle American.
“The arrival of punk rock in Milwaukee gave me the impetus and a forum that might not have existed. Older rock critics didn’t seem to get it,” he says. “Somebody had to ‘get it’ so I chose myself as one of the people to do it.” Luhrssen and Kinney were beaten to the punch by fellow Marshall High School alumni Paul Macavaney, Todd Schramel and Clancy Carroll who published the zine Autonomy shortly before X-Press debuted.
X-Press grew within months from a one-sheet zine to a 12-page tabloid. When the publication became Express in 1979 it broadened in scope, with Marty Racine, Cathy Gubin, Downstairs Dan Hansen Dan Kehoe, Judy Hanson and Mark Shurilla among those along for the ride.
Green Sheets, Fortune Tellers and Air Supplies
Luhrssen’s reputation as a music writer soon led to 14 years of bylines at The Milwaukee Journal through the early ‘90s. He later heard an apocryphal story of a list at the Journal of people who would never write for the newspaper. Luhrssen supposedly was on the list.
He recalls taking the train from New York with his girlfriend to Asbury Park. As fans of Bruce Springsteen, walking along the boardwalk they encountered the fortune teller Madame Marie—a character from Springsteen’s song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”
“There she was, all garbed, and told me my fortune: ‘Something very important will happen to you soon.’ We went back to Milwaukee; the phone rang, and it was editor Steve Byers with an offer to write for the Milwaukee Journal.”
Luhrssen’s initial assignment was to review soft rockers Air Supply at State Fair. “I proved my ability to write quickly, with a fair-mindedness but yet a critical edge. I realized right away I couldn’t just slag off Air Supply the way I would if I wrote about them in the X-Press.” He cites the quick turnaround for deadlines, the necessity to be “hyper-prepared” for assignments, as valuable lessons learned at the daily.
Shepherd redux
Then on Dec. 4, 1994, he returned to Shepherd Express as Arts & Entertainment Editor. Instead of turning into the old guy writing about music that was no longer relevant to him, Luhrssen’s focus as a writer shifted from music to film.
“I used to write as many as three reviews of current films each week for the Shepherd Express, and most of the Hollywood movies were mediocre at best,” he says. “This came after an entire decade, the ‘80s, when I watched nothing new but foreign or indie films. Then I started seeing where Hollywood had gone—and I hated it!” His column “I Hate Hollywood” continues at shepherdexpress.com.
In 2003, Luhrssen and Shepherd Express Publisher Louis Fortis struck up a conversation with folks who were planning a film festival for Lake Geneva.
“After we got back to the office, Louis asked if we could do such an event in Milwaukee,” Luhrssen recalled. “There had never been an all-purpose film festival here, just special focus events—the Jewish Film Festival, the Short Film Festival—so I said ‘yes.’ Then the work began. We debuted the Milwaukee International Film Festival in 2003 and managed it through 2007.” The 11-day event annual screened 140 films from 40 nations in four venues each year. Attendance for 2007 totaled over 30,000.
Among his book projects are collaborations with the late songwriter and poet Martin Jack Rosenblum. Of writing Searching for Rock’n’Roll with Rosenblum he recalls, “We had a 10-day deadline to knock out the first edition: Each day I’d have a conversation with him in the morning about a chapter topic—Country, Blues and so on—take notes, write the chapter that night and email it to him for approval. Marty once called me a ‘Talmudic poet.’ It was the best compliment I ever received as a writer.”
Juggling three book projects currently, Luhrssen sees a time in the not-too-distant future when he moves to fiction. (A close look at his bibliography shows a pair of short stories published decades ago.)
As a young person he was seduced by the paychecks of journalism and put fiction aside. But with a lifetime of experiences, he feels he has made sense of “the patchwork of odd influences” that defines him today. “I don’t think I have anything more of interest to say about music or film history. After these next three books are done, I think at that point I’m going to write a novel in my spare time.”
Role of Shepherd Express
Luhrssen underlines the necessity of independent journalism and Shepherd Express in Milwaukee. He says the publication has had an important role in keeping people informed about the culture of Milwaukee’s food, music, theater and events.
“Milwaukee is a much more active city than it was 30 years ago when I became A&E Editor. That is important because politically speaking I disagree with Karl Marx,” he says. “I don’t think human history moves forward on the wheels of economics—it moves forward on the wheels of culture and ideas. Economics is not irrelevant, but politics comes from culture. If politics came from economics, then the majority of people wouldn’t continue to vote against their economic interests every election.”
That being said, Luhrssen says the political aspect of Shepherd Express has always been important because no one in Milwaukee was doing this. “From the Bugle American on, I saw myself as an activist journalist—someone who is not just sitting back and reporting on the world, but I have the idea that I want to make the world different than what it is, a better place. And that is what the Shepherd Express wants to do. That’s what the Crazy Shepherd wanted to do, and at all points along the way what Louis Fortis wants to do. We really do have the idea that the world could stand some improvement. That’s not Utopianism, it’s not having the false dream of something you can never achieve. It means rolling up your sleeves and taking actions that will make the world we live a better place for more of the people living there.”
