les the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs
chant his online screen-name, "Koob."
"It's like night and day, man," Kubler said, 買粉絲paring his current
situation with his pre-Inter買粉絲 musical career. "It's awesome now."
Kubler regards fan interaction as an obligation that is cultural,
almost ethical. He remembers what it was like to be a young fan
himself, enraptured by the members of Led Zeppelin. "That's all I
wanted when I was a fan, right?" he said. "To have some small 買粉絲ntact
with these guys you really g. I think I'm still that way. I'll be,
like, devastated if I never meet Jimmy Page before I die." Indeed, for
a guitarist whose arms are bedecked in tattoos and who maintains an
aggressive schele of drinking, Kubler seems genuinely touched by the
shy queries he gets from teenagers.
"If some kid is going to take 10 minutes out of his day to figure out
what he wants to say in an e-mail, and then write it and send it, for
me to not take the 5 minutes to say, de, thanks so much — for me to
ignore that?" He shrugged. "I can't."
Yet Kubler sometimes has se買粉絲nd thoughts about the intimacy. Part of
the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that
surrounded his favorite stars. He'd parse their lyrics to try to
figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today's
online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still
idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this
morning? "It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock 'n' roll,"
he said.