Dallas-born music lover and player Liam Gowing chose to attend UCLA over Stanford because he "wanted to be a rock star" and figured it would be easier to get discovered in L.A. Surprisingly, despite never gigging and circulating a demo tape that had his name misspelled, he never got signed. After blowing money earmarked for University of Chicago Law School on a round-the-world backpacking trip, Gowing ended up back in L.A., broke and working a variety of dead-end jobs to make ends meet. One of these was being a lackey for the music editor at the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles. For a lark, Gowing wrote an unsolicited concert pick on a then-unknown band called Queens Of The Stone Age. His boss hated it, so purely out of spite, Gowing e-mailed the piece to the paper's cross-town competitor, LA Weekly. The Weekly printed it, a check was mailed out, and the rest is history. In addition to serving as The A.V. Club's Los Angeles City Editor, Gowing writes for SPIN and LA Times. He lives in the armpit of West L.A. with his girlfriend (who was named after a Beatles song) and his cat (who wasn't).
Liam Gowing
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