Biography
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Author and former Rolling Stone editor Kurt Loder came to MTV in 1988 to anchor the channel's long-running weekly news show, "The Week in Rock," and later its successor series, "1515." He has also written and hosted a number of MTV News specials, among them "Smashed" (about alcohol abuse), "Straight Dope" (about drugs), "Hate Rock" (about the new wave of racist and neo-Nazi bands, both here and in Europe), "The Cult Question" (about dubious religious groups) and "Abducted" (a comical show, as it turned out, about the phenomenon of so-called "alien abductions"). He continues to write and host various MTV News specials as well as do interviews and reports for both MTV News and the MTV Radio Network. He also writes on a regular basis for MTVNews.com and can be found on MTV.com reviewing the latest popular and lesser-known movies in "Kurt Loder on Film."
Raised in New Jersey, Loder spent three years in the U.S. Army and then worked as a journalist in Europe for several years. Returning to the States, he worked at Circus magazine in the late '70s, and then moved on to a nine-year stint at Rolling Stone, where he was a writer and senior editor. He is the author of the New York Times best-seller "I, Tina" (with singer Tina Turner; later the basis of the movie "What's Love Got to Do With It") and "Bat Chain Puller," a collection of his Rolling Stone features, which was recently reissued by Cooper Square Press. Much of his other Rolling Stone work is collected in the compilation "Rolling Stone Interviews of the Eighties," which he also annotated. He is still a Rolling Stone contributing editor, and he has also written for such magazines as Esquire, Details, New York and Time and has tapped out liner notes for compilations by such acts as Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, the Ramones and Jimi Hendrix.
Loder lives in New York City and doesn't really like to leave it.
