About Derk
Derk Richardson might have finished his Ph.D. in history if he hadn’t been sidetracked into more than a decade of occasionally overlapping occupations as a childcare provider at the University of California Berkeley, a soda jerk at Ozzie’s Fountain in Berkeley, a SCUBA instructor for underwater scientific researchers at UCB, and author of guidebooks to Thailand and the Caribbean. Even then, his main gig for the past 20 years has been writing about music for various publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the East Bay Express, Fi magazine, Yoga Journal, and others. In recent years he has added restaurant reviewing to his freelance pursuits, and his “East Bay Dine” column appears in the Bay Guardian every other Wednesday. In addition to hosting Thursday night’s “The Hear & Now” on KPFA, he writes and produces a “Hear & Now” music column enhanced with real audio, which appears every Thursday on the San Francisco Chronicle Publishing’s website, The Gate at http://www.sfgate.com He was born in Oakland and lives there still with his wife Robin and four formerly feral cats.